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  “It was removed. By a merchant who then sailed from Deadman’s Cove to Vargos. He hoped to sell it there, but it was taken from him after he tried to kill an innocent man.” She paused and slightly narrowed her eyes. Was it pity I saw? “Yes, I know you were innocent, Vance. You never stole the blade. You merely took it from a man who would have consumed your soul with it.”

  “What?” I said, looking down at the dagger. The gold pommel was fashioned in the likeness of a demon’s head, but it looked nothing like the images of Isu I’d seen. And it looked nothing like the figure standing before me.

  I glanced up at the woman I was now certain was Isu. The dagger’s light caught her beautiful face, which instantly assumed terrifying demonic features identical to the ones on the pommel.

  “You never answered my question,” she said. “So, I’ll answer it for you. Vance, you choose death.”

  She was suddenly standing a fraction away from me. Before I could raise my dagger, she punched me. Her fist tore through my armor and punctured my chest. Her ice-cold fingers gripped my heart before she tugged back. Her hand came out, holding my still-beating heart.

  My eyes widened as the shock set in, and a frigid sensation gripped my entire body. I was paralyzed. She took my heart and dropped it into the font. The liquid bubbled as it ate the organ, and suddenly, the font was empty, as if the acidic liquid had been absorbed by my heart. It was still beating, but it had changed from a lively red to a charred black.

  “Now your soul has drunk of death,” she said, “and our fates are entwined.”

  She took the heart and slammed it back into my ribcage. The wound she’d made grew shut, and I sucked in a lungful of air as the cold released me.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “Exactly what I said I would do. You, Vance, are now Divinely Fated. I have given you power over death. Now, what will you do with it?”

  “The only thing I can do,” I answered immediately. “Take back what was stolen from me.”

  “Excellent. I knew I selected you for a reason.”

  Chapter Two

  With the echo of Isu’s voice still ringing in the stale air of the chamber, the mosaic tiles that had formed the body of the goddess fell in a clatter to the floor, raising a puff of dust. When it settled, there was no sign that the pile of tiles had ever been alive—for lack of a better word.

  I scanned the gloom, already wondering if I’d imagined the whole thing, and then gingerly touched my fingertips to my chest. Had my heart seriously just been torn out, doused in acid, tainted with Death, and shoved back into my chest? There was a hole in my cuirass, but the skin beneath showed no signs of injury. I guess it had really happened, as crazy as it seemed.

  But why had Isu just up and vanished like that? And what the hell was this “power over Death” thing she had told me I had? It sounded pretty damn kickass, of course, and seemed like it would be a pretty handy asset when it came to taking back everything that had been stolen from me—but how was I supposed to use it? I didn’t feel any different, really, even though my pumping heart now felt like it had slipped through a grill and spent a night in a smoldering firepit.

  “Goddesses,” I muttered, shaking my head. “Turns out they’re not much different from mortal women.”

  And while my body had begged me to forget about the whole Death and revenge business and just pounce on the fine thing, I had to keep a cool head, solve a vague, unsolvable riddle, and just accept being played around with. Maybe I should have slipped Grave Oath between the ribs of that pile of tiles after all—even if it did have out-of-this-world perky tits and a nice round ass. And was a physical manifestation of the Goddess of Death and all that.

  I turned the dagger over in my hands, examining the hilt as closely as I could in the dark. I vaguely hoped Isu’s effigy might provide some sort of clue, or perhaps conjure up her physical form if I stared at it long enough. Closing my eyes, I did my best to visualize what I had seen mere seconds before. Maybe she needed me to do this, to truly believe, to show her I had true faith, that I was her devoted servant and…

  Nah.

  Who was I kidding? I was no freaking paladin. I didn’t serve anyone but myself, and I certainly wasn’t about to bow down before a flying pile of glazed and baked dirt. Maybe the special powers she’d given me would reveal themselves when the time was right. Come to think of it, that was just how a woman—yes, even a goddess—would do it. All mystery, all dancing around the plain truth with riddles and battings of eyelashes.

