Unfinished Dead: Unwilling Souls, #4

By Gregory D. Little

Ses Lucani has failed. The gods are free. All that remains is the end of the world.

After two centuries of imprisonment, the gods have returned. Some are content merely to rule, while others demand vengeance for themselves and their followers. As godly servants clash with those people who dare resist, and bodies fill the streets, one thing is clear: anyone who does not submit to the gods' dominance will suffer.

Ses's world lies in ruins. Her allies are scattered, broken, or dead. Against the gods in the fullness of their power, she can't hope to prevail. The completion of their ancient efforts to cleanse the world of the unfaithful seems inevitable until a faint ray of hope arrives from an unlikely source.

Ses learns that imprisonment wasn't always the plan. Those who fought the gods two centuries ago first tried to destroy them utterly using a wrighted weapon of incalculable power. But, where those long-gone fighters failed in their quest for victory, Ses and her remaining allies might yet succeed…

 

If they are willing to pay the price their predecessors were not.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gregory D. Little Publishing, LLC
• Release date: Jul 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201263492

Gregory D. Little

Gregory D. Little is the author of the Unwilling Souls series, set in a world where technology is powered by the souls of the dead, the gods are locked away in the hollowed-out center of the planet, and what remains of humanity has rebuilt its cities out of the corpses of the great beasts that destroyed them. His short stories can be found in the A GAME OF HORNS, DRAGON WRITERS, UNDERCURRENTS, and ECLECTICALLY SCIENTIFIC anthologies. He writes the kind of stories he likes to read, fantasy and science fiction tales featuring vivid worlds, strong characters, and smart action where nothing is as it seems.

Book preview

Map of Calavaria

1

UNENDING DARK

Using the still-smoldering wreckage of his hellship, Lach built his sister's cairn.

The twisted pile stank of acrid char and another, stranger scent. It was ethereal, difficult to describe. A distillation of an unnamed smell he'd known in the fane all his life, the concentrated smell of home. Overwhelming numbness masked the pain, but Lach could sense it bright and hot beneath, a laceration that hadn't decided to bleed yet.

His hands marred the pieces' sooty perfection, leaving smeared, reverse handprints with every touch. Each piece of wreckage he lifted burned him with residual heat, but he gloried in the bracing pain of the work. The twisted chunks of metal were lighter than they should have been thanks to the wrighted patterns and inlays coating their every surface. Still, to a boy not accustomed to physical exertion, they proved heavy enough to strain his muscles with the effort. He gloried in this, too.

During one brief pause to catch his breath, Lach wondered if the souls trapped within the ruined ship would leach out of the metal now or remained imprisoned forever. But, no. If they were draining away, the metal would be crumbling to dust. He had certainly seen Ses perform that very feat more than once.

Only Ses Lucani could free the energy trapped within, if she still lived. If Lach and Esis hadn't failed her in that most crucial of moments, leaving her trapped with a mass murderer and an unpredictable god somewhere in the bowels of the planet.

Ses was counting on us, counting on me, and I failed her.

If Lach ever found Ses, he'd be fortunate if she so much as spoke to him. He'd failed his sister, too. Esis had died because of the promises Lach had made to Ses. But unlike Ses, there was no chance he would never again find his sister. Not in this world or any other. He had vowed not to fail either of them and had instead failed both in the same moment.

With such notions looping over and over unto obsession, Lach scarcely noticed when his sweating stopped. He ignored his body's warnings: the building headache, the fog of confusion and dizziness. He felt no gratitude as the wide-open wilderness around him became close and confining with an onrushing rampart of clouds. The storm front interceded on his behalf, bringing rain that likely saved him from death by heatstroke.

Smoke became steam as the water washed Esis's grave clean. Only then did Lach fall to his knees and turn his head to the sky to drink. He shivered as the deluge of water soaked his clothes and filled his mouth. The water both soothed and aggravated his burns.

We just needed another second. Esis was right behind me.

At last, stomach sloshing, his neck and shoulders aching as his body continued to shiver, Lach bowed his head, praying in the unique manner of his people. He prayed not to anyone; there was no one to whom he would or could pray in the fashion of the gods and their worshipers. He had no soul to commend to another's care upon his death. Neither had his sister.

When Esis had forced her brother through the hellship's last portal ahead of her even as it collapsed, she had consigned herself first to the fire of the dying ship and then to unending darkness. That had not been her choice, of course, any more than it had been his. It was a condition of their lives neither had ever questioned seriously. Only now, with the shroud of death drawn over her so early, did Lach wonder how much comfort he might feel if he were not a part of this branch of humankind.

But it was too late for second thoughts.

So much misery, all of it courtesy of the treachery of one of Murien Alaini's polistraat companions. It had to be one of them who had left the lethal gift of that small, spherical wrighting behind when they'd departed. The other explanation, that it had been Ses's godly companion Vexvow, pained him too much to consider. For that was the very god, known to the others as Veilenya, Ses was trapped deep below at this very moment, depending on Lach to save her.

