Azrathel released Karmin and the man collapsed completely; breathing but broken, his mind emptied of everything useful. Damian's eyes returned to silver. He stood slowly, walked to his desk, and poured wine with hands that shook slightly.
"Well," he said. "That's concerning."
"What did you learn?"
"The backup is real. Someone with imperial blood will sacrifice themselves during the coronation and the ritual will force the Portal open regardless of whether we have the Tear." He drank deeply. "But he doesn't know who. The Grey Hand has a hidden leader called the Overlord who coordinates everything. Only the top three know the identity."
"Valric, Mordris, Selyse."
"Correct. Everyone else operates on orders passed down the chain." Damian looked at Karmin's twitching form on his carpet. "He's told us everything he knows. Which isn't enough."
I studied Karmin. A low-level courier who had stumbled into my trap and paid for it with his sanity. Barely involved in the larger conspiracy.
I saw an opportunity.
"Don't cure him," I said.
Damian raised an eyebrow. "Excuse me?"
"Kill him. Then use him."
"Use him how?"
"Necromancy. Azrathel can raise him. We send him back to the Grey Hand."
Damian was quiet for a long moment, the wine glass frozen halfway to his lips.
"As a spy?"
"As a message."
I outlined the plan in simple terms. Kill Karmin while his body was still fresh. Raise him as undead with just enough control to walk and speak a single sentence. Send him to the next Grey Hand meeting and let him deliver that sentence before the magic fails and he collapses.
"What sentence?" Damian asked.
I smiled and it felt wrong on my face. "Something that creates paranoia. Makes them doubt each other."
"Like?"
"'They know everything. We've been compromised.' Or 'One of us is the traitor.' Or 'The pact-bearer has infiltrated us.'"
Damian considered this while swirling his wine. Then he smiled too; the sharp smile of a man who appreciated cruelty when it served a purpose.
"That's elegant in its brutality."
"We can't kill all of them before the coronation but we can make them distrust each other. Paranoid enemies make mistakes. They watch each other instead of watching us."
"Azrathel would need to know where the meeting is."
"Karmin knows. Pull it from his mind before you kill him."
Damian looked at Karmin's broken body, then back at me. "You suggest this very easily."
"It's necessary."
"Is it? Or do you just enjoy it?" Azrathel and Damian are switching very fast tonight.
I didn't answer because I wasn't sure anymore.
"Any last words?" Damian asked me.
For a split-second, I thought about the man I was becoming and whether that man was someone worth being.
"Make it quick," I said. "He's just a courier. He doesn't deserve to suffer more than he already has."
His hand closed around Karmin's throat. Quick and professional. Thirty seconds of pressure and then stillness.
Karmin stopped breathing.
Damian stood and his eyes went fully red; Azrathel taking complete control.
"We'll need a few hours to prepare the working. The corpse must be fresh when we send it. You should get Nyssara and bring her to the catacombs by eleven-thirty. We'll meet you there with our messenger."
"Understood."
I turned to leave through the window I'd broken.
"Yozi."
I stopped.
"This plan is clever and ruthless and exactly what we need." Azrathel's voice was approving in a way that made my skin crawl. "You're changing. Becoming something useful. Don't lose that edge."
I didn't respond. Just climbed through the shattered glass and dropped into the night.
The run back to the safe house was slower without the Raubtier Speed.
Grey world. Tasteless air. Numb skin. The familiar emptiness that had become my constant companion, broken only by moments of violence that let me feel human again.
But my mind was sharp despite the numbness.
Tonight we would sow paranoia among the Grey Hand. Tomorrow we would steal the Tear and stop the ritual. And somewhere in between I had become the kind of person who suggested killing a man just to send a message.
"You okay?" Malgrin asked quietly.
Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.
"Fine."
"You're lying."
"I know."
"Does it bother you? What you suggested?"
I thought about Karmin. About his last moments. About the fact that I had felt nothing watching Azrathel torture him and nothing suggesting we kill him and nothing as Damian's hands closed around his throat.
"No," I said. "That's what bothers me."
"Ah."
Silence stretched between us.
Nyssara was awake when I climbed through her window, sharpening her sword by candlelight with the focused attention of someone who needed something to do with her hands.
"We need to go," I said. "Midnight. The catacombs. Damian has something to show us."
"What kind of something?"
"A message for the Grey Hand." I paused. "And a demonstration of what Azrathel can do with fresh corpses."
Her hands went still on the blade.
"Necromancy."
"Yes."
She didn't look up at me. Just stared at her sword, at the reflection of candlelight on steel, at anything except my face.
"Whose corpse?"
"A Grey Hand courier named Karmin. He triggered my trap in the passage and I brought him to Damian for interrogation. Azrathel extracted everything he knew." I kept my voice flat and factual. "He's dead now. We're going to raise him and send him back to his handlers with a message designed to make them paranoid."
Nyssara's jaw tightened. Her grip on the sword went white-knuckled.
"You suggested this."
It wasn't a question.
"Yes."
"And you're not..." She stopped. Started again. "You don't have any problem with it."
"It's necessary."
"That's not what I asked."
I didn't answer because the truth was worse than silence.
She sheathed her sword with a sharp motion.
"Let's go," she said.
"Nyssara..."
