Bound by Ink (A Living Ink Novel)

by Marcella Burnard

  Isa thought she’d put most of her fears to bed. Shivering on the bank of a river of scorpions, she tried to moisten cracked lips with her swollen, bleeding tongue. Whatever progress she’d made against her weaknesses hadn’t been enough.

  Blowing out a shuddering breath, she glanced down at the spirit holding her hand.

  The child had tousled, tangled black hair. His body had been painted Maya blue. Deep puncture wounds, edges curling with rot and old blood, marred his chest. When he tipped his face up to her as if to meet her gaze, Isa strangled a cry.

  Sunken black eye sockets stared at her. His eyes had been plucked out. Foul, terrible stains wept down his blue cheeks.

  He flinched.

  Isa tightened her grip on his insubstantial, bony hand and on her run-amok pulse. “Please don’t go. We’ll get across the river somehow.”

  Could she conquer her fears to the point that she could wade into the roiling mass of venomous creatures without being stung?

  This was a vision and therefore magic. Albeit, magic on a scale that made her power little more than a firefly flashing in the tall grass.

  Maybe a shield would deflect the creatures?

  Cold wind swept her back. Fingers clutched her sweatshirt again, begging for attention. Knowing what she’d see, Isa set her expression to neutral, steeled her nerves, and looked.

  Spirits. Mostly adults. All bearing the wounds that had killed them.

  “Take us with you,” they whispered.

  “It would be my honor,” she said, “but we must cross the river. And I don’t know how to do that and survive.”

  Several of the spirits moaned and shrank back.

  “The trials of this place are meant to kill mortals. You’re already dead,” she said. “Nothing here can harm you. The scorpions are here to stop the living. To stop me.”

  “She will ask the gods to free us,” the child said. “She promised.”

  Isa huffed a laugh. She’d promised him, because he was a child afraid of bespeaking his gods. Understandably. He hadn’t been old enough when he’d died to have been trained in the spiritual practices of his people.

  Adults, though, even dead ones, would have been. They knew enough to take responsibility for approaching their own deities.

  Still, Isa didn’t contradict the child because the souls of the Mayan dead were edging forward, led by a man missing an arm and part of his jaw. He’d been painted with blue dye in patterns against his brown skin. A warrior felled in battle?

  He crouched beside the river, glanced back at Isa for a second, and then plunged his remaining hand into the scorpions.

  Hissing, accompanied by chirps that sounded remarkably like a chorus of crickets on a warm night, erupted from the river. Scorpions scuttled around the spirit’s arm. One struck.

  He started, but didn’t rise. He uttered a soft chuckle full of pleased surprise. “No pain. In this place of fear and bitter tears, the scorpion sting is nothing. How long have I let fear shackle me?”

  He rose and turned so she looked at the side of his face that still had a jaw. “You will petition the gods for our freedom?”

  How did he manage to speak at all? No. She didn’t want to know. Focus on the question. Isa nodded. “I will.”

  “The bargain is struck,” he said.

  As if the faint, sibilant words had communicated something more to the other spirits surrounding Isa, they flowed past her. The arctic breeze of their going ruffled her hair and tugged at her sweatshirt.

  The child spirit pulled free of her hand. “I want to help.”

  They surrounded Isa, using their petrified flesh to shunt the hissing, furious scorpions around her.

  “Thank you,” Isa said, climbing down into the hip-deep riverbed.

  A child’s giggle drifted up. “They tickle!”

  Isa smiled. She didn’t know how to conquer her fears, but maybe showing these spirits they had nothing to fear from Xibalba’s trials counted for something.

  Protected by the dead, she crossed the river without a single sting. On the far bank, the child took her hand again as the path of Isa’s blood led deep into a tunnel of icy and shimmering, frosted rock.

  Goose bumps rose on the skin of her back as her dead helpers strung out behind her. Good to know there was still something colder than she.

  The ice cave forced her to crawl on her belly at one point to pass beneath glinting, sharp-edged ice daggers. If her innards hadn’t already been frozen solid, contact with the burning cold ice of Xibalba did the job.

