Novels by Blessing Chizaram

Nobody moved for a long moment.Kane stood in the tunnel with Seraphine beside him and fifty skeletal soldiers behind him and the Shade called Castor in front of him burning cold blue in the dark. The silence was the kind that happens when too many important things are trying to occupy the same small space at once.Then Kane did what he always did when something terrifying was standing directly in front of him.He asked questions."Who are you," he said."I was called Castor," the Shade said. "One thousand years ago I commanded Malachar's armies across three kingdoms. I never lost a battle." It paused. "When the Church took him I gathered his six most loyal generals. I gave them a choice. Run and die one by one. Or come down here and wait.""You have been underground for a thousand years," Seraphine said."Yes.""Waiting for him." She looked at Kane."Waiting for his blood," Castor said. "There is a difference."Kane looked at the Shade carefully. "You said the tomb has been awake for

The entrance to the tunnel was not impressive.A rusted iron door half buried in a hillside at the edge of the forest, so covered in dead vines and old dirt that a person could walk past it a hundred times and never know it was there.Kane stood in front of it and pressed his palm flat against the metal and felt what was on the other side the way you feel heat from a fire through a wall.Hundreds of thousands of them.Sleeping in the dark. Packed into the earth like seeds waiting for rain."This is it," he said.Seraphine stood beside him looking at the door with an expression that was working very hard to look calm. "It smells like three hundred years of death." She said looking irritated "It is three hundred years of death," Kane said with a chuckle. "Wonderful," she said. "Open it."The door groaned when Kane pulled it. A sound like something that had not spoken in centuries deciding it still remembered how. Cold air pushed out from the darkness beyond it, heavy and still and ca

Seraphine had one rule that kept her alive for six years.Never stay anywhere long enough to become familiar.Familiar meant predictable, predictable meant caught and caught for someone like her did not mean prison. It meant a church examination room and an Inquisitor asking questions she would never answer.She had stayed in those ruins with Kane for three hours.Three hours with a boy she had known for less than a day, someone who talked to a dead king in his head and raised seventeen thousand soldiers from the ground like it cost him nothing.She must have lost her mind.She looked sideways at Kane walking beside her through the trees. Tall and lean, dark messy hair, grey eyes always looking at something just beyond whatever was directly in front of him. Like he was listening to two conversations at once.Which she supposed he was.He had no soldiers now. He lost both of them in the fight with Drav Solus. She had watched the Hunter take them apart and she had seen the look on Kan

Nobody spoke for a long time after the Hunter left.The seventeen thousand undead soldiers stood in the clearing like a silent sea of old grey bones, their purple fire burning steady in the dark, waiting. The shadow wall Seraphine had built was dissolving slowly at the edges, bleeding back into the trees like smoke clearing after a fire.Kane stood in the middle of all of it and stared at the space where Drav Solus had disappeared.Aldric Voss wants you alive.He remembers the name Ashveil.He said you would understand what that means.The problem was that Kane did not understand. He understood nothing. He was a nineteen year old grave digger standing in a forest at dawn surrounded by thousands of dead soldiers and a girl he had known for approximately seven minutes and a voice in his head that kept handing him information like stones and watching him try not to drown under the weight of them.Seraphine turned to look at him."Kane Ashveil," she said slowly, like she was testing the w

Kane had three seconds before the Hunter reached the ruins.He could feel them counting down in his chest. He did not wait for them to finish.He stepped outside.Kane positioned his two skeletal soldiers in front of him and watched the treeline.Nothing moved.Then everything moved at once.Something dropped out of the trees to his right and crashed directly into him. It was not the Hunter. It was not anything he was prepared for. One moment he was standing and the next he was on the ground with something heavy on top of him and his face pressed sideways into cold wet grass and all the air knocked completely out of his body.He shoved the weight off him and scrambled upright fast.A girl was crouching in the grass two feet away, catching her own breath, one hand pressed flat against the ground. She looked up at him through wet dark hair and her eyes were sharp and black and absolutely furious in the way of someone who had just been startled and was not handling it gracefully at all.

Kane did not wait to find out what the horn meant.He already knew. Every person in Valdris knew. A single long horn in the middle of the night meant the Silver Order was not sending patrol guards anymore.They were sending someone else entirely. Someone whose job was not to chase but to find. There was a difference between the two and that difference usually ended with a body.He moved fast through the trees, his two skeletal soldiers following without a sound.He found the ruins about twenty minutes later. An old stone building the forest had been slowly swallowing for years. One corner inside still had a roof over it. Kane ducked in, sat down against the cold wall, and pressed his back into the stone.He needed to think.His two skeletal soldiers stopped in the doorway and stood there without being asked, their wide bony frames blocking most of the wind coming in from outside. Kane looked at them for a moment."Thank you," he said quietly.They did not answer. But they did not mov