Caldreth inhaled.

  The breath didn't come clean. It scraped up through a throat packed with sand and dried blood before bursting out of him in a ragged, lurching choke - "Get off-" that dissolved into a coughing fit that bent him forward, his whole chest convulsing, eyes watering before they'd even focused.

  He threw his arms out blindly, swatting at nothing.

  The coughing tore through him for a long moment before it finally loosened, leaving him hunched over the slab with his palms braced against the stone, dragging air in careful, deliberate pulls until his lungs remembered what they were for.

  He straightened slowly.

  The chamber was dim, lit by a scatter of red-tinged glowstones across the floor, their light thin and guttering. Stone ceiling. Carved walls. The smell of copper and cold earth pressed close.

  His gaze moved across the chamber. Two bodies lay crumpled near the entrance, still and silent in the half-dark. He looked at them the way a man looks at something that doesn't concern him, registering their presence and moving on. His attention found the blood next, a great deal of it, dark and spreading across the stone floor in slow, cooling pools. Then, the collapsed remains of a chalk circle around the slab, and a book, resting near his feet as though it had always been there.

  Against the far wall stood a figure, watching him.

  He was tall and gaunt, draped in an indigo cloak, his pale skin slightly tinged red in the dim light. Violet eyes tracked Caldreth with the focused, clinical attention of something measuring what it was looking at.

  Caldreth's chest heaved, the adrenaline bleeding out in uneven waves. He pressed a hand to his neck and found a raised scar where something had torn through.

  The stranger tilted his head. "Do you feel... compelled to obey?" His violet eyes flashed with the clear expectation of immediate subservience.

  A flicker of red pulsed through Caldreth's irises.

  At his feet, the book stirred.

  "I obey none."

  The stranger's expression shifted into something that looked like a man mentally revising his plans. "Right," he said. "That'll be an inconvenience."

  Caldreth studied him. Vials hanging from belt loops. A cloak smeared with blood and soot. Rings on every finger. And carved into his bare chest, a pentagram. Caldreth knew the mark without knowing how he knew it.

  His ash-grey eyes lifted to meet the stranger's violet ones. "Your name, death-caller."

  "Krimarion Netherbane." The man straightened slightly, as though the name still carried weight he intended to reclaim. "Krim, if you insist on familiarity."

  Caldreth looked at the chalk circle on the floor. At the book by his feet, and finally back to the two cooling bodies near the entrance that he had no reason to look at twice. His gaze returned to Krim.

  "You tried to raise me as a thrall."

  "I did," Krim said. "And something intervened." His eyes moved to the book with an expression Caldreth couldn't yet read, equal parts wariness and fascination. "With considerable enthusiasm."

  Caldreth looked down at the book. It sat on the stone slab like an ordinary, battered journal. It was not ordinary. He didn't know how he knew that either, only that the certainty sat in his chest like something that had always been there.

  He looked back at Krim.

  "How does a necromancer end up performing a rising rite over a corpse in the Infernal Wastes?"

  Krim settled back against the wall with the particular posture of a man who had been waiting to be asked.

  "It started with an entrance exam I was never meant to pass."

  - - -

  Three hours earlier, Krimarion Netherbane had been doing what he had been doing for the better part of four weeks: walking.

  "How much further, Master?" Phylin wheezed, shielding his eyes from a scouring gale. "The sun is high, and my water skin is mostly silt."

  Krim moved with a stiff, unnatural gait, his boots crunching over bone-dry stone. "Until we find it, boy. Or until the Grave Watch concludes my entrance exam."

  "Master, we're chasing ghosts in a wasteland," Phylin gasped, his head hanging low as he dragged his boots through the ash. "If the Grave Watch couldn't find a single drop of Sangrathi blood in the last three centuries, what makes you think it's waiting for us here of all places?"

  Krim stopped and turned. "An impossible path such as this is reserved for the unwanted. I intend to find that blood and prove them wrong."

  "We're unwanted?" Phylin asked, his shoulders slumping under the heavy pack.

  "I am unwanted," Krim rasped. He leaned in, his face parched and devoid of life, inches from Phylin's. "You are nothing more than a pack mule sold to the lowest bidder. Me."

  He let that sink in for a heartbeat before his tone shifted, the light in his eyes flickering. "But if you wish to make a name for yourself beyond carrying bags, help me find the remains of a Sangrathi. We bring them that which is gone, and they will have no choice but to allow us into their ranks."

  The rot of the undead surged, thick and cloying. Phylin swallowed hard against the rise of bile.

  "Very well, Master."

  Krim's gaze swept the horizon, where the heat distorted the wicked landscape into shimmering teeth. "The Underworld forgets nothing; secrets are buried everywhere." His voice carried the firm confidence of a man who had staked everything on a theory he couldn't afford to be wrong about. "There are always traces of old history for those willing to search. The Watch is simply too comfortable in their towers of bone to sift through the dirt."

