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.