My second life started three days after the end of my first, and it started pickled in a vat of cadaver jelly. The viscous ooze clogged my sinuses and filled every hollow of my lungs. It slithered through my intestines, suckled my skin, smeared under my fingernails.
Something brushed against my hip. Skin. The back of a hand. A body, drifting through the jelly. I recoiled in a panic, slithering into another limp corpse as I did so. There was nowhere to go. A dark, dark as dark can go, with nothing but bodies and warm brass walls to give definition to the world. I could hardly tell which way was up.
I wasn’t breathing. The instant I realized it, a primal instinct wrestled control, and I pounded on what I assumed was the ceiling. The dull thumps echoed lazily through the vat. The cadaver jelly gave so much resistance that I couldn’t get the leverage to slam any harder.
After minutes with my lungs clogged full of jelly, I still wasn’t dead. The panic steadily unspooled, replaced by bewilderment.
I was still floating with the feeling when someone opened the vat. Light pierced in from my right. I’d been completely wrong about which direction was up. Someone spoke, but I couldn’t make out more than a muffled mess through the jelly. Limp shadows were dragged between me and the light—whoever had opened the vat was picking through the bodies.
Maybe they were looking for me, and maybe they weren’t. All that mattered was that I had an opening to get out. I set my feet against the brass wall, and pushed off, slithering through the jelly, bursting out into the blinding light of open air.
Jelly coated my skin. Someone yelled. Scrabbling blind, I wrenched myself over the lip of the vat. A hand skated over the slick skin of my shoulder, slipping as it tried to grab me. Overbalanced with a push off another corpse, I flopped out, and slammed to the ground in a heap, bashing my shoulder and hip as I crumpled to the stones.
More words. I couldn’t hear them over the jelly clogging my ears. My lungs were clogged full of the stuff. Now that I was out in the air, that primal instinct triggered yet again, and I vomited and hacked myself clean, heaving lungfuls of jelly out onto the stones.
“What is that one doing out?” a man demanded. “The gladiator, you damned fool! Does that doll look like she’s fit for the fighting pits?”
I hadn’t had a chance to work through what was happening when a shadows came for me. I scrabbled back on my ass, shoving blindly against the stones. “Stay back!” I blubbered around a mouthful of jelly.
“What was that? Did it just say something? How is it even animated?”
I scraped the jelly from my eyes and flung it onto the stones. The jelly was the color of bloody urine, and it clung in gelatinous clumps. I recognized the stones underneath me, a tired, pale gray, like ash. I must have been in a back room of the mortuary, only this one was cavernous, filled with colossal bronze vats, the sort you’d find in a distillery. I’d been in a smaller vat, thank Heaven; if I’d flopped free from the top of one of the towering main vats, I would have broken bones.
“We work in the shadow of a tower—anything could have animated her.”
The embalmer. He was on the other side of the massive room, near the door, threading an emerald tube through a hole in a steel coffin. Some abomination moaned within.
A servitor stood at the ready to push the coffin on a wheeled table. It was far from the only one. The cheap mummified undead were everywhere. They hauled sacks of salt, scrubbed the floors, and worked the machines with simple, automatized movements.
“Just get her back in the vat, and get me the man I need,” the embalmer said. “We have an Arbiter waiting in the front office for his purchases. We don’t have time for this. But be careful with her; remember she’s worth a fortune.”
The man coming for me was one of the embalmer’s assistants, a mousy man with a vicious scar that I remembered flashes of from my embalming. He was coming at me with a pole that had a wire hoop at the end, the sort of thing you’d use on a rabid animal.
I scrambled up to my feet, slipping twice. There was something wrong with my muscles and joints. I slid around a table, putting something between me and the man who wanted to put me back in that vat of corpses. I left smears of cadaver jelly on the steel.
“Don’t come any closer,” I said. Heaven only knew what I’d do if he did. I was naked, and I’d never been in a fight in my life.
The mousy assistant stopped, pole dangling, and licked his lips. “Uh…sir? We might have a problem.”
“Are you telling me you can’t handle a single rogue husk? What’s the point of having you if you’re such a disaster!”
“I don’t think she’s a husk.”
The embalmer finally looked up at me. His puffy, expressionless face went utterly still. “Get her back in the vat. Now.”
I searched for anything to use as a weapon. A piece of copper piping laying against one of the vats was was the closest I could find. It would do. I didn’t reach for it yet, but I was ready to dive at it the second anyone took another step towards me.
“I am not going back in there,” I said.
“Sir, is she a revenant?” the mousy assistant asked.
The embalmer hissed for silence, and peeked through a doorway leading somewhere I couldn’t see. He didn’t want someone to hear this. The Arbiter, waiting to pick up his purchases?
Satisfied with whatever he’d seen, the embalmer glared at his assistant, and jabbed a finger at me. “I’m not paying you to think. Get her back in the tank.” He snapped at a group of servitors hauling salt. “You three! Help him.”
