Agents of Artifice

CHAPTER SEVEN

For the span of several deep breaths, the enmity between them seemed forgotten as Semner and Liliana both stared through the open doorway, long after the running fellow was well beyond seeing or hearing. And then Semner raised an eyebrow as the necromancer turned to face him, a black blaze of flickering shadows dancing behind her eyes.

"I wouldn't recommend it," he told her, idly flipping the bloody dagger between his fingers. "Not a lot you can do for him now. And me, contract's done. Got no reason to kill you unless you make me." As before, his gaze slid like glistening slugs across her body. "And it'd be such a waste."

Liliana merely glared back at him, any revulsion she felt subsumed by a growing eruption of fury.

Despite himself, Semner began to grow nervous. "I suppose," he continued with a bit less confidence, "I probably ought to cut you down for what you did to my boys. But fact is," and he paused here, long enough to glance around, to be certain that all his men were either dead or at least unconscious, "it just means fewer ways I have to split my fee. I-"

"You idiot!" Liliana finally exploded, jabbing her finger at the thug and murderer as though lecturing a child. "You utter halfwit! What in all the worlds is wrong with you?"

"I-um, what?"

"'She can go, but kill him'?" Liliana parroted back his order from days ago. "What were you thinking?"

"Um, what?" Semner said again, apparently believing it a point worth repeating.

"You were expressly ordered to let both of us live!" She took a single step toward him, and Semner found himself recoiling. "You could have ruined everything!"

"Look, bitch, I know Rhoka's rep! The man's an assassin! I wasn't about to leave him alive to come after…" Slowly, comprehension dawned across his brutish face as his brain finally caught up to his ears, panting and wheezing from the unaccustomed exertion.

"How the burning, steaming hell do you know what my instructions were?"

Liliana could only roll her eyes heavenward, as though beseeching the patience of a higher power. "Wow, you really are that stupid."

"Listen here, Vess…"

"No, I mean it. It would take two of you to be any dumber."

Any reluctance Semner had to killing her outside the bounds of his contract was evaporating like morning dew. "You've just got a smart comment for everything, don't you? If I walk over there and shove this dagger through your skull, you think you'll have a clever answer for that?"

"In this scenario, I'd pretty much be dead, wouldn't I? So unless there's a necromancer hiding in your pocket, that's a really stupid question."

And that, finally, was that. Semner ceased spinning the dagger, allowing it to come to rest pointing directly at Liliana's face. "What I said about killing you being a waste? Nah. I'm going to cut the best parts off of you and take them with me. You think you can summon something up before I start cutting?"

"Now why would I need to summon anything," she asked with a sudden, vicious grin, "when I've got so many friends right here?"

Behind him, the dead bodies of both his victim and one of his own men had dragged themselves forward on bloodless hands. Brittle fingernails snapped against the weight of the corpses; twin trails of blood, already dried and blackened by the touch of

Liliana's animating magic, matted and stiffened the shag of what had recently been a clean carpet.

And as Semner finally got wise enough to realize that he should probably be afraid, each of the corpses reached out a hand and clamped a deathless clutch on his calves.

Beneath the implacable strength of the risen dead, cloth and skin parted. Semner screamed, a high-pitched shriek of agony such as he had never known. So tightly did those fingers squeeze, so hard did they press, flesh peeled back from bone, muscle tore from clinging ligaments. For the dead, who feel no pain, it mattered little; to Semner, it mattered a great deal.

His body convulsed, he screamed until his lungs burned for breath. Within the meat of his legs, bony fingers clenched around the muscles of his calves and yanked them away.

The room shook as Semner toppled to the floor. Even had the fall not knocked the breath from his lungs, his scream would still have faded. Already too much blood had pumped from the gaping holes in his legs; his skin had paled, his vision begun to fade.

Mercifully, perhaps more mercifully than Semner deserved, he lost consciousness before the dead men hauled their way along his body and began to tear away pieces far more vital than his calves.

For long moments Liliana watched the carnage without expression, neither turning away when bits of Semner's body were exposed to light for the very first time, nor flinching at the terrible wet sound of ripping flesh. Only when Semner was well and truly dead did she drop her concentration, allowing the bodies to fall motionless once more, to return to the eternal rest they had earned.

She stepped across the blood-drenched carpet, her boots squelching with every stride. Gently she knelt beside the body of Kallist-the real Kallist, not the man with whom she'd spent so many months, complicit in his efforts to deceive himself-and squeezed his shoulder.

"I'm sorry it had to happen this way. You didn't deserve this." It was a whisper, and barely that. But it was all she felt entitled to offer.

For several minutes she remained, her head hanging, hair hovering mere inches above the slowly drying blood. She wanted, if only briefly, to abandon the whole endeavor. To fly from the room and down the stairs. To find Jace, to ensure she hadn't harmed him with the soul-numbing magic that had knocked him flat in the doorway, to comfort and to hold him during what could only be a terrifying, horribly painful time.

But she did none of these things. Instead, she rose to her feet and turned to face the darkest corner of the room, the magic already flowing through her. Perhaps when all this was over-assuming they were victorious, assuming Jace survived-she might find a way to make it up to him. But not now.

"Find him," she ordered. "He can't have gone far. But stay out of sight. Let me know if it looks like he's not going to recover; otherwise, just ensure nothing happens to him until he returns."

The darkness seemed to nod once, to blink with faintly glowing eyes, and was gone, leaving Liliana alone with the dead.