by E. S. Bell
Jude returned to Sebastian’s side. Her fingers were cold and hard as gripped his jaw and jerked his head up. The ache in the back of his head flared and subsided back to dullness. He looked at her. She was beautiful like a jungle cat—a beauty that invited you to stroke her sleek softness and find instead sharp claws and tearing teeth. Marks from Bacchus’s fingers stood out on the pale skin of her neck.
She’s probably proud of them, he thought dully. Like Selena feeling blessed despite her wound. To the bloody Deeps with this god and both its faces.
Jude’s grip turned into a gentle caress over the line of his jaw. “This night has been long. Longer than I anticipated, and not half so smooth. But now it shall progress properly. The way it should.”
A scream, muffled but nearby, resounded in the earthen temple. A woman’s scream. Sebastian’s heart clenched. He looked at Jude with wide eyes. Another scream sounded on the heels of the first, jagged with agony.
“Make that stop,” Sebastian breathed.
Jude smiled. “Not yet.”
Palace of Ice and Bone
The assassin was beaten. It was the screams, Accora knew.
He thinks they’re Selena’s.
She pondered whether to comfort him with the truth, but for the last several nights she had dreamt herself in her greenhouse, dodging a demons’ slicing blades and waking to the sounds of shattered glass.
He deserves no comfort. He is Sebastian Vaas.
They had been left alone in Bacchus’s chamber, she and Lunos’ most feared assassin. He was afraid of the smallness of the space.
A strange, silly weakness, she thought, but then the chamber shook her bones with terror too, though for other reasons.
Her eyes trailed to the slab upon which so much pain had been visited on her. She tried not to let the fear swamp her but it crashed over her in waves and battered her with memories of the last time she had been Bacchus’s prisoner. She knew what kind of tortures she faced should Selena fail, and yet a miserable little flicker of hope burned in her heart that this time she would be granted a quick death.
I’m an old woman. Surely Bacchus would not…
But five years before she had been an old woman and Bacchus showed no discretion, no mercy, no deference for her age. The only thing that kept the hope alive was Selena.
A woman’s scream came again, and tapered off into a weary whimper. Sebastian’s breath hitched and he seemed to wilt further. Accora sighed.
“Oh for the gods’ sake, that’s not Selena.”
The man lifted his ashen face that seemed to have aged ten years.
Accora snorted. “You’re pitiful with hope. Besotted, yet you can’t tell your lover’s voice from another.”
“Who…?” Sebastian asked, and then said, “Ori.”
“Aye.” Accora said. “I tried to make her what Selena is. But she is weak. Mediocre. She has no future. Better that she die now.”
“Better, aye, now that she has outlived her usefulness to you.” Sebastian spat a wad of red on the floor by Accora’s knees. Relief had made him gritty again. “She is useful to Bacchus now as bait?”
“Bait to catch Selena. Jude let you think she was Selena to watch you squirm.” She smirked. “First thing the woman’s done right all night.”
Sebastian spat again and struggled against his bonds. “You don’t care for Selena. You never did. You just want Bacchus dead.”
“Yes. And no. Selena has strength. I care for that. I care for that very much.”
“Aye, to further your own ends. Killing him won’t close her wound,” Sebastian said. “Will it?”
Accora gave him an arch look. “Suddenly we are very concerned about who has been honest with Selena, aren’t we, Captain Tergus? How droll.” The wry look turned to disgust. “Every word you have ever spoken to her has been a kind of lie, and yet you accuse me of using her to my own ends. And what of you? You think standing in her light will dispel your shadows? Fool.”
The door at the rear of the chamber opened and Bacchus returned, dragging Ori by the hair. Jude and a handful of Bazira followed. Despite what she’d said to Sebastian, Accora breathed a small prayer for Ori. The Haru whimpered hoarsely. Her skin bore patches of gray and white.
Bacchus filled the room with his presence: a boulder rimed in ice that rolled into their midst, ready to crush them all. He regarded his prisoners. Accora’s mouth went dry and her heart stuttered in its bony cage as it had the first time.
