16. Zombie in the Attic #2
“And all of them silenced,” Genna finished, her voice flat and hard.
They exchanged wary glances and moved on.
Miles peered into the first cell through the bars. Empty. Just dust and the smell of old terror. The second was the same. The third, however, held a stain on the floor, a thick, dark sludge that looked like oil mixed with decay. Miles wrinkled his nose.
“Don’t look too closely at the puddles,” Genna said, her voice flat. She moved to the fifth door on the left, and Miles followed.
Standing in the center of the cramped cell was a man.
Or what had been a man. The skin had tightened and browned, lips pulled back from teeth that looked too long.
The clothes were rags, hanging off a frame that shouldn’t have been standing.
It was a corpse in an advanced state of decomposition, yet it stood upright, balanced on rotting feet, staring at the door with milky, unseeing eyes.
The body was still, but the shadow it cast against the back wall from Miles’s cold light was shivering.
“Shit,” Miles’s fingers twitched, begging to conjure a flame and purge the sight. “Well, you were right, Genna. Here’s your zombie. But why is it just standing there?”
“It’s dormant,” Genna said. She didn’t look at the monstrosity with fear, or even disgust. Her expression was heavy, sagging with a terrible, weary pity.
Gabriel peered over Miles’s shoulder and made a noise of profound distaste. “Tell me that’s not someone I knew.”
“Unlikely. Madaze wouldn’t have wanted to draw attention, getting bodies from among his connections,” Genna said.
She turned her back on the creature, her attention fixing on a simple iron hook driven into the wall beside the doorframe.
Hanging there was a strip of fabric, a gossamer thing, dyed a shifting, iridescent gray that seemed to smoke in the cold light.
It looked like a lady’s scarf, delicate and harmless.
The fight drained out of Genna’s face, leaving only a pale, hallowed terror.
“Genna?” Miles asked, stepping closer. The magic radiating from the fabric was subtle but cold. It felt like the static before a storm, but reversed. Vacuum instead of pressure. “What is that?”
She didn’t answer. She reached out, snatched the fabric from the hook, and ripped it in half with a savage jerk.
A shockwave of magic snapped through the corridor, carrying the scent of ozone and the sea. Shadows bled from the tear, swirling violently before evaporating, leaving the heavy, metallic taste of salt on Miles’s tongue.
Inside the cell, the corpse collapsed with the sodden, heavy thud of dropped offal.
Miles stared at the heap of bones and rotten flesh, then back at Genna. “You just... unmade it.”
Gabriel gagged, clamping a hand over his mouth as the wet thud reverberated. “If I have to drag one more corpse out of this house,” he choked out, voice straining for his usual wit but landing on nausea, “I’m doing it with a trebuchet. Why was this thing here?”
“Madaze must have died without activating it,” Genna glared at the heap of bones. “Zombies degrade fast once they’re moving. This one was prepped, but he never got the chance to put it to work. Unlike the others. ”
Miles fixated on the torn fabric in Genna’s grip. Destroying the crafted component had instantly severed the animating spell. It was uncomfortably similar to his own artificing, though he loathed comparing his clean crafting to this obvious necromancy.
“That seemed suspiciously easy,” Gabriel said. “A torn handkerchief unravels the undead?”
Genna crumpled the gray silk in her fist. “Normally, the caster would be wearing or holding this while controlling the zombie. You’d have to get through them to destroy it.
I promise you—it’s done.” Genna dropped the torn fabric to the floor and wiped her hands on her apron, though the silk hadn’t been dirty.
“Let’s keep moving. I need to see the rest before I can make any conclusions. ”
“Genna,” Miles pressed, blocking her path to the next room. “You clearly know what this is. Ignorance is not a defensive strategy.”
She looked at him, her dark eyes flinty.
“Ignorance was the only thing keeping you off the radar of people worse than Vellast. But I suppose we’re past that now.
” She sighed, the sound rattling in her chest. “I need to be sure. I need to know if this was just Madaze playing with toys, or if it is... bigger.”
“Bigger?” Gabriel asked. “The man was a vampire who kept a zombie in his attic. Maybe more than one, given the number of cells. How much bigger does it get?”
“We’ll see,” was all she said.
She led them past the final cell—another puddle of sludge—and into a larger chamber near the end of the hall. A single dormered window let in weak light, supplemented by the steady glow of cold-light sconces mounted along the walls.
Four large looms dominated the space, but they weren’t strung with wool or linen.
