Was this it for her? Would she die crushed in the tombs? Would she be buried beneath the rubble with those already dead?

Her breathing constricted as panic set in. She had survived many things and averted disaster a time or two, but this was way beyond her ability to fix—there was nothing she could do against such a force. She would never see her father or her aunts again, or Condor, or her friends. She closed her eyes against the devastation and chaos, wondering what death would really be like.

As if in answer, she felt the presence of the death god’s steed beside her. She opened her eyes to find the stallion standing there in the corridor with her, his mane and forelock flowing in a supernatural breeze.

“Can you make this stop?” she asked. Or, had he come to claim her?

He turned his head just enough to fix her with one obsidian eye. That eye was a turmoil of stars, a race through the infinite. Karigan shook her head and looked away, fearing she’d get swept away in that gaze.

The destruction around her seemed far off, as though the closeness of the stallion buffered her from it. More of the dome’s ceiling panels crashed down, raising a powdery dust. The spirits whirled and rose and vanished into it.

“Well?” Karigan demanded of the stallion. “What are you going to do?”

He snorted at her as if marking her impertinence, then knelt down before her.

“Oh, no,” Karigan said, backing away. “This is your thing to fix. Your master is the god of death, and this is—this is dead business.”

His gaze caught her again and this time she could not escape. She was drawn into a vision of his making. In it she was swept out of the tombs, out of the castle, and upward among the stars as if suspended on wings. Below her she saw the castle and Sacor City. It was still dark and street lamps glittered below as tiny pinpoints of light. Despite the darkness, she could see everything: how the buildings shook and houses crumpled, how the city walls gave way. The towers of the castle wobbled. People fell from walls, were crushed beneath rubble. Others ran screaming through the streets. Fires consumed the noble quarter and other neighborhoods.

It was as if the hill the castle and city sat upon was coming to life and trying to shake the constructions of humanity off its back.

A castle turret toppled, then another, and a portion of the roof fell in. Karigan screamed along with those in the vision.

The hill then heaved and collapsed in on itself taking the castle and about a third of the city down with it, leaving a vast smoking crater. It wasn’t just dust rising, she realized, or smoke from burning buildings, but dark spirits spiraling out of the crater like a malignant cloud.

Karigan fell from the sky.

AVATAR

When the vision released Karigan, she was still screaming, thought she was still falling. The stallion exuded a blanket of peace from where he knelt beside her, and once she realized she stood on solid rock, her screams died.

“That’s what will happen,” Karigan said to the stallion, shaking all over. Despite the mayhem around her, the hill and castle had not collapsed. Yet. Her friends, her colleagues, they still lived; there was a chance to change the outcome. She licked her lips. “You showed me what will happen if I don’t mount.”

The stallion whickered. It came to her as a clear affirmative.

She did not want to submit herself to the will of the gods, to become their tool, but if Sacor City fell, the lord-governors would fight for power over the king’s corpse and Second Empire would take the opportunity to seize control. Nothing would stand in the way of Mornhavon the Black’s return. From that perspective her decision was simple. She would not, could not, allow Sacor City to fall.

She mounted the stallion.

And found herself clad in the splendor of star steel. She bore a great lance and a shield that displayed the device of the crescent moon, which shone with an ethereal pearlescent glow. Upon her head was a winged helm, and she knew its appearance without having to look at it in the same way she knew the armor she wore was forged by the smith god Belasser, the fire of the stars his furnace. The armor gleamed as though the light of those stars still resided in it, and it weighed nothing. Its surface crawled with winged symbols that changed shape so constantly she could not see their true form.

The stallion was likewise armored, and she sat upon a warhorse’s saddle, but he wore no bridle, just a chanfron of star steel to protect his face. The book she’d fought so hard to capture rested now in its own saddlebag of fine mesh mail.

With the armor came knowledge, the knowledge that not only would the castle and city fall if she did not act, but that the void in the middle of the chamber provided a doorway for spirits to leave the realm of death, malignant spirits that would torment and feed on the living.

This was why Salvistar became involved, and this was why she was chosen to act on behalf of his master: this rupture in the layers of the world violated the will of the gods and the laws of nature, and the heavens knew, literally, that she had interacted with the dead often enough.

Salvistar clip-clopped into the central chamber. Riding him was like riding the air. The destruction and shaking of the tombs paused as if all time stopped. The ghosts were clearer to Karigan’s vision than before, all the men, women, and children who had ruled over Sacoridia in life. They bowed to her and her steed, and backed out of the way.

The other spirits, those who had come from below, were not as clear. They remained smudges of darkness, but she had a sense of their more primitive natures, their desires were more basic. They hungered, lusted to penetrate the living world. Fear was their tool, souls would satiate them.