The Unfinished Song - Book 6: Blood (5 page)

It was tempting to let them believe that, but Umbral thought his lie would be stronger the more truth he wove into it, so he corrected Yastara.

“The Tavaedies of Orange Canyon are all Morvae. They do not tolerate Imorvae, except as birds that they ride, called Raptors. When they catch these poor Imorvae shapeshifters, they enslave them.”

“Humans are all the same,” said Hest. His tail lashed. “Beasts!”

“I quite agree,” Umbral said smoothly. “They don’t know I am Aelfae, obviously. You must trust me. We need to get into the tribehold. Vessia is there also.”

“How is it that you have human allies, Xerpen?” asked Gwidan. “How is it you know so much more than we about the world of the future?”

“I’ve been awake longer than the rest of you,” said Umbral. “As has Vessia.”

The Aelfae pondered this. Their expressions were mulish. He wondered if the Obsidian Mask would fail him.

Or if Dindi would betray him.

This would be the time she would denounce him, surely. She could tell the Aelfae he was not Xerpen. They were suspicious enough that they would believe her.

He met her eyes. He knew at once: she would not betray him. A strange emotion passed between them. Something almost
like trust.

That was impossible of course. They were still enemies. They did not dare trust one another, but for the time being, they both had a common enemy in the Bone Whistler. They had a truce. It was as fragile as a single thread, but it bridged the chasm between them.

“There is a secret passage through these caverns which leads to the House of the Great Loom, on top of the mountain,” said one of the Aelfae. She had spring flowers in her dark hair, fragrant lilacs, which were strange and wonderful to smell in the dead of winter. “I remember it, Xerpen. Unless you would rather lead us.”

“Take the lead, please, I don’t mind,” said Umbral, graciously, as if doing her a favor. In fact, he had no idea how to find his way through these caverns. He wondered if Kavio knew, but the memory of the man he had killed, which sometimes sounded like a voice in his head, was silent.

They formed a single file line that wove through the weird garden of stone grown over ten thousand years in the belly of the mountain. Umbral had been in many kivas and tunnels and mazes dug into the heart of rock and earth, but those had been fashioned by human hands, or sometimes, by Aelfae. Caves were different. Caves were strange, dangerous places where neither floors nor ceilings stayed flat or parallel; where sudden narrows, abrupt drops, impassable channels gurgling with water or burning with inexplicable heat foiled one’s passage.

Not even the air could be trusted. Several times during the twists and turns, the ups and downs (though mostly ups), the Aelfae guiding the group paused. The air smelled strange and she urged them, “Back away, there is a foulness here.”

Darkness seethed and skittered in those stinking places—Deathsworn magic—but not from the Deathsworn he served, he would swear to it. It was more of the stolen magic he had encountered before.

It was spreading. He wondered how many other befouled crevices in Faearth now harbored snaking wisps of uncontrolled death.

Traveling through the dark with Aelfae did have one advantage. They needed no torches. They each glowed enough to illuminate the passages. At times, the travellers passed through corridors of sparkling crystal. The rainbow light emitted by the Aelfae reflected in these crystals and was magnified a thousand times, throwing up dancing rainbows everywhere. Dindi gasped at the sight. Umbral took her hand, squeezed; and she squeezed back.

The nature of caves was such to frustrate any easy passage. After hours of patient threading of the passages, the end of their journey was still far off, according to their guide. So when they found a space with water dripping off the stalactites, wide enough for them to all stand and stretch, they agreed to stop and rest.

No one had spoken much during the spelunking, except to offer one another practical advice, such as, “A little to the left,” “Here, take my hand, I’ll help you over that,” and, “Watch the ledge on the right, there’s a chimney.” They all, apparently, had enough experience with caves to know to concentrate on the dangers. Dindi had proven the least experienced, which confirmed the Aelfae’s wariness of her, but they did not argue she should be left behind, even when they all had to slow for her to find her way through a hard place. One thing in her favor was that she glowed a little herself, though not nearly so brightly as the other Aelfae.

