feathered circle. Corien had told her he had engraved it himself when the fortress was first built. No one had stood within it until now. Until her.
It was an altar meant for resurrection.
At Rielle’s feet lay a beautiful young man from a rural province of western Kirvaya. He had been stripped naked and trembled on the cold floor. His skin was pale and smooth, his limbs long and healthy. The torchlight flickering around the circle painted him gold. Chosen for his beauty and strength, plucked from his bed by an eager angelic mind, even laid out on the floor like a slab of meat he was exquisite. His name was Tamarkin.
Corien, standing at Rielle’s side with his hands clasped behind his back, held the man fast, waiting.
With her eyes, Rielle traced the lines of Tamarkin’s body—every muscle, every sinew, every bone. She saw beneath his skin to his pulsing organs, his veins rich with blood. At his foundation, a sea of gold crashed and ebbed, forming everything that he was. Brightest in his mind and at his heart, illuminating the twin webs of his lungs.
She could have looked at him for hours, watching in fascination the pulses of light and energy that were his frantic thoughts, his rapid heartbeat. Only she could see these things, these deep inner workings of body and blood; not even the angels were witness to them.
“Are you ready, my love?” asked Corien gently.
Dreamily, she said, “Almost.” She knelt at Tamarkin’s side, ran her fingers along the dips of his pelvis, the ridges of his ribs. His skin twitched at her touch. In Corien’s grip, mute and terrified, his eyes were wild. He watched her fingers as if fearing claws.
Around them, the chamber pulsed. Tricks of light teemed in the air, but there was a heft to them, and their intelligence pricked at Rielle’s mind, deferent but greedy. The air bent to make room for them.
Angels, waiting in throngs. Their energy was that of a herd of beasts in their pen, muscles trembling, flanks sweating.
One of them hovered over Rielle’s head. His name was Sarakael, selected on a whim by Corien as the first to be resurrected. Rielle could sense Sarakael’s fervor, how he longed to fall before her in ardent worship.
But she hardly noticed him. Though she could sense every watching angel—how their minds slipped through the air, how their whispers rustled and hissed—her attention was entirely on the man lying before her.
She wondered if she should be nervous, but she was not. The chills traveling along her spine were like fingers tapping her awake.
Corien stepped closer. Now, Rielle?
She nodded. Now.
At once, Corien killed the man. An easy shattering of his mind, and without the mind, all else would fade. There would be agony, he had told her, for an instant, and then a nothingness, a slip into the long dark of death. Rielle watched the light leave Tamarkin’s lovely blue eyes.
His empty body waited for her to begin.
The how of it was easy, but she suspected the doing would not be. She had thought it all out. As Corien slept, she had sat in the fur-draped chair by the windows and stared out over the vast ice, designing her method.
And now, she followed her own instructions. Her breath trembled, her body alive with a surging heat that knocked like fists at a door. She reached out with her power and commanded the angel Sarakael to enter the body, then waited while his faint shadow-self sank through every orifice—the slightly open mouth, the nostrils, the ears. She placed her hands around the skull, for this was the most important anchor. Living mind to dead brain. Bright eyes to dull ones.
The trick, she thought, was to work while the empirium was still bright inside the corpse. Tamarkin’s body was warm, and seas of gold still pulsed inside him, but soon they would thin. The more vital the empirium, the stronger the binding would be.
So she began to knit.
She used her hands, because she found the physicality a useful focus and because she wanted to look impressive and unknowable. As she knelt on the ground beside this dead man, rebuilding him into something new and glorious with her deft fingers alone, the angels would look upon her and marvel. The bond would be stronger than if Sarakael had simply possessed the living body. She would stitch them, mind to body, fusing the two together so completely that they would become a single being, stronger than either human