Tanya gasped.
She had expected to see fire. They were in a collapsed volcano, after all, and the heat was a tangible, living thing clawing at her pores. A raging river of fire would have been alarming certainly, but logical.
Underneath Bloodstone, however, there was nothing so simple as fire.
It was an endlessly deep pool of the black sludge. It shone as it writhed and weaved under the rock, more like a snake than a river. It looked like tar or like oil, but tar and oil were sluggish substances. This black thing was quicksilver, darting back in and out of crevices, pooling in that niche and spiraling in this one. It emitted a violent sucking noise, as if it were devouring some unseen prey with the force of a tornado.
As she craned her neck over the mare’s ears, she couldn’t help feeling like the black sludge was alive—like it was talking to her.
It made shapes; told stories. Tanya saw a lantern, swinging in the wind of a dock; a boy, painfully handsome in profile; a key, ornate and flaking away with rust.
A woman’s hand coalesced and reached out of the swamp, grasping at Tanya.
Tanya let out a shriek and the mare stumbled backward, neighing in protest. They got clear of the chasm and began to pant, both covered in sweat, the moisture from the mare’s flank soaking into Tanya’s skirt. Shivering, Tanya wondered if the mare had seen what she had, or something else entirely.
The Tomcat and his small entourage had sidestepped the crater, cutting across the cracked earth until they picked up the marble pathway again. He was at the end of the path, looking at her with a studied blankness on his face.
The walkway was bright white, tracing a meandering path up to a narrow opening in the side of the Volcano itself, on the eastern side of where the mountain had originally split, spewing out the lava that had formed Bloodstone.
It was dark past that opening. Tanya couldn’t see where it led.
The mare tossed her golden head and trotted up the path, her feet making a neat, clattering sound, waking Tanya back up to herself.
Horse hooves, the quill on her arm, the rustle of her skirt: These things were real, not shadowy shapes in black slime, conjuring pictures out of Tanya’s own head.
Tanya pushed the damp hair off her brow. She could manage this.
The opening into the Volcano was uneven, cut straight from the rock, and so slender that the company would have to enter single file, but it was enormously tall, tapering to a narrow point at the top, some thirty or forty feet above Tanya’s head, crowned with a single, enormous, black diamond.
The doorway had no knocker or lock. Tanya gulped. Anyone who doesn’t lock their door either has nothing worth stealing or knows that they have nothing to fear from an intruder.
If Madame Moreagan was to be believed, this was a temple of demon worshippers, and so she was inclined to believe the latter.
“Let’s just get this over with,” Tanya whispered to the mare. She dismounted and they followed the Tomcat, squeezing through the gap into the darkness of the Volcano.
For the first few minutes the darkness was absolute, thick and claustrophobic—as was the silence. But slowly a rustling—a whispering—shivered into Tanya’s awareness. She twisted her head behind her, trying to locate the source of the sound, but everywhere was black as pitch . . . until it wasn’t.
Like the whispering, the light started slowly, just a thin line of crimson in the corner of her eyes. Then, all at once, the mare stumbled as the rock path fell off into a round antechamber filled with muddy, red light. It sealed up behind them.
Tanya knew immediately what the antechamber reminded her of and felt her usually iron stomach turn a wobbly somersault.
The curved walls were pink and glistening, divided into channels, and dripping with viscera in yellow, brown, and the unmistakable rust of blood.
It was as if they were standing inside the butchered chest cavity of some giant beast.
Except this beast wasn’t dead and butchered—it was breathing. The walls were pulsating and strung throughout with a grotesque lattice of veins, pumping the black sludge.
The quill began to vibrate and cast out a bright white light, illuminating and making transparent the white cotton of her blouse.
The sludge halted and the whispering sound stopped. Then the sludge was moving faster than before and the whispering intensified to the roar of a sea being ravaged by a hurricane.
