“Uncle!”

  Ahead, through an ocean of bone, there was an altar raised on a pyramid of stone. Pipes and wires crawled along the masonry. Granite columns wreathed the apex of the structure like the ornaments of a crown. In the center of the altar, there was a bank of metal devices, thrumming with an energy that gasped and moaned and begged.

  “Uncle!”

  A strip of shattered concrete led right to the pyramid. On both sides, there were rows of skeletons. They had been crucified against rusted hunks of the metal ships. The flag of the necromancers was draped around their bodies—with the desert sun shining down on them, the ancient fabric still had hints of red, white and blue.

  “Uncle!”

  There was movement at the altar. A cloud of bone flitted through the air. A trio of thralls spread out into firing positions along the edge of the pyramid. Between the stone and machinery, souls were leaking from the pyramid, like the mortar between the bricks was evaporating. They were no more than wisps. There were not many left.

  At the helm of the devices, Berith stood black and tall. His eyes pierced through the souls. His shaved head gleamed in the sunlight. Bones crawled along his body like a swarm of maggots.

  Even with his back turned, Isaac could see the colossus everywhere he looked. Its ribcage casted a field of shadows across the ossein. Its skull was a gruesome sigil on the cavern wall. There were the contours of a shoulder blade, the slope of a pelvis, fingers and teeth and the bristles of a bony tail. Every one of its bones left a mark on the earth that was large enough to be listed on a map.

  But, for now, the beast was still. The only sound was the gentle hiss of falling sand.

  “I told you to leave.”

  Isaac’s legs were weak. Every breath took conscious effort.

  Berith walked to the side, trailing a hand along the metal instruments. “What happened to you? How did you manage to fall on some knives?”

  A loose shower of dirt fell from the sky. In the distance, boulders smashed holes through the ossein canopy.

  Berith walked to the edge of the pyramid. “Let me guess. That was your pirate accomplice. Stabbed you in the back at the first sign of trouble.” He made a noise in his throat. “You should’ve expected as much.”

  Isaac was judging the distance between them. He counted the steps of the pyramid, watched the readied spells of the thralls.

  “Your father is dead,” Berith said. “If he isn’t now, then he will be soon. There’s no more souls to keep him alive.” His scowl deepened. “I only wish I could’ve done it sooner.”

  A gentle breeze blew through the flags of the crucified skeletons.

  Berith watched him for a moment, waiting for a reaction. When none was given, he wiped some blood from his face. “I have medical supplies. If your injuries are serious, then I can aid you.”

  Isaac began to walk forward. His heart was pounding. He wasn’t sure if it was fear or loss of blood.

  “I didn’t tell you to approach.”

  He stepped over a cracked geyser of concrete, kicking through loose clods of dirt.

  “This was never your mission. Let it go.”

  Isaac growled, stretching the burn on his chest.

  “Isn’t this what you wanted?” Berith asked. “A chance to be free from your father? I always read through your journal, whenever you were studying. It was my duty. I had to gauge your development, assess the risks.” He looked at him through the falling sand. “So full of dreams.”

  He was now in range of the thralls. Ice and fire tracked his position.

  “So full of resentment.”

  His arm clenched at his side.

  “You’ve always hated this,” Berith said. “As you should have. I hated it just as much.”

  A gasp escaped his throat. Blood leaked down his arm.

  “Stop.”

  He kept walking.

  “Stop!”

  A salvo of bone shot into the ground at his feet. The splinters tore through clothes and skin.

  “What do you think you’re doing? Your arm is useless! You can’t cast! What is your plan, Isaac? Tell me!”

  Isaac stopped. Slowly, using his good arm, he pulled Zaria’s dagger from his hip pocket. He put the sheath in his mouth, drew the blade, and spat the leather scabbard onto the floor. The dagger glinted bright in the sun.

  Berith gave a humorless snort. “Did your pirate give that to you?”

  There were only a few things standing between them. A set of stairs leading up the pyramid. A trio of thralls at the top. A cloud of bone above his head. And the shadow of a colossus, standing as still as the landscape around it.

  “Do not force my hand,” Berith said. “I will not spare you a second time. Put it down.”

  Isaac began to walk. His legs were wobbling.

  “Put it down! That’s an order!”

  His knuckles were bone-white on the hilt.

  The sigils on the students grew brighter. Fire blazed, ice bristled.

  “Isaac!”

  He never took his eyes off his uncle.

  One of the students shot a lick of flame. It was no more than a thin spout, but it hit Isaac square in the thigh. He collapsed to the floor, slapping desperately at the leg of his robes. The flesh crackled and split. He could hear it hiss. Sand fell into the wound, driving him close to screaming.

