Chapter 16: The Power of Blood

“You're proposing that I care for someone who is not a witch and therefore cannot subsist off of blood for the weeks it will take the bones in his leg heal,” Kasha said, “and all the while keep him hidden from the forces of the kingdom which I am sworn to protect from the wrath of the dead because he is a fugitive from justice?”

“His story is that he was framed,” Lilith said, “that Thom is the conspirator and he's the one who discovered his secret, not the other way around.”

“And you believe him?” Kasha asked.

“Honestly, I don't care,” Lilith said, “I wanted an explanation, I got one, I don't know if he's telling the truth or not.” This was a bald-faced lie. Paulus had explained to her on the way that the real purpose of the mission was to sound out the Green Hills County for sympathy to the prince over the king. Unfortunately for Paulus, it turned out that Thom didn't take kindly to people even implying a lack of support for the king. Paulus maintained that legally speaking, he'd done nothing wrong that Thom could prove. Unfortunately if Thom had the ear of the Duke as thoroughly as he said he did, it wouldn't really matter. Duke Barradin was powerful enough to order executions of anyone he liked, and only the defense of someone similarly powerful would save him. The prince wasn't going to speak up for someone with as little influence as Paulus.

“Why do you care so little?” Kasha asked, “did you sign up to be a grave watcher for the fame and fortune?”

“Well, compared to cleaning bloodstains out of the Abbey's infirmary wing, the grave watcher lifestyle is pretty glamorous,” Lilith said.

“And that's it?” Kasha asked.

“No,” Lilith said, “I think the dead deserve better than what they're getting. A lot of them were good people. Did everything right. Some of them never got what they deserved for it, and they're supposed to. That was the point of the catacomb, wasn't it? The Marutuk rewarded their followers, and Thorn would too. But they never really got it since the Sect Wars started and we were never able to win. If I can fix that for even one ghost, that'll be worth it.”

Kasha scrutinized Lilith. “Interesting,” she said.

“Yes, that sounds kind of like a prepared speech," Lilith said, "it's not like I never thought about this before. Much fun as this interrogation is,” Lilith said, “aren't we a little off-track? Are you turning Paulus in or not?”

“What do you want me to do with him?” Kasha asked.

Lilith was quiet a moment. “I don't know or care about his politics,” she said, “but he's the reason I'm a grave watcher. I don't want him to end up tortured to death in some big public spectacle. I don't want to see his head on a spike. For whatever my opinion is worth, I think Paulus deserves to live.”

"Then I'll keep him alive," Kasha said with a sigh, "this time. Don't expect me to make a habit of harboring fugitives for you, though."

“Thank you,” Lilith said.

“Of course,” Kasha said as she walked away, “it helps that if I keep him alive I can suck at least a meal a day out of him even if he can't restock.”

Lilith licked her lips, thinking of the pair of fang scars on her own wrist. It was irritating having to eat for two, but she didn't blame them for it. Nothing tasted better than human blood.

Despite the gargoyle infestation, the Old Shrines were still Kasha's home. Kasha had left to go wait for the Duke and summon him for reinforcements, so Lilith spent the first few days lugging around a massive tome in which was written the rites for all those honored at the shrines. There were no bones down here, only thousands upon thousands of urns. At each shrine, Lilith would simply list off all of the dozens of names honored there, and light a candle for each of them, and then honor some great event that had occurred to the entire group, before reading the specific rite of a half-dozen or so specific individuals, according to a certain schedule. With so many laid to rest here, it was impossible to honor more than a tiny fraction of them. And the air was thick with wisps and spirits. Fortunately they clustered around their shrines and were polite enough to clear the way to the altar when Lilith entered, otherwise she would be unable to see through the haze of ethereal bodies. When Paulus commented on how empty and lonely the catacombs were, Lilith actually laughed. Empty, no. Lonely, perhaps. She was alone in the crowd, being the only living person there.