Do not lose yourself, she chided. You are not alone this time. You are not so helpless.
“This one is drained.” Bacchus nudged Ori with his boot. “What say you, mother?” he asked Accora. “Have you the voice to guide the Aluren home?”
He sent a small bolt of ice that struck her in the chest, rendered casually and with the sacred word only barely muttered. She wheezed as the cold ache spread out inside her, tightening her lungs and making her shiver enough she thought her bones would shatter.
“Selena w-will e-end you…”
Bacchus snorted. “You send a broken weapon at me and believe it will strike true.” He shook his head, the greasy hair that fell over his face brushed his jutting chin. The crags and lines of his pale skin were stark in the light of the lone torch that guttered on one earthen-packed wall.
“She is not as broken as you believe,” Accora whispered.
“She is a fool to follow you. Fools are easily bested,” Bacchus told her, as Ori mewled on the floor at his feet. “Your screams or his—” he inclined his head at Sebastian—”will draw her. But her wound…” Bacchus’s fingers clenched and unclenched and an eagerness lit up his dark eyes. “Her wound is a gift of the Shadow face to us.”
“You will thank me for it,” Accora whispered, “when Selena kills you quickly and with mercy before I have my turn with you.”
She tensed, waiting for the blow that would knock her senseless, or kill her. “The same empty words from an empty husk,” he said. “I will keep you alive long enough to watch your Aluren die and then grant you your peace.”
Accora’s hands clenched behind her back. Bacchus’s notion of “peace” was very far removed from the actual meaning.
The Reverent looked to Jude. “Where are my Bazira and how many?”
Jude’s pale face paled further. “Half a hundred men await your command, my priest.”
Bacchus narrowed his eyes at her, as if he couldn’t comprehend what sort of creature stood before him. “Only one night ago, my men numbered near two hundred.”
“M-my men report that Selena Koren h-has an army, my lord. An army of Zak’reth, fighting for her. They k-killed the hundred men I sent to retrieve her after Accora abetted her release from my camp.”
Zak’reth army? Accora looked at Sebastian. He shrugged almost imperceptibly.
“Your failures compound and compound, like dirt shoveled on a grave,” Bacchus told Jude. “Zak’reth?”
“It’s true, my lord, I swear it.” Jude cleared her throat and thrust out her chin. “But I promise you will have Selena Koren by dawn. I swear—”
Bacchus blasted her with three bolts of ice to the midsection and Jude crumpled to the ground.
“Zak’reth army,” Bacchus said and snorted like a wild boar. “That is no such possibility. The men lie to you to cover their failure and you repeat it to cover yours. It does not matter. The Aluren comes. I feel her. Take the remaining Bazira and get her. Succeed, Jude Gracus,” he told her as she crawled to her feet.
Accora watched Jude swallow a lump of fear. “Yes, my lord. And what of the dragonman?”
Sebastian bolted upright and Accora felt a surprising stab of fear pierce her old heart.
“He will swim,” Bacchus said, and though the words sounded harmless, Accora knew what he meant.
Darkpool. Gods, no.
“Go,” Baccus told Jude. “Eradicate her allies and bring her to me. I will wait here…and do my part.”
“Yes, my lord,” Jude said. She set three of the Bazira
to guard Accora and Sebastian and then scurried out of the chamber through the door that led to the beach on the northwestern quadrant of Isle Calinda.
“The Shadow face,” Bacchus said to Accora, “despite your wasted blasphemy, is not so weak. Cold,” he said. “The Aluren bitch is always cold…”
Bacchus raised his arms and beseeched the Shadow face of the god in a voice that rivaled the thunder of the storm itself.
Immediately, Accora’s breath began to plume before her and she shivered as the air inside the temple turned frigid. A circle of ice formed around Bacchus’s feet and spread outward: a puddle of ice, then a small pond, wider and further until the floor was laid with a sheen of it. Ori shivered and huddled nearer to Accora. The old woman paid her no mind, but watched as the ice formed, climbing up the walls, to the dirt-packed ceiling, forming icicles, like jagged teeth, until the entirety of the room was sheathed in it. Accora knew the entire temple looked as this little chamber now did. The wood creaked and groaned with the weight of it and Accora saw the Bazira men stare fearfully to the ceiling, even as they were awed by Bacchus’s power. Everyone shivered as the cold spared no one its icy bite, but for Bacchus himself who stood, waiting.
