Page 114 of Deadly Maiden

Nothing lives here, unless one counts ants, birds, and beetles.

“We should count those,” I murmur.

“What?” Rorsyd asks, rumbling beside my ear. Yards behind, his tail lashes, rasping across the dry spindlegrass.

“Nothing. Just musing over whether anything lives here.”

“It is quite a scene of…devastation. I did mention the rumors. I wonder what did this? The arrows are plentiful. There are a few severed limbs.” With his claws, he rakes at a nearby arm and backbone connected to a skull.

“I think know what killed them.” I whisper that because I am a little…just a little, afraid.

The undead are calling me.

Should I try what my thoughts implore me to do?

A tremor ripples through me, from toes to spine to mind, simmering upward from the ground upon which we stand, a rustling, a susurration that enters my ears without needing to be heard.

“You do?” He twists his neck. “Damn. The Aos Sin from the tower are coming. In large numbers. I can see the dust cloud from the hooves. They’re riding fast.” A new thunder rumblesthe ground. “I might be able to flame them, but I am weakened. I’ve spent too long like this.”

Now he tells me? We are stretched thin, using our abilities to the very edge of sanity.

But there is no point in regrets.

My question is answered. We need help. Just…how can I know if I can control them? Trial and error is easy to say, harder when error means being dragged underground and held there while you scream and scream and suck dirt into your lungs.

My imagination needs killing, if nothing else.

I draw a deep breath, hold it, and shut my eyes. Gheist. It’s everywhere. Not as a solid, clustered-together identity. Most of the ghosts are barely here, yet every atom of air jostles against particles of gheist. We are breathing the stuff.

To me, a necromancer, this is raw, unadulterated power.

I lift my right hand, palm up, as if holding something weighty, and I push higher, higher until my hand is at neck level. The effort is making my bones creak, my eyeballs feel ready to pop. The seconds pass, and I breathe, and I begin to be sure this is working. I feel a disturbance in the earth, a widespread movement across the expanse before me. Long-forgotten bones shift aside the soil and seek to rise, to once more find the warm sunlight that bathes the living world.

Flesh and blood and a pumping heart?

Who needs those when you havethese.

My deathly people.

My parents’ forgotten, derelict, but powerful army.

A bead of sweat dribbles down my forehead. This is difficult, new, and scary. It’s pulling some part of me into the utmost exertion—my heart beats faster, louder, my head feels the pressure. It’s also, strangely, a relief to be able to dosomethingafter flying here with only my father’s death to contemplate.

I need this.

I want this.This is my birthright!

I shove my palm higher, my arm shakes from the load. Dark tenuous smoke issues from my fingers. I am bringing into the light a thousand, newborn, undead warriors.

Well, I suppose newborn is pushing it?

Re-born warriors.

We left Andacc behind to sort out the logistics of his war, so there is only Rorsyd, still a dragon, myself, and Kyvin. Shoulder to shoulder, we three stare at the ten-story-high gate.

The soil across the entire expanse between us and that gate is jiggling.

It appears as if Rorsyd has missed that. Poking him with my elbow is probably a bad idea. “Do you think the key will work in that gate?”

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