Barza worked me through two sunsets without more than a few minutes of rest. If anything, I should have been more worn out. For Heaven’s sake, I’d started this endless day in a vat of corpse jelly—and I’d started it dead.
My mind was frazzled, but physically, I was still completely fine. Still loose and slippery in my joints and muscles, perhaps, but after a few days spent slipping about, I was at least getting proficient at walking around without flopping to the floor in a boneless heap.
That didn’t mean it wasn’t unsettling, especially not after I heard a spider skitter up behind me during my second shift, and in a panic, I twisted my head all the way around like an owl. A fucking unnerving thing to discover you can do, let me tell you.
Even when the eastern sky started smoldering on my third day, I still wasn’t tired. Seemed I didn’t need to sleep. That would have been more of a blessing if it didn’t just give them an excuse to work me harder. Mostly, I got thrown in with the mindless servitors, doing menial labor.
Absurdly, it seemed Barza was under the impression that household chores would break me down to my new position. Hilarious. I hadn’t had much time to take in this new society I was a part of, but it was clear they had no grasp on how the rest of the world lived. I was an eldest daughter; just about all my living memories consisted of doing menial household chores. I didn’t correct Barza’s assumption. Who knows what else she’d have thought up if she knew doing dishes and scrubbing floors wasn’t shattering my resolve.
The real problem wasn’t the work, even relentless as it was, but the way the lack of sleep began grinding away my grasp on time. I hadn’t realized just how reliant I’d been on that cycle of sleeping and waking to keep the days distinct. Without it, time bled into a smear of servitude.
I was scrubbing myself clean after my third shift with the spiders when Arbiter Vertale sent a vellum knight to snatch me. Seemed it was finally time to meet the tower’s master.
If I hadn’t just blown my mind phobically panicking over the spiders, I doubt I’d have handled the summons so calmly. By the time that vellum dragged me up out of the bowels of the tower, I simply couldn’t muster another drop of panic.
The tower was enormous, each floor wider than my family’s tavern. A single continuous staircase corkscrewed against the outer wall. Awfully precarious: anyone who fell could just tumble down the stairs all the way to the bottom. A ribbon of stained glass windows spiraled up alongside the stairs at eye level, giving colorful glimpses of the sea. Vel Zerav was the most beautiful building I’d ever been in.
Vertale met me at a landing a dozen stories up. He was standing beside a pair of armored vellums, and a servitor holding out an orange square neck dress.
“I hear you have some utility,” Vertale said. “A good thing. We had to give our last spider milker to the gladiator pits after we caught the ungrateful cav stealing.”
I doubt I’d last long in a gladiator pit. “You won’t have a repeat with me: I’ve never stolen anything in my life.”
“What you did in life isn’t worth so much as you’d think; you’re dead now, after all.” He pointed to the dress. “Change into that. Magister Zoivan is finished with his experiments, and he’s ready to see you.”
I took the dress. “Where should I—”
He snapped at me. “Don’t waste my time, cav. You lost your right to dignity when you died. Change. Now.”
It had been a misplaced instinct, anyways. It’s not like I really thought I had enough worth in these people’s eyes to justify any basic human respect. Moving mechanically, I draped the dress on a cushioned stool, and stripped out of my robes.
“You will be on your best behavior when you meet the magister,” Vertale said. He seemed completely disinterested in my body, thank Heaven.
“Yes, Arbiter,” I said.
Cramming myself into the dress was a challenge. Even with a few buttons on the back undone, it was still so tight I could hardly breathe—blessings then that I didn’t have to.
“Good. It fits,” Vertale said.
Tight as a noose. “Like a glove.” I wheezed through a forced smile.
Magister Zoivan’s chambers were a fever-dream collage of a languorous royal bedchamber, a gaudy throne room, an overstocked library, and a mad experimenter’s laboratory, complete with pickled specimen jars and a half stitched together abominations laid out on lab tables. The room reeked of antiseptic and incense. The chambers were cavernous, with enormous arched ceilings covered in a single continuous fresco that was crumbling with age. It was ancient; I’d heard he built this tower, but clearly that wasn’t true.
