All morning, the Brinn searched for anything that could be salvaged from the wreckage: weapons, supplies, but most importantly people.
They found ten thralls that had survived the selkie seal attack, including, to everyone’s delight, Ruzar, the party cook.
They found many more thralls dead, drowned, or smashed upon the rocks from the watersung storm. I felt guilt with every corpse we passed. The thralls had not assaulted Datrea; they weren’t even permitted weapons. I had no grievance with them specifically, but they had been the ones to die in my attempt to kill Jaetheiri and Wes. I saw their bodies and thought of the Datreans the Brinn had captured at the gates of the city.
They could become just like these dead thralls one day.
Yethyr sensed my horror but thankfully said nothing about it. I would prefer throwing myself back into the lake than suffering the embarrassment of having him soothe me again.
We walked on in silence and it occurred to me suddenly that Yethyr could undo this destruction. He was a deathsinger! He could return their spirits to their waterlogged bodies with a song!
I dropped the idea into Yethyr’s mind, but he recognized my influence right away. “No Bonesong. Thralls they may be, but they were devout Brinn. I will not rob them of their chance at Heaven. I am not so cruel a master as that.”
Damn him and his ridiculous zealotry. It seemed clear to me from the hunter he had briefly raised and questioned that many of these Brinn were not going to like where they were going very much.
The Prince suddenly froze. There, among the scattered dead, was a limp mound of orange fur.
Yethyr caught his breath. The cat that had followed him from Datrea, through Hell, and aboard 3 different boats was now lying there on the beach, very still.
“Is it dead?” Jaetheiri asked
“Yes.” Yethyr was a deathsinger. He did not need to get closer to know a corpse when he saw one.
Yethyr took a step towards it anyway. The song in its bones called to him strangely.
“Draw back, my prince,” Wes cried. “You don’t want to be close.”
Yethyr trusted the fear in Wes’s voice and drew back. “Will its spirit return from Hell?”
“Probably.” Wes and the Prince watched the dead body sharply. They listened to the cat’s bones’ strange deathsong grow fainter and wilder. It sounded more alive than dead with each passing moment. Then a little mote of red light rose from the lake, twisted into a mirror image of the dead cat, and entered her body.
The deathsong went silent and the orange ball of fur convulsed and whimpered in such pain that I felt, for a flicker of a moment, even Yethyr’s cold heart move to pity.
Then she shot up, alive and yowling, and Yethyr’s brief pity left. She glared at the Prince with affronted green eyes, as if she held him personally responsible for the boat capsizing. Yethyr glared back and before he could open his mouth, probably to command her to die again, she shot into the thickets and disappeared.
“It is hard indeed to keep a cat in Hell,” Wes murmured.
Yethyr scowled, lamenting that the demon lived to haunt him still. “I suppose you are glad of it.”
“Glad? Neyleesi blessed her children, but there is a limit and a price. Every time a cat dies and returns from her hellish halls, they are changed by it, more demon than they were before.” Wes’s skeleton fidgeted. “Better let them live out their natural lives and never use their precious tickets out of Hell.”
“How many lives do they have?”
“It depends. There are no records of any exceeding nine.”
Yethyr growled. He didn’t like the idea of having to kill the mangy thing eight more times before getting it to leave him alone.
They found Mandorias’ broken body tossed aside in the sand, drowned and dead. His maps were waterlogged and his records ruined, but Yethyr had hope that Mandorias himself could be salvaged.
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His thrall scholar was not Brinn and so the Prince had no qualms about calling him up.
“Yethyr, son of Yevvar Kentheir greets you, Mandorias of Cozzat. Come to me.”
His deathsong of calling and binding was unleashed and Mandorias’ dead body jerked up with a start. “Master?” he said in a hoarse voice. Unlike Wes, his throat had not been ruined by his death and so could speak just as well as he did in life, which was as accented and halting as ever.
“Master, there was a storm. I hit the water. There was song and spirit. I couldn’t swim and then—”
“That’s over now.”
“Is it? It doesn’t feel like it. My lungs feel heavy. There’s this weight pressing upon my head, and then there’s this deathly sound ringing in my ears.”
“That would be my deathsong. I’m told it’s alarming when you first hear it.”
“Deathsong?” Mandorias was slow in speech, but quick in thought. “I’m dead then?”
