16

  The next morning, they all agreed that they would not sample the breakfast at the inn they'd stayed at the previous night. Instead, they headed back out into the streets of Byzantium, bustling with the business of the morning. "Do you know a good tavern or inn around here?" Sara asked.

  "I'm partial to the Drunken Dog's offerings personally," Edric said. "We haven't really been back since—"

  Without warning, Edric's symbiote began throwing a barrage of nonsensical thoughts and feelings at him. Simend froze at the same time, his head tilted to the side. Edric stared at his metal-laced arm. The lights flashed erratically in a way he'd never seen. The color remained constant, the steady azure of the radiant release he had it set for, but there was no pattern he could discern to the way the light bounced through the crystals. Nor could he make sense of anything it was trying to tell him. "What on earth?" he mused aloud.

  "Do you feel that too?" Simend asked.

  "Feel what?" Dalibor asked.

  "I don't know what it's trying to tell me," Edric said. He held his arm close and began adjusting the settings with the crystals at his elbow. "Maybe it'll be clearer if I set it for inversion?"

  "Are you two feeling alright?" Sara asked. "You're not making a lot of sense right now."

  "It's the symbiotes in our arms," Simend explained while Edric adjusted the radiance of his symbiote to flow into himself instead of out. "Something's upsetting them, but we can't figure out what."

  "Might it be me?" a stranger at Edric's shoulder asked.

  "Star take me!" Edric swore, leaping away from the sudden stranger. His arm leapt also, still set to release, and he could almost feel the lightning gathering at his fingertips. But when he finally turned to face the man that had startled him, there was nobody there.

  "What's wrong?" Simend asked. The lights in the jackal's symbiote had stabilized and now burned with a steady glow that Edric recognized as presaging flames.

  "There was somebody behind me," Edric said. "Did you see him? Or hear him?"

  "I thought I saw him," Dalibor said. He had drawn his strangely curved sword and scanned the rapidly dispersing crowd around them. The street was emptying out in the face of two spooked luminaries and a jackal swinging a sword. "But when you moved, he was gone."

  "Is it me you're looking for?" asked a man walking towards them from across the street. All four of them spun to face him, weapons or symbiotes at the ready. He wasn't much to look at. A rather nondescript Homin man with dark hair and dark skin, clad in dark leather garb and a black hooded cloak.

  Edric reached into his symbiote, trying to ask what it thought of the man, when Dalibor and Sara both gasped. "Lucilius?" Sara whispered.

  "Who?" Simend asked.

  "How in all the names of the Arbiter did you find us?" Dalibor shouted.

  "Ah, the Final Arbiter," Lucilius said with a chuckle. Everything about the man made Edric's symbiote feel like it was crawling around inside his arm, and he didn't like it. "Funny you should bring up death. Because you see…"

  Edric's stomach almost felt like it was going to leap straight up out of his throat at what happened next. The man's features seemed to melt straight off his face as if the blood running through his veins had turned to acid. His cheeks and hair sloughed away, and his eyes dropped to the pavement, until only the skull remained, bone white and dry. Within its eye sockets burned a piercing yellow light. His clothing sizzled and turned to steam until only a tattered brown robe remained. At the last, a circlet, fashioned from the same yellow light burning within the skeleton's eyes, wrapped itself around its head. The creature began to laugh. "The Star has blessed me with power over death itself," he cackled. "And I have come to bring you home at last! We all heard your song calling us amongst the radiance, but I found you first! The honor of taking you will be mine alone!"

  Simend didn't need additional prompting to attack, and darted towards the skeleton, his physical gladius and a swarm of phantom blades flashing as he charged. But before he could get close, Lucilius held his skeletal arms out in from of him and conjured a massive fan of fire that swept across the street between them. Edric barely had time to create a radiant shield to intercept the flames that raced towards Dalibor and Sara, but Simend, being closer, did not have time to properly shield himself at all. He threw himself towards the ground, his symbiotic arm held out in front of him to take the brunt of the flames. People all around them screamed and fled. Some of the passersby, though, had been set aflame and scattered, igniting everything they passed until they, at last, succumbed.

  Edric could hear the skeleton laughing, but once the initial wave of fire had passed, the monster was nowhere to be seen. The shark scanned the streets, arm up, standing as close to Dalibor and Sara as he could. "Sim!" he called.