The Aelfae used the “rest” period to stretch and a few even began to dance spontaneously with one another. They laughed easily.
Like children. Like…
fae
. Though the guide with flowers in her hair did not frolic with them. Neither did Dindi or Umbral.

He wove a subtle lace of silence between himself and the Aelfae, to ensure privacy, then sought Dindi. She sat alone, hugging her knees, watching the Aelfae wistfully, until Umbral crouched beside her.

“How are you doing?”

“Fine,” she said automatically. Then she paused to consider the question. “Tired. The dark kind of …eats at you, doesn’t it? Not all of it, but… You know the places I mean.”

“I do.”

She rubbed her eyes. “Umbral, what are we doing? Why do you want them to think you are the Bone Whistler? Why do you want to take them to the Orange Canyon tribehold, where we know the real Bone Whistler is waiting? Isn’t that the place we should want to avoid most of all?”

“Three reasons,” he said. He brushed the floor, and his fingers played over a scattering of white pebbles there. He idly placed the small pebbles in a pile as he spoke, one for each point. “One, we need to find out what his plans are. Two, we need to find out whether the White Lady is allied with him or not. Three, we need to kill him.”

Dindi placed pebbles in another pile, next to his. “One, we may find out his plan by bringing him the very allies he needs to complete it. Two, even if the White Lady is his prisoner, how can we free her, the two of us alone? Three, what if she
is
working with him? Will you kill her in cold blood? And what about these Aelfae? Will you kill them too? I don’t know how they were brought back to life. It may have been at a terrible cost, but they are alive now. You can’t just murder them.”

“Dindi, I may have to.”

“And then you’ll kill me too!” Her voice rose, and she quickly looked around to see if anyone had heard. Umbral had taken care of that with his shield of silence, but he worried that the Aelfae might be suspicious if they saw Dindi apparently yelling without sound. However, the Aelfae were so sufficiently pleased with their own company that they had not noticed.

“That’s your solution to everything, isn’t it?” Dindi said more softly. “Death, death, death. But have you stopped to consider maybe that’s not the best way to fight Xerpen’s hexery—which is clearly Death magic?”

“
Is
it Death magic, though?” he asked. It was not a rhetorical question, but one that had been troubling him for a long time now. “It’s akin to Deathsworn magic, but there’s something
inverted
about it. Deathsworn magic does not bring the dead back to life—that would miss the point, wouldn’t it?”

Dindi’s expression was unfathomable. Perhaps she was wishing she could bring the dead back to life. Umbral shifted uncomfortably.

“Can I ask you something, Dindi? You don’t have to answer.”

She nodded warily.

“When you were…”
Muck it all, this shouldn’t be hard.
Euphemisms came to mind, softened phrases to make himself sound better, but he rejected them and said harshly, “…running away from me, fleeing up the Ice Snake. Why didn’t you fly? You could have escaped. You wouldn’t have nearly drowned. You know I wouldn’t have been able to follow you.”

She looked astonished, then grimaced. “Uh. Good question. I doubt it would have worked. You saw me try to manifest wings earlier. As Kia said, it was pathetic. But to be honest, it never even occurred to me to try.”

“Maybe that’s the problem.”

“What do you mean?”

“You think of yourself as human. But to fly you need to think of yourself as…more.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“You carried both of us to safety once. If you did it once, you can do it again.”

“
You
try it, if it’s so easy.”

“I don’t have Aelfae blood.”

She turned to him with an odd light in her eyes. “Are you sure?”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“You have six…what-do-you-call-thems…your shadow Chromas…”

“Penumbras.”

“Because you once had six Chromas, correct?”

Umbral realized where this was going and unease coiled around inside his gut.

“You must have. That’s why
you
had to be the one to kill Kavio. That’s why
you
had to be the one sent to kill me. Because you also…”

“Enough!”

