by Shean Pao
Anarra spoke a word to raise her wards. The man had entered because she had forgotten to secure them once Barbarus had gone. How many hours had they been down? Her memory crumbled at the edges. Your memory, Anarra, or your mind? she asked herself.
She didn’t know which she was losing, and that made her afraid.
She feared the love this man offered, feared that he might make her see things about herself. Or remember things. He might change her. Isn’t that what happened when you grew close to someone?
Anarra had taken great pains to achieve her position in this world. Powerful magic hid her deeds and made her forget what others had done to her.
She shook her head and crumpled to the floor. The stiff taffeta of her skirts blossomed around her as she sank. She lifted her hands to her face. Her breath slowed. She gained control after a few minutes. Rising to her feet, more composed, she smoothed her gown.
She picked up the paintbrush and returned to her easel.
Around her, leaning against the walls of the bare stone room, were canvases that repeated the image of the painting she worked on. Pastel pigments swirled into a muted mix of hues.
While she worked, the mist in her mind thickened, and colors added layers across the darkness in her thoughts. She painted over her memories … and forgot.
Chapter Six
The Minstrel
The following day, Anarra ascended the hundreds of steps within the great spire, winding around the core of her tower. Her satin skirts swept the stairs, bare feet carrying her ever higher.
Barbarus’s visit had disturbed her. She could no longer deny it. Troubled by the things his master sought of her and the visions in her Moon Well, she fought against the belief that disaster would strike if she pursued the Feather.
When the green-eyed man had intruded into her home, it had been the last straw. Her thoughts swirled, unsettled, an eddy filled with too many emotions to sort out.
So she escaped to the one room where she could always find comfort.
Anarra’s fingers glided lightly over the walls, weaving magic while she climbed, trailing wisps of blue light that winked with tiny stars. The clockwise circle of her steps woke an ancient sorcery within the tower. A great many doors and archways appeared and faded as she passed. Many had not been entered in years and were brushed with dust and cobwebs. Some only half materialized, their contents forgotten, unwanted.
The entrance she sought eventually emerged. A delicate representation of musical instruments embossed the wood. Its surface gleamed, polished with rose oil and carefully maintained, for she cared deeply for what lay within.
When she placed her palm upon the door, it swung open. The room she entered was expansive, containing a small forest of white birch saplings. A wide stream flowed over mossy rocks through the woods, vanishing into a drain in the far wall. Beside the brook, in a clearing, sat an attractive cottage built of rounded river stones. Wispy, budding clouds bumped against the white ceiling and evaporated. Light and warmth emanated overhead, though no sun or sky pierced through the Veil. She walked to the cottage and entered.
On the far side of the room, in an alcove, nestled a trestle bed. Beneath a window stood a roughhewn table displaying a vase of wildflowers—bluebells and purple pansies. A fire burned in the hearth, though the house never held enough of a chill to warrant one. The wooden floor was swept clean.
An old, long-limbed man hunched in a chair, tuning a lute. His dim blue eyes glazed over as they fell upon her, and his head lowered in submission. Gray hair framed his high brow and hung to his shoulders. Age sagged his jowls, pulling his lips into a frown.
“Milady,” he murmured, rising to his feet. He wore an unlaced vest over a white cotton shirt, and brown trousers. Long fingers held the lute against his thigh.
“Minstrel! How glad I am that I need not wake you. Sing for me.” Anarra arranged her pale-green skirts and sank into a chair by the table.
She closed her eyes, and the minstrel’s resonant voice lifted into song. The faint tones of the lute accompanied his ballad. Pure notes crafted the words he sang into a lyric filled with yearning. That deepest longing fueled his music, coaxing Anarra near to tears:
I played on the harp, I played on the lyre,
I sang for my sweetheart while she lay on her pyre.
She’s lost to the moonlight, lost to the sea,
Deep ’neath the waves of Conoch o’ lereá.
I played on the harp, I played on the lyre.
The faé and the fairy will build her a caer.
She’ll sing from its tower, she’ll sing in the May.
Soon I will join her and we’ll sing all the day.
