Cobweb Bride (32 page)

There were several gasps behind her.

They could all see
him
now.

She was holding Death’s hand, and thus, they could see him.

“Your Cobweb Bride is before you,” said the Infanta, Claere Liguon. “Surely, she is present—if not myself, than one of the others.”

“Come! Approach! You are the first to have come through my Gate and into my Hall, and I will see you,” Death said, and this time his voice was audible to all, to match his physical aspect. With a flick of the wrist, he released Percy from her hold of him.

And still they could see him.

“Come!”

The voice broke the somnolence of the hall with a jolt of dark fire. It seemed to run along their nerve endings and cut them with a dull ache that was at the same time infinitely sharp, as though an ice blade had scraped along their skin and left behind a razor burn of winter. . . .

The girls, compelled in every manner possible, moved forward, some holding each other, and others stepping forth alone.

They walked through the thick curtains of cobweb silk, and they stepped up to the dais of Death’s throne.

“I am here
 . . .” each one whispered, “take me.”

.
 . . here. . . . here . . . me . . . take me . . . I . . . here . . . am . . . me . . . take me . . . I am . . . here . . .

Their voices blended in the strangest dream sequence.

. . . take . . . me . . . here . . . here . . . here . . . I . . . I . . . I . . . am . . . am . . . am . . .

Percy watched and listened in amazement. She was not speaking, she felt no need to answer, but everyone else in the hall was responding, mesmerized and softened in a strange apathy of receptiveness.

Even the men had stepped forward. Beltain and Vlau were glassy-eyed, as they stood before Death, whispering silken words. . . .

The Infanta—a statue of dun stone, a column, a pillar of salt—stood before Death, her eyes closed, her hands opened at her sides, softly reaching out, offering herself. The personal death-shadow at her side appeared ready to spring, poised just on the brink of an ultimate resolution.

Dissolution of will. . . .

And Death was watching them all, observing closely, attending to each word of intimacy, each unique offering of the self.

It seemed to Percy that an eternity had passed. She was a silent, fully-conscious witness to a nightmare dreamscape where there were only suspended beings and snaking
words, words, words
, coming forth to slither into ragged smoke and shadows.

She wanted to cry out their names, to reach out and start shaking each and every one present. But what held her back was a sense of obligation, of something still unresolved.

Because it occurred to her that in this hollow, colorless, shadowed manner, Death was making his choice.

And then the suspended shadow-state came to an ending, as suddenly as it has begun. Death’s voice broke the creeping, overflowing, humming non-silence.

“No. . . .
She
is not here!”

Everyone came awake, some blinking, others shuddering.

The black knight glanced around him, and Vlau Fiomarre immediately approached the Infanta, reaching out with one hand in reflex to support her upright.

“Mourn
 . . .” Death said. “None of you are the one I seek. There is no Cobweb Bride in my Hall. Not even
you
—” and he pointed to Claere, the dead maiden among them—“nor
you
—” and he pointed to the very sick Emilie, who truly appeared to be near the brink, between life and death—“nor
you
—” and he pointed to Percy.

They stood in stunned dullness before this pronouncement.

Heartbeats passed.

Death settled deeper on his throne. And then, like smoke dispersing, he resumed his previous state of non-being. Before their eyes, he stilled, froze, congealed, petrified, solidified, slowing down in every physical way like a wound-down clock, and—if such a thing were possible—becoming even more motionless.

And he started to
fade
.

“Wait! Wait, O
lord of nothing!
” the Infanta cried out. “Do not leave us to this unresolved existence! As the daughter of an Emperor, I invoke the ancient privilege of kings! Tell us what we must do to serve you!
Anything!
Only do not abandon us to this impossible fate! I am beyond fate already, I am yours, yes! But these poor people, they will starve and linger in eternal agony! Please, I beg you, take me unto you, for their sake!”

“You offer me nothing.
 . . . I require my Cobweb Bride . . .”
Death’s voice sounded, from a tunnel of psychic distance.

It was then that the hall of white cobwebs and grey smoke and ivory bone seemed to narrow around them with an overbearing sense of oppression, a crushing weight of stones settling on their chests.

The grave was settling, shriveling
inward
upon its bones, and the entire illusory world contained within its scope was contracting. . . .

Dissolution of will.
 . . .

Percy saw the terrified confusion, the utter despair on the faces she had grown to know so well these past few days.

And Percy rushed forward and reached for the fading hand of ivory with its long polished claws. She felt Death’s touch once more, the shock of nothingness and the blackout of all her senses.

This time, she held on, and she
faded
together with him, passing gently into the
other place
that was even deeper than his grey hall, more remote than the deepest grave.

She entered
serenity
.

P
ercy held Death tightly, clutching his still hand, the atrophied fingers worthy of a skeleton, and yet covered with supple, ethereal skin.

Her eyes were open wide, pupils dilated to the intimate grey pallor that was now the whole world, containing her like a mother’s womb. And she either stood or floated, dizzy with vertigo caused by the lack of any physical frame of reference.

Except for
him
.

Death was before her, at her side, and he was no longer clad in black garments of human mourning.

Instead, he was pure white. His doublet, hose, lace, his hair, skin, all was incandescent pallor of sparkling sun upon snow, shining with a radiance that yet did not blind.

And this time—here, now, in this impossible, unreal
interior
of the mind—she could at last see his face.