The band of thieves instinctively tightened into a knot behind Jana, who, double-outlaw though she may have been, was still their strongest fighter. After a shared uneasy glance, Darrow and Greer joined them, and Tanya followed, pulling out her quill and craning her neck upward, scouting for danger. But there was nothing to fight, just this enormous organ and the sludge. There was also no escape—no doors, no passageways.
With a sucking sound, a gash opened up between two channels and a young girl walked out.
Tanya joined several of the men in shrieking.
The girl was unperturbed. She appeared undernourished and unnaturally pale—as if she hadn’t been under the sun in months. She was also completely bald. But she stood straight as a steel rod and reacted to ten armed men and one Jana baring her teeth with nothing more than a polite smile.
“You are expected,” she said, addressing Tanya. “This way, please.”
She turned and led them through the rift, which was narrower than the tunnel had been. The back of Tanya’s hand brushed against the wall and came away sticky, smelling of iron and entrails.
The girl led them into a room that was the older sister of the antechamber. It was made of the same organic material, was the same round shape, and was strung through with the same sludge.
But if the first chamber was a private altar, this room was a massive temple, the walls climbing one hundred feet high to form a grand, pointed dome. The veining of the sludge was arranged in a pattern of unsettling esoteric symbols that Tanya didn’t want to learn to read, but somehow couldn’t stop staring at.
A long table of bone grew straight out of a heightened ridge on the squishy floor. Behind it was a row of seats made of the same living bone, more like thrones than chairs. They were carved with the same symbols as the walls and had high, pointed backs crowned with jewels. The thrones grew larger and more opulent toward the middle of the table, trading moonstone and mother-of-pearl for sapphires, rubies, and finally, at the very center, another black diamond.
The women in the thrones at first glance appeared identical. A sustained glance showed the differences—wildly differing in tones, a mole, a crooked nose, a rosebud mouth. But they seemed the same. They all sat with iron spines and folded arms, and were dressed in plain black dresses and white caps covering their hair.
Their eyelashes and eyebrows were green.
Their bald guide quickly joined a ring of girls forming a half circle behind the high table, all of them as shorn as she and clad in black, a simpler cut than the women in their thrones. The girls were all thin and sun-starved, but alarmedly calm and poised.
The sludge moved along the walls, curling lovingly into the spaces between the novices. A glow rose in the girls’ hollow cheeks as it passed by and Tanya felt her eyes drawn to its circuitous, voluptuous path, following the sludge as it formed a spiral, first spinning left, then right. It felt like it was taunting her.
It’s just mud, she told herself firmly, willing herself unsuccessfully to look away. It’s not doing anything, it’s not alive!
But, a quieter, more honest voice whispered: That’s not true.
The woman in the center throne cleared her throat and Tanya ripped her attention away from the sludge.
The woman was on the older side, and had retained a sharp beauty, with smooth skin the color of rosewood and wide cheekbones.
“Be welcome to the Volcano of Bloodstone,” she said in a voice like whiskey spiked with molasses. “You may step forward to pay your respects to the Lord of the Lava and the Steam.”
Stepping forward slowly, not wanting to l
ose her footing on the viscera of the floor, she finally reached the dais and curtsied.
“I believe you wished to see me, madam?” asked Tanya, aware that she was only barely succeeding at keeping her voice even and determined to ignore that fact. She raised her eyes.
The Other sat back in her chair. “When the Tomcat first arrived at our temple to place his petition before our Lord of Licking Flame, we were not very inclined to listen. He wished to commandeer our lord’s power for access to the secret landscapes and hidden realms that are within his grasp. However, we are not in the habit of distracting our Lord of Burning and Smoke with tawdry proposals to contract his power for the commercial enrichment of others. Particularly not”—here her voice hardened—“when a petty thief attempts this sacred access by bribing the Lord of Bloodstone, He Who Controls the Flame and the Spit, with some forgotten trinket of one his servants.”
Here the priestess lifted her hand. At this signal, one of the handmaidens turned to the pulsating wall and thrust her arms inside. After some turning, twisting, squelching, and squashing, her hands returned to the light, bloody but firmly grasped around the tiara.
