Taran snatched my knife off my belt and knelt down. Before I could ask questions, he cut a swift line across his palm, just enough to make blood well up in a line of red-streaked gold, then pressed his bloody hand to the stone floor.
We waited a minute together with my breath still whistling loudly from grief, but nothing happened.
Taran sighed in frustration and sat back on his heels. With an unhappy twist to his lips, he considered the wound in his palm, which was already starting to scab. “Damn you, Wesha,” he said softly. Then he closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and lifted the knife again.
This time he slit his wrist.
I cried out and dove for him, trying to close my fingers over the vein he’d sliced open. All my training said that was a fatal wound. His lifeblood was scorching against my hand as I stumbled into the first lines of Genna’s blessing to heal it.
Taran jerked back as though surprised that I cared, but his expression softened for only a heartbeat.
“Don’t think you’ll be rid of me so quickly. This shouldn’t takeallmy blood.”
When I reluctantly released him, he lowered his wrist to the floor and shook it to let blood drip onto the stone in a pool. This time, in only seconds, there was a response. A faraway rumble.
Taran stood up, his other hand clutching at his wrist while I tried to locate the source of the noise.
“Get out of here. Run. I’ll make sure the bird makes it.”
I wasn’t leaving himeither, and I spread my feet to balance as the floors and walls began to vibrate and creak.
A few moments later, from far down the hallway, a large lump appeared in the stone floor, for all the world like a cat trapped under the bedcovers. It spun back and forth, searching, lifting the stone floor as easily as cotton gauze.
When it was near the spot where Taran’s blood had spilled, the stones split and re-formed. Slowly, they shaped themselves into features. A nose jutting out of granite. An eye with a rim of stalactites and an onyx pupil. Enormous lips made of rose quartz geodes, the entire face the size of a horse cart. Taran clenched his jaw as the face solidified.
“Who?” A creaky, inhuman voice issued from between the stone lips. “Who hurt my babies?”
Taran frantically gestured at me to go, but I hesitated a few feet behind him.
“Good evening, Grandmother. Several of the Stoneborn have broken your laws and sacrificed your children,” he announced, muscles coiling in anticipation.
“Grandmother…?” the stone lips muttered. The tone was distant, sleepy, as though the stone giant had just woken from a very deep slumber.
Incrementally, the face turned so that the roiling eye could focus on Taran. The great black pupil constricted as it found him, and the stone lips spread into a rictus of anger, one which opened in a dark, ragged tunnel down to the center of the earth. Abruptly, the mouth began to shriek.
“You! How dare you call megrandmother, you murderous little shit.”
Taran winced and took a few unsteady paces back as the stone face continued to scream invective at him.
“You’re the worst thing my children ever brought into this world! Oh, they should have let me punish you. They should have let me eat you up!”
Much faster than the face had drifted up the hall, a wave of stone flew toward Taran, forming out of nothing but moving with enough force to splatter him against the side of the tunnel.
Taran dodged to the side, but his movements were sluggishfrom blood loss, and he crashed into the opposite wall and bounced off with a painful thud. I ran to pull him upright as the ground shook hard enough to rattle my bones.
“Run,” he gasped again, and I dearly wanted to, but I gripped his arm to get him steady on his feet.
The shrieking continued, because it seemed that the Allmother was still holding a grudge, three hundred years later, over Taran’s theft of the stone blades that could kill immortals.
Or she knew more about the circumstances of Death’s last defeat than Taran did now.
“I should have known it would be you,” the Mountain’s voice moaned and burbled. “What have you done now?”
“I haven’t done anything this time,” Taran called, grabbing my wrist and scrambling backwards, toward the large cavern. “Come here and see what Napeth has done to your children.”
“Get my poor son’s name from your mouth,” the Allmother sobbed, eye searching again for Taran as the ground violently wobbled. “I don’t claim you. Thief! Liar! Murderer!”
“You’re still my grandmother,” he yelled, pulling me away from her blindly snapping mouth. “So at least you should see where immortal blood was spilled!”