I snatched the copper pipe and bolted between the vats, searching out some other exit to this room. The assistant was on my heels when I found a window behind a metal staircase. I hit the wall in a slippery rush, and fought the clasp, trying to shove the window open before they reached me.
A loop of wire fell around my face. I just managed to duck out of it before he tugged it back, squeezing out a thick clump of cadaver jelly as I pulled my hair free. I had to writhe away from the window to get away from him.
“Grab her if she rushes you, but don’t go any closer to her until I take her down to the ground,” the assistant said. Commanding the servitors.
“Let’s just talk!” I begged, backing up into the corner, hemmed in by servitors, with the assistant coming on with the loop pole, and the embalmer preparing a terrifying syringe. If that went into me, I was sure that would be the end.
I wasn’t ready to die, not again. Not before I’d even had time to understand what was happening.
“Best you just let this happen, we don’t want to break anything,” the mousy assistant said, and lunged at me with the pole.
I swatted it away with my pipe, but got the pipe caught on the loop and ripped out of my hand for my effort. No no no. I recoiled back, and hit the wall, frantic. I didn’t stand a chance. Useless as a trapped animal. No wonder they’d embalmed me alive; I wasn’t good for anything, and there wasn’t any way I was getting out of this alone.
But I didn’t have to.
There must have been some reason the embalmer didn’t want the Arbiter to find me up and walking about. Rolling dice with the unknown was better than going back in the vat, so I sucked in a lungful of air, screamed as loud as I could, “ARBITER!”
“Shut her up!” The embalmer stormed over with the syringe in hand. “And lasso her already!”
I tried to keep it off me, but it went around my neck and one hand, and tugged me off balance. I hit the stones hard with my knees and one hand, twisting muscles as I fought to writhe free. This was clearly a tool for mindless husks, because I was able to writhe free easily—but by then, the husks were on me, piling on, pinning me face down to the cold stones. I screamed until the assistant shoved a rag into my mouth. It was soaked in antiseptic and salt water.
“Infernal timing you’ve got,” the embalmer said as he knelt down groaning beside me. I tried to writhe away from him as he brushed my hair away to reveal my neck, but with three servitors holding me down, I wasn’t able to do more than wriggle in place. With a thumb, he searched my neck for my jugular, and lined up the syringe.
“Well, this certainly looks exciting,” a man said from the doorway. The Arbiter. Going off the way the embalmer slumped in defeat, it had to be. I’d staved off the end, at least for another few moments.
“You didn’t tell me you had a revenant—and a spontaneous animate, if my intuition is correct,” the Arbiter said. “Put her on the Tower’s tab; Magister Zoivan is always hunting down unique cases.”
“My lord Arbiter, forgive me, but this cadaver is not mine to sell.”
“Am I hallucinating?” the Arbiter asked. “As that is the only reasonable justification for what I just heard come out of your mouth. You have two choices. Either put her cost on the tab or don’t; it’s not your choice if she comes with me.”
“I…” the embalmer trailed off, then cleared his throat and bowed to the Arbiter. “Of course, lord Arbiter. I will record it in my ledgers.”
The Arbiter lazily waved a hand at the embalmer’s three servitors, like gathering a group of dangling strings, curled his long fingers, and pulled them taught. Each servitor twitched violently. Simple as that, they were his. “Bring me the girl.” He ordered, and they hauled me up to my feet.
As I was hauled past him, the embalmer whispered to me,“You really dug your own grave with that idiocy. You should have just gotten back in the vat.”
“Anywhere’s better than here,” I said.
The embalmer just laughed at me, and smiled that puffy, frozen smile full of stolen teeth.
***
The Arbiter was a lean, severe man with coppery skin, bushy ash gray hair, and eyes the color of desolate sand. His fur lined emerald suit was finer than anything I’d ever seen—but the fur inner lining still had the head attached.
This man had a taxidermied stag’s head on his chest, with the antlers bending back to rest over his shoulders. It was grotesque, but clearly I was reaching my limit of horror, because what really got to me was the weight. I couldn’t imagine someone choosing to carry something that heavy around on their chest.
The Arbiter didn’t give me more than a second to react to his disgustingly bizarre fashion accessory. He was frighteningly impatient, forcing me to stumble out into the street after having me hosed down at a water pump in the embalmer’s shop. I was still half-naked, cinching myself into a khaki wrap-dress. At least I’d buckled on the shoes first, because I’d never seen a street that wasn’t filthy.
The embalmer’s door let out into Port Sadrine’s town square. I hadn’t had the chance to take the town in as I was getting wheeled in, so I wasn’t braced for the hurricane of sensation. Stalls crammed themselves into the spaces between buildings.
Some sold food, crustaceans so over-spiced the air scalded my nose with horseradish and cinnamon. They sold cuts of dire shrimp the size of dogs, and torn chunks out of a blue-grizzle crab that could have lifted a wagon.