At least, that’s what I thought until I saw the man.
Magister Zoivan was gaunt as the mummified dead, and his skin was thin as rice paper. Sunken eyes closed, he reclined in a bed larger than most rooms, like a withered worm in an apple. Tubes and needles threaded through his body. He made rotting corpses look healthy and young.
A man sat reading a thick tome on a sofa beside the ancient magister. He was startlingly attractive, a heroically proportioned goliath with immaculate black skin and a jawline sharp as a drawn blade.
“Magister, I brought the new revenant, Aveline,” Vertale said.
The man looked up. The moment he locked eyes with me, I stiffened. His eyes were the milky white of the dead. I hadn’t seen my own eyes yet. Sweet heaven, my eyes don’t look like that, do they? It would explain the reactions I’d been getting.
“Oh, marvelous,” the man said. He closed the book, and set it on the bedside table. “Tell me again where you found her?”
So it was him, not the old man? Then who was the old man?
“Out at the embalmer when I was picking up our gladiators,” Vertale said.
The man—the magister, Zoivan?—stood in one smooth motion, and strode toward me. He looked me over like a new statue, debating where to place it in the gallery. “Marishole’s place? He always did good work, and she is exquisite.”
He brushed my cheek with his fingertips, gently twisting my head to inspect the arch of my neck in a way that made me want to curl up and die.
“Marishole has been dead for thirty years, sir,” Vertale said.
“Truly?” Zoivan dropped his hand from my cheek. “Fascinating how the time flits away, isn’t it? Although I suppose you’re still so young.” He turned on me. “So what was your name? Aveline, wasn’t it? You’re a pinelander?”
I curtsied instinctively. A button popped with the movement and went flying behind me. Neither of them seemed to notice, and I could finally breathe. “Yes Magister. Aveline Ouvare.”
“You remember your last name as well? Delightful! What brought you this far east?”
An honor killing. “My betrothed was in the pale business.”
Did Mervale know what had happened yet? And what was he going to do when he found out? By the standards of my old life, Mervale was a terrifyingly powerful man—but compared to these people, he was nothing. Surely he couldn’t be fool enough to try to get me back.
But I wished he would. Watching Mervale get humbled would be the first good thing that had happened to me since he had his men drown Dorien.
“Ah, the corpse peddlers who make it all possible,” Zoivan said. “Blessed profession. I forget, is the White Forest imperial territory, these days?” He didn’t give me a chance to respond, and it didn’t seem safe to interrupt him. “I never keep up with the frivolities of external politics unless the fools try marching on us. I say let the church have its petty empire. It’s less troublesome dealing with them than a cornucopian scattering of barbarians, let me tell you.”
With no warning at all, Zoivan slapped me across the face. It wasn’t the hardest anyone had hit me, not by a long shot, but it rocked my skull all the same and it came out of nowhere. Oh Saints, Aveline, what in the hells did you do wrong now? On instinct, I caved into my shoulders, averting my eyes to the floor and going as submissive as I could.
“Well?” Zoivan demanded. “I asked you a question, cav. Were you an imperial or not?”
He wouldn’t stop talking long enough for me to answer—was I supposed to interrupt him? “Y-yes, Magister. I was born under the sun.” I curtsied again, and stole a glance up at him, trying to gauge if he was going to hit me again.
Instead, Zoivan turned his dead eyes on Vertale. And just like that, I may as well have been nothing but a piece of furniture. “She’s a little slow, isn’t she? Are we sure all of her mind came back?”
Vertale shrugged. “She is a spontaneous revenant after a live embalming, performed by a professional; I believe she might have simply been like this when she was alive.”
How fucking insulting. I kept the smile plastered on my face as the humiliation deepened.