While the minstrel played, Anarra felt the burden of her worries lift. His voice eased her mind and settled her spirit.
When he finished, she rose and approached him. He bent so she could kiss his brow, a custom they had maintained for more years than she remembered.
“I have heard angels sing, but your song is sweeter.”
“I am happy to please you, milady,” he mumbled.
“You have sung that song for me before?”
The minstrel tilted his head. “Aye, milady.”
“Next time I see you, I hope to hear a new song.”
“As you wish, milady.” He lowered his eyes.
Anarra paced the room. She paused at the table, letting her fingers caress the purple pansies in the vase, then rested her gaze on him. He appeared more fragile today, like one of the petals about to fall.
“Are you unwell?” she asked. “Can I bring you anything? Do you wish for a new wine for your meal this evening? Perhaps another book?”
“No, milady.”
Anarra frowned. Lately he repeated the same answers. He wanted nothing different, and whenever she tried to engage him in a conversation, he responded with short remarks. He wouldn’t meet her gaze.
She missed their old talks. They used to speak of things late into the night, while playing fidchell by candlelight. He’d always maneuvered his game pieces so cleverly across the board. She’d seldom won, but she treasured the memories.
Anarra crossed to the door. “Be well, minstrel.”
Chapter Seven
Choices
Barbarus rubbed furiously at his broken horn, fretting at the thought of facing his master. He can’t read my thoughts. He can’t read my thoughts. He rushed through the cavernous innards of the earth, moving ever downward through the upper levels of the Nine Hells.
Few paths existed to the lower world, but Barbarus had traveled them all. The one he took now led from the abandoned copper mines outside the city of Ethcabar.
The tunnel started as a tight crevice of shale that descended for half a mile, then opened into a labyrinth. Some tunnels shrank so tight that Barbarus was forced to crawl on his hands and knees. Others broadened so wide and high that their walls and ceilings vanished.
Though he could see exceptionally well in the dark, he carried a small glass container filled with starflurries to illuminate the passages that were utterly devoid of light. Many of the caverns he passed through held their own illumination: glowing fungus, starflurries, or clumps of minerals that shone like muted lamps.
Barbarus’s fingers worked over the broken nub of his horn, worrying longer at the sharper jagged edge along one side.
Fear twisted into his brain as he traveled. Like the Uaighe knife that Rash’na’Kul used for his most potent spells, it pitched a painful whine in his thoughts. He’d always believed his master could read his mind. Those ice-white eyes with their shifting pupils tore every shred of information from him.
His master’s strange eyes were a telltale sign of the Nepha Lord’s overuse of the Uaighe knife. The power it possessed was slowly turning Rash’na’Kul into something less than human.
Master would know if I lied. Wouldn’t he? But guessing and knowing stood as distant as the sun from the moon. Had Rash’na’Kul been guessing, or had Barbarus confessed everything out of fear?
Navigating the Hells was dangerous, but the suarachán took the safer trails. He scrambled over boulders and scree with the efficiency of having traveled these paths hundreds of times.
Without fail, he watched for items his master might need: bits of crumbling minerals, glowing fungus, and toadstools. A blue beetle with red legs and a black worm the size of his thumb both went into a supple leather pouch hanging from his hip. For seven years he had focused on ways to please Rash’na’Kul just to stay alive. Collecting ingredients had become second nature.
For the first time, it occurred to Barbarus not to pluck a precious blue-spotted moth from a moist rock, though he did it anyway. Dangerous thoughts spread like spores, sprouting mushrooms of rebellion he could not tear out fast enough.
The cave trail descended, and he entered a chamber filled with spongy, rootlike tubers. The deeper he went, the larger and more tangled they became. Soon Barbarus was climbing over and between interlocking branches thicker than his body.
Tiny starflurries, coveted by city folk for Ethcabar’s lanterns, crowded the upper cavern, feeding on lichen that thrived on the ceiling. They filled this level of Hell with an eerie brilliance that Barbarus cherished.
Somewhere along the path, he dipped his hand into the pouch and freed the spotted moth.
