Guilty Blood Read Free

minutes Garmand was pouring on the oil and we had a modest blaze going, the smoke of old rulers wafting up through the broken window and invisibly out into the night. The lurid light flickering through crackling skulls did little to lessen the foreboding weighing in the pit of my stomach. Somehow the hellish light seemed ominously prophetic.
    Here and there we'd find something worth pocketing—a brooch, a pair of earrings, a gold-capped walking stick—but it was Liscena who first laid eyes upon the dagger.
    "Whoa," came her flat interjection, escaping with such dumb surprise that we all turned in curiosity. She had just wrested the lid off a low alcove, not far from the fire. Inside, something caught the light and danced like a serpent's tongue in the corpse-fueled flames.
    "I found it. It's mine!" Liscena snapped as we crowded close, doubtlessly not even sure what "it" was. Cautiously, her brother reached into the alcove and tugged forth a corpse unlike any we'd defiled that night.
    On the dusty marble of the mausoleum floor lay a withered form in a grim military uniform, its chest seemingly crushed under the medals weighing upon it. Its high-collared coat shone with gold thread, broad epaulettes, and silver clasps. At its hip, a gilt-encrusted saber jutted from an elegant ebony scabbard. But although the corpse was interred with the honors of a leader, it was obvious it didn't receive such esteem in life's final moments. Four vicious wounds marred the body, the open buttons of the jacket and shirt revealing a ragged path from the face, neck, and collar to the center breast, which rot had deflated like an emptied wineskin. There, from the sternum, as though the murderer had tired mid-crime, jutted the handle of a silver dagger. Yet more remarkable than the apparent murder weapon being interred along with the victim was the dagger itself.
    Although the blade hid within its morbid sheath, what was visible bore an exotic elegance reminiscent of treasure-laden Katapeshi palaces. Delicate flourishes adorned the hilt, but the handle appeared to be carved from a single miraculous crimson stone imprisoned within a web of delicate gold filigree. Proud and deadly, it was the weapon of royalty—and, apparently, the slayers of royalty.
    An impulsive girl, Liscena already had her hand around the pommel, yanking before anyone else made a move. Thinking back, I'm not sure whether it was the girl or the corpse who screamed first.
    The dagger didn't come away cleanly, but rather burst from the corpse like a surely secured stopper, spilling the thief backward. A geyser of something like luminescent entrails erupted forth from the unplugged wound, an ephemeral burst of upward-roiling ethereal humors. Gushing from the dead man, the torrent of nether fluids refused to rain back down, accumulating and writhing in the air above the corpse, hanging there in defiance of gravity and sanity. And with the glowing viscera exploded a terrible sound, a depthless intonation from an indistinct distance. A noise that grew evenly in volume, as if it falling up into the crypt from the pit of the world.
    A moment later, a grotesque apparition hung above the empty carcass, a knot of churning, unnatural organ-stuff glowing the unsteady green of a flickering altar votive. With revolting deliberateness the mass churned and took shape, as if worked by the hands of some invisible fiend. Limbs, garments, a withered visage rent by slashes—each took shape until the thing floating there was a spectral copy of the husk below. And all the while the sound came, issuing from the form like a scream heard through a shattered window, the horror-stricken source hidden at some unworldly remove.
    When the phantasmal form moved, the four slashes marking its disfigured body stared like a vertical row of empty sockets, taking us in even as they unleashed that terrible, voiceless howl.
    I can't say who made the first move, but terror gripped us each in unique ways.
    "Proud and