Dark Lord's Wedding (43 page)

“You’re right.” The Talon beamed at her. Blood had stained his teeth pink. “He’s light and darkness.”

“Half the prisoners, I will kill for blood.” Hiresha lifted both hands, with the gold razor in her skinless hand. With her nerves numbed, she couldn’t feel the grip. It would’ve slipped out had she not Attracted the gold to her bones. “Half will sacrifice their forgiveness and live. Both will satisfy your god.”

“No,” the Talon said, “no, no, the gods care only for life force. It pools in the heart in times of fear.”

“And otherwise in the brain, where the correct state of mind permits alternate offerings,” Hiresha said. “The teachings of your predecessors in less bloody ages recorded sacrificing parts of the soul, and not through blood.”

“Now the god needs more,” he said.

“I choose to believe a person’s capacity to forgive can be sacrificed. That piece of the soul can be given and the rest of the person can yet live.”

“No,” the Talon said, “you must cut out the sacred cores.”

“You’ve gifted me these prisoners to sacrifice. I will do so in my own way.” She would save half of them. Elbe and the other guests would hardly thank Hiresha for it, yet any other path may well make Hiresha irredeemable.

The prisoner slid her feet back and forth on the floor, trying to push away from Hiresha’s gold razor. The winged warriors held her upright. Urine splattered over her legs. Her tears ran down pockmarks. She had survived a plague only to face death again. She could’ve been as young as twenty.

“Will you forgive me?” Hiresha lifted the knife with its golden finality.

The question had to be repeated before the woman could gather herself to reply. Her face quaked and shone with tears. She strained and panted. Hiresha could well believe forgiving would take a great effort, even if one’s life depended on it.

“Yes.” Her eyes bright with tears flashed up at Hiresha. “Your hand is the god’s.”

“Will you forgive yourself for the choices that brought you here? Will you forgive your god and send to him the power of your forgiveness?”

“I will.”

Hiresha touched the woman’s brow, made a cupping motion as if her hand filled with life force, and then lofted it skyward toward the divine. Hiresha hoped the execution of the improvised rite would satisfy the Talon on some level. The results proved to be more dramatic than anticipated.

The woman projectile vomited out gold nuggets and a slurry of cornmeal. She slumped as if Hiresha had ripped out her spine. The winged warriors caught her, and she hung between them, eyes spinning.

The guests gasped. Some on the lower tables cheered.

Hiresha gazed down at her hand, the one with skin with which she had touched the woman. Her palm felt inextricably warm, as if she had held something of heat and power. Perhaps she had accomplished something greater than theatrics.

It did not feel like victory.

If the changes in the woman came only from self delusion, they were yet convincing. She started to scream. All composure in the face of death had left her, and her face cramped in a stricken look as if she had taken a wound that would never heal.

“I hate you,” she shouted at Hiresha. She beat back the winged warriors. “I hate everyone.”

The servers had to remove her forcibly from the dining hall. The next sacrifice was pushed forward.

Hiresha spared those with forgiveness strong enough to absolve their executioner. The rest, she killed. She had to choose somehow. Picking at random would insult all involved, not least of all the god. She could forgive herself all too easily. The lives she sacrificed in all probability would’ve amounted to little.

The kings had best admire the sharpness of her blade. The knife parted skin and cut bone. Each slice came too easily, and a mirroring pain slashed across Hiresha: deep, absolute, and irrevocable. She could not slow or show weakness, and to do so she had to scrape out a part of herself. Like the women who sacrificed their forgiveness, Hiresha was uncertain she would ever be whole again.

A wake of tears and blood followed her; she reminded herself she was saving lives. The Talon would’ve killed them all. That man, may parasitic worms eat their way up his legs and devour his liver!

One prisoner asked for death. “To keep the sun alive.” This, Hiresha granted. Her enchanted blade parted skin and bone alike.

“I forgive you,” one woman said. The left corner of her lips crinkled into a smile. The flicker of expression was gone in the next instant, yet it meant smugness she couldn’t quite suppress. This woman hadn’t forgiven; she thought to steal back her life by outsmarting Hiresha.

Hiresha cut out the woman’s heart and willed it to float overhead still twitching and spurting. Then the knife tore open the woman’s stomach. Out came the swallowed gold. Hiresha Attracted off the bile and gore and threw the nuggets onto the pile of loathsome treasures.

The blood of the sacrificed mixed with Hiresha’s. She separated it drop by drop, unit by unit, before drawing her own back into the vein of her wrist. Some trace of those she killed must’ve still remained in the blood because it itched its way up her arm, burned in her chest, and scoured her heart.

The last woman’s flashed grin may have merely been a nervous twitch. Hiresha had to allow it might not’ve been her intention to deceive. Or if the woman hadn’t forgiven, maybe Hiresha should’ve spared her anyway. Hiresha had killed the cleverest.

Now her blood was soiled. Death flowed in her veins.

“It is not enough.” The Talon lunged to a living woman, waving his pitiful flint knife.

A wall of obsidian rose from nothing to block his path. A Feaster must’ve summoned the barrier. “The slaves were given,” Tethiel said from the ceiling. “They cannot be ungiven.”

Hiresha nodded to him in thanks. “Those remaining may now go free.”

The man Tethiel had spoken of as the king brute shook his head at her. “Half flayed or no, she’s still a woman and weak.”

Hiresha had expected disapproval. Confirmation of her fears still disappointed her. At another table, Fos sat hunched, his shoulder blades pinched together. He wouldn’t look at her. He had come so far to see her, and she’d had to greet him with carnage.

