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 ofDeath, 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-priestbitch,” he keened, turning to gesture at the horrified dusk-souls who stood by with their hands tight on their spears. “Put her on the altarfirst.”
“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.
I expected my dress to burn from the press of their hands. My skin felt as though it blistered and sizzled when they grabbed me by my upper arms to drag me back to the altar, but the fabric didn’t char and I couldn’t smell any smoke. It hurt like a palm over a candle flame though, every nerve ending that intersected with the green flare of their touch burning without the relief of extinguishment. I screamed, and the dusk-souls winced at the noise but did not stop.
I tried to tell the dusk-souls it wasn’t their fault, mostly becauseI wanted to apologize to someone before I died. I’d always tried to do the right thing, but I’d made itworseat every step of the way. If I had said nothing when Death sacrificed Elantia, that day in Ereban might have ended with only one death. If I hadn’t led a reprisal against Death’s cult, the other priests might not have fled to the Summerlands. If I had let Taran evacuate the acolytes from the battle on the beach instead of trying to confront agod, Taran would have lived. And now I’d die down here without having saved even a single one of the captured priests.
Many people in my rebellion must have died in despair, but dying ashamed seemed like my inescapable fate.
Taran was going to be so angry at me, if he ever found out.
The thought made me struggle again. Even if there was no chance I’d escape, I’d make the Fallen remember me. Give one a nasty scar across an ugly face, maybe a wrist that ached when it rained. I sang fire that passed harmlessly through the dead but made Fallen jump back and curse me again. I kicked, screamed. The touch of the dead burned, but they weren’t stronger than they’d been in life. They had to heave and yank on my arms to get me toward the stone altar. I fought for every inch, but eventually one of the Fallen bull-rushed through the gusts of fire I was calling and got me pressed against the stone.
The hallucinations, or perhaps memories, had started to crowd in brighter and clearer as I drew closer to my mortal end. I no longer saw a stone cavern around me but the whitewashed walls and ceilings of the small temples of Wesha, where I’d spent most of my short life. I heard the voices of the priests who raised me and measures of the Maiden’s melodies. Smelled disinfectant and honey salve.
Maiden-priests spent too much time trying to save lives to think much about what happened afterward, but before the rebellion, Death’s cult had promised that the Underworld was a reflection ofhow a person had lived—the comfort of home at the end of a long journey if you’d lived a worthy life, a torment if you had not.
I snarled as much at the phantoms conjured by my own mind as the Fallen who was trying to hold me in place long enough to sacrifice me; I didn’t want to die as Iona ter Wesha. The maiden-priests weren’t my home. That wasn’t what my life had been about, if the measure was moments that had mattered rather than the number of days.
If I had to pick one moment to live in forever, it would have been one with Taran. The day we met. The first time he asked me to sing the calendar of flowers for him.Say yes, nightingale.Or evenI’ll love you till the stars fall out of the sky.
Lingering in those moments forever wouldn’t feel like a punishment; forgetting them would be worse than the pain of these last seconds. Another Fallen climbed to the altar and seized my hair in his fist, exposing my throat for the blade.
There was another shout. My name, maybe.
