Painted devils, p.5
Painted Devils, page 5
“Vanja was the reason I survived a major case in Minkja, which we won only because of her,” Emeric says firmly, ducking under a gnarled branch. “If you think I’m exaggerating, Minkja has a statue of her now. One a Low God put there.”
Oh, the bastard, I think my heart’s going to explode. I seriously might tell Kirkling and Helga we’ll catch up in an hour and haul him off into the bushes.
“Always figured you were holding out on us,” Helga says a bit cryptically. Before I have a chance to ask what that’s supposed to mean, we break through the tree cover and into sunlight.
Boderad’s Gorge yawns before us. The swift-moving Ilsza River has cut seemingly down to the bone of the Haarzlands, leaving stark walls of spotted slate and hornfels striped fancy as a parlor, heaps of greenery collecting on ledges the way dust gathers on mantels. The last traces of morning mist cling to the water some sixty feet below, the divide spanned by an old sturdy rope bridge rising from our side to a higher cliff across the way. Another sixty feet to our right, the head of a waterfall nearly meets our eye level, spilling a pale curtain into the distant churning pool that feeds the river. A second bridge arches far below us, little more than a thread of ancient stone strung much closer to the pool’s surface.
Towering beyond the opposite end of the rope bridge is Broken Peak itself. Unlike the other jagged spurs of milky feldspar or hawthorn-dulled hilltops, this is a great block of mostly barren granite with a summit that looks to have been sheared off like the tip of a broken tooth.
And unlike the timid fringes of buttercup and pale thimbleweed along the trail behind us, violent unbroken red blooms from every crevice at the peak’s base, turning it into a massive bleeding gum.
“Promising,” Emeric says mildly.
Helga steps off the trail, uncorking a small bottle of something sharp-smelling, and sprinkles a few drops over a small granite altar I hadn’t noticed. I see little bundles of dried wildflowers, tallow stains, even what looks like the remains of a straw doll. “Thank you for the safe passage,” she says to the air. Then she calls back to us, “Knock on the post as you pass.”
That’s about when I realize we’re going over the rope bridge. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before. And it’s not that heights bother me—at least, not the way they bothered Dame von Falbirg, who couldn’t look down a staircase in Castle Falbirg without getting the shakes.
But there’s a significant difference between a flight of stairs and a sixty-foot plunge.
Helga taps her knuckles to a rune-spangled bridge post and steps onto the planks. I take a deep breath, then rap the post and follow. The hempen guide ropes look ancient and weathered, but they barely give a creak at our weight, abuzz with old power.
“The story goes that, centuries ago, a giant named Boderad wanted to marry Princess Brunne from one of the old kingdoms, and her father was too afraid of the giants to refuse,” Helga explains as she leads us up the rope bridge. I don’t know if she’s talking just to keep our minds off the drop. “Princess Brunne … did not appreciate it. She tricked Boderad into teaching her how to ride one of his horses—”
“Why is it always horses?” Emeric mutters behind me.
Helga clears her throat. “And then, the night before the wedding, when everyone was drunk, Brunne stole the horse and ran.”
“No, actually, now I’m curious: What’s the deal with horses?” I ask.
Helga makes an exasperated noise. “I don’t know! It was a special giant horse or something! The point is, Boderad chased her, but when they got to this mountain”—she flaps a hand at Broken Peak—“Princess Brunne decided to jump it instead of going around. The force of the leap split the hills and made the gorge, and her horse’s hoof clipped the mountaintop, snapping it off. Boderad couldn’t stop in time and fell into the chasm, and his dying rage turned him into a hellhound. Brunne became Huntress of the Haarzlands, and Boderad still guards the basin where Brunne’s bridal crown fell.” Helga points to the tumultuous pool at the waterfall’s base. “We call it the Kronenkessel.”
There’s a scoff from Kirkling.
Helga stops in her tracks, and since the rope bridge isn’t very wide and I don’t feel like rolling the dice, I stop, and so do Emeric and Kirkling.
“I get,” Helga says slowly, “that to people who prefer their world neatly measured and registered and codified, this all sounds like superstitious peasant nonsense. But what you need to get is this.”
