Chapter 8
EIGHT
AVIORA
My lips are still tingling when the first wave hits the sea gate.
I should be focused on the battle. Should be calculating angles and exits, counting enemies, doing all the things that have kept me alive through worse odds than this.
Instead, I’m standing on a fortress wall with the taste of an orc pirate on my tongue, watching the dead rise from black water, and all I can think about is the way his hands felt on my waist.
Focus.
The drowned pour over the chain boom in a tide of pale flesh and cold light.
They don’t climb the way living things climb—they flow, their movements wrong and liquid, their rotting hands finding purchase on metal that should be too slick to grip.
The ward fires flare blue along the harbor walls, driving some of them back, but there are too many.
For every wraith that retreats, three more take its place.
“Eastern wall!” Zoric’s voice cuts through the chaos. He’s moved to the command position at the Great Hall’s balcony, his blade drawn, his attention sweeping the battlefield with the cold precision of a man who’s done this before. “They’re flanking through the collapse!”
I run before I think about it. My feet know the route—through the corridor, down the stairs, toward the crumbling section of wall where the seabirds nest and the stones are slick with decades of spray.
The sounds of fighting reach me before I clear the passage: steel on dead flesh, the shriek of wraiths meeting ward fire, the grunts and curses of living men defending their home.
The Eastern Collapse is chaos.
Drowned things clamber through gaps in the rubble, their luminous bodies casting shadows that move wrong.
Dreadhaven’s guards fight in the narrow spaces, their blades finding necks and limbs, but the dead don’t fall easy.
Even headless, they keep coming—hands grasping, mouths opening and closing on words no one can hear.
I draw my knives and wade in.
The first wraith doesn’t see me coming. My blade takes it in the base of the skull, and whatever animates these things seems to live there—it drops, its glow fading.
The second turns toward me with a face I almost recognize, some merchant sailor who died in waters he should have avoided, and I don’t let myself hesitate.
The knife finds its mark. The body falls.
“Nice work!” A voice from my left—young, male, orc. I glance over and find a guard with a quick blade and quicker grin. “You fight like you’ve done this before!”
“I fight like I want to survive!” I duck under a grasping arm, slice the tendons at its elbow, kick the body back into the gap it crawled through. “Less talking, more stabbing!”
He laughs—actually laughs, like this is some kind of game—and throws himself at the next wave of drowned.
I follow, because there’s nowhere else to go.
The cursed coins pulse at my belt, hungry and eager, and I can feel the dead responding to them.
They want me. The curse is calling them, and every wraith in this breach is fighting to reach the gold I’m carrying.
Good.
I use their hunger against them. Let them focus on me while the guards cut them down from the sides. The rubble-choked passage becomes a killing floor, and I’m the bait at its center, dancing between reaching hands and snapping jaws.
Minutes pass. Or hours. Time loses meaning in combat—there’s only the next strike, the next dodge, the burn of muscles pushed past endurance. My knives grow slick with whatever passes for blood in the drowned. My clothes are soaked through with spray and worse. And the rubble shifts.
Not outward.
Inward.
Dust settles instead of flying. The guards near the breach hesitate, blades half-raised, because nothing comes through.
Then one of the fallen men twitches. He’d been dead for minutes. I watched the light go out of his eyes. Now that same ghostly luminescence leaks back into them.
Gold glints in the cracks of stone. Not loose coins—chains. Fine links of cursed gold slither through the rubble like living things, sliding over broken rock, threading through armor, burrowing into flesh. One link catches the dead guard’s wrist. Another slips between his ribs.
He arches.
The sound that comes out of him is not human.
“Back!” someone shouts.
Too late.
The chains yank.
Stone grinds as the rubble parts, not shattered but drawn aside, dragged into shape around the body as if the wall itself is obeying.
More fallen men jerk upright. Their limbs snap at wrong angles, dragged into alignment by glittering gold.
Bone cracks. Flesh tears. The chains bind them together—torso to torso, limb to limb—until the mass rises, taller and taller, a grotesque tower of fused bodies wrapped in molten links.
Eight feet high when it finishes.
The faces are still there. Half-buried. Eyes glowing.
Barnacles crust the skin as if the sea itself has claimed them. Water seeps from their mouths.
And at the center—one face I do not recognize—smiles.
“Little thief.”
The voice resonates through every throat at once. Wet. Layered. Deeper than Oreth’s, but cut from the same rot.
“The captain wants you.”
Its gaze fixes on the coins at my belt. I feel the cold of them even before it moves.
“Alive,” it continues, the gold tightening around fused flesh. “If possible.”
The mass moves.
Not a charge. A glide.
The chains pull it forward in a lurching, unnatural stride, stone grinding under its weight. A fused arm lashes out, claws forming from knotted bone and gold.
I drop, roll, feel the rush of air as it tears through where my head was a heartbeat ago. I come up throwing my knife. The blade sinks into one of the faces embedded in its shoulder.
The face screams.
The whole thing doesn’t even slow.
The young guard is suddenly at my side. Pale. Steady.
“Go!” he snaps.
“Like hell—”
“The captain needs you breathing! Go!”
He launches himself forward before I can grab him. His blade drives between two torsos, severing a chain. Gold shrieks like metal under strain. The creature roars—every stolen throat joining the sound—and slams him aside hard enough to crack stone.
Not again.
I am not watching another boy die buying me time.
The pouch is in my hand before I consciously reach for it. The coins burn cold against my palm, hungry and aware.
“Hey!” I shout.
The fused faces turn toward me.
“You want it?” I shake the pouch. “Come earn it.”
I fling it—not at the monster—but past it, through the torn breach, out toward the cliff edge and the waiting sea.
The coins arc once in the torchlight.
Every chain in the creature’s body snaps taut.
Orders or hunger—hunger wins.
The mass twists violently, limbs tearing free from one another as it lunges after the gold. The combat fighter, bloodied but upright, uses that split second. His blade hacks downward with both hands.
He severs the thickest chain at its spine.
The creature comes apart.
Bodies collapse separately this time. Limbs fall. Gold goes dull.
The glow drains from their eyes.
Beyond the breach, I hear the faint splash of coins striking water.
And for a heartbeat, the sea answers with a roar.
“I’m Brek,” he says, looking out the hole. “You threw them away.” Brek stares at me, chest heaving. “The cursed gold—you just—”
“If I need them, I’ll get them back.” The words are steadier than I feel. “After we survive the night.”
He doesn’t get a chance to respond. More drowned are coming, climbing through the new gap the lieutenant made, and we’re back to fighting for every inch of ground.