Cobweb Empire (48 page)

Nothing had happened.

Everything and everyone had gone terribly
silent.

And Lord Death himself, if such a thing were
possible, appeared perplexed.

Percy released a held breath and stared in
terrible confusion.

“What is the meaning of this?” said he who
was Death, holding the hand of his Bride and her shadow. “Why is
there no
union?
”

Lady Melinoë opened her eyes and looked up
at the one who held her by the hand. “Am I
still . . . dead?” she whispered. “What has come to
pass?”

And Death continued looking at her with his
shadowed visage invisible to all, and he said, “I do not know.”

Then, slowly, he turned to look at Percy.
“You, who have been given a fragment of my heart—come to me.”

Percy wordlessly obeyed. She climbed the few
steps of the dais and stood before her immortal liege.

“Now,
you
must try to do what I have
taught you. Take my Bride and her death and unite them!”

“What?
I?
” whispered Percy. “But if
you
yourself, My Lord, cannot—”

“You are mine also, and my power is yours. I
must observe what comes to pass when it is exercised.”

With her trembling fingers, Percy reached
out and received Melinoë’s ice-cold hand and then she took hold of
the billowing shadow. . . . She felt the immediate
gathering of dark roiling power, and the familiar echoing sound
descending upon her mind.

Dear Lord in Heaven! She was supposed to do
this thing before Death himself, as if she were his young
apprenticed pupil!

Percy felt the immediate connection between
the maiden and her shadow, and then she drew upon all that was
contained within herself and
pulled
the two
together—recalling the same thing she had done before in the
shadowed chamber underneath the Sapphire Throne—only this time it
was not merely to break the bond of the energy veil, but the real
thing, to enact the final true death.

She pulled, and the world within her mind
fell apart to mirror shards and crumbling pieces then coalesced
together again from the effort. She pulled—

And nothing happened.

Percy let go of Melinoë and drew her hands
to her mouth in fear. “My Lady Melinoë,” she said, “can you feel me
when I attempt to do this thing? Was there anything at all you felt
just now?”

“Yes . . . I feel a slight
pull, as if my soul is being called forth, and then, nothing.”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake! What now?” suddenly
said the beautiful, shrewish lady still seated on the dais. “This
is simply unbelievable! What on earth is going on?”

The young gentleman meanwhile placed his
tousled head between his legs and groaned. “No! Oh, no, no, no! A
thousand times, no! This cannot be happening!”

“I do not understand,” Death said again.
“Why is there no union?”

“Maybe because a
union
requires love,
or, at the very least, a bit of affection?—nay, familiarity? An
attempt at courtship? Mild flirtation?” exclaimed the lady, while
the gentleman hurriedly retorted, “Hush, my dear Amaryllis! By Jove
and Tartarus, do hold your delightfully waspish tongue, at least
with this particular dark gentleman—”

But Death seemed to attend to her words.

“Love . . .” he uttered. “I
know not of it—not as a proper mortal man, for I am not one of you.
And yet, I know that when I take your kind upon me, each one of you
is more precious and beloved by me in that one moment than the
entirety of the world.”

“A lovely sentiment, but a bit excessive
upon first acquaintance,” said Lady Amaryllis. “For indeed, that is
all any of us gets with you, Lord Death, is it not? A moment for
acquaintance and then—pouf!—and then only Lord knows what happens
next. I do suggest you start enriching your time with our mortal
kind. Have you considered an extended wooing ritual? Begin with a
simple flower folded in a sealed and perfumed note declaring your
true affections—it would be a rather fine start. Followed up with,
perhaps, a lovely serenade under the balcony of a moonlit boudoir?
Or is that too much to expect in exchange for uncharted
eternity?”

“Maybe—” Percy meanwhile said gently, with a
glance at Beltain who stood behind them all, observing with
unbelieving eyes. “Maybe when I freed you, Lady Melinoë, maybe I
broke
something in the process? For, I still don’t quite
understand the dark sorcery, the nature of that ethereal veil that
held you imprisoned and fixed in stasis.”