Helga fishes a rye roll out of the lunch Udo packed for us, then pitches it with considerable effort toward the waterfall. I can barely see it by the time it hits the foaming water of the Kronenkessel.
I have no trouble whatsoever seeing the enormous gaping jaws that surge up from the froth a heartbeat later. They close with a thunderclap we hear even through the roar of the waterfall, and I get a fleeting glimpse of algae-stained gray fur over a monstrous muzzle before the creature sinks below the surface once more.
“Just because it isn’t in your records,” Helga continues, glowering at Kirkling, “doesn’t mean it won’t bite you in the ass. And by the way, that was your lunch roll.”
Neither Emeric nor I have to say a word; our hands latch together and stay that way until we’re off the bridge.
Helga points out other details as we pass: a small rune-bedecked cabin to shelter anyone caught out too close to sundown, a distant ring of boulders called the Witches’ Dance, toadstools marking an enormous beech claimed by the Mossfolk. The flowers grow larger and redder the closer we get to the base of Broken Peak, and I see they’re not even the kinds that naturally grow crimson. Some, like vetch and hollowroot, aren’t too far off from their usual magenta, but stems of toothwort and saxifrage, meant to be shell pink and green gold, are stabbing from the earth in the same vivid red as Emeric’s handprint.
It’s not long before we reach a path of worn, crooked stones that has long outgrown its time as a staircase and since lapsed into a noncommittal slope. It leads up to a crude archway hewn into a granite wall looming ahead. Red-blooming vines wreath the ingress.
“Is that Felsengruft?” I ask.
Helga nods. This was her suggestion; the Scarlet Maiden had said, after all, that she’d slept below Broken Peak. Felsengruft is an old shrine and a barrow cut out of the peak’s cavern system—exactly where a god might nap for a few centuries. “Just remember, you go up the stairs for the shrine’s rite hall, down for the crypts. I’d try the rite hall first, it’s where they did any ceremonial business.”
“You’re not going with them?” Kirkling asks as we reach the entrance.
“Neither of us should,” says Helga. “It’s an old structure. If anything happens in there, someone needs to be ready to help here and the other to go get aid from Hagendorn. Besides, I hate caves.”
Kirkling scowls, but she can’t argue with that. “As long as Schmidt isn’t going to be a distraction, Aspirant Conrad.”
Saints and martyrs, I should have pushed her off the rope bridge. “I don’t know,” I simper, “nothing screams romance like rolling around on a sarcophagus. Is it weird if the skulls watch?”
“And we’re going.” Emeric loops his arm through mine and leads us under the vine-choked arch.
I ask loudly over my shoulder, “Do you think all the desiccated corpses might give it a certain, oh, ambience?”
“Please stop antagonizing her,” Emeric says under his breath as the daylight fades.
“Maybe when she stops being such a—”
“Oh, and, children?” Helga calls after us (despite being, at most, four years Emeric’s senior), “Don’t forget, with all that stone, sound carries.”
“—dedicated … servant of … the people,” I finish through my gritted teeth.
Emeric lights his prefect coin, then reaches for the well-worn lantern I borrowed from Jakob and Udo. “Here.” He taps a pane, and the candle inside ignites.
Ordinarily, there are two ways for the average person to work magic in the Blessed Empire. One is as a warlock, bound to a spirit’s immense power but usually for a terrible price. The other is the most human way of gaining power: eating it. Low Gods, spirits, they all shed bones, fur, scales, and so on. It can be burned down to what we call witch-ash and eaten by the pinch for its magic.
This is the second time I’ve seen Emeric work magic without it, though. Prefects have something like a warlock’s bond with the Low Gods at large, but … I blink up at him. “I thought you wouldn’t get new tricks until after you’re fully ordained.”
“That’s what they told me. It turns out the second initiation’s more incremental.” He gestures to his upper back, where the mark binding him to the Low Gods’ power is. “They add to the mark with every stage I pass, so mine’s almost done.”
Murals begin to unfold over the uneven stone walls the farther we go, each painted in faded chalky pigment. Lantern and coin light spill over Brunne, riding into the night. Another seems to depict a girl before a crowd in a castle, a story I don’t know.