  Phylin opened his mouth to argue, but the words died as a sudden, freezing resonance rippled through the air. A pressure that buckled his knees and flared Krim's eyes with a violent intensity.

  Krim pivoted as the unseen wave surged across the Cinder Fields. Phylin's frame went pale and began to shake, his fingers clawing into his own tunic, white-knuckled and desperate, as if physically trying to pin his soul against his ribs.

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  "You felt that?" Krim asked.

  Phylin could only nod, his breath coming in shallow gasps. "It felt like the world went silent for a second. Like the air turned to ice."

  A tiny, sharp glimmer ignited within Krim's bruised gaze, a flicker of something close to validation. "Then there is hope for you yet, boy." His eyes snapped back toward the western horizon, toward the source of the ripple. Someone had died. "Come. We move."

  Phylin staggered forward, his lips moving in a silent mantra. For her. Just find a Sangrathi. Bring her back. Carry the weight.

  Not long after, Krim paused at the edge of a sunken ridge. Ahead, a demon corpse lay sprawled across the shale, unpicked by scavengers, even the flies giving it a wide berth.

  "Look at the throat," Krim said.

  He crouched beside the body. Threaded through the black blood was a luminescent green sludge, fighting for dominance in the veins.

  Phylin caught up, chest heaving, and dropped the pack with a hollow thud. He pulled a small, battered notebook from his pocket, scribbling a crude sketch of the corpse. "Is this relevant to the rising rite, Master? Does the green bile act as a reagent?"

  Krim suppressed a scoff. "It's an infection, you fool. A blight. Put the book away. You aren't ready for theory."

  "This corpse won't do," he said, standing.

  "A picky necromancer," Phylin muttered. Another day without a lesson. Every day spent walking was another day she lay cold in the ground.

  "I am not picky. A contaminated corpse is unpredictable when it comes to raising the dead."

  Phylin grimaced, taking a respectful step back. "I just want to learn. You said if we gained entry into the Grave Watch..."

  "And we're no further than when we started," Krim grunted. "Walk."

  They crested a dune of blackened earth. Ahead, a ruin jutted from the ash like a snapped fang.

  The wind died the moment they drew close. Not gradually, but all at once, as if the air had decided to hold its breath. The silence that replaced it was the wrong kind, too deliberate. No skittering of sand-skimmers, no distant clicking of scavenger packs. Even the heat seemed to pull back from the stones, leaving a cold pocket around the ruin's threshold.

  Phylin slowed without meaning to. His boots dragged. Something at the base of his skull whispered at him to stop and turn around. To find a reason, any reason not to follow the dark opening down into the earth.

  "There you are," Krim said, his voice low with satisfaction. "A cold void in a land of blistering heat."

  Phylin didn't know what that meant. "Which means cursed," he muttered.

  "You're more than welcome to stay out in the heat. Maybe the demons will keep you company," Krim called back before disappearing into the ruin's yawning mouth.

  Phylin stood at the threshold. The dark below didn't just swallow light; it was waiting for something to swallow. He touched the small locket hidden beneath his tunic, fingers pressing the worn metal until it bit into his palm.

  "I'm coming," he whispered. "I'm not giving up on you." He stepped into the dark after his master.

  Krim flicked glowstones down the stairwell. They clattered across the floor, their pale luminescence expanding to reveal a chamber carved from the very roots of the world.

  In the center lay the carnage. Two bodies sprawled near the entrance, torn apart with a ferocity that made even Krim's hollow chest tighten. But it was their skin that stopped his breath.

  "Phylin," Krim whispered, his voice cracking. "The notebook. Now."

  Phylin, still rubbing his bruised shoulders, fumbled for the battered book. "Master? What is it? More blight?"

  "Read the description," Krim commanded, his eyes fixed on a female corpse. "The physical profile Curator Malcor gave us. The one he laughed about as we left the Necropolis."

  Phylin flipped through the pages with trembling fingers. "Skin like deep bronze or burnished gold. Hair of spun sunlight. Features sharp, as if carved from obsidian." His attention drifted to the bodies on the floor. Gaunt, brassy, ancient. "But Master, these carry the rot of centuries, but the blood is still wet."

  "It cannot be," Krim whispered, his eyes dancing with a manic light. "They're Sangrathi, in the flesh. And this one here..." He hovered over the figure on the slab, fingers twitching. "He is in perfect condition to raise as a thrall."

  A laugh erupted from his chest, echoing off the angled walls.

  "Master?" Phylin whispered. He had never heard Krim laugh. It sounded like metal scraping against a tombstone.