And the thought that Veilenya had played them false was too much to stomach today.

With none to hear his prayers, Lach simply spoke his gratitude to an uncaring universe. Esis felt no more pain. The physical remainder of her recent, traumatic captivity was erased, as was the pain of the love she had lost to the same captivity. It was comforting to imagine the two of them together now, even if this was the exact sort of pleasing lie that had birthed this darkest of nightmares and set it loose upon humankind.

At last, when he could no longer discern his tears from the rain, Lach rose, looking around him desperately for something else to occupy his mind. He found it almost at once and wished he hadn't.

Whatever sort of wrighting the soul-powered sphere had been, it had waited patiently, taking its time in acting to kill the ship and half its pilots. Yet, despite the destruction it had wrought, it lay placidly on the ground, totally undamaged as far as Lach could see, as though it had simply dropped to the soft earth while the ship disintegrated around it.

A sphere of nife iron the size of four fists bunched together, the wrighting still blurred along its circular edge, which looked as indistinct to Lach's eyes as it had moments before his sister's murder. Yet, he approached it with the courage of one who no longer cared whether he lived or died. Each notion had its upsides.

Bending over, he picked up the deadener, and as if it responded to his touch, that dissolving edge calmed to a solid one, and the wrighting went quiet. As though he had completed some great task, exhaustion crashed down upon Lach. Cradling the hateful sphere against his chest for reasons he couldn't fathom, Lach curled himself against the cairn, seeking the lingering heat of the pieces shielded from the worst of the water. He then fell into tortured sleep.

He woke to the rumbling sound and punishing vibration of the ground being torn asunder around him.

2

UNCERTAIN FATES

You have to find another—

Cassia Lucani's final words before her death. Ses Lucani's mother had spoken them as the Globe—the prison of the gods—broke apart, right after she'd shoved her daughter clear of falling debris, saving Ses's life at the cost of her own.

In that moment, bereft of both parents, absent everyone but her one-time tormentor, Brea Reati, Ses had spoken as her own momentous understanding had crushed her in turn.

The prison didn't contain the gods. It was the gods.

The words rang in Ses's head as she stared up, considering the monstrous construct of metal that hovered in the air of the Pit above the barracks. Asymmetric fans of jagged nife iron squealed as they swayed, caught in a stiff breeze that didn't actually exist. Backlit by the molten boundary of the Pit, the living ingot's twisted form seemed the very definition of evil. Split though they were by a fissure, its two sets of clustered eyes nevertheless stared down in silent, malevolent regard.

"That thing, Brea said in response, pressed so close to Ses they might as well have been one person, is a god?"

Dead, Mother's dead. Father's dead. They're both gone! They're all gone! I'm all alone.

Before Ses could break through her own rampaging thoughts to answer, the reply was everywhere.

It. Is. The voice's cadence was hesitant despite a sonorousness which could have leveled mountains. Rather than riding the air, the god's voice seemed a law of nature unto itself.

You have to find another—

I love you, Ses, but we failed.

Which one are you? Ses asked in a whisper. Never did it occur to her that the god would not hear her. It took everything she had not to fall on her knees and beg this thing for mercy.

When did we believe we could fight these creatures? How could our ancestors have been so naive as to think they could be imprisoned?

You have to find another—

No, Ses thought, a desperate negation to blot out the endless cycle of thought. No, there's no path to win. We never stood a chance.

The mammoth, shifting, living metal took its time in responding. Ses watched in fresh terror as jagged barbs that moved like liquid uncoiled from its metal fans, lancing outward to spear drifting fragments of nife iron and reel them back to itself. Each of the snared pieces melded into the greater whole once they touched its surface.

The one you should have listened to, it said at last. And though that could have applied to any of the gods she'd interacted with—Ses had never been terribly inclined to obey them before this moment—she knew with certainty which she now faced.

And from that certainty rose a spark of hope.

Veilenya? Brea's grip on Ses tightened.

Veilenya was but a part, the monstrosity thundered, its voice at last finding a normal rhythm. You speak to Vexvow.

Ses forced herself to unclench her jaw, no small thing when each word the god spoke caused her physical pain. Surely her ears would begin bleeding if this continued.

You will leave this place, the god said. At once. You will gather up what Veilenya claimed, and you will enact the fallback—

Then the words, cyclopean as they were, were lost in a rising shriek like tearing metal as one of the other chunks of the Globe—another god—collided with Vexvow at a speed impossible for something so massive. Metal ripped at metal, tearing and gouging with malevolent purpose. The cacophony was deafening as Vexvow fought back with stabbing barbs of her own. The momentum of the second god carried both writhing forms away from the barracks platform, locked in a deadly embrace, flowing metal looping and darting, glowing red like fire in the baleful light.

Singscreamer. Is that Singscreamer?

Veilenya's father certainly had reason enough to want to harm her.

RUN.