  "I'm fine," Simend said. He looked up from where he'd tackled the pavement, and a large patch of fur on his head had been singed away.

  "You don't look fine," Sara said.

  "And I'm very angry about that," Simend replied. He pushed himself to his feet. "Where'd the bastard go?"

  "I can't find him," Edric said. He grabbed Simend by the arm and began to soothe the jackal's burns with a cool, restorative mist from his fingers. "And how did he do that without a symbiote?"

  "He's the Sable Fang's Enforcer," Sara said. "Or he was, anyway."

  "Uh…" Dalibor stammered. "Something's wrong with those bodies."

  Edric turned to where the few people who'd been caught in the flames had fallen. They were getting back up, but their motions were jerky. It looked as if something were using them as puppets. Edric's stomach threatened to come up again when, in unison, the four charred corpses turned their sightless gaze upon them, a familiar yellow light burning where their eyes had been.

  With another lurch, Edric's symbiote pulled his attention back in the opposite direction. Lucilius had reappeared down the street, still cackling as he raised his arms to the sky. Edric and his symbiote both recognized the flow of the radiance around him. "Lightning!" he shouted. "Take cover!" Dalibor sprinted towards the covered terrace of a nearby grocer, but the others were too far from safety. Simend jerked himself free of Edric's grasp and dashed towards the far side of the street, his radiant shield raised over his head. Edric in turn grabbed Sara by the shoulder and forced her to the ground near his feet. He knelt over her and raised his arm over their heads, coaxing the lightning shield out of his symbiote almost by reflex. The first lightning strike very nearly flattened him with its strength, even with his sparkling, radiant shield taking the worst of the blast. He wrapped his free arm around Sara and bent low over her, using both his body and his shield to protect her. "Stay close," he told her. "I won't let anything hurt you."

  "Ed, watch out!" he heard Simend yelling. Edric looked up, and the reanimated corpses, ignorant of or perhaps protected from the lightning, shambled towards him, their limbs still moving in inhuman fashion.

  Another bolt of lightning against his shield nearly tore off Edric's arm. "I can't fight them and keep my shield up at the same time!" he shouted.

  "Fire incoming!" Simend shouted back, and gouts of flame flew from the jackal's hiding spot across the street. The fire engulfed the bodies, but, except for a slight stagger from the force, they ignored it and kept approaching.

  "They're already dead!" Dalibor called. "You can't kill them again."

  "Balls!" Simend swore. "I told you I should figure out how to make ice, Ed!"

  "Not the time, Sim," Edric called back. "Crawl with me, Sara, but stay low. We need to find real cover." The next bolt dispersed his shield entirely, but he managed to get it back in place within a second. "Quickly."

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  "Simend!" Dalibor called. "Focus on Lucilius! We have to stop the lightning!"

  "Yes, warlord," Simend called back. The jackal hurried down the street towards the skeleton, darting from covered porch to covered porch between the lightning strikes.

  Nearly all the strikes were focused on Edric, though, and his arm couldn't take many more of them. The monster wanted the princess, and he was the one in the way. Another bolt struck, and he nearly collapsed on top of Sara. "Just a bit more, Edric," she told him. "We're almost there. You can do this."

  He tried to lift his arm, but it was entirely numb. His symbiote struggled within, trying to command enough of the background radiance to reconstitute the shield, but it too was unable. Edric looked up. The corpses were closing in on them, the doorway they were heading to was too far away, and Edric could feel more lightning in the air. They were going to have to run, but he couldn't let her run on her own. Any bolt could be lethal if she were out of cover. "Put your arms around my neck," he said. She complied, and Edric scooped her up with his weak but still-functional left arm. He staggered to his feet and ran as fast as he could towards the door, stooping over to make sure the princess's entire body was covered by his. She was so small compared to him. They were nearly there, but Edric could feel the static building on the back of his tunic. They weren't going to make it.

  But the bolt never landed. From down the street resounded a cry and the bone-crunching sound of a skeleton getting tackled, and then they were safe. Edric smashed through the wooden door with his tingling shoulder, tripped, and rolled as he fell so Sara would land on top of him when they hit the floor. He panted briefly once they skidded to a stop in the middle of a house's common room. Sara had her face buried in the scarf around his neck. He patted her on the back. "You okay?" he asked.

