Chapter 8
Bek
Year One
Lucia Aqualas Divinanar had looked like being a bit of a nightmare while she was alive.
Dead, she was all of a nightmare. Her corpse rampaged between the long benches, scattering stools as she lunged for any acolyte foolish enough to let her get close.
She’d broken the arm of one girl, who managed to twist free and crawl away under the tables.
But even as Bek turned from her own escape to watch, Lucia knocked down another acolyte and grabbed her ankles.
She swung the girl—who had sat close to Bek at breakfast—overhead in an arc, bringing her down to wrap around a stool.
The cracking sounds as her spine made a U-shape in the wrong direction were not those of wood breaking.
Added to the violence was an incoherent roaring that seemed too loud to be issuing from her foam-filled mouth.
Kindness Undu had positioned herself at the main doors and announced that nobody had permission to leave the lesson until they dealt with Lucia, or the corpse ran out of steam.
“She doesn’t look tired yet…!” Einsa had to shout for Bek to hear her, even though she, Mollandra, and a score of other acolytes were as far away from Lucia as they could get.
They huddled together on the platform, where the Kindnesses and instructors had eaten, and pressed themselves against the wall.
“Do the dead get tired?” Bek asked. She’d only just regained her breath after running frantically from their last safe haven to this one.
“Get ready…” Mollandra hadn’t said it loudly enough to be heard, but as Bek turned to see if she could press farther into the crowd, she read the words on the smaller girl’s lips.
Glancing back, she saw Lucia throw down the smock she must have torn from someone and turn to glower at their end of the hall. Something in the weight of her deranged stare fastened a choking band around Bek’s throat, reminding her once more of how the girl had died.
The acolytes started to shift to the left, anticipating Lucia’s charge down the right-hand side of the hall.
It hadn’t yet occurred to Lucia’s cooling brain that she could leap from table to table.
If she started to copy what some of the girls had been doing to evade her, she’d be nearly impossible to escape.
“We can’t run forever!” Bek shouted. She certainly couldn’t. Her diseased lungs already felt like nets trying to hold water. “Undu could be lying about Lucia getting tired.”
“She never said she would.” Einsa hurried to the left after the bulk of the crowd.
“We should stop her while we’re fresh, then!” Bek grabbed at Einsa’s thickly muscled arm. The girl was smaller than Lucia, but she was definitely one of the five biggest left.
“Stop her?”
“Kill her, then.”
The retreat turned to a rout as panicked acolytes began to sprint.
“She’s already dead!” Einsa shouted, not looking round.
Bek found herself at the rear of the group of girls fleeing along the side of the hall, Lucia’s bellowing growing louder at her back with each of Bek’s floundering strides.
Her lungs just refused to provide her legs with the strength that terror demanded.
Any trip or even stumble would put her in the monster’s grasp and certain death.
Help. To her shame, she would have cried, “Help!” But she hadn’t the breath for it. The other acolytes were suddenly yards ahead of her. Bek saw Mollandra glance back from the rear of the group, surely thanking the stars that she was faster than the slowest person.
The hand that clamped down on Bek’s shoulder felt more like an iron claw than flesh. Bek screamed despite the lack of air in her chest and began to fall.
She kept falling through a darkness that swallowed first the light and then all sound too.
Bek had spent too much time imagining how she would die, how much it would hurt—not whether, because dying always hurt—and almost no time imagining what being dead would be like.
She wouldn’t have guessed there would be so much falling.
So much of it that after a while she stopped trying to scream against it and found that it didn’t really feel like falling anymore.
“Where…” She sat up.
A bone sky offered no light, and yet somehow she could “see” the black banks rising to her left, studded here and there with what might be thorn bushes or the antlers of monstrous deer buried too shallow. That these growths were also black didn’t seem to prevent her sensing their outlines.
The sound of her own screaming, and the wheeze of her breath rattling into deficient lungs, had both been replaced by a low, constant rushing. She saw the lightless waters now, hurtling past, almost close enough to touch. A river of frightening speed, although she sensed no gradient.
Bek got to her feet. She hadn’t recovered her breath so much as stopped needing it. She turned and stepped back in shock, one heel almost making contact with the turbulent shallows. Lucia stood just two yards away, angry eyes hunting the darkness, her back to the river.
“Hello?”