  “You always were disobedient,” Berith said. “I was convinced you just enjoyed testing me.”

  When he tried to stand, the pain became blinding. He crumbled back down to his belly, breathing desperately.

  “This was all your father’s doing. You understand that, don’t you? If he hadn’t come to this tomb, if he hadn’t blundered his way into a trap, if he hadn’t. . . .” Berith snarled around his breath. “If he had just died when he should have. If he hadn’t been so desperate to save himself. If him and the Diet hadn’t extorted me into raising you.”

  With the dagger still in hand, he pressed his knuckles to the stone, pushing himself up.

  “If I hadn’t been forced to kill your mother.”

  Isaac got back to his feet, slouching heavily on one leg. He started to walk again, limping and slow.

  “This was all his fault!” Berith yelled. “Do you think you’re defending him? Do you feel some need to save the man who tried to sacrifice you without a moment’s hesitation?”

  He had reached the stairs. There were not many of them. Even still, he was forced to crawl.

  “Answer me, boy!”

  Every step sent agony up his leg. He crawled up the stairs with the dagger in his fist, digging through rifts of fallen sand.

  “Stop!”

  It was no different than the yard. There was shouting, and there was exhaustion, and there was pain beyond what he thought he could endure.

  “There is no need for this! We can go home together!”

  Elemental spells churned around him. Bones boiled in the air.

  He reached the top of the pyramid. All the students watched him like a row of statues. He felt the heat of their flames, watched the ice crackle and glimmer. Not a single one made a move to stop him.

  As he struggled back to his feet, the colossus moved behind him. The earth trembled, and shadows raced across the pyramid—pelvis, ribs, and shoulders. A squall of wind ripped through the air. The world around them seemed to tense for a strike.

  It never came. The beast was too massive. He was too close.

  Berith retreated backwards, pressing himself into the bank of metal devices. The bones on his robes slithered into links and chains, racing to protect his vital organs. “Isaac.”

  The haft of the dagger was slick with sweat.

  “Isaac!”

  Bones rained down around him. It was only a single humerus, at first, but when he did not stop, it turned into a grapeshot of fingers. Soon, there were skulls screaming past his face, a blizzard of vertebrae shattering at his feet. The air became thick with motion and bodies. He limped through it all, never dropping his gaze. Nothing touched him but the splinters.

  It was all a show. It was all an empty threat.

  “Listen to me.”

  A human femur came down from above. It held itself straight, like an arrow caught in flight. A spherical head aimed at his chest.

  “You can still have a life,” Berith said. “A real one. Somewhere far away.”

  Isaac kept walking. The femur did not retreat.

  “I can help you escape. The Diet will never know the truth.”

  Only a few paces remained between him and his uncle.

  “You’ll never have to see me again.”

  Isaac raised the dagger. The femur shot forward, pressing into his neck. It split his breath in half. With the slightest bit of force, it would severe his arteries.

  “Look at me, Isaac.”

  His blue eyes glowed with magic. There were wrinkles in the flesh where his scowl often rested. Isaac was sure he would never forget the face in all his life.

  “You’re my son,” Berith said.

  His vision began to blur.

  “He’s not your father anymore. I am. You’re my son, and I—”

  “No!”

  His scream echoed across dust, stone and sand.

  “No! I am not your son! I will never be your son!”

  The femur trembled at his neck.

  “I was your prisoner! I was your burden! I was nothing more than a sacrifice!”

  Berith swallowed. His hands rested on the metal controls. Souls leaked and moaned.

  “Was I still your son when you sent me off to die?”

  His fingers roamed towards tiny levers.

  “You lied! You lied to me about everything! Every spell, every book, every potion! Every day, there was nothing but lies! You knew it was all pointless! You knew you were going to kill me! You could’ve told me the truth, but you didn’t! You said nothing! Nothing!”

  He slapped the femur away, taking a step forward. The bone shot back into place. Barely an arm’s length remained between them.

  “I would rather die than be your son,” Isaac said.

  Behind him, the thralls stepped closer. They formed a semicircle, faces burning with magic.

  “Do it.”

  Berith blinked. The bone quivered.

  “Do it!”

  “Isaac.”

  He leaned his neck into the bone. “No more tricks. No more lies.”

  “Isaac,” Berith said. “Please.”

  Isaac felt tears come down his face, mixing with dirt and blood.

  “This doesn’t have to happen.”

  His hand ached from gripping the dagger.

  “I can just—we—you and I—”

  “Uncle,” Isaac said. “It’s me. Or you.”

  Berith looked him up and down, as if seeing him for the first time. Barely more than an arm’s length remained between them.

