Deus Necros

The restricted corridor dipped lower than Ludwig expected.

Not back into the filth of the catacombs, but beneath the public halls of the Sacrosanctum where the stone became older, heavier, and far more reinforced. The prayers from the mass above still vibrated through the ceiling, but here they sounded distant, muffled by layers of marble and consecrated wards. The compass beneath Ludwig’s lantern pointed ahead without wavering now, as if the thing guiding it had grown impatient with subtlety.

They reached a double door of pale stone and silver bands. There was no handle, only a set of circular markings that overlapped in layers around the center. Kaiser stepped forward before Ludwig even asked, placed two fingers against one of the rings, and frowned slightly.

”Overbuilt,” Kaiser muttered. ”Which usually means someone important wanted to impress someone even more important.”

”Can you open it?” Ludwig asked.

Kaiser gave him a mildly offended glance. ”I said it was overbuilt, not well built.”

The symbols dimmed one after another beneath his touch. A soft click sounded from inside the door, then another, then a deeper shift of hidden locks withdrawing into the walls. Ludwig placed a hand against the stone and pushed. The door opened inward with almost no sound, revealing a large circular hall beyond.

”Damn, if you’ve become a thief, you’d have been a menace.”

Kaiser didn’t even want to entertain the joke. It felt... demeaning to all his study.

The first thing Ludwig saw was the core.

It floated in the center of the chamber, a massive sphere of stone and metal suspended several feet above the floor. It was larger than a carriage, made from overlapping plates of dark iron, white marble, silver bands, and pieces of something that looked disturbingly like bone polished until it shone. Innumerable inscriptions covered its surface, so tightly packed that the eye could not follow one line without losing itself in three others. Holy wards circled it in slow, steady rotations, each ring glowing gold, white, and pale blue, but beneath that clean radiance ran something far uglier.

Glowing blood.

Four lines of it stretched from the sphere in different directions, written across the floor in long, looping script that pulsed like veins. The lines reached the walls and vanished into them, feeding into hidden channels that ran through the Sacrosanctum itself. One line likely crawled down toward the prisoner cells. Another toward Titania’s chamber. The others went elsewhere, perhaps into the public sanctum above, perhaps into places Ludwig had not yet seen. The room smelled of incense, heated metal, and old blood pretending to be sacrament.

Ludwig’s lantern trembled once against his side.

”That’s it,” he said.

Redd’s grip tightened on his weapon. ”That thing is holding the souls?”

”And likely Titania,” Kaiser said, his eyes moving across the inscriptions. ”Elegant, in a disgusting way. The holy wards provide authority. The blood script redirects passage. Death cannot take what the formation refuses to release, and divine revelation cannot reach what the formation decides is not permitted to receive.”

”Can you break it?” Ludwig asked.

Kaiser tilted his head. ”Eventually.”

”I hate that word.”

”You asked for accuracy.”

Before Ludwig could answer, one of the bored priests near the entrance looked up from the small table where he and two others had been playing cards. He held his hand of cards halfway to his chest, blinking at the three intruders as if the sight had taken a moment to make sense inside his head. Beside him, a paladin had his helmet on the table and one boot rested carelessly against a chair. Another priest was chewing something and staring with his mouth half open.

For a breath, nobody moved.

Then realization hit the room all at once.

”Intruders!” the first priest shouted, knocking the table over as he scrambled to his feet.

The paladins surged toward their weapons. One reached for a sword leaning against the wall, another grabbed for a horn hanging near the door. Ludwig stepped forward, but Kaiser was already faster in a far quieter way. He lifted his hand with the same bored elegance he had used before, and the air in the room changed.

The priest reaching for the horn stiffened first. His shout died in his throat. His eyes bulged, both hands flying to his neck as he staggered back into the overturned table. The paladin beside him managed to draw half an inch of steel before his breath failed him too, knees buckling under the sudden absence of air. One by one, the men around the entrance collapsed, gasping soundlessly, armor clattering against the floor until unconsciousness took them.

Redd glanced at Kaiser. ”You do that too easily.”

Kaiser stepped over one of the priests without looking down. ”You say that as if ease is a flaw.”

”It is, when you make me wonder why anyone bothers learning swordsmanship.”

”Tradition. Vanity. Poor education”

”it’s not that this magic is impervious...” Ludwig said. ”A good swordsman can still fight with his breath stopped, a bad one panics too fast and falls unconscious.”

Ludwig moved toward the core. And where he had only taken a few steps when a voice cut through the chamber from beyond the sphere.

”WHERE DID YOU GET THAT CORPSE!”

The words slammed into the room like a thrown blade.

Ludwig stopped.

Redd’s head snapped toward the far side of the core, and his entire body went rigid. The voice was familiar enough to make his expression change before his eyes even found its owner. Kaiser, however, became very still, his false young face turning slowly toward the speaker with an expression Ludwig could not immediately read.

A figure stood near the rear of the chamber, half hidden by the glow of the floating core and the drifting rings of holy wards. She wore priest robes, which somehow made the sight of her worse. The clean white cloth, the golden stitching, the symbol of the Sacrosanctum resting at her chest, all of it looked obscene on her body. Sister Gallows had always seemed hostile to anything that breathed, anything that prayed, anything that dared exist and have joy in its heart. Seeing her dressed as a priest made the room feel like a cruel joke told by something crueler.

