“Some can fly. Others lumber. This one is a viper. Its greatest weapon is speed. They propel themselves rapidly across the ground, as lizards do, and can move in near silence.”
As he spoke, Corien walked slowly through the room, long black coat trailing after him. He had bathed after their night together, and the dark waves of his hair gleamed in the laboratory’s torchlight.
And Rielle listened as he spoke. She really, truly did.
But she also found those ebony locks of his difficult to look away from—mostly because she remembered how silken they had felt against her thighs the night before.
“When your saints created the Gate,” Corien was saying, “the act of tearing open the fabric of the Deep sent ripples of chaos through the entire realm. An immeasurable vastness forever altered by the crime of our imprisonment.” His voice darkened. “The making of the Gate rent apart countless seams, most too insignificant to consider. One of them, however, opened into the world from which these creatures originate. The crack is small, but it exists, and it is ever-widening. The cruciata are cunning, and the strongest of them, the luckiest, are finding ways to escape their own world and enter the Deep. It has taken them centuries. Even fewer of them have managed to pass through the Deep, ram their way through the Gate, and come here. But more will come. It is only a matter of time.”
Rielle’s mind struggled to accept the idea that there were other worlds beyond their own, beyond even the Deep. Countless others, Corien surmised, all connected by the immensity of the empirium.
Other worlds. Yet another piece of information Ludivine had neglected to share with her.
Ludivine. Ludivine. The more often she said the name to herself, the less it hurt to remember it. Someday, she would imagine Ludivine’s face and feel nothing at all.
Someday. But not yet.
“But the Deep stripped your bodies from you,” Rielle pointed out, trying to focus. “When the cruciata enter the Deep, does the same not happen to them?”
Corien’s expression was grim. “No. They seem to be immune to such indignities.”
“Perhaps the empirium saw fit to punish the angels for beginning the war against humans,” Rielle offered blithely. Antagonizing him cleared her mind. She could not resist it. “Perhaps the cruciata have committed no such offense.”
Corien shot her a dangerous look. “Perhaps.”
“I was told about these cruciata before,” she said, moving past him. “I heard they originated from the Deep itself.”
“Who told you this?”
“Jodoc Indarien. Speaker of the Obex in the Sunderlands. He shot Ludivine with an arrow constructed of a strange metal. He called it a blightblade.”
Corien stiffened, reading her memory. “He told you only what he knew, which was incomplete.”
“Jodoc also said that a cruciata’s blood is deadly to angels. Is this accurate?”
“Frustratingly, yes.” Corien glanced up at the suspended beast. A line of neat black stitches bisected its belly. “This viper crawled through the Gate some years ago and—clever thing—snuck aboard a trade vessel that had come to the Sunderlands with supplies for the Obex. I don’t think the Obex even knew it had broken through. Many angels died during its capture and during the journey here. It’s something about the blood. We had to bleed it dry before it was safe to dissect. Even the fumes can be toxic.”
“To you,” said Rielle. “Not to humans.” She blinked guilelessly at him. “So Jodoc said.”
Corien’s mouth thinned. “On that point, he was correct. My hunters, once exposed to the beast’s blood, were pushed from the human bodies they inhabited and completely lost cohesion. Thankfully, others took their places, and I’m confident we’ll eventually engineer ways to protect ourselves from their toxins, should we encounter more cruciata in the future.”
The suggestion in his voice killed her amusement. She looked straight at him. “You mean if I open the Gate.”
He gave her a tight smile. Her use of the word if had not escaped him. “I do.”
She shivered at the thought. The empirium rippled through her, a dark tremor. Was it afraid or eager? She searched her own heart for the answer but found none.
“I have many loyal to me in the Deep,” Corien went on. “Thanks to you, my dear, and your failed efforts to repair the Gate, I can now communicate with them. They tell me the vast majority of cruciata remain in their own world, which we have named Hosterah. If you open the Gate, the risk of a cruciata invasion is slim. If you’d like, you can reseal