The voice in Ses's head, somehow louder even than the god's true voice had been, jolted her back to herself. By the way Brea started and winced, she'd heard it as well. Out of the corner of her eye, Ses noticed other movement as the Pit’s human survivors moaned and lifted themselves from the floor.

More importantly, she saw motion in the air above the barracks. Other gods stirred, stretching otherworldly appendages as though they were stiff from long disuse. If Singscreamer wasn't the one attacking Vexvow, he might be awakening even now. Him, or any of the others that had reason to hate Ses.

Suddenly, running sounded like a good idea.

But Ses found she couldn't move. Her gaze kept sliding to the pile of ingot debris, her mother's impromptu cairn. One piece, roughly Ses's size, stood nearly upright as though it were a grave marker.

Brea pulled Ses to her feet and dragged her into a jog.

We have to go! Brea said. I have to keep you safe! Her voice shook as she said the words.

Forced by Brea's tugging insistence to tear her gaze away from her dead mother, Ses finally took in their direction. This isn't the way to any launch platform, she said. Her voice sounded thick and muffled in her ears.

Have to get something first, Brea said. I think I helped her get it, but I don't remember. She told me where it is just now. Brea was leading them back to the barracks.

No. No, not the barracks, no.

Ses had just left her mother's remains, but at least they were buried. She did not want to see her father's body again. She began to resist Brea's grip, but the older girl's pull was inexorable, as though Ses was being borne away on a current.

It's all right, Ses told herself. Father's in the medical wing. In the basement. Surely what Brea needs is in her room. I won't have to go back down to that place.

That place where her father had been chained as he withered away, too corrupted by godly presence to be trusted even as he slowly died before Ses's eyes. She had run out on him as he begged her to stay, unable to bear the words she could not trust were his, the uncertainty of whom she was really speaking to.

Uncertainty. Doubt. It was a message her father had tried to drill into her. That someone had tried to drill into her.

But she could worry about that later, wonder if she'd made the right choices another time. She wouldn't have to go back to that place. Not ever again.

Except, of course, she would. The realization buried her as surely as the ingot had her mother.

Springer.

Her giant spider friend, stung by an equally giant wasp, maybe dying, was down in that medical wing as well. With a feeling like repeated blows to her midsection, Ses realized she hadn't had a chance to check on Springer since she'd last left the Pit.

Her feeble resistance to Brea's pull abruptly reversed as she broke into a run, dragging the other girl along. A horrible dread built within Ses with every step.

You get whatever it is you need, she said, voice hoarse with fear. I have to check on someone in the basement.

The medical wing, slate gray and starkly unadorned, was eerily empty considering the number of wounded Ses knew were present outside. Doctor Adric was out there now, seeing to those who could be helped. She'd passed him leaving just a few minutes gone on her way in to find her mother after the ingot broke through into the Pit and struck the prison.

Just a few minutes. That was all it had taken for hope to die and the world to end.

We should be helping Adric with the wounded.

But the thought skittered by, failing to gain a foothold in a mind full to bursting already. Ses couldn't conceive of anything but her current, desperate mission, that of finding her one friend who had survived this catastrophe.

She survived. She. Survived.

The room where Adric had placed Springer to let her work through the wasp sting was toward the back of the medical wing, just prior to where the hallway transitioned to storage rooms, like the one her father had been kept chained in.

Ses found the door to Springer's room not only open, but badly damaged. Something looked to have been stabbed through the handle, splintering the wood to break the latch.

Pulling up short, not daring to draw close enough to see into the room, Ses stood rooted, her mind latching to the muffled sounds of pounding and shouting coming from a door further down the hallway on the opposite side, well into the storage area.

Someone needs my help.

Ses nearly turned from Springer's open door to investigate. Then she realized who she was hearing. The slaver, Rast. Her mother's prisoner.

My prisoner, now.

The thought left a ringing in Ses's ears.

No, I will not see to Rast before I see to my friend.

Thusly steeled, Ses stepped into the open doorway. She promptly forgot all about Rast, or Brea, or her parents.

No. No, oh no.

Springer, what was left of her, lay in the room's center, as though the spider had crawled there from her makeshift bedding in the corner to get more room.

More room, but not for her.

The spider was splayed open, her entire body ripped down the centerline like the seam on a shirt, black-and-white striped hair stained with oily, dark fluid. Her once powerful legs lay akimbo. Her many eyes had gone milky white. The smell in the room, metallic and putrid both, threatened to make Ses sick. Around her edges, her outline was already growing indistinct, falling away to fine, metallic dust.

Then tears filled Ses's remaining eye, mercifully blurring the image.

I did this to her. My fault. I made her come with us to the wasps' nest. Oh, Iron Hell, we set those wasps free!

Ses approached warily, laying her hands gingerly upon the bristly hairs as though there was some part of Springer she could still hurt if she moved too fast.

I'm sorry, she whispered through the tears. I'm so, so sorry Springer. There was nothing else to say. My fault. My fault. My fault.

