The Songbird and the Heart of Stone (Crowns of Nyaxia #3)

Chapter 9

CHAPTER NINE

I felt the burns first—fresh ones on my hands, my penance for the flame I’d used to save Asar. They throbbed fiercely.

Throbbed, and then?—

“Ow—!” I let out half of a strangled yelp before a hand clapped over my mouth.

“Hush, Iliae,” Asar said. “The dead crave the living. Let’s not rush the inevitable.”

I opened my eyes. We were in—some kind of cave, maybe? My back was propped up against something hard and uncomfortable. Fair, smooth stone encircled us, the empty sky visible through an opening behind Asar. He removed his hand from my face and returned to his work—on my hands, which he leaned over with a singular focus that reminded me of priests at morning prayer. I bit my lip as he finished removing a piece of burned skin and flicked it aside.

“Your god doesn’t love you half as much as you think he does,” he muttered. “You burned yourself to the bone. It’s beyond me why Atroxus still allows you to use his magic, but be careful of the price you pay for it.”

“It’s not— ffff .” I swallowed my curse as he smoothed cool liquid over my palms.

“Almost done.”

He covered my hands with his, his touch so gentle that it sent an uncomfortable shiver from the base of my spine up through my shoulder blades. Pulsing waves crawled toward us from every shadowy crevice—from beneath his arms, from between the cracks of stone, from the place where we touched. Something else inside me reacted to the call, too, reaching for the surface. It made my skin prickle, like a caress of the crest of my ear or breath against my throat. Almost ticklish, if it hadn’t been so damned pleasant .

I couldn’t stand it.

He released me just as I was about to pull away. I looked down at the red, angry burns. They usually healed slowly and scarred badly.

But the wounds were already closed, and before my eyes, flesh stitched to flesh.

“It’ll take some time before they’re completely gone,” he said. “But at least you can use your hands in the meantime.”

“How do you do that?” I asked.

“The potion did most of the work.”

“No, it didn’t.” I’d tried them all, from the cheap tonics peddled by street vendors to the expensive ointments crafted by royal healers in the House of Night. None worked this well. Injuries by the vampires’ natural enemy posed a unique challenge. “How do you do that with Shadowborn magic?”

The vampires of the House of Shadow could manipulate the darkness, obscure the truth, look into minds. They could spin illusions and bend you to their will. It was the magic of deceit and secrets. Not healing.

“Shadowborn magic can bring the dead back to life,” Asar said. “It’s more than deceit and secrets .”

I slammed my mind shut, hard. I’d sensed Asar’s presence lingering, but I’d misattributed it to the aftereffects of his magic. Stupid mistake. “Don’t do that,” I grumbled.

He remained a moment longer, pushing against my mental boundaries—an intrigued hand testing a door—before withdrawing.

He stood, dusting off his jacket. “You respond better to it than most.” He spoke without looking at me. “As if your body wants to return to its natural state.”

He tried to sound casual, but I could feel his interest clinging to me. He was curious and trying not to be. And maybe I should’ve used that curiosity to fulfill more of my own, but—and this was uncharacteristic of me—I just didn’t want to. I didn’t want to think about why my skin was still tingling. I didn’t want to listen to Asar talk about what my body wanted .

I’d rather ignore it all, and thankfully, he didn’t press it. “We should be going to find the others,” he said. “Goddess knows what kind of mess they’ve gotten up to already.” He shot me a cold glance. “I told you to stay on the path.”

The tingling was now gone.

“I didn’t mean to fall. And the reason I did was because I was saving your life. You’re welcome!”

“I’ve made this trip countless times. The guardians wouldn’t have been an issue.”

“I’m not talking about the guardians, and I think you know that.”

Whatever had attacked us wasn’t one of the dead, and it definitely wasn’t a guardian, either. And even though I wasn’t quite sure how I knew it, I was certain it had been targeting Asar.

Asar didn’t say anything, which I took as confirmation. He slid his hands into his pockets and went to the cave entrance. I followed him.

“Anyway, where are?—”

I stopped short at the mouth of the cave.

“Oh,” I breathed.

Before us, a river coiled lazily through the velvet night like a snake writhing through the grass. But instead of water, it held blood. Ruby deep crimson spilled over dehydrated white dust. Tributaries split off from its main body like veins splitting into capillaries. In the distance, mountains of ivory rose into the sky, jagged as broken bones. Ruins dotted the landscape, so eroded that they were only the faintest suggestion of what they’d once been. Glistening ivory stalks topped with ridged caps of white, blue, black—every color, reduced to paint strokes in the distance—crawled over them, intertwining with the stone in an unnerving collision of man and nature.

