We curve around a waterfall past a low pool of koi fish and a wall made entirely of shaped metal figures. One blows a trumpet from his place standing on the back of a lion. Another is playing drums that are giant turtles. A pair of girls play harps as they are carried on a sheet borne by a flock of birds. It’s whimsical and beautiful and I could stare at it for hours.
“Where are his dancers and musicians?” Markanos murmurs. He has pitched his voice very low and he holds one palm out, pressing down in the air as if trying to keep me quiet.
I am soundless as I follow him through the door and into a vaulted cedarwood room full of gleaming instruments on stands. The smell of the place fills me with a quiet longing to hear the music play. My eyes linger on one instrument after another, each more spectacular and rare than the last.
Our footsteps are masked by carefully patterned rugs, and it’s only when we’ve reached the other side to a room just as large but covered from floor to ceiling and then across the ceiling with paintings, that I realize it is very quiet here. For such a very large place, there are no servants. No musicians. No artists. No one at all.
I find myself copying Markanos’s careful, quiet tread. We slip through the rooms like ghosts. In the distance, I hear a tinkling sound that I cannot place. It sends little shivers up my spine.
We pass through another door to a well-lit gallery withfloor-to-ceiling stained glass windows in a geometric pattern. It’s a pottery room. There are shelves and plinths for the pieces. Shelves that are empty.
I gasp.
Earthenware shards cover the floor and run up the sides of the room, and the items on display are not the only thing smashed. People—mortals—are dead throughout, pinned to the walls with shards of broken crockery. I don’t know what killed them or who, but I know that the woman hanging on the wall nearly at the height of the ceiling was not just hovering in the air there when this happened. She is skewered to the plaster like she is a painting, too.
There is one single item untouched, the shards seeming by chance to have missed it—a clay platter on a plinth upon which is the severed head of a mortal. I recognize this horror as the slain musician Ordanus had mourned at the Resurgence. He’s kept the head here like a memento.
I shudder, but what is one horror in a room of horrors? For this is not all.
In the center of the room, in a perfect circle bare of anything else—pottery, people, blood, anything—lies Ordanus.
He does not lie in a natural way. His limbs are bent wrong and so is his back. He’s pinned to the ground, speared through by half of a waist-high vase, his eyes wide and terrified. His fingers scrabble across the bare rug like a pair of blanched crabs.
“Markanos,” Ordanus gasps.
Oh gods, he’s alive.
A string of bloody drool falls from the edge of his mouth and hits the perfect circle of the bare floor.
I can smell blood and offal all through the room. It’s enough that I stumble and clamp my free hand over my mouth. My foot crunches on broken earthenware and I fight back sudden tears of pain as a single shard goes through my bare foot.
This has happened recently. Moments ago, if I am to judge. Some of those trickles of blood from the humans hung high on the walls have not yet dripped all the way to the floor.
But we heard no sound on our arrival and the other rooms are intact. There is some mad power at work here—something wrought by a god.
I’m shaking, terror snatching control of my limbs from me.
“Ordanus,” Markanos says grimly, but there’s nothing sentimental about his tone, nothing even verging on compassion. He makes a single circle around the room, peering into shadows, sword ready, as I pick the shard of pottery out of my foot and limp into the bare circle. When he’s done, he seems to be entirely at his ease as he saunters over to Ordanus and squats down beside the dying god. “Who killed you, brother?”
A roar splits the air from behind us. I straighten, both hands tightening on the haft of the trident. I spin to look behind me, but there’s nothing there. I turn again, searching and seeing nothing, but Markanos is faster. He must see something I do not.
He’s on his feet in a moment, throwing me to the ground behind him so that I sprawl beside Ordanus, nearly brushing his cooling flesh as I pick myself up. His overlarge eyes—beautiful in life and dripping with charm—watch me from inches away and I want to vomit as I force myself to my feet again.
“Wife of Okeanos.” Ordanus laughs threadily, leaking more blood. My stomach rolls over as he whispers to me, his plump lips forming each word lovingly. “Two. He has two now.”
Two?What is that supposed to mean?
The sound of pottery breaking behind me fuels my rise as only terror can.
I spin around and see Markanos struck in the chest by a creature—the strange leechlike thing I saw at the Resurgence. It is formed like a tangle of black gleaming ropes that slide over one another but shaped more like an eel with a long shadow tail and a mouth that opens to show row upon row of gleaming inky teeth. The creature’s flesh swells outward and then draws tight and lands another blow directly to Markanos’s chest. My ally bucks hard from the hit, air knocked out of his lungs, grappling to try to keep his feet. The weight of his opponent nearly bowls him over.
It’s Treseano’s monster. Which means the God of Death must be here somewhere, and Ordanus said there were two. Where is the other one?
I adjust my grip on the trident, looking left and right, and then there it is, emerging from a shadow where it washidden. It’s a second rope creature, and this one is shooting right toward me.
I’m seeing things in little bursts between heartbeats, they’re happening so quickly.
Heartbeat.A shadowy figure twitches behind the roiling creature. I identify him as Treseano. He’s holding an empty sack and moving quickly, sprinting in a circle around the room from shadow to shadow.
