The Unfinished Song - Book 6: Blood (44 page)

Warriors jabbed Dindi awake with the tips of their spears. They barked ugly curses. Amdra was treated no better. Her hands had been tied behind her back, and the guards shoved her around with special malice. Tamio was forced out of bed—Hadi helped him walk—and he was driven, with the rest of them, out of the lodge and up and down steps until they reached the Plaza of the Spider. Dindi had thought the rites of the eclipse would be held in the Plaza of the Eagle, the same plaza as the other rituals, but Xerpen had something else more dramatic in mind. The Plaza of the Spider, the clearing before the Bridge of One Thread, was set up to accommodate the crowds on temporary tiers of wood and stone. This plaza was also rectangular, but the long edge ran perpendicular to the ledge of the chasm. Along this ledge, the thirteen bone cages had been set like pegs in a row. Pitiful packs of slaves were driven into the cages. Dindi and her companions were placed in the cage closest to the Bridge.

“So many captives.” Hadi craned his neck to look down the row of bone cages. “What’s going to happen to us?”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t involve
that
,” said Tamio. He pointed to the Black Well. The roiling obsidian mist had swelled nearly to the top of the gorge, a venomous brew ready to boil over the edges of the pot.

“We will be lowered into the mist when the moon swallows the sun,” said Amdra flatly. “The poison vapor will melt the flesh from our bones. It will be slow and agonizing, and our screams will echo until death silences us.”

Hadi paled until the hue of his cheeks matched the bones of the cage.

“We’re not yet dead,” cried Kemla. “Look! Our tribe comes to rescue us!”

They all struggled to see what Kemla pointed to. It was far away, and hidden by trees and rock, but there, treading the path up toward the eastern slope, they saw tiny dots. They looked like moving pine trees, but Dindi realized they must be warriors, camouflaged with branches.

“Haven’t you heard the rumors?” Kemla said impatiently. “It’s the Maze Zavaedi’s army, climbing the western path, to attack the tribehold.”

“In all the seasons of Faearth, this tribehold has never fallen,” said Amdra. “Never. It will not fall to the Maze Zavaedi. You will see. My fool of an uncle can’t save us from my grandfather.”

“Cheerful girl, isn’t she?” Tamio asked no one in particular.

The Eagle Lords and Raptor Riders took to the center of the plaza in their full Tavaedi regalia, feathered robes and warbonnets, to perform a war dance. They pantomimed an avalanche burying Vio’s army beneath rock and snow. The Aelfae next entered the plaza and joined the humans in the war dance. The six faeries swiveled and swirled and flicked in the air, and tossed one another in wild, impossible feats of acrobatics that mere humans could never have mastered. They all but flew. Whirling, whirling, whirling, the six spun like tops in and around, in a circle. In red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet they were dressed, in faery gauze that swept around them like zephyrs.

Whirling, whirling, whirling…until the dancer in violet and black disappeared.

Dindi blinked. “Mrigana Travelled!”

The dance formation was broken…but not for long. Xerpen himself donned a purple manta and mask and joined the
tama
in Mrigana’s place. Symmetry restored: Six perfect dancers. The human Tavaedies formed a square around the faery circle, and the war dance went on.

As Amdra watched, she chanted weirdly, in beat to the drums of the dancers:

“The ram’s horn will sound,

Where a thousand spears are found

Encircling the mountain, all around;

Twice sound the horn—let foes frown!

Warn of woe,

To those below!

Thrice sound the horn…”

At the end of the dance, the humans lifted rams’ horns to their lips. The wail was taken up by warriors in bomas further down the mountain. The Aelfae also lifted their voices and emitted piercing ululations too high and loud for human ears to bear. Many in the audience fell to their knees, clutching their ears. The captives in the cages cowered and covered their ears as well, except for Amdra, whose hands were tied behind her back. If the sound bothered her, however, she gave no sign of it. Her eyes burned with fever as she watched the approaching army creep up the western slope.

“
And
,” she whispered. “
All. Fall. Down
….”

The mountain quaked.

Together with Hawk and Danumoro, Vio watched Finnadro’s Branch, the Green Woods warriors, ascend the western slope. They crouched in the lee of a rock, where they could not be seen and targeted by a Raptor Rider with a bow.

Steep as it was, the western path was the only road to move mass numbers of men on foot or hoofed beast up the mountain. All other routes to Cliffedge were so precipitous as to require wings… unless one counted the secret caves in the heart of the western mountain. But Vio had a suspicion of what lurked there, and would not send his men into that doom.

In the distance, Vio and his men heard the drums.

“They are performing their war dance now,” he said.

At his side, Danumoro nodded.

Rams’ horns sounded.

The mountain trembled and rumbled in response to the horn. The shuddering snows perched upon the shoulders of the western peak were loosened, unleashed, and shunted upon the slope in an avalanche.

Far below, the cries of men could be heard, before the avalanche fell hard over them, like white water from a river drowning tree, rock, and spear. The slope turned white from tip to base.

Hawk shook his head grimly. “As I warned you.”

Danumoro covered his face in his hands. “Do you think any survived?”

Vio could still feel the trembling of the mountain, the immense power of it, and a heaviness sat in his belly. Familiar enough, that weight. Once he had called it fear. Now he called it an old friend.

“No mortals could have survived that. The avalanche has destroyed the army from Rainbow Labyrinth,” Vio said. He smiled tightly. “Or so our enemies must assume. Let’s move.”

The rest of his warriors, the Rainbow Labyrinth Branch, waited in the ravine that fed the Ice Snake, under the overhang of the western summit of Cliffedge. On the way, they had to pass a hidden crevice in the toes of the mountain which led to the secret caverns up the very heart of the giant. A sense of foreboding struck him.