Something warm hit the top of my head, and I looked up to see that the rivers coiled above us, too, wild as vines swaying under a brisk breeze. Some broke mid-air, blood pouring down into a waterfall before resuming their path again far below. All of it continued up into the sky, streams splitting and tangling until they disappeared beyond the mists.

“Welcome to the Descent,” Asar said.

I jabbed my finger to the distance, eyes round despite myself. “Are those mushrooms ?”

I wasn’t sure why, out of everything, the giant mushrooms were the most shocking. At least the bone mountains and blood rivers seemed appropriate for a path to the underworld.

“The Sanctum of Body is the level of decay. It’s where the dead shed their physical forms. So, yes.”

“They’re actually?—”

Beautiful , I was going to say. But a breeze rustled my hair, and with it came a smell so putrid I had to cover my mouth to keep my blood breakfast from ending up in the dirt.

“Holy fucking gods. What is that?”

“Neglect,” Asar replied bitterly. “It’ll pass.”

Thankfully, he was right, and I forced bile back down into my stomach as he surveyed the landscape.

“There will be a temple that acts as the epicenter of the Sanctum,” he said. “Probably in there.”

He pointed to the distance, where the massive mushrooms grew particularly thick around a cluster of ivory cliffs in a dense jungle of decay.

He didn’t wait for my confirmation. He just started walking, and I had no choice but to follow.

“Probably?” I said. “I thought you’ve been here before.”

“There are parts of the Sanctums that are difficult for me to go now.”

Now . As if it hadn’t always been that way.

“Difficult?” I said.

“Dangerous.”

That was encouraging.

“What about the others?” I said. “Where are they?”

He touched his chest—the anchor. I did the same, and I could feel an ever so faint tug somewhere off in the distance.

“They made it here,” he said. “Luce will have found them quickly. She’ll lead them toward the temple, too. We’ll come across them soon, I’m sure.”

I thought about Chandra’s hands, frail and human, trembling in mine.

“I hope Chandra is all right,” I murmured. “She was terrified.”

Asar scoffed beneath his breath. “If she’d moved faster?—”

“She wasn’t going to move faster . She was afraid. Of course she was! She died a few days ago.”

“I made sure she didn’t remember it.”

“That doesn’t make a difference. You still feel it. It’s—” I shut my mouth. I felt like I’d just cut something inside me too close to the quick. “She’s just a scared human.”

Humans showed their emotions differently than vampires did. Even Oraya, who had trained herself all her life to hide hers. I could still smell them on her like smoke—the byproduct of burning your own vulnerability for survival.

I wondered if my fear had smelled like that once, fifty years ago, when I’d met a handsome vampire prince and realized he would kill me.

“She’s not just anything, Iliae,” Asar said. “I told you that everyone in Morthryn deserves to be here. Her affinity to Atroxus gave her forty years of life she didn’t deserve in the hopes that she might be useful one day. Lucky for her, she was.”

Forty years? Chandra looked to be in her sixties. So she had committed her crimes when she was in her twenties?

“What did she do that was so horrible?” I asked. It was hard to imagine frail, quiet Chandra as a true threat to any vampire.

But before Asar could answer, a jolt yanked through my chest, right over my sternum—the anchor.

At the exact same moment, a scream rang out in the distance.

This one was different from what we had heard on the path above. That had been ethereal, going beyond the physical. This was all mortal, a sound of pure physical agony. It was hoarse and gurgling, as if ripped from a broken throat.

I froze mid-step. Asar’s gaze snapped to the horizon. He let out a hiss of frustration between his teeth.

The sound was soon joined by others—more and more shrieks until they fused to a formless cacophony.

“That’ll be them,” Asar muttered.

I followed his stare.

The figures in the distance were so tightly packed that, at first, they looked like a single writhing mass. But no, they were people…?or at least, they had been once. Now, even this far away, I could see that something was very wrong with them. They moved in fits and starts, bodies lurching, limbs bending in discordant directions. And at their front, running toward the temple, were three familiar forms: one bearing a sword, one bearing light, and a wolf made of shadow.

“Holy gods,” I whispered, but Asar was already off, strides long and quick. I had to awkwardly run to keep up with him.

“What are those?”