  A sudden sound from outside the chamber jarred me from these thoughts. A gruff shout was soon followed by the patter of heavy boots, the clinking of armor and weapons, and more aggressive men’s vocalizations.

  Well this was it, the chance to see whether Isu had been telling the truth or just messing with my head. And even if the latter was the case, I wasn’t too worried. A couple of soldiers wouldn’t cause me to break much of a sweat. I twirled Grave Oath around in my right hand with a juggler’s flair.

  This was going to be fun.

  Flitting from shadow to inky shadow in stealthy silence, I darted out of the chamber and slipped through the corridor back to the main chamber of the crypt, where I ducked behind a large stone plinth and listened intently to the echoes of the approaching soldiers’ footsteps and voices. Their coarse jokes turned abruptly to angry grunts as they discovered the withered corpses of their comrades—with their souls removed prior to death, courtesy of me.

  “It’s that fuckin’ Soultaker,” snarled the lead soldier, a burly fellow with a balding head and a protruding gut. “He’s probably still in here somewhere, so look sharp, ya bunch of whoresons!”

  I took a good long look at the soldiers as they filed in, their flaming torches illuminating the gloomy space in hues of yellow, red, and orange. Their dead friends seemed to have been a scouting party; there were at least a dozen soldiers in here now. A few of them were bending down to examine the shrivelled corpses of their fallen comrades, staring at the withered husks with a mixture of fear and wrath on their grubby, stubble-thick faces.

  I glanced across the crypt and noticed a jeweled urn perched on top of a tall plinth, perfectly illuminated by a nearby soldier. As an experienced diver, I’d seen this trap many times before; it was a setup only an amateur would fall for, and it was perfect for what I was about to do.

  I stepped out from behind the plinth and walked to the center of the chamber. The soldiers stared at me for a few moments with their heavy jaws slack with disbelief, a look that quickly morphed into fiery rage.

  “Welcome to the party, lads,” I said with a cheeky grin on my face as I had my dagger perform a lazy dance for them in my right hand. “Your friends over there got here a little early… but they had a great time, as you can see.”

  “You piece of shit!” bellowed the lead soldier, drawing his longsword. “We’ll have your head on a spike at Rollar’s camp before the day is out, and I’ll be the first to shit down your throat! Get him, boys!”

  I chuckled as the rest of the soldiers drew their weapons and charged at me with a savage roar. Then I spun on my heels and flung a throwing star at the jeweled urn. My aim was as perfect as always, and the projectile knocked the urn off the plinth. As soon as it did, I dropped to the floor, flattening my body against the stone, and with a pneumatic hiss, the trap I had just set off abruptly blasted a volley of poison darts across the room.

  The charging soldiers screamed out in agony and dropped their weapons as the steel points, tainted with a fast-acting poison, whistled over me and pierced their leather armor before driving themselves deep into their flesh.

  Meanwhile, my throwing star had bounced back off the urn and up into the air. Without hesitating for a second, I jumped to my feet with an acrobat’s agility and caught it before charging into the midst of the floundering soldiers.

  The poison was already shooting through their veins and messing up their coordination, causing them to stumble like drunks, froth at the mou
th, and swing their swords with clumsy, inaccurate hacks. They’d all be dead within minutes, but I wanted their souls before the poison stole those prizes from under my nose.

  The lead soldier was almost pathetically easy to kill. Drooling and swaying on his legs, he launched the weakest thrust I’d ever had to dodge. He was so slow, a blind swordsman could have evaded the attack. I stepped past the man’s blade, half turning as I did, and slammed Grave Oath into his heart. His eyes bulged from their sockets with sudden agony, and as I removed the blade and his soul, his chunky body deflated rapidly, like a wineskin I’d just stuck a pin into.

  As his corpse dropped to the floor, I sucked my stomach in, arched my spine, and spun on my heel, deftly evading a spear thrust from another soldier. In my movement, I grabbed the spear haft and yanked, jerking the soldier forcefully forward onto the point of my dagger, which plunged through his right eye and into his brain. He was dead before his body hit the ground, and Grave Oath had claimed another soul.

