We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from C.S.E. Cooney’s brand new fantasy novel Saint Death’s Herald, the sequel to 2022’s World Fantasy Award-winning Saint Death’s Daughter—publishing with Solaris on April 22nd.
Heartbroken, exiled from her homeland as a traitor, Lanie Stones would rather take refuge in good books and delicate pastries than hunt a deathless abomination, but that is the duty she has chosen.
The abomination in question happens to be her own great-grandfather, the powerful necromancer Irradiant Stones. Grandpa Rad has escaped from his prison and stolen a body, and is heading to the icy country of Skakhmat where he died, to finish the genocide he started. Fortunately for her, Lanie has her powerful death magic, including the power to sing the restless dead to their eternal slumber; and she has her new family by her side.
Grandpa Rad may have finally met his match.
Chapter One
The Ghost-Mounted Man
Year 4826 of Higher and Lower Quadiíb
On H’za, 24th of Jdeni: the Second Month
21 Days till Spring Equinox
If the man were a house, the ghost who possessed him would be the black mold spreading across his walls. No stopping it. No scrubbing it. Only enduring.
Except, he couldn’t endure it. Not anymore.
“Just kill me,” Cracchen Skrathmandan begged as he shoveled out the hanged man’s grave with his bare hands.
“I am killing you!” the ghost of Irradiant Stones replied. “I’m just doing it at my own pace. Now dig!”
Useless to plead with the ghost. It only irritated him. So Cracchen prayed instead—to Erre’Elur, god of death and winter—for the blessing of death this winter’s day.
But the ghost was a necromancer—or had been one in life—and a necromancer was a priest of death. Cracchen had himself dealt death in his day, plenty of it. Before the ghost had entered him, melting his left eyeball from his face and taking up residence in its empty socket, Cracchen had thought himself mighty. Warrior giant. Royal assassin. A ruthless killer in the prime of his life.
But he had never worshipped death. His dealings with Her had been transactional, a straightforward matter. That made all the difference now, when the only god who could help him would sooner bend Her ear to a ghost’s demands than his own.
“Buck up!” cried the ghost, his nasal voice rattling through Cracchen’s skull. “Put your back into it! You root out this gallows’ meat for me, my oinker, or I’ll seize control of your bone-bag again. Remember last time?” His sneer was palpable, like being spat on from the inside. “You don’t want that, you dig, boyo. Or else!”
The ghost threatened, but held back, tucked smugly inside his eye socket. After all, Cracchen was well-trained, He’d been the ghost’s mount for months now. For, perhaps, eternity.
A harsh, gray, late-winter day, edging into evening. Cracchen hardly remembered a time when the world held color or warmth, when he wasn’t equal parts agony and numbness. A light but relentless precipitation waffled between liquid and solid states, resulting in gelid misery. Any bird or beast so fortunate as to not be possessed by the ghost of Irradiant Stones was tucked cozily away in bush or burrow, blissfully ignorant of necromancers or gods.
Buy the Book
Saint Death’s Herald
Saint Death’s Herald
Buy this book from:
“Heave ho, boyo! Work those burly biceps! Think I chose you for your brains? Pah! Saint Death would gag on that paltry mouthful. Twelve Gods know it wasn’t for your sorceries. A more gods-bereft sack of unmagical meat I never did lay eyes on.”
As the ghost’s regular pattern of complaints droned on and on, Cracchen heaved-ho.
And then—at last!—a sucking sound, and the grave’s mud relinquished its buried treasure.
The corpse in Cracchen’s cold grip glopped a few inches out of the half-frozen soup of earth and into the diffuse twilight.
“Again!” the ghost cried. “Heave!”
Cracchen bent his head to his breast, trying to breathe. He was dizzy. (He was always dizzy these days.) Each breath pinched a deep place between shoulder blade and spine, seized his sinuses, sealed his nostrils shut. His mouth and nose were blistered with sores.
But none of these, nor any of his multiple other hurts, were worse than the sensation in his empty left eye socket. The static shock of ever-present infection. The slow, corrosive crumble of invasion.
“Stop loitering! Do you think we have all the time in the world? Our foe is closing in!”
