Chapter 6
There was no moment of transition. Just the shock and pain, and then I landed on my hands and knees on a stone floor.
I immediately pressed my hands to my neck, grabbing for the wound in my throat, because Wesha’s knife stroke should have ended my life in a second.
But while the fingers of my hand came away bloody, all I felt beneath was unbroken skin.
I slid my hands next to my chest, trying to discern whether my heart was still beating.
It trembled in a rapid staccato there, fueling my wheezy, panicked breaths.
I felt alive. I still felt the weight of my limbs, the chemical taste of fear on the back of my tongue, and the ever-present ache in my foot.
More importantly, I could still decide what to do. I had to figure out where I was.
The air was warm and dark, and all I sensed around me were vague shadows until I rasped the blessing of moonlight. When my orientation returned, I was in a windowless stone room crowded with wooden crates and stacked casks of wine.
It didn’t look how I expected the Underworld to look.
The epics weren’t entirely clear, but I expected vast underground caverns in which the dead wandered, dreaming snatches of their past lives and searching for the light said to lie at the end of the infinite maze.
But this room could be underground, I supposed.
I scraped myself up off the floor and blotted the blood at my neck.
I didn’t exactly appreciate the way in which she sent me here, but if this was closer to Taran than the Painted Tower was, I’d chant thanks to Wesha anyway.
My kithara was on the ground next to me, and I carefully put it away on a high shelf before examining the crates.
They were full of valuables—cloth, jewelry, spices, other temple offerings.
But there was nobody here, so I inevitably turned to the room’s only door, finding it locked and bolted.
I might have been able to finesse the lock with a hairpin, but after a moment of wracking my memory, I recalled that Taran had once taught us a blessing to open locked doors.
There’s a god of thieves? Drutalos had asked Taran as we ransacked the villa of a loyalist noble.
The Allmother made a god for every impulse of the mortal heart, Taran had replied, prying open the latch to the wine cellar. Certainly one for the urge to drink someone else’s wine.
I was cautious but not particularly worried when I swung the door open into a larger room. The dusk-souls on the beach hadn’t bothered with me, so I expected nothing worse in the Underworld.
Like the one I emerged from, the next room was cluttered with cargo, but there were windows high on one wall that revealed a starry night sky, and the chamber was lit by oil lamps in niches along the other walls.
At the opposite end of the room, two people were unpacking boxes, taking an inventory of the goods within.
Wait, not people.
“Shit,” I said, belatedly clapping my hand over my mouth. At the sound of my voice, two robed figures turned their heads in my direction. I froze in place, the instinct of a prey animal.
I never imagined before the war how hard my unconscious mind could work to keep me alive.
I never dreamed that my eyes would learn to pick red robes from black in the moonlight or that my mouth could shape the words for fire before one of Death’s own priests.
But I immediately knew this was worse than death-priests, even though the figures at the end of the room wore the same bronze lion masks and red hoods as death-priests.
I knew how humans moved. I knew the shapes of human bones and jaws and hands.
I was afraid long before my mind caught up and formed the word for what I saw.
Fallen.
Long ago, when the other gods lived among us, they often dallied with mortals, and those unions produced great heroes and brilliant priests.
The royal house had a drop of golden ichor in its bloodline traceable to Skyfather himself, though it was probably not safe to mention this to the queen anymore.
After the Great War, when the gods retreated from the mortal world, no more such children were born. With one disgusting exception.
Death was forbidden all other women by his marriage vows to Wesha, but he’d found a stomach-churning loophole. He lay down with snakes and beasts and other loathsome things—and the children that resulted were monsters.
Death’s Fallen had killed nearly as many people as his fires had.
“What, what’s that?” a monster hissed, scenting the air with a forked tongue. “What is it, a thief in our father’s storerooms? Come to steal from the offerings?” Clawed feet jutted beneath a robe that concealed legs bent in the wrong direction.
Its sibling slunk toward where I was backing up, even though there was no exit where I’d come from.
There was a door on the other side of the storeroom, but both Fallen were between it and me, and I wasn’t fast anymore.
The second Fallen looked more human, or at least more mammalian than the first, but its large, reflective golden eyes made my gut clench when they focused on me.
“It is a priestess,” this one cooed without slowing its approach. “Someone else’s priestess is in our father’s palace. A maiden-priest? One we are allowed?”
“I’m not a maiden-priest,” I protested, even though I didn’t expect my denial to be especially convincing, given that I was dressed like the high priestess of Wesha. I put my hand over the remaining knife on my belt, but there was no chance I’d ever defeat a Fallen in simple combat.
“A mortal girl,” the first said, wedge-shaped head tilting back and forth to study me like a snake before it struck. Closer and closer it crept, nails scraping the stone tile. “Smelled her blood, honey and copper.”
The second Fallen reached me, and I was glad the darkness of the room hid the full, awful planes of its face below the mask. I bit back a whimper as it seized me by the shoulder and leaned in, smelling my bloody neck with a canine huff of stinking breath.
“Smells like a priest,” it said through a mouth that wasn’t perfectly shaped for mortal speech. “Smell the vows on it. It reeks of priest vows. Whose priest?”
The first Fallen dropped to its belly on the floor, still flicking its tongue to taste the air.
That awful reptilian head neared the hem of my dress as though to dip beneath the fabric of the skirt, and I kicked at it despite its sibling’s grip on my arm.
It neatly evaded me, teeth gnashing in a serpentine chuckle.