“That’s cheating.” Sebastian said through gritted teeth. “But she’ll beat you anyway. She’ll burn up your fucking icehouse and you in it.”
“Watch him,” Bacchus told the three Bazira men, and strode across the chamber, his booted feet cracking the thin layer of ice his magic had wrought. Accora fought the terror that welled up to her throat, choking her with bitter bile.
He took her by the hair and lifted her from the floor. She screamed and gripped his huge hand in both of hers as he dragged her across the icy floor.
Not again! No, not again!
But he took her past the stone slab with its bloodstains of coppery maroon. She met Sebastian’s eye as she was dragged from the room. She expected a victorious grin or triumphant smirk, but the assassin only shook his head in silent commiseration.
The temple’s upper chamber struggled under the ice. Already unsound, the bones and broken planking it was made from creaked under the added weight. The darkpool took up nearly half of the small chamber. Beside it, a figure lay huddled, shuddering. One wing was folded tight against his body.
He will swim, Bacchus had said.
As the priest dumped Accora in the crescent-shaped spill of light—muted and gray from the storm cover—her gaze was riveted to the fetid surface of the darkpool. The waters boiled with stronger fury. The wasted arms of merkind—Accora guessed perhaps three dwelt within—pulled at Ilior and she realized he had hauled himself out and they wanted him back in. His skin was rent with scratches and bites, but he managed to crawl further from the lip of the darkpool, and then curled on the ground again. His side moved up and down with his wheezing breath, and he twitched spasmodically.
“The horror on your face is a mask, mother,” Bacchus told Accora. “You did that.”
“I didn’t…”Accora began and then snapped her mouth shut. She remembered all too well the price of defiance. What Bacchus believed to be the truth, was the truth…or else there was pain.
Pain is his truth.
“He is the second,” Bacchus said. “I caught another dragonman, just three days ago. The darkpool does beautiful things to humans. Brings their darkness forward, where it belongs. To the merkind, it destroys their minds. Useful weapons to me. But to dragonkind…One little drop. One little sip is all it takes.”
“What? No…” Accora thought back to the kafira ritual on Saliz. “I gave them nothing. One sip…”
“Is all it takes.” Bacchus looked to where Ilior huddled, the Vai’Ensai was oblivious to them both. “I hasten his death by making him swim, but you killed him, mother. The Aluren will not be pleased.” Bacchus’s shadow fell over her. “I seem to recall you had great voice five years ago. Do you have it still?”
Accora pushed herself to sitting and smoothed her ragged robes over her knees as if they were in a rich man’s parlor, instead of a temple built of bones where a Vai’Ensai fought for his life not ten spans away.
“Bacchus,” she said. “Do you not also remember the years before? When I cared for you as if you were my own son?” The words were sour and shamed her to utter them.
The offspring of fear and desperation. But I must live to see Selena end him. I must.
“I remember,” he said. “A mother with poisoned teats who would have led me to doubt the Shadow face had you not been so transparent. You deserved the punishment you received. You deserve it now.”
He closed his hands into fists.
“You will mourn me,” Accora said with trembling lips.
“I mourn no one.”
She closed her eyes.
I will not beg. I will not, she promised herself. The first daggers of ice invaded her body and she realized—from some distant place she retreated in her mind—that she couldn’t break her promise if she wanted to.
She couldn’t beg; she only had voice enough to scream.
Bacchus
Zak’reth marched behind her. One hundred men in thick armor and heavy boots should have made enough noise to alert the entire island to their presence. But they made no sound. The steady susurration of rain falling over leaf and soil, and the occasional drum of thunder above them, were the only sounds. The storm had abated, but not ended. Selena could feel it gathering again, ready to mount another siege. She tightened her grip on her borrowed sword and glanced over her shoulder. One hundred pairs of yellow eyes flickered back.