From inside his skull, the ghost set spur to his host body, sending a spike of disorienting pain straight into Cracchen’s brain. With a sound that was half bellow, half groan, Cracchen hoisted himself, and the cadaver with him, out of the slickening grave in a gross parody of birth.
Cracchen thought: I would give the world—I would give my mother’s life—I would cut the heart out of my brother’s body—if I could just lie back and make this grave my own.
“Tsk tsk tsk,” clicked the ghost. Tongueless, toothless, incorporeal, he was nonetheless still more than capable of clicking like a cicada. “Not on my watch, boyo.”
Cracchen’s vision grayed. One moment, he was backsliding into the mud with his hard-won corpse. The next, he was fully out of the grave, several yards away on solid ground, straddling the corpse, knife in hand, with the flesh of his arm already scored open.
Bewildered tears welled in his eyes. They fell, with his blood, onto the body beneath him.
“Every time I take control,” the ghost growled, “it lights you up like a beacon, boyo. They can see you, clear as a signal fire in the darkest reaches of night. Think the foe won’t tear you apart to get at me? You’d be wrong. And then you’d be dead.”
As he wept and bled over the corpse, Cracchen felt the frosty breath of the upturned grave at his back, cold as Erre’Elur’s kiss. Thank Her name, the corpse he’d just dug up must have been buried only recently—two or three days at most—for its flesh was blistered but not ruptured, and though its reek was foul, what of it? Everything stank. The corpse. The mud. Cracchen himself.
His breath rattled in his throat. He stared at the ropes still binding the corpse’s wrists.
Criminal, the ropes accused.
So it doesn’t matter, does it? he pleaded with Erre’Elur. What we do to the corpse? Crimes committed upon the dead are no crimes at all. The dead will never know. And surely any criminal deserving of execution deserves whatever comes after. Don’t they?
The god did not answer. But for some reason, Cracchen did not think Her silence meant agreement.
At least praying (if it was praying) put his concentration elsewhere than his own nausea at the noxious stench. Not that his stomach had any contents left to vomit. His head spun as the ghost squirmed around inside of it, scanning the skies for enemies.
“You’ve done it now. Caught their attention. They’re turning our way. Why isn’t my ectenica catching? Your blood is useless! Cut again. We need more juice.”
Cracchen’s hand shook on the knife handle. He whimpered, uselessly, “Please. Kill me.”
“Saint Death’s sake, you nincompoop!” the ghost snapped. “Know this if you learn nothing else: before I move on to better accommodations, I’m going to squeeze every last minim of use out of you. Skaki trash. I gave my life destroying your kind, and Twelve Gods know I’ll dedicate my undeath to it. Now. Cut me a good one and bleed on that corpse! Or I’ll cut you myself!”
Trembling but obedient, Cracchen sawed into the soft crease of his elbow with the muddy, bloodied knife.
They had performed this ritual of resurrection dozens of times in the months since the ghost had first possessed him. Usually, the dead thing they would find was considerably smaller than a human: a bird smeared to feathers in the dirt, an incomplete set of fox bones tangled in some tree roots, a pony that had broken a leg and had been put down at the side of the road.
The ghost had a sense about the dead. He could sniff out a pile of old bones from a mile away, across water, cached beneath a stone. For days, he had been excitedly spurring Cracchen through the bush of western Damahrash, until, finally, late this afternoon, they had stumbled upon a crossroads marking the border between Damahrash and Leech. The gallows were not visible from the road. Both gallows tree and its garden of shallow graves were tucked behind a hill, where their presence would not distress passersby. Nevertheless, the ghost led them to the place unerringly. He had sniffed through Cracchen’s nose, all the way up to a patch of freshly disturbed earth, positively gleeful.
Presently, the earth considerably more disturbed, the corpse exhumed, and Cracchen’s new ragged cut now welling like a red spring, the ghost yelled, “That’s enough!”
Cracchen dropped the knife into the mud. Ghost and host body both watched as their blood dripped down onto the cadaver. The ghost hissed when a few drops fell onto the ropes instead of dead flesh.
“Wasteful,” he muttered. “Get out of my way! I’ll do it!”
