The Gift of Life

Chapter 2

II

Her second life was steel and fire, the shadows of an alley, a stolen knife clutched in her hand. It was whispers over food scavenged from the pockets of corpses, and the quiet of a city that reeked of two hundred thousand dead. Blue fire, and dead hearts beating again, and her own silence, thick as plaster in her chest as the world descended into madness.

She woke to find Meline kneeling beside her, surrounded by a blue glow. She didn't remember how she came to be lying on the floor, but dead bodies lay all around her, stacked near the walls, awaiting cremation.

She sat up, turning her arms over. The dark blotches left by the disease were gone. She let out a breath that felt too stale, as if she had been holding it for hours. Suddenly, she knew.

"You did this. How?"

"It doesn't matter." Meline looked off to the side, where another body lay facedown in a pool of congealing blood. "We've come to the end of it. Akiya has found the cure."

Aumeri followed Meline to the apothecary, a hope as fragile as a moth's wing fighting to rise in her chest above the dawning horror. But what they found was quick to shatter it.

Akiya too was dead.

Too far gone to cure himself, he had saved as many others as he could before he succumbed. They found the remaining healers gathered around his body where it lay on a bare stretch of floor. She saw his still hands, he who was always working, tending to his roses on their balcony when he was not mixing medicines, fingers trembling with the need to create. She saw his closed eyes and pained frown, he who'd had a smile for even the sickest patient or the shyest student.

She gave Meline a hard look. "Teach me how to do what you did."

*******

Crouching on top of the temple's outer wall, her ears ached as if straining to hear a familiar sound. Once, it had been almost impossible to escape the clamor of the city, but now there were only the shrieks of the seagulls that filled the plaza, fighting over strings of flesh.

Meline lifted her hand, pointing beyond the empty streets and shuttered windows, beyond the white walls to the sea. Three new ships sat docked in the port, their furled sails a deep charcoal gray. Black sails, forswearing allegiance to any land.

"Where did they come from?" Aumeri asked.

"It doesn't matter." Meline shrugged. "We were the empire's wealthiest city after the capital. Soon more will follow, from anywhere and everywhere."

"They'll spread the sickness."

Meline nodded. "They have to be stopped one way or another."

They chose Darzuuln to go with him, as he was the physically strongest of the survivors. Meline handed out the knives they had once used for surgeries, and at nightfall they went out into the city. In the streets, every breath felt like a shout. They kept close to the sides of the buildings as if the moonlight would burn them.

In an alley behind an inn, they waited for hours. Through the closed shutters, they listened to whispered plans of how to root out the last of the survivors, whether there was more treasure to be found in the Hall of Mazishanae, or in the Vashnii Palace.

When one of the brigands finally stepped outside, Meline froze a second too long.

"The dead!" the brigand called out in Imperial, his eyes wide as he made a gesture to ward off evil. "The dead have come for us!"

Another thief burst from the door, already drawing a long knife, and the first man quickly returned to his senses.

A tangle of limbs and knives, and it was all over.