The Black God's War (27 page)

Dim rays of light from outside revealed a much heavier door in front of them, one reinforced by tall bands of steel and decorated with round obsidian gems. It blocked the only way forward. Carved into it were the following words in the ancient script:

Truth is the only therapy.

“Shall we?” Caio asked.

Her eyes darted downward and sideways before she nodded.

Caio pressed the lever atop the rusty handle and pushed. The metallic hinges produced an echoing screech and another tiny room opened in front of them, this one crowded by musty texts lining shelves along the side walls. Lucia coughed painfully, a sound almost like vomiting.

“Don’t touch,” she paused to hack up rancid air, “even one book.”

Caio nodded and pulled her behind him. “I remember.”
His Truth can only be found through direct experience
.

Two paces ahead, an open archway framed their view of the main room in Danato’s Lighthouse. They stepped forward into the tall space. Spiraling, moss-coated stone steps led up to the lookout. Pale green limestone tiles covered most of the curving walls. The eerie wind whispered from the windows of the level above. On the opposite side of the room, almost behind the stairs, lay a man-sized circular hatch in the floor.

“The myths tell us we should go directly downward,” Caio said. Without hesitation, he stepped around the stairwell and pulled up the rotting wood by its metallic curved handle. The nether world exhaled from below, hot air like a pent-up cry.

“We must go, with open spirits, willing to meet whatever he presents to us,” Caio said.

Lucia crouched at the edge of the hole and held her brother’s gaze. “I’ll go first. Please stay close to me.”

With no wall or ladder to grasp under the hatch, Lucia lowered her legs into the circular maw and fell in. Her body disappeared in the darkness and Caio followed.

Down.

Chapter 38: The Curse of Memory

LUCIA PLUMMETED, swinging her arms around, hoping to grab onto something to break her fall. She found only darkness.

Panic.

“Caio!” she screamed. The sound became muffled in the suffocating black. It felt as if her stomach might fly through her throat.

“Someone help me!” she cried with long syllables as hot air rushed through her hair.

Ignored.

Lucia plunged and spun faster. The force overwhelmed her muscles. She couldn’t control her arms.

Her shaking lips managed to mouth, “No,” but only produced a squeak.

Breakdown.

Tears flew from her face.

With only a small part of her spirit intact, she waited for it to end.

Impact. Submersion.

Water!

A flesh-like weight pushed her down. She felt suffocated.

I will not surrender! You’ll kill me first.

The water surged beneath her and pushed her straight up. She began hitting objects as she rose—
bodies?
—and threw her arms over her face in disgust. Her head emerged above the surface with a howling gasp, sucking in the putrid, sulfuric air. More impenetrable darkness met her eyes, though her wits began to return.

“Do you wish to see, Lucia?” Lord Danato’s voice rumbled from above and to her left, calm and patient.

You want conversation?

“Let me know when you wish to begin.”

Lucia swam instead, away from the sound of his voice. Almost immediately, she had to push a lifeless body away from her now naked flesh.

“Haven’t you come to see me, my dear Lucia?”

Damn you!
“Where is my brother?”

“What if dead? And floating near you?”

Her jaw clenched and she glared upward in his direction, her mind thinking of the goddess Ysa and the prayers she could make to her.

“Ysa will not help you here. My sister would not invade my realm, nor act against me. You do not yet understand that the gods are one.”

“Where is he?”

“Caio’s body is here.” The Black One paused. “You will have to find him.”

“I can’t see anything!”

“Do you wish to see, Lucia? After all this time?”

A long silence followed, save for drops of water dripping onto the dark sea. Judging by the sounds, the body of water extended out a great distance, all around her.

“What I want is to find my brother. Then we will ask what can be done to save our people from this war and plague. I am talking about your people, we who honor you, the people of Rezzia.”

“Do you honor me, Lucia? Then tell me how.” Lord Danato’s voice still bellowed from a towering height.

“When have
you
ever honored me?” she asked.

“I have always honored you.”

You are vile.

“Do you wish to see, Lucia?”

“Fine! If that is the only way. Yes.”

Hundreds of torches lit the air like fireflies and floated high and low, animated by an unseen force. A sea of corpses floated in the black ocean. Lucia spun about, her legs ready to give out and her skin still throbbing from the impact. She looked into so many pale, empty faces. Thousands of corpses, once Rezzian soldiers, surrounded her—women and children, too.

A sheer cliff loomed before her, stretching into the darkness. At the ledge of a cave high up the rocky surface, massive Lord Danato knelt on one knee and looked down upon her with eyes highlighted by the orange teardrop on his cheek.

“Where is Caio?” Her hysteria began to return.

“Why don’t you find him?”

“There are too many bodies! Where is he?”

“If he is dead, does his body matter? What will you do next? What will you
feel
?”

I’d bloody kill you if I could.

“Can you raise him from the dead?”

Curse you! You know the answer to that.

“I gave you the markings. You bear the power.”

“I want nothing to do with your gifts!”

“Could you be a Haizzema?”

“No!”

“Could you heal the children?”

Lucia almost punched herself as her hands flew to the sides of her head in frustration.

“Could you end the war?”

Shut your mouth!

“What lies beneath your rage, Lucia?”

