Chapter 37
She had to get close enough to the magpie to touch her.
Poison her with the weapon the Queen of Serpents had infused into her skin.
Once she was dead, the acolytes of the Bloody Claw would scatter.
Elver was almost sure of it. Maura just needed to believe she had given up; then she might let her guard down.
‘Stand in the pool,’ Maura snapped. ‘It is the Bloody Claw’s sacred place. In here, he is the strongest of all the gods.’
Elver took a few steps towards the shallow pool that waited in the centre of the chamber. The water there was shifting and strange; sometimes it looked like blood, and other times it looked like lake water, green and deep and silent. Maura stood at the edge, already murmuring magpie words.
Lucian had slumped in Dalesh’s arms, the blood loss finally catching up with him, and she considered what Maura had said.
The handsome boy with the hazel eyes who had been with Dalesh that day had had no sympathy in his eyes when he had picked her from among the orphans; there had only been a certain sharp satisfaction, an eagerness for power.
It would be easy to hate him. Except that she had seen his desperation and his fury.
She had seen, to some small degree, what Maura had done to him—not just casting him from his body, but moulding him to be a weapon, a tool, a thing to be used and discarded.
She knew it wasn’t the sort of thing that was easy to recover from.
And then, as she watched, awareness flowed back into the boy’s body and it was Artair slumped there instead.
He sat up, surprising Dalesh, who pressed the blade back towards his throat.
‘Don’t move,’ she hissed.
‘Elver!’ She saw the confusion and pain surface on his face as he took in what was happening around them, and somehow that was the worst of it. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She glanced back at Maura, to see if the mage was taking this in. ‘Look after the cub for me. Take him back to the Jih Forest. I think I… I’m glad I met you, Artair.’
‘What’s happening?’
‘That’s enough,’ Maura said sharply. ‘Get into that pool, girl. The time has come. I have promised the Bloody Claw the rarest and most delicious of meals, and He is going to grace us with His presence. Prepare yourself.’
Elver stepped into the pool. It was blood, she thought, but blood that wanted to be other things, stranger things.
She frowned at it. Around her, the room was growing warmer, the lamps glowing a deeper, darker red, and there was an overpowering scent: of raw flesh, of fetid pelt, of animal sweat.
A dark shadow was growing, a looming shape that stood on the far side of the pool.
She was ankle-deep in blood, and in its still reflection she could see things that shouldn’t be there: the trees of the Jih Forest, the lazy trickle of insects through the air, a sky scudded with clouds.
It was as if she stood by her own lake, looking at its reflection.
You are close, my queen , she thought. But are you close enough? Maura had wanted to draw her here for a reason, and she suspected it was because in this place the Queen of Serpents was greatly weakened.
There was a cry from Sunay, drawing Elver’s attention away from the pool. Maura lifted her arms in welcome.
‘My lord!’ she cried. ‘I bring you the child of another god, one touched and blessed by the queen of monsters, the Queen of Serpents. Yours to devour.’
Reluctantly, Elver lifted her head to look at what had appeared in the pool with her.
It did look like a lion, a lion as tall as the oldest oak and as wide as a house, with a mane that cascaded around its proud head and eyes that burned like twin, green stars; but instead of being covered in golden fur it was a raw and bloody thing, made of twisted flesh and sinew.
She had the sudden, awful idea that each piece of the Bloody Claw was made from the blood and flesh of everyone and everything that had ever been sacrificed to him.
He takes us and makes us part of himself, adding to his own power , she thought.
No wonder Maura wants to feed me to him.
‘Maura means to kill you!’ This was from Artair, who received a shove from Dalesh in payment.
‘Mother Maura is my most dedicated, my most blood-soaked mage,’ rumbled the Bloody Claw. His voice was thick and deep, a clotted rumble. ‘The one mage in all of Tlevrae who ripped her allegiance from a lesser god to be in my service. Her loyalty is absolute.’
‘It is my honour to serve,’ said Maura, bowing her head. The mage came forward, stepping into the pool of blood. She produced a long, serrated knife from somewhere in the folds of her dress. Elver felt the woman bury hard fingers in her hair, pulling her head back to expose her throat.
‘That’s it, accept your fate,’ Maura murmured into her ear. ‘Be a good girl and do as Mother says.’
Elver waited for a heartbeat, waited for the knife to appear in the corner of her vision. She saw Maura’s hand clasped around the handle, the freckles on the backs of her fingers.