I almost didn’t want to ask.

“Death is hungry,” he said. “Starving for what they once knew. Like you and I crave blood. That’s what we are to them. Get your sword out—don’t give me that look , Dawndrinker, yes , the sword. I’ll need you functional at the temple. No burning yourself alive before we make it there.”

His steps quickened to a run. Of course, he still unsheathed his sword with all the grace of a raven taking off into the night, not so much as missing a step. I stumbled behind him, fumbling with my own, which was awkward and heavy and a little too long to draw comfortably while I ran. Still, as much as I hated to admit it, I couldn’t argue with him too much. I winced as my palms—still tender—closed around the hilt. I couldn’t risk incapacitating myself early.

The screams were now a constant, rolling roar, drowning my thoughts. The waves of the dead grew closer. I could see the others now, hacking and fighting their way through—gods, there were so many?—

I felt the eyes of the dead turn to us.

“Don’t let them touch you,” Asar said. The last thing I heard before his words were swallowed by the howls of their hunger.

I raised my sword and braced myself.

The wave crashed down upon us.

Don’t let them touch you, he said, like it was that fucking easy. I was starting to realize that Asar often gave advice that wasn’t very useful.

I wasn’t sure what I expected to find on the path to the underworld. Dead, of course. But I was expecting, perhaps, disembodied souls, mournful ghosts. These were living corpses, still encased in the rotting remnants of their mortality. The stench of decay surrounded us as they descended, all open mouths and outstretched hands. Their hunger buried into my bones—deeper than flesh, like they’d slide inside our skin just to remember what it was like to be alive.

I swung my sword clumsily to bat them back, but it occurred to me that perhaps a sharp piece of metal wouldn’t exactly do much to deter opponents who were already dead.

Elias, Chandra, and Luce collided with us, the five of us circling into a tight pack. Elias hacked admirably away, fending off corpse after corpse. Chandra shook like a leaf, but blinding light spilled from her palms as her lips moved in constant prayer—her chosen weapon over the sword. The Helianen specialized in the art of distilling the magic of the sun. It wasn’t as deadly as flame, but was still very powerful. The dead lunged for it only to shrink away when its rays fell over their faces. They were so desperate for the warmth that they let it burn them over and over again, and I wasn’t prepared for the sharp twist of sympathy I felt for that.

I watched Chandra out of the corner of my eye, a tight ball of jealousy forming in my stomach. She was no fighter—she’d probably been a healer once, if I had to guess—but her mastery of the light was obvious. It came to her so easily. Simple as breathing.

“The passage!” Asar was yelling, pushing back the dead with one arm and pointing to the narrow opening in the cliffs with the other. “Move!”

I started to run.

But then I heard the voice:

Mische…?Mische!

My steps faltered. My head swiveled around. My eyes searched the morass of dead. Their pleas blended together into a wordless hum.

I’d imagined it. Surely. But I couldn’t stop myself from looking?—

Pain tore through my arm, punishment for that distraction. I yelped and spun around, managing a direct hit across the face of a pale woman with purple beneath her eyes and blood dripping from her mouth. I didn’t have time to examine whatever she’d done to me, but as I tried to regain my footing, I stumbled against a sudden wave of dizziness.

She, on the other hand, recovered quickly. She let out a moan, hands outstretched.

A wave of darkness rolled over us. It passed right through me, momentarily numbing sound and sensation, then left my opponent gasping against the ground. Someone grabbed my wrist and pushed me toward the temple.

“I told you not to let them touch you,” Asar growled in my ear. “Go!”

I started to obey, but he had planted his feet, squaring off against the sea of the dead. I skidded to a stop.

“What are you?—”

But Luce, who dove by me, bit down hard on my hand, forcing me to follow. He knows what he’s doing, she seemed to say. Run.

I fixed my sights on the gap in the stone. Chandra and Elias were several strides ahead, bolting like their lives depended on it. The cries of the dead rose behind me.

I couldn’t see what Asar did, but I certainly felt it.

It was as if someone had gathered up all the shadows in the air and wrung them out like a wet towel. Everything twisted. The sensation sank into muscle and bones and then left through the soles of my feet. Ahead, Chandra stumbled in shock, nearly tripping Elias as he let out a string of curses. We were within a few feet of the temple now. Smooth trunks of white rose up all around us in a dreamlike, fungal forest. Fluffy silver spores drifted slowly to the ground from the rainbow ridges of the mushroom caps above. I hadn’t been able to see it from a distance, but the temple was constructed of sheets of glass that had been stained blue, nearly black. A few panes had split under the crowding of the overgrown mushrooms, sending lightning cracks over the walls.

