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 tothe 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 Iwoulddo 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 stillfeltlike 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.
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 belonghere, 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 seebetter 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 ofmortalsthat 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 knotsaround 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.