  The air was hot. The wind was dry. Only their breathing pierced the silence.

  “You’ve always looked like him,” Berith said. “Your father. You’ve been told that your entire life, but . . . you do.” He pointed. “Except for the eyes. Your father’s were brown. Yours are blue. Like mine.”

  Over his uncle’s shoulder, something glinted in the sunlight.

  “You must’ve only been a year old,” Berith said. “I had finally worked up the nerve to kill you. Not for the Diet. Not for your father. For your sake. To spare you the life I knew would be waiting for you.”

  He could feel the thralls standing at his back. Bones skittered across the floor.

  “I went to your crib with a knife in my hands. I had a plan to dispose of your remains. The Archons would never know the truth.”

  The femur was tight on his neck. He could barely breathe.

  “You were asleep. It was the first time you had stopped crying in hours. For the entire day, it was all I could hear in the tower. All I could focus on.”

  Souls leaked from metal and stone.

  “I placed the tip of the knife to your chest. At an angle. It would’ve gone right past the sternum. Straight to the heart.”

  The femur drifted down to his chest. It pressed against him, as if to demonstrate.

  Something moved among the boulders and ossein. Something grew closer.

  “I was going to do it this time,” Berith said. “I would not falter again. It had to be done. For your sake. I knew you would only suffer if I didn’t.”

  The tip of the femur pressed towards his heart, almost breaking the skin.

  “But you woke up. You saw me hovering above you. And when you looked at me. . . .” Berith looked at him now, as if his memory was as clear as the present. “Your eyes were blue. Just like mine.”

  The femur quivered at his chest.

  “You looked at me, and you smiled, and your little. . . .” His voice cracked. Isaac had never seen it happen before. “Your little fingers wrapped around mine, like I was going to play with you again, and you looked up at me, and you said ‘father’.”

  Berith’s eyes stopped glowing. The students slumped to the floor.

  “That was your first word. You called me your father.”

  His eyes were normal again. Pale blue, like the edge of the sky.

  “How could I kill my own son?”

  At his chest, the femur fell away, clattering on the ancient stone.

  Berith looked Isaac up and down, as if taking in all the details. The injuries, the tattered robes. The dagger in his hand. He lifted his head, gazing over the colossus.

  “I’m sorry, Isaac. What I did to you. . . .”

  Berith’s form began to be eclipsed by a larger one, sprinting from behind.

  “I was angry. I was bitter.” He blinked, and his cheeks glistened with tears. “I should’ve been better. I should’ve. . . .”

  He stopped. Isaac didn’t know if he heard the footsteps, or saw the expression on his face. Either way, his eyes widened. He began to turn. Bone and thrall began to rise.

  Zaria gored Berith with her captain’s sword. The impact was violent enough to lift him off his feet. With a snarl, she stopped her charge, lifted him by the blade, and slammed him to the ground. He did not come all the way off. She stomped a foot to his chest, Berith’s arm desperately grabbing at her leg, and the cutlass wrenched itself free, shining a bright red in the sunlight.

  Berith remained on the floor, choking and reaching. Zaria raised the sword, preparing to plunge.

  “Stop!” Isaac shouted. “Stop!”

  She paused, mostly by surprise. Isaac attempted to run over, but he put too much weight on his burned leg, and he collapsed into the sand. She came over, tried to help him stand, but he shrugged her off, crawling on his hands and knees.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  Berith clutched at his chest, giving wet and rattling gasps. Bones tumbled from the air. The thralls slumped like discarded dolls.

  Isaac fell to his uncle’s side. Berith reached out, gripping his arm. There were desperate, whistling breaths and fountains of blood.

  Anatomy diagrams. Lungs. Heart. Trauma.

  Intubation.

  Isaac put pressure on his uncle’s chest. His robes were sopping wet. “The sword!”

  Zaria looked at the blade like she had forgotten she was holding it.

  “Give me the sword!”

  One of his lungs was punctured. Filling with fluid. He had to drain the blood. If he tore a hole in the pleural cavity, flipped him onto his side, the blood would drain—

  It was sloshing from his throat. His mouth gaped and flapped. Every breath was weak and sucking.

  He was drowning. His uncle was drowning.

  The blood. Bright red. It must’ve come from an artery. Aorta. Carotid. Subclavian.

  Diagrams. Diagrams. Diagrams—

  Berith’s grip tightened on his arm.

  Isaac tried to flip him onto his side. His arm was weak, and the cauterized skin was a screaming pain, and he might’ve been screaming himself. Nothing worked. The gurgles—

  “Give me the sword, Zaria!”