For the second time in a span of minutes, it happened. Cracchen’s vision grayed. He felt his mind, like a kitten in a burlap sack, being thrust down into the darkest recesses of himself as the ghost took over. As he sank, he felt the ghost, that chewing-on-charged-metal presence, skitter out of his left eye socket, slide down the side of his neck, and hop into his shoulder.
Thence, it slipped into the open wounds of his left arm, where the ghost began to swell. He was pushing himself, pushing his magic—his substance, he called it, during his interminable lectures—into Cracchen’s blood, mingling with it as it left his body and spattered on the corpse.
To make undeath required only three ingredients: living blood; dead flesh (or ‘accident,’ as the ghost designated it); and the substance, the soul-stuff, of a necromancer.
“Come on,” the ghost muttered through Cracchen’s lips. “Come on. Spark! Spark, my ectenica. Before they find us.”
The process was taking too long. It always took too long, according to the ghost.
Irradiant Stones was fond of telling his host that had Cracchen been blessed by any of the gods, with any magic whatsoever, he might at least have bent those mysterious sorceries to his purpose. And had Cracchen been that rarest and most coveted kind of sorcerer of all—a necromancer, priest of death—his blood would have been so charged with that particular magic, there was nothing the ghost might not have accomplished with his plenteous fluids.
Alas, Cracchen’s utter lack of divinely blessed blood had been the cause of constant monologuing all their long months on the road.
Nor did the ghost stint now. Irradiant Radithor Stones was a ghost of many words. Many of them were the same words, over and over again. His obsessions were few but intense: how he had once been the world’s greatest necromancer and would be once more; how he must complete his life’s work in Northernmost Skakmaht, winning a war that the world had long moved on from; and how his foes would pay—how they would pay!—once he was at full strength again, and able to catapult upon their heads the fiery ordnance of his wrath.
Those foes, Cracchen had learned over long months of wearisome repetition, were a few dozen magically disembodied souls, all grouped together into some kind of single, uncanny entity, like a rack of storm clouds. This ‘storm of souls’ was pursuing the ghost with a single-minded fury.
At the very end of his life, Irradiant Stones had sundered the substances from the living accidents of hundreds of Skaki sky wizards in one mighty act of magic that ended the Northernmost War—and ended his own life. But even in death, he did not allow those souls to pass on into the god of death, but trapped them instead in a basalt sarcophagus. The shells of their bodies were abandoned in the far north, not dead but forever frozen, never to rot away, never to walk again.
Meanwhile, over the last century of his long afterlife, the ghost had been picking off his captive souls one by one, sucking their living substances dry to feed his undeath. Those who survived this had recently escaped their stone prison.
And now they wanted revenge.
For his part, Cracchen wished they would get on with it.
“All my life and after,” the ghost droned, with honed-razor nasality, “I have had to contend with the shortcomings of my own kin. My own flesh and blood. How I suffered! But at least they were mine: my folly, my fruit. Their vanity, their vapidity and arrogance, their laziness and underhandedness and treachery, and worst of all,” the ghost spat (he had to use Cracchen’s mouth, lacking his own salivary glands), “their ingratitude I could endure, silently, nobly, and get on with my work. Because their blood ran with Saint Death’s magic, and so, they were somewhat useful. But then, oh then, I was so accursed as to fall upon your useless husk as the instrument of my escape. Why, of all bodies on Athe, did it have to be you? Had you come with a fraction of actual power…”
Here the ghost seemed to lose his thread, and left off his complaints to growl at the blood-spattered corpse, “Catch, damn you duodecifold! Give me my ectenica!”
A moment later, it did.
Cracchen knew it did, because he heard the ghost hiss with pleasure through his own broken teeth.
Somewhere, in that mix of mud, blood, icy rain, and clay-cold flesh, a blue flame sparked.
Then two.
Then twenty.
And then the sparks became a shimmering throughout the surface of the skin. The corpse was glowing, as with foxfire.
“That’s right,” the ghost crooned. “There’s my good ectenica. Go on. Open your eyes now.”
The newly undead thing gummed open its eyes. These were not the worm-eaten remnants of the corpse’s cold clay. No, these were the pure, radiant, blue-white beams of undeath, and they looked up at the ghost in Cracchen’s skull with adoration and obeisance.
