Chapter 20 #2
Taran looked around the cavern, face drawn with disgust. There were a dozen branching passageways, both natural and constructed. Some of them were sealed with thick, crude doors of stone, while others led farther down.
“Wesha. It’s always about Wesha. Reaching her in her tower. Being stronger than her. And then going through the Gates, for Smenos. That must have been the bargain.”
“Can Death do that?”
“With the sacrifice of a thousand mortals and some of the Allmother’s lesser children? He could crack the Summerlands in two.”
Clenching my teeth against this nightmare, I drifted toward one of the stone doors.
It was locked, but my numb lips managed the blessing to open it.
Beyond it was a hallway, with dozens more stone doors set at regular intervals along the rock wall.
All of it fit together as though the stone had just grown into the shape.
There were small holes at the top—not large enough to be windows, but perhaps big enough for air.
When I put my eye against one I saw nothing but darkness, but it wasn’t quite silent within.
The door had no lock or handle. I pushed to no avail, then tried to get a grip on the stone. It didn’t budge.
“Taran, help me. I think there are people in here.”
He came just to the start of the hall with his hands curling against the sides of his neck in horror.
“We need to go,” he said from the doorway, voice cool. “When the Allmother finds out about this, we shouldn’t be here.”
“Didn’t you hear me? This is some kind of prison. They haven’t sacrificed everyone yet.”
The remaining priests were being stored here the way a spider caches a fly in a corner of its web to consume at its leisure. I was certain of it—the pens that would have held goats and sheep in Death’s temples were full of Smenos’s priests and retainers.
“If Death finds out we’ve seen this, he can’t afford to let us live. We’ve already been down here too long.”
“We can’t just leave them,” I said, whirling reproachfully on Taran.
“There could be hundreds of doors in here. We don’t have time. Someone will notice we’re missing, Death will come down here to finish the work, and then we’ll be two more bloodstains on that altar.”
He wasn’t saying he couldn’t do it. He was saying he wouldn’t.
“You wouldn’t leave Smenos’s priests down here to die. To be—to be fuel for Death. This is worse than what caused the rebellion! That was one child!”
I said he wouldn’t because I wanted to be right about Taran, not because I was certain I was.
“They’re not my priests,” Taran said, eyes going hard. “Don’t make me carry you out of here.”
“You won’t. You wouldn’t,” I said, desperate to believe that.
Taran’s response was to grab my arm and bend his legs as though ready to toss me over his shoulder.
I let my knees give out, falling on them despite his attempt to hold me up.
“Please,” I whispered. “Please don’t leave them. Don’t be someone who would leave them.”
Taran made a despairing noise, but he let me go and turned back to the first door. He put his hands on it and concentrated until his fingers sank into the stone like bread dough. Then he braced his legs and pulled.
Sweat beaded on his neck from effort as it slid open, just a crack.
As soon as the stone was unsealed, a terrible wave of cries wafted out.
Dozens of voices, mortal and immortal, a chorus of hopelessness.
Fingers and claws waved frantically through the crack without the power to slide the door open farther.
Taran stopped, no doubt realizing that so many people could never escape through Smenos’s palace unnoticed. His expression went haunted and trapped, and he looked again at the exit.
“I can’t do it,” he said, voice ragged. “I’m sorry. I’ll tell everyone what we saw—Genna, Diopater—”
They wouldn’t help. The most Genna had done was send Taran, even when it was all the gods’ power at risk.
“Please help them,” I begged again. I only had one card to play. “I’ll do—I’ll do whatever you want. What do you want? I’ll be your priestess. Take whatever vows you want. I’ll obey you.”
Anything would be better than leaving Smenos’s priests to die down here in the dark.
Taran’s jaw, if anything, went more taut. “You can’t offer me that! After what you saw tonight? You know what I could make you do if you promised to obey me.”
I hit the stone floor with the sides of my fists. “These are innocent priests, people just like me. They’re being used for meat. What do you want? I’ll do it.”
“I could have you chained naked in my bed for the next three hundred years. Or I could parcel your body and soul out to the other Stoneborn. Humiliate you in ways you can’t even imagine yet,” he shouted, some echo of forgotten torture bleeding into his voice.
“Is that what you’re asking for when you keep asking me to be your priestess?” My heart was so brittle it felt as though it would crack and stop.
His face pulled into a stiff mask of hurt at my words. “What have I ever done to you, except keep you safe and offer you everything I have? Why do you treat me like a monster?”
Because I don’t want you to be one, even if the rest of them are.
I didn’t answer out loud. I grabbed Taran’s tunic and held on to it, because there wasn’t a single blessing I knew that could help us now. He had to do it.
He trembled as though wavering on the edge of a pit, but finally ducked his head and rubbed his pale cheeks.
“Fine,” he said softly. “I’ll do what I can to get them out. And we’ll discuss later what you owe me, if we survive. Get ready to run.”
Taran snatched my knife off my belt and knelt down. Before I could ask questions, he cut a swift line across his palm, just enough to make blood well up in a line of red-streaked gold, then pressed his bloody hand to the stone floor.
We waited a minute together with my breath still whistling loudly from grief, but nothing happened.
Taran sighed in frustration and sat back on his heels. With an unhappy twist to his lips, he considered the wound in his palm, which was already starting to scab. “Damn you, Wesha,” he said softly. Then he closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and lifted the knife again.
This time he slit his wrist.
