The Unfinished Song - Book 6: Blood (41 page)

“There’s enough of the antidote for you too, Umbral,” Ash blurted. “In the jar on my belt.”

I snapped the tiny ceramic jar off the cord around her waist, dropped it to the ground and crushed it. She cringed.

“I no longer care who I was in my other life,” I said. “I serve Lady Death. The past would only be a distraction.”

I went to my horse, where a tiny girl, just able to toddle, slept in a papoose. I picked her up. She tucked her curly head against my shoulder, too drowsy to wake up.

“Do you see this little girl?” I asked quietly, returning to Ash so that she had no choice except to see the child. “I found her in a hut at one of the clanholds where you started a fire. The family had fled in panic, not realizing they had left her behind.  She was wailing, too small to know how to get away. If I had not found her in time, because I was tracking you, she would have burned to death.  Is that what you want, Ash?  Another little girl burned as you were?”

Ash turned her head to avoid seeing the tot. “That was an accident!”

“You didn’t do it on purpose, but it was no accident.”  I kept my voice low in order not to wake the child.

“Ash, listen to me. You become the Patterns you weave. You are from Obsidian Mountain, you should realize that better than anyone.  We are not fae, removed from the consequences of our actions in the world. There is no core of ourselves that we can keep pure and aloft from the practice of our lives.  Nothing survives of us except the Patterns we leave behind; that is the sum of our existence.

“When you became a Deathsworn, you swore to transcend that girl who had been abused and left for dead.  You haven’t.  You never let yourself stop burning.  It’s worse than that.  You haven’t left behind the men who hurt you, either.  It isn’t your own Pattern you are weaving with your life… it’s theirs. With every one of them you hunt down and torture, you just strengthen the Pattern they started.  They taught you this dance of cruelty, pain, and hate.  You’ve been dancing it ever since. You’re even teaching it to more children, burning their homes, murdering their kin.  It has to end, Ash!

“You are my friend,” I leaned forward, holding the child.  “It isn’t for the sake of those men that I hate what you do.  It is for your sake.  When all is said and done, is what I saw back there really what you want the Pattern of your life’s dance to be?”

Ash tried to answer. Instead, she began to sob.

I stood up from my half crouch. I rocked the child as Ash cried.  After a moment, I brushed the little girl’s hair from her face and tucked her back into the papoose, so I could untie Ash from the tree.

I was only halfway back to the tree when a man stepped out of the wood with his bow cocked.

“Don’t move, Rogue!” the newcomer ordered. “This arrow is aimed right for your heart—if you even have one.”

“You can see me as I am?”  I asked in surprise. Suddenly, I remembered I had removed the Obsidian Mask to confront Ash. I cursed my stupidity silently. The man could see my real face.

The bowman laughed humorlessly. “I know what you are.  I know what you’ve done. I just found the third of your victims.” He took in Ash, mutilated and tied to a tree, then the infant girl in the basket. “I see you don’t even spare women or children, you beast.  Hold your hands away from your body and lie down on the ground, face down. If you make one wrong move, you die.”

I gave Ash a look.
Play along
. I did as the bowman had instructed. 

The archer kept one hand on his bow while he used the other to cut Ash free.  “I am Finnadro, the Henchman of the Green Lady,” he told her. “My men are not far to the west of us. Go quickly, and tell them where I am. Take your baby. I will take care of this brute.”

Ash nodded. She picked up the basket with the infant and hurried away. As soon as she was gone, I flipped to my feet, somersaulted through the air and kicked the bow out of Finnadro’s grip. He blocked my next kick to his neck.

We fought hand to hand. Our spat traversed the forest. I had practiced my fighting skills to some extent in Obsidian Mountain, but not until now had I the opportunity to test myself to the edges of my skill. I had to grin. I had not realized I had missed this challenge until I’d had a chance to cross wits with an excellent fighter.

