Around four o’clock Netherhame guided us to the edge of Treetown, and in the solitude afforded by a gloomy clearing far from any of the lords’ mansions she started to test what I’d learned.

Wings protruding through my grey robe, the new mask settled about my face, I soared around the tree-enclosed patch of grass and bushes, keeping low, my eyes and hands fixed on my work. Shallowlie was on the opposite side to me, keeping pace with a host of spirits roiling about her black-clad form, casting out the threads of force that I caught, fastened, threw back…

Ghostlike and near-invisible, our mentor floated in the sky, looking down from above to ensure I was doing it right. She didn’t hold back the criticism, either.

“Put a knot in it!”

“No, look, you clod, you’ve looped it the wrong way!”

“Faster!”

“You’re supposed to catch it!”

I knew Ly well enough by now not to let myself become enraged at her belittling tone. It was just the way she was. She spoke to Min pretty much the same way.

After half an hour of toil Netherhame called us together, descending into the centre of the clearing.

“Okay… you’re getting better,” she said gruffly.

“Don’t go over the top with the praise,” I said, removing my mask and mopping at my face with my sleeve. It was a cold day, but weaving shields was hot work.

She glowered at me, so I grinned deviously back at her.

“Feychile, you are almos’ dere,” Shallowlie said, in a much more complimentary tone. “You haf amazing range. You jus’ haf to watch for de line – be ready to take i’ when i’ comes…“

“I’ll try to get better.” I replaced my mask and hood. “Thanks, Shallowlie.”

She nodded, her smiling, creepy mask hiding her expression.

“You’d better learn fast.” Netherhame had a warning tone. “I’ll show you what you might be up against in Zadhal – that’s why we came here. Can’t frighten the kiddies, or get ‘em gobbled up if you screw up your weave. Spread back out, and I’ll show you a zombie giant.”

Once we were ready, on opposite sides of the little treeless patch of ground, Netherhame tore open Nethernum, summoned her zombie giant, and cut her control off.

I was almost sick looking at it, listening to it, smelling it on the wind.

I’d read about them before, heard the stories. Clearly they’d never been written or told by anyone who’d actually encountered such a creature up close. I’d always imagined them to be, well, zombified giants. Huge, dumb undead critters. They’d always been described in that way.

Maybe zombified giants did exist. But this certainly wasn’t that, even though it was giant, and made of zombies.

It was thirty-five, almost forty feet tall, and comprised entirely of corpses. Individual corpses, stitched or fused together somehow at the skin, making out of them a single entity. Tatters of cloth were snared into its fleshy seams, the clothing the dead people had worn to the grave now making a vast, confusing patchwork of rotten textiles.

It was headless, but nonetheless humanoid: a vast round torso that must have contained hundreds, thousands of packed bodies; hundreds more in the two arms, two legs. The faces of the dead on the surface of its pale, wet-looking skin were singing, their eyes shining blankly as their blue lips parted and they raised lifeless, out-of-synch voices in an awful dirge to death.

And sweet Mother of the Mercies how it moved.

There was no hesitation or cumbersomeness to its motions – it was more like a ghoul, crunching the bodies in its ‘feet’ into the earth before leaping, raising its singing ‘fists’, barrelling immediately at Shallowlie, the closest target –

I caught the line of force she threw to me, tied it, threw it back, forcing myself not to look at the thing we were fighting.

The zombie giant reached out with fingers that were limbs, trying to grab the sorceress – and it recoiled from the barrier, crashing back and whirling. I could feel the contact despite the weave being inherently detached from me.

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Then the giant came for me, and I almost closed my eyes in squeamishness as its own horrid eyes, covering its flesh all over, stared transfixed upon me. Its choral voice, growing louder as it approached… I half-understood the words, could’ve translated them in my head if I focussed…

Tie the knot… cast the line…

“Great work, Feychilde!” Netherhame cried down. “By Kultemeren, you’re just, like, fantastic, you know that?”

“O-kaaaay,” I growled back at her, already pouring with sweat again, tying the next weave, hurling it back to Shallowlie…

As the eldritch fell back from the honeycomb shield enclosing it, I caught the sound of Netherhame cackling on the wind.

* * *

After just ten minutes I was hurting from the strain, my brain throbbing with every ‘knot’ I tied in the blue weave – that’s what I was telling myself, anyway. It had nothing to do with the singing corpse-faces, no, definitely not.

Dozens of times, hundreds of times, the giant’s fleshy blows came to naught, recoiling from our combined might.

