They walked, and Maximus talked, and the dark listened.
Boots rang on stone. Water dripped somewhere out of sight. Pip fidgeted on Maximus's shoulder, opening her mouth twice and thinking better of it — a personal record.
"Stories won't keep us alive down there," Kael said from ahead.
"No," Maximus said. "But you'll want this one before we arrive."
"Karthos," he said. "A surface kingdom, three thousand years gone. Green hills. White walls. A scholar for a king."
"Malachar," Lyra said.
"Malachar," Maximus agreed. "Second of his name, though nobody used the number." He paused, searching for the honest word. "He was a good king, once. Built libraries. Forgave taxes in bad harvests. I saw him at a harvest fair, years before any of it — he was dancing with his daughter standing on his boots, both of them laughing, and the whole square laughing with them. That's the man I keep trying to remember. It's important that you know he was a man first."
Pip swung her feet. "This doesn't sound like a villain origin story."
"Wait for it."
"Malachar had a daughter," Maximus said. "Wren. Seven years old. Quick as a minnow, loud as a thunderclap, absolutely certain she was going to be a knight when she grew up — she had a wooden sword and she made the palace guards drill with her every morning — and the gods help anyone who told her otherwise."
Something in his voice changed on the name. Lyra glanced at him, but his eyes were on the dark ahead.
"A fever took her in three days. One winter. That's all it was — a winter fever, the kind children survive every year in every kingdom in the world. She didn't."
Silence, except for boots on stone.
"The King stopped sleeping. Stopped eating, mostly. He'd always studied the old arts — Karthos had libraries full of things better left unread, and Malachar had read all of them. After Wren, he stopped reading about death." Maximus's jaw tightened. "He started practicing it."
Seraphina's staff-light flickered. "Necromancy."
"At first it was small things. A bird, brought back wrong — it flew into walls. A hound that didn't bark anymore, just stared. Then his advisors started noticing the palace servants didn't blink enough." A humorless smile. "Half the court fled within a year. The ones who stayed — well. Then the soldiers on the wall stopped needing sleep. Then the villages on Karthos's borders started going silent."
"Silent?" Lyra said.
"Not raided. Not burned. Silent." Maximus's voice dropped. "Joren found the third one. Dinner still warm on the tables. A cradle rocking by the hearth with nobody pushing it. Forty people, gone — or not gone. In the churchyard, the earth was turned over from the inside, and there were footprints leading back toward the houses."
Pip had stopped swinging her feet.
"That's not how you told it last time," she said quietly.
"Last time there was ale involved."
"There was a LOT of ale involved. Last time there were twelve of you and a dragon."
"There was no dragon, Pip."
"There was a dragon-ish thing."
"There was not."
Joren brought us the word — Joren was our scout, twenty-two years old, fastest feet in four kingdoms, talked too much when he was nervous, which meant he talked constantly. He came into our camp white as milk and said the dead were walking the roads of Karthos in daylight, wearing the faces of farmers.
There were four of us. Cassian — a knight, big as a barn door, laughed like a landslide, carried a shield with a dent in it he'd never get fixed because the dent had a story and the story was better than the shield. Mira — a mage, sharp as a tack and twice as likely to draw blood, complained the entire way about the damp ruining her reagents. Joren. And me.
We weren't heroes. We were just the ones who went."
"Why?" Lyra asked quietly.
Maximus was quiet for a few steps. "Because somebody had to. That's the whole of it. There's no better reason, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something."
"The night before Karthos, Cassian got drunk and told us about the dent in his shield. Took him an hour. It involved a siege, a goat, and a misunderstanding. Joren laughed so hard he fell off his log. Mira pretended not to listen and corrected his geography twice."
Karthos the White was gray when they reached it.
The gates stood open. No guards — or rather, guards who no longer needed to stand, only to lean, their eyes filmed and empty, their hands still curled around spears they'd held for weeks. In the streets, the dead went about the business of the living with terrible patience: sweeping steps that would never be dirty, mending nets for fishermen who'd never sail again, rocking empty cradles.
"It's polite," Joren whispered, and his voice shook. "That's the worst part. It's all so polite."
The palace rose above it all, white marble gone sallow, its windows lit from within by a light that had no business being that color. They went in through the crypts — Mira's idea; the dead, she said, never guard their own back door, because who would be fool enough to come that way.
They were that fool, four times over.
The throne room was empty. The council chamber was empty. But below the palace, down stairs that went deeper than any cellar had a right to go, there was a sound like a great slow heart, and a light like the inside of a bruise, and they followed it down.
The ritual chamber was a dome of black glass, open to the sky.
And the sky was wrong.
"The eclipse," Seraphina breathed. "The black sun."
Maximus nodded. "It had started when we came up out of the stairs. The moon taking bites out of the sun, one after another, until the light went the color of old blood and the birds stopped singing all at once, like someone had closed a door."
"In the center of the dome there was an altar. And on the altar — " His voice roughened. "He'd kept her. Three years. He'd kept her seven years old forever, perfect as the day she died, her wooden sword laid across her chest, and he knelt beside her with his hands folded like a priest. He was thinner than I remembered. There were circles under his eyes like bruises. And he was crying, and he was smiling, and I've never seen anything so broken in my life."
Lyra was watching his face, and something in her own face had gone very still.
"What did he say?" she asked.
Maximus closed his eyes. "'Death is a door,' he told us. 'I've spent three years learning its hinges. Today the sun goes black, and the door opens, and I will walk through it backwards, and I will bring her out with me. And I will leave the door open behind me, so that no one ever has to lose anyone again.'"
