Chapter 18 #3
It was faster than my eyes could track. None of them were hampered by mere mortal strength and agility, only by their surprise and incandescent rage.
It wasn’t a brawl—it was more like a rockslide, given the forces being applied.
Taran fought like it was a bar brawl though, a dirty one, striking out at weak points, eyes and groins and kneecaps.
But he was outnumbered and not as strong as the other two gods, his defeat inevitable even as they exchanged five blows, ten, the seconds twisting up and tighter like the air was being torn out of my lungs.
I shoved at Marit’s shoulder, trying to push him into the fight, but he winced away with a reproachful expression.
“A guest should not fight with his host. But look—Taran’s winning,” he said.
And somehow Taran was—he had more experience taking hits, or perhaps in dealing them out, and Smenos was flagging quickly while Death couldn’t aim past his black eye and swelling nose.
Taran’s lips were drawn back in fierce battle-joy, even though the skin on his knuckles had split and he was favoring his left leg.
The way he moved was like a dancer as he hammered the side of his hand into Death’s floating ribs before Smenos finally got a hold on him by the back of his skull to lift him into the air with his feet dangling.
Taran made an impossible flex of his stomach muscles and swung his feet back to connect with the crafter god’s diaphragm, but Smenos’s grip didn’t slacken.
That was when I felt the change. The taste of dust and decay on my tongue prickled into metal, swelling and heating in my nose.
Divine power. This room had been empty of it before I called Wesha’s here, and now some other god’s power was sweeping in like one of Marit’s waves.
I saw nothing, heard nothing, but I recognized it, what I’d felt in the high temple of Ereban a moment before the fire fell from the rafters and turned dozens of maiden-priests into unwilling sacrifices.
Death. He’d stretched back his arm as though pulling something heavy out of the world, and his face was no longer that of the smiling young man who taunted Taran over wine, but the bright shape of the lord of the Underworld who scoured life from the Earth.
He’d dropped the mask, gathered his power, and now he prepared to fling it at Taran.
Abruptly certain I was about to watch Taran die a second time, blasted into his component atoms by the raw force of Death’s hatred, I screamed.
“Stop!”
In the second before Death launched his attack, the voice of a trained singer was enough to carry over the grunts of Taran and Smenos where they grappled hand-to-hand, the growling fury of Death…and the outraged howl Wirrea made when she realized I had a knife pressed to her carotid artery.
I tangled one hand in her fawn-dappled hair, hard enough to bow her neck back and make it clear to Smenos that the knife I held was a stone one. I firmed my feet before I looked at the other gods, but my relief that Death had stayed his hand fell into pulse-skipping confusion.
Four gods stared at me in identical, horrified disbelief.
Even Taran.
I licked my lips and shot my eyes at Death, wordlessly indicating to Taran that he ought to take this momentary reprieve to get his own knife out and even the odds.
Instead, his voice was appalled when he spoke. “Put the knife down, Iona.”
“What?”
I tried to understand what the play was. How were we getting out of this room? I glanced at Marit, wondering if a giant wave was going to deliver us from the standoff, but the sea god slowly shook his head, eyes beginning to fill up with fat, wobbling tears.
When I didn’t move, Taran shook Smenos’s grip off and slowly approached me. I didn’t believe he was serious about it until he put his hand over mine and wrenched my fingers away from the knife. It clattered to the ground, and Wirrea burst free, running with a wail to her husband.
I turned to Taran full of confused horror, because why weren’t we fighting our way out of the room? How had he thought we were getting out when he hauled off and slugged the god of death in the face?
Smenos briefly embraced the wife who’d been grinding her hips into Death’s lap a few moments before, then stalked across the wreckage of dinner to me.
Even then, I had the impulse to align my shoulders with Taran. I should have realized by then that he didn’t see us as fighting this battle together, but it still took me by surprise when he let the crafter god scream into my face so loudly that spittle flecked my cheeks.
“A guest. A mortal. You attack my wife in my house?”
The last two words made the beams of the rafters creak and flex as though ready to bring the entire building down on top of us.
Which I might have survived. Smenos’s rage looked worse.
The Shipwright wasn’t known for his displays of emotion, and he stretched out both arms as though attempting to gather calm. The walls and ceilings flexed and vibrated but finally stilled as the panting of our breaths slowed.
