The Unfinished Song - Book 6: Blood (40 page)

“Thank you,” she said.

“It is I who owe you,” he said quietly.

She looked at him in surprise.

He returned to what he and Amdra had been doing before she arrived, which was sitting next to each other on one cot, with the sleeping baby between them.

Dindi wilted with exhaustion. All the tension from the night left her feeling battered. Yet she could not sleep. She heard voices, like whispers, or a conversation heard at a distance, yet not
quite
either of those. She thought she recognized the voices of Amdra and Hawk. When she looked over at them, they sat still, as before, not speaking. Yet she was sure they
were
speaking, and she could almost make out the words. Orange light flowed between them. Green light as well.

Hawk stood up. “You know you won’t see us again.”

Amdra looked away. “Just go.”

He picked up the baby and she helped him put the infant into a pack on his back. The baby woke up briefly, but his mother hushed him, and soon the infant snuggled against his father and slept again. Hawk left the lodge. Amdra glanced around as if nervous that someone might have noticed, so Dindi closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep.

If only she could fool herself as well.

Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw Umbral, broken and bleeding, being hauled away from Xerpen to be beaten again. She remembered the hate burning in his eyes, hate for her. He had never looked at her that way before, not even when he had once intended to kill her. She had never appreciated his rock-solid sense of honor until it had been stripped from him. She had been so busy seeing him as an enemy, as Kavio’s killer, that she had fought her own heart’s song. She had never meant to fall in love with him. She hadn’t meant to fall in love with Kavio two years ago, either. But love did not ask permission to steal a heart away from common sense. In a scorched forest, or in a scorned heart, the seed of love found soil made richer by pain. Now she wanted to weep for what she had never even had the chance to claim. Would Umbral ever look at her with anything other than rage again? Whatever Xerpen had done to him had changed him from a hero into a monster.

Maybe his anger could serve him. His hate had almost been strong enough to let him slay Xerpen, but would it be strong enough to sustain him against whatever opponent Xerpen set against him in the duel tomorrow? And if his hate was strong enough to save him, what could be strong enough to save him from his hate?

Hate filled the darkness. Umbral hung painfully from the hook in empty space, yet the Pit was not empty.  He sensed skittering. He smelled a cloying pestilence. But he did not know what it was…

…until hundreds of spiders scuttled over his body. Crawling, scurrying, stinging, sticking, biting, maculating, and masticating his flesh…horrid and itching… fetid and foul… fanged and venomous. They stung and devoured and skittered all over him, inflicting a thousand tiny wounds. They tore into his mind as well as into his meat.

Scars of the past, centuries of pain, flayed him with a thousand shards of mad Visions. No wonder one night here was equal to a thousand lifetimes.

The Aelfae who had once lived in Cliffedge had been no innocent pixies. They had been man-eaters. Generation after generation, they brought humans into this cave to be torn limb from limb and eaten
while still alive
. A thousand, or ten thousand sacrifices, death and suffering uncountable and unaccountable, had all unfolded here. A thousand or ten thousand lives had been cut down and unwoven here, and the dangling threads of their memories were now tangled here forever, a vast, trackless web of agony upon agony.

Umbral relived them all.

Once the Aelfae had given birth to a girl they rejected as a monster. Her own mother, Zithra, had tried to kill her. She had crawled away to find human allies and returned with an army. Then she had taken her revenge…. Spider Woman had devoured her own living mother. But Zithra refused to give up her immortality. Mother cursed daughter to become her new vessel and poured her memories into her daughter’s body. Immortal, amalgam, abomination: the Spider Queen was born.

With every successive generation, a new Zithra-Lume was resurrected. Not until the Black Lady’s own champion had ended the Spider Queen’s reign had Zithra-Lume’s last memory been cast into this very Pit
.

