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The Waste, the Worm, and the Witch – Extract

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The Waste, the Worm, and the Witch

Gary Kloster

I lay in the dark with the dead. Still, patient, silent – except for the voice in my head.

Lira thinks she has me by the throat… backstabbing coward… have her blood before the next dawn.

The words ran through my skull, vicious and angry, but I had no idea what they meant. Who was Lira? Why was she a backstabbing coward? I clenched my teeth together to keep myself from shouting those questions into the dark, and I felt the sting in my lower lip as my fangs, keen as razors, dug in. The pain didn’t help.

‘Quiet, Mother!’ I moved my lips, but I didn’t draw in any air to speak. ‘Quiet, quiet, QUIET!’

No air, except for a small, hissing breath at the end so that I could breathe out those last words. They were a whisper, a scrap of sound, but they felt like a shout in the silence, and there was a rustle of bone and teeth as the dead shifted around me.

I hear something, Nyssa.

I held myself still, mouth shut so hard I could taste blood, and didn’t answer. I hated it when she used my name.

From somewhere far away, beyond the dark, I heard a noise. The faint thump of footsteps, moving across the ground, the rustle of grass against someone’s feet. Sounds too soft for a mortal to hear, but my senses were far keener than any human still trapped in their first life. I had got them from my father’s blood, along with all the other gifts of the Soulblight.

Much better gifts than a mad voice inside my skull.

She was quiet now though, thankfully, and I focused on those footfalls, moving slowly towards where I lay. They grew louder, closer, and when the mortal stepped on the wood planks that covered me they sounded like thunder. I could see light now, thin lines of it through the boards overhead. Those lines grew and shrank as the mortal moved, prowling through the empty house above me. The trapdoors in the floor were well-hidden, but my hands tightened on the hilts of the two swords that I held. Waiting, ready. If they found those hidden doors and opened them…

My senses were one thing I inherited. My speed was another. I would be on whoever it was before they could speak.

Lira. I’m coming for you.

‘Enough!’

The word hissed out of me before I could stop it. The only thing that saved me was the fact that I hadn’t pulled any air in, that my lungs were empty of anything to form a shout. But still I made a sound, and the skeleton beside me clicked its teeth in response. I froze, hands tight as chains on the hilts of my blades, and listened.

The movement above me had stopped. Had they heard? I stared at the thin strips of light, so bright against the dark, and my body quivered like a bow pulled taut, ready to move. But I held myself still. This was just a scout. Not all the mortals were in the trap yet, and I wanted all the Sun Seekers, not just a portion of them.

I held myself still, even as my mother began to shout in my head.

Do you hear me! I’m coming for you, and I’m not going to stop until your blood stains my teeth!

Not far over my head, the footsteps began to move away. Not creeping, not running, but moving at a normal walk, and I held myself still. Maybe mother hadn’t ruined this for us. The scout moved, stepping onto the grassy village green that lay outside the house I was hiding beneath. Then there was a voice.

‘It’s empty!’

She sounded young and excited, as if she had run off the farmers who had called this place their home all by herself. She wouldn’t be excited for long.

There were a few moments of silence, outside and in my head, and then the sound of many more boots, mixed with the sounds of hooves. Not many, though. The Sun Seekers had lost most of their cavalry ten years ago at Ire Crossing, when they’d first shown their hand on the Broken Plains and attacked us. The fact that they had hit us by surprise was the only reason they hadn’t lost all their cavalry and more.

Today I meant to repay that ambush.

Backstabbing coward.

‘Empty?’ Another woman’s voice, but she sounded wary, not excited.

‘They ran from us,’ said the scout. ‘Or the bloodsuckers took them. Probably the–’

There was a thin, twanging sound, and the scout’s voice cut off with a grunt. There were shouts, the sounds of feet running, the wary woman barking orders. Then the sound of steel cracking against bone. They’d found the skeletal archer I’d left for them, hidden in the thatched roof of one of the houses.

‘Burn it,’ the woman barked.

‘You heard Lieutenant Takora,’ a man shouted. ‘Burn them all!’

Takora. I smiled to myself. I’d fought her twice before, and she’d slipped away both times. I shifted my blades, getting ready. She wouldn’t get away today.

Have her throat.

‘Quiet,’ I breathed, letting the words out now. There were running feet and shouts and the crackle of flames starting outside, and I could at least give vent to a whisper now. Soon. Soon. In my chest, my heart gave a single beat, stirring the cold blood in my veins as my body prepared itself. I reached out with the magic in my blood and touched the dead around me. Pale grave light flared up from dim points in empty eye sockets. Then, drifting down from the cracks above, the first tendrils of smoke came. They’d set the house above alight.

Fire…

‘Don’t,’ I said as the air around me stirred, beginning to grow hot, and light began to pour through the floorboards.

Fire, Nyssa. Run!

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A Black Library Publication

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