  She lifted herself up onto her elbows and looked down into the side of his face. He stared back at her from the corner of his eye, unable to turn his head to look up at her due to his fin. His stomach squirmed again, though for a very different reason this time. It had been a long time since he'd been this close to a Homin, and she was even more attractive this close up. "Sorry for manhandling you," he said. "I should have asked before touching you like that."

  Sara cocked an eyebrow at him. "You saved my life, Edric," she said. "You don't have to apologize."

  "Still," Edric said. "It feels rude to just carry you around like a child without asking first." Dalibor stuck his head in through the door, and the two of them looked up at him from the floor, Sara draped across Edric's chest with her feet between his legs. "It's not what it looks like," Edric said quickly.

  "Oh, don't mind me," Dalibor said, turning his face away from them. "I'm just crippling corpses out here. Guess I'll take care of it myself." He rushed back out into the street.

  "Are you going to be okay?" Sara asked Edric.

  "No," said Edric. "Well, yes. Eventually. You should go. I need to see if I can get my arm moving again."

  "Could use some backup!" Dalibor called from outside.

  "Go," Edric said, shooing her away without touching her this time. "Your warlord's nothing without his comrades." Sara rolled off him and sprinted out the door, her battered knife clutched tightly in one hand. Edric rolled onto his stomach and took a deep breath. She'd been so warm and, somehow, smelled like the roses of New Rome. It had been years since the last time he'd been in the capital. He could still smell the scent of the roses that nearly every patrician grew in their personal gardens blowing gently on the winds of summer. It was one of the few things he could smell at all with his nose dried out, and he hadn't realized he'd missed them so much.

  An old man leaned into Edric's line of sight. "Are you okay, son?" he asked.

  "Oh," Edric said. "I'm sorry about your door. I'll pay to fix it."

  "What's going on out there?" the man asked, moving towards the door.

  Edric tried his arm. It moved, but he couldn't actually feel it move. All he could feel was a roiling cloud of prickles, as if the lightning was bouncing around inside it. "Don't go out there," he said. "It's not safe."

  "Are those… corpses?" the man asked.

  "They are," Edric said, massaging the tingling flesh between the platinum inlays on his arm. "It's been kind of a weird morning. Can you see a skeleton in a robe down the street? Maybe fighting a Sabwa?"

  The man leaned out the door. "Yep," he said. "Fighting two dogs, actually. I don't know what those boys are thinking, leaving that poor girl to fight off all those bodies by herself."

  Edric was on his feet almost before his mind realized what he was doing. "They what?" he roared. He shoved the man out of the way and charged back into the street. Sure enough, Sara was darting between three new corpses that had obviously been killed by lightning. She slashed and dodged past them as they tried to grab her. Edric shook his arm, trying desperately to get feeling back into it. "Come on, buddy," he whispered to his symbiote. "I don't even need you to do anything. I just need my sword arm back." But his arm remained asleep and clumsy. He growled. "Fine. I'll do it without you."

  Sara didn't really need his help. He recognized that. However, she was very small and had only a knife that looked like it was supposed to be a seal breaker, and he would never forgive himself if he didn't at least do something. Besides, he was very not small and definitely did not need a sword or even a working right arm to cause a large amount of mayhem. He was Sior, and his teeth were not for show.

  That said, he quickly learned that dead people tasted gross, maybe especially dead people who'd gotten blasted by lightning. He hadn't sampled enough varieties of freshly dead people to know. But amidst the taste of burned flesh and stagnant blood, his symbiote noticed something else. He tackled the remaining body that Sara wasn't slicing into ribbons and gave the symbiote a moment to process. It comforted him that, even if he couldn't yet reliably move his arm, the symbiote was still alive and functioning.

  The sense it sent back to him after a short pause caught him off guard. It had found traces of lightcrafted constructs inside the dead bodies. Which would explain both how they were moving and why they moved like puppets. But how was this skeleton throwing fire, conjuring lightning, and lightcrafting puppets inside corpses without any hint of a symbiote? For that matter, how was the skeleton even moving?

  That, Edric realized as soon as he'd thought it, was the correct question. If it was itself a construct, it could be dispelled like a construct. He grabbed his metallic arm with his left hand and supported it as he reached out towards the skeleton. His symbiote flared within the numb appendage, and the lights on his arm began to cascade out past his dangling, numb fingers. "Sim! Dalibor!" he called down the street.

