Dark Lord's Wedding (3 page)

They came with obsidian swords. Edges of the black glass jutted from the sides of wooden paddles. They came in silence. Their faces were even, no expression, no fear in their eyes. Only light. They came not as enemy warriors but like marble statues. Unstoppable. Unkillable.

Behind Jerani, the woman screamed. There were words in her cry, but they weren’t as loud as the pounding of blood in Jerani’s ears. He couldn’t hear right. The wail sounded as if the woman wasn’t falling. How strange to think that.

Even stars could fall.

Jerani dodged the obsidian swords. The Bright Palms kept on. He scrambled behind a tree trunk. They kept on. He speared them, but they kept on. They would not drop. They would not stop. Until Jerani was dead.

“Tell Celaise,” Jerani shouted. “Tell my family how I died.”

Jerani awoke in pain. He was lying beneath trees, pinned down by a purple star on his chest. No, it was a shining jewel. Jerani gripped it, tried to throw it off him. His skin stretched, but the gem was stuck.

“Leave the amethyst,” the woman said. Her gloves were off, and more purple gems glittered over her fingers and arms. “It’s binding your wounds closed.”

She hadn’t fallen. Jerani hadn’t died.

There had been a battle. Yes, he could remember she had swept in with a pyramid of light. It had blasted through the Bright Palms. She had pitched them into the pit. The mantis claws of the man-monster had lopped off one of their heads. And, Jerani, what had happened to him?

He gripped his arm where the skin was rough and bunched together. A Bright Palm had chopped through someone’s arm. It might’ve been Jerani’s. The toothy black sword of obsidian had sliced through the bone. No, Jerani couldn’t have lost the limb. He had all his. Jerani’s guts heaved. A greasy sharpness burned up his throat. He rolled and spat, coughed and sputtered and collapsed.

If his arm had been cut off, he should hurt more. Waves of heat throbbed outward from his shoulder, but it wasn’t agony. The gem on his chest was cold to the touch. Its light shone between his fingers.

The woman had placed it there. She had saved him. The lord had called her the Lady of Gems. Yes, she was that.

The two stood together at the edge of the pit. Jerani lifted up his head high enough to see. She wore a backless dress. Blue jewels that he had thought were stars gleamed around her spine. Their lights swam and knocked into each other, but that could’ve just been him and his smack-rattled skull.

He wasn’t right. Jerani had to keep his mouth clamped shut or he would start giggling or weeping.

No, he was right enough. He lived.

A gem floated above the lady’s hands. Unlike all the others, it was lightless.

The lord rested his spindly sharp fingers on her shoulder. “The diamond is false, my heart?”

“Zircon.” She closed her hand over it with a cracking sound. “An abomination carved by the jewel duper.”

“He did warn me he’d copied the stone while bedbound. The thief owes us a favor.”

“He owes us his death.” The lady opened her hand, and shards of a broken gemstone fell in a glittering shower.

Jerani had held up his neck too long looking. A whiteness buzzed across his vision and he rested his head back down.

The lady’s voice was precise and cutting. “I knew the jewel was wrong at the first instant, yet I wanted to believe. My true diamond is near.”

“Is it below?” The lord’s voice was dry like dead grass in the wind.

“The Bright Palms must’ve dropped the genuine jewel into the sinkhole, keeping the false one in hand to taunt me. Painfully sensible of them.”

“What can we depend on these days if not stupidity?”

“Very little,” the lady said. “Except possibly each other.”

“Shall we descend together?”

“We always seem to.”

Jerani blinked and tilted his head to the side for a look. The lord and lady were holding hands in front of the black nothingness.

She turned to him, and in the light from her gemstones, her face lit violet. Her cheek bones were sharp angles, her chin a point. She had nothing soft about her. There couldn’t have been, or she would’ve shriveled away from the lord. She would never have matched his gaze. The corner of her eye couldn’t have wrinkled with fondness.

Jerani had seen her face before, somewhere. But he couldn’t have met her on his travels. He never would’ve forgotten the Lady of Gems. What could her real name be?

The lady and lord stepped off together into the chasm.

Hiresha flew down. Night air washed over her, a nip on her bare feet, a thrill up her legs, a cool flow along her back, and crisp pressure against her face. Tingling waves ran along her arm with which she held Tethiel.

His hand bit into hers. Her power grasped him tighter.

The limestone walls rotated around them as they fell deeper. The world moved. They were still. Time resonated, fluttering forward and back along her spine.

She had the sense she had been here before. Or she would again soon. In her other dream, in her other facet of reality, she had saved a young man who had fallen into the sinkhole. This time, he was safe above. She would rescue her red diamond. Or she would find it broken. Gems were more fragile than people.

Their depth increased, and the air warmed. It thickened with a sulfur stench.

“If this cave is a deity,” Tethiel said, “we must be entering the wrong end.”

“If we descend into a god,” she said, “it would pay to be politic.”

Hiresha sent her blue paragon ahead. The pyramid-shaped diamond dropped to illuminate an underground lake. Bodies bobbed. The waters churned with the hunger of cave scavengers. Eyeless fish dashed in to bite, and knobby legs of half-seen things skittered about with clicking pinchers.