Barbarus pulled himself up, swung over a limb, and paused when his eyes fell on a tiny humanoid in front of him. He snatched the creature with both hands in a crushing grip before it could escape. Its oversized, misshapen skull writhed on its skinny neck. Its flesh tone was a deeper hue of red than Barbarus’s skin, but mottled. The ugly thing hissed at him, then screeched, but Barbarus held tight. He realized it was a daoine maithe—a faé being from the upper world.
“Stupid maggot, what are you doing here?” Barbarus couldn’t fathom how it had foraged this deep into the Hells. He squeezed harder.
The creature howled. “Let me go! Let me go! Let. Me. Go!” One gnarled hand shoved uselessly at Barbarus’s knuckles.
The daoine maithe gave an agonized wheeze as Barbarus forced the air from its lungs.
Then he remembered something Anarra had said. He stopped tightening his grip.
“What will you do with this freedom you seek?” she had asked. Her gaze had mocked him, tested him.
Why should he care for such matters? Many nights he had lain awake, wishing for death rather than to spend another moment doing the Nepha Lord’s bidding. Yet he clung to life with desperation. Was that hope?
And what was freedom—choice? A choice you alone owned?
A gift given by the Maker, he decided. The choice to take this road or that. Choice to craft your own future, to accept your own challenges. The burden of it rested on the failures and successes of those choices, a weight he felt willing to carry.
Why did her questions make his head spin? Why did he think about these things now when he never had before? Barbarus stared at the creature caught in his fists.
The daoine maithe’s large blue eyes bulged while it struggled. Barbarus opened his hands. The creature scampered off into the tangle of roots.
He understood his choice for the first time—to kill or let live. His choices, his small freedoms, belonged to him alone.
* * *
Barbarus crossed a great archway of granite, the only accessible path to his master’s stronghold within the Sixth Hell. With barely a glance, he passed the creatures guarding the bridge—two-horned beasts with squat, stubby bodies and scales like iron. They did not defend the fortress. The real guards lay hidden in the crevices of the structure itself. These brutes merely watched for attack. They would bellow a warning to shake loose the very stones overhead, should the need arise.
But it had been years since another Nepha Lord of the Sixth Hell had challenged Rash’na’Kul, and the more powerful Lords of the deeper Hells simply did not acknowledge his existence.
The citadel itself huddled like a twisted pile of fungus on top of a great pillar of black rock. Gnarls of decaying stone and brown-streaked ridges led to higher chambers. Mushroom-shaped towers sprouted without regard to aesthetic appeal.
Barbarus slipped into a cavern that curved into the stronghold and then descended three steps to duck beneath a low arch. He navigated great flanks of drying flesh, sheets of pit fiend skin, and furs that hung from the ceiling.
He paused at the entrance to a great chamber shaped from polished onyx. Heat rose in visible waves from the floor, carrying with it the pit fiend stench from the lower room.
The sound of spilling salt whispered within. The only other noise came from the rustles of the batlike sciatháns perched on the T-stand beside the throne at the opposite end of the chamber.
Panic closed clawing fingers around Barbarus’s throat. He had forgotten about the spell! His master had started the incantation without him. Why hadn’t he returned sooner?
Rash’na’Kul was performing Barbarus’s task of pouring the grains from a silver pitcher, creating a twenty-foot circle on the gleaming floor. The circumference of the ring precisely mirrored the size of the flat, metallic disc embedded above him in the high ceiling. Bronze light caressed its surface, reflected from ornate sconces set strategically around the bell-shaped room.
Fleek, one of the sciatháns from the stand, clung to Rash’na’Kul’s shoulder. A white tuft of fur crowned its narrow, russet-colored head. Fleek was Barbarus’s favorite.
Barbarus’s heart dropped to his stomach, and sweat beaded across his brow. He knew better than to interrupt his master during a ceremony or draw his wrath by making a single sound.
Barbarus never stood to his full height in the presence of the Nepha Lord. He hunched his body and slid along the wall toward an alcove where he waited when not needed.