She lost herself in weeping for a time, a torrent of grief finally bursting free even as it endlessly replenished itself. Gradually, though, the needs of this terrible moment reasserted themselves, and Ses forced herself to analyze what she was seeing.

The wasp hadn't just stung Springer. No venom would make her ... explode like that.

It had laid an egg in her.

And the egg had hatched.

The hairs on Ses's neck stood up, drying her tears as she whirled, scanning the corners of the room, looking for the giant wasp or larva or something she was suddenly sure would be there. Then her gaze fell back on the damaged door. Damaged from the inside, then thrown open.

Gone. It's gone.

Springer is gone.

Suddenly, she wanted very much to be out of the basement and gone from the barracks, gone from the Pit. The pain, the fear. They were suffocating.

But she couldn't even leave this room. Not yet.

Tentatively, she reached out. Not with her hand, but with her will. She probed at the ruined husk of her spider friend, searching for a sensation that she knew would be there.

Souls. Human souls, trapped in a nife iron construct that looked and, until recently, functioned like a spider.

Not nife iron. Alive. Springer was alive. Just ... not anymore.

But though the entity that Springer had been was no longer, souls were still trapped in her remains. Springer's husk contained far fewer souls than Ses would have guessed, but their suffering clawed at her. Ses could feel them, still trapped in the emotions they'd felt at the moment of their original death.

Perhaps their existence as a spider had allowed them to forget that for a time, but if so, the sensations had returned to them, now with the agony of Springer's final hours layered atop it. Almost, Ses had to pull back, such was the intensity of her own pain, knowing that she'd caused this.

But she could still make it right in some small way.

Ses flexed whatever ethereal muscle she possessed, and the souls drained away from the spider husk, passing briefly through Ses, who served as a lens through which they bent like light.

A conduit into nothingness and non-being.

Ses could feel their surprise and relief as they were released from their torment. Unlike the still-living wasps she'd drained, there was, blessedly, no resistance.

When the last of the souls had fled her friend's body, Ses opened her eyes again to behold the spider's husk crumbling slowly to nife iron dust. Even guessing it as she had, it was a jarring sight. Everything about it screamed the spider's artificiality to Ses's sensibilities.

No. She was real. She was my friend.

And the tears came again.

Ses was struggling to get herself under control when Brea found her, pausing in the doorway to take in the horror there.

Oh, Ses, I'm so sorry. Beyond this, Brea seemed incapable of finding the words. Her face still had that pained look from before, the one she'd worn after Vexvow had spoken into their minds. As though the god was still in there, corroding her from the inside.

In a sudden rush of memory upon her overtaxed mind, Ses recalled that this was likely close to the truth. Vexvow had used Brea as her avatar, robbed her of her soul to keep her docile, then abandoned her with some kind of lingering suggestion or set of orders to help guide her into this new soulless existence. All this suffering just to give the god a chance to enact her plan. A plan which, insanely, had revolved around Ses herself becoming a god and ruling over all the rest.

Or maybe it only seemed insane until Ses stopped to contemplate the previous ten minutes of her life.

How do you feel, Brea? Ses asked carefully, momentarily quashing her own pain. She didn't trust her voice not to break, but the chance to think of something—anything—beyond the crushing loss poised to bury her was too much of a relief to ignore.

She expected a platitude. Fine, or don't worry about that now, but Brea's face crumpled as though on the verge of tears.

Something's wrong with me, she said, her voice breathy and robbed of force. Something happened to me when we were in Requis Leonis. Shame blossomed on that lovely face, and despite their painful history, it was an awful thing to witness. She did something to me. Took something. I feel ... this horrible emptiness.

I could tell her, Ses realized, surprised at her lack of surprise. I could at least help her understand.

But she didn’t even know how to begin that conversation.

It will be all right, Ses said, aware even as she spoke the words how laughably inadequate—and false—they were.

But something in her tone seemed to straighten Brea's spine. The girl nodded, smoothing her face with an effort. Her eyes flicked to the carnage behind Ses and she paled, but stiffened a quivering lip. It will be all right for you, too, she said. Terse as it was, it sounded genuine. But we've got to go, she said, wincing again. "It's not safe for you—for us—here."

For me.

Ses wondered if this focus upon herself was the evidence of what Vexvow had confessed to before the battle in the ingot. Still, Ses nodded. She thought of asking Brea to wait outside, but the request might physically pain the girl. So, she steeled herself, turning back to the ruined corpse of her spider friend. Maybe her last friend, for surely Lach and Esis were—no, not now.

I'm sorry, Springer, she said again, trying and failing to hold back tears. They burned in her still-healing eye socket. She fought for something more profound, but she could think of nothing to capture the size of what she felt. I'm sorry.

No sooner had they exited the dying chamber than the entire building shook around them. Brea fell to one knee and Ses nearly toppled entirely. Rast's pounding against his door stilled for a moment, then resumed louder than ever, accompanied by muffled shouts. The walls of the hallway now sported ominous cracks, some running the full length of stretches between doorways. Dust floated everywhere, stray motes catching in the dim light of wrighted sconces.