Unfortunately for Finnadro, he did not realize he had two opponents. While I kept him occupied, Ash sneaked up behind him and lashed him with threads of shadow magic. His eyes bulged before he lost consciousness. He collapsed between a catch of ferns and a blackberry bush. Ash and I lifted him against a tree and bound him there with shadow.

“Where’s the child?” I asked her.

She snorted. “Don’t worry, Papa Bird. Your egg is nested in the tree.”

I retrieved the Obsidian Mask and checked on the safety of the papoose. It was indeed hanging on a branch, and the little one inside had awakened and started to fuss. I knew nothing of infants, but when I handed her a stick, she chewed on it, and at least that quieted her. The baby still had living kin, and I needed to return her to her own. First, however, I had to make certain that Ash…

I heard a hoarse scream and cursed.

Ash had strapped on her own black skull mask, and started to amuse herself slicing skin off Finnadro’s leg. The defleshing had awakened him enough to bellow. Ash was draining his aura, using the pain to loosen his Chromas. He passed back out of consciousness.

“Ash!” I snapped.

“Come now, you can’t complain about
this
. He attacked us, so he deserves to die. And his aura is
strong
, Umbral. The power would last weeks…”

I felt Finnadro’s pulse. “He’s not dead.”

“I can fix that.”

“Did you listen to nothing that I said?” I asked in exasperation. “Why kill this man? He was just trying to do what was right, as far as he could see it.”

“He saw your real face,” Ash objected. “He could be dangerous to you.”

I just looked at her.

“Fa, very well then, I won’t kill him!” Ash grumbled. “But one day you may regret sparing his life, Umbral.”

“So be it.”

Finnadro stood numb with shock after the Vision ended. His hands were shaking. The smoke in the Blood House, forever tainted by foul vapors of burnt flesh, tasted acrid in his dry mouth. This wasn’t possible. This had to be a trick… a lie… it wasn’t possible he owed Umbral his life.

Umbral had tried to warn him:
Some would say you owe me a lifedebt
.

What have I done?

Finnadro scrabbled to the stone over the Pit. The blindmutes had ignored his commands to remove it, and they did not want him to remove it either, but when they tried to pry him away, he fought eight or nine of them and knocked them all unconscious. He drew on all the power he had gained in the last three days to heave the stone.

He had almost rolled it free, when Xerpen himself stormed down the ladder into the Blood House. Xerpen wore no mask, no headdress, and no robe. In fact, he was dressed strangely, in black leather, embossed up and down the length of his legwals and tunic with one long serpent devouring its own tail.

“What are you doing?” he asked coldly.

Finnadro stood defensively in front of the Pit.

“I cannot continue the duty you entrusted to me.” His voice sounded like sand on stone, dry, hoarse, empty of all emotion. “I have just discovered…I owe this man a lifedebt. I have owed it to him the whole time I tortured him.”

“Have you?” Xerpen’s lip curled. “Even engorged on power, more power than belongs to you, or than you deserve, it took you
this long
to figure out that basic fact?”

Finnadro stared at him. “You…
knew
…?”

“It was obvious from the first memory I took from you,” sneered Xerpen. He made a cutting gesture. Pain, as if his body were being ripped in two, buckled Finnadro to his knees. He touched his arms, half-expecting them to be ripped off, but they were still there. It was the leash that Xerpen had cut, and with it, he had taken away the two extra Chromas that Finnadro had enjoyed. Growing up, he had never missed them, but having tasted them, he felt the loss as keenly as he would a severed limb.

Without the power of the leash feeding him magic and giving him control, the full horror of the Blood House crashed in on his mind. Finnadro could feel the gnashing screams of every victim ever tortured here; their anger at his role in even more torture added more blood to the fire.

Xerpen walked in a slow circle around Finnadro, mocking him in that soft, serpentine voice of his, golden, sugared and cruel.

“Sssssso, you made an oath to me… and broke it. You owed a lifedebt to him… and dishonored it. You swore to protect your Lady… and failed her. You’re pretty useless all around, are you not, Finnadro?”

