“Stop where you are,” he ordered the man. He could practically hear Nes’s eye roll above him.
The man didn’t stop. Toran flicked his sword, just as he’d done back in the Guard’s Pub, slashing a shallow cut across the man’s forehead. The cut puckered, the flesh splitting easily, but no blood escaped the wound. The man stumbled forward, and Toran took a step back.
“What are you doing?”
He ignored Nes and snatched a discarded lantern from the ground as he retreated. He struck a match and lit it, holding it up so the light shone on their attacker’s face.
The stare that met his was as blank as a new moon. Gravity had dragged the pupils down so only the whites were visible between the slits that were the man’s eyelids. And beneath his face, the man was gaunt—hip bones sticking so far out it looked like his skin might split open, his ribs as pronounced as the black keys on a piano.
The man didn’t look alive. Didn’t move like the living. But he still moved. It shouldn’t have been possible.
Magic. Toran’s gut roiled at the thought of the Witch reanimating corpses.
He swung his sword again, harder and faster this time, in an attack that would kill any normal person. But he needn’t have worried about killing. Not when it was already dead.
His blade cut into the corpse’s torso, slicing through decaying flesh without a whisper of protest. The tip of his sword embedded within the thing’s stomach, and when he pulled it free, a horrible squelching sound filled the distillery. Bits of organs and entrails hung from the wound. But the body did not slow.
Its head lifted. And he could have sworn the body looked at him through those glassy, milk-filled spheres.
“What are you doing?” Nes demanded again. “Cut off its head!”
She made a good point. Surely without a head the thing couldn’t continue forward. He held his sword ready. Above him, crouched among the rafters, Nes waited. When the body advanced again, he swung for its exposed neck.
Arms of mangled skin moved with a speed he thought impossiblefor a corpse. Dead hands caught his blade, the tiny bones still intact beneath ruined skin, and halted his strike. He stood frozen, shock cascading down his whole body.
Now, when it tilted its head so hazy eyes met his, he was sure it wasn’t just looking at him. It wasseeinghim. But what inside was still capable of seeing? There was no bringing back the dead. It was the only thing he knew with absolute certainty to be true.
A shape flew down from the rafters, dark cloth billowing behind her solid form like great wings before she crashed on top of the corpse. A fierce wildness glowed in Nes’s eyes.
His sword came free and the corpse fell, hitting the ground at the same time Nes plunged a fist through the thing’s back.
He’d seen dead bodies, had seen plenty of people kill and be killed, body parts he hadn’t known existed laid out for the world to see. But this…
Nes was brutal. One hand held down the corpse’s head, crushing its face to the cement floor, while her knees pinned the exposed arms and her other hand dug around inside the body’s chest cavity. The thing struggled beneath her, but even with the impossible strength he’d felt when it had grabbed his sword, Nes showed no strain. The back skin flapped and moved like bubbling pudding under her ministrations, and Toran swallowed down a gag. Still, he watched as Nes rifled through the thing’s insides—unable to look away as she skirted rib bones and snapped veins.
The body beneath her shuddered once before Nes yanked her arm from its chest. It took him a second to recognize her hand within the mess and what she held in it. Her fingers were coated and sticky with congealed blood and thin strings that had once been veins. In her palm lay the heart.
It was so small compared to the remains underneath her. And frozen. Crusted over with a layer of crimson crystal shards that blinked back at him with a strange sort of menace in the lantern light.
Nes pushed up from her knees, dirt and bits of decaying flesh falling from the smooth fabric of her pant legs.
“This,” she said, holding the hard, blackened heart out to him like a peace offering, “was my plan.”
When he didn’t take it, she tilted her wrist, letting it drop to the ground. And as he watched the heart fall, he was reminded of those vanishing eels—how you couldn’t see them until they drew blood.
He lifted Cavallis, the sword suddenly heavy in his hands, and sheathed it. He tried to avoid Nes’s victorious gaze, but the only other place to look was the dead body, and, frankly, he didn’t care to dwell on the rot.
“How did you know to go for the heart?”
Nes callously wiped her hands on the outside of her cloak. “I could fill a book with the things you don’t know about magic.”
When he didn’t respond, she sighed heavily and said, “Do you know what happens when someone consumes pure magic?”
“Of course I do. They die.”
“But do you know what happens before that? How the magic kills?”
He’d never considered how one would die from pure magic. He’d always assumed it was an instantaneous thing. Once the magic disappeared down your throat,boom, dead.