“Well, at least she has such a prodigious quantity of fat on her chest to make up for the disastrous quality of the fat in her skull.” Zoivan laughed at his own crude joke. “You know what the church calls spontaneous revenants?”
“Saints, I believe?” Vertale said.
The magister chuckled, and turned on me. “So humor an old man. Was there a reason why you were ‘sainted,’ girl? Is there anything special about you at all? Have you done anything with your life to justify the angels’s choice?” He turned back to Vertale before I could even attempt an answer. Was I going to get hit again for this? “Can you imagine letting geniuses like Kertuvesh and Naier wither away and die, but choosing some idiot peasant girl and giving her a second chance? What sort of insane religion could ever believe there was an intelligence behind these choices. Utter idiocy.”
Vertale gave a vague affirmation, and Magister Zoivan set off rambling again. At least he didn’t hit me again.
The man liked the sound of his own voice. It seemed like he could go on forever, but eventually, there was a blessed interruption. A slim woman in blue robes crept into the room and went to the withered old man on the bed. If this young, dead eyed goliath was Magister Zoivan, then I had no idea who that ancient sleeper was. No one had acknowledged him while we spoke.
“Apologies, Magister, but it’s time for your morning treatment,” the woman said with a demure curtsy. A nurse for the old man, it seemed. He clearly needed one.
“Pitiable shame, it was such good conversation,” Magister Zoivan said. Conversation was a stretch. “Give me a moment to settle the body.”
“Of course, Magister,” the nurse said.
Zoivan sat his titanic body back into the armchair beside the bed, rolled his shoulders, settled into a comfortable spot, then went completely limp.
The old man wheezed awake at precisely the same instant.
Oh. So they were both Magister Zoivan. Disturbing. What was it the corpse seller had thought I was? A vessel? That had to be what this young titan was: a puppet for the magister’s mind.
“Let me see you with my own eyes, ‘Saint,’” the ancient Zoivan rasped while the nurse crawled onto the massive bed and worked the tubes in his withered body.
I stepped up to the edge of the bed, but was still a good ten feet away from him. Going off his squinting frown, it wasn’t nearly close enough.
Moving careful around such a delicately ancient man, I crawled onto the bed and knelt beside him. He pawed at my hip. I forced myself not to recoil in disgust.
“At least you’re a pretty thing.” He cupped my cheek with one withered hand. “But you’d best be useful, little cav, or I’ll have my rippers stitch this face onto someone who deserves it.”
“Vertale, why don’t you show her Yasette’s laboratory,” Zoivan said. “Let the girl see what we do with useless meat.”
“I don’t need that insolent Calico’s help taming a cadaver,” Vertale snarled, then flinched, clearly realizing he’d lost his temper around his magister.
Whoever this Yasette was, I was instantly intrigued. I couldn’t care less if Zoivan thought her laboratory would intimidate me; intimidation was an omnipresent feature of my life these days.
“But if you think it’s necessary…” Vertale said placatingly. “
Zoivan choked on phlegmy laugher. It took him a few seconds to hack his airway clean enough to speak. “Your wounded pride is adorable, my dear Arbiter. If the woman truly insulted you that much, just challenge her to a duel and be done with it.”
Vertale cleared his throat. “That really wouldn’t be seemly of me.” That sounded like an excuse. “I should check on her anyways. Heaven only knows we funnel enough fortunes into that catastrophe of a lab.”
Vertale bowed and left the Magister with his nurse. I scampered after him as fast as I could, but he still shoved me unnecessarily on our way out the door.
“Get some life back in your bones, Cav,” he hissed. “You should be grateful. You’re about to get introduced to our tower’s prodigal ‘Painted Witch.’” Vertale sneered in disgust.
If I had any pride, the needless shove would have been infuriating—instead, I had to bite my lip to hold in the grin: he was clearly being sarcastic, but the truth was I’d gladly meet anyone who unsettled him this much.