Holding it carefully, she carried it to the dais and placed it in front of the head priestess. The priestess picked it up, lightly and casually, holding it out toward Tanya.
“You stole this, did you not?”
Tanya put her hand on her wrist, feeling the quill, the power that was backing her. She disengaged from her curtsy and stood up straight. The Other raised an eyebrow.
“Yes,” said Tanya defiantly. “I stole it.”
The Other looked merely amused. She turned the tiara around in her hand. “This tiara has a very long history of being stolen,” she told Tanya. “It was stolen from me, many years ago, along with much else. But what that man behind you could never begin to understand is that I never missed it. I found all the riches I needed and more in service to the Lord of Bloodstone.”
Tanya snuck a look at the Tomcat, who was looking deferential, but glowing in his gold-buttoned waistcoat and mirror-shiny boots.
She flexed her quill arm. “The affront of the Lord of Soot and Sludge must not mean very much if you reward disrespect with access,” she said tartly.
The Other smiled faintly. “Soot and sludge,” she repeated. “Yes, that is part of him.” She leaned forward. “Would you like to examine his ‘sludge,’ as you call it?”
Tanya had to swallow her bile. In truth, she wanted to run as far away from it as possible, but her mission was to gain information about the magic emanating from the Volcano.
Your magic is stronger or theirs is, the Queen’s voice echoed in her head. They’ll take you or you’ll take them.
The Queen had taught her to trust her own power above all else. The Queen was waiting. Tanya would not be taken.
“If it pleases you, Madam,” she answered, keeping her voice as neutral as she could.
The high priestess nodded to the Other next to her, the one from the thoroughfare and the Night Swap, who smiled rather nastily. She rose, walked to the wall, and reached in her pocket for an ornately carved, iridescent white scoop.
Tanya watched as the Other held the edge of the scoop to one of the wall veins and extracted the sludge in its chamber. Turning to Tanya, the Other walked slowly to her.
“Open your hands,” she ordered Tanya in a low, soft voice.
Tanya wrinkled her nose but held out cupped palms. Smiling wider, the priestess poured the contents of the scoop into Tanya’s hands.
She felt her fingertips go numb the second the first drop fell. By the time the fourth and fifth fell, though, they were on fire, a white-hot, invisible fire that spread up her arms, over her shoulders, across her chest.
Tanya shrieked and felt the quill shriek with her, filling her whole body with its convulsive vibrations, her tattoos shuddering across her skin, shuddering in pain. Still yelling, still in agony, she wrenched her hands apart and tried to drop the sludge on the floor, but it wouldn’t move—it stuck to her and spread.
“Will you listen to our Lord Demon, Tanya? Will you let him in?”
Tanya fell to her knees with exertion and pain, feeling rather than hearing the swift footfalls that brought Greer and Darrow to her side as the roaring sound of the sludge reverberated overwhelmingly through her ears.
“Get it off!” she shouted over the din as the sludge crept over her chin and began to spread across her face. “Get it off me, now!”
Through her panic, she saw the high priestess and saw that she had changed position. Instead of leaning back and idly twisting the tiara around her wrist, she was leaning forward with both hands flat on the table, the tiara high on her head. Her eyes were closed and she was whispering in tandem with the whispering of the sludge.
The dais next to her was empty. The Others and their novices were coiling themselves into a spiral, sinuously moving as one organism, like a serpent—or like the sludge itself, now racing through the veins in the walls as if escaping a fire.
As they coiled, they began to hum and emit a violent orange-and-black glow.
“Stop it,” cried Tanya as the sludge crept up her face. “I will listen to the demon of the Volcano. I will listen!”
The head priestess opened her eyes and removed the tiara. The other Volcano witches stopped their interweaving. The veins in the walls slowed their pumping. The sludge on her face retreated, vaulting off her skin like a live thing.
The head priestess spoke into the hushed silence that followed:
“Tanya of Griffin’s Port, meet the Demon of Bloodstone.”