  Berith’s grip tightened again. His face was as pale as the bones. He was trying to speak.

  “You . . . you. . . .”

  He gurgled. Blood raced over lips.

  “You deserved. . . .”

  Two pairs of blue eyes gazed into each other. After a moment, one of them went glassy and still. The hand took longer to fall.

  The world seemed to fade away. Suddenly, Isaac felt as if he had never left. All that he had seen and learned on his journey vanished from his mind. All at once, there was only his routine again.

  “Isaac.”

  Training. The morning sun. Grass and sweat and pain. Books lit by candlelight. Warm meals, political discussion. Treatises, questions, tests. The preparation of lab equipment. The night sky glimpsed only through a window.

  A hand on his shoulder. “Isaac.”

  The sneer. The shouts echoing through the tower. The lack of satisfaction. The constant demands, the gaze that always seemed to guess his thoughts.

  The books. The jokes. The mercy, rare as it was. The small nod whenever mastery was achieved. The smile. He could remember every single smile.

  “Isaac!”

  He looked up at Zaria, but she was not looking at him. She was craning her head back towards the sky.

  The colossus was moving again. Now that he was free from the dry dock, he received his first proper look at the creature.

  It was bipedal, but leaning forward heavily, and the spiky protrusions from its tail and vertebrae formed a caltrop line down its body. Its pelvis was wide and pointing backwards. Its arms were small and folded against its chest. Its ribs were so long that they almost curved around to meet each other, like the curling limbs of a spider.

  Isaac saw now, more than ever, that the titan was a horrible amalgamation of body parts. Its skull and pelvis was reptilian, but its vertebrae were so specialized that they could only be mammalian. Its neck was almost too long to properly support its head, its chest was grotesquely wide, and its arms were so tiny that they might as well have been vestigial. It looked like a failed experiment. Like the creature had never actually been killed, but merely succumbed to the inadequacies of its own anatomy.

  It reared itself back until it was almost standing straight. A thunderous growl pierced the air. Its body heaved and stretched until there were visible gaps between the bones, held together only by the energy of thousands of souls. The titan moved like it had never had its own freedom of movement before—or it had been so many millennia since then that the memory was less than dust. There was almost pleasure in the bones. The pleasure of life.

  Berith had taught Isaac this lesson very well. Killing the master of a thrall did not kill the thrall itself. It would retain its energy. The only thing that would be lost was control.

  “Isaac! Do something!”

  The reptile steadied its head. Its empty eyes roamed over the rubble of the cavern. Searching.

  The metal devices still remained active. Souls leaked from the metal.

  Isaac stumbled into a run. The movement was just enough to catch the titan’s attention. They had moved far into the cavern in order to confront his uncle, but that distance was inconsequential to such a giant. It would be less than a single step.

  He grasped the bank of machines, fingers gripping through the hanging souls. He had no idea how to work such a device. There were calibration knobs, measuring dials, rusted buttons, levers whose function was only written in an ancient language. His hand roamed over the different control mechanisms, lessons on necrotic resurrection racing through his mind.

  He looked up towards the sky, and the sky was gone. There was only the skull peering down at him. The bones grinded together, all the teeth pressing into bleached white lines.

  Isaac made eye contact with the colossus. It felt like staring into the face of a god.

  The beast pointed its snout and sniffed at him.

  The suction of air was monstrous. Walking past a tornado would’ve been a more calming experience. Isaac had to grip the metal device to stay where he was, and Zaria was outright lifted into the air, flung forward from the force of the gust.

  When Isaac regained his balance, he began to slap as many of the strange buttons as he could.

  The titan lurched back, letting the sun return. Its body seemed to spasm. Entire forests of ossein were swept away as it took a stumbling step backwards, and Isaac was forced to brace through the squalls of shrieking wind. The beast caught its balance, shredding acres of earth and concrete with its toes. It snarled with a voice that boomed like a thousand storms, opened its jaws, and rushed for them.

  In pure desperation, Isaac grabbed a rusted lever and wrenched it down.

  There was an apocalypse in the sky. It looked like all the clouds of the desert had been shot from a cannon. Ossein flew like the spray of ocean waves, the earth shuddered as if it had suffered a mortal injury, and Isaac fell to the floor of the pyramid, barely noticing the scraping of the knives against the cataclysm at his feet.

  But, when he looked again, the beast was leaning against the opposite wall of the cavern. One of its legs had cleanly detached from the pelvis. Bones laid scattered across the leagues of concrete, in much the same way that a city might be scattered across a field. Toes studded the ossein canopy. A femur rolled and spun like the felling of an ancient tree.