A woman’s scream broke the silence. A scream so full of pain, Selena felt an answering ache in her own chest.
“Ori.”
That meant the Black Storm had followed them to Isle Calinda, or the Bazira had captured them on Isle Saliz. Either way, everyone on board was now Bacchus’s.
“Double-time,” she called over her shoulder, and began to jog. Her strange, silent army jogged after her.
Ori’s screams accompanied them for a little less than an hour, guiding Selena through the forest. When they ceased, Selena was relieved and frightened both, for the silence likely meant Ori’s death. She marched on, now without direction though she could hear the crash of surf against shore that meant they had traversed the entire island.
Selena called a halt at a small rise in the woods. She gestured for her army to wait while she scaled it. She gestured for her army to wait while she scaled the rise. From the vantage, she could see a stretch of black sea laced in white-caps hugging the western shore. Three Bazira ships at anchor—black-winged shadows— bobbed on the water. A half a league to the west, Bacchus’s temple: a twisted, thorny-looking tangle atop its own small rise. It seemed too small; a one-room shack and not fit to house the Bazira priest and his retinue for so long. She guessed there was more to his dwelling than she could see in the storm-swept night—an enormous underground stronghold perhaps filled with Bazira.
No, impossible. The island is too small, she thought and hoped that she and her Zak’reth had already faced the bulk of Bacchus’s protection.
She started back down the rise but was brought to her knees. An unseen hand, cold as the deepest sea and just as heavy, pressed down on her. The air tightened and chilled, burning her lungs and she hugged herself, as if she could keep from shattering to pieces. The clouds released the moon and she watched as a sheen of ice spread outward from the little temple on the hill— like a flood of molten silver—and raced outward in all directions. Under the soft sounds of the squall that was building toward a second siege came the cracking snaps of trees as the cold swept over them.
She planted her borrowed sword into the ground and pushed herself to her feet. The thin sheen of frost crunched under her feet as she started down the rise, hunched over like an old woman. She returned to her army.
They marched, slower now, following Selena’s halting step, and arrived at the foot of the small hill upon which Bacchus’s temple sat. Its walls were remna
nts of the village that her wave had destroyed ten years before, and the Zak’reth ships that had been her intended target. Plain, simple wood beams were haphazardly tacked to lengths of planking that still bore flakes of the red and gold paint the Zak’reth favored. Pieces of a ship’s deck made up the roof, and two masts formed a pinnacle at the top.
The bones unnerved her the most. She had thought the bodies of her victims must have long ago found rest at the bottom of the sea, or in the bellies of sea creatures, but skulls adorned the jutting spars on the temple roof and piles of jagged femurs and ribs lay strewn about the grounds, now rimed in ice. Selena stopped, the black sockets of the dead staring down at her, accusing. But the bones at her feet—a skeleton with a dolphin’s tail and a human’s skull—told her the truth. The Calindari and the Zak’reth who perished with them were long gone.
There are merkind here. Bacchus’s dead, not mine.
She remembered Accora’s words; that darkpools formed in places where great death and grief had been wrought.
I did this ten years ago. These are my dead.
She glanced behind her, to try to gauge if the sight of the remnants of that mighty Zak’reth armada stirred emotion in her Zak’reth. But they were silent. Waiting. Their yellow eyes flickered in the dark and she found them strangely comforting.
Another scream tore the night. Accora’s scream, ragged with pain, emanated from inside temple and then tapered off in something like a sob. Selena understood what Bacchus was doing, calling her to him, using the suffering of others as his clarion. Coward. She whispered the sacred words to call healing to her body.
The healing energy glowed inside her. The cold of Bacchus’s magic still wrapped her in its icy grip, but she could move and think and fight. She turned to her Zak’reth, ready to order them to siege the temple when the stomping thunder of booted steps sounded from the western side of the island, near the shore. She watched as a line of Bazira marched out of the ground from a tunnel she could not see, and began to curve around the temple hill toward her. She guessed there were near fifty of them, armed with swords and ice.