Brea threw a nervous glance toward the door to Rast's makeshift cell, re-shouldering the burlap bag Ses had only just now noticed she was carrying. Does he know anything that could help us?

Does anyone?

Ses dare not speak her gut reaction. Any further erosion of hope and she would just lay down and die.

‘He's Mother's problem’ was what she almost said.

Then unreality tore at her with the return of that awful realization: My mother is dead. My father is dead. Springer is dead. This is all on me, now.

If the building came down around their ears, Rast, too, would die. She tried to parse how she felt about leaving a slaver to die, helpless in a basement cell.

She'd just denied Veilenya's offer of godhood. If she hadn't, none of this would have happened. If she hadn't, they'd have won. This would all be over, for everyone except Ses, anyway. She thought she'd refused in some fit of self-awareness and maturity, but maybe all it had been was the dread of a struggle that would never end.

But having refused godhood not once, but twice, Ses didn't very well think she could start deciding who lived and who died now. Vile as he was, she couldn't leave Rast here to die when the survivors—if there were any—had to flee the Pit. It was the most reluctant step she'd ever taken, that first one toward the slaver's cell, but she took it.

The building lurched hard. Struggling to stay first upright, then on her knees, Ses watched the entire basement hallway slide sideways, shearing from its foundations. Every door frame shattered, doors splintering or popping free of their mounts as though spring-loaded.

Won't have to set him free now, Ses thought.

It was a detached notion, eerily calm when the entire building, she recognized dimly, was about to come down on all of them. But Rast did not emerge from his now-open cell. Ses realized that his cries had cut off almost at the moment the shaking had resumed.

His door had broken and sprung inward. The part which remained attached to the frame sprouted long, thick shanks of shattered wood.

The shaking subsided, the building un-collapsed for now. Ses watched, numb, as a wide, rapidly spreading pool of red emerged into the hallway from the now-silent room.

I think we'd better go, Brea said from behind Ses, voice hoarse.

Yes, Ses said, wondering where Rast's soul was heading now. Let's.

3

UNTETHERED SELF

The thought was singular in Brea's mind, echoing in the horrible, cavernous emptiness now present there.

Protect Selestia. Protect Selestia. Protect Selestia, it repeated endlessly, a drumbeat calling the march.

Brea could no longer deceive herself that this thought was her own. She had done wrong by Ses. That was putting it mildly; she'd made the girl's time as an apprentice in the Pit a waking nightmare as often as possible. But this wasn't her newfound guilt or some desire to atone speaking. Someone had put this thought—this command—in her head.

And there was only one being who could have.

They emerged from the barracks into the fiery glow of the Pit, and Brea heard Ses sigh with relief behind her. The shaking of the barracks platform redoubled as, behind them, the building slumped and crumbled, falling in on itself as though it had only been waiting for them to leave.

Brea grabbed Ses without thought, pulling the younger girl out and away from the collapsing wreckage of the closest thing either had to a home. The sack of nife iron shapes slung across her back bounced painfully against the linen of her sweat-soaked shirt. It almost made her miss the awful leather robes.

Without consciously deciding to, Brea found herself pushing Ses instead of pulling her, shielding the girl from any stray debris from the building collapsing behind them.

The alien instinct spoke to her, and she pulled Ses to a halt next to the pile of prison debris that had crushed her mother.

Gruesome as it was, Brea shoved the now-protesting Ses behind that grim monument, out of sight of the ruined barracks. Brea followed, crouching and dragging Ses down with her.

At last, the rumbling subsided. A billowing cloud of dust, the accumulation of centuries, rose into the air above the barracks, forming a ghostly edifice where the squat, solid structure had once stood. Like a memorial to the Pit's end.

Cautiously, Brea peered around the corner of their hiding place, trying not to think of who lay beneath the twisted jumble of nife iron they stood upon. The source of the barracks' collapse immediately became apparent. From within that dust cloud, a form emerged, asymmetric and bulbous, ever shifting.

A god poked sinuous tendrils of flowing nife iron into the barracks debris, probing, searching. It seemed too much to hope that it was not searching for them. Fortunately, it seemed not to have seen them flee the building.

Come on, she said, all steely determination even though her legs felt like elongated sacks of water. We've got to get out of the Pit.

First of all, Ses said, don't manhandle me like that again. Her voice was as durably hard as Brea's. Her one eye shone with unshed tears. It also sparked with unspent rage, though Brea didn't think it was really directed at herself. Second, thank you for saving me just now. A flash of worry passed through her eye as soon as the words left her mouth.

Brea seized on it before it could vanish.

What? You know something.

Just before she ... vacated you, she said she was going to make sure you'd have a reason to keep going. Apparently, not everyone can when they—

When they what? Brea almost asked, but there was no need. When she really stopped to think about it, she found she already knew.

When they lose their soul, Brea said, surprising herself that she could, in fact, keep her lips and voice as steady as Ses had.

