I stroked the wood one last time before throwing it in, as Wesha had asked. The cured wood shouldn’t even have smoked in an open fire, but it was consumed almost immediately, vanishing as all sacrifices did.
Wesha’s lovely voice began to chant again. I didn’t recognize this prayer or the melody—I had heard the blessings to honor all the Stoneborn and many of the minor gods, but this one was new to me. The language was archaic and difficult to follow, so my mind hung on the syllables, trying to puzzle them out. To which god had we sacrificed my kithara? Not Wesha.
I paid careful attention to her words and not her hands, so I didn’t notice her lifting the knife until it was at my throat. Too late, I understood what the sacrifice was.
The pain as the blade parted my skin and her palm shoved me forward into the coals wiped my mind of all conscious thought, but I was positive I heard Taran’s name in her song before everything went black.
6
There was nomoment of transition. Just the shock and pain, and then I landed on my hands and knees on a stone floor. I immediately pressed my hands to my neck, grabbing for the wound in my throat, because Wesha’s knife stroke should have ended my life in a second. But while the fingers of my hand came away bloody, all I felt beneath was unbroken skin. I slid my hands next to my chest, trying to discern whether my heart was still beating. It trembled in a rapid staccato there, fueling my wheezy, panicked breaths. I felt alive. I still felt the weight of my limbs, the chemical taste of fear on the back of my tongue, and the ever-present ache in my foot. More importantly, I could still decide what to do. I had to figure out where I was.
The air was warm and dark, and all I sensed around me were vague shadows until I rasped the blessing of moonlight. When my orientation returned, I was in a windowless stone room crowded with wooden crates and stacked casks of wine.
It didn’t look how I expected the Underworld to look. The epics weren’t entirely clear, but I expected vast underground caverns in which the dead wandered, dreaming snatches of their past lives and searching for the light said to lie at the end of the infinite maze. But this room could be underground, I supposed.
I scraped myself up off the floor and blotted the blood at my neck. I didn’t exactly appreciate the way in which she sent me here, but if this was closer to Taran than the Painted Tower was, I’d chant thanks to Wesha anyway. My kithara was on the ground next to me, and I carefully put it away on a high shelf before examining the crates. They were full of valuables—cloth, jewelry, spices, other temple offerings. But there was nobody here, so I inevitably turned to the room’s only door, finding it locked and bolted.
I might have been able to finesse the lock with a hairpin, but after a moment of wracking my memory, I recalled that Taran had once taught us a blessing to open locked doors.
There’s a god of thieves?Drutalos had asked Taran as we ransacked the villa of a loyalist noble.
The Allmother made a god for every impulse of the mortal heart,Taran had replied, prying open the latch to the wine cellar.Certainly one for the urge to drink someone else’s wine.
I was cautious but not particularly worried when I swung the door open into a larger room. The dusk-souls on the beach hadn’t bothered with me, so I expected nothing worse in the Underworld.
Like the one I emerged from, the next room was cluttered with cargo, but there were windows high on one wall that revealed a starry night sky, and the chamber was lit by oil lamps in niches along the other walls. At the opposite end of the room, two people were unpacking boxes, taking an inventory of the goods within.
Wait, notpeople.
“Shit,” I said, belatedly clapping my hand over my mouth. At the sound of my voice, two robed figures turned their heads in my direction. I froze in place, the instinct of a prey animal.
I never imagined before the war how hard my unconscious mind could work to keep me alive. I never dreamed that my eyes would learn to pick red robes from black in the moonlight or that my mouth could shape the words for fire before one of Death’s ownpriests. But I immediately knew this was worse than death-priests, even though the figures at the end of the room wore the same bronze lion masks and red hoods as death-priests. I knew how humans moved. I knew the shapes of human bones and jaws and hands. I was afraid long before my mind caught up and formed the word for what I saw.
Fallen.
Long ago, when the other gods lived among us, they often dallied with mortals, and those unions produced great heroes and brilliant priests. The royal house had a drop of golden ichor in its bloodline traceable to Skyfather himself, though it was probably not safe to mention this to the queen anymore. After the Great War, when the gods retreated from the mortal world, no more such children were born. With one disgusting exception.
Death was forbidden all other women by his marriage vows to Wesha, but he’d found a stomach-churning loophole. He lay down with snakes and beasts and other loathsome things—and the children that resulted were monsters.
Death’s Fallen had killed nearly as many people as his fires had.
“What, what’s that?” a monster hissed, scenting the air with a forked tongue. “What is it, a thief in our father’s storerooms? Come to steal from the offerings?” Clawed feet jutted beneath a robe that concealed legs bent in the wrong direction.
Its sibling slunk toward where I was backing up, even though there was no exit where I’d come from. There was a door on the other side of the storeroom, but both Fallen were between it and me, and I wasn’t fast anymore. The second Fallen looked more human, or at least more mammalian than the first, but its large, reflective golden eyes made my gut clench when they focused on me.
“It is a priestess,” this one cooed without slowing its approach. “Someone else’s priestess is in our father’s palace. A maiden-priest? One we are allowed?”
“I’m not a maiden-priest,” I protested, even though I didn’t expect my denial to be especially convincing, given that I was dressed like the high priestess of Wesha. I put my hand over the remaining knife on my belt, but there was no chance I’d ever defeat a Fallen in simple combat.
“A mortal girl,” the first said, wedge-shaped head tilting back and forth to study me like a snake before it struck. Closer and closer it crept, nails scraping the stone tile. “Smelled her blood, honey and copper.”
The second Fallen reached me, and I was glad the darkness of the room hid the full, awful planes of its face below the mask. I bit back a whimper as it seized me by the shoulder and leaned in, smelling my bloody neck with a canine huff of stinking breath.
“Smells like a priest,” it said through a mouth that wasn’t perfectly shaped for mortal speech. “Smell the vows on it. It reeks of priest vows. Whose priest?”
The first Fallen dropped to its belly on the floor, still flicking its tongue to taste the air. That awful reptilian head neared the hem of my dress as though to dip beneath the fabric of the skirt, and I kicked at it despite its sibling’s grip on my arm. It neatly evaded me, teeth gnashing in a serpentine chuckle.
“We will say it was a maiden-priest, even if it belonged to someone else,” the first Fallen suggested in a burst of inspiration. It surged up to seize my other arm, and the two began to drag me out into the hall. I took mincing steps in feigned compliance, planning my next move as metallic fear coated the back of my tongue. I didn’t know whether they wanted to defile me, kill me, eat me, or perhaps some combination in the worst possible order, but Death’s spawn had all the strength of their animal mothers added to that of their immortal father, and struggling would be useless.
