Chapter 21
The stone of the cavern roiled like the gut of a living creature, making every step unsteady.
My foot was in agony within a few moments, but I was afraid that if I stopped, I’d fall, and if I fell I’d never get up again.
There was the roar of the Allmother, the thunderous noise of rock shifting, and the screams of the captives disorienting me, but there was also Taran’s grip on my arm as my lodestar.
He was flagging as badly as I was, immortal strength failing after all he’d suffered today, and he was running on bare feet across the hot, jagged rock of the tunnel, but he somehow kept us up and moving.
Immortals began to pass us in their desperate escape.
Abandoning all pretense of human form, they crowded around us and sped upward on wings, hooves, and clawed feet, adding to the noise as the Mountain convulsed in the Allmother’s fury.
I knew what panic could do to the gentlest soul, so I expected no aid from anyone else fleeing the altar of bone if we stumbled during the long, treacherous climb.
We reached the mouth of the tunnel under an unexpected beam of light from the rooms ahead of us. As we followed the fleeing crowd, I tipped my head back and saw the night sky where there should have been the ornate, coffered ceilings we’d passed on the way in.
The Allmother had lifted the entire top of the Mountain off Smenos’s palace, and now she rummaged within, looking for her disobedient children.
I pulled on Taran’s arm when he would have plunged ahead.
“We should climb out!” I yelled over the din, pointing behind us. Everywhere things were crashing to the floor—shelves, cupboards, the walls.
“I have to find Marit,” he insisted, face drawn. “He won’t understand what’s going on.”
I would have said that Marit was better able to take care of himself than the two of us, but as I was the one who’d gotten us into this disaster, I nodded and ducked my head as we pushed on.
The former crafter-priests and immortal retainers knew the layout of the palace and were taking the most direct way out, but caution made me tug Taran into a side passageway of the confusing warren.
While we were navigating a series of trophy rooms filled with dusty, ancient beasts, I heard distant chanting that would have made me sit up and pay attention if I’d been in a months-long coma.
“Death-priests,” I hissed, jerking Taran into an alcove long enough to weave Lixnea’s darkness around us.
I should have cleared the other guest rooms before looking for Taran; Death would never have come here without an entourage, and now he’d ordered his priests to dispatch the beings he’d meant to sacrifice.
The final notes of the prayer for a curtain of fire were met with howls of pain ripped from countless throats, echoing through the wrecked halls.
“He can’t possibly think he’ll be able to stop news of this from getting out.”
Taran was still wild-eyed with surprise, but none of this had felt the least bit surprising to me from the moment I’d heard Death was here. This was what Death did.
“He killed every last maiden-priest,” I said, lifting Taran’s knife off his belt and pushing it against his slack palm. Death was entirely capable of eliminating every witness to this outrage, and I didn’t doubt that was what he intended.
Soon more screams ricocheted through the building as death-priests found the first line of crafter-priests and tried to prevent them from escaping by conjuring the fire god’s flame.
The shouts widened, spread, as combat was joined throughout the palace, and the tempo of the shaking overhead quickened in response.
Despite everything, or perhaps because of everything, a deep clarity had settled over me, stopped my hand from shaking where it held my own knife.
It made me quick to act, almost happy to do it, even though Taran was showing signs of shock from the trauma.
Part of me was back in Ereban two years ago, and the muddy hillside was collapsing around the city, but Taran and I had survived that day and we were going to survive this one.
Wrapped in Lixnea’s darkness, we wove back to the guest wing, obscured from the hunt-priests and death-priests who were assembling barricades while the much more numerous crafter-priests and lesser immortals battered them down with the sheer weight and force of their bodies.
Despite the holes in the roof, smoke was beginning to fill the corridors—we had only minutes left to make it out before it would overwhelm us.
But I knew what to do in a fire. I knew to stay low and follow the smoke out. I knew how to kill death-priests under the choking darkness they’d created. I knew Taran’s shape at my side. I knew how to do this better than anything else I’d done since following Taran to the Summerlands.
We found Marit passed out in a pool of mingled wine and seawater, insensible to the wreckage already strewing his room and the thunder of the battle outside.
