Lila and Idris took their contingent of two hundred soldiers after dawn broke, and rode carefully over the Harransee’s barren soil, leaving Cressida and her fae delegation behind. Before they went, Willard gave both of them hard, close hugs, and promised he would see them soon, and Lila dried her eyes on the sleeves of her overcoat from the back of her horse.

  Three separate forces moved through the clay and mountains. They all knew their roles. Idris thought of the opera.

  The soldiers and Lady Eremont, alongside Kurellan and Riette, were to walk only part of the way with Idris. After four hours, the column split in two, and Riette gave Idris a hearty wave, her flag-bearer waving the purple-and-gold of Crescent Crest above her head so he could see her. Idris did not wave back. He stopped his horse so he could watch the procession march into the wilderness, so he could remember the things he had done to get to that point. When he was certain that nobody cared that he was watching, though, Kurellan lit his beacon in blue and lifted it high, in a sort of silent farewell that Idris found oddly touching. It bobbed over the horizon and disappeared.

  “Ready?” said Lila, who had sat by his side, saying nothing.

  “Yes. Onwards.”

  They marched until sunset, then made rudimentary camp. The soldiers did as all soldiers – they raised tents and hung aria bells, so the wild winds of the Harransee sang their secret songs through the night, and made campfires and cooked stews, and whispered songs and poems to each other as the stars winked out between folds of evening clouds.

  Idris and Lila sat separate from the huddle, while she heated tea. He named the constellations.

  “Lots of different arias in there, tonight,” she said at last.

  “Do you think you could name them?”

  She sat back, ears trained on the glass aria bells on Idris’s tent post.

  “Stone,” she said. “And night. Arias of wind and sky. Your aria, the sad low one.”

  “You are getting good at that, you know.”

  “I am learning much, in the barracks.” She poured the tea into the travel cups, crude wood and bone structures. “More than is probably good for me.”

  “I am glad you have a life beyond this,” said Idris quietly.

  Lila pursed her lips. In the firelight, he could see the blush in her cheeks.

  “Sir Idris... no, this time, just Idris, my friend,” she said. “I hope you have a life beyond this, too, one day.”

  “I think I have had the last birthday I will ever see,” he said simply.

  In the silence, she took a deep, steady breath.

  “I think,” she said softly, “that might be true.”

  It was a relief, to hear her agree so readily, to not hear platitudes or reassurances.

  “But know I will stand beside you to the last,” she said, gripping his hand tight.

  “I thank you, Lila. That eases my mind.”

  “It comforts me to know that death does not scare you like it does me.”

  “There is nothing to be frightened of. Would you like me to tell you what I know for sure happens when we die?” he said.

  It was one of the unspoken reasons why people found Idris unnerving. He knew what lay beyond – or at least understood it better than most. Where most people saw a terrifying eternity of darkness, he saw differently, and he could pull the veil aside and let them see it, too, if they wanted. He had never spoken to anyone besides his uncle about the promise that waited for them all, eventually, and Lila had never asked.

  But that night, Lila nodded firmly.

  “It is black,” he said, “and silent. Nothing hurts. Nothing matters. All of these worries and problems and fears, they are all gone. You become a part of the song. A note in the melody. Drifting. Warm. Your body will do what all bodies do – it will decay and turn to bone and then to dust, and it will be worm food and eventually nourish trees and plants and animals, and be useful that way. But everything that you are, your energy, your music... it will be the song some other necromancer will hear, one day. Caught in the resonance of an aria bell. You persist, indefinable. Silent. On the wind.”

  Her grip on his hand did not waver while she considered this information.

  “All we become, then, is music,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “I like that.”

  “I do, too.”

  “Your uncle is music you hear.” She smiled. “Only you hear.” Idris nodded. “He would like that, I think.”

  “He did, when I told him. He was afraid at first, and trying not to be. But I told him he would be here always, that I would always hear his song, and I... well, maybe that was what persuaded him at last to stop fighting.”

  “I won’t be able to hear you,” Lila said, frowning.

  “No. But you will know I am there. In the bells.” He paused. “Do you know why we use the term ‘black bells?’”

  “No.”

  “It is a belief people used to hold. About necromancers. That their souls inhabited nearby aria bells and blackened them with the death aria, so they could play nothing but. It is not true, but if you were so inclined, a set of black bells might be a fitting way to remember me by.”

  “I will do that,” she said. Then, “Drink your tea, Sir Idris. It is late.”

  *

  When the pass began to darken the horizon, Idris commanded that his soldiers halted. The mountains had come up hard and fast, filled with crags and steep cliffs, and for the better part of the morning they had wound through the canyons of the Harransee in silent formations. They opened out, eventually, and the final push through to Layton’s new fortress sat like the thin slit of an eye, eating light.

