Chapter 28 #2
“You promised! To get me out of here! And you’ve had weeks to get to the Painted Tower. What are you doing here, you lazy drudge?”
“Did you not notice that the City is under attack?”
She whistled a shrill dismissal. “Yes! Wesha’s barely holding the Gates closed, and this entire place is about to fall apart. You were supposed to get the boy and go. Where is he?”
I grimaced, feeling my breath hitch as if it would like to become a sob instead. An unworthy part of me wished I’d done just that and didn’t know this was happening.
“Probably waking up alone right about now—he tried to stop me from coming to help.”
“Of course he did. With the Allmother gone—”
“Did you see what happened? Is she really dead?”
The little bird postured with one beady eye like she wasn’t going to answer, but she hopped between me and the trail of scorched earth.
“I heard the fight go on for weeks, Napeth and the Mountain. Today he cracked the ground open to escape, and the Mountain is quiet. She’s either dead or asleep or…
I don’t know. It’s never happened before.
If she’s not there to remake us, who even knows whether we’re still immortal? We could die, really die!”
Awi certainly meant herself and Taran, not Death, but that was where my mind immediately went. If I took my little knife and went after the winged lion in the distance, might I end things for good this time if I got in one lucky blow?
Worth a try, my despairing fury crooned.
Anger could provide enough light and heat to keep a wounded soul alive. I knew that from experience. It wasn’t hope or righteousness that had fueled me when I started the rebellion against Death. I’d relied on anger, and I welcomed it back into the furnace of my heart now.
“I’ll go find out,” I said, a tingling sense of resolve stilling the shake of my limbs. I almost smiled, but the bird goddess realized my plan and panicked.
“What! No, you stupid little polecat, you’re just going to leave me, all these priests, that wretched boy you came all this way for?”
“Taran wouldn’t come,” I repeated bitterly.
“So you’re just going to ditch him?” she shrieked. “You’re just as unforgiving as he is—a hateful, stupid girl, the worst priest I’ve ever had.”
“I’m not your priestess. I have one little vow to you, and if I happen to live past sticking a dagger into Death’s black heart, it should be very easy to convince Wesha to let you through the Gates.”
I could hardly rush after Death while being heckled by a sparrow, so I was forced to try to catch her.
“Stupid! Stupid!” she chanted, dodging my hands. “What do you think a priest is, anyway? It’s just a vow, and every vow is a sacrifice. You’re the only priestess I have left—or that Taran has.”
I’d never put that together before. Every vow was a sacrifice of our freedom, and the vows of complete obedience that priests took gave up their entire lives. No wonder the Stoneborn were so greedy for priests: it was the same impulse as Death’s lust for human sacrifice.
Maybe I could end it today. I didn’t delude myself that my chances were very good, but if Taran had managed it once, perhaps I would succeed today—maybe Death’s fight with the Allmother had weakened him, or I’d catch him by surprise.
“I guess you’d better hope I live, then,” I said.
The bird must have seen the determination on my face, because she flew directly at my throat, tiny feet scrambling for a hold on my neckline.
“Stop! Wait, I’ll tell you where they took the priests.”
With another wrench of anger, I halted, plucking her from my collar and holding her at arm’s length. Her little black eyes bugged out as she pleaded with me.
“If you’re just going to get yourself killed, you might as well do it with a tiny chance of success.
Go after your mortals instead—I saw Death’s Fallen take them.
There’s a passage to the Underworld hidden in Wesha’s palace.
They’ll sacrifice the mortals there, try to give Death enough power to bring down the Gates from the inside. ”
My immediate reaction was that the bird was lying to get me off the battlefield, but it was almost too fantastical to be pure invention. I’d been living there for weeks, Taran for months—how could he have missed that?
Though he did have Death’s armor—perhaps that was how he’d stolen it.
If the passage was there, he probably wouldn’t have told me. He didn’t want any part in my war, after all.
“Why would there be a passage to the Underworld in Wesha’s palace?” I demanded.