“Come on, wake up.” Taran patted Marit’s cheeks frantically, then lifted the other god’s arm as though preparing to drape him across his back.
I looked around for something we could use as a sledge—I wasn’t certain Taran could carry the other man in his state—but the sea god jolted awake in midair.
“What is—is it time to go?” Marit yawned, making a face like a sleepy kitten.
“Yes, right now. We’ve worn out our welcome,” Taran informed him while I peered out the narrow slit of the window.
The courtyard was full of rubble and flame, but the guest wing was mostly intact, and so were the stables. Unfortunately, between us and the mouth of the valley were the workshops, where my own fire had spread among the wreckage caused by the Allmother’s battering arms on top of the Mountain.
When I craned my neck in the other direction, I spotted the Huntress and a trio of hunt-priests, who’d taken a position on the roof of one of the intact buildings so as to pick off people fleeing down the front steps.
Her arrows must have been tipped in gleaming stone, because in the few moments I watched, I saw a slender being whose body was covered in segmented copper plates fall with a bolt in their throat and dissolve like a drop of honey in wine, leaving only a puddle of gold ichor on the stone.
Some people were making it past the Huntress though. She couldn’t catch everyone.
“When we come out of the front entrance, we need to hug the wall on the left and head straight for the stables,” I told Taran urgently. “I can cover us on the way there, but when we ride out, we’ll be totally exposed.”
Taran nodded gravely, and my heart twisted to see him that serious. The last time he looked at me like that, he’d died.
“It is not very polite to leave without saying farewell to our hosts, and…” Marit began to say, but he stopped and turned in the direction of the Mountain, hearing something in the din that my mortal ears couldn’t discern. His eyes widened. “Mother?”
“Yes, she’s here, and she’s still not happy with me either,” Taran muttered, yanking on Marit’s arm to pull him out of the room after us.
Despite what I’d said, I paused as soon as we were outside, Lixnea’s shroud on my lips, just to gape at the smoke and rubble that had replaced the Shipwright’s domain. The earth was convulsing and shaking with an endless earthquake, and above us—
I nearly died as a boulder fell from the sky and crashed against the spot where I’d been standing before Taran tackled me to the side.
“Keep moving!” he yelled, hauling me back to my feet before the shards of rock had finished vibrating on the ground.
Under the cover of the Moon’s darkness, the three of us sprinted toward the stable, and this last bit of effort was what made my foot give up for the day.
I collapsed in the open door by the hayloft, then twisted on the floor to stare up at the battle above Smenos’s palace.
The Mountain behind us was alive. I couldn’t separate the Allmother’s shape from the jagged peaks anymore. Her angry, grasping arms reached out as columns of rock, smashing the Shipwright’s holdings into smaller, smoking pieces.
“Napeth! Napeth, I’m here. Where are you?
” she howled in a voice like a hurricane, blindly patting through the rubble in search of her youngest son.
As I watched, one arm snatched up a death-priest squirming in his red robes and dragged him beneath the ground.
When her stone hand reemerged, he was gone without a trace.
But Napeth had not acquiesced to her punishment, nor had the Shipwright and his wife. They fought back in the rubble in their primeval forms, dwarfed by the size of the Mountain but still enormous and deadly.
We of the Maiden’s cult rarely sang the songs that described the oldest shapes of our gods, and we might have said that the language these songs were composed in was now archaic and difficult to understand.
The truth was that we did not like to remember that our gods only sometimes took the shapes of men.
More and more often as centuries passed and as more of the world was cultivated and turned to man’s will did our gods reflect our own nature, but there was still much of the world that did not bow to our hands, and that history was flesh in the nightmares that brawled in the flames.
The Huntress’s shining green-golden eyes were lanterns in the smoke as she brought down her targets with stone-tipped arrows. The Shipwright was a hulking machine of iron and timber, tossing boulders at the lesser immortals who scattered before him. And Death—
All my life, I had seen depictions of the winged lion in the stonework of his altars. Artists had made the creature beautiful when they rendered him in gold leaf and carnelian. His form used to decorate the backs of coins, a symbol of strength before the war.