  Isaac did not have the necromancy training to directly control the colossus, but the device at his hands could still control the flow of energy. And the souls were the only thing giving it life.

  The beast roared, trying to hobble towards them. Isaac scrambled to his feet and pulled every lever he could see. As the reptile came, entire sections of its body began to twist and fall. There were lances of ribs and meteors of vertebrae. An elbow joint popped loose and cleaved the arm with it. Teeth and fingers rained down like the missiles of a trebuchet.

  Before the colossus had taken another step, much of its torso was scattered upon the earth. Before Isaac had finished depressing every lever, it had already collapsed to its side. And, when he snapped the last rod down, its skull popped from the top of the vertebrae, rolling forward like the sun would roll across the sky. Its face rested against the growing dunes of sand. It gave one last wrenching gasp, burying its mouth in dirt and sand and bone, and went still.

  For a long moment, Isaac only felt the sun on his back and the falling sand on his face. The death of the colossus seemed to have stilled the world.

  Then, the device at his hands began to rumble. Souls erupted from the metal. He stepped back just as the welding began to sunder and break, shaking violently on its frame. He took another step, and his burned leg screamed in pain, and he collapsed to the floor. Just when he was about to start crawling, a pair of fuzzy arms wrapped around him, lifting him off the ground and running backwards.

  The metal device exploded. Isaac and Zaria hit the floor, barely dodging a cloud of shrapnel. When he looked again, the device was gone, leaving only a deep, ruptured hole in the stone, like the caldera of a volcano.

  And a spew of souls erupted from the pyramid. The entire structure seemed to rumble. Thousands of beings gushed from the earth, churning like the stampede of a crowd, wreathed with spectral limbs and stretching faces. Sunlight enveloped their forms, roiling the souls into a radiant mixture of whiffs and tufts and streams. As they rose higher, and spread further apart, the souls became thin and translucent, the limbs and faces drifting apart into wisps and vapor, until there was only a faint sheen of dust left behind, sparkling in the light.

  He could hear their voices again. Instead of screaming, the citizens of the necropolis seemed to sigh, as if finally being given a chance to rest.

  It felt like the geyser of souls erupted for hours. It might’ve been less than a minute. Eventually, the flow began to lessen. The radiant plume relaxed into a minor spout, and soon divided itself down into leaks and dribbles. As the voices disappeared, and the sky glittered with souls and dust, the jagged hole in the earth became still and empty. Only a few tendrils remained, like the last morning mists fading before the dawn.

  For a moment, Isaac thought he saw one of the souls turn its face towards him. It was no more than a suggestion, the vaguest shape of a face and its smile, and before Isaac had truly seen the soul at all, it was gone. All that remained in the air was loose sand and golden light.

  The air grew quiet. Thin motes of dust fell from the air. They glinted like a metal.

  Zaria had him nestled against her chest. She roamed her hands over his body. “Good?”

  He tried to answer. All he could give was a grunt.

  “Yes or no, love.”

  He tried to breathe, and his lungs wouldn’t move.

  Zaria released one of her hands. It was dripping with blood. “Oh, fuck me.”

  He was dizzy. The world seemed to swim.

  “Isaac!”

  The knives. The splints had broken. They were jagged, ripping through the flesh. All the tumbling and wind. He couldn’t. . . .

  Everything shifted. He was staring at the sun. There was warmth on his face. There was a feeling of ice crawling through his chest.

  “Hey, hey.” Her face. Bloody. One eye wide. “Stay awake.” His body shook. “Stay with me!”

  His throat was dry. Cracked and torn. He tried to speak, ask for water, but nothing came.

  The sky was blue. There were veins. Rocky strands. There was tugging somewhere below. Distant pain.

  There was sand and broken metal. He saw a pile of black. There was blood. Limbs. A face.

  Uncle.

  “Isaac!”

  Berith.

  Wait.

  No.

  Pounding.

  Uncle.

  Pain.

  Had he?

  No.

  “Isaac!”

  Wait.

  No.

  Wait.

  Wait.

  Uncle. . . .

  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  He woke to the gentle flapping of cloth, straining against the wind.

  For a moment, he thought he was back in the desert. The air was hot, and there was sand on his skin, and sunlight was beating down on the roof of his tent. His muscles ached. His lips were cracked and split. His skin felt like a garment that was slightly too small for his size.

  That day in the desert, his eyes had opened to the slanting fabric of his tent, and he had known that he was about to die. His thoughts had been muddy and scattered. Everything he did required great concentration. He had crawled out into the belly of a dry river gulch, fingers scrabbling through the cracked dirt, and he had realized that his only hope was to head into the dunes and search for the oasis detailed on his map. Instead, he had met Zaria, and she had given him water.