After half an hour I had to call a halt to it. I waved to Netherhame to get her attention then drew my hand across my throat.

She re-bound the zombie giant, dismissed it, and descended, shouting, “All hail Feychilde! That was truly impressive, magnificent, that was! Never seen owt like it before in – my – life…”

“Doan worry,” Shallowlie said once the three of us reconvened, floating in the centre of the clearing. “When we are in Zadhal, dere won’ be any reason to keep a weave up li’ dah, dah long. We will jus’ cont-rol da zombie, or dest-roy i’.”

“You hope,” Netherhame said. “You don’t know that, Min.”

“Now who’s the unsure one?” I smiled. “Do you think ‘T-Man’ would just send us all to our deaths?”

“And I thought you said he couldn’t see everything,” she countered – but I could sense the grin on her face. “Anyway, you’ve got time to practice. We’ll meet back here on Starday night –”

“Err – I’ve got a date, Starday,” I mumbled. I wasn’t a big fan of theatre, but I could endure it for Em. “Sunday? Moonday?”

“Sunday. Nine o’clock.” Netherhame craned her neck. “Min?”

“Sanday, nahn o’coh,” Shallowlie repeated.

“When you said ‘time to practice’,” I said, feeling a little conflicted, “well, he’s not actually planning to make us wait till Yearsend or something, is he?” It wasn’t like I wanted to rush in, but I wouldn’t have been able to handle some extended wait now I knew what was coming.

“He thinks it’ll be a week. We’ve got time for a couple more sessions like this. I recommend you spend the time gathering your strength, any items you might need – a demiskin wouldn’t go amiss if you don’t have one already, and supplies…”

“I’ve got a few things in mind.”

“Good,” she finished. “Well –” she looked across at Shallowlie “– see you in a couple of days.”

Netherhame started flying away, but Shallowlie took her by the hand, stopping her, looking back over her shoulder at me in silence.

What was going on?

Netherhame said, as if she was being pestered, “Okay. I’ll stay. I’ll hear this.”

Shallowlie removed her mask, looked at me with shining, expectant eyes.

Netherhame followed suit – somewhat perturbed, I removed mine.

“Err –” I looked between them “– yeah?”

“Cah you tell me… how he die? I listen at da Gathering bu’… What were Duzzbriger’s las’ words? Was he… in pain?”

I sent my mind back, into the crimson darkness beneath the obsidian tower, the eolastyr’s throne-room.

“Sorcerers, get back! Block them the moment they come through!”

That couldn’t have been the last thing he’d said, but it was the last thing I remembered.

I told them the story the way I’d seen it, gave them more information than they’d received last night at the Gathering. I saw the need graven in their faces, saw the way they both needed to hear it all – the details, how exactly he’d passed from this world. How he was taken away from them.

That he had been silent and still, at the end. That he was surely no longer conscious when the arch-demon claimed him, obliterated him.

But as Min wiped her eyes then took Ly by the hand, flying away with her back towards Hightown, I had my doubts. They had to know, like me, that he had joined with a bunch of spectres and other creatures. There was every possibility he’d been awake when he’d been disintegrated.

I turned my back on the rising moon and flew home towards the setting sun, doing my best to sort through the jumbled contents of my mind. I always ended at the same conclusion. It was more feeling than thought, more emotion than realisation: my hopes, Em’s fears, they were all mingled together.

What I hated in Killstop. My parents.

Me.

I wasn’t scared of dying. I was excited by the possibility.

Zadhal. I’d just straight-up agreed to go – leaving the twins hadn’t even occurred to me.

But they would survive without me. It was me that was doomed. By these powers. By this burden.

And I found that I didn’t care. I didn’t want to die, and I would fight to avoid my last breath until I breathed it – but I knew it would come, and there was a significant part of me, a growing part of me, that didn’t give a damn. That fed on the thought of it. Ten minutes after a vampire-lord pulling out your ribs, you shouldn’t have been rocking back and forth in your seat at the prospect of visiting said vampire-lord’s home to meet his family.

Yet I was. And I wouldn’t be alone.

Thoughts of trying to join with a vampire never further from my mind, I angled my flight towards home. I’d find a cleaner option.

And I would explain. I would tell them.

The worst part wasn’t that they wouldn’t be able to understand – the worst part was that I’d be putting them in that position in the first place.

But cleansing Zadhal? I could no less skip that event than I could the Gathering. We were all in it together.

Then the realisation came.

I thought of us – champions, archmages – and realised.

All of us… It’s all of us.

We’re all broken.