Yethyr crouched down to be level with him, ignoring his ever-aching knees. “Yes.”
“You raised me.”
“I did.”
Mandorias’ jaw dropped. “But…but you hate raising corpses. Saps the power you use to move, doesn’t it? ‘Not worth the effort,’ you have always said.”
“You’re worth the effort,” Yethyr said and Mandorias gaped more. I wanted to laugh. Yethyr’s emotions on raising the dead were ones the Prince preferred to breeze past. “Truly, you are not much effort at all. You drowned. Your body is more or less whole, apart from it being dead. Not much is needed to keep you together. Besides the initial song to bind you back to your body, it is mostly your spirit that is maintaining the composition.”
“My spirit,” Mandorias echoed with a furrowed brow. “You…took my spirit.”
“I did. If a Fang of Maethe claimed you, tell me now and I will release you. I do not mean to steal you from Heaven.”
Mandorias curled his lip. “No Fang of Maethe need be involved for you to steal me from Heaven. I am a scholar of Cozzat. We either fall to the halls of Z’krel or rise to the Heaven of Braithe, never knowing which until our end. Such is our way.”
Yethyr was suddenly afraid. He had not known that. He had thought of Cozzat as solely the domain of Z’krel. If Braithe was involved…
I could feel Yethyr recognize the name and respect it. Braithe was not his angel, but a king among angels and if he denied Mandorias a place in his heavenly halls, he would not forgive himself.
“The time of knowing is now. Where did your spirit go?” And Yethyr was afraid of the answer.
“I had gone to neither, as far as I can tell, although perhaps it had just been too early for one or the other to come. Based on the state of my body, I gather I have not been dead a day.”
“You are correct.”
“And yet…” Mandorias scratched his white beard, startling at hearing the sound of the deathsong puppeting him change to accommodate the motion.
“And yet?”
“My memory is hazy, but I do believe…I do believe something did come to me, while I was dead. I remember a skull with eyes of flame.”
“That sounds like Z’krel.” Yethyr was ashamed that he felt relieved. He did not deprive this old man of Heaven after all.
“But he didn’t take me,” Mandorias was saying. “He said no one would. I can’t recall why.”
“I’ll take you.” Yethyr came to his feet. “You don’t have to worry about Z’krel again.”
The man slowly stood and seemed even more alarmed at how smoothly his own body moved. I watched his gaze fall to me on Yethyr’s hip and a strange troubled look entered his green eyes.
“I do not fear Z’krel, Master.”
He followed the Prince down the beach, walking tall and straight-backed, nothing like the slouching shuffle that had characterized Mandorias in life.
No one seemed more surprised by it than Mandorias himself.
By midday, the Brinn had gathered what they could from the beach. They regrouped and started toward the mountain, stumbling upon Grokar and Hegrir in the process, both very much alive.
“Thank the angel!” Vezemar cried upon seeing Grokar. “I was worried Kettir and I would guard the Prince’s sleep alone.”
Grokar looked decidedly less excited at seeing him. “I had feared you all perished.”
“It would take more than that to end us!” Nisari cried.
“Indeed,” Hegrir said, looking at Yethyr. “I should have known.”
Yethyr ignored Hegrir’s eyes upon him; he was busy calculating. With Grokar and Hegrir found, all hunters had been accounted for. He had lost Kvelir, Umbar, Dathari, and Dethur due to the selkie attack. He now had six hunters, seven if he counted himself and eleven thralls, twelve if he counted Wes. Not nearly enough, but it would have to do.
They pressed on. Following the river would lead them to the mountain, but they all agreed they wanted to be far from the water when they set up camp.
So they traveled away from the river. Everyone was exhausted after the hectic sleepless night and after only two hours, Yethyr was convinced, by an aching Jaetheiri, that they should set up camp early.
They had only been able to salvage two tents among the wreckage and their conditions were dubious at best. Thralls worked to prepare them for sleeping, while most of the hunters went off to find something for their party to eat. They had not managed to salvage much food from the wreck.
Yethyr sat off to side with Jaetheiri, nominally supervising the preparations, but in truth, all his focus was on the key he turned in his hand. Tular’s key. He withdrew Kvelir’s copper lockbox from his pocket and looked to Jaetheiri.
“Ready to open it?”
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What would you do with a demonic cat that came back from dead?