Munne had told her via ghost messenger to stay with Kasha until Kasha was satisfied that the latest crisis the northern section of the catacombs had been averted, unless Munne sent specific instruction to the contrary. Kasha, however, had not returned for four days. Paulus' recovery was painfully slow. Even after four days he was still bedridden, and for the first three days Lilith worried what might happen if a gargoyle should stumble across him. Lilith bumped into one at least once an hour since she'd arrived. Having arrived without minions, and having nothing but urns to work with, Lilith had to kill them with her staff and knife early on, but while their rocky hide required incredible effort to split open, they made for incredible minions once properly torn up and stitched back together. War horrors made from gargoyles were far more resilient than the normal kind, and Lilith had hardly had to replace any since she arrived despite the incessant battles.

The only genuinely terrifying fights were when a pack of gargoyles ambushed her. Often enough, the sight of one gargoyle meant others would be nearby. When she saw the one, Lilith would draw her pack of minions around herself, forming a barrier on all sides between herself and whatever other gargoyles may be lurking in the darkness. The first time one had dropped on her from above, she had nearly panicked, but fortunately their durability did not grant them much strength, and she was able to escape its grasp and direct her minions to stab it to death before it managed to do much more than smack her around a bit. Its dull claws had little luck in piercing her armor, fortunately.

Lilith's concerns for Paulus' safety proved to be unfounded, however. Whenever she inquired, Paulus insisted he would be fine if he were attacked. One day, Lilith came back to the shrine that Kasha had made her home in (it was falling into disrepair, and the urns had been relocated to better maintained shrines) to find the smoking husk of a gargoyle in one corner. The charred remains were barely recognizable. There wasn't even enough left to make a minion out of. “Told you I'd be fine,” Paulus said. Lilith hadn't even known the gargoyles had enough dark magic in their system to be vulnerable to smites. Paulus said he didn't either, until he met one. Monks could smell dark magic the way witches could see ghosts.

It was the fifth day when Kasha came back, and not alone. Another monk followed her, along with a squad of eight armed guardsmen. Kasha led them across the vast underground chamber towards the shrine where Lilith and Paulus lived. Lilith grabbed her helmet and put it on before leaving to meet them, four war horrors with the stony flesh and reverse-joint legs of gargoyles marching behind her. Here in the catacombs she did not wear the mask as often as up above, but she didn't want anyone seeing the brand behind her ear. “Here to help flush out the cultists?” Lilith asked Kasha, nodding her head towards the guards.

"They are," Kasha said, "and they'd like to be back on the surface before nightfall. Are you ready to move out with them?"

"I am," Lilith said. Even if she wasn't, Paulus was in the shrine, and every second these guardsmen were down here was a second that he might be discovered.

"Good," Kasha said, "everyone follow me! The Mausoleum isn't far."

Lilith walked just behind Kasha. Her minions mingled with Kasha's ahead, forming a massive shield over a dozen strong. Overhead, two eight-legged catacomb prowler minions crawled across the ceiling. The guardsmen took up the flanks, and Grazden walked in the middle, muttering under his breath to maintain various protective enchantments. The gargoyles gave them a wide berth. “Don't drink the blood of the cultists,” Kasha said, “they've stolen one of my books of blood magic, and if they've learned its secrets they can turn their blood to acid. It'd kill you.” Lilith nodded her understanding.

At the far end of the massive chamber that contained the Old Shrine was the Crusades Corridor. It ran for half a mile to the Crusaders' Mausoleum, lined with thousands of the dead. They gathered in droves to watch the small army marching through, their armor archaic. Hundreds of them gathered to block their passage forward, an ethereal legion whose misty forms stretched as far as Lilith could see, given her suboptimal vantage point. Lilith could see the guardsmen shrinking back from the sides of the corridors where the ghostly legion stood, even though the guards could not see the ghosts.

“Crusaders of ages past!” Kasha announced when the war party entered the corridor, “centuries ago you gave your lives to tame the eastern frontier and subjugate those who worshiped small gods and uncivilized spirits, and here were you buried, within the great afterlife of Thorn! And yet, for weeks, your rites have been disturbed by the cult of Grenth worshipers who defile your final resting place. We, your descendants in Ascalon above, have come to correct this injustice, and restore to you the honor you earned with your deaths!”

