We stumbled together back into the large cavern, where the lava pool was now bubbling over and beginning to spread. Sweat dripped into my eyes, nearly obscuring my vision as the form of a giant woman rose from the middle of the pool.
She was made of stone mortared together with lines of solid gold, but her shape was maternal and terrible. Wide hips and strong arms, skin patched in granite and basalt and ore, body taller than Wesha had been in her tower. The Allmother, the first of the gods, the Mountain. The ultimate ancestor of every immortal being. Her stone features glared at Taran like she planned to break him into pieces, but her attention was inexorably drawn by the fetid stink ofthe altar. She took one step toward it, two, the ground vibrating as she moved. When she reached it, she pressed her barrel-sized hands to the altar of bones, fingers digging for the gold blood trapped there, then sampling it with senses I lacked.
Recklessly, she pulled the altar apart, snapping femurs like blades of grass until her hands were spread on the gold that had pooled at the very base, prevented from falling onto the stone by the thick leather hides spread beneath it.
“Who?” she hissed again. “Who killed them? Was it you again, you viper?”
“Death,” Taran said, edging backward with me. “With the Shipwright and the Huntress. He sacrificed your children here, just for more power. Mortals, immortals, some still trapped here, inside your stone—”
She didn’t care to listen to the rest of the explanation. The Allmother dug her jagged fingers into the altar, then tipped her head back as though gathering breath for a scream.
“Time to go,” Taran breathed again, pushing at me as the stone goddess’s form pulsed.
I blinked dust from my vision as the Allmother’s temporary form dissolved, flowing into the ground. A mouth formed again in the ground, five times larger than before, and the Mountain keened.
The scream echoed through my skull, pounding against my eardrums. My teeth vibrated in my clenched jaw, almost hard enough to chip. I couldn’t think through the noise, couldn’t even breathe through it. I was only distantly aware of the howls of the imprisoned sacrifices joining the din as their cell doors popped open, and of Taran grabbing my wrist to pull me toward the tunnel to the surface.
21
The stone ofthe cavern roiled like the gut of a living creature, making every step unsteady. My foot was in agony within a few moments, but I was afraid that if I stopped, I’d fall, and if I fell I’d never get up again. There was the roar of the Allmother, the thunderous noise of rock shifting, and the screams of the captives disorienting me, but there was also Taran’s grip on my arm as my lodestar. He was flagging as badly as I was, immortal strength failing after all he’d suffered today, and he was running on bare feet across the hot, jagged rock of the tunnel, but he somehow kept us up and moving.
Immortals began to pass us in their desperate escape. Abandoning all pretense of human form, they crowded around us and sped upward on wings, hooves, and clawed feet, adding to the noise as the Mountain convulsed in the Allmother’s fury. I knew what panic could do to the gentlest soul, so I expected no aid from anyone else fleeing the altar of bone if we stumbled during the long, treacherous climb.
We reached the mouth of the tunnel under an unexpected beam of light from the rooms ahead of us. As we followed the fleeing crowd, I tipped my head back and saw the night sky where thereshould have been the ornate, coffered ceilings we’d passed on the way in.
The Allmother had lifted the entire top of the Mountain off Smenos’s palace, and now she rummaged within, looking for her disobedient children.
I pulled on Taran’s arm when he would have plunged ahead.
“We should climb out!” I yelled over the din, pointing behind us. Everywhere things were crashing to the floor—shelves, cupboards, thewalls.
“I have to find Marit,” he insisted, face drawn. “He won’t understand what’s going on.”
I would have said that Marit was better able to take care of himself than the two of us, but as I was the one who’d gotten us into this disaster, I nodded and ducked my head as we pushed on. The former crafter-priests and immortal retainers knew the layout of the palace and were taking the most direct way out, but caution made me tug Taran into a side passageway of the confusing warren.
While we were navigating a series of trophy rooms filled with dusty, ancient beasts, I heard distant chanting that would have made me sit up and pay attention if I’d been in a months-long coma.
“Death-priests,” I hissed, jerking Taran into an alcove long enough to weave Lixnea’s darkness around us. I should have cleared the other guest rooms before looking for Taran; Death would never have come here without an entourage, and now he’d ordered his priests to dispatch the beings he’d meant to sacrifice. The final notes of the prayer for a curtain of fire were met with howls of pain ripped from countless throats, echoing through the wrecked halls.
“He can’t possibly think he’ll be able to stop news of this from getting out.”
Taran was still wild-eyed with surprise, but none of this had felt the least bit surprising to me from the moment I’d heard Death was here. This was what Death did.
“He killed every last maiden-priest,” I said, lifting Taran’s knife off his belt and pushing it against his slack palm. Death was entirely capable of eliminating every witness to this outrage, and I didn’t doubt that was what he intended.
Soon more screams ricocheted through the building as death-priests found the first line of crafter-priests and tried to prevent them from escaping by conjuring the fire god’s flame. The shouts widened, spread, as combat was joined throughout the palace, and the tempo of the shaking overhead quickened in response.
Despite everything, or perhaps because of everything, a deep clarity had settled over me, stopped my hand from shaking where it held my own knife. It made me quick to act, almost happy to do it, even though Taran was showing signs of shock from the trauma. Part of me was back in Ereban two years ago, and the muddy hillside was collapsing around the city, but Taran and I had survived that day andwe were going to survive this one.
Wrapped in Lixnea’s darkness, we wove back to the guest wing, obscured from the hunt-priests and death-priests who were assembling barricades while the much more numerous crafter-priests and lesser immortals battered them down with the sheer weight and force of their bodies. Despite the holes in the roof, smoke was beginning to fill the corridors—we had only minutes left to make it out before it would overwhelm us.
But I knew what to do in a fire. I knew to stay low and follow the smoke out. I knew how to kill death-priests under the choking darkness they’d created. I knew Taran’s shape at my side. I knew how to do this better than anything else I’d done since following Taran to the Summerlands.
We found Marit passed out in a pool of mingled wine and seawater, insensible to the wreckage already strewing his room and the thunder of the battle outside.
“Come on, wake up.” Taran patted Marit’s cheeks frantically,then lifted the other god’s arm as though preparing to drape him across his back.
I looked around for something we could use as a sledge—I wasn’t certain Taran could carry the other man in his state—but the sea god jolted awake in midair.