  I was about to deal with the next of the stumbling soldiers when Isu’s voice suddenly entered my mind. It was a weird sensation; it was as if she was talking inside my brain, yet at the same time as if there were a thousand invisible clones of her filling the room around me, echoing every word she uttered.

  “You have power over Death, Vance,” she whispered. “Use it; use the dead soldiers against their living comrades.”

  As soon as she said this, a strange tingling like potent static electricity blasted out from my heart, rippled through the nerves and muscles of my arms, and pooled in my fingertips, where it crackled with an almost ferocious urgency. As if Isu herself was guiding my hands, I pointed at two of the fallen soldiers I had killed earlier and heard myself whispering a command in an arcane language I’d never heard. I knew the words I uttered meant “rise again, and serve me,” but I had no idea how I knew this. One of the unexpected perks of having a heart touched by Death, I guessed.

  The corpses of the soldiers exploded, the shriveled flesh bursting in tattered plumes of dull crimson and purple. And from these unholy explosions of soul-drained meat, congealed blood, and withered innards, living skeletons rose.

  For a few seconds, both myself and the poisoned soldiers froze and stared in awe. Then all the hells broke loose. One wouldn’t expect a skeleton to move very quickly, given the lack of muscle, sinews, and other connective tissue, but these were fast. And strong, probably way stronger than they had been inside their flesh suits.

  Utterly fearless, they stormed into the midst of the soldiers. One skeleton, finding itself between two of the soldiers, lashed out and clamped its bony hands like vices around the men’s grimy throats. It slowly lifted each of them off the ground until it was holding them high above his head, one on each side, still slowly squeezing the life out of them.

  The soldiers kicked and gasped, dropping their weapons and trying to grab the skeleton’s fingers, but their faces quickly turned purple as their tongues bulged grotesquely from their mouths.

  A big, drooling soldier stumbled at me, swiping his battle ax at my head. I ducked and spun so that my back was turned to him and caught his arm in the crook of my left elbow. I grabbed his belt with my right hand and twisted my hips to throw him over my shoulder, and as I slammed his body into the ground, I tossed Grave Oath into the air, jumped up, caught it again, and brought it whistling down, driving the blade into his chest as I landed on my hands and knees. He screamed and convulsed as the cruel steel sucked his soul out of his body and crumpled him into a dry husk.

  As I backflipped into a standing position again, preparing to take on the next soldier, I saw the second skeleton grab one of the smaller men, picking him up as if he were nothing but a sack of potatoes. It raised him high above its head and hurled him at the huge cleaver blade that was hanging from the ceiling from a previously triggered trap. The flying soldier’s scream was cut abruptly short as the blade split his body in half at the waist.

  These skeletons were pretty damn handy to have by your side in a fight. I was starting to like these new powers.

  As two more soldiers were staggering over, I sidestepped the first one’s saber lunge, slammed my dagger into his stomach, then used the embedded weapon as support to send a double-legged kick flying into the second, who stumbled right into the arms of a waiting skeleton. The dead fighter grabbed the soldier’s head and gave it a sharp, vicious twist. As the first soldier’s soul was being sucked into my blade, the second man’s neck snapped with a sickening crack, and his body slumped to the ground, limp as a dead fish.

  The tables had turned. The remaining six soldiers now faced me and my two skeletons, the raw fear in their bleary eyes unconcealed. One of them, foaming at the mouth and swaying from side to side from the debilitating effects of the poison, threw his blade down on the ground and raised his shaking hands above his head.

  “Mercy, Soultaker,” he said. “Please, don’t use that… dagger on me.”

  “The women and children you assholes slaughtered in the village a few hours from here begged for mercy too, didn’t they?” I said. “But their pleas fell on deaf ears, didn’t they? No, not just deaf ears—ugly, stupid, stinking ears. I’ve met goats with more brain than you scum have combined, and more compassionate vipers lurking under moonlit rocks. But justice, my friends, finds a way. Remember that as my blade takes your soul; justice is finding a way.”

