Chapter Thirty-Three
It wouldn’t change what they had.
The soldiers started talking, and Seraphina felt her being splinter in the middle. One half wanted them to stop, the other needed to know.
“Project Prometheus,” the first, whose name was Huber, said.
“That’s what we heard people call it,” the second continued.
“The Lord Harvester wanted to create soldiers that would not fall. Stronger than any beast alive, fast beyond comprehension, capable of ending lives with their bare hands, these creatures are supposed to end the war without the High Harvester needing to use his most prized relics in battle. The bones are valuable, the men he loses cannot be brought back, and these revenants are the answer to both hurdles.”
“Project Prometheus started two years ago,” Huber said.
“The Lord Harvester gathered the most brilliant minds at Schloss Ewigheim near Freising: naturalists, chemists, physicians, mathematicians, and philosophers. They did experiments... I heard from people who worked at the schloss that the floors were bathed in blood, the miasma of death permeated the walls, day and night, graves were dug and rotten parts were buried. The Lord Harvester sent his loyal men to collect the corpses that littered the battlefields. His surgeons hacked them and mashed them together, stitched them up and built bodies that were twice as big.”
“They reanimated them,” the second one said. “That’s why they are called revenants. But that is all we know.”
“Yes, that is all we know,” the first soldier confirmed.
Seraphina’s head hung low and her hands were pressed to her ears. She heard every word all the same. She couldn’t turn toward Rune, and she despised herself for it.
“I remember a fire,” Rune said. His voice was lower than ever, defeated. He sounded like he was far away, not in this world. Not of this world.
“The schloss burned two months ago,” the second soldier said.
“No one knows how the fire started. The people who worked there, servants and men of science, tried to put it out but the more they tried, the bigger the flames grew, until they swallowed everything and burned them alive. Not a single soul escaped.”
“Except for the revenants in the dungeons,” Huber said. “The Lord Harvester had taken some of the revenants to Munich to train, but had left a few in the dungeons, locked in the cells, where they did things for him.”
“What things?” Rune asked.
“We don’t know. Those creatures didn’t burn, so they found their way out. The Lord Harvester has tasked men with finding them and bringing them back.”
“If we bring you back,” the other soldier said, “We will be rewarded.”
The men fell silent, which meant that was how far their knowledge went, or that Seraphina would have to ask more specific questions. She felt ill, and was it her imagination, or was she swaying on her feet? She stumbled to the side and caught herself on a tree, her fingers digging into the bark.
The forest whispered around them, the branches cracking under the weight of snow. A cold wind blew from the east, mercilessly biting her cheeks.
“I want to see it,” Rune said. “Schloss Ewigheim. It was night when I escaped the flames and stumbled into the rain. It’s true that the fire couldn’t be put out, because it was pouring and the rain did nothing.
It was all so bright under the night sky, I was blinded, could barely see where I was going.
I just kept walking, trying to get away from the sudden vastness of it all, but the more I ran, the more the sky and the forest seemed to open before me and swallow me whole. ”
The way he talked reminded Seraphina of who he was. Rune. He said he didn’t know, but she did. He was the man who was afraid to be alone under the endless sky, the man who’d never seen the sea, the man who’d needed her to hold him by the sleeve of his cloak and lead him through a crowded city.
He was the man whose touch she craved, whose hands had explored every inch of her body, whose essence she’d drunk.
They’d lain on the grass near a lake, and she’d told him what four monsters had done to her.
They’d shared a bed, their limbs entangled, he’d sworn to spill their blood, she’d promised to help him find himself.
She hadn’t known then, and she’d told herself it didn’t matter anyway. Now she knew. He was made up of disparate body parts, taken from dead people, he was sewn together, stitched up...
It didn’t matter.
Seraphina had said, over and over, that she would always choose him.
“You,” she said, turning her head toward the two soldiers. “Take us to Schloss Ewigheim.”
They stood up, leaning against each other.
Their legs had fallen asleep from lack of movement and the cold.
They looked at the muskets that lay discarded in the snow but made no attempt to reach for them.
They wanted to – Seraphina could sense it – but as long as they were in the relic’s thrall, they could only do what they were commanded.
“We will pretend that we are your prisoners,” Seraphina said. “Are there soldiers at the schloss?”
“Yes, there’s a company,” Huber said.
“Then our plan will work.” She thought about the muskets and wondered if she should risk it. “You, pick them up.” She pointed at the weapons. “Check that they’re unloaded. You will walk behind us and keep them aimed at our backs.”
The soldiers didn’t hesitate to follow her orders.
Soon enough, they were on their way to Schloss Ewigheim.