The little bird swung her tail angrily in my palm. “Because back when Wesha was just as young and stupid as you are, she used to sneak her sweetheart up to see her. Stop staring at me. If you want to catch them, you need to go now.”
“Her sweetheart? Death?” The monstrous husband she despised, the one she reluctantly married only to stop the Great War? How long had she “trifled” with him, as Lixnea had put it?
At my vehemence, Awi took flight and fluttered back a few feet, afraid I would squeeze her to shake out more answers. Was even a single thing I’d ever been taught about Wesha true?
“She wouldn’t be the last person to make terrible mistakes for love,” Awi said defensively. “As if your reasons were any better.”
With that stinging rebuke, the bird goddess took flight, leaving me to weigh my chances between getting my dagger in Death’s heart and following his Fallen into the Underworld. Neither sounded very survivable.
Between my vows, the people I’d lost, and the people I’d left behind, there was little of my soul left for love. I wished love had been the reason for more of my terrible mistakes. They probably wouldn’t weigh on me so heavily if I could say I’d made them all out of love.
Cursing every immortal in the Summerlands, I turned and ran for Wesha’s palace.
The entrance to the Underworld was open to the sky in the same courtyard where I’d tripped over Taran during my first night in the Summerlands.
The potted flowers were shriveled and dry—dusk-souls had passed through with the captives here.
The paving stones had been pried up, exposing a neatly constructed tunnel with walls smoothed by a Stoneborn’s power.
My descent was entirely in darkness. I followed the downward slope by touch, tripping over my feet in my flimsy sandals. I didn’t dare call for light and instead chanted Lixnea’s shroud in anticipation of the moment that I would encounter the dusk-souls and the stolen priests.
I spent an hour alone in the dark with my thoughts before I saw the first signs of any captives.
They were visible before the turn of the tunnel from the green glow of the dead, but when I crept close enough to make out the group, I counted four incandescent dusk-souls, one Fallen in Death’s red vestments, and nearly a dozen stumbling priests of Genna who clung to each other as they were herded toward the Underworld.
Wrapped in darkness, I snuck closer. I was limping and tired, but several of the priests were injured, and I gained on them without breaking into a run that would have risked my balance.
The dusk-souls, when I got a better look, didn’t appear to have been soldiers.
Instead, when their forms momentarily solidified, they were dressed like farmers or peasant laborers, their young-old-ageless faces twisted in the same horror as the dead priest in the Shipwright’s fortress.
They didn’t want to do this—Death’s power had enslaved them.
Still, they carried spears whose bronze tips were pitted by age, and they harried the priests to follow the Fallen into the abyss. I had no idea how I might stop them.
I got on well with most of the senior priests of Wesha during my childhood, perfect student that I was, but one old stick of a man had proved the exception.
During his surgeries he made every single incision, even when he was supposed to be training more junior priests.
If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself, he’d say, like he was imparting wisdom instead of just demonstrating his low opinion of everyone else.
Of course, I’d thought back then that I would do everything perfectly when it was my turn, and now all I saw behind me were my mistakes.
I didn’t care now if someone else could do it better than me—please, let someone else who would do it worse have a turn! If I thought anyone else would care about the fate of these priests, I would have gladly turned around, but I hadn’t even convinced Taran to help me.
What do I do? Taran, what should we do?
Part of me was still surprised, at every moment, to find myself here without him.
Part of me still expected him at my side, hand under my elbow, eyes on my target, heart beating in time with my own.
From the day I met him until the day he died, I wasn’t ever alone, and it still felt like he should be here.
The worst thing was, I was certain that part of him remembered that too. Needed it. He just couldn’t remember why. He must feel as betrayed as I did today—and he might never forgive me for this, even if I did survive to return to the surface.
The Fallen leading the dusk-souls had maternal ancestors of barnyard stock, and his cloven hooves tapped the stone as he descended farther into the earth—an abomination that barely registered for me in light of the other atrocities Death had committed.
Without a better plan, I crept after the creature, thinking that I needed to see where he was taking the captives before I acted.
The tunnel had branches, and I might lose the other priests if I stopped to free this group.