And in a swirl of noise and colour it was all gone and Einsa was hauling her across the dining room floor.
“I…I’m—”
“Good, you’re awake. Get up!” Einsa released her.
“Where’s…”
“Lucia collapsed when she touched you. Both of you did.” Einsa frowned. “This little idiot”—she indicated Mollandra—“was already going back for you.”
Mollandra danced around Bek as she struggled to stand, her attempts to help more like bird pecks.
Not far away Lucia was also getting up.
“Shit. I thought it was too good to be true.” Einsa started to back away.
“Wh-what was?”
Mollandra pushed Bek. “Go! Run!”
Flanked by Mollandra and Einsa, Bek began to run. Behind them Lucia’s howling restarted.
Bek arrived gasping at the opposite end of the hall. The girls she’d been chasing were now clustered with dozens more around Undu at the doors. Some were even foolish enough to beg her to let them out. Several were weeping, close to hysteria.
Lucia had been distracted by another knot of acolytes and was rampaging after them while a score of other girls ran along the tabletops, jumping the gaps to maintain their distance.
Bek mastered her breath as best she could, not wanting to sound vulnerable. The weak are seldom listened to.
“Can you do that again?” Einsa asked.
“Do what?” Bek spread her hands. “I don’t know what happened.”
Einsa had more to say, but for a moment Lucia’s screams were added to by higher-pitched cries of almost the same volume.
Back among the table rows Lucia had snagged someone else.
The new screams ended suddenly and Lucia’s howls fell silent almost at the same time.
Bek could only see the dead thing’s back as it bent over its victim.
A moment later she couldn’t see either of them and the hall fell silent save for weeping.
It didn’t stay quiet for long.
“She’s eating her!” The acolyte’s scream sent everyone still out in the hall towards the main door, driven by a horror so great it might even overcome their fear of the Kindness.
“She’s dead.” Bek swallowed against the urge to vomit as for a moment Lucia raised her bloody face. “But if we put her eyes out she can’t see, and if we tie her up she can’t move. We should all attack her together.”
“But she’s so strong!” An unknown girl behind her. It was true that Lucia’s strength seemed to exceed even that promised by her height and powerful frame.
“She’s not stronger than all of us put together.” Bek struggled not to pant. If they thought she was doing this to save her skin rather than out of bravery, they would never follow her.
With a roar Lucia rose again, her mouth crimson, blood sheeting down her chin and neck, soaking her shift. She overturned the closest table with contemptuous ease. Without the tables they were doomed.
“She’s drinking the blood!”
“She’s getting stronger!”
Bek had expected Mollandra to join in with the panic, but instead the small girl lifted a fist from which a four-inch metal spike jutted. A second later she opened her hand to reveal the business end of the spoon she had clearly purloined from their breakfast.
“Meh.” Einsa, unimpressed, pulled out a seven-inch hunting knife with a serrated back by way of reply.
“What…” Bek didn’t have time for more. Lucia was already barrelling towards them.
“Everyone together!” Einsa roared, brandishing her blade overhead. “Together or we’ll all die.”
Of the over eighty acolytes perhaps a dozen stayed. Bek couldn’t really fault them. If she could have got someone else to do the work, she would have.
“Grab stools!” She seized a nearby one and held it before her, legs aimed at the oncoming undead monstrosity.
A stool might not be much by way of armour, but somehow the illusion of safety considerably boosted Bek’s courage.
Heartened by her example, most of the other dozen acolytes grabbed stools of their own, and there were even others running back now to add their contribution to the thicket of wooden legs opposing Lucia’s charge.
The bloodstained monster that had briefly been their fellow acolyte smashed headlong into the defensive wall.
Several girls were thrown back, one of them falling, but the wall held.
Grunting with effort, feet slipping on the flagstones, the girls refused to let Lucia through, and she hung on the forest of legs, howling, stretching for them.
Gory hands clutched at the air just before Bek’s face, but Lucia’s reach proved not quite sufficient.
Bek struggled for breath and struggled to hold her place.
“On my mark!” Einsa bellowed. “Three! Two! One! Push!”
Strong as she was, heavy as she was, Lucia couldn’t resist them. Yard by yard they forced her back. Halfway to the wall, frustration penetrated Lucia’s rage and she changed tactics. She yanked on a stool, and it came flying forward with Mollandra staggering behind it.