She picked her way carefully through the near darkness, sprinting short distances whenever a flash of lightning helped illuminate the way.
She made it to the pass, hesitated only a moment to study the cluster of elongated white stones that glinted like fangs around its opening, and then she stepped into that narrow mouth. The rain funneled down and the wind howled hauntingly loud in the more-enclosed space. She had only taken a few steps when she nearly tripped over…something.
Something that she thought might have been a fallen piece of one of those odd white rock formations, or perhaps the wayward root of a scraggly tree— until a brief pause to narrow her eyes and let them adjust to the dark revealed that no, it was neither of those things.
It was an arm.
Cas stumbled back, gripping her dart gun more tightly. Two men clad almost entirely in black lay on the ground before her. Silver brooches fastened their cloaks, and they were engraved with the emblem of the king-emperor’s house—a tiger rearing on its hind legs with its jaws opened wide.
The men almost looked as if they were sleeping, so much so that Cas gathered a few shreds of courage and crouched beside them for a closer inspection.
Neither had a pulse. Their skin was rain-slicked and cold. One still had his eyes partially open, and his hooded gaze stared up at the dark sky, unseeing. It was hard to tell in the blackness, but his irises looked grey… unnaturally grey, as if all of their true color had been leached out of them by the Fading Sickness.
They looked terribly similar to Cas’s own eyes—albeit considerably more dead.
Heart pounding, she removed one of their brooches and dropped it into that pouch on her belt. She briefly wondered what had killed these men—had it been that Fading Sickness?— but then she pushed it all from her mind just as quickly. It wasn’t her job to make sense of things. She was getting paid to collect proof, that was all, and here was proof that some of the king-emperor’s men were at least in this area.
It was a start.
Hopefully her colleagues had found other things. They had split up to better search for these things—and to find the path of least resistance to that Oblivion Gate. A path that, so far, Cas still believed she had discovered; if two dead bodies and the occasional rock viper were the only things she had to face on this route…
She kept going.
Deeper and further through the pass of the Bone god she went. The stone walls squeezed more tightly around her. The air began to feel strange, to burn her lungs as she inhaled it, almost as if it was woven through with invisible threads of poison. She remembered then that a mask hung against her throat, buried under the cowl neck of her coat. It had allegedly been blessed by one of the Sky-kind—who were wielders of barrier magic—and Laurent had insisted they all wear them.
Cas wasn’t convinced the mask would do much to protect against the evil airs of this place, or that she personally needed that protection, given her history. But she wasn’t in the mood to hear another smug lecture from Laurent, either, when he caught her not wearing it.
At the very least, the mask might help hide her identity from any of the king-emperor’s men waiting up ahead. So she pulled it up, secured its bands around the curves of her ears, and then picked up her pace once more.
The sound of boots tromping and chainmail rattling made her pause.
She twisted around. Raised the dart gun to her lips. Cursed as she realized her mask was now covering those lips, and instead reached once more for her bow. She nocked and aimed an arrow into the darkness behind her.
Two men emerged from that darkness. They were dressed almost identically, save for their cloaks. The man in front no longer had a cloak—because Cas had stolen the brooch that once held it in place.
These were the same men that had been dead a moment ago.
Despite their dead, vacant stares, now they moved as if they were alive. Alive and fast. The one in front rushed her, whipping his short sword from its sheath with a fluidity that was otherworldly. The noises that creaked and groaned from his mouth were equally unnatural.
A slew of terrified curses fell from Cas’s own mouth as she sized up her targets.
It didn’t count as gratuitous killing if her targets were already dead, did it?
She decided quickly that it didn’t, and she loosed an arrow and then swiftly followed it with another. Both arrows hit their mark, and the first not-quite-dead man staggered back a few steps, the arrows jostling but not falling from the pale forehead they now protruded from.
The man regained his balance. His hooded eyes darted upward, just briefly, as if those arrows were only a minor nuisance that he was barely aware of.
The second man drew closer, groaning out sounds that soon twisted into what were clearly words, though they were spoken in a language Cas did not recognize. He seemed equally unconcerned about the arrows bouncing around in his companion’s head— even as thick currents of blood began to ooze from that puncture wound.
The bleeding man responded to that second man in a tone that sounded almost…amused.
With a sick feeling wringing her gut, Cas realized what she was going to have to do to stop these two.
And she was going to need a sword for it.
The arrow-impaled man lifted his blade and sliced toward her. Cas ducked his attack. She darted around him, and around the man behind him, too—a difficult maneuver in the tight space—and then she planted a foot in the lower back of that second man. He fell into the other. As the two became a briefly incapacitated, tangled-up heap, Cas aimed an arrow at the sword-wielding man’s wrist.
It struck and pierced straight through. He didn’t cry out. His dead body didn’t seem to register any pain. But the strike jostled his grip enough that the sword fell from his hand. It clanged against the rocky ground and then skittered a short ways down the path.
Cas didn’t hesitate. She tossed her bow aside and leapt forward, stomping a boot between the shoulder blades of the second man as he tried to untangle himself.
He swatted for her ankle.
She dodged, propelled herself into another leap, and landed deftly on the other side of the two men. She snatched up the fallen sword and spun back around to face her enemies.
They untangled and rose, swaying a bit as they did. Quick as a shadow, the one she’d fired arrows into swept around behind her. A deathly cold swept over Cas as he came, and suddenly the rain that was falling felt like needles of ice stabbing into her.
She gripped the sword in both hands and spun around, hoisting it high, as if she planned on delivering a crushing overhead blow. Her target crossed his arms and lifted his bracers to take the brunt of the attack, leaving his mid-section completely unguarded. Cas pulled her blade back down and aimed a powerful kick into his stomach. As he doubled over and curled inward, exposing his neck, she swung her stolen sword in the arc she’d truly planned all along.
It lodged deeply into his neck. Cas twisted her torso, drawing strength from her core as she’d been taught to do, and the blade proved sharp enough to manage the rest of the job; the thunder and howls of wind drowned out what she imagined was a gruesome noise as the man’s head was severed fully from his neck.
The body crumpled but then kept moving for a moment, writhing about without its head, its hands beating along the ground and searching.
It might have been comical looking, if it hadn’t been so horrifying.
Cas kept moving as well, afraid she might end up frozen in place if she didn’t—either from fear, or from that strange cold that the undead men were still giving off. She found that severed head before its body could and, cringing, she drew back and kicked it as hard as she could, sending it hurtling back up the path she’d already traveled.