For several seconds, nothing happened. The ghosts stared, and Kasha stared back. Then the ghost at their head, a high-ranking officer of some sort, nodded his head and stepped aside. The ghostly sea parted. The war party moved forward again.

The ghosts of the mausoleum were in a sorrier state. Each of them seemed to Lilith to be an officer of some kind. Their armor was a primitive sort of plate, beautifully embellished despite the centuries of decay, and each of them carried a shield with the sigil of a house on it. Lilith could recognize most of them. In fact, she could recognize one as a de Magi. But despite the splendor of their armor, the ghosts stared, drifted about, said nothing as the war party passed through. The Grenth cult must've done something to them to prevent them from harassing them through the night.

The Mausoleum's door was barred shut, but the massive facade of the underground structure had begun to crumble. Kasha directed her prowlers inside. They scraped, fumbled a moment, and then the bar shifted, lifted, was cast aside, and the doors pulled open from within. Three dozen war horrors rushed out to confront them immediately.

Kasha and Lilith's own horrors braced themselves for the impact of the charge, shielding the rest of the war party from the initial attack. The enemy horrors' blades found themselves turned aside by the protective spells of Grazden, while the guardsmen swung around from both sides, shouting battle cries and hacking into the flanks of the minion army.

“Heartbeats,” Lilith said to herself, kneeling down to make herself a smaller target and feeling for anything living within the Mausoleum, “the cultists are alive, they've got to have heartbeats, no matter how much they've poisoned their blood.” Though they were distant and faint, it wasn't too difficult to pinpoint those beating hearts. They were slower than the adrenaline-fueled pumping of the guardsmen, slower than the furious thumping in her own chest as the battle raged only five feet away, and they were distant, a solid three hundred feet away, on the other side of the Mausoleum. Six of them.

Lilith pulled off her helmet and opened her mouth. The swarm welled up inside her and burst forth from her orifices as usual. Less usual was the primal scream from her throat. She sucked in a deep breath and replaced her helmet as the swarm flew out across the Mausoleum towards the cultists. She just hoped they weren't wearing much armor. It would take the plague locusts half their lifespan just to reach them at this distance.

The minion army was thinning in front of them on both sides. In the chaos of battle, the guardsmen could hardly tell friendly minions from foe, with the exception of Kasha's prowlers, which had been smashed and hacked to pieces within seconds of the battle's start. They were nimble, not durable. Only one of Lilith's own minions had survived the fray. “Come on,” she said, “just once, let a single war horror pull through the battle.”

Her minion was hacking away at the chest of what she hoped was an enemy minion and not Kasha's, but the guardsmen were charging ahead now, towards the cultists in the back of the Mausoleum. What enemy minions remained chased after them, their fortunately more concerned with their own defense than with picking off fragile enemy casters while they had the chance. Kasha raced after them, slitting her wrists to fuel her blood magic. Names aside, Lilith noted while dashing into the Mausoleum to take cover behind a pillar, Kasha's blood was still red.

Lilith counted the five cultist heartbeats as they quickened, spasmed, and then ceased, one by one. The pounding in her own chest slowly stilled. Lilith poked her head around the corner to see if there were any remnant horrors. Without their masters guiding them, they would kill any living thing they could see, and the guardsmen smashed away at a pair of horrors still walking. Grazden knelt by wounded guardsmen at the entrance to the Mausoleum, his hands glowing with healing light as he sealed up their injuries.

“Well,” Lilith said, approaching Kasha, who was rounding up her own remaining minions, “I guess it's a good thing these guys showed up to do my job for me. I don't know what else Munne might have been expecting.”

“You sell yourself short,” Kasha said, “your swarm killed one of the cultists at the battle's start. A fair chunk of the enemy horrors began attacking friend and foe alike. We would have managed without you, but the battle would've been that much bloodier.”

“Oh,” Lilith said, “I guess I didn't notice in the fray.”

