Chapter 19 #2
A band across the centre had been levelled and paved, dividing the chamber like a boundary that Mollandra would have to cross in order to reach the passages leading from the far side.
She approached slowly, burdened by the doom that haunted the space all around her, unseen but certain.
She could see no source for the light, and it made her eyes ache.
Drawing closer, she could see that vast numbers of small bones had been used to mark out complex patterns, including several large circles surrounded by symbols spelled out in the frail white bones of children’s fingers.
Although the skulls were beyond sight now, Mollandra could feel their gaze upon her, the weight of their judgement suddenly a physical thing.
She had broken the old lore on the very doorstep of the Academy on the day that she joined it.
To kill one’s parents—there was no higher crime upon the Kindnesses’ lists.
And she had taken their coins while her father’s corpse cooled by the roadside.
She had been marked for failure since that day.
And now the reckoning was here. She would never leave this place.
As she set foot on the boundary, Mollandra fell to her hands and knees.
Everything that had come before was as nothing to this.
She gripped the tooth in her pocket, and it burned fiercely cold.
Drool hung from her panting lips as she fought to resist. Before, she’d battled the urge to run, but here the chance to run felt long gone.
Here if she failed to eject this consuming nightmare from her mind, it would kill her.
Her heart would beat itself into oblivion.
“It’s…just…” She spat and crawled one pace forward, then another. “…monsters…”
Tooth and claw, blade and skull, rot and horror—she had seen these things before. Death and the threat of death were no strangers to her or any acolyte. Whatever terrors stalked these caverns, be they of this world or any other, the instructors had worse waiting for her upstairs.
Another forward yard, about to pass between two of the bone circles.
Without warning, the oldest and foulest of Mollandra’s memories invaded her, knocking aside the walls that cracked only in the depths of her worst nightmares.
She fell on her side, curling in on herself to make a smaller target but finding no respite.
This torture employed all the fears that were integral to the foundations of who she was.
At last, among all the many challenges of the Academy, Mollandra had met her match.
She lay paralysed, unable to defeat herself, rigid with emotions that had surpassed fear and were driving her body beyond its limits.
Memory strangled her. She was, once more, the tiny child hiding despite the inevitability of being found, the little girl pressing back into cupboards in rigid, unbreathing, desperate silence wanting only to be saved and never once believing salvation existed.
In this place of ghosts Bek and Einsa came not as spirits but as simple memory. A glimpse of their faces, their rare smiles breaking through the choking clouds of past and ever-present horror.
Mollandra sucked in a convulsive breath.
Neither Bek nor Einsa had ever known that they had saved her, albeit far too late.
Neither knew that what they offered, what they didn’t even consider kindness, let alone love, had been to her the key to the locked box of her life, a glimpse at another kind of world she hadn’t known existed.
A clenched hand opened. Sore eyes unscrewed and regarded the darkness. Mollandra thought of what had been taken from her, and by whom, and slowly, agonizingly slowly, converted the fear that had infected her back into the anger it had been.
She finished the crossing of the boundary on two feet, kicking aside the patterned bones without caring what harm might come.
The next cave marked the limit of Treecie’s bravery.
The constant foulness of the air reached a new level in the tunnel leading down to the chamber.
Breathing became difficult, and Mollandra decorated the stones with the part-digested remains of her breakfast. The atmosphere felt physically thicker.
At first Mollandra saw only Treecie, standing on the slime-slick rocks at the edge of a sickly green lake that stretched beyond the light of their lanterns.
The girl watched her with pale resolve, hands empty.
Mollandra, realizing that she should have picked up a weapon, even if only a loose rock or sharpened bone, began circling away to the left, following the wall.
She saw first one body and, while fighting the urge to retch again, saw another, then another, and understood that an unbroken mass of decomposing corpses lay on the cold stone, one overlapping the next.
Each had been stripped of their acolytes’ robes, and Mollandra stifled a hysterical laugh at the realization that this must have been done in the name of economy.
Heaven forfend the Academy should waste anything other than young lives…
Bodies lay in every stage of the journey from flesh and bone to just bone.
Mollandra lowered her lantern before she had a chance to see whether one of them was Einsa, but not before she discerned that the slope of the rock shelf was sufficient to deliver the products of putrefaction into the water.
It was even possible that the water wasn’t water at all.
A faint splash turned Mollandra’s head. Treecie had set her lantern down and stepped backwards into the lake. She stood almost to her knees in the foul brew, her robes floating around her.
“Look at what they’ve done to us…” Mollandra said. “Look at what they make us do.”
The same hysterical laugh that Mollandra had kept in broke free from Treecie, half of it wild terror.
In that moment Mollandra would have turned and left, swearing never to kill again save in self-defence. She would have let the Academy deliver any justice Treecie deserved, and that only if it could manage to do so before Mollandra managed to burn it down.
But Treecie retreated another step, the cold slime reaching her waist, and as she raised her hands the dead girls at the edges of the heap began to stir. Mollandra could see the shadows heaving at the periphery of the lanterns’ illumination. Soft, wet sounds accompanied the motion.
She could have run and let Treecie hunt her. Perhaps the girl’s control would weaken as she left the chamber. But Mollandra hadn’t given chase only to run away. Empty-handed, she followed Treecie into the pool.
Beneath the watery foulness and its floating fats the rocks descended in uneven steps, causing Mollandra to throw out her arms to keep herself from stumbling. Treecie, going backwards, had a tougher time of it and fell away with a strangled cry.
