Chapter 14
Chapter fourteen
Ashara
The Descent
Click. Click. Click.
I flinched, just like all the others, when the acolyte clamped the thick iron collar over my throat.
Reddened fingers lingering beneath my jaw, he adjusted the clasp before hooking the attached rod to the laurel’s collar ahead.
I thought not of hands, or metal, or collars, but of buttons, dimples, and smith yards.
Twirling the pearl buttons at my sleeves, I rubbed their ridges until my fingers grew raw.
“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe! I ca…” The laurel’s plea, three collars down, sputtered into a scream when an acolyte’s belt kissed the side of her cheek. Blood showered across the parquet and cushions, the force of the blow rattling our collars, all connected like links in a chain.
I tried to crane my neck, to check if she still stood, only to find I could not.
I was melded in place—trapped by the bar clasped to the laurel in front, a laurel with acorn-coloured hair.
Her braid swished over her hips as she rocked on her heels, likely reciting some psalm from the Book of Dendralis under her breath.
Pious laurel, sinful laurel, dormouse laurel, acorn laurel.
It mattered not who I followed, only where we were headed.
I breathed in a lungful of air, throat tightening as my neck crushed against iron.
Coiled like a serpent, they marched us from the chamber as a single body, our slippers slapping against stone as we wound down through the turnpikes and corridors of the templum.
At some indeterminable bend, a breath, a turn, or a godsdamned cycle later, the temperature dipped, just enough to raise the hairs on my arm.
So it would happen in the dark, then. In the shadows.
The laurel’s braid became a pendulum, the steady tick-tick-ticking of time.
So little left.
Feet beginning to drag, we came to a shuddering halt.
Up ahead, a line of paxiams stood with spears upright, funnelling laurellian men into our line as they exited a small wooden door, its planks rotted and scratched.
I twiddled the buttons, scanning every distant head for a dimple or a wayward curl.
My heart stopped around twenty laurellians later.
Chestnut hair, broad shoulders, a crumpled white shirt.
Teeth grinding, I chewed on a scream until nothing but the tattered shreds of it remained.
I’d disobeyed the Butcher, and now, I would watch my friend die.
Shutting my eyes, I counted each boon in my chest. Thump.
Thump. Thump. This was my gift, to spare him the horror of looking, of watching my blood spill first.
His collar clicked shut, and my lids opened.
“Laurels.”
Ascending the stairs of an alcove to our right, Falstaff loomed over the line of us.
Basked in the glow of a stained window to his back.
Its blues and reds cast him in both the chill of winter and the heat of summer; one point of his helm ice, the other fire.
His thurible breathed with that same sticky incense, tendrils drifting to join the collars at our necks.
Beside it hung another pouch, pulled taut with the weight of its contents I hadn’t noticed before.
An ornate F, embroidered in gold thread, looped in dramatic swirls.
He suddenly clutched it with all the tenacity one squeezes a grape for wine.
“Ye are made whole again.” His voice scratched like pits’ yarn, the following inhale sharp and pinched.
“Trifles such as man or woman matter not. Cast aside all memory of who thou art, who thou were. You are but one today.” His hand released the pouch and motioned to the arch above him, a brass candelabra dripping heavily with blackened wax from its peak.
“Thou art His children, and He demands of you what any doting parent would: obedience, respect, recompense. What blessings He gives, He hath the right to reclaim.” Descending the few steps he’d climbed, the hazy mist of incense parted for him like curtains. “Come.”
The walkway steepened, the templum’s windows growing sparse until only torchlight remained.
Shifting from Ovidian stone to packed dirt, the walls took on a cavernous shape, the corridor somehow morphing from walkway to tunnel the farther we marched.
I kept my eyes fixed on the acorn braid the whole way, counting its swings in time with the crunch of feet upon gravel.
Eight hundred and ninety-four, ninety-five, ninety-six.
Demetri, cherry wine, wet thighs. Ninety-seven, ninety-eight.
A slashed throat, iron pauldrons, a belly full of fire… Ninety-nine, nine hundr—
I lost count as our path crested, a small incline forcing us up rather than down. At its summit, over the heads of the laurels below, I glimpsed the flames.
Pyres.
The image of Demetri blistered and burning had my feet digging into the grit, refusing to budge until the collar at my neck forced me forward.
“Mercy,” I whispered, too softly for the paxiams or acolytes to hear. I imagined his beautiful skin charred to bone, almost feeling the ghost of it lick the inside of my flesh, too. “Oh gods…mercy, mercy.”
The flames’ purpose became clear as we descended, calming the almost unbearable wracking heat in my stomach.
They were braziers, not pyres—small infernos contained in bowls of bronze that framed our procession towards a wide, open pit.
Ahead, cast in firelight, loomed our Maker, our Father, the reason why the boons in my chest and the breath in my lungs would be among my last.
The Blood God.
Carved into the cavern wall, He rose above us, eyes hidden beneath the hood of His robe.
Hands cupped together, He cradled a pool of blood that spilled over to drip down His fingers and wrists, veining beneath the cuff of His sleeve.
We halted, Falstaff a burnt candlewick in the distance, the horns of his helm perfectly centred beneath the Blood God’s curved hands.
“‘Tis known, laurels, that no mortal may look upon the eyes of the Blood God.” His words echoed in the vastness, rebounding off the dirt and stone. “To do so would incite a wrath beyond the likes of anything we’ve witnessed before.” He pounded two small fists in the air.
“It would usher in the end of all things, bathing the world in an almighty blood plague. Thromarra would run red.” He slid his gloves down the expanse of his veil, the tinkle of metal reaching my ears, even from a hundred heads back.
“Thus, we druids hide our countenance. To spare ye…to spare the world from turning to stone.”
I had an urge to rip it off. Perhaps they wished to spare themselves, not us—hiding behind metal, shuttering their eyes to the horrors of it all. I glanced up at the Blood God, to His hood and I flared. Perhaps so did He.
Falstaff gestured to his side, further along the wall, where a smaller likeness of the Other had been carved from the stone and mud of the tunnel.
Unlike the Blood God, His face was shown, a small, knowing smile etched into it.
His arms were open, too, as if in welcome.
A great chain of coins hung around His neck, some the size of dinner plates, others no larger than a button.
I reached for my own attached to my sleeves.
“But He is not the only God thou shalt meet this night. When thy due of blood is rendered, the Other shalt weigh the fate of thy soul. Wilt ye burn in the pits?” The braziers roared beside us, the wall of heat striking my skin, no match for what was already crackling within me.
“Or will ye rest eternal in the hands of your Father?” He cupped his hands again, mirroring the Blood God, whose feet he stood between.
“Enter the Room of Rites, and I shalt, with mine own hands, absolve thee. Be not afraid; blessed paradise awaits.”
Through a sliver in the Blood God’s robes, Falstaff slipped from sight. The gap was small, rising from the ground in an uneven triangle, as if born from some old tremor in the earth rather than carved by men with metal and axes and hands.
As I passed beneath the unseen gaze of the Blood God, I lifted my chin as far as the collar allowed and searched for His eyes. He scowled down at me, His mouth gouged into a sneer. Look, I demanded. Look.
But He did not, and perhaps I would not have, either.