Chapter
30
Tanya struggled for breath. “The sludge . . . is the demon?” she asked, still rooted to the floor, while Greer awkwardly patted her shoulder.
Darrow had his eyes closed and was whispering prayers to his own god. As she got to her feet, she saw that Riley also had his eyes closed and was making the violently clenching and unclenching fist that she knew was the method of prayer to Herold, patron god of criminals.
The Others were calmly rearranging themselves into their original formation, unfazed by the unholy display.
“The Volcano is the body of our sacred demon,” said the high priestess, looking upward with ardent affection. “We are inside our Lord of Boiling and Whispers as we speak. The black matter is his life-force, his will—his blood. It is a living manifestation of his influence.”
Tanya looked at the tiara, horrified. “And you can control it using that,” she said, her voice a whisper. “You’re using the magnification powers of the tiara to expand and direct his influence across Lode.”
“What was that?” asked the priestess, her voice sharp.
Tanya didn’t even bother to dissemble. She looked the priestess in the eye.
“Let’s not waste time,” she said flatly, and rolled up her sleeve. She lifted the quill, which looked as though it had been shocked, each spine standing on edge.
“If you can do that with the tiara, what do you need with this?” asked Tanya. “Why am I here?”
The priestess’s eyes went wide and she stared at the quill with something that was like hatred, but not quite—or at least not only.
The Other looked away from the shimmering lights of the quill and held out her hand. “I will examine it.”
Tanya stuck out her chin. “If I refuse?”
The silence was deafening. Even the hum of breathing from the sludge and veins stopped.
“Why would you refuse?” asked the Other after a moment. “In fact, who are you to refuse? Is it yours?”
The feathers leaned backward over Tanya’s wrist in what was almost a caress, and she smiled. “Try to take it from me and find out,” she taunted. “Higher authorities than you have made that mistake.”
Some of the Tomcat’s men behind her smothered shocked laughter, but the Other didn’t. Instead, she stood up and stepped off the dais, walking around the long table until she had passed her second-in-command and was standi
ng in front of Tanya.
She was no taller than Tanya nor was she an otherwise imposing figure. But she did radiate a certain solidity that Tanya couldn’t remember ever encountering, as if the woman were one of many rolling hills. The seaside girl in Tanya was discomfited.
“It allows you to wield it,” said the woman, carefully eyeing the quill, but keeping her hands to herself. “Sometimes power finds us. Other times, we have to find power. Neither way is better than the other. Tell me, are you free?”
“I’m free enough.”
The Other turned to look at the women and girls behind her, a faint smile on her lips. “All who serve the Volcano are free,” she said softly. “What was that, boy?” she asked, turning suddenly to Riley.
Riley blanched. “I didn’t say anything,” he said quickly.
“Yes, you did,” she said, coming to stand in front of him. “You didn’t think anyone could hear you, but I did. Say it again.”
Riley visibly swallowed, but bravely lifted his eyes to meet hers. “I said that it didn’t look like your little girls were even free to leave this cave,” he said defiantly, and then tensed up, as if bracing for a blow.
The Other stepped even closer to Riley, forcing him to arch his back and bend away from her.
She looked at him a long moment and then abruptly turned away to move once again toward Tanya.
“There is freedom in sacrifice,” she said. “In service to a power greater than oneself. I wouldn’t expect a street rat pickpocket to understand.”
Riley blushed scarlet and again balled his hands into fists.
The Other ignored him, focusing on Tanya, on the quill in her hand.
“But a girl who had charge of a fishing village inn before she was twelve,” she said softly, circling Tanya like a vulture lazily riding a breeze. “A girl who knows what a true skill learned means for the soul; a girl who refuses to accede to a stranger’s request, no matter that stranger’s power; a girl who has learned to use such a powerful object, who has been chosen as its favorite, its wielder—I might expect that girl to understand the freedom involved in serving the Volcano.”
Wench Page 29