He hated this room. It magnified the echo of his every movement. He struggled to walk on his heels to avoid clicking his black nails against the floor. The strain of his exertions trembled through his twisted leg.
Agony crawled across his shoulders, causing tendons to jump beneath his red-hued skin. A flame of pain shot down his bad leg, making his claws twitch. He reached the alcove and squatted down to wait.
He had not disturbed his master. With relief, he wiped his sweaty hand over the shift that clung to his thin frame. His nails scrapped against the leather.
“You are late!” Rash’na’Kul’s cruel voice rasped against the walls.
Barbarus immediately prostrated himself upon the floor. “Forgive me, Master!” Stupid, wasting time eating cake! Can he read my mind? Does he know what I have done? Fear coiled in his gut like a nest of writhing snakes.
The Nepha Lord seized the leather-winged creature from his shoulder. Fleek squeaked with alarm, struggling in his grip. “Do not make me wait for you, Barbarus,” Rash’na’Kul said, and dashed the sciathán against the cavern wall to punctuate the word wait. The animal squelched downward, leaving a smear of blood. Its furry head twitched and stilled while Barbarus cringed.
Not Fleek! He was mine.
Rash’na’Kul, Nepha Lord of the Sixth Hell, whirled to face his slave. A copper bowl rested on an onyx pedestal at the center of the circle near him. A strange colorless fire burned within the container, smokeless and clear.
Next to the pedestal writhed a dying pit fiend tied to a wooden bench. The wolf-sized creature lifted its head and weakly snapped its long, tusked snout. Blood matted its tan-and-black bristled fur into clumps. A quarter of its intestines spilled over the floor.
Sweat slithered down the back of Rash’na’Kul’s shaved head, highlighting whorls of florid red tattoos that covered the lower part of his scalp. Torchlight struck across the breadth of Rash’na’Kul’s shoulders. It angled from strips of rune-etched metal stitched into the weave of his sleeveless robe. The metal stiffened the fabric and lifted the cloth to form a high, braided collar.
He was a tall man, dark skinned, and graced with an agile and powerful frame. Hundreds of pale scars puckered the skin of his chest and arms—marks he’d carv
ed himself.
“Did you find her?” Rash’na’Kul demanded.
Barbarus crept forward, his heart squeezed in misery at the loss of his little winged friend. His eyes flicked toward his master with the nervous movements of a mouse.
Pay attention. Pay attention or he’ll kill you.
Barbarus knew this mantra well. “Yes, Master.”
Rash’na’Kul’s shoulders eased, and he nodded. “Good.” His gaze focused on the flames in the copper bowl, and he made a gesture toward them. They blazed and deepened in hue.
A sudden magnetic energy thrummed between the metal disc on the ceiling and the ring of salt on the floor. The flames in the sconces surrounding the chamber surged higher, then bent long, grasping fingers toward the bowl. The clear fire within the container responded, rippling and burning taller.
Rash’na’Kul stretched out his hand, palm up. “Bring me the knife.”
Too slow, Barbarus! A centipede of dread scurried in the suarachán’s chest. He scrambled to the bloodied bench where the pit fiend lay. I should have already given him the knife.
Barbarus snatched a dagger from the bench. Revulsion rose in a wave of nausea at contact with the evil weapon and persisted until he placed it into his master’s palm. A blister broke open on Barbarus’s thumb, oozing yellow fluid.
Every time the curved knife of the Uaighe touched his flesh, it seared his skin. Barbarus’s tongue retreated in a useless dance of escape, tasting sour bile.
Rash’na’Kul closed his hand over the spiraled handle of the weapon the way a spider clasps a fly. His fingers fit perfectly between the thick thorns of metal that erupted from the dagger’s hilt. Torchlight skittered over runes etched into the blade in the abhorrent language of the Uaighe.
As the dagger settled in his master’s grip, it emitted an eerie whining that made Barbarus’s ears want to bleed. Pressing his hands over them, he hunched on the floor again. He couldn’t keep from drawing back his lips, baring sharp teeth, while watching the man he hated and was forced to serve.