The threads were translucent, shimmering with that same smoky, oily quality as the scarf.
Two of the looms had half-finished weavings in progress: fabric that resembled what Genna had torn to release the zombie.
Workbenches lined the walls, cluttered with bowls of powdered bone, jars containing what looked like teeth, and dried botanical matter that Miles didn’t recognize from any standard alchemical text.
Except the Veilflower petals. There was a lot of Veilflower here.
A fortune’s worth. The scent was suffocating.
Not just floral, but thick with static of a thousand memories that weren’t his, pressing against his temples.
Miles had to shake his head to clear the sudden, phantom sensation of strangers’ hands on his shoulders.
“What is this?” Miles moved to a workbench, hovering his hand over a bowl of gray dust. “Crafting, obviously. But the components... this is sympathetic magic, but the symbolism is beyond me.”
“It’s a Veilmancy workshop,” Genna said.
She walked to a loom, running a hand along the wooden frame.
“This is where they weave the shrouds. Shrouds of Reanimation. Shrouds of Binding. That thing in the cell? It was just practice. A way to increase Veilmancy proficiency before attempting something big.”
“Big? Like house-sized big?” Gabriel picked up a spool of silver thread, frowning. “And what the fuck is Veilmancy?”
“I fear big-like-a-house might have been only a part of it. Veilmancy is a type of magic,” Genna said. “Just like the magical practices with which you are familiar. Except we only pull from Aether with our components; they also pull from the Veil. The barrier between life and death.”
She gestured for them to follow her through a heavy archway into the final room at the end of this hall.
The floor here was polished black stone tiles, inlaid with intricate geometric patterns in silver.
They converged on a low altar in the center.
The geometry was complicated and dense. Miles recognized the mathematical precision required to lay it out.
This wasn’t the work of a hedge witch or a dabbler.
This was high-level, magical engineering.
Bookstands surrounded the altar, holding heavy, bound grimoires. Genna walked to the nearest one and flipped it open. She stared at the text, her face pale.
“These books,” she whispered. “They aren’t from Averly. This is Veil Isles’ work.”
“Madaze had contact with the Isles?” Miles asked, his mind racing.
The Veil Isles were a boogeyman, a lawless, drifting archipelago of monsters.
Utterly forbidden to Averlians and Lyonnorians alike.
No one went there, and no one was allowed to come here from there. “Smuggling? The nerve it would take…”
“More than smuggling,” Genna said, turning to face them. She looked small against the backdrop of the dark altar, but her voice was steady. “Miles, Gabriel. What do you think a vampire is?”
Ah. So Genna was finally ready to share more about vampires than what she’d slipped up and hinted at that day they cleaned the house with Nikka .
“A victim of a bite,” Gabriel said. “Cursed to drink blood. Burns in the sun. Hates garlic. The usual laundry list.”
“Forget the fairytales,” Genna said, dismissing it with a wave of her hand. “If the Guild told you the truth, half their mages would be booking passage to the Isles by morning. It’s not a sickness, Miles. It’s a promotion. Think less infection, and more a stage of evolution .”
Miles rubbed the bridge of his nose. His headache was getting worse. “Evolution into what? The Guild maintains that human physiology can’t sustain high-density magic transformation without collapsing.”
“The Guild knows about as much regarding Veilmancy as a goldfish knows about celestial navigation,” Genna said.
She walked a slow circle around the ritual stains on the floorboards, her heavy boots kicking up motes of dust that glittered with unnatural hues.
“The goal is Paragon . A perfect vessel for both Aether and Veil. But the failure rate is... high.”
Gabriel ran a finger over the black stone altar, checking for dust, or perhaps blood. “And let me guess. Madaze was a dropout.”
“He got stuck in the transition,” Genna said. “He opened the door but couldn’t step all the way through. At least not before we ended him.”
“So he rotted on the threshold,” Miles said. The sheer waste of it. All this genius, just to become a parasite.
Genna nodded. “The magic consumes the vessel unless they master it. The hunger isn’t malice, and it isn’t a curse. It’s just a simple equation of input versus output. He was empty, Gabriel. He needed life force just to keep his own skin from unraveling.”
Gabriel’s face was still and blank, but Miles saw the minute tension at the corner of his mouth, the way his fingers curled inward against his palm. “So, no tragic accident in a dark alley.” Gabriel’s voice was light but brittle. “No swooning into the arms of a dark stranger.”