“Does that mean you don’t need witch-ash anymore?” I ask, partially to take my mind off the eerie stillness of the passageway.
“Not unless it’s been a very taxing day.” He catches my muffled sigh. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, it’s fine.”
“I don’t believe you,” he says primly.
“It makes you smell like juniper,” I mumble, sheepish. “It was nice.”
“Oh.” An equally sheepish grin creeps across his face. “I’ll see what I can do.”
I dart ahead like a flighty colt. I’m still not used to being around him like this again, dancing around each other. “Careful, wouldn’t want the good proctor to think I’m distracting you.”
“As long as I do my job, it shouldn’t matter.” He lingers at another mural. This one looks like the Witches’ Dance henge. Then he shakes his head. “Our records on the Haarzlands are … woefully inadequate. I don’t think there’s been a prefect in these parts for forty years.”
“Ominous.”
“Exciting.” Emeric continues down the corridor. “Dormant gods, ancient hellhounds, unprecedented loopholes in prefectorial-godly regulations…”
“I don’t feel like those belong on the same scale of exciting,” I note.
“Agree to disagree.”
“So when we find the Scarlet Maiden, we want to know…” I start ticking off fingers. “Why she was able to bypass the accords.”
“Correct.”
“What this whole sacred-feast thing entails.”
“Yes.”
“Why she wants you to be the servant.”
“Right.”
“And maybe her thoughts on the inherent seductive allure of a crypt.” We reach a wider chamber, and I feign a swoon against one of its blocky columns.
“I would rather not,” Emeric says, scanning the newest crop of murals. Rusted sconces are bolted to the stone, torch stems long since disintegrated. Matched brackets of stairs descend out of sight on either side of the chamber, and ahead, broad shallow steps rise.
“Helga did say to try the rite hall first. We could fool around in there.” I jab a thumb at the central stair leading up, sarcastic. “Then again, we already got frisky on an altar in Minkja; maybe you want to change it up with the coffins.”
There’s a pause.
“I need to borrow this.” Emeric abruptly plucks the lantern from my hand. I assume he’s spotted something, but he just sets it on the floor.
Then he slides one hand around the nape of my neck, braces me against the column, and proceeds to kiss me like both our lives depend on it.
Oh.
I can’t hold in a startled little gasp, but I catch up fast enough, marveling in the sweet heady rush, leaning into him with a kind of hunger I’ve tried and failed to forget these past few months. In the end, all I forgot was the way every little thing—every fingertip pressing into my hip, every pulse in his jaw beneath my palm, every feverish collision of lips, teeth, tongue—strikes new lightning down my every last bone.
Then Emeric draws back, running a shaking thumb over my bottom lip. “Will you please,” he says, hoarsely enough to puncture the smugness in his voice, “stop distracting me.”
“Absolutely not,” I say with zero hesitation, pulling him to me again. A wicked smile flashes over his face before he veers off, pressing a kiss below my ear, then continuing down my throat. I shiver, making a horrendously undignified noise, and let my head tilt back.
Then, for the second time today, I go cold from head to toe.
“E-Emeric.”
His eyes flash with concern as he immediately lets me go. “Sorry—are you—was that too much?”
“No—not you—” I catch his sleeve and point to the ceiling.
Another mural unfurls above us, this one unfaded by time.
A woman in a crimson cloak presides over three great circles; each circle holds an identical view of the waterfall and the unmistakable frothy, stone-fanged Kronenkessel. A golden crown lurks in the depths.
In the first circle, a crude human figure stands on a low stone bridge over the pool, a red handprint plain on their chest. In the second, the marked person leaps into the raging white water. And in the final image, the figure is gone. All that remain are the bridge and the pool, with one stark, terrible difference:
The waters of the Kronenkessel have turned a dark and bloody red.
“I don’t think,” I say slowly, “that it’s dye.”
CHAPTER FOUR
CLAIMS
“Hmm,” Helga hums, swinging her own lantern to study a mosaic in Felsengruft’s rite hall. “Yeah, this definitely looks like human sacrifice.”