The air went eerily silent.

I chanced a glance over my shoulder to see Asar running to catch up with us, and behind him, motionless heaps of bodies. They looked like driftwood piled up at the ocean’s edge.

“Temporary.” He was out of breath, sweat beading on his brow. “Step back.”

He pushed past us and threw himself against the temple doors, one hand upon each. Black-red blood spilled from his palms. It pooled in the ancient carvings, spiraling around his hands before tracing the outline of the eyes of Alarus—lashes, lids, irises, and then, at last, bloody, piercing pupils.

The doors swung open, and Asar ushered us inside, shutting them behind us.

The scent of damp decay filled my nostrils. Dim light from the misty skies filtered through warped expanses of glass. Once, they’d formed intricate designs—probably some kind of religious tableau—but now, the fungi had overtaken them, piercing panes of blues and purples and greens with blooming ruffles of translucent white. It pushed up from the cracks in the floor, breaking the marble tile to reveal black earth beneath. It was so dense that I could barely see anything else, a rainbow of fungi, just as alive as the Citadel forests.

“This is…?something,” panted Elias, the way one might say, I hate everything about this.

My eyes were wide. “It’s amazing,” I whispered.

Chandra shook her head, shooting me a pitying glance. “It’s death, child.”

Something about the way she said it—the way she looked at me—reminded me of a morning I’d spent in the gardens with Saescha, hands buried in the dirt. Hidden beneath a rosebush, I’d found a dead firefinch. It had been gone for some time. Its wings had been splayed like a dancer’s skirt. Its eye sockets were black and sunken with decay. Maggots writhed in the wound that had likely killed it. A single bright stalk of green had sprouted up right in the center of its body, right in the middle of what remained of long-unmoving organs.

I’d stared at it for too long.

When Saescha had seen it, she’d let out a sound of revulsion.

“Poor thing,” she had said. “Don’t touch that, Mische. It’s disgusting.”

“It’s not disgusting,” I’d replied. “We’ll all look like that one day.”

She had given me an odd look, then batted my arm. “Not anytime soon.”

But now, I thought back to that look—a twin to the one Chandra gave me now. Saescha was the wisest person I’d ever known. Maybe she saw a hint of what I’d become that day.

I broke Chandra’s gaze and turned to the temple. A single broken path led through the mushrooms. Perhaps once it had been an aisle? A hallway?

Asar nudged past me, Luce at his heels.

“We don’t have much time before the dead are all over us again.”

I followed him, Chandra and Elias behind me.

“What are we looking for?” I said.

Our voices echoed in the silence. Gods, this place was enormous—much bigger than it looked from the outside. What I’d expected to be a short path just went on and on. Speckles of moving light played over the floor, and I looked up to see that the ceiling was even higher now, the mushrooms reaching far, far above us.

A numb buzzing sensation built behind my skull. I lifted my hand in front of my face to see the tiny hairs on the back of it standing upright.

I’d spent enough time studying places of great spiritual importance to know when I was standing in one. A god had given up a part of himself here. It was an inflection point, and I could sense the power of it pulling at me beneath the surface.

“We’re close,” Asar murmured under his breath.

He felt it, too.

We stepped through the crumbling remains of a doorway and into a massive, circular room. A sheet of glass rose from the far wall, silhouetting the vegetation beyond. A massive stained glass eye, circles nested within circles, stared back at us. Before it, perfectly framed, stood a silver altar.

“It has to be there,” Elias said, starting forward.

A soft whoosh rustled the silence.

He halted mid-step.

Again—louder this time. The strands of hair around my face quivered. A shadow blotted out the watercolor light over the ground.

I started to lift my chin.

I recognized the sound of flames roaring to life before I even finished the movement. My arm flew up to shield my face from a sudden wall of heat.

I nearly fell back to the floor. I barely managed a wavering, “Shit!”

A monumental bird wearing a golden skull face soared above us, wings extended, talons bared. Flames engulfed its massive body. It framed itself against the ceiling, wingspan so great that I couldn’t capture the width of it at once. Its skeletal face, half-broken, stared down at us with deathly promise.

The third guardian.

The supposedly dead guardian.

The bird let out a terrible, wretched cry, and dove for us.