  Zaria. The tomb. His father. . . .

  He blinked. He was in his tent again, lying on top of a bedroll. There was stone beneath him, and sand blowing through the holes of the fabric, and, with the wind, he began to hear voices.

  “. . . can’t go together. Too big a target. It’s like that they’ll be rousing the constabulary of every town worth mention.”

  “My sister’s still home,” a male voice said. Isaac didn’t recognize it. “My aunt. My grandfather. I have to warn them.”

  “Wouldn’t try it, personally,” Zaria said. “Might be you get there before the news spreads. Might just get stopped in the road. Next thing you know, you’re hauling irons for murder and treason. Your kin are like to catch the same charge if they’re seen with you.”

  Somewhere nearby, a woman was sobbing. She sounded like she had been doing so for a while.

  There was a tingling sensation running down his arm. Isaac recognized it immediately. It was the same poultice he had always used whenever the cane lashes had left him too debilitated to study. The pain would be smothered, the wounds would not fester, and the flesh would grow back faster than a weed. He had made the very same concoction for Zaria in the necropolis.

  Looking down, he could no longer see the two knife hilts jutting from his arm—instead, there were only sutures and bandages. There was a deep purple band of bruises where the tourniquet had been. His leg had been swabbed, wrapped and packed with poultice, but the burn was too wide to fully cover. He could still feel the edges of the wound. He would have to clean it frequently.

  “We need to go,” a second male voice said. “Now. It won’t be long before they send a search party.”

  “Not holding you hostage,” Zaria said. “Run along, then, if you’ve got some urgency.”

  The woman continued to sob.

  “You should come,” the first male voice said. “Help us finish the climb, at least. And . . . well, even if the coma—”

  “I’m not hearing this again.”

  “The blood loss—”

  “He’s a tough little cunt. I’m sure he could fuck a dragon and just be wiping his cock afterward.”

  There was a pause.

  “Right,” said the first voice. “Well, if you’re sure. . . .”

  “You’re the only one looking doubtful.” There were footsteps, coming closer. “Do as you wish. I’m not leaving ‘til he’s up.”

  The tent shifted. He managed to lift his head. Through the glare of the sun, he could her face poking inside. The ripped cloth she had wrapped around her eye had been replaced with proper bandaging.

  “Well, now,” she said, breaking into a grin. “Speak of him, and he shall rise.”

  Isaac tried to sit up. He managed to climb only a few inches before his strength waned. His body felt like it had been filled with lead.

  Zaria crawled inside the tent, her considerable frame nearly uprooting the poles. “How’re we feeling, then?”

  “Alive.”

  “Right you are.” She almost said something else, but seemed to lose the words as she looked down at him. “Wasn’t looking that way for a good while.”

  His throat was painfully dry. “Water.”

  She reached over to the side and handed him the same mortar he used to prepare his potions. Inside the stone bowl, there was a limpid broth, spotted with shreds of salt meat. It looked about as appetizing as old bath water, but Isaac drank it greedily, and, right then, it tasted better than any stew he’d ever had. He drained the cup, barely chewing the leathery meat.

  The tent rustled again. He saw movement at the glare of the entrance.

  Three of the Khador students were staring inside. The sigils on their faces were jagged and scarred, and the flesh had blackened along the deep grooves and winding circles. It was two boys and one girl. They must’ve been close to Isaac’s age, but it was hard to tell from their appearance—their faces were gaunt and worn, and their robes hung like curtains on their bodies. Berith must’ve drained much of their energy during the battle. He didn’t appear as if he had been feeding them well, either.

  Berith. The blood. Rattling gasps.

  Isaac tried to sit up again, managing to get to his elbows before Zaria pushed a firm hand to his chest.

  “You’re takin’ a rest,” she said. “Don’t make me tie you up again.”

  “How are you feeling?” one of the male apprentices asked him.

  “Weak. Cold.” Isaac swallowed. He was still thirsty, and ravenously hungry on top of it. “Did you make the poultice?”

  “Yes,” said the other boy. “Professor Berith showed us how.”

  The girl’s cheeks were red and streaked with tears. Her eyes were painfully green, staring deeply into him.

  Zaria was already preparing another stew. She was using her bandaged hand like it wasn’t paining her anymore. “I told them how it happened. Wasn’t a fun telling, but things stayed civil.”

  “Thank you,” said the first boy. “Thank you for saving us.”

  “There were many others,” Isaac said.

  The girl began to sob again. The second boy wrapped an arm around her shoulder.

  “Do you—” The first apprentice hesitated. “Do you need further aid? We were hoping to save what vials we have.”