Death was an elegant young man, and his features were exquisite. His eyes were smoky and glorious, and he smiled at her with gently curving lips worthy of a god of love.

“Oh! But you are neither ancient nor withered!” Percy could not hold back. “You are as beautiful as—as—”

He looked at her with a soft expression of bittersweet profundity.

And she recognized at last the nature of his sorrow and his secret.

Death was a Bridegroom.

He was dressed in splendid white, for his Wedding Feast.

But there was no Bride.

“Yes,” he spoke, perceiving her ultimate moment of comprehension. “Now that you have followed me here,
inside
, you can see why I wear dark mourning in my Hall, while here I am revealed in my true
eternal aspect
that cannot change, not even to match the temporal circumstances of my grief.”

“Your grief? But why?” Percy asked. “What has happened to you? And to
her?
Where is she, this Cobweb Bride?
Who
is she?”

“All these things you ask, I do not know, and I cannot remember.”

“But—” Percy’s facial features were fluid in confusion. “How is that possible?”

Death, the exquisite young man, sighed. “If I knew, I would have no need to ask the
world itself
to help me. For that is what I have done.”

“What you have done is stopped life itself! Don’t you know that the world cries out for you, plunged into unrelieved agony? While you were never properly welcomed, you were a dependable relief for us all, in the end, at the proper time for each one of us
 . . .” whispered Percy. “If you arrived too soon, we cursed you. Indeed, we dreamed that you would not arrive at all, not ever. . . . But now that our fool dream has come to pass, we admit our desperate need of you!”

“You need me
 . . .” he echoed.

“
Yes!
But you have abandoned us, and we don’t know what to do with ourselves after we are
broken
.”

Death sighed, and it seemed that the radiance around him dimmed somewhat, in sympathetic sorrow.

“Since the dawn of existence, you mortals have feared dying, feared the unknown and the
pain
of it, and yet, pain is a part of
life
, not death. And I—I am the first moment
after
pain ceases,” he pronounced. “It is life that fights and struggles and rages; life, that tears at you in its last agonizing throes to hold on, even if but for one futile instant longer. . . . Whereas I, I come softly when it is all done. Pain and death are an ordered sequence, not a parallel pair. So easy to confuse the correlations, not realizing that one does not bring the other.”

“But we are mortal idiots, and we only care about pain, not causality,” retorted Percy, rather proud of having used the word “causality” in a formal conversation outside of a book (specifically, it had been within a tattered volume of sacred hymns, indeed, a monk’s reading primer, which together with two other books, she had secretly borrowed from her mother’s small trunk of personal treasures—why in Heaven’s name was she now thinking of that book? For that matter, why was she talking so much? She never talked like that in the real world, only thought such things in her mind
 . . . all these wild and twisted and strange and arcane things she would never verbalize).

Death softly smiled, as though he knew the exact course of her thoughts—which, surely he did. “Is your mortal pain not a good thing, then?” he asked her. “For it means you are alive.”

“Oh, but you misunderstand us! Yes, we welcome the pain that comes with living, but we fully expect it to end at some point—and to vary in intensity. And, did I mention, to
end?
”

“Then know this, mortal maiden—I too know pain without end, as a result of what has come to pass. I feel pain for not being able to continue doing what I do, what must be done.
 . . . For I am not merely an immortal aspect of being, I am its function. And as such, I suffer far worse, for being unable to perform my part, than the world can imagine.”

“Then how do we find this Cobweb Bride for you? If she is indeed what you require—”

“Again, I do not know—”

“But, if you know nothing, how will you know her? Have you ever seen her before? Do you know what she looks like?”

“I will
know
her.”

“How?” Percy asked again, getting oddly frustrated.

“I will . . . recognize in her a part of myself.”

“Do you mean a physical resemblance? Or, is it a spiritual affinity? Maybe a beauty spot? Eye color? The shape of her teeth? Freckles? The amount of dusty cobwebs in her hair? Because really, since she is a
Cobweb
Bride—”

“Stop
 . . .”
whispered Death.

And then a strange light came to his wondrous smoke-colored eyes. He turned away, looking into the uniform greyness around them, and looking somehow
beyond. . . .
And he uttered, as though remembering, in an ancient language that Percy had never heard but somehow understood:

“
She
is covered in white . . . white cobwebs of a thousand snow spiders . . . she lies in the darkness. . . . Her skin—it is cold as snow. . . . Her eyes, frozen in their sockets. . . . Her gaze, it
lives
. It is fiercely
alive.
 . . .”

Percy heard a distant wind rising, and it lifted each hair along her skin.
 . . .

“What do you see, mortal maiden?” Death asked, his beautiful face still turned away. “What do you see when I speak these words? Tell me what you see, for I am
so close now
, so close to knowing!”

Percy shivered. “I am sorry, but, if you insist, I only see a whole lot of grey nothing
 . . . and now, to be honest, I see the back of your head.”

Indeed, looking at his profile, turned more than halfway from her, she pronounced this nonsense—because she was abysmally exhausted—and because fear had returned, tugging at her, and the only way she knew how to counteract fear was to either be ridiculous, or somewhat rude. “What I see
 . . . it is all rather pleasing, indeed, no unsightly skull visible, and I am happy to inform you that you do not have a bald spot, unlike my Pa, who actually has a small one on the very top—”