if he’d frozen to death. Perhaps he had; she couldn’t see a wound. He lay on his side, and blood had settled dark and purple in one cheek and outstretched arm. His flesh was stiff as wax, colder than the air.
“What happened?” Asheris asked.
“Ghosts. The dead are hungry. They drained his life away. Does this happen here often?”
“No,” one of the guards said. A Sivahri man, face drained pasty and yellow. “We sing the dead on, to guide them to the twilight lands. We burn offerings and prayer-sticks, and in exchange the ancestors watch over us.”
“And no ancestors ever decide they want more?”
His throat bobbed. “It happens, but not often. I’ve seen the madness take a ghost, but an exorcism usually puts things right. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“This was more than one ghost.” She stood, moved farther into the village. She’d seen slaughter before, villages looted by bandits or savaged by demons, blood and bodies in the street, houses charred and smoking. All these buildings stood intact, neat-thatched and clean. No destruction, only death.
Not everyone had died as peacefully as the boy. She saw clawed faces, blood crusted beneath their nails. Wide-eyed, rictus-mouthed, hands raised to ward off blows.
Something moved in the shadows beneath a house and she started, reaching for her blade. Only a dog. The animal whined and barked, then bolted past her toward Asheris and the soldiers. One woman crouched, offering a hand. The dog whined again, but finally let her stroke his head.
Isyllt turned away from the soldiers. “Deilin Xian.”
The ghost appeared beside her, barely more substantial than the tattered fog. She snarled as she saw Isyllt. Then she looked around and her face slackened.
“Is this what you would have done to your great-granddaughter?”
“No,” the woman whispered. “Never this. The madness was on me, but I only wanted to feel again, to be flesh again.”
“Who did this?”
Pearlescent nostrils flared. “My kin, my compatriots. Those of us who fell fighting the Empire.”
Isyllt gestured to the corpses. “And this is so much better than the occupation?”
Deilin glared, then shook her head and looked away. “I don’t know.”
“Where are they now, your murderous kin?” The whole village reeked of ghosts, so strong she could hardly feel Deilin standing beside her.
Again the ghost sniffed the air. “Gone, mostly. But fresh corpses attract spirits.”
A soldier shouted, and Isyllt turned.
A corpse sat up.
She’d seen corpses stir before, as muscles stiffened or bloat swelled-this was nothing so innocent. A dead woman stood, moving with an eerie marionette grace. Her eyes gleamed like pearls in her death-bruised face. The dog growled and began to bark, rust-and-black ruff standing on end. Isyllt dismissed Deilin with a hasty word.
When the dead possessed the living, an exorcism might put things right. When ghosts or spirits possessed dead flesh, the result was not puppetry but a terrible melding. The result was demons.
A soldier fired and missed. The next man didn’t; the demon staggered but didn’t fall. The wound didn’t bleed.
“Do you have spell-silver?” Isyllt shouted. The answer became clear as the soldiers fired at more corpses, none of which stopped moving. She drew her knife, a bone-hilted kukri. Silver inlay traced the hilt and blade, wrapped the weapon in spells.
The nearest corpse twitched and lunged for her legs. The blade bit deep, jarring against bone. The demon shrieked as smoke curled from the wound. Her boot caught it in the face with a crunch. Isyllt yanked the knife free and swung for its neck. The demon screamed again; the next stroke caught its larynx and the cry became a gasp.
The third stroke opened its neck to the bone. Flesh crisped and blackened. Isyllt planted her boot on its head, forcing its face into the mud as she wedged the knife between vertebrae and sawed. She felt the spinal cord sever, both through the blade and in the rushing chill as the spirit left the flesh.
Gulping air, she staggered away from the mangled body. The corpse was harmless now, the spirit dissolved; demons only had one chance at life.
Another clawed for her, nails raking her outflung arm. She buried the knife in its gut and twisted. Nothing close to fatal, but it screamed as the silver burned. The stench of bowel filled the air as she tugged the blade free; ropes of blood clung to the metal, thick and sticky as jam. Someone else was screaming, high and unceasing.
“Fire!” she shouted at Asheris. “Fire will stop them!” The screams ended in a gurgle; pistol shots echoed.
She kicked the demon’s legs out from under it, wrestled it to the ground. Easy with the newly wrought, still clumsy and awkward. An old demon was nothing she ever wanted to meet again.
This was butcher’s work-when the corpse fell still she pushed herself up, wiping at the mud and blood splattered on her face. The air smelled of roasting flesh.
Half a dozen bodies smoldered on the ground, while another handful writhed and flamed and shrieked. The soldiers huddled back-to-back while Asheris set demon after demon alight.
What came after the butchery was worse.
One soldier was dead, another badly mauled. Isyllt eased the woman’s pain and checked the wounds as best she could. Corpse-bites always festered, but sometimes worse traces lingered. When she finished, the woman’s comrades carried her off for proper treatment and returned with a barrel of salt from the closest village.
One by one Isyllt and Asheris searched the houses for demons or survivors-of the latter they found a few: an infant in her cradle, a toddler hiding under his bed, a dog nursing a litter, two cats, and a caged bird. Whether the ghosts took pity on them or they were simply too small to be worth eating, Isyllt couldn’t say.
When all living things were out of a house, Isyllt circled the building with salt and Asheris burned it to the ground. He was one of the most skilled pyromancers she’d ever seen-fire answered him instantly, burned clean and fast, never a stray spark to threaten them. Even by the fourteenth house, when sweat ran down his face and strain washed his skin gray, the flames never faltered.
She salted the charred remains as well. The reek of death and witchery clung to everything, seeping into the soil. The crops had already spoiled from the chill. The village was as dead as its inhabitants; no one would rebuild here soon.
Xinai found the first ghost-marker late the next afternoon. Bones and beads woven around a wooden frame, dangling from a branch. A ward and a warning-it marked cursed land, haunted by spirits and the hungry dead. Even with Shaiyung beside her, Xinai had no desire to meet another gangshi, or any other incorporeal predator. They climbed higher into the foothills to avoid it, though that left them edging beside the mountain’s wards as well.
They were perhaps a third of the way around the mountain; she’d never ventured so far northeast before, and nothing was familiar. Riuh only shook his head when she questioned him, and soon they were both cursing under their breath as they stumbled through the brush and over craggy hills. Xinai snarled at Riuh nearly as often as he spoke, only to apologize a few minutes later. After an hour of this he gave up talking, and Xinai cursed herself for not remembering the potion that put off her courses.
The mountain towered over them, blocking the sky. Once or twice when they broke through the tree line, she smelled the smoke and sulfur stench of the burning cauldron. The jungle spread out all around them, dipping and swelling over the hills, rising to meet the eastern mountains. Shadows floated across the canopy as clouds drifted east, where they thickened and shed their rain.
As dusk came on, Xinai was cursing in earnest. They’d passed three more ghost-wards, a greater expanse of unclean jungle than she’d ever seen before. Twilight chased purple shadows across the hills and the light was nearly gone. And as they circled east, the diamond’s pulse began to fade.
Finally she stubbed her toe once too often and sat with a snarl, flinging a stone down the slope. Riuh turned back, eyeing her so warily she wanted to throw rocks at him too.
“If you want to stop, we should go down again.” He gestured toward the shadow of the woods below.
“So the ghosts can kill us and the kueh peck our guts out? Not that it matters, when we’re going the wrong bloody way!”
Riuh’s eyes narrowed, but Xinai waved him silent. Her jaw slackened as a thought kindled. She pushed herself up, scrubbed sweat off her face, and clambered down the rock-strewn slope in the direction they’d