  “What now?” said Lila quietly.

  “We wait.” He glanced around. “Set up camp. This will be our base. Our only job is to be a distraction, so we must be a good distraction. I would like scouts sent out before sundown.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  Everyone in Idris’s contingent knew their role was as a shield. Even so, the soldiers were jovial, content even. It was a peculiar logic that Idris understood: if a man knew he was going to die, it was easier to face it with courage. The term ‘spearhead’ was being used rather freely, even though everyone assembled knew the heads of spears were often the first to break.

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  Idris did his job. He planted the fae seeds he had been instructed to drop, and he asked his three stone magicians to begin digging a well, as fast as they possibly could. Every soldier got a small vial of caustic salt and a quick introduction to basic thrall destruction, in groups of ten; each group got a set of aria bells. Swords were sharpened, shields tempered.

  The scouts came back in the dawn light, bringing the taste of rain on the air.

  “The rain is good,” said Idris. “Her Majesty can work with that. What of Layton’s forces?”

  The scouts estimated five hundred thralls and animals, in neat blocks of twenty. Makeshift barricades blocked a direct assault on the castle keep and the ground was littered with pentagons.

  “If we take the pass,” said one of the scouts, “we go right where he wants us.”

  “Then that is what we will do,” said Idris. “Thank you.”

  Idris made pentagons of his own. He asked Lila to measure the steps, to check his lines. In all, he made five, in a pentagon before the pass, and when he stood in the centre of this larger shape, he could already feel the heat.

  “Are you sure this is safe, sir?” said Lila, frowning as she stood beside him.

  “No.”

  “How does it feel?”

  “Loud. Hot. Strong.” He breathed deep. “Uncomfortable. Itchy, under my skin. Like the sound is trying to claw out.”

  “Yuck,” said Lila, pulling a face.

  “It is good. It will be enough. One more pentagon, right here, with me in the centre. Can you draw it?”

  “Is that wise?”

  “Probably not.”

  Lila did it anyway. By the time she was done, the heat and the sound was making Idris feel queasy, so he stepped away from the shapes and made sure to drink as much water as he could.

  And then the sun was up, and the clouds were grey and thick, and Black Star was humming in Idris’s hands. The hare’s foot sat on his hip, for quick access, and a sword on the other.

  They marched on the pass.

  The closer they got to the walls of the gorge, the darker it became. Idris watched the crags for undead birds that might swoop down on them, but he saw nothing except the grey strip of cloud peeking through the cliffs. The pass was so narrow that only five men could walk abreast at once.

  “This is going to be a massacre,” Lila whispered.

  “If it is,” Idris replied, in a sombre undertone, “at least I will have corpses to work with.”

  Unnerving quiet gripped them. The pass echoed the sounds of the soldiers’ footsteps and clanking of their weapons, but Idris was sure he would have heard a feather fall – even though he was the only person in the pass who could hear something else, something more sinister. Under everything, louder with every inch he travelled, there was the death aria, not the unbridled and raw aria he heard within his own pentagons.

  Controlled. Tame. Repetitive. Forced.

  It revolted him. He could not understand why. After all, Layton merely did what he did – conduct the aria, as only they could. But the sound of his father’s direction gnawed at his bones, inaccessible and cold.

  The air was close, heavy. Idris wished the storm would break.

  “Idris?” said a soft voice in the back of his head.

  His skin prickled, but he focused on the aria.

  “Father,” he said, under his breath, feeling it burn with the taint of the magic.

  “You came after all. How delightful.”

  “Let me through.”

  “You? Perhaps. All of those other useless husks beside you? No, I would rather not.”

  “You make an army and you assume I will not bring one in return. That is unwise.”

  Lila eyed him strangely; he shook his head and continued.

  “Come out to meet me, Father. We can talk.”

  “I rather think the time for talking is over,” said Layton.

  Rocks clattered. Something shook. Idris felt it through the floor. Some of the soldiers cried out in surprise. In the aria, the pitch shifted, just enough to raise the hairs on the nape of his neck.

  “This is the work of the breastplate,” he said, the char gone from his voice.

  “What is it?” said Lila, her cheeks flushed.

  An odd, dry scream filled the air. If he could have guessed, Idris was sure it came from an animal larger than any he had ever seen or imagined.

  It was near silent in the pass, afterwards.

  “I do not know,” Idris whispered, his ears still ringing. “But we press on.”

  The march became more cautious, weapons raised, footsteps slow. The scream did not sound again but Idris became aware of other noises, beyond the bitter aria of the breastplate and his father’s curses. Shuffling and snapping. Rocks shifting.

  “I think this is where we stand, gentlemen,” he called to the soldiers.