He glared at her, and she fell silent without completing the sentence; but he could not unthink the thought she had planted. He remembered breathing underwater in his fight with the undead Aelfae. He had drawn on Kavio’s memory, but how had his body manifested the ability?

Dindi touched the three stones in the parallel piles. “I guess our Thinking Stones are evenly matched.”

Kavio’s Thinking Stones. Once, the realization that he had been borrowing from Kavio’s memories would have annoyed Umbral. Now…he had too many real fears to worry about trivia. Or maybe he and Kavio had made their peace. The voice was still strangely silent.

Umbral added another pebble to ‘his’ pile. “If we turn around now, the Aelfae will know something is wrong, discover we’re really human, and kill us.”

The subterranean hall, fashioned from slabs of black basalt, slithered from dark to dark like the gullet of a black snake. Few sky holes or hearth fires ventilated this section of the maze under the tribehold. In the Bone Whistler’s day, these cells housed
mariahs
waiting to be sacrificed. It had groaned with bodies. Now it was empty except for one captive.

The chamber where Zumo had imprisoned Vessia, and where Zumo had himself been imprisoned, was not actually a slave pit; it had once been a sleeping room for the warriors who guarded the
mariahs
. It had a skylight and lavish furnishings and was not as dank as lower cells, which seeped with water during the flood season. Vio had allowed Zumo the same luxuries that Zumo had allowed Vessia. But no more.

Ten warriors guarded the door at all times. Instead of the usual leather door apron, it was blocked with a cage-like slab of criss-crossed wood beams. The warriors parted for Vio when he arrived and slid aside the wooden blockade.

Zumo heard the commotion and stood at attention in the center of the room by the time Vio entered.

The boy swallowed hard. “Uncle Vio.”

Looking at him, Vio remembered the gangly toddler he had once been, totting about with Kavio when they were both babes. They had loved to swing sticks like spears, shouting:
Ya! Ya!

“You asked to see me, nephew?” Vio asked coolly.

“I didn’t kill Kavio.”

Vio turned to leave. “Tell your lies at the trial.”

“He could have killed me after the War of the Bears and Sharks. He spared my life. Do you think I would kill someone to whom I owed a liftdebt? Am I such scum in your eyes, Uncle?”

“Yes.”

“Even the Bone Whistler himself would not have betrayed a lifedebt.”

“You obviously didn’t know the Bone Whistler.”

Zumo kicked the rug in frustration, and Vio left. The guards replaced the wooden blockade behind him.

Over the next several moons, Vio pushed to hold the trial, while Nangi pushed to delay it. He knew she was desperately seeking votes for mercy in the Society of Societies. As it was, most of the Tavaedies believed Zumo guilty. He was the only one with the ability, aspiration, and chance to have killed Kavio. That Kavio was dead was accepted, since otherwise he would have returned or sent word. Nangi, however, insisted there could be no trial without a body. Vio retorted that the body had most likely been burned, or buried, or even sent to Obsidian Mountain in all honor. How would any of them know? The wrangling continued. Zumo rotted in his cave in the meantime.

Vio sent word to his wife to return to the Labyrinth, but she was set on her scheme to find the Vaedi, bride for a dead son, madness he chalked up to grief.

Shortly after Midwinter, Rainbow Labyrinth clanholds in the mountains reported that the skies in the direction of the Hidden Woods had turned black during the day. Winds brought the stink of ash. The whole forest was burning.

Vio sent messengers, but they could not get through. Attacks by Orange Canyon warriors turned them back.

Finally, a messenger from the Hidden Forest arrived with terrible news.

Vio stalked back down into the dark coils of the maze to Zumo’s cell.

Zumo was paler and thinner but otherwise no worse for his incarceration.
It was early morning, and the boy was still on his pallet in the stone niche dug from the wall when Vio barreled in and lifted him by the throat.