“More!”

“And beneath that?”

“More!”

And beneath that?”

“Bloody more and more! Bloody gods damn more!”

“And
that
is why you suffer.”

“Do you know how much I despise you?”

“Any emotion toward me is better than none, my daughter. It brings us closer together. I have long watched over you for my sister. Before your mother died, Ysa asked me to take care of you.”

Lucia wrapped her arms around her head and tried to exhale her insanity.

“You do not see. You do not know how I have loved you.”

“You are a liar,” she mumbled.

“And now Caio is gone. Haven’t you always been afraid he would die, just as your mother left you?”

“Do not. Speak again. About my mother.”

“She was your everything, Lucia.”

“Shut your mouth!”

“What did you feel when you saw me standing over her? Do you remember?”

I loathe you.

“What did you feel? Was it like your feeling now that Caio is gone?”

“You’d better kill me before you take Caio,” her voice became weak and pleading. “He is not tired of this life. He has not yet begun to heal this world.”

“Why don’t
you
heal this world?”

Curse you, you vile bastard!

“You could do it.”

“Bring Caio back.”

“For once, you should consider my words, Lucia.”

“What can I do to appease you?”

“Lucia, this is the way. The way is in your heart.”

“Then tell me.”

“Openness. Honoring me.”

“Tell me what I need to do.”

“You are doing it.”

“What?”

“It is in your heart now.”

“I only know that I need to find my brother and we need your help to end this war.”

“Good.”

“What else can I do?”

“Come to me, Lucia. Your subservience pleases me.”

Chapter 39: Heat

CAIO PUSHED HIMSELF off the edge and dropped through the hole into the darkness. After falling a short distance he crashed onto a moist, clay floor, falling forward onto his hands and knees. The pitch black felt like some kind of oven. He felt a sizzling steam wash over his body, bringing with it the scent of mugwort. The environment was, at best, a sauna. At worst, inhospitable.

“Lucia?” Caio’s lungs burned as the hot air entered them. He crawled, extending his hands looking for her body. “Lucia?” The silence lingered as it would in a vast cavern. “Are you all right?”

His intuition told him she was somewhere else, even though she had jumped into the same pit a moment before him.

I am praying for you, Lucia.

Caio dropped onto his stomach and stretched out his legs, pressing every available part of his body against the cooler floor to escape from the heat. Even this low to the ground, the air burned so much it hurt to breathe.

I could die here.

I could pass out and die.

The war would go on without me. The plague would continue to spread.

And I wouldn’t have to kill another man or watch another person die from disease …

No.

Please help me, Lord Danato.

A thin beam of light shone from far away and with it came strange sounds. Caio crawled toward the light with sweat streaming into his eyes. He tried wiping his forehead with his arms, but they too were drenched. The scalding heat and burning in his lungs lessened as he pushed on. A brief look backward still revealed no other light and no way back up to the lighthouse.

The sound eventually became clearer. Some kind of raucous gypsy tune played near the light, which looked increasingly like the outline of a door. Behind it, stringed instruments and drums were being played at a frantic pace, unlike any music Caio had ever heard.

Caio stopped crawling and turned an ear toward the tiny door.
Voices. Hollering. Eruptions of joy
.
Noises like animals would make—but these are men and women.

Please be here, Lucia.

Caio hesitated in front of the door. The temperature was still uncomfortably hot, though more manageable now.

Behind the door, a fiddle screeched to a crowd with hands clapping in rhythm. Women shouted, but with ecstasy. A deep sound boomed over and over behind the frenzied music, the passionate thumping of a long, thick string.

Bright light streamed from the edges of the door. Bodies seemed to be dancing on the other side. Caio felt the door and discovered wet, coarse stone. He nudged it slightly open and the overpowering scent and taste of alcohol overwhelmed him, like a cloth soaked in red wine and dragged across his nose and lips.

His feet, he found, were tapping to the beat. The music—sultry, bouncing, pounding—grew louder. On the other side of the door, he anticipated finding an unchaste celebration. The door opened after a firm shove from his shoulder, revealing thousands dancing to the band of musicians playing on a tall wooden stage.

The instruments stopped all at once and a tan woman with long, curling blond-brown hair began humming a deep, seductive melody. Her red lace dress barely covered her supple breasts and no part of her shoulders. Tattoos of branches and leaves wrapped around her biceps in a narrow band.

The singer looked directly at Caio as she sang, though no one else seemed to notice him. The crowd kept dancing, acting crazed. The women wore scanty dresses and low-cut shirts. Their chests and thighs bounced and flexed. The men wore no shirts at all.

These denizens of the underworld won’t know me, will they?

The warm air reeked of alcoholic spirits and human sweat. Caio drifted through the crowd looking for Lucia, but the farther he went in, the harder it became to get through. He wanted to go past the musicians, but as he approached the stage the bodies were more densely packed.

Without warning, a hairy man put his hands against Caio’s face and shoved him sideways. Caio tripped and began to fall, but two full-bosomed women held him up by pressing their bodies against him. Before he could pull away, the darker of the two women put her mouth around his ear and pushed her tongue into it. As he turned to tell her to stop, the fair-skinned woman grabbed his cheeks and kissed his lips.