‘My lord, devour this gift and grant me a boon!’
The point of the knife touched the skin under her jaw.
Elver grabbed Maura’s wrist, the one part of her arm not covered by the sleeves of her dress, and the woman gave a single high-pitched shriek, yanking herself away so that Elver lost her grip.
She stumbled in the pool of blood, scrambling to get another purchase on the woman, but Maura was already summoning more magic, her free hand shaking slightly as she drew shapes in the air.
The skin around her wrist was the colour of a sweet red apple.
‘ Spiteful little snake. ’
Ropes of fire appeared out of nowhere, looping around Elver’s body as quickly and as tightly as a snare. She fell into the pool, unable to move her arms or her legs.
‘Have it your way,’ Maura said, shaking her wounded hand. ‘My lord can eat you alive instead.’
Elver lifted her eyes to the god that towered over her.
She could see his jaws opening, revealing yellowed fangs of bone and gristle, each as big as she was tall.
She tried to bring the Jih Forest to mind, its cool breezes and the extraordinary creatures that lived there; in particular, she thought of the serpent’s lake, the one where the Queen of Serpents would come to visit her.
This isn’t blood I’m lying in , she thought, this is lake water, fresh and green and ready to welcome me.
I am always home, because I carry it with me.
With some difficulty, she turned her head back to face Maura. ‘Let them go. That was the deal.’
‘The deal, poison child, was that you went to your fate willingly.’ Maura grinned. ‘But you just had to lash out, didn’t you? Like the little snake you are.’
Elver swallowed, and looked up at the lion god.
‘I hope I stick in your throat,’ she said.
Artair watched, helpless, as the Bloody Claw lowered his head and snapped Elver up in one bite. His knees gave way and he slumped to the floor.
‘No.’
He could feel Lucian close and knew that his dark spirit—except dark spirit wasn’t what he was, he knew that now—had seen what had happened somehow, had dreamed it or tasted Artair’s own horror. We’ve lost her , he thought. After all this, she’s gone.
The Bloody Claw himself was shaking out his mane in apparent satisfaction.
‘A fine meal,’ he said. ‘A rare flavour indeed. I can taste the fury of the Serpent Queen, notes of curtailed potential. Except…’
Mother Maura lifted her head, her eyes hooded. Her shoulders were rising and falling quickly.
‘Hm. Perhaps I do not feel…’
There was a flash of orange light, and the god Tisk appeared in his handsome human form. He looked up at the Bloody Claw, shaking his head.
‘You always were an old idiot,’ he said mildly.
‘No real interest in humans beyond what they could feed you, when I could have told you they’re full of so many interesting things, so many complications and complexities.
Learn how to eat those and you’ll never be hungry again.
’ Tisk grinned. ‘That’s certainly what I’ve found, anyway.
And I strongly suspect you should have listened to the mortals today. ’
The effect of Tisk’s appearance on Maura was electric. The colour had drained from her face, and her lips were drawn back from her teeth as though she were ready to bite him to pieces. Meanwhile, the Bloody Claw was lowering his body to the floor, shaking his head as though he had a bee in his ear.
‘You!’ screamed Maura, jabbing a finger at Tisk. ‘You dare show your face to me again?’
‘A fine way to talk to a god,’ said Tisk.
In speaking he seemed to become larger, more dangerous: rather than a fox or a man, he was something else, something much older, with sharper edges.
He nodded to Sunay, whose eyes were very wide.
‘Do you hear this, Sunay? Are you not going to defend my honour?’
‘You’ve always been cheerfully dishonourable, my lord,’ she said in a very small voice. ‘It’s one of the things I like best about you.’
Tisk chuckled at that. ‘It’s you, Maura, who are the dishonourable one. I gave you my blessings at birth, just like Sunay here, but you threw them away. Pledged yourself to the big idiot cat. How am I supposed to take that as anything other than an insult?’
‘ You failed me. ’ Tears were streaming from Maura’s eyes and there were patches of hectic colour on her cheeks and lips.
‘I gave you everything I had, everything I could, and you wouldn’t bring them back .
None of you could.’ She took several deep ragged breaths.
‘All of you, useless. So I must become my own god.’
‘I do not feel… I feel wrong, somehow.’ The giant lion of flesh had lowered his head to the pool and yellowish drool was running from between his jaws. Tisk continued as though he hadn’t spoken.