Page 22 of Tomb of Ancients
If indeed we breathed air here. I may as well have been taking in terror itself.
And the thing’s head, oh, its head. I wished for nothing more than the ability to tear my eyes away, but my gaze remained ever fixed on its white, rising skull, the length of it too slender and unnatural, waxlike, with a slimy surface that made my hairs stand on end. It had two narrow slits for eyes, black, and a serpent’s diamond nose. Its mouth never quite closed, lolling as if its jaw had been broken in a hundred places and never allowed to mend.
It leaned forward suddenly, carrying with it the smell I knew only to be death. Rot. It was studying me, examining me, peeling away flesh and bone so that I could easily see beneath,and I gasped again, my chest searing with pain, throbbing as if the thing had ripped open my rib cage to peer inside.
“Daughter of Trees, of Darkness,” it purred, ever-moving mouth slopping from side to side, the reek of corpses, sickly sweet, pouring out. “Willing One, Changeling Child, Servant of the Devil, Companion to the Moon’s Own Son, you come with a request.”
It was not a question. The way it drew out the sibilance inrequestprodded at my spine.
“I do,” I said, not knowing if there was some set exchange I was expected to know. “Who are you?”
Though the ancient strands of life in me knew the answer, I wanted to hear it spoken aloud. All of me shouted,it is Evil Itself, but I waited, my hands knotted and sweating. It pendulated, weighing my question, relishing it with what I assumed was a smirk.
“I... am a Binder. Eight are we. Eight we are who make the world. You know our work, little Unworlder. I sense its touch upon you.” And here the Binder wriggled one of its eellike hands, showing me again the undulating mouths of its “fingers.”
I felt a burn across my own fingertips and frowned, overburdened then by knowledge and fear.
“You make the books,” I said. “The Black Elbion—I touched it once and it marked me.”
“The mark was made forfeit by death, but still I know it upon you.” The Binder looked... proud. Smug. That expressiontwisted its liquid mouth into a hideous shape. “Yet I do not make the books, Freedom Seeker. Eight are we, and only one binds the books. I bindsouls.”
“That’s why I’m here,” I said, trembling. It was best to hurry. I knew that nothing I said would surprise the Binder; it already understood me completely. “I came to unbind the Mother. Her soul is trapped inside a spider’s body, put there by my father ages ago.”
The Binder inhaled as if enjoying the bouquet of a fine wine, its slit-like nostrils flaring wide, revealing only moving black ink behind them. “Yes, I remember it well. Not a pact I took lightly.Notan easy binding to undo.” It leaned farther across the table, and I nearly retched from the smell of it. “This will not go well for you, Fae Spawn.”
“I—I’m willing,” I stammered. Courage. I remembered the frisson of bravery I had felt when Khent pressed his thumb between my shoulder blades. “What must I do?”
It waggled a wormy finger in my direction, shaking its narrow white head. “The chanting has already begun. Now”—it inhaled again, its entire body twitching with delight—“now comes the ssssage.”
I smelled it, too. The acrid tang of burning sage filled the air, a halo of smoke rising around us from the ground. It rose and rose until it began to choke me. The Binder remained unaffected, smiling ghoulishly as I coughed and patted my throat, my mouth raw from the hot sting of the smoke. I wasbreathing in fire, I realized, and it was scorching me down to my stomach. Then the flames came, erupting fast, circling me and leaping onto my gown. I struggled in vain to put out the fire, but there was nothing I could do. The skirt flamed with hungry red blossoms that climbed up my body, the pain in my legs so excruciating that they soon grew numb. Not numb, burned away. I could see bone then, and fluid muscle, and fat oozing from the fire, crackling and speeding the kill.
My screams must have been terrible, but I couldn’t hear them above the pop and sizzle of the flames. I watched helplessly as the remainder of my dress caught, and the flesh of my fingers burned away, nothing but furnace-hot bones left behind to claw at the flesh of my neck that bubbled and ran like wax. The screams ended, they must have, for I no longer possessed a mouth, just a gaping wound that breathed endless fire, cooking me from without and within.
I felt a deep throbbing in my face and then sudden wetness, a jolt that came with a sound like rifle fire. My eyeballs popped.
It was all over. I had to be dead, for the pain was madness and the fire had consumed me utterly. And yet... And yet. My vision returned, and with it, the Binder. It was as if nothing at all had happened. The flames were gone and my throat had only the lightest taste of char upon it. But my relief was short-lived. When I looked across the table and saw the smile that awaited me, I knew beyond certainty that my trials had only just begun. “Are you still willing?”
With the heat of the fire having left so abruptly, I felt chilled and clammy, as if I were experiencing the warning signs of an impending illness. I hugged myself tightly and looked away from the Binder, knowing that this was some kind of test or game. This stranger had warned me that there was no going back, that once the ritual began it must be completed.
“Yes,” I whispered. “I’m still willing. Is this what my father suffered? To do the binding?”
The Binder drew back, narrow eyes widening as if in surprise.
“After bleeding Mother to a state of death, he captured eight humans and carved the willingness into their chests, then burned them in a field of sage. The rain did not quench the embers for days. When they were ash, he mixed it with wine and feasted.”
“So others suffered instead? How very like him.” I shook my head.
“There is more than one way to gain the attention of a Binder,” it said. “Yours is a tender heart. His is stone. Now give me your palm, bold fool. A sacrifice is required.”
Had I not already sacrificed? And yet this was the step of the binding that I feared most.Blood and ink.The only way forward, I decided, was breath by breath. Nothing in this strange shadow land was real, even if the pain of the fire had been deeply felt. Even if my fear was undeniably real.
I reached my right hand across the small circular table between us, showing it to the Binder palm up. As I closed myeyes, the Binder ceased leaning in toward me. It was only when I opened them again that it moved. God, it was forcing me to watch whatever sinister thing it had in mind. I swallowed around a lump and sat straighter, determined to press on. Breath by breath. I simply needed to keep breathing and remember that this was a realm of tricks.
The Binder’s left hand hovered over my palm, its three wriggling fingers lowering inch by dreadful inch. The little mouths opened and closed rapidly, faster and faster as they neared my skin, hungry. My stomach turned and I held back a cough, as if my own guts were filled with those twisting snakes. I could tell the Binder was not watching our hands but my face, enjoying every twitch of discomfort that tightened my lips.
The Binder’s fingers found my palm, and at once the long tubes of them went rigid, attaching to my flesh. The sensation at first was mild, just a light tugging, as if someone were playfully pinching the meatier parts of my palm, but the pulling did not stop, and the pinching was no longer so playful. My eyes flew to the Binder’s, and the calming breaths I had ordered myself to take were ragged and noisy.
“Shall I stop?” It was taunting me, all but giggling.