“Zavaedi?” asked Danumoro, when Vio paused. “Have you changed your mind about our path?”

“No,” he said. “I fear too much for the lives of any warriors sent into that dark hole. However… I fear almost as much to leave it at our backs, with no warriors to guard it.”

“I don’t think it would be wise to split the men any further,” said Danu.

“Nor I.” And yet Vio hesitated.

The men began to shift uncomfortably. He knew their thoughts. Had he grown weak and indecisive in his old age?

A beautiful woman with long black hair and a dress of dark petals, the deep purple of a night sky, walked toward him. A mask of mist hid her face, and more mist swept eerily in her wake. Vio had not seen whence she came, and he doubted any man had. She was fae, yet not any fae he knew.

“Maze Zavaedi,” she said in a rich, smooth alto. “I desire to speak with you.”

“I do not know you.”

“All mortals know me.” Her smile chilled him.

A band of men and women in black strode out of the mist behind her. Soot-darkened skull masks hid their faces.

“Deathsworn!” muttered Danumoro.

“Lady Death.” Vio bowed to her, and so did the other war leaders, though their eyes whitened with fear. It was not strange for the Deathsworn to flock to the edge of a battle, like crows waiting to feast on the dead, but Vio had never known the Black Lady herself to appear, or to request an audience with one side before the battle.

“If you want me,” he said boldly, “You cannot have me until I have bathed in the blood of my foes.”

“I have not come to cut the threads of your life,” she said.  “I have come to fight, if not
for
you, at least
beside
you.”

“Since when do the Deathsworn enter the battles of tribe against tribe?”

“Xerpen has been profligate in his making of enemies. His offense against you is of no matter, but his offence against me must be answered.”

A sparkle of green light shimmered into the form of the Green Lady. Behind her was arrayed a troop of Sylfae, some with hair like pine needles and feet like roots, and others in the shape of great, gray wolves with glowing green eyes.

“Maze Zavaedi…” she began. Then a shudder rippled through her and she jabbed a finger at Lady Death. “What is
she
doing here?”

“No different than you, Thar,” replied Lady Death coolly. “Proposing an alliance of shared interests.”

“We Sylfae can share no interest of yours, Curse-Bringer!”

“The Sylfae are our allies,” Vio said to Lady Death. “And while it is no desire of mine to make a personal foe of you, my Lady, I will not break a pledge already given.”

“And which of you, the humans or the Sylfae, will brave the belly of the mountain?” Lady Death gestured to the crevice that hid the secret entrance to the caverns.

Vio looked to the Green Lady.

She shrugged and sniffed. “My wolves do not mind caves, but there is a darkness in that mountain they will not go near.”

“I also do not wish to send my men inside,” Vio admitted.

“You need us.” Lady Death sneered, “
We
are not afraid of the dark.”

Vio signaled his warriors to back away. After a moment, the Green Lady and the Sylfae did the same. The dark faery queen and her dark minions swept past them without another word, to disappear into the depths of the under-mountain.

Finnadro and the other human warriors crouched under the protective branches of the Sylfae when the avalanche fell upon them like white thunder. The predawn gray of the woods turned utterly dark. If it had not been for the scent of pine and vanilla from the tree faeries, one could have mistaken the cavity under the leafy arms for a cave. One of the wolves whined.

While the bigger dryads maintained the air pocket, holding off the snow with their backs, other Sylfae, along with a throng of pixies, sprites, and willawisps, danced in a graceful circle.

“What’s going on?” demanded a Green Woods warrior on the edge of panic.

“The fae are turning our enemies’ avalanche against them,” Finnadro explained to those without the Chromas to see the fae for themselves. “They are melting the snow. The steam will create a heavy fog over the mountain, which will cloak our march up the slope.”

Some of the warriors nodded and grinned, but a few still looked in need of more logs on the bridge to understanding.

“They think we’re dead and buried under the snow.” He bared his teeth in a feral grin. “They’ll have no idea we’re coming.”

The moon and the sun fought for the sky, racing toward one another in their enmity. It would not be long now before one obliterated the other.

The war dancers had crushed all hope of rescue from Rainbow Labyrinth. Xerpen could conduct the rest of the ceremony without fear of war. There remained duels to be fought, as today was the Sacrifice of Rams, when the men selected as sacrifices were matched into pairs to fight each other. The victorious would be allowed to live as warriors in the service of their War Chief.

Normally these duels would take place one at a time, and last all day, but Xerpen had an eye to the sky, and the conjunction of celestial bodies was near. So dozens of duels unfolded in the Plaza of the Spider simultaneously. The losers, if they did not die in the fight itself, were thrown, wounded, into one of the bone cages. Those who perished immediately were thrown directly into the Black Well.

The diet of strong young lives excited the Black Well. The mist kept rising. It looked thicker too, less like cloud, and more like a mass of crawling things, too tiny to make out, as a disturbed anthill pouring out a black mass of insects looked from a distance.

Dindi searched the warriors for Umbral but he was not among them. Would Xerpen keep his word? Surely Xerpen must imagine he had nothing to lose in honoring their bargain, given how hurt Umbral was, how weak. At least, Dindi hoped the War Chief would think so. She hoped that the truth would be different, that Umbral would find some reserve of the strength to fight. Admittedly, the last she had seen of him gave her no reason for optimism. Even Hadi could have defeated Umbral in that state.

And yet…

He was Umbral. He was stronger than Kavio had been. He had fought an undead Aelfae and won. If anyone could survive Xerpen’s torments, it had to be Umbral.

The last of the duels ended, in death for some, in survival but slavery for others. A single ram’s horn sounded, and Xerpen strode to the center of the plaza to announce the last duel before the Eclipse.