  Again, I felt Isu’s unseen presence, like the echo of a whisper, and the strange energy crackled in my fingertips. Yet again the words of an arcane language passed through my lips, and I didn’t know the sounds I was whispering, but I knew what they meant: “Attack, kill, tear them to pieces.”

  The skeletons charged at the remaining soldiers with their bony fingers outstretched, and the fight entered its final stage. This time, there would be no pause, no reprieve, no more talking. A darkness gripped my soul and drove me on with merciless determination. I flung Grave Oath at the scumbag who had dared to beg for mercy. It whizzed through the air, spinning in deadly circles until it embedded itself in the bastard’s throat.

  As he staggered back, clutching futilely at the blade, I sprinted forward, leapt, and ran up his falling body, using him as living ramp. I plucked the blade from his throat and in one go, launched myself off his chest, vaulting over the heads of the other soldiers and somersaulting through the air.

  Having landed behind them, I slashed the blade across a jugular vein of the closest one. Just as his startled companion tried to turn around and defend himself, I gripped his wrist, breaking it with a savage twist. When he dropped his longsword with a yelp, I finally drove Grave Oath in an uppercut-style stab up through his jaw and into his brain. There, it sucked the soul out of him, his body withering into that of an old man before he even hit the ground.

  I looked around and found that the skeletons had taken care of the rest. The fight was over.

  I surveyed the scene while I caught my breath. The skeletons stood to either side of me, still as statues, waiting for me to give them another command. Corpses littered the floor. Their blood was gathering in pools that glinted in the red light from the burning torches.

  As I stood there, I began to sense Isu’s presence again. The pools of blood on the dusty floor started to run toward the center of the room, as if pulled by gravity into some invisible drain. There was no drain or crack in the floor, though.

  But when enough blood had gathered there, I realized what was happening. It rose up and slowly took on the form of a woman, a naked woman with long, shapely legs, flared hips curving smoothly into a narrow waist and a silky belly. Her big round tits sat gloriously atop their hourglass pedestal, gleaming a dark, slick crimson in the dancing light of the burning torches.

  Finally, a now well-known face was formed.

  Isu was stunningly beautiful in a dark, sinister way; she was the kind of woman with the word TROUBLE tattooed in huge, invisible letters across every inch of her immortal skin. Well, duh… she was the Goddess of Death, after a
ll.

  “Well done, Vance,” she purred, gliding across the floor toward me, leaving a trail of bloody footsteps behind her. “Your command of the powers of Death was excellent. What do you think of your new servants?”

  I managed to take my eyes off her sensual form just long enough to shoot glances at the skeletons standing on either side of me. Light glistened off her twin horns, their points deadly sharp.

  I shrugged.“They’re all right, I guess. But kind of… primal, you know? The whole bare hands thing. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think they’d make much better warriors if they were able to grip a sword or swing an ax.”

  Isu’s full lips curled into a strange smile that could have been either mocking, seductive, or offended—or all three at once.

  “Indeed they would.” She slid up to me, her blood-liquid breasts and hips gleaming in the light. “And they will—when I am stronger. I need more souls, Vance. More souls, more power. Give me what I desire, and I will make you the most potent necromancer in the world.”

  It didn’t sound like too bad of a deal to me. I enjoyed wielding Grave Oath and meting out my own personal brand of fucked-up justice to pieces of shit like Rollar’s troops and the scumbags who had stolen my birthright from me. And if killing assholes like them strengthened Isu’s powers, which in turn enhanced my budding powers, well, I was quite happy to keep doing it. I definitely wanted to see what else I could do with these newfound abilities and find out just how far I could take this whole necromancer thing.

  “I can do that, Isu,” I said, looking her slowly and openly up and down. “Say, are you ever going to be able to take human form?”

  She smiled slyly. “Feed me more souls, and you’ll find out. For now, I have another gift for you. Give me your throwing stars.”

  Curious about what she was going to do with them, I held them out for her to take. Blood dripped onto my outstretched hands when she took them; it seemed that she was already losing grip on her physical form.