Xerpen pressed a Vision into his mind: the Green Lady writhing in agony before her sister as the Orange Lady tortured her. Finnadro staggered across the room to the stone statue of his lady. The torment frozen on her face mirrored his own.
I failed you
.

Xerpen strolled over and put an arm around his shoulders. He hissed in Finnadro’s ear. “Sssssso, you have no honor left. You have no love left. You have nothing left.”

“Nothing…” Finn echoed dully.

“I suggest,” Xerpen continued, in a sibilant croon—but it was a Command,
“
You go to the cliff and throw yourself into the Black Well
.”

Finnadro lifted his head, heart pounding. His throat opened to a cry from the depths, and he heaved the statue into his arms despite the weight, and, on his back, rushed it from the Blood House.

Xerpen followed him as far as the doorway, shouting, “It is hours before dawn! Don’t think your Lady can save you, fool!”

Finnadro had no intention of letting his Lady save him. But, even under Command, he would not leave her in
that
place. Nor would he take her into the Black Well. Xerpen’s final Command strangled him like a snake, trying to force him toward the chasm of darkness, but Finnadro sprinted to the other cliff, tearing against the pull of Xerpan’s will, to the far precipice where the bone cages holding his people had once been. Due to the overhang, there would be nothing to break his fall, or foil his final journey. Below was a deep ravine and frozen river. When his Lady awakened to life again, she might at least console herself with the sight of his splattered body beside her, on the shore beyond the river: his confession, his apology, his final sacrifice.

He kissed the pebbled lips of his Lady. His tears darkened the stone of her cheek.

“Forgive me,” he begged her silent form. “I must. I am a monster.”

Embracing her stone body, he threw himself over the precipice.

A disk of light cleaved the darkness. The spiders scattered and disappeared. Umbral squinted upward, trying to understand what sun shone so brightly into the abyss. Then he realized it was the hole in the ceiling of the cavern. Someone had rolled away the covering stone.

He felt himself heaved up. The hooks tore at his flesh with every jerk of the rope. It wasn’t dawn yet—somehow he knew that even though time had no meaning—he knew it could not be dawn, because he was still sane.

A strong man, not Finnadro, lifted him out of the hole.

Not one of the blindmutes and not Finnadro. In fact, Umbral realized suddenly, the leash connecting his mind to Finnadro had been broken. His mind was free.

“Umbral.” The man cradled his head as a father would. “Umbral, we need to get you out of this terrible place.”

Umbral blinked at him. “Do I know you?”

“I must look younger than you remember,” smiled the man. “Thanks to the Black Lady. But it’s me… your old friend. Snakes Bites Twice.”

Umbral stared at the Deathsworn. Yes… he did recognize him now, although he looked impossibly young.

“Ash told Obsidian Mountain you were here,” Snake Bites Twice said. “And our Lady appeared to me and gave me a drink which stole away my winters, leaving me with this spring that now you see. It was all for you, to save you. You are her champion. She would do anything for you.”

“I failed her.” Umbral blanched for shame.

“What?” Snake’s voice caught. “I know they tortured you, but Umbral, you did not break…”

“I did.”

“You told your torturer the secret?” demanded Snake. He was furious, as well he might be.

“I…”

“Tell me exactly what you told him!” hissed Snake.

“I showed him our Lady,” rasped Umbral. “I thought I could convince him to serve Her. But he refused…He called me a monster...”

“What about the Aelfae Traitor? Tell me everything, so I know what they dragged from your mind.” Snake Bites Twice shook Umbral’s weakened body like a rag. “Tell me! You can still redeem yourself in the eyes of the Black Lady!”

“Lady Death will never forgive me,” rasped Umbral. “She ordered me to kill Dindi, but I rebelled…”

“Dindi…the girl with Aelfae blood. So she
did
know the Traitor…why else would Lady Death want her dead? But you did not kill her before she had a chance to tell Xerpen.”