  Almost as soon as he said that, there was movement at the end of the pass. A huddling, skulking mass of low, four-legged shapes.

  “Mountain lions?” said Lila, her hand on her hilt.

  “And more besides,” said Idris. He clutched Black Star to his chest. “Time to see if this Spirit Glass really works.”

  It was a ragtag assortment of patchwork beasts, grey fire burning in their eyes, skin sloughing off from rotting limbs. Unlike the wolves of the mine, these snarled and growled. Something of their old selves remained.

  “Salt!” Idris cried.

  The archers, set up in line behind him, lifted their salt-bomb arrows and, as one, sent them whizzing through the air. The first one crashed down onto the back of a lion; it hissed and fizzed, and the air around it burned. The pass was alight with aria fire and the smell of scorched hair, burning off the corpses as they began to run forwards, towards the Queen’s men.

  Lila drew her sword.

  “I named it,” she said, as she and Idris stared down the animals.

  “Oh?”

  “Her name is Raven’s Reckoning.”

  He smiled.

  “Perfect,” he said.

  A boar pounded through the centre of the pack and straight towards them. One of its tusks was gnarled and broken; mucus dripped from its nose. Idris set his stance, heart pounding.

  “This is mine,” he said to Lila. She nodded.

  “Duty first,” she said.

  “Family first,” he said. “Family always.”

  “Family always, Sir Idris.”

  He raised Black Star high, eyes locked on the grey fire of the boar, and drove it straight down in a clean arc.

  He was sure, for a moment, that the tainted aria pounded harder and faster and higher in his blood, until it was everything he was. He was sure he felt fire in his palms and fingers on the shaft of the hammer. A power he did not know he was capable of surged from the sole of his left foot all the way to his scalp – and it discharged as soon as the head slammed onto the skull of the boar.

  Its head splattered. Whatever inherent magic the Spirit Glass held applied more force than Idris could wield alone. Blood burst out with shards of bone. The aria sang. Idris flinched, pulled the hammer back up.

  And there, in his core, like a ribbon tied around his spine, he could feel his own control over the remains of the boar. Half-headed, one tusk still clinging to the jaw, it waited for instruction.

  Idris thought clearly about the thralls, the undead animals.

  “Kill,” he said.

  The command charred his throat. The boar turned around and hurtled back into the crowd.

  “Again!” cried Lila, holding her blade in the mouth of a wolf as she tried to hold it at bay. “Do it again!”

  Idris slugged Black Star’s head into the rib cage of the creature.

  The connection was electric. The aria shivered through his arms, down his back. The wolf tumbled a few feet away, then picked itself up and stared at him.

  “Kill,” he ordered.

  “Black bells,” said Lila, watching the wolf immediately turn and tear into a lion’s neck.

  “Keep going!” Idris shouted to the soldiers. “Out and through!”

  “Out and through!” was the response, and the Queen’s men surged on.

  Idris remembered what was so difficult about war, as the sweat rolled down his back and his arms shook with the strain of swinging. It was that every death punched through him like a blunt knife.

  Braemar had not been the first battlefield. At the start of the war with Lord Orrost, he had gone with Cressida to a small skirmish on the far border, to see what he could do to assist her, and it had been the worst afternoon he could remember. When Haylan died, it had been a lingering, awful melody in the next room that pulsed in the air, but when several people died, all at once, violently and without reason, the aria plunged into his gut and put stars in his eyes; it beckoned and drilled and surged until he vomited, shivering, on his hands and knees.

  They hit like rocks, in his shoulders, on his scalp. The music was glorious and terrible and sweet.

  Here, he was a god. A miserable god of carrion and corpses. A god without any desire to do what nature had given him and raise the dead and yet unable to want anything else.

  Gasping and disorientated, Idris swung Black Star in wide arcs, hitting every creature that crossed his path. Some he merely wounded. Others, the instant they died, became his own. He wanted, so badly, to put his knees to the clay and conduct the chorus, pull every fallen man to his feet and have them dance to his tune. The urge was primal and sickening. Filled so quickly with sound and colour, it was everything to stay upright.

  There was another rumble, this time to his left, easier to pinpoint. Rocks shifted.

  “The stone magicians,” said Lila, turning her head.

  “They must be through,” said Idris, unable to hear his own voice over the crashing crescendos of the aria.

  “Then your mother must be trying to cleanse.” She grabbed Idris’s wrist. “You shouldn’t be here, sir. Quickly.” To the soldiers, “Push forwards! Push hard!”

  With Lila’s aid, Idris retreated, back through the pass, out to the comfort of his pentagons and the new surge of the death aria that threaded through his whole being.

  “What’s the plan now?” she asked, confused.

  “Now,” said Idris, looking to the centre of the pentagons, “I play the Dead-Walker at his own game.”