Huber and his partner didn’t talk unless Seraphina asked them something.
Rune didn’t speak either, lost in thought, and Seraphina gave him space to process.
She needed the quiet too. She was hyper aware of everything that happened around them, every little sound and movement, and in her mind, she focused on keeping the two soldiers in her thrall.
She wasn’t sure if that was how the relic worked, but she assumed the bone wouldn’t lead her astray now that it had found its new keeper.
She wondered about the woman who’d had it before her, the wife of baron Von Rothenfeld.
How had she lost her head? The men who’d broken into their house and killed them all must’ve figured out that she was using a relic.
One of the soldiers must’ve outsmarted her somehow, taken her by surprise, cut off her head before she could utter the word “you”.
Most likely, it had been a strike from behind.
That thought made Seraphina uncomfortable as she felt the barrel of the musket gently prod her lower back every time Huber slipped on a patch of ice.
They walked for an hour before Rune described to her the black towers of a castle rising in the distance.
It was another hour before they reached the gates.
The crunch of snow under their boots turned to sloshing as they stepped onto the main path.
The air smelled acrid, like wet ash sitting there for months.
Seraphina could hear people around them, men who hooted, exclaimed in disbelief, or murmured amongst themselves.
“There are maybe fifty men,” Rune said. “They’ve pitched tents along the eastern wall. The schloss itself is a shell. Black holes instead of windows, and black stone all around.”
They walked through an archway, and Seraphina knew they were inside the structure, but the air was just as freezing as it was outside.
It smelled stronger here, like old smoke.
The two soldiers let them up a winding staircase into the western tower.
The climb was long, the stone steps slippery, and Seraphina used her walking stick to steady herself.
It was narrow and hard to breathe, but then Rune’s arm brushed against hers, and she felt better.
Comforted. They were here together, and whatever awaited at the top of the tower, they would face it and it wouldn’t change them. It wouldn’t change what they had.
They were pushed into a room, and Seraphina felt the space widen.
There was a man sitting behind a massive table, she could see his dark shadow hunched over papers, and when he heard them enter, he looked up and pushed away from the table in shock, the legs of his chair scraping against the stone floor.
“What is this?” he asked.
The air rushed out of Seraphina’s lungs. It was as if she’d been punched in the stomach. She knew his voice.
The soldiers escorting them didn’t react. If Seraphina wasn’t the one to give them the order to speak, they weren’t going to open their mouths.
“Explain at once. Where did you find the revenant? The Lord Harvester will be pleased. But who is the woman?”
A small sound escaped Seraphina, something between a gasp and a scoff of disbelief.
“You don’t remember me?” she asked.
The man cocked his head, possibly studying her from head to toe. She couldn’t tell, because she couldn’t see the movement of his eyes.
She turned to the two soldiers.
“You, get out of here.”
They turned on their heels and rushed down the stairs, nearly tripping.
She wondered how long it would take for the thrall to release them, if it was a matter of time or distance.
She also wondered if they would feel confused or violated, or if they would grasp at all that they’d been under someone else’s control and their actions in the past two hours hadn’t been of their own volition.
Rune hadn’t seemed to realize he’d been manipulated into kissing her.
“What–” the man started but was cut off by Seraphina’s commanding tone.
“You, what is your name?”
He snapped to attention, his back straight and his eyes fixed on her.
“Thomas Mayer,” he said. “Captain Mayer.”
“And you don’t remember me at all, Captain Mayer?”
She approached the table, leaning her walking stick against it. Then she reached for her daggers, pulled them out, and placed them right in front of him. Saint Vivia’s relic showed her his shadow move closer so he could look at the daggers.
“If you uncovered your face...” he murmured.
“I won’t do that, though I should. You deserve to see what my face looks like after you and your friends gouged my eyes out.”
There was a sharp intake of breath, and that told Seraphina it was coming back to him.
That day in September 1816, when he, Viktor Eisengrau, and the two other men whose names she hadn’t yet learned had attacked the carriage she and Matteo were traveling in, killed the guard who stayed and fought, then killed Matteo and did unspeakable things to her.
They’d left her in a ditch, covered in mud, semen, and her own blood, and taken Matteo’s body with them.
“You,” he said.
She laughed. “No, that’s my line.”
Rune moved closer. She felt him at her side.
“Is he one of them?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“There are papers on the table,” Rune said. “And a ledger.” He reached for it, and Mayer didn’t stop him.
Seraphina was more focused on the fact that she was about to get her revenge on this man. And once she was done with him, there were three more to follow.
“Captain Mayer,” she said in the sweetest voice. “Do you know what today is?”
“No.”
“Today is the day you die.”