The Unfinished Song - Book 6: Blood (25 page)

Umbral’s face twisted into a paroxysm of rage and hate. He rattled against his lashings so hard the whole chassis rocked.

That was the moment Finnadro reached in and yanked the memory from Umbral’s black aura.

They bound me to a rock upon a promontory that overlooked a thousand hills and valleys. They left me there to wait for nightfall, and I will never forget how beautiful the vista was. Sparkling flocks of willawisps of all colors undulated over the hills. The sky was clear overhead, but on the horizon a bank of gray clouds poured rain, which from this distance, looked like silver mist. A rainbow arced across the whole sky, from hill to hill, so brilliant and clear I could imagine it was an actual painted bow I could pluck from the sky and turn against my captors to free myself. I will never forget it. It was my final rainbow. Dusk swallowed the last colors.

The Deathsworn held their dances on the promontory in front of a natural formation of stone that resembled a slab-like obelisk. This natural monolith leaned back at a faint angle. Those Dark Initiates who were fated to kiss Lady Death were laid out upon it—or lashed to it, as I was.

During my captivity, while waiting for the new moon ceremony tonight, I had learned things about Obsidian Mountain. Only Tavaedies could become Deathsworn. The more powerful the Tavaedies, the more powerful they would be as Deathsworn. New Deathsworn were referred to as Dark Initiates.

Most of the Dark Initiates who came to Obsidian Mountain were either old and withered or wounded and crippled. All of them were resigned to death, since it was known by all the tribes that no one left the Mountain alive. Some, however, were so mad with pain that they could not lie still on the monolith to accept the obsidian knife that would bring them peace. Only after, one way or another, they had agreed to the knife, were a select few told of a way that they could live on for a short while, though it must be under the Shadow of Death and in Her service.

I was not injured, crippled, or old, yet they dared keep me. My hate for Lady Death had only grown the longer I was captive. While I was tied alone on the rock, I strained against my bindings, hoping to snap them. All my struggles only succeeded in tightening the leather around my wrists and ankles.

“That won’t do any good,” Ash warned me smugly. She had arrived so quietly I had not heard her. The Deathsworn valued stealth above brute strength.

I glared at her.

Others arrived shortly. The Pattern began at sunset, as tradition decreed. When the last Purple of day vanished into the Black of night, the Deathsworn gathered in a circle with drums and flutes and rattles. They wore black leather, black feathered masks, and blackened human bones as adornments. All of them carried weapons: leather whips, thorny switches, stone knives. Several of them carried smoldering sticks.  They also built a bonfire in the center of the circle.

The drumbeat started out slow. The dark dancers shuffled in a circle, chanting a wordless dirge. Gradually the pace picked up. As each man or woman passed before the rock where I was bound, they flicked me with a lash of leather, a cut of stone, or a singe of firebrand.  Some of them were too timorous to do more than give me a token pat. Others, like Ash, relished the opportunity to make me flinch in pain as they passed. Those who carried pointed sticks touched the sticks to the bonfire, then used them to inflict a burn with the smoldering end.

I had told myself I would resist in rugged silence. What a fool I was. Pain whipped pride. I writhed helplessly in my bonds, screaming until I was hoarse. As the tempo increased, even the most gentle spirits became frenzied with the mindless animal rhythm of the chanting and dancing. Every passerby in the circle brought me new torment.

Suddenly the drums stopped.

At the respite, I went slack in my cords. I was covered with hundreds of small welts, gashes, and burns. Snake Bites Twice and Dame Vulture hobbled over to the rock.

“Are you ready to give us your Chromas willingly?” asked Snake Bites Twice, cold and remorseless.

“Go muck yourselves!” I wheezed. I tried to spit again, but my throat was too dry from screaming.

They shrugged and withdrew. Dame Vulture lifted her hand in an imperious gesture.

The drumming resumed.

The dance continued all night. Twice more, Dame Vulture stopped the dance to ask if I were ready to capitulate. By the second time, I dripped red with sweat and blood, trembling and half-mad with pain. I had no saucy answer for her that time, only the shake of my head.

By the third time, I whimpered for mercy.

“You’re ready now,” Vulture said with satisfaction.

I shook my head. I could not surrender my Chromas. It was the one pain I knew would be worse than this.

“He will die if we try to take his Chromas without his consent,” Dame Vulture said to Snake Bites Twice.

He shrugged. “He may die either way. We must proceed with the next stage of the ritual regardless of his cooperation.”

The dance macabre resumed.

This time, as the Deathsworn Dancers passed, they did not touch me physically. Instead they pulled at my aura, tearing my Chromas from me. My Chromas would not relinquish their foothold in my soul so easily.  It required heave after heave, tear after tear.

My howls became inhuman.