  Krim lunged forward, his bony fingers locking onto Phylin's shoulders, the weight of his rings biting cold through the fabric. He shook the boy violently. "Don't you see, boy? The look on Curator Malcor's face when I march a Sangrathi into the Grave Watch's council... it will stay with me for millennia! He sent me searching for lost whispers, and instead I found grave goods!"

  He released Phylin with a shove, turning back to the slab. His expression hardened from manic glee into professional greed. "He's my ticket into the high halls, and your ticket to whatever little secrets you're so desperate to learn."

  Krim didn't wait for a reply. He began to pace, his stiff movements replaced by a feverish, bird-like agility. "The chalk, Phylin! The blackened salt, bone powder, and the focus-stone. Now!"

  Phylin scrambled to obey. Krim dropped to one knee and began scrawling markings on the cold stone floor around the corpse, his ringed fingers moving with a practiced, hungry precision. Each symbol connected to the next in a continuous circuit, a cage drawn around the dead.

  As the last mark closed the circle, the chamber responded.

  The temperature dropped several degrees in a single breath. The glowstones dimmed, their pale light pulled inward as if something in the room had begun to feed. A low vibration moved through the floor, not a sound exactly, but a pressure that settled in the back of the teeth and the base of the skull. Phylin pressed a hand to the wall to steady himself.

  Krim rose, his voice dropping to a rhythmic chant as his darkcraft seeped into the chalk lines. They began to pulse with a faint, sickly violet light, crawling from symbol to symbol like something alive learning to walk.

  "It's too perfect," Krim hissed between incantations. "A vessel this ancient... they'll have no choice but to accept me."

  He placed the focus-stone, a shard of obsidian, on the body's chest, right over the heart. The amethyst light in Krim's eyes began to pour out, swirling like smoke around the Sangrathi's body. The chalk circle flared. The corpse's fingers twitched.

  It was working.

  "Rise," Krim commanded. "Rise and serve the one who found you in the dark!"

  The body shuddered. The chest rose a fraction, not breath, not yet, but the ghost of it. A responding tremor moved through the chalk lines, and for one suspended moment, Krim felt the soul on the other side pressing back against his will like a hand against glass.

  Then the glowstones bled.

  Their pale light turned a deep, arterial red, the color bleeding outward through the stone like ink dropped in water. Phylin stumbled back.

  "Master? The glowstones... they're bleeding. Is this part of an advanced rite?"

  The chalk lines went dark. The vibration stopped. The violet smoke curling from Krim's eyes was snuffed out as cleanly as a candle pinched between two fingers.

  "What is this?" Krim snapped, staggering back. "What forces contend against Krimarion Netherbane? Reveal yourself!"

  Above the slab, reality tore. A jagged wound wept red light into the crypt, and from that gash, a book fell with the weight of a tombstone. It stopped inches above the corpse's chest, hovering, its dark leather cover cracked and shivering as if a chill ran through its bindings.

  The tome opened slowly, crimson bleeding from its pages, staining the air around it like mist.

  Phylin screamed as an invisible current lifted him and dragged him through the air. He reached toward Krim in a desperate attempt for safety. "Master! Help me! I haven't saved her!" His skin withered against his bones as ropes of blood were ripped from his pores, drawn into the floating book.

  Krim stood mesmerized as red mist seeped from the book's pages down into the lifeless figure on the slab. The bronze skin dulled to ash-grey, hair shortening and turning black as the mist wove itself into his marrow, replacing atrophied muscle with a sharp, corded tension. He leaned in despite himself. Krim had seen many things rise from the dirt, but he had never seen a corpse's appearance change so dramatically.

  Then the book drifted away from the figure's chest and settled onto the stone, a perfect mimic of an ordinary, battered journal.

  Krim's power flickered and vanished. He looked at the spot where Phylin had stood, the boy who had complained about the weight of a pack he would never carry again. The Wastes were merciless, but even here, death usually came with teeth. To be unmade by blood itself was something he had no precedent for.

  He stood in the silence for a long moment.

  - - -

  Krim looked at Caldreth with the particular expression of a man recounting a disaster that had somehow turned into a windfall.

  "And then you started breathing." He straightened his cloak with two fingers. "Which, given the circumstances, I found deeply inconvenient. You're welcome, incidentally."

  Caldreth's eyes hadn't moved from him during the entire account. He looked at the book at his feet, then back at Krim.

  "You intended to own me," Caldreth said.

  "I intended to present you," Krim replied, with the careful precision of a man choosing a word that wasn't own. "To the Grave Watch. As evidence of what I'm worth." He paused. "The book had other ideas."

  Caldreth was quiet for a moment. "And the boy?"

  Krim's gaze moved briefly toward the far wall, where nothing remained. "The Wastes are merciless," he said.

  It wasn't grief. It wasn't quite indifference either. Something between the two that Caldreth filed without comment.

  He reached for the book.