Ses's nod was reluctant and solemn. But we don't have time to worry about that now. She said it more like she hoped that was true, as though she might will it into being. Yet, somehow, it worked to dull some of Brea's edge. Like you said, we've got to get out of here. Her halved gaze scanned the barracks platform. Along with anyone else who's alive and healthy enough to move.

As if summoned by her voice, Brea could suddenly hear their cries. Her classmates. They were either distant or very faint. Shamefully, her first reaction was to shudder at the thought of having to move wounded through all that open space to safety. When Veilenya had controlled her, she'd often felt trapped, claustrophobic. She'd doubted the decision immediately upon realizing the enormity of it. But she'd never felt weak, exposed, the way she did now.

She'd had a god protecting her.

Brea tried to follow Ses's lead, tried to take in the situation around them. She thought there were fewer living growths of nife iron hovering in the space of the Pit than there had been before. But she couldn't think how that could be. Those she could see still moved aimlessly, sending out probing tendrils of nife iron tentatively, as though experimenting with long-forgotten limbs.

Surely they'd nearly run out of grace. Their time left to escape might be measurable in minutes.

Abruptly, Brea felt her gaze dragged away from the waking gods. Her head moved as though pulled by a wire.

The battle between Vexvow and her assailant had not ended while they'd been inside the barracks. Now the cancerous mass of flowing metal that was Brea's god snapped whip-like limbs, hurling her attacker against the curved, magma wall of the Pit midway between three of the temples, very near the barge platform Brea and Ses had wrecked on their way down.

Brea winced automatically, certain that the fields holding back the crushing weight of magma would fail. The immense pressure they contained would seize its moment at last and bury them all as the planet rushed to fill in the great cavity that was the Pit.

But the fields had been forged to take punishment. They held, flashing an angry, electric blue at the point of impact.

Maybe it will keep them trapped, Ses said beside Brea as the other god bounced free and, rallying, hurtled through the space of the Pit back toward Vexvow. She sounded so desperate for something to hope for, to latch onto, that Brea almost hugged her. Maybe the fields aren't just to hold back the magma, but as a last resort.

As they watched, three-dozen tendrils shot out from the god charging Vexvow, lancing her in as many places. The attacking god halted uncannily quickly, and Brea imagined she saw the Vexvow's form shudder as the tendrils piercing her retracted and she was dragged closer.

The process was so slow it was almost an embrace, something intimate, uncomfortable to watch. The side of Vexvow's assailant began to ripple like liquid and a concavity began to form, a widening circle lined with hooked barbs.

Ses's frown was as perplexed as Brea's.

What are we seeing?

But Vexvow was not content to submit to whatever was happening. The distance between the warring gods closed rapidly as Vexvow drove herself at her assailant, the tendrils hooking her going slack and losing their leverage. She accelerated at impossible speed, seeming to reach the god in the blink of an eye, driving the pair of them straight at the magma wall.

As it to flaunt Ses’s vain hope of a moment ago, this time, the fields did not hold. Great flashes of shockwork blue erupted around the warring gods in a nimbus of webbed, crackling light. As the combined mass of the gods drove deeper into the fields, they flashed solid azure, blindingly bright even at this distance, before at last yielding and allowing them passage.

Both gods sank upward into the mantle of the planet, still clawing at one another. Between their fading forms and the Pit, the fields flashed, reasserting themselves before the magma could rush in to fill the gap.

A scream tried to tear itself free from Brea's throat at the sight of her god, of the soul she had lost, disappearing behind blinding, electric blue and burning, red-orange light. But Ses was too fast, clapping a soot-smeared hand painfully over Brea's mouth, muffling the sound which would have surely drawn the god still searching the wreckage behind them. The two battling gods had vanished, leaving barely a ripple.

Then it was Ses's turn to drag Brea, numb and dazed, away from the ruins of the barracks.

4

UNSPARING PAIN

The worst part for Murien was Aeliana's laughing face. That lovely face, that face he'd kissed, now contorted in perverse delight over his shrieking agony.

The pain lanced through him like lightning, tracing the myriad paths of his nerves from his spine to his extremities and back again faster than thought, which it all but blotted out. He tried to make his mouth form words, tried to find a space between screams large enough to speak them.

To beg.

But deep down, he knew this was the end. He'd made mistake after mistake, and he hadn't learned from a single one. And now, at last, he'd been subjected to his own worst crime. Just as Ses Lucani had once done, Murien Alaini had trusted the wrong person.

Now the pain wouldn't end until he did.

She's so upset, Painpride crowed as tears ran down Aeliana's cheeks. The host's breathing was heavy and ragged. "She's begging, begging me to spare you. But I ... I just don't want to!" Her laugh was lunatic. She'd held the massive, barbed agonizer in an almost casual grip, but now she straightened her elbow, tongue between her teeth. A glaze of fevered ecstasy covered those Blazing orange eyes.

Somehow, impossibly, the pain got worse. Murien's vision tunneled. The alley into which he'd fled closed in around him.

Please, just let it end.