Hiresha hurled the gifts of gold up, high through the quartz apertures, into the heights of the dome. There the sparkling refuse would float until needed. If only Hiresha could toss the guests after it and give them as little thought.

Bright Palm Alyla stepped forward carrying an old shovel with a notched blade of bronze. “This is my gift to you. It’s for burying all the Innocents you will have to kill after marrying the Lord of the Feast.”

Hiresha crumpled the shovel into a mass of splinters. She warped the bronze blade around them to make a perfect sphere. “I’ve improved your gift. Now it will remind me of you, being composed on the outside and full of rubbish.”

The Bright Palm didn’t blink.

Though the kings and the other guests disliked Hiresha’s decision to kill half the prisoners, Elbe might see the good in it. She understood compromise. Her city had done as much with a pact with the Dominion.

Elbe sat at her table weeping. Her entire cheeks were slick with tears, and the glaze of underserved judgment covered her tattoo of the sapphire bee. Elbe should know that sometimes death was necessary. New queen bees killed the larvae of their slower sisters. The Purest still blamed, judged, and condemned with her grief.

Beside Elbe, the Bleeding Maiden covered her mouth in an obscene attempt to hide her giggling. The gleeful mischief in her eyes gave her away. Yes, Hiresha acknowledged, the Feaster had reason to gloat.

The Talon had alienated all the guests from Hiresha. It had only taken him one maneuver. Hiresha would need many more to win them back. She had to believe she would succeed. Otherwise, all those women had died for nothing.

Hiresha turned to her bridesmaids. “This calls for a change of plans and a change of dress.”

“
I have moments of doubt concerning our wedding. They become hours, which stretch into days. How any love-fool arranges a marriage, I can’t imagine. It is an ordeal of planning.”

“
You adore devising plans, my heart, and my daily exercise is scheming. What better reason for us to wed?”

“
I was being politic. What I mostly have doubts about is you.”

“
Then we share that in common too.”

“After I have received all the gifts,” Hiresha said, “I’ll choose which is best. Whoever gave it will gain the favor of my first dance.”

The high guests stood, leaning their ears forward for her words, squinting at the glass plates of her new dress. Only the Talon slouched over his stolen seat, beating his bloody fist against the table and weeping. His histrionics seemed genuine to Hiresha, as much as they surprised her in a man who cut out hearts daily. She could only postulate her partial refusal to sacrifice in a similar manner had driven the priest to tears. He dribbled all over, and it wasn’t even his assigned spot.

A woman with even less wholesome blood approached. The Bleeding Maiden held out a wooden pendent. Hiresha couldn’t help but note it lacked the dark richness of ebonwood or the luster of jet, and those precious woods could still hold only meager enchantments. The Feaster hadn’t brought a gift, only another insult. The pendent had the shape of a dog.

“Did you imagine,” Hiresha asked, “that I’d need kindling?”

“It’s a Bright Palm symbol,” the Bleeding Maiden said. “I thought it could protect you, just so all the nailers know you’re on their side.”

The meaning was all too obvious to Hiresha. This simpering killer saw her as a stooge for the Order of the Innocent. The Feaster guests chittered. Their eyes traced lines of false logic from the Bright Palms back to Hiresha.

The Bleeding Maiden touched her dimple. “Who could say why the Bright Palms worship a she-dog, but—”

Bright Palm Alyla interposed with the even plane of her voice. “The Wise Hound was a brave guardian, and not a bitch.”

The Bleeding Maiden pulled back the pendant. “Then it does seem less right for you.”

“The Lady of Gems,” Tethiel said, “is not of the hound but the fox.”

He swept a hand and a crimson trail of lace toward the common tables. There the fennec was chasing butterflies released in prelude to the next dinner course. To the great diversion of the guests, the fennec leaped over a sitting Bright Palm to come within a paw’s width of snapping a pair of black and white wings out of the air. The fennec landed with an explosion of chirps.

The fox shot under a table, and now guests were laughing too loudly. “Ho-ho! Faster than a hare,” one said. At least some wedding guests were enjoying themselves and not being sacrificed.

One Feaster hid her braying mouth behind a fan of multihued glass. It matched her dress, also Hiresha’s. The Feaster had crafted a crude approximation of the stained-glass gown. The impertinent woman had also worn it first. Hiresha had swept out in her newest innovation only to see it already copied.

Hiresha had met this imitating Feaster before, and she was of no great mind. She couldn’t have anticipated the gown herself.

Hiresha beckoned to the Bleeding Maiden, lurching her closer to hear. “I know you’re behind Physis’s dress mockery. If only I could say such antics were beneath you.”

“Oh no! Did you mean for your wardrobe to stay secret? Your dressmaker must not’ve meant to betray you.”

“I don’t blame Celaise, only the woman who coerced her.”

“And people shouldn’t think you’re careless,” the Bleeding Maiden said. “Your designs were found out, and you never knew. But you would’ve taken more care if it weren’t just a silly wedding.”

“Will you die before dropping your charade? You’re only half as stupid as you act, and intelligence trumps meanness.” Hiresha swept away to the Feaster in the glass gown. “To think, Physis, I once envied your beauty and your power.”

The Feaster’s smile was both sharp toothed and brittle around the edges. “Will you fall asleep halfway through this party too?”

Hiresha waved to the clutter of glass plates the Feaster wore. “Innovation doesn’t fit you. You have a list of my dresses? It will be most amusing to see you struggle with designs beyond your mental scope.”