Chapter 20
Finding Awi was not as simple as finding Taran.
The tug in my chest seemed to be pointing to the center of the Mountain, not any one spot in the anthill of the palace.
And the layout was confusing the deeper we went: organic rather than carved from the rock, curving and doubling back and sometimes expanding into vast caverns.
The entire wealth of kingdoms was kept here in metal ingots and rare woods and other treasures: the tithes of generations of craftsmen, dimly illuminated by the single lantern we dared carry.
After half an hour of wandering, I stopped to rub the cramps out of my foot, and Taran took the opportunity to rummage through a felt-lined jewelry box, forgotten for the past hundred years if the dust was any measure.
When he lifted a gold chain set with chips of lapis into the air as though picturing how it would look on me, I automatically opened my mouth to scold him—Taran’s inclination toward casual theft needed curbing—and stopped to laugh. In light of my recent crimes, Taran might as well enjoy himself.
“It’s been a trying day,” he said, smiling when he saw I wouldn’t object and spinning the chain on a finger. “We deserve this, don’t you think?”
I played along, batting my eyelashes at him. “Oh, thank you, yes, I agree this day merits jewelry, but I actually prefer emeralds.”
Taran peered into the coffer. “You can have emeralds.” He rustled thoughtfully through a tangle of jewels until he pulled out a heavy torque set with green stones. “This one comes with a matching diadem.”
“Of course I need the matching diadem,” I said, giggling as I imagined us sneaking out of the palace, wrapped in Lixnea’s blessings and weighed down by enough jewelry to buy a farm. It was worth it to see some of the care lift off Taran’s face as he came over to arrange it over my bound hair.
When I turned to let him fasten the torque around my neck, I spotted a small flutter of movement down the next dark hall. A plain brown house sparrow, hopping just ahead of us.
“Awi!” I hissed, as loud as I dared. “What are you doing? We need to get out of here.”
In response, she flew away from us, farther down into the Mountain.
“Should have brought a net,” Taran muttered, giving chase.
We pursued her deeper and down, the ceiling dropping and the walls pressing closer together, until we came to an iron-barred door at the end of a narrow hall.
Everything in this part of the palace was covered with months of dust, but the boards of the door seemed new, and the iron locks that held it shut still had faint ridges from their recent manufacture, not yet worn smooth by use.
There was a small open panel where Awi flew to rest. The air that passed through the window tasted dry and warmer.
As I approached, ready to snatch up the bird goddess in my hands, I realized she was making a little creaking noise. Crying.
“What happened?” I asked, now hesitating to reach for her, though she didn’t appear injured.
“Napeth! Did you see him? He’s totally cracked. Off his stool.”
“Yes, I know,” I said, annoyed if nothing in particular had happened to Awi. “He’s so terrible, we had to fight a war about it. Two! And also why we need to go right now—”
“No, not like he was before. He’s worse, he came back worse. He would never have done this before.” She was still crying, sobbing if a bird could sob.
“What’s he done now?” I asked, but Awi abruptly flew at Taran’s face.
“You did this to him. This is your fault!” she cried, tiny feet almost scoring his cheek before he swatted her away, his face creasing in confusion.
“Mine? How is it my fault? I met him for the first time today. Wesha was the one who decided to exile her husband for three hundred years.”
“He was just supposed to stop being such a brute, and he could have come home. I never thought he’d go this far. Nobody would have.” Her voice was a hoarse screech, and she darted through the window before I could stop her.
“Damn it!” Taran spun on his bare feet. “A net and a birdcage.”
I tried the door and found it locked—not only locked, but bolted in three places.
There was no furniture nearby that might conceal the key, but though the tugging of my vow had disappeared with Awi’s flight, I still wondered where it led. What she’d seen.
“Where does this go?”
“Deeper into the Mountain, I guess,” Taran said reluctantly, examining the bolts.
I gnawed the inside of my cheek, then did my best to paste a look of nonchalance across my face as I sang the short blessing to open the lock, hoping Taran wouldn’t notice.
His head whipped toward me in surprise.
“What did you just do?” he demanded.
“This blessing opens locks,” I said, fingers crossed that he’d let it go.