“Don't notice, know,” Kasha said, “learn to know by instinct the shape of the battle and your place in it. Who needs reinforcing, where the enemy is weak and where they are strong, when the battle is going poorly and it is time to retreat and regroup rather than waste more lives on a meatgrinder. You are a minion master, a commander. You don't have time to think or notice, and you can't afford to fight blind. Don't notice. Be aware. All the time.” She took a small hatchet and hacked off the lock on a cheap wooden chest. It looked out of place in the Mausoleum, probably something the cult had brought with them, along with the bedrolls and other litter that came from the crypt having been lived in for a month.

"Okay, but, how can I know things without first noticing them?" Lilith asked.

"Awareness will come with practice and experience," Kasha said, opening the chest, "focus on knowing the tide of battle and in time it will become second nature. You aren't ready to fight on your own until it is."

"Alright," Lilith said.

Kasha removed a leatherbound book and handed it to Lilith. It had no title, but opening it up revealed that the author was Kasha herself. "The book I wrote on blood magic," Kasha explained, "I want you to borrow it."

“Oh,” Lilith said, smiling as she leafed through the pages. The book was only about two-thirds full, every page crammed with Kasha's tiny but neat handwriting, along with diagrams, including what looked like a massive index of witch glyphs. Lilith didn't think she recognized even half of them. “Thank you.”

“You can only have it under a few conditions, however,” Kasha said, “first of all, you never take it out of the chapel. I don't care if your favorite reading spot is ten feet outside it, this book is my life's work and you don't take it anywhere that it could get damaged or lost. It stays in the chapel, and if something unfortunate happens to you, Munne will see that it gets back to me. For the same reason, it's never to so much as share a room with any kind of food or drink.”

“Okay,” Lilith said, “there's plenty of spare rooms in the chapel where I can keep it safe. Anything else?”

“Yes,” Kasha said, “the next time you consider giving shelter to a fugitive just so you can weasel an explanation out of him, don't.”

“I'm sorry, but what does that have to do with-” Lilith started, but Kasha cut her off.

“If I were your teacher I would simply command you not to do something that stupid again,” Kasha said, “but since I'm not, I'm offering you a trade instead. Every secret of blood magic known to the kingdom of Ascalon, and in exchange all you have to do is not jeopardize your entire career as a grave watcher. With our numbers as thin as they are and the training process as dangerous as it is, the very last thing we need is a promising apprentice getting herself killed in a moment of idiocy.” Lilith opened her mouth, closed it again, looked down to the book in her hands. “I would rather you take time to think about the implications than answer immediately,” Kasha said, taking the book from Lilith and tucking it under her arm. “We need to return to the shrines, think about it on the way.”

“Are you going to...” Lilith trailed off. There were plenty of guardsmen within earshot. Details would be excessively unwise. But if Kasha did turn Paulus in...Well, Paulus was her friend. Sort of. Certainly he had been kind to her, and for no other reason except that he thought she deserved it.

“No,” Kasha said, “you're part of the catacombs. You're a grave watcher. We look out for one another. So despite how stupid the whole idea was, I'm not going to stab you in the back. You haven't told me why, and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume it's because you're not sure yourself, but clearly this is important to you, which makes it important to me. But do not make a habit of it.”

“Thank you,” Lilith said, breathing a sigh of relief. Lilith felt like she should say something more. The words did not come. Kasha nodded her head to Lilith and then turned towards the exit, where Grazden was putting the last of the wounded guardsman into a shape that would be able to walk back to the surface without ripping something open.

Despite the dramatic reduction in minion forces, the war party was still bigger than anything the gargoyles wanted to deal with. Lilith was left alone with her thoughts. Certainly Kasha had a point. Bringing Paulus to the catacombs, asking Kasha to shelter him, it was a risk. If they were found out, this war party would've been sent to kill them. Granted, it might not have worked very well with Kasha on the other side, depending on how able a healer Grazden was, but sooner or later the warband up north would be defeated, the troops would come home, and then the Duke would have plenty of soldiers with which to clean house. And in any case, the Grenth cult would still be operating out of that Mausoleum. Bringing Paulus here had been a risk, and for what?