It was the only thought Murien could form. It repeated over and over in his head until the words lost all meaning to him.

The moment he forgot that he had ever not been in pain, it stopped.

And then it was Aeliana's turn to scream.

The agonizer artifact clanged to the alley’s cobbled floor a moment before Aeliana, as if boneless, followed. Her screams tore the stifling air. Her lovely, orange eyes were wide and rolling, the tips of her fingers hooked into her cheeks and temples as she sought to gouge the dark skin of her face.

Crying out with every tiny shift of his position, Murien at last rose from where he'd fallen, unsure if he should help the girl or not. Unsure if it was safe to. She, or rather her resident god, been having a fine time torturing him mere moments ago.

The betrayal of it tasted as bitter on his tongue as the ashes rising on the breeze. And on its heels, shame, guilt.

This is what I did to Ses. To Brea.

He'd been sure he was about to die, and it had felt like a fitting end.

But now something had changed. And although he did not trust his hunches much anymore, Murien had the sudden conviction that the god had vacated the girl. Those wide eyes looked lost, bereft.

In any other city or at any other time, this alley would have been the object of every gaze and a subject of intense investigation from anyone passing by. Here, as Requis Leonis tore itself apart around them, they were just one more minor tragedy nobody else had time for.

Except that before Murien had tried fleeing from Painpride, the pair hadn't been alone. Murien had helped rescue a half-dozen other undercover operatives. And based on what he'd seen as he put the pieces together in his mind, he was willing to bet they were godly sympathizers to a one.

And Bailith was not.

Murien's mentor had been dangerously unstable, but he had gotten that way because Aeliana, Painpride, or both had secretly dosed him with mind-altering substances for days. The natural paranoia of a successful undercover operative had been ramped up to violent levels, and Murien would never forget the torture he'd been subjected to. Even though it paled in comparison to what he had just experienced, it had come from a trusted mentor. But Bailith had not been in his right mind.

Aeliana continued to wail. How long until her friends came looking for her?

After what felt like an eternity, but was probably only a few seconds, Murien at last crawled his way over to the stricken girl, keeping well clear of the fallen artifact. With as much gentleness as he could muster, he pulled her gouging fingers away from her face before she could blind herself. He tried to comfort her, if halfheartedly, but she shuddered away as if his very presence was poisoning the air she breathed.

His own pain receded slowly, its departure interrupted with spasms of recurrence that left him gasping on sharply indrawn breath. He wondered if Painpride had done him permanent harm. But none of his joints failed when he placed weight on them to rise.

After a laborious effort to stand upright, he concluded that the only permanent scars would be upon his psyche. Still, propping himself against the alley wall for a time was a relief, if also an indulgence. Aeliana's friends would be looking for them. He needed to get out of here. He knew this, and the urgency of his need to get away, to get under cover and not be exposed any longer, set his heart thudding. It was the constant background urge of the undercover officer.

That's not what I am anymore.

He didn't know what he was. He'd betrayed friends both old and new, forever acting on information that was rotten at its core.

No time for these self-recriminations now.

The cacophony from beyond the alley mouth hadn't lessened in the slightest since he'd entered. Cries, clashes, and what sounded like the collapsing of a wall, echoed in from the middle distance. This city was the rotten thing, burning, ready to collapse, and Murien had helped Aeliana start it.

Is there anything I can do to stop it?

But the thought of doing more than standing was, at the moment, quite impossible. Even something as mild as a slow walk seemed destined for a face plant into the street.

And he still didn't know what to do about Aeliana herself.

The girl's shrieks gradually subsided into whimpers as Murien collected himself. By the time he took tentative steps just to prove to himself he could, she rolled over and looked at him with now-haunted eyes.

Murien? Her face was full of pain, sending a twinge through his heart. Horror seized her expression then, the terrible, belated understanding of a grievous sin committed. What have I done?

5

TO GRASP A SOUL

Ses only had to drag Brea a few steps before the girl recovered herself enough to run alongside. The image of two gods vanishing into the magma beyond the fields repeated over and over again in Ses's mind. Were they dying even now? Her conscious mind could not move past it, but her unconscious was, she realized quickly, retracing their steps from when they'd arrived in the Pit. And she suddenly realized why.

Ulthrick.

They'd left the vile man badly injured and unconscious on the barracks landing platform upon their disastrous arrival. Panic seized Ses at this thought. She'd just seen her father and her spider dead, watched her mother and Rast meet their ends. Surely Ulthrick would be either dead, and therefore of no use, or vanished and free to kill more people to achieve his own chaotic ends.

It would be one or the other. This was, after all, the end of everything.

Her dread mounted as they followed the corkscrewing path until the rest of the barracks platform was down from their perspective, the gravity wrightings inlaid into mundane steel keeping them from drifting off into the Pit space. Topping the last rise, Ses held her breath for an uncomfortable stretch.

She nearly tripped at the sight of Ulthrick's stirring form, such was her surprise.

Maybe this one thing will go right.

