Page 56 of In the Ravenous Dark
He sets off down the hall, beckoning for me.
Invisible, feeling like a ghost, and not entirely knowing what the hell just happened, I follow.
19
I can’t get warm. As soon as I close myself in my apartments—happily able to see myself again—I start shivering violently. My skin feels like a corpse’s, nearly white underneath the crimson lines of my sigils.
I drag a dark green blanket around my shoulders, woven with golden leaves thatactuallydrift down the length of it to pile at the bottom edge. I use the sigil to ignite a fire in my massive stone hearth carved like a lion’s roaring mouth. The thing is hideous, and for a moment I consider asking Ivrilos to change the shape of it—he can do that, after all, with death magic—but my knees practically give out before I can. I sit down on the floor right in front of the fireplace, not even bothering with a chair.
“Are you sure I’m not dead?” I ask.
Ivrilos crouches next to me, dark eyes looking softer, warmer, in the flickering light, though his expression is as marble smooth as ever. “I can’t imagine your teeth would be chattering if you were.”
“Okay,” I say, gathering the blanket tighter. “Here’s your chance to explain what the hell just happened. What you did to me. Why I’mnotdead.”
For a moment, he just stares into the fire, the orange glow playing over his ridiculous cheekbones. “I have to explain a few other things first.”
“Perfect,” I say, rocking back and forth, trying to get warm, “because as I recall, you promised to tell meeverything.”
He grimaces. “I did, didn’t I?”
Sighing, he drops all the way into a kneeling position next to me. We’re an incongruous sight—a disheveled young woman and a man who looks like the embodiment of death, huddled in front of the fire—but I’ve seen stranger things this evening.
“Think of your body like a small raft,” he begins. “A leaky raft. Itwantsto sink, and sinking is death.” He cups one hand, palm up, and gestures beneath it with the other. “The current is the force that spins the living world. It’s exhausting, and it will eventually, inevitably drag you down. Your pneuma, your spiritual essence, otherwise known as your shade after you die, rides within the raft of your body, and your… living spark, your vitality, whatever you want to call it… is the bucket with which you madly bail to keep from sinking. Some people have bigger buckets, some smaller. Some”—he shoots a barely there smile my way, and it makes my heart kick—“can take their bucket, make it into whatever shape they want, and play with the forces of the living world. Bloodmages, like you.”
His lips take a downward turn—whyam I looking at his lips so much? “I don’t belong here in the living world, frankly, as a shade—a being of pure pneuma with no body or vitality of my own with which to keep me afloat. Bound to you like I am, I’m using you. Especially when I make myself more…present… here. It’s as if I’m hanging off the side of your raft, dragging against the current. In actuality, I’m drawing onyourliving pneuma, making you weaker as you bail. If I were to draw on you too much, I would swamp you immediately—kill you, like I almost did back in the gallery. To do what I did to those guards, I needed a lot of you. Too much. But even as an extra passenger taking care not to wear out my welcome, I’ll still wearyouout all the sooner.”
“Finally, the truth,” I declare, with a great exasperated breath. “Not that I hadn’t guessed already. Butthat’swhy bloodmages age quicker here in Thanopolis. It’s not the weight of our bloodlines,which, as you said, actually make us stronger.” My lip curls. “You’re like leeches who’ve found the fattest vein. My father knew this.”
“He did,” Ivrilos says shortly.
“But you didn’t swamp me, back there,” I continue, eyeing him sideways. “You did something strange. Youkeptme from sinking.”
You kissed me, I don’t add.
Ivrilos’s eyes close and his jaw clenches, as if he regrets what he did. “Yes, I did. I… I gave youmypneuma in return.”
“But you’re dead!” I goggle at him for a moment. “You mean I have essence ofdead manin me?”
He nods solemnly.
I bark a short, humorless laugh. “I guess that explains why I’m cold. And why the darkness looks… less dark.” I shudder. “A dead man’s breath in my lungs. Blech. Yuck.” For some reason, the thought of a dead man’slipson mine doesn’t make me squeamish, but I don’t tell him that.
“Are you quite finished?” Ivrilos asks, but the words don’t have bite. “I didn’t actually know all the ways it would affect you because I’ve never done it before. It’s entirely forbidden, the strictest law we have. I suppose now instead of weighing you down, it’s more like I’m holding you up,feedingyou as you bail.”
As he says it, his eyes dart away from me. I wonder if, were he alive, there would be more than just firelight coloring his pale cheeks.
“So it’s usually you feeding on me, but now it’s the opposite?”
“Yes. We became a closed loop, at least temporarily—which is why you could touch me for a brief moment. We were of the same essence. Mine was almost entirely filling you, since yours had nearly moved on. But your pneuma came back to your body, once I revived you by giving you a… a breath for one drowning. This weakened me, of course, but I had the strength to spare.”
“How?”
He gives me a look I can only describe as mildly chagrined. “As you’ve pointed out, I’mold. A shade can fade—they’re sometimes called fades, in fact, those who are evanescing. Or, if one doesn’t fade, one can… grow. Strengthen. Deepen their capacity to take in pneuma. Just like your capacity for wine is gained by drinking, we can draw more and more on the essence of the living over time, though only from those we are bound to. Live pneuma is more powerful than our own, and far more invigorating with blood to animate it. Which is why guardians, especially older ones like me, are much stronger than normal shades, linked to the living as we are, for as long as we’ve been.”
“But still, you nearly killed me to…take care of… those guards. And yet somehow you were able to revive me and then death-magic everything”—I draw my hand out of the blanket to make a sweeping motion—“without finishing me off?”
His voice goes quieter. “We can also draw on the essence of other shades in the afterlife, without needing to be bound to them.”