  “Aye,” Zaria said. “Funny how quick there’s a bedside manner when you were itching to leave him for dead.”

  “T-that wasn’t—we need to preserve—”

  “There’s no blame. It weren’t unfair.”

  Isaac flexed the fingers on his arm. Blood loss had made them stiff, and it was obvious that his wounds were only numb rather than healed. Still, there was little pain. “I’m fine.”

  “Good. Good.” The apprentice looked to Zaria.

  “Remember the route I marked?” She kept stirring the lukewarm broth. “Which contacts are like to give shelter?”

  “Yes. Uh, yes. It’s here.”

  “Got some rope practice? Remember all the knots?”

  “Y-yes. I’m sure.”

  “Hey,” Zaria said. “Trust me. Send a courier. Tell your kin to meet you somewhere and don’t have them go all together. Got it?”

  The boy gave a weak nod, his face pale and drawn. The girl was cradling her head in her hands. The second boy was staring off into the distance, gazing over the cavern walls.

  “Right, then.” She reached out and clapped the first boy on the shoulder. “Farewell. Best of luck all around.”

  The first male apprentice looked quickly between Isaac and Zaria, opened his mouth, didn’t seem to find any words that would fit the situation, and left the tent entrance. The second boy tried to pull the girl away, but she was staring at Isaac again, and refused to move.

  “I know you,” she said.

  Isaac blinked back at her.

  She pointed a finger. “The tower. Berith’s tower. You’re the boy that always stared out the window. You’d watch us every day.”

  Isaac didn’t answer.

  “You’re Berith’s son.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not.”

  She stared back, just on the edge of speaking. Her eyes were green and tinged with red.

  “I know you, too,” Isaac said. “You lived four houses down from the apothecary. Your chimney was broken. You had two siblings, one still a babe, a father with a patched frock who worked as a tanner, a grandfather missing an arm, and probably an aunt, if not a hired seamstress. You always played with two boys at the herbarium. You’d put flowers in your hair to hide the smell of leather.”

  The girl’s mouth became a tight line. Her empty sigil was black and already scabbing over.

  “Did you ever keep the dog?” Isaac asked. “I saw you feeding a stray.”

  “No,” she said. “I found it dead one morning. Neighbors butchered it for supper.”

  “Oh.”

  Sand blew in from beneath the tent. The air was hot and swirling.

  “Come on,” said the second boy, tugging her back.

  “What were you doing in his tower if you weren’t his son?”

  Isaac didn’t answer. He laid back down on the bedroll, feeling dizzy and lightheaded.

  “That’s enough,” Zaria said. She leaned over, nearly dragging the tent with her. “On you go. If you get stuck on the climb, just sit tight, and we’ll be like to cross paths.”

  The second boy nodded, dragging the girl away. She was beginning to weep again. Slowly, her cries faded into distance.

  Isaac concentrated on breathing. Despite the heat rubbing against his skin, he felt chilled and feverish. His skin was glossy with sweat.

  “Drink up. Meat and fluid until you’re feeling better.”

  “Can you cook it, at least?”

  “Drink the fucking stew, squire.”

  He did. He made an effort to swallow three more batches of the thin, salty broth, and every round seemed to help his mind pierce the dizziness.

  Berith. The blood. Blue eyes.

  “Right,” Zaria said, feeling his forehead. “Still looking pale. You’re staying on your back until the morrow, and I will not hear any stubbornness on the matter.”

  “Z. Where’s my father?”

  She looked down at him. There were still traces of blood on her fur.

  “He said—” Isaac tried to sit up, felt the world spin around him, and fell back to the bedroll. “He said he was running out of energy. Has he . . . ?”

  “There’s been no sign.”

  “How long have I been out?”

  “Couple hours, at least.”

  He tried to sit up again. Her hand pushed him down.

  “I need to find him.”

  “You’re in no condition.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Well, I fucking do, and I’ll give you worse than Soren if you keep acting fierce about it.”

  There was nothing else he could think to say. “Please.”

  “By Oerin’s cock, you’re just itching to kill yourself at any given chance, aren’t you?”

  He kept looking at her.

  She sighed, stifling a growl. “Fine. But you’re commitin’ no heroics, and so help your furless arse if I see a single hint of a spell.”

  With gentle effort, she helped him crawl out from the shade of his tent. The stone of the pyramid burnt his fingers as he steadied himself. The sunlight felt like a physical weight on his skin, if not a couple knives stabbing through his eyes. He stood as straight as he could, leaning against her side and blinking through the glare.