“But where did you learn it? Not from Wesha. Or Lixnea,” he said with new wariness on his handsome face.
I hesitated on how to dissemble when I’d never heard anyone but Taran use it.
“I heard the man I was going to marry use it a few times,” I said, pulling the latches apart with my best expression of distant grief. This did not discourage him from inquiring further.
“Did he belong to a temple? Who was his patron god?”
I shrugged, not daring to look at him as my vow of truthfulness prickled my throat.
“Which god was his patron?” he pressed.
I hauled the creaking door open. “I’m not sure. Genna, maybe?”
“It never came up?” he asked skeptically.
I grimaced, because this was not the best moment for Taran to get curious about how I’d spent the rebellion.
“I’m coming to realize there were a lot of things we never talked about, but should have.”
“I understand,” he agreed after a moment, and I relaxed when he gestured for me to proceed into the tunnel behind the door.
There was only one way to go, so we descended, pace quickening to what my limp would allow. The slope was still gently downward, but now precise and straight as it went farther into the Mountain.
After a few minutes, I began to worry about the distance. How was it possible someone had cut this far down?
“It must have taken ages to cut through this. Even for one of the Stoneborn,” I said.
Taran swiped his fingers across the wall, expression blanking when he saw the black soot it left on his fingertips.
“It wasn’t cut. Someone burned through the rock.”
My steps faltered. “Death?”
“This would take…an incredible amount of power,” Taran said slowly. “How many priests did he have left, when you came here?”
“No more than a handful,” I said, mind grappling for an explanation. “The mortal queen outlawed all sacrifice and worship. He couldn’t have managed this when he died.”
I resisted the urge to say I told you so.
If he could melt through bare rock now, he could have obliterated Taran in the banquet hall.
But Taran’s face was paler than realizing how close he’d come to nonexistence would account for.
He’d put something together, either from what Awi said or what I had.
There was a breeze from underground, sharp and gritty, and it stung my throat with every breath.
We’d been walking steadily downward for almost half an hour before I spotted a red glow ahead of us.
The rising heat was nearly intolerable, and when we reached the first open space since passing through the door, the source proved to be a pool of lava as big as a cistern, bubbling up from within the stone.
I’d heard stories of lava deep inside Mount Degom, the mortal twin to the Mountain, where the Allmother had formed the Stoneborn at the beginning of time.
There used to be annual pilgrimages there, to light Death’s sacred flames for each temple.
I would have gone after being ordained, and I still felt a little religious awe to see the pool of it, but the lava wasn’t what seized my attention.
Death’s temples all had a sameness to them beyond the chosen ornaments and idols of any other Stoneborn.
I’d been in most of them to personally oversee their destruction during the rebellion.
The angles were all born out of the same immortal mind and repeated from the western shore to the northeastern mountains.
I would have known that this cavern was a temple of Death even without the bronze lion or wing ornaments capping the peak of the altar behind the lava pool.
But that wasn’t what knocked out my breath.
Instead of stone, the entire thing was constructed of bone.
Hundreds of bones. Thousands. Lashed together with leather and sinew, femurs and tibias and shoulder blades and a pebbled layer of skullcaps, all of it resting on a thick bed of tanned hides and thick furs.
Some divine genius had been warped to the challenge of constructing an altar using only the parts of living things.
Some of the bones might have been those of cows and goats and sheep. Most were not.
“Smenos’s priests,” I whispered, throat closing up from horror.
The surface of the altar was caked black from frequent and vicious use.
This was what had happened to Smenos’s priests.
This was the sacrifice that had fueled Death’s power so quick after his death.
This was what had made even the heartless little bird goddess weep. “Why would he give Death his priests?”
“Because they weren’t his priests anymore, after he died,” Taran said, voice low and tight. “But that’s not why he made an altar of bone. It wasn’t made to sacrifice mortals.”
My entire being rejected any closer inspection of the grotesque structure, but I forced one squinting eye to focus on the cracks in the skulls that formed the base.
And beyond the black of dried blood there were dried rivulets of gold in the crevices, places where the lifeblood of lesser immortals had gathered.
“What does he need this much power for?” I whispered.