  She paused when another river crossed her path.

  It flowed, dark, thick liquid swirling. Blood. The taste and the smell filled her head. She couldn’t distinguish the blood in her mouth from the metallic miasma of the river.

  The dead couldn’t protect her from this river.

  Not that she needed them to. Blood held no horror. It was life. It was death. It could not harm her or them.

  She stepped into the liquid.

  The child spirit let her go.

  Current washed her ankles. Her jeans wicked moisture up to her knees, weighing her down. She edged deeper, testing whether the current wanted to take her feet out from under her. Eddies curled lazily around her calves and she waded into the middle of the waist-deep river, certain of her footing.

  Silence reigned on the shore behind her, as if the spirits held the breaths they did not need to breathe.

  Blood soaked her sweatshirt, settling in a sticky mass against her skin.

  Voices, carried on the current, called her. Recognition stopped her dead in the middle of the river.

  She’d assumed the river flowed with the blood of all the sacrifices generations of Mayans had offered to their gods.

  Based on the distant screams whirling in the current, it was that, in part. But the blood swirling around her carried louder, more recent voices, raised in panic, shouted in rage. Lawrence’s dying cry. Dick’s wheeze from the griffin disassembling him. A rasping moan that could only have belonged to the colonel from the containment camp swirled around her. The current picked up speed, threatening to sweep her from her feet.

  She stood in the blood of everyone she’d killed, whether via direct action or through her inaction. Isa staggered. The river darkened and the tenor of the cries dragging at her changed. Inhuman voices buffeted her. Tattoos. There was the hydra’s final warble, and the dying shrieks of the tattoos she could have saved in the quarantine center. A handful of the tattoos she’d bound over the years rose from the river that no longer ran with blood. It was black with Ink.

  The weight of every Living Tattoo she’d killed settled around her neck, bearing her down. Sinking her. Sucking her beneath the surface.

  “The hydra was going critical,” she protested. “It had killed hundreds of people. I had to put it down. It would have killed hundreds, if not thousands, more. I had no idea I could save it. Even if I had, I’m not sure I would have.”

  A little of the weight lifted.

  She inched one foot across the abruptly treacherous, slick river bottom. “I would have attempted to save the tattoos and their people at the containment camp if I could have. For the damned, ignorant rules, and the guns that kept me from trying, I’m sorry that colonel died so that the families of the dead can’t sue his ass.”

  “For the record, I’m not sorry about Lawrence or Dick. Predatory bastards. How many more magic users would they have murdered? If lack of remorse means I drown in their blood, so be it.”

  She didn’t.

  As if the resentment she harbored over the needless deaths in the quarantine center somehow appeased the souls of the tattoos and their hosts, the weight on Isa lessened further. She waded out of the greedy river.

  Breathing hard, she propped her hands on her knees and glanced across the broad expanse of swirling blood.

 
Spirits lined the opposite bank. Hesitating, shuffling skeletal feet.

  Isa studied them. Was that fear? Again? “What?”

  “Priestess, you’ve killed?” The child’s shrill question cut through the gurgle of flowing blood.

  Isa straightened. “I’ve killed to protect people. I wish I could tell you that in all cases I was sorry. It would be a lie.”

  “Not sacrifices?” the warrior asked.

  Even with the distance between them, at the motion of his partial jaw as he spoke, greasy nausea slid up her esophagus. Isa swallowed hard and shook her head. She hoped he could see the gesture. She didn’t dare open her mouth to speak.

  “Protecting your people and your community,” the warrior said, “that is the charge given the warriors of our people.”

  Our people?

  He took the child’s hand and crossed the river. The rest of the spirits followed.

  The stench of the final river, the river of pestilence, challenged Isa long before she laid her vision- questing eyes upon the crusty green-and-yellow sludge piling up and rolling over itself like some kind of toxic magma flow.