  To their right laid the colossus, the bones digging through equal measures of fallen sand and broken ossein, and its scattered form was so massive that Isaac found it difficult to see it as anything other than a collection of bony foothills. To the side of the corpse, the obelisk was still standing, if only barely—one of the giant’s thrashings had cleaved through the top of the structure, leaving only a stump of a tower. Above it, an avalanche of rock had spilled into the cavern. There was now a deep valley wrenched through a segment of the cavern walls, almost perfectly curved in the shape of a rib cage. There were flecks of white beneath the sand and rocks, little segments of the necropolis visible amidst the rubble. It must’ve been the first time the buildings had ever seen sunlight.

  Much of the cavern still laid in shade and darkness. The titan had only sundered a path through the middle of the ceiling. It was like a half opened pair of eyelids—a great furrow of light across the center, and, to the sides, two hanging curtains of rock, leaving the great distances in shadow.

  As he looked, he could see the Khador students making their way towards the ruins of the necropolis, their robes almost lost between the concrete, boulders and sand. The crucified skeletons had been scattered amongst the mounds of ossein, the stars of the necromancer flags flapping in the breeze. He continued his gaze in a sweep, searching through the shade . . . until his eyes fell on a body lying not too far away.

  In the bright sun, his skin was turning ashen. Bones still littered the floor around him, but the blood had already long evaporated, leaving only a faint residue. He could see lividity marks, sand collecting in the open eyes, and he knew the heat of the sun would accelerate the decomposition. It would start smelling before long.

  The world spun again. Only Zaria’s grip kept him from fainting.

  “Isaac,” she said. “I’m sorry. I know that—”

  “No. It had to be done.”

  He had sent him off into to die, either by dragon or thirst. He had sacrificed dozens of students. He had been ready to kill his own brother, resurrect a titan, and send it on a warpath that might’ve consumed the entire world with it.

  Zaria loosened her hold on him. “Just . . . seemed like he was trying to say something, at the end.”

  Every day of his life, Berith had lied. He had known all along.

  “Whatever he was going to say,” Isaac said, “it wouldn’t have made a difference.”

  The sun was hot and merciless. The wind was soft and full of sand.

  But, as he gazed over the corpse, watching the robes bend and flutter, he felt a pressure building on his lungs. He tried to breathe, but the wind carried the smell, or he might’ve imagined it did, and he nearly vomited on the spot. His knees began to buckle.

  She turned him away. He was too weak to resist. “Right, then. There’s nothing over there. Nothing you need to see any longer. Let’s keep thinking that way.”

  His body was chilled and heavy. Even the effort of standing was leaving him breathless. He would’ve gladly crawled back into his tent and slept for days.

  But, then, he saw it. In the distance, through the shade and bone, there was a building. It was fairly small, not much larger than the home of a judiciary or some other member of the gentry, and the walls were nestled into the bedrock of the cavern wall, such that it almost blended into the dirt and sand. No more detail could be seen through the gloom. But there it was, all the same. Unmistakable.

  He had imagined that building his whole life. He had been holding it in his mind’s eye as he died of thirst in the desert. He had kept it in his thoughts all the way through the giant skeleton, from mouth, to neck, to chest, abdomen, pelvis, and legs. After all the leagues he had travelled, all the tribulations he had suffered, he had come to the end of his journey. There was nowhere else to go. The cavern at the bottom of the tomb was empty, save for a colossal skeleton, a field of festering bone . . . and that one lone building.

  Zaria seemed to follow his gaze. “That’s it? Over there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure about that?”

  “What else is left?”

  She glanced back at his tent. “Aye, well, we got two good hands between us, and not much light in the day. Best we get packing.”

  He looked up at her. She casted a sharp figure in the sunlight. He looked at the scars on her eye, the ones wrapping around her black muzzle, and the tawny fur lining her cheeks and ears. He felt both a warm and chilly sensation again, spreading through his stomach like it had back in the extraction chamber, when she had refused to abandon him.

  “Thanks, Z.”

  “Sure. Glad to aid my squire. He’s certainly done enough for me.”

  They set to packing up his supplies, aiding each other whenever their injuries hampered their progress. The sun burned into his skin. He was glad for it. It helped keep his mind off what laid behind.

  They made their way down from the pyramid, through the canyons of ossein and metal ships, over the growing hills of sand still falling from the land above. He had to lean against her as they walked, and she kept him tucked to her side, clutching her captain’s cutlass in her hand. From the way she moved, he knew she was just as beaten and exhausted as he was, but she made no mention of it, and Isaac never doubted that she would help him stand if he fell.

  They entered the shade of the cavern, leaving only a few things left to shine in the sun—a giant skeleton, a field of bone, and one lone body, wrapped in black robes.