I cried out and dove for him, trying to close my fingers over the vein he’d sliced open. All my training said that was a fatal wound. His lifeblood was scorching against my hand as I stumbled into the first lines of Genna’s blessing to heal it.
Taran jerked back as though surprised that I cared, but his expression softened for only a heartbeat.
“Don’t think you’ll be rid of me so quickly. This shouldn’t take all my blood.”
When I reluctantly released him, he lowered his wrist to the floor and shook it to let blood drip onto the stone in a pool. This time, in only seconds, there was a response. A faraway rumble.
Taran stood up, his other hand clutching at his wrist while I tried to locate the source of the noise.
“Get out of here. Run. I’ll make sure the bird makes it.”
I wasn’t leaving him either, and I spread my feet to balance as the floors and walls began to vibrate and creak.
A few moments later, from far down the hallway, a large lump appeared in the stone floor, for all the world like a cat trapped under the bedcovers. It spun back and forth, searching, lifting the stone floor as easily as cotton gauze.
When it was near the spot where Taran’s blood had spilled, the stones split and re-formed.
Slowly, they shaped themselves into features.
A nose jutting out of granite. An eye with a rim of stalactites and an onyx pupil.
Enormous lips made of rose quartz geodes, the entire face the size of a horse cart.
Taran clenched his jaw as the face solidified.
“Who?” A creaky, inhuman voice issued from between the stone lips. “Who hurt my babies?”
Taran frantically gestured at me to go, but I hesitated a few feet behind him.
“Good evening, Grandmother. Several of the Stoneborn have broken your laws and sacrificed your children,” he announced, muscles coiling in anticipation.
“Grandmother…?” the stone lips muttered. The tone was distant, sleepy, as though the stone giant had just woken from a very deep slumber.
Incrementally, the face turned so that the roiling eye could focus on Taran. The great black pupil constricted as it found him, and the stone lips spread into a rictus of anger, one which opened in a dark, ragged tunnel down to the center of the earth. Abruptly, the mouth began to shriek.
“You! How dare you call me grandmother, you murderous little shit.”
Taran winced and took a few unsteady paces back as the stone face continued to scream invective at him.
“You’re the worst thing my children ever brought into this world! Oh, they should have let me punish you. They should have let me eat you up!”
Much faster than the face had drifted up the hall, a wave of stone flew toward Taran, forming out of nothing but moving with enough force to splatter him against the side of the tunnel.
Taran dodged to the side, but his movements were sluggish from blood loss, and he crashed into the opposite wall and bounced off with a painful thud. I ran to pull him upright as the ground shook hard enough to rattle my bones.
“Run,” he gasped again, and I dearly wanted to, but I gripped his arm to get him steady on his feet.
The shrieking continued, because it seemed that the Allmother was still holding a grudge, three hundred years later, over Taran’s theft of the stone blades that could kill immortals.
Or she knew more about the circumstances of Death’s last defeat than Taran did now.
“I should have known it would be you,” the Mountain’s voice moaned and burbled. “What have you done now?”
“I haven’t done anything this time,” Taran called, grabbing my wrist and scrambling backwards, toward the large cavern. “Come here and see what Napeth has done to your children.”
“Get my poor son’s name from your mouth,” the Allmother sobbed, eye searching again for Taran as the ground violently wobbled. “I don’t claim you. Thief! Liar! Murderer!”
“You’re still my grandmother,” he yelled, pulling me away from her blindly snapping mouth. “So at least you should see where immortal blood was spilled!”
We stumbled together back into the large cavern, where the lava pool was now bubbling over and beginning to spread. Sweat dripped into my eyes, nearly obscuring my vision as the form of a giant woman rose from the middle of the pool.
She was made of stone mortared together with lines of solid gold, but her shape was maternal and terrible.
Wide hips and strong arms, skin patched in granite and basalt and ore, body taller than Wesha had been in her tower.
The Allmother, the first of the gods, the Mountain.
The ultimate ancestor of every immortal being.
Her stone features glared at Taran like she planned to break him into pieces, but her attention was inexorably drawn by the fetid stink of the altar.
She took one step toward it, two, the ground vibrating as she moved.
When she reached it, she pressed her barrel-sized hands to the altar of bones, fingers digging for the gold blood trapped there, then sampling it with senses I lacked.
Recklessly, she pulled the altar apart, snapping femurs like blades of grass until her hands were spread on the gold that had pooled at the very base, prevented from falling onto the stone by the thick leather hides spread beneath it.
“Who?” she hissed again. “Who killed them? Was it you again, you viper?”
“Death,” Taran said, edging backward with me. “With the Shipwright and the Huntress. He sacrificed your children here, just for more power. Mortals, immortals, some still trapped here, inside your stone—”
She didn’t care to listen to the rest of the explanation. The Allmother dug her jagged fingers into the altar, then tipped her head back as though gathering breath for a scream.
“Time to go,” Taran breathed again, pushing at me as the stone goddess’s form pulsed.
I blinked dust from my vision as the Allmother’s temporary form dissolved, flowing into the ground. A mouth formed again in the ground, five times larger than before, and the Mountain keened.
The scream echoed through my skull, pounding against my eardrums. My teeth vibrated in my clenched jaw, almost hard enough to chip.
I couldn’t think through the noise, couldn’t even breathe through it.
I was only distantly aware of the howls of the imprisoned sacrifices joining the din as their cell doors popped open, and of Taran grabbing my wrist to pull me toward the tunnel to the surface.