  Simend used his own symbiote to deflect another cascade of fire harmlessly into the air while Dalibor fenced with the skeleton, which was now wielding a spiked club that seemed to be crafted from a swarm of stones pulled from the road. "Little busy, Ed," he called back.

  "You're going to want to clear out," Edric replied.

  Simend glanced over his shoulder, saw the azure sigils beginning to form in the air around Edric's outstretched arm, grabbed Dalibor's tail, and sprinted towards the side of the street. Dalibor yelped, lurched from Simend's tug, and fell. Simend swore in Sabwan and returned to Dalibor's side, throwing his own darts of fire at Lucilius to keep the skeleton from being able to get close to the downed jackal.

  "Here it comes!" Edric shouted. Simend swore again and brought up his arm to place a radiant shield between Edric and the two of them.

  Lucilius didn't even try to block. "I am Death itself!" he screeched, reaching towards the heavens to grab yet more lightning. "I will not be denied!"

  Edric's only response was to unleash the disruptive beam he'd been charging. The sigils in the air around his limp fingers spun once around his hand and flared as bright as the afternoon sun above them. A beam of ghostly blue light erupted from the ring of sigils and streaked down the street, growing wider as it went. It hit Simend's shield first and broke harmlessly over it. As soon as the blazing light struck Lucilius's skeletal form, though, his entire body, clothes and all, were washed away as if they were chalk in a rainstorm, the colors of his bones and robes briefly joining the cascading light before fading completely from view.

  Once the beam had faded, Edric lowered his arm and looked down the street. What few corpses had still been shambling around now lay properly lifeless on the ground. Simend and Dalibor peeked out from behind the pulsing crimson glow of Simend's radiant shield. The screams of the fled townspeople were far and faded.

  "Where'd he go?" Sara asked.

  Edric glanced back at her. The bodies she'd been fighting were also still. Dispelling the skeleton had apparently broken whatever control it had over them. The shark turned his gaze up, towards the roofs of the buildings around them. "The skeleton wasn't real," he said. "I mean, it was solid and all, but somebody had used the radiance to make it. Probably that Lucilius you mentioned. I don't see where he could have been controlling it from, though."

  "Guards are coming," Simend said. He jogged up to them, Dalibor following close behind. "Do we still have contacts in Byzantium?"

  Edric shook his head. "Not that we're on good terms with after our last job here," he said. "I mean, I know who can be bribed, but can't we just tell them the truth? Emperor Poplicolus sent assassins to bring his daughter back and she objected?"

  "No," Sara said, shaking her head. "Byzantium is still part of the empire. They'll imprison us until my father can send somebody to collect us."

  "Well, that's that then," Simend said. "Time to disappear, Ed."

  Edric groaned. "I don't know how much more of this I can handle at the moment," he said. "I got hit by a lot of lightning."

  "Come on, big guy," Simend said, gently punching his left arm. "You can do this."

  "Fine," Edric said with a sigh. "We don't have a lot of options, I suppose. Everybody hold hands." He held his symbiotic arm up in the air. Sara took his other hand, and the others formed a chain behind her with Simend at the end. Her hand was so small. And so warm. Edric would have sworn the feedback he got from his symbiote was a bemused smirk. He set his jaw. He didn't need lip from a non-verbal, metallic snake living inside his own arm. With a quick prayer that his numb fingers would comply, Edric snapped. The crystals on his arm flashed once, and all four of them vanished from sight.

  "Wait!" Dalibor said too late. "Half of our gear is still with our horses!"

  "You're going to have to let that go, gorgeous. The horses too," Simend told him. "May as well be property of the state now."

  "But Ebonmane!" Sara cried.

  "Try to stay quiet," Edric scolded as he started walking. "We're invisible, not silenced. Just try to avoid running into anybody until we get onto a ferry into Phrygia."

  Dalibor yelped, and Edric felt Sara tug on him when Dalibor's stumble nearly pulled her down as well. "I'm never going to get used to this," Dalibor muttered.

  Edric knew that none of them could see him nod, but he did it anyway, still clutching Sara's warm hand in his. "It has been kind of a weird morning," he agreed.