Yet, even today, remnants of the abomination still festered here… Zithra and Lume, mother and daughter, venom and sting, each the torturer of the other, the echo of a hundred evil incarnations. Shame and vengeance, hate and pain, tangled forever, growing stronger with every new victim to the Pit. Seeking, ever seeking, a new resurrection…

There was only one tiny prick of light in all that dark Pit, an infinitesimally minute seed, the last growth from a dying vine. All but strangled by time, darkness, and Umbral’s own shadow, this was what remained of Kavio; all that endured of his memory of the light. There was no fight left in Kavio, only forbearance; but, too, something Umbral knew he did not deserve: forgiveness.

Kavio held out a droplet, shimmering like a prism, with a hint of rainbow.
Take it, Umbral. Hold onto it. Hold
.

It was the seed of a memory, the tiniest seed, the simplest Vision
.

It was hazy—that time of day when the sun hides but yet illuminates everything fully—just before dusk or right after dawn. Kavio had just chased a kill into a valley hidden between dark hills. It was a cache of garden, some farmer’s secret patch of tended earth, this little hidden vale. The earth perspired sweetly and curled like a maiden’s body as she reposed after a dance. Both sides along a brook shimmered green with tendrils of growing corn. In soft breezes that scooped along the curving course, swaying husks sheltered the tranquil vegetative meditations of the embryonic maize.

Something about the moment made Kavio hold back his arrow from the final shot. The doe, sensing his change of heart, stopped too, granted him one peep from limpid eyes, and lapped at the brook.

The sun itself could not be seen, but the bright white limestone of the valley walls, the brilliant water, the round white boulders arrayed like protective arms around the whole, all reflected the unseen sun, shining bright and white, as if the whole vale was lit from within. Kavio drank deeply from the rivulet, then waded into the billowing froth. The water felt cool and wonderful sloshing about his thighs as he crossed to the far shore,
to a cradle of moss where he knew he could rest.

Umbral spit out the memory.
Just another trick!
First Dindi, then Finnadro, and now Kavio—no, Kavio had been his first foe from the start, hadn’t he?—all trying to trap and turn Umbral against Lady Death. No, and another no, and thrice no.

This, this last gasp of Kavio’s, this offered victory of happy recall, Umbral would not hold. Not though it was his last chance against the onrush of darkness. It would mean victory for
Kavio
, not for himself. Umbral refused to buy his sanity with Kavio’s memory, even if all he had of his own was pain and loss and oblivion. He would battle darkness with darkness, the abyss of Zithra-Lume’s pit with the chasm of his own hatred.
Let her chew that, the bitch
.

The pain of a thousand biting spiders, of a thousand lifetimes of torture, racked his body, and he screamed his soundless curse into the silence and the dark.

Finnadro stood in the Blood House and listened to the skulls scream. The longer he was here, the more pain he caused Umbral, the stronger Finnadro’s own magic became. He relished the feel of power it gave him to have six Chromas coursing through his veins, electric, like liquid lightning.

Blindmutes had brought the stone statue of the Green Lady to the Blood House, that Finnadro might protect her, and that he not forget what was at stake.

Though Umbral was in the Pit and the stone was over the hole, Finnadro felt the leash more sturdily than ever. He knew nothing of his own emotion leaked. He had destroyed the weakness, which, earlier, had let Umbral push back on the link. Was it only a day or two ago? Time moved differently here; it felt as if it had been months. Finnadro had been weak, and Umbral strong. Now he, Finnadro, radiated power, while Umbral’s mind was as fragile as a twig, ready to snap in Finnadro’s fingers.

Finnadro could sense everything. He knew Umbral’s body writhed at the end of the hook in a lightless cave, seething beneath a hive of magic that caused untold agony. He knew that Umbral’s mind fled this reality into a maze of madness. He knew that Umbral knew he was still there, still prying, still searching for the last secret.