“We will say it was a maiden-priest, even if it belonged to someone else,” the first Fallen suggested in a burst of inspiration.
It surged up to seize my other arm, and the two began to drag me out into the hall.
I took mincing steps in feigned compliance, planning my next move as metallic fear coated the back of my tongue.
I didn’t know whether they wanted to defile me, kill me, eat me, or perhaps some combination in the worst possible order, but Death’s spawn had all the strength of their animal mothers added to that of their immortal father, and struggling would be useless.
As soon as we reached the corridor, I began to sing as quietly as I could, praying in my head to Wesha that they wouldn’t recognize the melody.
I’d only get one chance for this trick; by the end of the rebellion, Death’s people had started to put wax in their ears or bang pots and pans to drown my song out.
It seemed that these Fallen had never heard the story of how Iona Night-Singer destroyed Death’s temples, because they didn’t make any attempt to shut me up.
It took many more verses than it would have for a mortal—they dragged me all the way into a room decorated like the inside of one of Death’s temples.
These were all the same: murals of fire on the walls, too many braziers, winged golden ornaments at the corners of the bloodstained altar.
Before we reached the altar though, I got the entire prayer for sleep out, and the Fallen collapsed in unison to the floor as Wesha shut down their nervous systems.
I wheezed in relief that it had worked, nearly falling along with them, but they wouldn’t be out long.
I still had one stone knife on my belt, but I wasn’t sure where the heart was located on a creature whose mother was some kind of adulterous garden lizard, and I wasn’t strong enough to decapitate them.
I couldn’t risk waking either of them up with a nonlethal stab wound.
I ran instead, praying my foot wouldn’t betray me again.
The corridor led to stairs, and the stairs led outside. Although it had been midwinter when I took the boat to the Gates, I emerged into a night rich with the scent of summer and snatches of distant song.
In front of me was a garden, lit up as though for a royal party, with lanterns on poles and garlands of flowers strung between them. Faraway music and the conversation of dozens of people drifted across the manicured lawn, but it was the night sky that stopped me at the top of the stairs.
There was moonlight, but no Moon. The world was lit all around the horizon by a silver glow, but the full Moon to light the night so brightly did not hang in the sky.
The stars were different too—bigger, brighter, and somehow individual, as though, if my eyesight were slightly better, I might pick out a form and shape behind each light.
This couldn’t be the Underworld. This wasn’t the mortal world either, not with that sky.
The Summerlands.
I was beyond the Gates of Dawn. In the land of the gods, forbidden to anyone except immortals and their chosen priests—a group that I still did not belong to, no matter what the Fallen thought.
Wesha had given the other gods entirely new reasons to want to kill me when she sent me to the Summerlands.
There was a howl of sheer rage from the storerooms below as one of the Fallen woke up.
I ducked into the shadows along the wall, running along the side of the building I’d escaped from.
I had to get away from the Fallen and the immortals both, somehow escape back to the Gates and explain to my goddess that, no, there must have been some miscommunication, what I actually wanted was to take one dead mortal and go home, no trip to the Summerlands required.
The stone wall ended at the elaborate brass gates to an empty garden.
All around me loomed the shapes of ornate villas.
Thinking that the Fallen might hesitate to follow me into the residence of some immortal, I sprinted away from the party toward the nearest building, a few hundred yards away.
It was a broad, low-slung structure of pale pink marble blocks and flower-capped columns supporting a green slate roof.
The imposing front door, decorated with white bursts of datura blossoms and golden stars, was providentially unlocked, so I slipped inside and shut it behind me.
With a closed door at my back, I stopped to catch my breath and rub the tremors out of my foot, which throbbed from the force of my flight.
This villa was palatial, its walls covered in bright murals depicting the deeds of Genna and the other Stoneborn, and every floor a gaudy mosaic or padded with silk carpets.
A king’s ransom in oil lamps turned the halls to midday.
Ordinarily, I would have stopped to gape and touch and scoff at the wealth that had been carelessly poured into such luxury, but I took a deep breath and set off in a random direction, panic urging me faster.
I’d find a place to hide for a few hours and find my bearings.
Each time I heard voices, I turned a corner or cut through darkened interior rooms. I quickly lost track of which way I’d come in, trying only to keep out of sight.
Eventually, my luck ran out. I spun through a doorway into a small interior courtyard with a decorative fountain and flowering almond trees reaching to the night sky above.
There was only one other door, on the opposite wall.
As I approached, it opened to emit a waft of humid, wine-scented air and male laughter.
Before I could fully turn around and retreat, two men staggered into me, taking all three of us to the ground.
We tumbled onto the mossy flagstones like empty bottles.
I tried to scoot away as soon as I landed, but my legs were trapped under a young man who was clearly an immortal—his pink skin gleamed like the inside of a clamshell, and the wet hair that clung to his forehead was the color of seaweed.
This godling had landed on his knees, and he made a vaguely disappointed grimace before flopping forward to vomit a bellyful of wine on the lawn.
I barely escaped the splash in my scramble to get away, but this backed me right into the drunken god’s companion, who’d rolled free on his stomach.
“That was my best wine,” this one scolded his heaving friend, but his richly amused voice locked the air in my chest. I stopped trying to get away, slowly turning my head as though if I looked too quickly, this reality would vanish.
The second man propped himself on an elbow and blinked brilliant, familiar green eyes at me.
“Oh. Are you lost, darling?” Taran asked.