Chapter 28 #3
As we descended, the tunnel widened and the ceiling rose, yet the light emitted by the dead was not lost in the greater space.
There should have been nothing but featureless, packed dirt in every direction, but instead I began to see new shapes out of the corners of my eyes: trees with pink blossoms, a stand of cattails.
Movement too. Shapes that flitted, a breeze through tall grass.
When I tried to focus my eyes on what I thought I’d seen, there was nothing but rock. No light or sound. The hair lifted on the back of my neck as I reassessed the source of my growing unease.
I had plenty of reason to despair, but I probably owed the queasy lurch of my stomach to my instinctual mortal fear of the Underworld.
We’d crossed an invisible line, fallen beneath the Summerlands and into the land of the dead.
I didn’t belong here, and my living flesh and fearful heart rebelled against my mind’s instruction to proceed.
The swell of sound and shapes, just out of focus, was as dark and hallucinatory as a fever dream.
I thought I saw the hovel I was born in, though it had burned down before I went to Wesha’s temple.
I thought I smelled the ocean breeze for the first time since I arrived in the Summerlands.
I thought I heard Taran’s voice, very distant, but when I turned around, there was only darkness behind me.
Whipsawed by the unreliability of all my senses, I didn’t notice that we had stumbled out of the tunnel and into a vast open space until the group I’d been following halted.
If I looked hard with my mortal eyes, there was nothing but stone for miles: stone beneath me, stone overhead, and stone walls sweeping away past where they were lost to the dark.
If I unfocused and lost myself in the wash of false sensations, I could see a distant fortress of sculpted white stone, with high walls that nearly concealed a silver-green forest within.
Looking at that beautiful fortress made my soul vibrate in a painful way, as though my vows wanted to shred me for just laying eyes on Death’s citadel.
Between it and our group were the drifting forms of the dead, moving through their memories of life at an infinitely slow pace.
Free dusk-souls at the terminus of their voyages across the sea, blissfully unaware that Death sought to return and force them into war with the living.
This wasn’t a place for the living. If Wesha had sent me here to retrieve Taran, instead of to the Summerlands, I wasn’t certain how I would have survived long enough to lure him back to the Painted Tower.
My body had never felt more useless: a fragile bundle of blood and sinew, animated by a mind fogged by fear.
The cloven-hoofed Fallen did not seem to suffer any such effects and turned directly toward the white fortress that I could see better with my eyes closed. This creature was real and solid, at least, and it didn’t make my head hurt to continue following him and his captives.
The next real thing I saw was the altar. Everything else in the Underworld seemed conjured out of memory, but the pile of stones and the bonfire behind it were sharp and coherent as soon as we drew close enough for my eyes to pick them out in the dim light. That was our destination.
Our group had to be one of the last, because there were already dozens of mortal priests in a huddle near the altar, wearing the colors of Smenos and Genna and a few other gods whose blessings didn’t lend themselves to combat.
Death had always struck at the weak, attacked children and the elderly, like outrage was the point of it.
More Fallen were building up the altar fire without much skill, poking at logs with their weapons and trying to coax them into the bed of coals necessary for a ritual sacrifice.
I counted seven Fallen and nearly three dozen dusk-souls armed and standing by with terrified faces.
That was almost the largest number of mortals that I’d ever managed to affect with Wesha’s blessing of night, and my wobbling mind had trouble composing the words of the blessing I might use for these particular circumstances, let alone the meter and rhyme.
My vows had also begun to prick at me too.
I’d ignored the slight pain during the descent, but this far from the tunnel I’d followed, surrounded by enemies, I was feeling my promises pull tighter at my limbs.
I’d vowed to bring Taran to the Painted Tower, and I’d vowed to bring Awi past the Gates, but I was very far away from any path that took me back into sunlight.
I tried to shake those doubts away and focus on the priests. They’d been tied in a line, one long rope looping through individual knots around their wrists and feet. The goat-Fallen called out a greeting to his siblings, then moved to add my group of priests to the previously bound captives.
I had only one fragile stone knife, and even if they were freed, most of the captives couldn’t help me fight back.