Around me gaped emptiness where once there had been vibrancy and light. The Deathsworn ended their dance and gathered around in a hush to see if I had survived. My head hung down limply. My sobs had ended. Even my breathing had almost ceased.

Dame Vulture gripped my chin in her bony hand. I wheezed.

“He is one of us,” declared Dame Vulture. “Take him down and treat him.  No, Ash. Not you.”

They tended me in a stone hut, built into the mountain so that raw rock made the final wall. The hut had one crawlspace and no windows. They kept wood slats across the low-slung entrance, but, lying on a fur, I could peer through the cracks. The sky paled from obsidian black to flint gray, thin evidence that somewhere beyond the black mountains, a sun was rising. Its light did not touch me.

I suppose I slept. When I awoke, it was brighter in the room, yet I sensed it was still night. The wooden slats before the door had been removed, and when I stumbled outside, no one stopped me, though several Deathsworn sitting near other huts, also built into the mountain, looked up from their labors to watch me. The sky glowered too brightly for nighttime, but it was not blue. The moon was full, but no stars were out. There were white clouds in the gray sky.

I could not understand. Everything looked wrong. By night, objects are never their true hue, they are only shades of themselves, pallid-ashen to somber-shadow. Unless they are painted by firelight, colors at night look sickly and grim, as if washed in murk. Everything looked that way now. There were no real colors anywhere, only vomitous tones, as if the whole world had been devoured and regurgitated by a foul beast.

The elderly ladies were pounding bread, the men further up on the mountain, at the obsidian quarry, were tap-tap-tapping at the stone. These were activities for daylight. And yet still, I refused to understand.

I sagged to my knees as the truth hit me. What had been done to me last night, the pain, the shame, the fear; it was nothing to the breaking I felt at that moment; a tiny, soundless snap inside me that no one else could hear.

What I had supposed was the moon was the sun. What I had supposed was night was day. The gray putrid ugliness all around me was what the world looked like without magic. My Chromas were gone. This was all I would ever see. I remembered the rainbow and tried to picture the colors in my mind, their brightness, their glory. Even in memory, I could not get the colors back.

They were gone, gone, all gone.

The experience was so vivid Umbral knew he had relived the memory of his Dark Initiation as a Vision.

Not only had he relived it, his torturer had too. Finnadro had seen everything. Heard every scream. Witnessed his cowardice, his shameful weeping. Finnadro must be rejoicing at how simple it had been to reduce him to a shivering, whimpering child. Finn must be thinking how easy this was going to be.

Going through the Dark Initiation had been bad. Reliving it had been worse. But knowing Finnadro was gloating over the memory was the worst of all. Umbral felt violated. But that was the idea, wasn’t it: To rape his memories one by one, until his torturer found the one he wanted.

Finnadro was in for a surprise. The Deathsworn had shattered Umbral, but they’d also broken away the weak flakes. All that remained was blade.

I may have been weak then, but not now. I’ll never let you have what you want of me. You can shatter a flint blade, but you can’t make it bend.

Never succumb.

Never submit.

Never surrender.

Finnadro had tasted hundreds of Visions before. Never like this.

He had never had six Chromas before; he hoped never to suffer such overpowering magic again. He had lived the Dark Initiation through Umbral’s memory and felt every lash as if it had struck his own body. When the Vision finally released him, Finnadro sank to his knees, clutching one of the wooden beams in the Blood House for support.

Who knew what Umbral had been before the minions of Lady Death got hold of him?
They
had turned him into what he was now.

A man becomes a monster because monstrous things were done to him.

The smoke stung Finnadro’s eyes. How had he succeeded in ignoring the stench of rotting corpses this long? He couldn’t take another breath in this cursed place. He barked at the blindmutes to take Umbral off the fire, then stumbled up the ladder.

The sunlight outside, anemic though it was, hit him with such affront he squinted and shielded his face with his arm. He groped his way down the terraces below the Blood House, across the deep-set courtyard between the Waiting House and Xerpen’s compound, to the cistern where he had first purified himself. The bowl still sat beside the tall jar.

He doused himself with ice water until his hair, clothes, and skin were drenched. Bumps prickled on his skin. The light didn’t hurt anymore, but he still felt unclean.

Sparks, like droplets of emerald, popped and fizzed in the air beside him, heralding the Green Lady. Finnadro had not intended to draw his Lady into his troubles. However, she had a way of knowing when he needed most to see her. She had chosen to wear tan rather than lime skin, hair closer to brown than jade, and deerskin legwals under a simple tunic. Only her eyes retained their usual brilliant green. Her warmth felt like sunshine against his skin.

