Percy was numb. Her next breath did not rise inside her, for she was suddenly choking, being stifled by an invisible hand . . . her lungs could not move in natural reflex and she was drowning.
See how easy it is, how I hold you, my Champion!
Percy did not struggle. Ebrai saw how she was suddenly sliding limp against his chest. “Percy! Are you well? What is it! What is wrong?”
And then the Goddess released her. And Percy gasped and coughed and took in a deep shuddering breath of air.
“I am—it is nothing,” she said to him. “She is toying with me. Keep going.”
Up ahead, only fifty feet, was the breach of the gates. Musket and arquebus fire volleys came loud and with it the stench of black powder. Solemnis troops were here in force, and they were holding the passage into the city.
“There is no way to get through!” Ebrai exclaimed, pulling up his horse short.
Mother! Percy thought. Mother, help me! And her briefest thought was of Niobea, followed by overwhelming golden light.
Help me, Mother of Bright Harvest, you who are Thesmos, who have come to me in dreams. . . .
And before them, out of the grey smoke and grime, hanging like a curtain before the gates, arose a golden light.
It bloomed forth in a warm radiance against the polluted sludge of snow and the fallen Trovadii corpses and the roiling mess of fallen bricks and sections of city walls and running foot soldiers. . . .
Demeter, golden Goddess of plenty and the riches of the harvest, rose before them out of the icy ground, and she was growing, and she was twenty, then a hundred feet tall.
Help me do this one last thing! Percy thought with all the force of her being. Take me to her!
“Come, dear child!” boomed the voice of Demeter the golden-tressed, as her immortal shape towered like a colossus before the gates of Letheburg. “I may not take you through shadows, but I will take you through light! Enter me and ride!”
And the next moment the figure of the goddess blended with pure light and she became a shimmering curtain, a portal into another place.
“Ride!” exclaimed Percy.
Immediately Ebrai spurred his horse and they flew forward into the curtain of golden light. . . .
. . . And they emerged on the other side.
It was a small street in Letheburg, claustrophobic, snow-covered, with narrow buildings nestled together with second story overhangs, away from the clamor of the fighting.
It was Rollins Way.
Percy opened the red door of Grial’s house and it creaked gently. And she stepped inside, while her mind was empty and numb. Ebrai Fiomarre came after her.
Grial, or Hecate’s parlor was a mess of broken furniture, pulled chintz curtains and smashed knick-knacks, all except for the sofa, upon which Persephone sat, humming to herself and examining her nails, long delicate claws of glossy ivory, reminiscent of those of her consort, Lord Hades. She was dressed in her silvery-metal chiton and her succulent skin was rich bronze and her hair the deepest pitch-black mahogany. An erotic scent of musk filled the room . . . stifling reek of barely repressed immortal desire.
In the corner, seated upon her wooden rocking chair, was Hecate.
Hecate was in her immortal form, rigid and motionless. But she was no longer fashioned of silvery-moonlight. Instead, all her surfaces had a strange matte pallor, like a rime of frost. Only her eyes remained unaffected, familiar, warm, and very, very dark, watching Percy with wisdom.
It took a second for Percy to recognize the fine layer of cobwebs starting to cover her from head to toe, and frosting her noble braided crown of hair with whiteness.
Persephone stopped humming.
“My Champion!” she said. “And my dear Ebrai. How good of you to deliver my Percy to me. I suspected you would prove loyal, from the very first instant you looked into my eyes. Although, I must say at first you struggled so hard to maintain your tedious façade of deception that I came to pity you. Such a clever ruthless boy you thought yourself to be—it made you a delicious curiosity, and yes, it kept you alive. Ah, my poor Ebrai. . . . What—did you think I did not know you and your father were sent to spy on me?”
Ebrai Fiomarre went very still. He was gripped with the charismatic slithering force of her gaze—eyes that were no longer sky-blue, but sensuous ripe earth and upturned soil, and the sweet, deep burrowing riches of its fertile darkness.