"I said let's go." She stood and walked past me toward the door, not the window. "I'll meet you at the catacombs. I need to walk."
She needed to be away from me. Needed time to process what I'd become while she wasn't looking.
I understood. I didn't blame her.
"Eleven-thirty," I said to her back.
"I know."
The door closed behind her.
The catacombs were cold and Nyssara was already there when I arrived.
She stood apart from where Damian was preparing the ritual space, her back pressed against a pillar, her arms crossed tight over her chest. She watched the proceedings with an expression carefully emptied of anything readable.
Damian had drawn symbols around Karmin’s cold skin in something dark that might have been ink or might have been blood. Candles burned at precise intervals. The air smelled of grave dust and old magic.
Azrathel was in full control now; Damian's eyes solid red, his movements too fluid, his voice layered with harmonics that made my teeth ache.
"The working is ready," Azrathel announced. "The messenger will rise, walk to the meeting point, deliver the phrase, and collapse. Thirty minutes of animation at most."
"What phrase?" Nyssara asked. Her voice was flat.
"'The pact-bearer knows everything. One of you is compromised.'" Azrathel smiled with Damian's mouth. "Simple. Effective. It will tear them apart."
Nyssara's expression didn't change but I saw her throat move as she swallowed.
Azrathel began the ritual.
I won't describe what happened next in detail. The words were in a language that predated human speech. The gestures were wrong in ways that made my eyes water to watch. The magic that flowed from Azrathel's hands was cold and dark and smelled like rotting flowers.
Karmin's body twitched. Shuddered. Rose.
He sat up on the slab with movements that were almost human but not quite; too smooth, too controlled, like a puppet being operated by someone who had studied how living things moved but didn't quite understand it.
His eyes opened. They were clouded and empty.
"The pact-bearer knows everything," Karmin said in a voice that sounded like dead leaves scraping across stone. "One of you is compromised."
Nyssara turned away.
She walked to the far end of the chamber and stood with her back to us, her shoulders rigid, her hands clenched into fists at her sides. I could see her breathing; too fast, too shallow, the controlled breathing of someone fighting not to be sick.
"Send him," Azrathel commanded, and Karmin's corpse stood, walked, climbed the stairs with those too-smooth movements, and disappeared into the night.
The candles guttered and died.
Damian's eyes flickered back to silver and he sagged against the wall, exhausted.
"It's done," he said. "By morning, the Grey Hand will be tearing itself apart looking for traitors."
I nodded. Looked at Nyssara's back.
She hadn't moved. Hadn't turned around.
"We should go," I said to her.
"In a minute." Her voice was thick. "I need a minute."
Damian caught my eye. Raised an eyebrow. I shook my head slightly; not now, don't push.
He nodded and made himself busy gathering his ritual components.
I walked to where Nyssara stood and stopped a few feet behind her.
"I'm sorry," I said quietly. "I should have warned you what we were doing. Given you the choice to be somewhere else."
"It's not that." She finally turned to face me. Her eyes were red-rimmed but dry. "I've seen death. I've caused death. I've watched the Inquisition do things that would make Azrathel's methods look gentle."
"Then what?"
"It's you." She stepped closer. "It's watching you suggest it like it was nothing. Watch it happen like it was nothing. Stand there while a dead man walked past us and feel nothing."
"I felt something."
"Did you?"
I wanted to lie. Wanted to tell her that of course I'd felt horror, disgust, revulsion at what we'd done. But she deserved better than lies.
"I felt satisfied," I admitted. "That the plan worked. That we'd gained an advantage."
Something in her expression cracked.
"Yozi..."
"I know what I'm becoming. I know it's wrong. I know that something in me is broken or breaking and I should be terrified." I met her eyes. "But I'm not. And that terrifies me more than anything else."
She was quiet for a long moment.
Then she reached out and took my hand. Her fingers were cold from the catacombs but the touch was warm; real, present, human.
"I'm not giving up on you," she said. "Whatever you're becoming, whatever the curse is doing to you, I'm not walking away."
"Why?"
"Because you just told me the truth even though you knew it would hurt me. Because you can still recognize that something is wrong even if you can't feel it." She squeezed my hand. "Because I trust you."
She walked past me toward the stairs, toward the night, toward whatever came next.
I watched her go.
I stood alone in the catacombs where we'd first met, surrounded by the smell of old death and older magic, and I understood something that made my blood run cold.
She trusted me. After everything she'd witnessed tonight; the torture, the murder, the necromancy, my cold satisfaction at watching a dead man walk. After all of that, she still trusted me.
--- SPECTACLE REPORT: THE PUPPET SHOW ---
Performance Rating: ???? (4/5) Malgrin's Note: "Ah, Necromancy. The classics never go out of style. Azrathel has a flair for the dramatic, doesn't he? But the real show wasn't the walking corpse. It was Nyssara trying to reconcile the fact that her 'hero' is turning into a sociopath. She’s clinging to your humanity harder than you are. That’s going to hurt when she lets go."
TACTICAL PLAY:
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Operation: [Dead Man Walking].
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Effect: Paranoia injected into enemy ranks.
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Success Probability: High. (Dead men tell no lies, but they deliver great threats).
MORAL COMPASS STATUS:
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Yozi: [ERROR: NOT FOUND]
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Nyssara: [CRITICAL STRESS DETECTED]