“You look rather human today, Thar,” he said, calling her by the name she had used for herself the first time he met her. In his ignorance and arrogance, he had thought her a wildling with a strong aura. Before he had understood she was fae, he had dared imagine he might win Thar to wife. For a moment, he painted a picture in his mind of coming home to her after a hunt, finding her in the yard of their hut, surrounded by their children. He let the picture go.

“I’m feeling rather human,” she said. She flashed an enigmatic smile. If she were not fae, he’d have said she looked tired. “Will you sit with me in the sun?”

“If we can find such a thing as sun in this place.”

He walked with her to the wall on the far side of the courtyard, the only spot where sunlight fell unimpeded by the shadow cast by the Blood House. Moss on the slate made for a cold but soft seat. She leaned against his chest; he rested his arm around her shoulders.

“We’ve caught the Deathsworn, and there is information we need from him. It has fallen to me to make him tell us.”

“And this is a good thing, is it not?” she asked.

A simple question for which he had no simple answer.

Finn wanted to tell her:
I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to cause pain, even to a man who would gladly do the same to me. I don’t want to
become
him to fight him. And I can’t stop myself from
feeling
what he does. Can you imagine
….

No. No, she couldn’t imagine.

He stroked her hair and kissed the top of her head, amazed at how fortunate he was to be able to hold her like this. His faery beloved, his fawn, his she-wolf, this beautiful and amazing woman who loved him so inexplicably. She was High Fae. She partook of that eternal innocence that neither inflicted any permanent damage, nor suffered any permanent loss, hence warranted no permanent shame. She could not imagine pain, neither Umbral’s physical agony, nor Finnadro’s private anguish. And for that, Finnadro realized, he was glad.

He recalled Xerpen’s challenge. Would he destroy this sweet faery, just so that she could be complicit in his guilt? Thrice no. No matter what kind of man Finnadro must become to finish the task before him, howsoever despicable, she would remain untainted. And because he had done what needed to be done, she and her kind, the Sylfae, and their brethren the Aelfae, would endure, forever blessing Faearth.

Finnadro kissed her palm. “It is what must be.”

They sat together until the sun disappeared behind a cloud.

“I’ve had many human Champions.” She stood, though she kept his hands linked in hers. “But none like you, Finnadro. I love you. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Love is stronger than any power the Deathsworn wield.”

“Yes,” he agreed automatically,
the power of love, fa-la-la
, not believing it.

Suddenly, he straightened. Squeezed her hand. “Yes. Yes. That’s what I should do. Thank you, my Lady.” He kissed her hand again and laughed. “You are perfect. Never change!”

Vessia stood in Xerpen’s courtyard, where she could not help but overhear the Green Lady’s conversation. Vessia wished she had not agreed to this. If the little hero Dindi were here, no doubt she’d harp that it was wrong to let the Green Lady surrender herself. Vessia agreed. But Xerpen was right, too. One had to have priorities. In a few days, the squabble between the Green Lady and the Orange Lady could be sorted out.

The Green Lady rejoined Vessia, who lifted her brows inquiringly.

“No last frolic?”

The Green Lady shook her head.

“You could have at least bid him farewell,” said Vessia. “You might never see him again.”

“If he knew my fate, he would abandon everything else to fight for me,” said the Green Lady. “He would not be able to do his task.”

Vessia clasped her on the shoulder. “You are changed, sister. There is a shadow on you, and not from what our sister has done.”

The Green Lady bowed her head. “Our kind was not Cursed, as the Aelfae were. But the humans have changed us, too. We cannot sing the same song when they have altered the tune. I have seen terrible futures in the Circle, where all my green children are devoured by strange flying and creeping and smoke-belching things built by humans with unfathomable magics; and I have seen futures where the humans have lifted our kind and themselves on wings of a new color to a Greater Kiva beyond Faearth…. But I cannot hold onto either Vision…they are but wisps of smoke and dream. There is no certain future for any of us if the Aelfae perish.”

“None of us will perish. We will arise again, as we were meant to. The humans will have to learn to live with us this time.”

The Green Lady nodded, but something moist sparkled on her cheek. Vessia had never known any fae except the Blue Lady, who mourned with a whole ocean of tears, to experience true sorrow. Was it an omen? Would humans go on to drive every kind of fae to extinction if the Aelfae were not there to defend them? The thought made her feel cold and helpless.

Vessia kissed Thar on the cheek, erasing the tear. Then Vessia led the Green Lady back to the upside down tree, to suffer and die again.

Gwenika bustled in, holding a basket of weird leaves and stinky jars. She sat down on the mat beside Tamio and at once poked him in the open wound in his chest.

“Ow!” he complained. “That hurts.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t suffer a blow to the heart,” she said. “You can recover from torn shoulder muscles, but a heart wound never heals.”

“Hadi seemed to think it was pretty bad. That I might die.”