By the time she rose from her floundering panic the girl was shoulder-deep, her hair plastered across her forehead, gobbets of rot rolling down her cheeks.
Behind Mollandra, splashes announced the arrival of the first corpse. Rather than face the horrors animated by the rage that Treecie had returned to sour flesh, Mollandra threw herself at the focus of her own anger. She fastened both hands around Treecie’s scrawny neck.
As Mollandra dug her thumbs into the softness of the girl’s throat, Treecie’s fingernails sought her eyes. Mollandra ducked her head, and as Treecie tried to pull away, both of them went under.
Refusing panic, Mollandra clung on, knowing she had the advantage even if neither of them could breathe now. She tightened her grip and kept her mouth and eyes screwed shut.
When Treecie went limp Mollandra knew it was too early and held fast, imagining that desperation had driven the girl to try such weak deception.
Only when the hands closed on her arms and fingers tangled in her hair did Mollandra understand where Treecie’s concentration had been aimed.
The inexorable strength of the dead pulled Mollandra’s arms free.
Sheer blind luck allowed her to surface, though the dead might not have reached them so easily if the fight had taken them out of their depth.
Mollandra snatched a lungful of the foul air, blinking away slime.
Two rotting husks held her, with others crowding in behind.
All of them must have been acolytes she’d shared her life with.
Even if they were from other years she would have passed them in the corridors, broken bread beneath the same roof at mealtimes.
They were too far gone for recognition, though, turned into nightmares by soft decay.
Mollandra fought, but the dead wrapped her in their rotting arms and, slippery as she was, she found herself trapped.
Where with a living foe she might break a finger, gouge an eye, or stamp on feet and let the pain create an opening, the dead had no concern for any hurt she might do them.
She expected to feel their teeth at any moment, but unlike Lucia, who had woken from death’s sleep with an appetite, these acolytes seemed less eager to devour her.
The stray thought that she might already have seen Lucia’s skull rolled across the furious storm of Mollandra’s thinking.
The girl’s bones might have spelled out one of the symbols she’d kicked apart.
“Bitch!” Treecie surfaced, choking and spitting.
Mollandra startled despite herself.
Treecie turned this way and that for a moment, caught in distress and disgust, swinging at the air, then wiping at her eyes. As she calmed, a smile found its way onto the girl’s dripping face. “Going to kill me, were you?” The words emerged in a hoarse croaking mockery of her usual voice.
Mollandra stopped struggling, hoping her captors might relax, allowing her to jerk free. “I gave it a try.”
Treecie stumbled into shallower waters, her shoulders emerging from the filth. The smile stayed in place but the anger in her eyes made a lie of it. “Me! You were going to kill—”
“Get it over with.” One way or another Mollandra wanted to finish this fast.
“If you begged a little, I might let you go.” Treecie advanced another step, smoothing the stinking liquid from her hair.
“Begging wouldn’t have saved you.” Mollandra flexed slightly, but the many hands on her maintained their painfully tight grip.
“I did it, you know?” Treecie said. “You were right. I jammed the lock full of dirt. Why not? It’s not like we have rules.
” She showed her teeth in a white line as if she were the one most likely to want a mouthful of Mollandra’s flesh.
“I could have them hold you under so you could know how it was for her at the end. But I want to see you die. And besides”—she rubbed at her throat, wincing—“the old lore says an eye for an eye.”
Dead fingers clamped around Mollandra’s neck, sealing away her air.
Mollandra fought, knowing that to conserve her resources would only draw out the inevitable, and if she could unbalance her captors some chance might present itself.
It did not.
Her vision began to vanish behind a crowding blackness. She stopped being able to feel her limbs, let alone fight.
Undu had often said that the connection to the shadow realms was strongest the closer a necromancer was to it.
And this could be by physically approaching death’s outer regions through such places as the Bone Garden, but more simply by being personally closer to death, be that through disease, injury, or merely age.
Right now, Mollandra knew herself closer to death than she had ever been before.
She stretched her will towards the corpse with its hands about her throat, hoping to break Treecie’s control. Undu’s lessons in these arts had never meant much to her, rather like Thurli could never master the division of one number by another no matter how Instructor Clakka explained it.
Mollandra experienced something different this time. She felt the dead around her and sensed Treecie’s power wrapping them like dark, pulsing vines. Against the black flame of Treecie’s necromancy her own felt feeble. A child’s strength against an adult’s.
Even so, with the dying flutters of her heart she was ready to try when visions of Einsa returned, pushing out all sight of the unequal battle she had been about to dive into.
Mollandra, for the only time in her life that she could remember, gave up the fight. Why not spend her last moments in the company of one of the tiny number of people who had shown her any warmth, any true kindness, or charity? She reached instead for her friend.
Something opened Mollandra’s eyes and lifted her head on the half-dead muscles of her tortured neck.
Treecie stood, deep in concentration, her face twisted with violent pleasure. A dark shape broke the mottled surface behind her, it loomed above her spilling filthy water. Corruption had not yet laid its hand upon Einsa. She stood as she had in life, though deadly pale.
She wrapped an arm around Treecie’s neck, the girl understanding her peril only at the last moment…and snapped it with a sharp twist, gifting her the unearned mercy of a swift ending.
Mollandra’s sight failed her at that point, and she fell into her own darkness where the lantern’s light could never follow.