I supposed that the best plan was to untie as many captives as I could while Lixnea’s shroud concealed me, sing the blessing of night to disable the Fallen and death-priests, then finally sprint to safety with as many of the captives as I was able to free.
I might not reach everyone, but if I turned around and went for help, I couldn’t imagine any rescue reaching these priests in time to save them from the altar.
I shifted into a crouch and crawled to the priests. My knife wasn’t the best tool to saw through rope, but it was wickedly sharp, and I got the first crafter-priest in the chain severed from his neighbor, and then, with more difficulty, the bonds around his feet undone.
The look of shock on his face when he turned to peer at me was my first clue that something had gone terribly wrong. He shouldn’t have been able to see me at all.
“Run back the way we came in,” I whispered, stomach sinking as the priests he’d been tied to looked up from their prayers and weeping.
I didn’t want to acknowledge that Lixnea’s shroud had completely dissipated until I heard one of the Fallen roar in outrage.
“What’s that one doing? Why isn’t it tied down?”
The Fallen who’d just hissed through the split upper lip of a mountain cat wheeled on the one I’d followed in. “You ass-licking son of a whore, make sure the sacrifices are secured.”
I jerked my knife through another set of ropes and spent precious seconds on a warning. “Run,” I snapped at the two priests I’d cut loose, then began to sing as the goat-footed Fallen swaggered toward me with irritation curling his animal muzzle.
Wesha’s song of sleep. I already knew it worked on Fallen.
I could only hope that the goddess who’d taken half of Death’s power had gained some measure of his control over the dead too, because there were more dead spearmen than Fallen, and the priests would never outrun dusk-souls whose feet did not quite touch the ground beneath them.
I sang loud and clear so that my song could reach the last ranks of dusk-souls near the altar, and every word was as precise as it had been during my first surgery.
I didn’t mumble or miss a single note—my voice never faltered, and my perfect pitch didn’t fail me then.
Wesha did.
For the first time in my life, my prayers went unanswered. There was not even a whisper of divine power, not even the sense of attention I got when I was struggling for the words to properly direct the Maiden’s blessings. Nothing happened. I might as well have been singing to myself.
“What was that?” the Fallen asked with a brutal laugh. “Was that a prayer to the Maiden? Here? She left three hundred years ago.”
I licked my lips, panicking. I gestured again at the two priests to run, but they were frozen with fear, eyeing the Fallen while they slowly advanced on me.
As I backed away, I tried the blessing of Lixnea again, hoping against the dawning realization of my reckless overconfidence that it might conceal me.
But the Moon’s power did not manifest any more than the Maiden’s.
The Fallen chuckled again as he waded through the shrinking priests to my side. “A pretty song, but there is no god in the Underworld but my father. No prayers reach through stone, and even the Mountain fell against his power.”
Fine, then. I took another step back, waited for him to clear the huddle of captive priests, and invoked the bastard who’d sired this monster.
It was just spite, at this point; I only knew one blessing of Death, and it would hardly protect me against this many of his followers. But I could do a lot with just spite.
Hail Death, who kindles flame, I chanted, and fire erupted from my hands.
It would have killed a mortal, and it probably hurt this Fallen quite a bit, but this monster’s father was the god of flame.
When his body was engulfed, he fell to the floor and rolled.
He shrieked in agony as the fire clung to his body, but the demonstration only drew the attention of every other enemy within hearing.
Death’s flame charred the Fallen’s red robes and exposed black-and-gold-webbed skin beneath his fur, but before I could run more than a few steps toward the tunnel mouth, he was back on his feet and furious.
“Maiden-priest bitch,” he keened, turning to gesture at the horrified dusk-souls who stood by with their hands tight on their spears. “Put her on the altar first.”
“Run now,” I called to the priests who had not yet been secured and to the two I had freed. But the prospect of death in some hours’ time was still better than the risk of death now if they ran, and nobody moved. The dusk-souls obeyed the Fallen though, sliding after me when I tried to flee.
I didn’t run very fast. I was tired, and my foot collapsed under my every step. They caught me.