At least a quarter of the stalls were alchemists selling concoctions and serums: some for the living; most clearly for the dead. One whole section of the square was filled with six foot tall jars with corpses pickled in maple vinegar. The corpses weren’t all human.
The undead were everywhere. Mummified servitors assisted at nearly every stall, helped carry purchases, and cleaned the grounds. The streets were immaculate. I’d never seen anything like it.
Vellum knights patrolled in identical cuirasses, their ashen skin smooth as paper, their veins sharp lines, black as ink. The only vellum knights I’d seen before coming here had been Marvale’s pair on his ship. And Port Sadrine used them as town guards? How wealthy was this place? The people certainly wore finer clothes than I’d ever seen.
But juxtaposed against everyone’s ornate clothes, however were more dead animals. It was a trend? What was wrong with this place?
Almost everyone wore something. Birds on hats seemed the most popular, but I saw a dead snake coiled around a child’s chest, and a dandyish young man with dead rats encircling the cuff of his stylish green suit.
The Arbiter snapped in my face for my attention. “Try to run away, and I’ll hunt you down, cut off your limbs, and bury you alive. You won’t die; you won’t ever die. It’ll be a terrible existence.”
Straight to the point with this one. “I won’t run, Arbiter,” I said. I’d learned my lesson with running.
He nodded simply. “I am Vertale, Magister Zoivan’s Arbiter. Do you remember your name, revenant?”
Of course. I opened my mouth to say it, and found nothing but a hollow void.
It took a few terrifying seconds of scrounging about my mind until I caught hold of it. “Aveline.”
Vertale grunted. “Good. You might just hold onto sanity after all.”
He walked fast enough it was a challenge to keep up with him. The more I walked, the more certain I became that there was something severely wrong with my muscles and joints. Everything was loose and over lubricated. My skin was frighteningly elastic, and was a bloodless, pure white that was utterly inhuman. Nothing living could be this pale; even my veins were white. I really am a walking corpse.
I was so focused on keeping myself upright that I didn’t notice the cadaver jars until we were strolling past them. When I looked up from my feet to check I hadn’t fallen behind Vertale, I was right there, looking directly at my husband’s corpse.
Dorien floated naked in the jar, pickled in maple vinegar. They’d shoved him in with another young man, like they were indistinguishable. Their limbs were a tangle.
The last few weeks had worn me down so much that I didn’t even scream. I just went still, and stared.
“Sorry, Doll.” A stringy corpse peddler jolted me out of my trance when he knocked on a wooden sign dangling from a knob on Dorien’s jar. Vel Kesse. “Report to your master that I already sold this batch to one of the Towers, but I have others if they sent you looking for a strong lad.”
“What…” I whispered. The sound hardly reached my ears. I cleared my throat, and tried again. “What are they going to do with him?”
The peddler paled and bowed to me. “Forgive me, Lord, I wasn’t aware I was speaking to a vessel.”
I had no idea what a vessel was, but I knew that his deference was misplaced.
“She’s not a vessel,” Vertale said. “She’s a revenant.”
I jolted at the sound of his voice. I had completely forgotten him. Bracing myself for a punishment, I was surprised to find him watching me from a few paces ahead, looking vaguely interested.
“You remember this one?” Vertale pointed at my husband’s floating corpse.
“He’s my husband.”
Vertale grunted. “Interesting.” He checked a stopwatch in his robes. “Well, come along. We’ve wasted enough time already.”
I couldn’t just leave Dorien behind. “Wait!” I bolted after Vertale. “Can’t we—”
“I’m not buying you a bauble, girl.”
“He’s my husband, please, there has to be—”
“Enough.” He used the word like a lash, and I cringed back.
Don’t press, Aveline. But I had to know. “What will they do with him?”
Surprisingly, he answered. “I’d make a vellum knight out of him, but Heaven only knows with Vel Kesse. Magister Heshara runs that tower, and she can be… eccentric. She tore her veil to ribbons. If she weren’t so intermittently useful, we’d all have killed her long ago.” He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “And if I have to tell you to keep up again, I’m putting a collar on you and handing the chain to a vellum. It wouldn’t be so tolerant as me.”
That was more like the reaction I’d expected. At least having a father like mine had prepared me for dealing with tyrannical men.
“Forgive me, Arbiter. It won’t happen again.” I stole one last glance back at Dorien, floating in the jar, and felt like a traitor for walking away.
Not forever. I promised myself. It was the only way I could keep walking away from him. He was only dead because of me. If I hadn’t come crying to him for help when I found out about my betrothal, none of this would have happened. He’d have lived a full life. I wasn’t going to let his body get used by some mad woman, not forever. I was going to fix this, no matter what it took.
But I couldn’t fix anything if I was dead. So I hardened my unbeating heart and abandoned my husband’s body.