  Isa lost her battle against nausea twice before dropping to her knees on the bank, weak and despairing. She’d come too far to give up. Too many spirits had followed her, relying on her promise.

  Blue hands shaking, she forced herself to her unsteady feet.

  The child’s spirit stood at her side, watching her as if he could see her out of those gaping eye sockets.

  “I can’t see how to do this,” she muttered, shivering as the spirits gathered at her back.

  Her breath hung golden and frosty in the frigid air.

  Like magma, her brain noted again. The solution hit her. Solidify the flow. Freeze it.

  She breathed a laugh. Time for the cold killing her to work on her behalf. Isa called up a sliver of magic. Holding her breath, clamping her stomach muscles to suppress her gag reflex, she channeled power into her right hand and touched the slimy, reeking surface of the green river.

  Gold frost spread from the point of contact, hardening the surface. The river flow piled up, rolling over the surface Isa’s magic had momentarily frozen. It wouldn’t be perfect, but if the crust held, it would be infinitely better than wading through the filth.

  Determination steady, Isa rose and routed magic through the soles of her bare feet. She stepped atop the green ooze she’d frozen with the touch of her hand. It supported her weight. The river couldn’t be stopped, but it could be made briefly solid. In the seconds it took to freeze a stepping-stone of pus and contagion, slime oozed over the top of her foot.

  Every fiber of her being quivered in disgust and outrage. Better than wading. Step by careful, nauseating step, Isa inched her way across the putrid river.

  Dry heaves wracked her three steps from the far bank, shattering her concentration. Croaking in protest, she sank knee deep in filth. Retching, miserable, she crawled to shore.

  Her company of spirits flowed across the sickening river. The chill of their coming soothed Isa’s nausea, but the stench of rot carried on the breeze made her groan.

  She couldn’t walk, so Isa crawled, following her blood trail. According to the Popol Vuh, she had one trial left before she could confront the gods of the dead.

  The crossroads. The stone cairns marking the crossroads began arguing over which path was the true road to the gods before she could even see them. She stumbled to her feet. Four separate tunnels led in different directions. Ignoring the competing, disembodied voices, she peered down each of the roads. Her blood trail flowed down each path.

  The child crowded against her legs.

  “You hear them?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “They can’t harm us. I know something they might not.”

  “What?”

  “Blood and magic,” she murmured, opening her magical eye. Light and color exploded across her etheric vision. She flinched.

  Rule eighteen: Magic sight within the spirit world—bad idea.

  Squinting filtered the sacred energy holding Xibalba together. She sought the dull glints of her gold signature. The second tunnel on her right bore traces of her energy. She studied the rest of the tunnels, just to be sure. Her assumption appeared correct. None of the other blood trails glowed gold.

  Isa led her dead Mayans deeper into the underworld. Ice and snow dwindled. Stone paving emerged from the frost beneath her feet. Greenery appeared, growing larger and lusher as she walked. Pyramids peeked above the palm fronds. Her path opened out into an avenue. It led them through a silent city to the courtyard fronting the tallest of the pyramids.

  A great, multicolored feast of fruit and foodstuffs spread across long, low tables. Seated upon stone thrones, the gods of the underworld, Hun-Came and Vucub-Came, watched her approach. Both wore crowns inlaid with jade, flint, and what looked like shell. Ragged, once brilliant feathers completed their headdresses. Their ornate skirts were inlaid with beads and shells.

  However well attired the gods appeared, Isa had to suppress another roll of nausea. Both gods were rotting corpses. Flesh hung from one side of Hun-Came’s face. His lips were the color of raw, seeping hamburger. Only sinew and bone remained in his neck. Bones shone through maggot-infested skin stretched taut over Vucub-Came’s ribs.

  Her reading of the Popol Vuh, hurried as it had been, had given her a view of devious, vicious gods inhabiting the underworld. They were insatiable. Yet she needed to pry not just her soul from their grasp, but the souls gathered at her back.