If someone knew the information they needed now, it would be this man.

This mass murderer.

He lay on his stomach still, but had managed to prop himself up on his elbows. But when he looked up at her, something was missing from his one beady, black eye. Some essential spark. His greasy, gray hair was matted to his head with blood from at least one head wound suffered during their barge's high-speed arrival in the Pit.

You, he said, voice a little slurred.

Ses did not hear the whip-crack intelligence she recalled. A strange emotion welled in her. It was almost ... disappointment? She shuddered with disgust at the thought. This man deserved to die if anyone did. He didn't get to be considered a worthy adversary.

You said you had information for us. Information we'd need. The next words felt cut out of her. You offered us a deal. This is me taking it. I'll guarantee you your life in exchange for your cooperation.

Ulthrick hacked, bringing up blood, and Ses nearly ran to him when she realized he was laughing.

A bit late for that now, he said around wet, labored breaths.

Selestia Lucani. The voice sounded booming the way Vexvow's had, but distant. With a chill, Ses realized that was an illusion brought on by their orientation with respect to the barracks platform. She knew with cold certainty that it was the voice of the god that had been searching the wreckage.

And she recognized that voice. She'd heard it once before, underlying her father's.

Ses, it said again. This time, it spoke in her father's voice. That was so much worse.

Seeeeees, it said, the taunting beckon call of a predator that knew it had its prey pinned. The time for running is over. You've done very well, helped my family far more than you hindered us. The voice, that cruel mockery of Larimaine Dunsinay, seemed to be drawing closer. "How does that feel, my daughter? How does it feel to know that all those you made suffer did so for nothing?"

Rage welled in her. The accusation wasn't true. Singscreamer's mad designs would have had the world an ash heap by now, burned and smashed flat by Draconis. But Ses couldn't deny she'd failed utterly to stop the gods' escape. And in the end, either one succeeding was the doom of humankind. She clamped her jaw tight against the urge to yell.

Brea placed a steadying hand on her wrist, and Ses forced her breathing to a semblance of calm. Her one remaining eye burned with tears of fury.

Sounds like your time is almost up as well, Ulthrick said. He'd rolled onto his back, and through the tears she blinked away, Ses could now see the source of the wetness in his voice. A great wound to his chest had taken its time in bleeding through his thick clothing, but bleed it did, spreading dark redness across the thick woolen rags.

Maybe so, Ses said, following a sudden hunch. Her little laugh had cruelty in it. But I'm guessing you don't want Singscreamer free when your soul leaves your body.

The pain in Ulthrick's features vanished, momentarily forgotten. He looked calculating, almost his old self. Of course I don't. I betrayed his commands. I will languish in Hell for certain. He regarded her then, that calculation sharpening despite the dazedness of his eye. And what can you do about it?

I can drain your soul, Ses said, not at all certain this was true.

Brea gave a little gasp from Ses's blind side.

Like a wrighting. I'd let it dissipate. You'd dissolve into nothingness. Another thing she was uncertain of. Free of Singscreamer and all the others.

Ulthrick grunted, genuinely surprised by her words. But his regard intensified into suspicion. You've never done anything like that. I'd have heard if so.

Seeeeeeees. Her not-father's voice drifted up from below them, closer now. "I'm going to enjoy tearing you apart, body and soul. First the former, then the latter. I can make sure it doesn't escape. You'll never escape me, Ses. We're going to learn what eternity is. Together."

Fine, Ses said to Ulthrick, trying to block out the horrid, mocking words and the anger they stoked. "I haven't done it before. But I promise you on my two dead parents that I will try my hardest if you tell us what you know."

I think we need to go, Ses, Brea said, her voice as tense as a harp string. If we don't launch now—

Ses waved her to silence.

You offer very little, Ulthrick said, and expect quite a lot.

I'm offering to spare you an eternity of suffering, Ses said, incredulous.

Ha! Ulthrick's laugh brought up more blood. He didn't seem to care. To be reduced to begging in this way! See how badly I’ve failed. Very well. I will tell you.

Ses! Brea's voice was urgent, and she shook Ses by the shoulder until she turned and looked to where Brea pointed.

The end of a shimmering filament of nife iron, gossamer in its delicacy, had drifted around the edge of the platform, its source obscured by the ground on which they stood. It swayed in the air, but not in the manner of a breeze. It moved as though searching the volume on this side of the platform. As though driven by a will.

Looking for us.

Whatever you have to say, say it fast, Ses said, lowering her voice as if the filament could hear. For all she knew, it could. Her heart was pounding now, and only partly in fear of the god that hunted them.

I'm going to have to try and kill this man.

Visions of Kethic swarmed her.

It won't be like that. I won't live it through his eyes.

But that only served to flood her with shame. Shouldn't she have to?

There is, Ulthrick wheezed, a wrighting.

What does it do? Ses asked. The filament had drifted closer, joined now by two others. How do we make it?

Let him talk if you want him to talk, Brea suggested as Ulthrick waved Ses to silence,