Her eyes were fixed on Kaiser.

Ludwig looked at Kaiser, then back at her, and despite the situation, a smile crept onto his face. ”You’re talking about this guy?”

Sister Gallows’s mouth twisted. Her hands moved beneath her robes and came out holding two massive circular blades, polished dark at the edges and wide enough to take a man’s head off without requiring much effort. Chakrams. The kind of weapon that did not forgive mistakes and did not need to be thrown to be lethal.

”Yes,” she hissed. ”That is Kaiser’s corpse. His prized possession. So it was you who stole it. You’re the reason Kaiser died!”

Kaiser sighed.

Ludwig looked at him again. ”You have a lot of strange history for someone who keeps calling other people dramatic. Old acquaintance I suppose...”

”Didn’t I tell you... we were all former servants,” Kaiser said.

”Ludwig,” Redd said.

The word came out tight enough that Ludwig immediately turned his attention to him. Redd was staring at Sister Gallows with the expression of a man seeing a nightmare step into the same room and put on holy robes. His sword was already in his hand, though Ludwig had not seen him draw it. The ghostly presence that clung to him had sharpened behind his shoulder, pale and furious, her outline clearer than it had been moments ago.

Ludwig knew better than to hold him back completely.

”Go wild,” he said.

Redd moved.

He crossed the distance between them in a blur, sword raised in both hands and brought down with Imperial swordsmanship clean enough that even Ludwig recognized the discipline behind it. It was not a wild charge. Not yet. Rage drove him, but training shaped the first blow. The blade came down toward Gallows’s neck with enough force to split through bone.

Gallows lifted one chakram and caught the strike on its outer rim.

The sound rang through the chamber, sharp and metallic. She redirected the sword with a turn of her wrist, stepped into Redd’s guard, and kicked him square in the ribs. The impact sent him skidding sideways across the floor, boots scraping against the blood script without disturbing it. He slammed into one of the fallen paladins and rolled to his feet almost immediately, snarling.

Gallows did not even look at him.

Her eyes remained on Kaiser.

”I said,” she growled, ”where did you get that corpse?”

Kaiser looked at her with the faintest smile, the sort that belonged at a noble dinner while someone quietly insulted an entire bloodline. ”Stop talking about people like they’re dead, Gallows.”

For the first time, her expression cracked.

Her eyes widened. The chakrams lowered by a fraction, not from fear, but from recognition so sudden that even someone like her could not fully hide it.

”You old bag of bones,” she said slowly. ”You didn’t die?”

Kaiser’s smile widened slightly. ”I have been accused of stubbornness before.”

Her gaze flicked to Ludwig, then to the lantern at his side. The hostility in her face sharpened into something more personal, more offended. ”Why are you working with the enemy? With Necros’s Apostle?”

Redd heard the words, but they did not land where they should have. His focus was already folding inward, narrowing around Gallows, around the shape of her face, around the voice that belonged to the thing that had taken his sister and left a ghost walking beside him. Whatever accusation she had thrown at Ludwig was swallowed by the thing rising inside him.

Kaiser gave a soft hum. ”I could ask the same about you. Working with the church, wearing their robes, standing beside a holy formation. How embarrassing.”

Gallows bared her teeth. ”I am not working for them.”

”You are standing next to their soul cage.”

”I am using what is useful.”

”Ah,” Kaiser said. ”So you have discovered politics.”

The insult struck harder than a spell. Gallows’s face twisted, and for a moment Ludwig thought she might abandon everything just to attack Kaiser.

”It really is you, damn old bag of bones, I wonder what he offered you so you’d turncoat. And attack your own allies!” she hissed.

”Me? Hmm, nothing much, also, when were we ever allies? We had the same goal, mine happened to change, I never thought of any of you as allies, neither has any of you...”

Kaiser’s eyes shifted past her shoulder, then back to her with calm amusement.

”But I think,” he said, ”that you should worry a bit more about him.”

Gallows turned.

Redd was already there.

He no longer looked entirely human. The change had begun somewhere between the kick and the recovery, but now it finished in a rush of snapping bone, stretching muscle, and fur crawling across skin. His jaw lengthened into the brutal shape of a dire wolf’s muzzle, lips peeled back from teeth far too large for a man’s mouth. His shoulders broadened, his spine hunching forward, claws tearing through gloves and scraping against the polished floor as his body abandoned the idea of ordinary human proportions.

Redd had never been a swordsman first.

The sword had been discipline. A tool. A shape that allowed him to pass among men and stand beside knights without everyone remembering what he was.

But beneath that discipline was the creature.

A transformed thing.

A skinwalker.

A Naaldlooshii.

Gallows brought both chakrams up, but Redd was already inches from her face, his jaws opening wide enough to close around her skull. His breath hit her cheek, hot and animal, and the ghost behind him flared like a wound that had finally found the hand that made it.

The core pulsed behind them.

The blood lines brightened.

And for the first time since they entered the chamber, Sister Gallows stopped looking at Kaiser’s stolen corpse and saw the monster she had made.