The ghost clucked Cracchen’s tongue.
“Oh, no. No, no, no. There is much too much of you. I need a lot of speedy little pieces. I need decoys! Distractions! Break up! Fall apart! Fly free! Fast as may be! My foes are almost upon us!”
The corpse was no more corpse in truth, but full ectenica now—a semi-sentient phosphorescence, like the flash of a moonstone by moonlight, that listened attentively to the ghost’s commands.
And obeyed.
The cadaver liquified itself into gelatinous chunks. The ectenical skull parted along its sutures. The ectenical arms dislocated from their torso, then snapped into pieces at elbows and wrists. (The ropes binding the wrists fell into the mud like discarded snake skins.) Thighs tore themselves from hips, lower legs from knees.
All pieces began to lose their former semblance to body parts. The ectenica became ever more amorphous, malleable. It flashed and flickered, bounced and slithered. And then, each ectenical blob began to hop away from the gravesite, fast as rabbits fleeing a fox.
“Off you go, my bugaboos!” sang the ghost, rubbing his host body’s hands together. “Go ye, and keep my foes at bay! Take my magical signal and make them give chase! Send them scattering off in all directions! Buy me more time!”
Cracchen found himself floating back to the surface, somewhat to his regret. The dreary, deadening presence of the ghost receded back into his left eye socket.
Being back in his body disgusted him. The rain-that-wanted-to-be-snow was slicking down his filthy hair, plastering ragged clothes to clammy skin, turning his lips blue. His right eye kept wanting to droop closed—except that the ghost kept needling him to prop it back up.
“Get up.” The ghost sounded weary, as he always did after performing an act of necromancy. “Move, boyo. We’ve got to keep going. Forward! Ahead! To Leech! While my foes are distracted.”
The storm of souls, they both knew, would not be distracted for long. They didn’t have bodies to feed and water. They needed no sleep.
“I’m running out,” muttered the ghost. “Out of time. Out of blood. Out of accident. Need a new one. Something with juice. Plump me up. Give me back my edge. Something that will last me till my work up north is done. Finish what I started.”
Cracchen wished him joy of his juicy new body, whoever it might be. So long as he, Cracchen, might finally be allowed to die, as he most ardently desired.
“No slumping now! We’re too close! Heave-ho, boyo!”
A wave of gray tentacled over Cracchen’s consciousness again as the ghost ascended. He piloted Cracchen’s body away from gallows and grave, forcing him to climb that terrible hill once more. As soon as he prodded Cracchen over the crest and sent him stumbling down the scree on the far side, he loosed his host’s reins and went dormant, leaving only the impression of his desired direction, and the compulsion to keep going.
At the bottom of the hill, a ditch.
At the bottom of the ditch, a dead deer.
In his fog and rush, the ghost-mounted man tripped over her without noticing her. He picked himself up, scrambled out of the ditch on hands and knees, and pitched forward again at a lurching run down the stony road into Leech.
But as he passed over her, the dead deer opened her eyes.
They were filled with a swirling gray fog, and they marked him.
The dead deer studied Cracchen Skrathmandan carefully, memorizing every last detail of him: how his body was emaciated, his flesh cut in a hundred places; how most of those cuts had knitted badly, were swollen with pus and other rank fluids; how his feet and hands were bare even in this freezing wind, and missing several toes and fingers; how his veins showed black against his rosy flesh; how he shimmered with fever, shivered with cold.
The moment Cracchen vanished over the first hill of Leech, the deer picked herself up out of the ditch and trotted after him on rotting legs.
One of her four hooves was missing, but she didn’t seem to heed that.
She didn’t heed the holes in her head either, or the foulness on her fur, or the worms in her belly. Her torso was completely stripped, ribcage red and exposed, entrails long since become a feast for scavenger birds, rodents, and the bloom of blowflies that grew upon her carcass.
But she had no thought for that. She was focused on Cracchen’s retreating form with an intensity far more befitting a predator than a ruminant—however undead that ruminant might be.
“Grandpa Rad,” murmured the deer in the voice of Miscellaneous Stones, necromancer. “Finally.”
Excerpted from Saint Death’s Herald, copyright © 2025 by C.S.E. Cooney.