  Though Isa readily identified the gods seated behind the feasting table, there were six gods. Three exact replicas of each of the two. Her final test. Which were the gods and which the fakes? She had to know which of them to greet. Which of them to ask how to heal the tear in her soul, to find out how to defeat the House of Cold, and then Uriel.

  If she could.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Isa stared, looking for some hint as to which was simulacrum and which was deity. She floundered while the gods snickered and sipped blood from skulls. The thick, red fluid poured down the visible tendons and spine of Hun-Came’s throat.

  Her gaze settled upon the food on their table. It wasn’t the wealth of fragrant, colorful fruit she’d first imagined. Silver bowls and clay plates were heaped to overflowing with hearts, some of them still pulsing.

  Bodies sprawled on the tables, chests laid open.

  One of the corpses pinned to the table like a beetle to a card turned its head to look her in the eye.

  Isa croaked a harsh cry and fell to her knees. Daniel.

  “You could have blessed my way,” he rasped. Tears flowed down his rotting cheeks. “You didn’t. Why? Did I mean nothing to you?”

  “Blessed may you . . .” Isa gasped.

  “No,” the two gods snapped as one.

  Their voices ripped through Isa’s skull. Volcanoes roaring. Boulders crashing down mountain sides. Their images repeated the denial a fraction of a second after the true gods uttered it.

  “Greetings, venerable and ancient Hun-Came. Greetings, venerable and ancient Vucub-Came,” Isa said, addressing the proper gods, blinking watering eyes. She stayed on her knees.

  The false images vanished. The two remaining gods snarled at her. “The transgressor is ours.”

  “You are the rulers of this place,” Isa said. “If you mean to keep him, and you have the right to do so, any paltry blessing I utter will have no power to take him from you.”

  “He is nothing,” Hun-Came sneered. As he spoke, his lips smacked like slabs of raw meat. He gestured.

  Daniel’s weeping corpse vanished.

  “Save that he served to bind you to our court,” the god said.

  “Is that why, honored lords, I wear the mark of your summons?” Isa asked, lifting her blue hands for them to see.

&nbs
p; They chuckled. Vultures cackling.

  “Come. You have traveled far, traversed the rivers guarding our court,” Vucub-Came said. “You recognized and greeted us as is right and proper. You bring the offering of your blood borne on an incense pleasing to our kind. Be seated, priestess. Take your ease while you speak the questions of your heart.”

  Isa spread her hands wide, remembering how in the Popol Vuh the gods of the dead invited supplicants to be seated upon burning hot cooking surfaces. “Lord, in the teaching of my people, I do not belong here in your realm. Not yet. Thus to linger here would be the height of disrespect. I came seeking your blessing and your advice.”

  “Advice.” Vucub-Came drew the word out in a long, head-splitting arc of amusement.

  “These spirits,” she said, glancing at the child beside her. “They are tired of being cold. Will you release them from their suffering?”

  “What will you give us in exchange?” Hun-Came asked.

  She hesitated, frowning. What did she have to offer? Dried, foul pus crusting on her feet? Blood-and-ink-soaked clothing? Blood. Ink. She’d never wondered what happened to the tattoos she’d destroyed. Did she need any further proof that they’d been alive?

  “Have I not already?” she asked. “The Ink and power of every Living Tattoo I’ve destroyed flows through the river of blood.”

  “So it does,” Hun-Came drawled.

  “It is potent enough to have nearly dragged even you down, priestess,” Vucub-Came said.

  The rotting gods traded bloody-eyed glances, fading feathers bobbing in their crowns. Hun-Came put down his skull goblet and clapped the bones of his hands together.

  Thunder rolled through the courtyard, knocking Isa flat.

  Cold wind shrieked, then rose, swirling into the dark—was it sky or cavern ceiling—above the Dark Gods’ palace.

  Aching, Isa climbed to her feet. The spirits were gone, including the child. She whispered a blessing for the path the spirits now had to walk. She hoped the warrior would guide the child into the Mayan paradise.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  The gods eyed her, but said nothing, leaving her to break the silence.