“I know that you set me free,” Melinoë
replied, looking at her with a lost but sincere expression.
“Whatever my previous existence had been, whatever illusion or lies
or horror my own mother, the Sovereign had enacted—”

“Wait, her mother is the Sovereign of the
Domain?
The
Sovereign?” whispered Catrine, staring at the
other girls.

“—Whatever it was,” Melinoë continued, “I am
grateful to be free of it. If only I knew more, if only I
remembered! My own mother did this thing to me! How could she? She
who braided my hair and brought me blooming flowers to adorn me and
told me wondrous tales? My beloved mother with her kind blue eyes?
She is no mother of mine!”

“Perhaps,” Death said, musing, “I might try
this thing, this mortal courtship. I will try to woo my Cobweb
Bride who is no longer bound in Cobwebs. . . .”

“Well, that’s just splendid and dandy!”
exclaimed the gentleman with the unkempt demeanor and an untrimmed
beard. “And while he woos and courts her, what are we to do in the
meantime? Eat our knuckles?”

“To be fair, it is all your fault, Nathan,”
said Lady Amaryllis, “for if you had not made us go sailing on that
infernal river, we would not be here in the first place, stuck and
unable to depart this excruciating unrelieved hell, next to this
mirthless, immortal
antique!
”

“No! No, no!” Nathan moaned again. “This! To
be resigned to this eternity in this dank hall surrounded by bones
and these poor girls, and now these newly arrived persons, whoever
the hell they are—”

“We have been told that a Cobweb Bride is
all that is required to set the world aright!”

“—and all I wanted was to have a bit of
steak once more, a single decent dinner before I became a stiff and
walking corpse myself!” Lord Nathan went on.

“
Silence!”

Everyone heeded Death’s ringing voice of
power.

And the dark Bridegroom turned to Melinoë
and again offered her his hand. “My Lady Bride, come to me. Tell me
your name, so that I may woo you.”

“My Lord, I am . . . Melinoë
Avalais,” she replied. “At least it is all I can remember of my
former life. I remember nothing else but vaporous dreams, and none
of them have solid form. Nothing to grasp or
recollect. . . . I—I am—”

“Tell me . . .” spoke Lord
Death gently, and for the first time his immortal masculine voice
took on a strange vulnerable sound, as though a wound had been
opened to the air. “Tell me of yourself. . . . All
that you can remember.”

“But there is so very little!” Lady Melinoë
cried. And yet she took his hand.

And leading her thus, Death took the lady to
the first stair and helped her step upon the dais and stop before
his ivory throne.

“I have no seat to offer you but my own,” he
said. “Take it, if you choose.”

But, “No,” said his lady Bride. “Sit in your
own place, My Lord. And I will lie by your
side. . . .”

And as Death resumed his throne, the maiden
came to rest at his feet, beside his throne, lying down softly on
the dais of bone, and resting her head against his sculpted legs
clad in dark hose, in a gesture of perfect trust.

She remained thus, for long moments, in
silence.

“
T
his is all the
stuff of poetry and minstrel song,” muttered Lord Nathan after a
quarter of an hour—or its seeming equivalent in this timeless
place—had passed. “But surely something must be done to hurry along
this infernal courtship process—by Hades, or Zeus, or Bacchus, just
look at them, they aren’t even
moving!
”

Percy meanwhile, seated next to Beltain on a
pile of crumbling bones, atop their black cloak, looked at the
young man with a gaze of wonder. She had forgotten, in this sweet
somnolent silence, where exactly it was they were and what was
happening. It was as if the world itself was suspended, and just
for the instant, nothing mattered. . . . And the
black knight took her by the hand and smiled down into her eyes
with his own internal fire that filled the air of grey apathy
around them with a nimbus of common warmth.

“Percy!” exclaimed Catrine, interrupting
their reverie. “Since we’re all stuck here, “Tell me about sis!
How’s Niosta? Where is she?”

