Chapter 18
The crafter-priest who served the dinner was dead, although I didn’t see a body anywhere.
He had the white beard of an old man and the brown smock and gold amulets of a master artisan, but his nearly transparent outline gave off the same foxfire glow as the dusk-souls I’d seen on Wesha’s beach, reflecting on the copper-sheathed walls of the Shipwright’s great hall.
It was a fortune in metal, beautifully wrought with bas-reliefs of his great works, but all I could think as the dead priest pulled out chairs and poured wine was that it smelled like old, rotting blood.
The expression on the dusk-soul’s features didn’t vary from abject horror, but his hands were by turns smooth and scarred from a lifetime spent fashioning little treasures. These jeweler’s hands trembled under Death’s control, but the Shipwright, his patron in life, did not spare him a glance.
This spectacle, the enslavement of the dead—this was Death’s oldest power, and only Taran looked even a little sickened by the display of it.
The souls of the dead rose from their bodies after three dawns, and if they were not laid in running water to journey to the Sea of Dreams, dusk-souls stalked single-mindedly toward the same destination.
It was bad luck to even see one, and whatever they touched was cursed.
Grass shriveled under their feet and animals fled from the sight of them.
During the rebellion, we did our best to attend to the dead after every battle, but we always missed a few, and the distant flare of green figures walking to the sea haunted many of my night watches.
When the dead crafter-priest placed a stone bench for me a short distance behind Taran’s chair, I tried to catch his eye.
What happened to you? I mouthed at him, but he didn’t see me. All he could see was his task and his own death, and when the first course was set on the table, he left the empty banquet hall.
There were only four chairs around the single table for five gods, and Wirrea instead sprawled across Death’s lap, her legs spread to offer Taran a view up her short, rabbit-fur tunic.
She’d made a joke about the lack of seating—by the end of dinner Marit Waverider will be under the table anyway, and Taran ab Genna bent over it—and I was ready to leave then, but Taran had laughed and looked through her like what she said didn’t matter.
It was Death he looked at, and he didn’t let his smile slip when he was introduced to the god he’d killed.
Seeing the two of them together, I had a dizzying moment of déjà vu.
Some memory or understanding that my mind had flinched away from, hidden with Taran’s death.
My gut churned—this had been a mistake. I didn’t want to be here.
I didn’t want Death to look at Taran and smile back.
Death was smaller than the two times I’d seen him before, no taller than Taran.
There was no more golden armor or bronze lion mask, so I saw him plainly, but I could never have smiled at him.
His form was a warped reflection of Taran’s immortal beauty: very similar in the lines, nearly painful in its perfection, but obscuring the horror of the soul beneath.
My eyes couldn’t quite focus on his bright hair and eyes—white and blue, like heated metal—but it was his stillness that unsettled me. He was still like a candle flame, still like a stone, and this was not the stillness of a living being.
Taran had barely passed for human, and none of the other Stoneborn would, but the way Death moved and spoke turned my stomach when even Marit’s swirling irises and always-wet hair did not.
What had Wesha ever seen in him? His power?
Wondering whether he was handsome was like wondering whether a house fire was handsome.
He and Taran might both have admirable cheekbones, but I didn’t see how someone could ever look at Death and see anything but a hungry monster whose appetites were as cold as his fires were hot.
Still, Taran had rallied his effortless appeal and taken his seat with good manners intact.
I did appreciate the things Taran’s winning smile had done for me over the years, but I thought it was the wrong weapon for the battle ahead.
Arbalests, Taran. Defensive earthworks. A couple of acolytes of Skyfather, ready with the lightning bolts. That is how we greet Death, not smiles and small talk.
It was still easy for me to speak to the Taran who existed only in my head, the one who would have helped me barricade the doors, and not the one who looked over his shoulder with a raised eyebrow, wordlessly instructing me to begin the night’s entertainment.
Death paid me no notice when I started to play on the kithara, but I doubted he could hear over Smenos’s wailing.
It was rapidly apparent that the crafter god was just as unbalanced as Marit had been.
He rose from his chair without warning, his empty hands clasping for nothing.