But what would have happened if she hadn't helped him? He might have been caught. Certainly he would've been much easier to track in daylight, he still had a broken leg, and he'd said himself that he didn't know where he could go for safety. Maybe his head would've ended up piked on the wall of the Barradin Estate. Lilith had gotten a friend murdered once, but everyone made mistakes. A terrible mistake it was, but it had only happened once. It wasn't who she was. She had been a noble. She'd kept her word, been loyal to her friends and the true king, at least back when she thought there was a true king. And whatever she was now, it wasn't a lying, cheating, thieving slave. Paulus was a friend.

Lilith was supposed to be a grave watcher. And Kasha, nearly two decades her senior, had told her quite explicitly that what she had done was not good for the grave watchers. Maybe Paulus couldn't be her friend anymore. The catacombs and the Abbey were different places. Lilith knew that, had known it when she was on the other side of the fence. They didn't watch out for each other. They did favors for one another and repaid those favors and always kept score. They were allies. But they weren't friends.

The guards and Grazden headed for the surface immediately when they reached the stairs. Kasha turned to Lilith when they had left and said “you should begin your return trip to Munne immediately. Have you made a decision?”

Lilith nodded. “This won't happen again,” she said, “I never really thought about it before, but I wouldn't do it again even if you weren't offering me the book. You're right. It isn't smart, and I wasn't thinking.”

“Fortunately for you, I wasn't lying when I said I want you to borrow the book,” Kasha said, handing it back to Lilith. “Tell Paulus he can't rely on you for help in the future. It's only fair.”

Lilith nodded, and entered the shrine. Paulus was still lying in the pile of blankets where he'd been recovering for close to a week now. His head and leg were the only parts of him visible beneath the blankets, the leg in a splint and a makeshift harness Lilith had thrown together. She wasn't sure what keeping the leg off the ground was supposed to do and neither did Paulus, but she knew it was something people did when mending bones the long way. "Paulus," Lilith said, "need to talk to you about the whole...Fugitive thing."

"Would it sound sycophantic if I thanked you again for finding a safe place for me to recover?" Paulus asked.

"No, but you probably won't want to by the time we finish talking," Lilith said.

"What is it?" Paulus asked, his eyes narrowing.

"I didn't turn you in," Lilith said, and Paulus visibly relaxed, "but this isn't happening again. You saved my life. Now I've saved yours. Once that leg of yours heals, you're not my problem anymore."

Paulus glanced away. "I understand," he said.

Kasha had been leaning against the entrance to the door, and now pushed herself off to walk towards the two of them. "And as it happens, healing that leg of yours should only take about ten minutes," she said, "I picked you up a present while I was in town." Kasha tossed a healing signet to Paulus. Powerful healing magic, not fast enough to be usable in combat time, but very valuable to those who expected to be mauled regularly. "I take it you know how to use it?" Kasha asked. Lilith wondered if she should bother learning. It was a complicated glyph, but she seemed to end up wounded somewhat regularly.

"Yes," Paulus said, "with all the time I spend on the frontlines, it was a worthwhile investment of my time." He clasped the ring in his hand and focused, and there was a sickening snapping noise and Paulus grimaced with pain as the bones mended themselves. He stood, limping slightly, but soon steadying as he grew used to his newly mended leg, and offered the signet back to Kasha.

"Keep it," Kasha said, "I can't use it. In any case, I am rarely on the front lines myself."

"Thank you," Paulus said, looking from Kasha to Lilith, "both of you."

"Where will you go?" Lilith asked, stepping out of the shrine and into the main chamber with Paulus.

"I don't know," Paulus said, "but I had better get going there. It seems as though I've worn out my welcome here."

"Be careful," Lilith said, stopping as she reached the stairs to the surface.

"Do you still care?" Paulus asked, stopping a few steps above.

"Yes," Lilith said, "I can't stick my neck out for you again. But I haven't forgotten what you've done for me. Good luck."

"Thanks," Paulus said, "you too." He turned, and ascended the stairs to the surface.