She was his Sovereign, now as much as ever, as she had been before, undeniably, when last he saw her in the splendor of the Palace of the Sun at the Sapphire Court . . . just before she gave him her last task to carry out.
“It is done,” he had told her then. And these same words he spoke again now, even though this time the words were formed in grim resignation.
She knew everything.
“You have done well, my Ebrai—despite yourself.”
Fiomarre felt cobwebs and darkness suddenly crawling through his mind, and he struggled in despair, for he knew that he could never deny her, not in the very end. . . .
He stood very still, his mind in ruthless turmoil, while Persephone stood up suddenly, ignoring Percy for the moment, and she strode up to him, and placed her nude sensuous bronzed arms around the raven-haired man’s neck. She then pushed back his chain mail and the armor gorget round his neck, and her slim fingers stroked the column of his muscled throat, right over the pulse point, and up over the Adam’s apple.
Ebrai’s eyelids flickered but he held himself steady and he somehow managed to meet the direct look of her eyes.
And then slowly his right hand moved down to his side. With a quick practiced move he took out his short secret dagger, and he plunged it directly into the chest of the dark Goddess.
He had nothing to lose.
She made a small stifled sound. A light, sweet gasp.
Or maybe it was Percy, standing nearby in numb silence. . . .
He drew back violently, and watched silvery-red immortal blood run down and stain the front of her iridescent chiton.
Persephone looked down at her chest and the wound, and then looked up at him. Her lips curved into a smile.
She reached down to touch her blood with her fingertips and brought it up to her lips, and tasted it.
“Sweet ambrosia . . .” she whispered. “Do you know that I used to cut myself and drink from my own wrists?” She put her fingertip directly into her wound, and she offered it to Ebrai. “Would you like a taste of immortality, foolish mortal? But no, you may not have my sweet blood, for you have not earned it. Far from it—now you have displeased me. Whatever shall I do with you?”
Ebrai’s lean face was a lifeless mask.
But Persephone already turned her back on him and now she gave her full attention to Percy.
“You are here just in time, my priestess and my Champion,” said the dark Goddess, standing before Percy and looking into her eyes. “But oh, you have restarted the tedious grand process of death, releasing so much of that wonderful life energy back into the cycle—so many souls set free and cast back into the universal ocean! I must say I am not pleased. Now I have to start all over again with another little Cobweb Bride—maybe a comely youth this time—”
“What have you done to Hecate?” Percy spoke in a numb wooden voice, not her own.
“My sister is merely indisposed,” Persephone cast a brief glance at Hecate in her wooden chair. “You might say I am gently divesting her of all that immortal gravitas. Soon she will be light enough that I will move her to this nice spot on the sofa upon which she can recline for all eternity.”
“You require the use of this rocking chair?”
“I require the use of this Throne to the Underworld.”
Percy stared at Hecate, covered in cobwebs and motionless, and the realization of the magnitude of it all came to her with a blow that was almost tangible.
Thoughts raced within Percy, and connections were made.
“You will sit upon this Throne and you will die, and you will dissolve and
fall Below and come into the Underworld . . .” Percy mused, and her voice was cold, remote; someone else was speaking in her stead.
“Precisely, my Champion.”
Percy bit her lips. “Ebrai and I will help you move Hecate from the chair. Will you have mercy upon us and the rest of mortal kind, if we help you now do this one thing?”
“Will I?” Persephone laughed, a soft silvery laugh, like the sound of a running spring brook over stones. “But lo! What’s this? You have given up—or so you want me to believe—and now you offer your will to me? Not much of a sport, are you, my girl? No fun at all! I’d hoped for more of a passionate struggle and existential flailing, raw mortal anguish on your part, maybe even a few choice curses aimed at the gods, especially after I had slain your true love. What, you would serve me now, and be my priestess and my Champion, while he lies in the snow?”
Sharp serrated blades and razors bit into Percy, cutting her in her mind, ripping off slices from her spirit . . . and the room turned and there was vertigo.
“Yes.”