When Marit put a glass of wine in his hand, he clutched it to his chest like a toy and pointed to the vacant hall, begging his guests to explain the grimy copper bas-reliefs of his past accomplishments.
“That marble bridge! I must have taught the mortals how to lay the keystone. And do you see, do you see the dome in the ceiling—there! Only my priests ever learned the formula for the arch. And now I’ve forgotten. I can’t even think of it. I don’t know it!”
As he ranted, bits of the ceiling began to rain down on us. Chunks of plaster, half a brick. When a flake of plaster landed in her glass, Wirrea dumped her wine on the floor and refilled it, and Taran brushed dust out of his dark hair.
I looked anxiously at the ceiling beams, which flexed with each of Smenos’s shouts about his lost art.
I’d already survived one building collapse, and it was an experience I wasn’t eager to repeat, but Taran and Death seemed locked in a silent competition for who could pay the least attention to the crumbling hall around us or the growing puddle under Marit’s chair as the sea god white-knuckled his chair arms.
I mentally begged him to turn around, so that I could indicate that I’d changed my mind.
Time to go, Taran. Make that excuse and get us out of here.
But he sat back and dangled his silver goblet from the tips of his fingers, smiling at the god of the Underworld and picking at the first course of quail livers on toast. Wirrea solicitously asked Taran for news from the City as the dead crafter-priest returned to heap live coals on the grill built into the center of the table for the meat course.
The dusk-soul handled the coals and the raw steaks with his bare hands, and both sizzled from the contact, as did his tears when they hit the vibrating flagstones.
Smenos nearly walked into the dusk-soul as he wove around his dining hall, only to recoil with a shriek as his wrist brushed the luminescent shoulder of his dead priest.
The other Stoneborn studiously ignored the noise, and Death complimented the wine.
“You always liked this one. It was served at your wedding,” Wirrea replied.
When I saw a crack begin to snake through one of the pillars in the corner of the room, I decided I wasn’t willing to die in defense of good manners.
There was a sappy, popular ballad written with the same time signature and key progressions as the blessing of Wesha that we used for light sedation—for tooth extractions and minor procedures.
The coincidence was an in-joke among maiden-priests.
When we were little children, the other acolytes of Wesha and I used to giggle about what love did to people, dramatically swooning and drooling through pretend declarations of devotion.
Did I dare? Would anyone at the table recognize either melody?
Feigning nonchalance but sweating into the waistband of my dress, I plucked out the notes of Wesha’s blessing on my instrument and began to sing. I firmed my diaphragm and trilled the opening lines of the overwrought ballad about star-crossed lovers.
For just a moment, Taran’s attention broke from the blue-white stare of the god he’d killed for me, but I didn’t dare acknowledge that he’d caught on.
I wasn’t even sure I would be able to call Wesha’s power without singing the words, no matter how precise I was with the melody, but seconds later, it answered.
I hoped to invoke only a drop of it, enough to settle Smenos and avoid a second roof collapsing over my head, but once I felt it begin to resonate with my voice and course through the room, I had to pour my entire concentration into the song or risk being found out.
Wesha was imprisoned on the other side of the Mountain, but her power was here, swirling around that of four other Stoneborn like the first rivulets of rain down a dry streambed. Stronger than I would have expected, when all her priests were dead.
I didn’t dare stop after it took hold, or it would be obvious what I’d done, so I searched my memory for the other songs I would have performed at a concert for the brokenhearted and moved seamlessly into the next piece, hoping that any gods affected would chalk up their stupor to the force of the music.
Slowly, over the next three songs, I released Wesha’s blessing.
“You’re a wonderful singer, Iona,” Marit said dreamily. “I think I’m very fond of music.”
Taran’s reaction to my little experiment hadn’t been a given either, but when the other gods broke into applause and Smenos absentmindedly took his chair again, still clapping, I saw him let out a long breath before shooting me a chiding look.
Thank you, nightingale, that was a close one, I imagined my love saying, because he would never have expected me to sit like a painted figurine while the ceiling came down.
“Breathtaking,” Death agreed, tipping a goblet toward me in appreciation. “Where did you get her, son of Genna?”