In three-eighths of second, Hiresha predicted, she and Tethiel would plunge into black water and nibbling teeth. Yet a lucid dreamer need only fall as far as she wished

Hiresha dreamed a dream of power and magic. Awake or asleep, reality or whimsy, she didn’t waste time deliberating, not when she could fly.

Her dream inversion had given her mastery over gravity, of the forces pulling objects together and apart. She had only to think it to Lighten herself and Tethiel. Their descent slowed until they were swimming in the air.

“How reassuring,” he said, looking down, “that the dark and deep places of the world are full of terrors.”

“I’ll be reassured when my red paragon is found unbroken.” She tightened her amethyst grip around his fingers. “Hold your breath.”

She allowed gravity to tow them into the watery blackness. It slurped around them, warm and thick with filth, almost gelatinous. She waved away the skitterers. She Repulsed the grime. Her blue paragon illuminated the way while towing Tethiel and herself deeper with the force of Attraction.

A figure glowed to their left, a woman. One of the Bright Palms had survived the backbreaking fall, as Hiresha had hoped. Her mercy was taxed when the luminous woman floundered toward them with a knife. The survivor would have to take them unawares to have any chance of success, and Bright Palms were about as stealthy as fireworks.

Hiresha raced out of reach, past sludge, beyond the clutter of bones, between stalagmites, down to the god’s treasure. Devotees must have tossed wealth here for centuries.

The gold nuggets shimmered blue in her light. When she reached to sift through the trove with a hand, the precious metals darkened to hues of violet. None of the treasure was in coins. Silver axe heads flashed. A jawbone was full of turquoise teeth. Broken knives of alabaster shone with turquoise-skull hilts. Jade frogs were everywhere. Some shattered, some crudely carved, some as big as toads, some blackened, some still pale, the frog effigies thrived at the bottom of the underground pool.

Her red paragon diamond was not here, and yet its nearness itched against her skin. She would find it somewhere else in the drowned cavern.

Tethiel squeezed her fingers. Yes, he had to breathe, and she ought to as well. She opened her other hand, and her amethyst piercings flashed. Water transformed into gas, and she held a bubble of air. She lifted it to her face and inhaled. It tasted of ancient rottenness, of death and forgotten lifetimes.

Hiresha kissed Tethiel and shared her air with him. His lips shocked her as if with static. He cupped her face, and chills crisscrossed down her neck. Despite all the foulness around them, she was smiling. Bubbles escaped the sharp corners of his smirk.

The treasure twinkled beneath them. What wonders she could build with such wealth. She might enchant the hoard with enough magic to dazzle the continent.

If only she were willing to pry a fortune out of a god.

The Bright Palm tried to ambush them with her knife again. They were whisked to safety, Attracted to the blue paragon. The diamond pyramid spun, each of its four sides frosted with an intricacy of facets. Hiresha cast the paragon before her, and it drew her and Tethiel to the surface and above. Rivulets of blackness drained from their clothes.

“My red paragon is elsewhere.” She lifted her hand, and dream-shine glistened over the cavern’s walls. “I suspect something carried it out of the water.”

“Why, that’s writing.” Tethiel pointed to the limestone, where black lines crossed each other in patterns like crazed hieroglyphs. “Someone must have been trapped down here, and he etched the walls with his madness. Or devotion. The two are so hard to tell apart.”

“No human made this.” Hiresha pressed her palm against the wall’s slime. Her hand sank to the wrist. The markings appeared as if worms had crawled into the stone then died.

“What monster then?”

“Many small ones. This cavern is afflicted with pestilence.”

Her world stretched and spun. She was above ground, in a village stricken with death. People wept, as did their ulcers. Hiresha pressed a purple garnet into each pockmarked hand, and her magic fought back the plague.

She blinked and was back in the cavern. She was in both places. Lucid dream and reality spun around each other like a flipped mirror. Too fast to tell them apart. On this side, on this facet of being, the stone walls were diseased, not thousands of people. Tethiel held her hand. He hadn’t made a nation suffer for her sake.

She had no reason to hate him, here. Even if the skin of her hand squirmed under his touch, she should not let him fall into water’s blackness. It would be wrong to leave him in this cavernous oubliette, to let him fight the Bright Palm and the skitterers over cold meat. Only in her other reality had he disappointed her.

Of course, if she tried to abandon him in these depths, he could lash out at her sanity with a storm of fangs. He wouldn’t, though. He loved her. Enough to sicken a nation.

“I’m sorry I was cold to you earlier this evening,” she said. “In my other facet, you deliberately disseminated a plague.”

“A plague?” He faced her. They stood on the water, their feet dimpling the surface. “Whyever would I have done something so messy?”

“For me. Only a dying empire would welcome me back.” She would not tell him how they had planned to marry in the city of her birth. He hadn’t proposed to her in this facet yet. “You tried to hide your involvement with the plague bearers. I found out.”

“How could you think so little of me?” He tapped his chest with his needle-shard fingers. “That I’d spread plagues in your dream. And get caught.”