Persephone laughed again, and Percy saw her hard, empty evil eyes.
“Ah, but you are lying to me, sweet little Percy, and doing it rather terribly. You always were such an awkward liar, and you can never lie to me. . . .”
“All right, I am lying,” Percy said. “I hate and despise you with every fiber of my being—or what’s left of it. But we will help you to relocate Hecate nevertheless. I don’t want her harmed any more than she already is.”
Ebrai nodded silently, still stunned from his own failed act of assassination, and grimly stepped forward. “What must we do?”
“Simply lift her up enough that she is not touching the wood of the chair with any portion of her body . . . not even a single hair must touch it, for it keeps her in control of the Throne. That should be enough. I myself cannot do this, for her power still rejects me and my slightest touch, even though she has grown very weak.”
Percy approached Hecate, and she put her hand upon the arm of the Goddess of the Crossroads, feeling the cobweb crystalline layer of energy covering every point of her surface. “I am so sorry, Grial,” she whispered, looking into the familiar wise eyes, liquid in the shadows. “But I must do this thing now.”
The eyes watched her with infinite understanding, without judgment.
Ebrai approached from the other side, and together Percy and he raised Hecate from her seat, gently, unfolding her stiff figure, a lovely silvery statue . . . and the moment she was no longer in contact with the rocking chair, Persephone gave a gasp of delight.
Ebrai carried Hecate and placed her still form gently on the sofa, while Persephone spun in a circle and then landed neatly in the rocking chair, so that it was immediately set in motion, creak-creak. . . .
“Well done, my priestess and my priest!” Persephone trained upon them her smiling face and her perfectly vacant, soulless eyes. “And now I only need to die one more time, for this ridiculous scheme of things to end. Never again will I endure the agony of complete dissolution and pointless sacrifice for this mortal refuse that you call your world. . . .”
Persephone sighed in contentment and closed her eyes.
Percy watched her with her own blank gaze, saw the exhalation of the last living breath from the lips of the dark Goddess, and heard her startled soft cry of immortal agony in the throes of the paradox that was her impossible death of passing Below—
“Die!” Percy said suddenly, in a voice that rang through the room, while at the same time there came the deep cathedral tolling of bells that were grand and measureless, the size of worlds . . . and the spheres rang with the rising cloak of darkness that was within Percy’s mind, pouring into her the infinity of Lord Death’s power.
The room filled with broken things began to shake, while a wind gathered. . . .
Die, you who are dead already! You are a dead goddess, for your soul has been cast asunder, and instead a death shadow haunts you, and her energy form is pallor and cobwebs.
She too is the Cobweb Bride. She is your divine aspect and she is your death shadow and she is subject to my will.
For I am Death’s Champion.
And you are an evil dead thing . . . you are nothing and you are now all mine.
With a flick of her mind, Percy struck the cobwebs that surrounded Hecate, and they shattered into a million invisible shards, motes of psychic dust. . . . She gathered them to her like glittering white ashes of crystalline force, and she shaped them into a female form, a ghostly shape of Persephone.
The Bride made of Cobwebs stood up billowing and translucent at the side of the seated dark Goddess.
So perfectly still, the Goddess’s dead face, just before its final dissolution and passing. So serene and lovely, like an unfulfilled promise of spring. . . .
And Percy took the glittering death shadow and she pushed it with all her will, and all her passion and all her despair and loss and hope, inside the corporeal body of the Goddess.
She pushed it inward, and into the brightest white light . . . and she followed after. She did not let go, not for a moment, for there was nothing for her to do here any longer, and Percy was done. . . .
The White Bridegroom stood before them, dressed for the Wedding, and he wore the smile of Hades and Beltain’s beloved eyes.
There came a glorious incandescent white flash, like staring into the face of a blinding white sun.
Finally there was nothing at all.
Percy opened her eyes to soft silvery lavender. The illumination came from far overhead, or possibly it came from all around her, for Percy was lying on her back upon a soft blanket of snow and her face was staring up, gaze trained overhead, facing an infinite dome of deep black sky, littered with a sugar sparkle of stars.