The gibbering in Umbral’s pain-addled mind was distasteful. Ranted Umbral

Misery pays mercy. Justice is for fools
, ranted Umbral.
Lies are what people want. The spear is the only voice anyone heeds. You remember the knife digging into your thigh? Next time I won’t let you escape, Finn. Next time, I’ll finish the flaying. I’ll savor your screams as if they were a bowl of blood sausages. Then I’ll kill your Green Lady and let her come back to life so I can kill her again. I’ll let you watch. Maybe two, maybe three times, before I Curse her, and steal her light forever. How would you like that, Finnadro? You’d never sing again. There would be no more Green light in the world, no more love. Love is a lie. Who needs it? Kill it, kill it, kill it! Rip away every color until there’s nothing left but black. Watch me do it, Finnadro, I can destroy this whole world. Watch me!

“Monster,” Finn muttered. “Just give me what I need, you beast, so I can end your misery and be free of you!”

He thrust his power into Umbral’s mind and grasped a squirming worm of a memory that felt significant to the Deathsworn. Umbral’s mind was disintegrating into a wriggling mess, yet even now, he fought the leash so wildly, the worm almost eluded Finn’s grasp.

The stone statue of the Green Lady stood against a wood post in the Blood House, a mute reminder. She seemed to look at him with pleading eyes.

Finn tightened the fist of his will around the secret and dragged it out of Umbral’s screaming mind.

I found Ash just as she was finishing up her dispatch of the third brother. The brothers had been members of the clan that had attacked hers. They had been young, randy warriors then. Now they were married men with families of their own. Ash had secretly departed at night one moon earlier to do her hunting in solitude.  Since then she had stalked the brothers one by one:  first she burned them out of their huts and fields, then hounded whole clans into the woods, where she could separate a man from his family. As soon as she had her mark alone in the woods, she began her game.  First, she would frighten him half to death by harassing him invisibly, until he thought he was going mad.

Then she would tie him to a tree and prove him right, piece by piece.

Ash waited impatiently for the man she was playing with now to regain consciousness. She had to give him a jolt of magic, which she drew from the surroundings, in order to revive him artificially. Otherwise he would have gone into shock.

She had bound his arms behind his back, then hung him from the tree by his wrists. He screamed as she batted him around like a cat with a string. That activity had ripped his arms out of their sockets after about twenty minutes, which is why he looked so elongated and disjointed now.  She had next built a fire under his feet. At one point, she had castrated him. At another, eviscerated him.  It seemed to annoy her that he kept passing out while she made knots in his entrails. He had gone and done it again, despite the magic infusion she had given him.

It was at this point that I caught up with her at last.

“By the Seven Faeries…” I whispered.

Ash whirled.

“This is none of your business, Umbral!”

“Ash, how could you do this?”

“The first one was the hardest. After that… Snake was right. Once you’ve crossed the first river, it’s not that hard to keep going.”

Snake Bites Twice had given her the antidote. That old fool had put her up to this. He must have thought he was doing her a favor.

“This stops,” I said flatly. “Now.”

“You are defending this dog?” she screamed.  “You know what he did to me!  I deserve justice!”

“This isn’t justice!” I strode over to the man on the tree and cut him down.  The man collapsed in a heap, entrails spilling out of him.

“Are you going to heal him now?” sneered Ash.  “Go ahead and try, he’s too far gone.”

“You’re right.” I leaned down to slit the man’s throat with one swift slice of an obsidian dagger.  “But I’m going to end this once and for all, Ash.”

“You can’t stop me!”

I grabbed her by the arm. Ash struggled like a wild beast, hitting, kicking, biting. She struck me with her magic. I wrestled her into a chokehold; at the same time I snuffed her magic completely. I took some of her own leather thongs, which lay about the camp in convenient piles, to bind her hand and foot.  I tossed her over my shoulder.

“I’m going to show you what you’ve become, Ash,” I growled. I brought her to the clearing where I had left my horse.  There I tied her to a tree.  Ash’s panic multiplied into hysteria.