“He said no such thing.”

“Were you listening?”

“Of course, I’ve been outside the door this whole time, waiting for permission to enter.”

Tamio felt his face heat. “Then you know Vumo’s my father?”

Gwenika poured something foul out of a clay jar and rubbed it on the wound. “I know you
say
he’s your father.”

“You think I would lie about something like that?”

She shrugged.

Furious, Tamio grabbed her wrist. “Look me in the eye! You think I would
lie
?”

She looked him in the eye. “I
know
you can lie, Tamio. Because you lied to me. Did you lie to Vumo? I don’t know and don’t care. It’s not my concern whose son you are, it wouldn’t impress me either way. Now, are you done? There’s a yeech nested in the wound, and I have to dig him out before he eats into your lung.”

“Dig him out how…what the muck is
that
?”

He eyed the sharpened reindeer clavicle that Gwenika pulled from her basket with a flourish.

“Oh, no, you are
not
going to…” he started.

She dug the tip into the softest, squelchiest, sorest part of his wound.

Tamio squawked and grabbed her arm again, forcing her to stop. “Do you hate me, Gwenika? Are you trying to kill me?”

“I
do
hate you, as a matter of fact, but I’m trying to save your life. I’m a Healer, and that’s what we do.”

He shook his head. Going into battle was one thing—the excitement meant there was no time to worry about pain—but Tamio didn’t think he could endure lying in a bed while someone scraped his muscles raw.

She softened at whatever she saw in his face… probably stark terror. 

“I
have
to do this, Tamio. If you could see Yellow, you could see the yeech crawling around inside your wound. He’s going to kill you.”

“Let him. Better yet, slit my throat. It would be more comfortable.”

Gwenika bit her lip, clearly annoyed with him. “I could ask Hadi to hold you down.”

“He couldn’t hold me.”

“I could have Vumo tie you to the bed.”

“I’d kill him first.”

Gwenika expelled a breath. “Tamio, honestly…”

“
Honestly
, how do I even know there’s a yeech? Maybe
you’re
lying.”

“I wouldn’t lie!”

“Now you know how it feels.”

Gwenika’s eyes narrowed. She glanced at her wrist, still pinioned in Tamio’s fingers, then at the wound. She leaned down and whispered.

“Guess what, Tamio. He’s
laughing
at you.”

“What? Who?”

“The yeech.”

“The fae?”

“Yes.” She giggled. “He just called you the biggest baby he’s ever met.”

Tamio released her and gripped the sides of the mat instead. “Kill him.”

She dug the clavicle around inside him, and he screamed. He clutched the mat so tightly he almost ripped the blankets. Then he screamed some more. And then he passed out.

He woke up in as much pain as ever. Maybe more. Definitely more. Gwenika was still sitting beside him, wiping sweat from his forehead.

“Good, you’re awake,” she said. “I want you to drink something for the fever.”

“I didn’t faint,” he said.

“Did I say you fainted?”

“I just decided it would be a good time for a nap. You know, to give you time to work.”

She showed him a bloody bone awl, the length of a pinky and the width of an eyelash, laced with a slender sinew thread. “Good decision, since I had to sew it up as well.”

“Oh, mercy.” He probed the sinew stitches. He shuddered.

“Why did you tell Vumo you were his son?” she asked.

“It’s a long story. But
I’m
not the liar.
He’s
the liar. He lied to my mother to trick her into surrendering herself to him, then he abandoned her to have a baby on her own. Can you imagine? What a goat’s bum-licking bastard! How could he do that? Didn’t it occur to him he might have left a son behind, a son who needed a father? A son who needed a hero to look up to, not a lying, cheating, womanizing… What are you rolling your eyes for?”

“Because
you
would never do something like that,” she sneered.

“I never would!”

“I’m laughing.” She wasn’t laughing.

He thought she’d been joking when she said she hated him, but the look she gave him now….

“Fa!” He glared at her. “You can’t tell me this is because of …you and me. You had fun. And I never lied to you.”

“You told me that virginity was ‘blocking’ my magic.”

“Right, that.” He waved it away. “But that was so obviously untrue it doesn’t count as a lie. Muck and mercy, any girl stupid enough to believe that deserves…”

Gwenika packed up her jars and awls and knife.

“I think I’m done here,” she said coldly. “I have important duties for the ceremony, and the sun is almost at zenith.  You should rest.”

“Gwenika! Why are you being such a shrew about this?”

“Really, Tamio? I’m being a ‘shrew’? You told me you loved me. You told me you wanted to be with me forever. You told me, when you took me that night, that it
meant
something to you. I found out soon enough it meant something very different to you than to me. To you, it meant one more notch on your stick and one more play in your game. To me, it meant the end of my childhood and the end of…”