I have one rule for dealing with a bad situation. You may be familiar with it, and with how anytime I break it, things have a nasty tendency to go sideways. This rule, for the uninitiated, is: Don’t panic.
Helga is not currently helping with that rule.
For the record, neither is Kirkling, lurking near the hall’s entrance like a disgruntled gargoyle. Unfortunately, when Emeric and I went to get Helga to confirm our suspicions, the proctor insisted on seeing the antechamber’s murals for herself, then followed us up into the rite hall.
“It’s against the accords,” Kirkling snaps, busily scratching in her notebook yet again.
“We’ve been over this,” Helga drawls back. Then she pivots in place, looking over to me. “Right? I didn’t hallucinate this morning, when I specifically told her that Haarzlands gods probably predate whatever accords she’s going on about?”
“Can we please focus?” I can’t help squeezing Emeric’s hand tighter. He returns it but stays silent as his eyes rove the walls. He hasn’t said much since I spotted the sacrifice mural; I wish he would, even if it’s just to blame me for bringing him into a mess that’s getting worse by the second.
“You said the Scarlet Maiden called it a midsummer feast.” Helga points to a niche, her words echoing off the walls. The rite hall is sparer than I expected and not much bigger than Hagendorn’s new stave chapel, but every rustle feels louder than a stampede as it bangs around the vaulted ceilings and the simple hewn-rock benches. Even the main altar is a massive unornamented slab of granite, and the murals are either thin flaking paint like those in the antechamber, or the embedded tiles of mosaics. The niche Helga’s highlighting is crowned with an inlaid sun of vivid yellow porcelain chips. “That sun should mark midsummer. And here’s the ritual again.”
Sure enough, the same three images from the antechamber’s ceiling—figure stands on bridge, figure leaps into water, water turns into either a bloodbath or a very ambitious punch bowl—are repeated along the niche. This time, the jaws of the hellhound are also clearly visible.
“So was anyone going to tell me about the yearly sacrifice to the local hellhound, or was I just supposed to sort that one out on my own?” I ask, my voice rising to a squeak despite my best efforts.
“I am telling you, human sacrifice is forbidden—” Kirkling starts at the same time Helga says, “This whole ‘feast’ business is news to—Do you mind?”
Kirkling ignores her, scowling into her notes. “No Low God has the power to demand a human sacrifice. Especially not of a prefect.”
“Incredible,” Helga breathes. “Like bouncing a penny off a boulder. Not a single thing gets through.” It’s her turn to ignore Kirkling’s scowl as she turns to Emeric and me. “Anyway, we don’t know if it’s a sacrifice to the hellhound or to the Scarlet Maiden, or if it’s even necessary since it hasn’t happened since the Scarlet Maiden’s time…”
“If the Scarlet Maiden is even a real Low God,” Kirkling interjects, detonating another round of squabbling with Helga.
I tune them out as I sneak another look at Emeric. His gaze is fixed on the final image in the niche: the hellhound’s fangs in a pool of terminal red.
If the Scarlet Maiden is really some elaborate fraud, he’ll have to bring me to trial before the Godly Courts himself. But if she is a true Low God …
No. I’ve defied Low Gods before; I’ll do it again. I’ll find us a way out.
There has to be a way out.
The argument between Helga and Kirkling is getting louder and louder, crashing off the granite walls as doubt starts welling up, fear deepening in its wake. All I can think is, I did this, I did this, I did this.
“Hey.” The single word pops out of me. It doesn’t so much as register with Helga and Kirkling (all I can hear is “How many times do I have to tell you this, old woman?”), but another, louder “HEY” stops them in their tracks.
But I’m not talking to them.
“Scarlet Maiden,” I half bellow as Emeric stares at me, “it’s, uh, your prophet! Can you come out here for a minute?”
Helga plasters a hand over her face. “Does no one know how these things work?”
“What are you doing?” It’s not accusation but intrigue in Emeric’s voice.
“We came here for answers,” I say under my breath, setting my lantern down by a pew, “so I’m getting them.” Then I raise my voice again: “SCARLET MAIDEN! CAN YOU GIVE US YOUR LOCATION? I JUST WANT TO TALK!”