Everywhere, serenity and silence. . . . And the same strange muted light. Percy took in a deep breath, feeling her lungs working to inhale the sweet air, with a strange hint of exotic perfume, as though the wind swept here from a remote field of flowers.
Flowers in the snow? Night? Where was she?
Percy sat up, using her hands for leverage, then stood. She wiped the snow off her knees and skirts and slapped her mittens together and stomped her shoes.
She was bareheaded, so there was a bit of loose crystalline powder in her hair, and she shook it out with her mittens, and then glanced around.
She was in her own backyard at home in Oarclaven. There was the side of their house, and in the opposite direction, the barn, and off to the side the ancient elm tree bare of leaves. . . .
Percy blinked, and turned to walk a few steps through the deep drifts that piled over the spot where had been her vegetable patch.
The front door of their house opened, and there were voices, and then someone came through the snow, and it was the familiar tall shape of her sister, Belle.
“Belle!” Percy exclaimed.
Parabelle Ayren, wearing her coat and threadbare headscarf, holding a bucket in her hand, stopped. She looked in the direction of Percy and then froze.
“Percy!” she exclaimed. “Oh dear Lord, Percy!”
And Belle dropped the bucket and ran toward her younger sister.
Percy was enveloped in a great but gentle hug—for Belle always had a light touch, and even her fiercest affections were expressed in delicate grace. “Percy, how did you get here? Oh, my dear Percy!”
“I—I don’t know. Where is ‘here?’”
“I mean, home, silly! What else would it be?”
Percy grinned at her sister, her face slightly ruddy from the chill air, and she bit her lip then rubbed her nose with the back of her mitten.
And then Belle bit her lip too—it was a family habit. “Well, that is, I suppose it is not entirely what it is, because we are home, yes, but we are also . . . in the Underworld.”
Percy stared. “What?”
“Well, it happened a few days ago, and no one is really sure, but we all ended up here—the whole village, and I have a feeling that
the whole world did too! Everything started fading, and we were indoors and I don’t think we realized what had happened, until some neighbors told us, and Uncle Roald was on his porch too so he saw everything but was too surprised to run—but the fading was just us being picked up by some kind of divine magic and moved down here! Houses and people and animals and even the land and the trees—everything!”
“But how do you know it’s the Underworld?”
“Well, it just is!” Belle turned and gestured all around her and then up at the sky. “Just look at it!” She swung her hands. “See that huge beautiful moon? It’s always like that, and it is very bright, and it never sets, only fades! And those tiny bright lights? You think those are stars? No, it’s actually a very high ceiling of ebony rock, and those are diamonds stuck up there! Every single one of them, a huge light-reflecting diamond the size of a goose egg!”
“No . . .” said Percy. “Now you’re just jesting with me.”
“Not at all! Am I the kind of person who jests? That would be something you would naturally do, Percy, not, me. You always say I have no sense of humor, only a sense of worry.” Belle shook her head and then smiled at Percy and pursed her lips.
“I suppose, you’re right, Belle.” Percy smiled back.
“Oh, and then there’s the strange daytime!” Belle resumed with excitement. “It’s not a normal sun, but a very odd and peculiar sun that rises every morning. Its light does not burn the eyes, so you can stare at it directly for hours. It is bright golden like a lemon and at sunset it is cheerful orange like an egg yolk! The sky suddenly turns from black like it is now, to pretty cornflower blue, because all those diamonds and ebony rocks in the ceiling light up! They are sharp and polished like mirrors, so they shine the light back and forth . . . and it’s like blue rainbows!”
“I suppose it doesn’t rain or snow here either.” Percy wiped her forehead with her mitten.
“Of course it does, silly, how else would there be all this snow on the ground?” And then Belle paused, thinking. “Well, actually, there was already snow on the ground when we all arrived here, backyard and houses and streets and all. So then, I suppose, I don’t really know. . . . I could ask Gerard, he might know—”