Once he had recovered himself, Smenos slowly looked me up and down.
“I will remember this. I will turn your teeth into the decorative inlay for a lap harp,” he told me conversationally. “And your sinews into its strings.”
“Oh, please don’t, that sounds dreadful,” Marit moaned, the only defense I got, because Taran had gone absolutely still next to me.
What’s the plan, Taran? How are we getting out of this one?
Death had pulled himself off the floor and put his urbane mask of civility back over his features, and now he dabbed at his bloody chin with a napkin soaked in spilled wine.
“That seems like a waste,” he said in the tone of an idle observation.
“I’ll tan her leather into hawking jesses. There won’t be any waste,” Wirrea snarled.
“Don’t be hasty.”
Once his face was clean, the god of fire straightened his clothes and came to stand between Smenos and Taran.
“If I don’t like a wine, do I smash the goblet it came in? The girl’s got an exquisite voice, and her form would serve. Willfulness is a flaw, but it requires a will to animate it. I don’t allow it in my priests.”
“You can’t suggest I let this go unpunished,” Smenos said, staring at my collarbones as though imagining the places where he might pry them apart.
“Not at all. But as your guest, I am suggesting that it might be appropriate to consider the insult to me.”
Smenos roughly snorted. “I already paid for the insult to you. Genna’s brat loosened three of my teeth, and I’ll probably piss blood tonight. We’re square.”
“Not that,” Death said easily. “The insult was watching a mortal hold the sacred stone of the Mountain in her hand after you’d offered me shelter under your roof.”
While Smenos chewed on that, Death looked back at the fuming Huntress to give her a conspiratorial smile. “I’m saying I’ll take the little redheaded she-cat for my troubles, and I promise that if she’s ever seen in public again, her behavior will not disgrace the Stoneborn.”
I began to edge backward, but Taran’s hand came around my biceps like a vise, holding me in place. Betrayal made my throat close up.
Smenos tilted his head thoughtfully, considering whether I might rightfully be enslaved to the bright-eyed monster who’d burned the world twice over now.
When Taran said nothing for slow, oozing seconds of time, my eyes darted for my knife, discarded on the ground.
Death wouldn’t take me easy. He wouldn’t take me alive.
Wesha’s mercy, what if that was his plan?
What if I was to be turned into another gibbering, terrified puppet by his power?
A dusk-soul, to serve forever? I subtly, unobtrusively shifted my shoulder as I prepared to reach for my last hidden blade.
Taran tightened his grip.
“Napeth is right,” he said to Smenos.
I couldn’t help a small noise of despairing outrage, which made Taran twist my arm behind my back and turn us both to face the crafter god.
“Then we’re agreed?” Death asked, looking with interest at my nearly bare, heaving chest.
“No, I mean that she didn’t know any better.
We are disgraced, but the fault was mine.
I am deeply shamed to see my priestess dishonor your hospitality, your trust. I brought her into your home.
Let me make this right,” Taran said to Smenos and Wirrea, as serious as I’d ever heard him.
Actually, serious like I’d never heard him before.
Death raised his eyebrows, and the Shipwright crossed his arms, listening.
“Let me apologize to your wife,” Taran said, voice vibrating with sincerity. “And I beg you not to shame me further by having a mortal take a punishment in my place. I’m not a child anymore. I’m one of the Stoneborn.”
After a moment’s thought, Smenos looked to Wirrea and her sullen pout. “The little bastard is the one who brought her in the first place. And you did ask for him, didn’t you? Do you want him? Which would you prefer, dear wife?”
Taran turned the force of his beautiful, pleading eyes on the Huntress. “You know that I make a lovely apology,” he said, adding a darker note to his voice, one that made my chest go tight and anxious even as I saw how this might not be a betrayal but only a very, very bad decision on Taran’s part.
No. He couldn’t. She was horrible.
He couldn’t actually plan to go through with it. That had to be the play. While the Huntress put on whatever garments the gods donned to engage in open adultery, Taran and I would escape. I told myself this even as doubt brewed out of the pinched look on his face.
“I do enjoy your apologies,” Wirrea acknowledged, eyes narrowing. When Taran didn’t dispute this, she drew herself up to her full height, brushed her tunic down over her hips, and let her eyelids fall into slits. Her approach was measured, but the crack of her arm was like a strike of lighting.