Page 10 of House of Dusk
Beneath the hum of the crowd, the whoops and hollers, Yeneris became aware of a slow beat.Thud. Thud. Thud.As if someone were banging at the doors from the other side.
Maybe it was a funerary priest who fell asleep on the job and got locked inside. Or a particularly incompetent grave robber. A pair of lovers with a fetish for the morbid? There were plenty of perfectly reasonable explanations for the thudding.
And her heart believed none of them. Yeneris moved to stand between Sinoe and the steps.
“What is it?” Yeneris demanded, glancing back. “Princess, what did you see?”
“Death.” Sinoe’s eyes were huge, and sorrowful.
A crack of splintering wood spun Yeneris back toward the gates, in time to see the doors finally give way, falling into splinters.
From the darkness, something slumped, staggering unsteadily. A human-shaped thing, with withered, skeletal arms and a body still trailing the gauzy tatters of a shroud. Pinpricks of bruised light burned in the wasted eye sockets, illuminating the leering skull as it paused on the threshold.
It gave a shattering, gargling cry, then attacked.
CHAPTER 4
YENERIS
The walking corpse tore into the fire spinners so fast they had no time to scream. It slammed into the man first, crumpling him. His partner toppled from his shoulders, her torches sputtering to the stones. A few cheers still punctuated the night. Some of the crowd must have thought this was part of the performance.
It wasn’t. The creature hunched over the fallen fire spinner, making horrible wet slurping noises. The man’s body twitched and flopped, then fell still. His partner scrambled to her feet and began to shriek.
The cheers vanished, replaced by unsettled mutterings. People began to pull back from the steps.
“Go on.” Sinoe shoved Yeneris in the shoulder. “Stop it!”
Yeneris bared her teeth. “No. I need to get you out of here, princess.”
“I’ll be fine,” she insisted. “But if you don’t stop that thing, it’s going to kill dozens. I’ve seen it.”
Yeneris stared into Sinoe’s wide brown eyes. They seemed suddenly very old, and very deep, the sort of eyes she could fall into and never escape.
Still, she tried. “Princess, my duty is—”
“Myduty is to these people, Yen,” snapped Sinoe. “I’m not leaving until they’re safe. The skotoi have to be stopped.”
Skotoi. It took her brain a heartbeat to translate the Helissoni word.Enemy. Any unclean, unnatural thing that had no place in this world.
Yeneris glanced back to the necropolis gates. The creature appeared to have finished with its first victim. It stood, uncoiling with an uncanny smoothness, moving in a way that human joints and limbs should not allow. Gore spattered its dingy shroud, the wasted shreds of flesh and splinters of bone.
The glowing eyes fixed on the remaining fire spinner, who had retreated to the steps to seize one of her fallen torches. The creature gave a low, menacing hiss.
When she was a little girl, Yeneris had loved the story of mighty Akoret, who had pledged herself to the service of the Scarab, in the House of Midnight. Akoret defended her people against all manner of enemies: manticores, river-maugs, the last of the jeweled incarnals. And ghouls. Malevolent spirits that escaped the Labyrinth of Souls, using unclean corpses as doorways back into the mortal world.
But Akoret lived centuries ago. There were still stories of ghouls, sometimes. If a body was neglected. If the dead soul was particularly corrupt. That hardly seemed likely here. Surely all the dead within a necropolis in the heart of Helissa City had been properly interred, cleansed by the tomb keepers.
She could decide what to call it later. Sinoe was right. If the thing—ghoul, skotoi, monster—wasn’t stopped, it was going to tear through this crowd as it had that poor fire spinner. Even now she saw the corpse cracking one arm back, lengthening the skeletal limb into a whippy length of bone, something more like a tentacle.
The bone whip lashed out, smacking the woman’s hand, sending her torch flying to the side. Leaving her defenseless. The creature coiled itself to spring.
Yeneris moved. A fluid, precise movement, sweeping the hidden dagger from her thigh and sending it flying right into the monster’s face.
By the time it struck, transfixing one burning black eye, she was halfway up the steps, swords drawn. “Go!” she shouted at the woman.
The fire spinner’s gaze flicked just once to the crumpled body of her partner. Then she fled. And Yeneris turned her full attention to the enemy.
The dagger had done very little. It remained plunged into the skull of the ghoul, like some strange glittering ornament. The force of the blow had sent the corpse stumbling back. Given her time, but nothing else.