"He tried to convince you," Seraphina said.
"He tried." Maximus's mouth twisted. "'You've all lost someone,' he said. 'I can see it on you. Join me — when the door opens, bring them through. No more graves. No more goodbyes.'"
He looked at each of us in turn. "Cassian. Your mother — sixty years old, a fever, the same as — "
"Don't." Cassian's shield came up like a wall. "My mother died clean. I'll not have her back dirty. Don't you say her name."
"'Mira. Your brother, at the border wars. I could — '"
"'You could nothing,' Mira said, but her voice wasn't steady.
"He looked at Joren last. He didn't even need a name. Joren looked away.
"'Joren,' Maximus said.
"'I know,' Joren whispered. 'I know.'"
And I said, "She wouldn't want this, Malachar."
The King stroked his daughter's hair, and he didn't look up, and he said, "She's seven. She doesn't get a vote."
Mira stepped forward — brave, brilliant Mira, who'd never met a ward she couldn't unpick — and she said, "Doors open both ways, you fool."
"And he said, 'I know.'"
The fight, when it came, was already lost — they just didn't know it yet.
Cassian went for the King and the King's risen guard went for Cassian, twenty dead knights in rusted plate, and Cassian laughed that landslide laugh and waded in with his dented shield like he was holding back the tide. "Come on, then!" he roared. "I've been bored all week!"
Joren took the dome's rim, his arrows finding the necromancers one after another, fast as thought — though his hands were shaking so hard he had to breathe between shots, the way he'd taught himself as a boy.
Mira went for the ritual circle itself, her hands blazing, shouting the counter-words — and the circle fought her. The runes rewritten themselves as fast as she unwrote them, crawling across the black glass like insects, and Mira snarled and redoubled, sweat running down her face, because that was Mira: the circle could crawl all it wanted, she was faster.
And I went for Malachar.
He had a sword — a thin duelist's blade, ridiculous against Abyssalfang — and he used it like a man swatting flies, because the spells did the real work. Every time I cut him, the wound filled with shadow and closed. He wasn't even looking at me. His eyes were on the sky, on the moon taking its last bites of the sun.
"You're trying to kill a man who's already buried his heart," he told me, almost kindly, while his dead tried to pull me down.
He didn't fight like a king. He fought like a man already half-dead — no guard, no fear, trading his own flesh for every spell like a man spending coins he didn't care about. He'd passed caring about his life years ago. That made him almost impossible to stop. Men who don't fear death are hard to kill, and men who've already buried their hearts don't flinch.
We were winning. That's the thing I have to live with. We were winning —
— and the sun went black.
Not dark. Black. A hole in the sky where the sun had been, ringed with fire, and the light went out of the world like a snuffed candle, and in that dark every corpse in Karthos turned its face toward the dome.
Malachar raised his arms. He spoke the last word. And the door opened.
Wren sat up on the altar.
Her eyes opened — black as the eclipse, black all the way through — and she smiled with a mouth full of shadows, and she spoke with a thousand voices layered under one small girl's voice, and she said:
"FATHER."
Malachar reached for her. He was weeping. He was radiant.
And the shadow came through the open door, and it poured into him — into his mouth, his eyes, the hollow of his chest — and he drank it down, he drank the black sun itself, he wanted it, because it had his daughter's voice, and the ring of fire around the dead sun reflected in his eyes as they filled with dark —
— and the man went out of him like air from a bellows.
What stood up from the altar was gaunt and gray and wrong, wearing Malachar's crown too loose on a thinned face, wearing Malachar's face stretched thin over nothing, and where his heart had been there was only a hollow dark, and it was hungry.
Pip's voice was very small. "You never told the tavern version with her in it."
"No," Maximus said.
Cassian hit it with his sword. The sword passed through like smoke and came out rusted to the hilt, red flakes falling like dead leaves — and Cassian stared at the rust, and he laughed once, a broken sound nothing like his landslide laugh, and he raised his shield anyway.
Mira threw everything she had — fire, light, the true names of things — and the dark drank it all and asked for more, and Mira's hands started to bleed from the inside of the words.
Joren put an arrow through its eye from forty paces, a shot nobody else in the world could have made —
— and it turned its hollow face toward him, and it looked at him, and Joren — brave, fast Joren, who'd never been afraid of anything — Joren screamed, and then he didn't.
"He held the stair," Maximus said flatly. "When we ran — and we ran, don't let anyone tell you otherwise — he held the stair behind us so Mira could think. He shot until the quiver was empty. Then he threw the bow. Then he held the stair with a broken spear." A pause. "Forty seconds. Maybe fifty. It cost him everything he had."
"Mira didn't speak for three days after," Maximus said. "Cassian kept Joren's broken spear. Carried it all the way to the sealing, and laid it down at the door when it was done."
Silence on the march. Kael, who'd scoffed at fairy tales an hour ago, said nothing at all.
"Mira understood before the rest of us," Maximus went on. "She grabbed my arm — her hand was shaking, Mira never shook — and she said, 'He isn't alive. You can't kill what's already dead.'"
"So what did you do?" Seraphina whispered.
Maximus's eyes were on the dark ahead, three thousand years away.
"We couldn't kill him," he said. "So we buried him."
The tunnel went quiet, except for boots on stone, and water dripping somewhere in the dark, and nobody — not even Pip — had anything to say at all.