“She is at Letheburg, with Grial,” Percy
said, tearing herself from Beltain. And then she told Catrine the
whole story of their adventures—since they apparently had all the
time in the world. As she spoke, Beltain listened to her with
bemusement.

Many long minutes later, Catrine told her
own side of the story.

“—An’ after we got off the damn boat on that
damn fool river,” she concluded, “we ended up here. Only, for some
reason, we could all see an’ hear Death, and that’s because of the
dratted river itself, he told us! Because we sailed the river made
of twilight, and felt its waters, what with the wet spray and stuff
durin’ all the rowin’, and Their Lordships sticking their fingers
in the nasty water, now we are all
marked!
Unless the world
is set aright, we cannot leave this hall!”

“What?” Percy shook her head with a frown.
“How awful!”

“Awful is right! We’ll starve to death!”
Catrine said. “An’ Death himself will just sit there, do nuttin’,
and look at us!”

“What a strange river it is that you
describe!” Beltain interrupted. “You say it is that same river that
is down below in our old Chidair Keep dungeon? I remember it
vaguely, for I had gone there maybe a handful of times, if at all,
mostly as a young boy, to hide and play with other children of the
Keep. In those days, we kept no prisoners in that rotten damp
cavern. And, now that I think about it, I vaguely remember those
same strange rules and warnings you mention, about not touching the
water or drinking from it or extinguishing the lantern—childish
games, I thought, told by adults to scare us and keep us away from
harm, from possible drowning.”

Apparently the Lady Amaryllis heard their
discussion. “The river,” she said, coming a few steps to join them,
“supposedly has a name. Lord Death had told us it is the River
Lethe, the most ancient and secret river in all of the Realm, one
that no one knows about in truth, except in very old stories.”

“The Kingdom of Lethe is named for it,”
mused Beltain. “I do know this, having somewhat dubiously learned
my history lesson years ago.”

“My Lord,” said Amaryllis, giving him a
glance of appraisal. “Are you indeed Lord Beltain Chidair, the son
of that insane Duke Hoarfrost? The same man known as the Black
Knight?”

“Regretfully, yes,” said he.

“Rumors of your prowess have reached the
Silver Court.” Lady Amaryllis gazed at him with an interested
smile. “But in truth you appear neither gruesome nor fierce, and
rather a fine sight for a man of your terrifying reputation. It is
a pleasure to make your acquaintance now, Lord Beltain, under these
impossible circumstances. Indeed, I am suddenly far less bored than
I was only moments ago.”

“Ah, Chidair! Don’t listen to My Lady, for
she is always bored out of her wits, and furthermore, flirts
outrageously,” said Nathan from where he half reclined on the
floor. He threw one sharp glance of his handsome dark eyes in their
direction.

“And what does it matter to you, sweetest,
that I flirt?” said the lady, with a backward glance. “When one has
nothing else to do but flirt and starve, which do you think is the
best course of action?”

“The River Lethe,” Nathan said, ignoring
her. “Supposedly, it has wondrous properties not found in nature.
And I refer not only to its impossible existence in the twilight
state. Lord Death informs us that if one were to drink from the
river once, everything one knows will be forgotten.”

“Oh, yes!” exclaimed Catrine. And then she
recited:
“Drink once, and you forget everything you know, drink
for the second time and you remember everything you knew, drink for
the third time and you die!”

“Lovely and gruesome, is it not?” Nathan
said. “At least none of us had the fool notion to drink. It is bad
enough we all touched its waters. And darling Amaryllis even
bottled some in a flask.”

Percy was struck with a sudden thought.

“What if—” she said, turning to Lady
Amaryllis. “What if the Lady Melinoë, who can remember nothing of
her life, were to be given this water to drink? Your Ladyship has a
flask of this water, is that not so? If the magic is true, then if
the Cobweb Bride drinks
twice
, she will then remember
everything she ever knew!”

And Percy stood up in excitement, and she
turned to look at Death on his throne, and his Bride reclining
before him at his feet.

“Lord Death! Let your Bride drink the water
from the River of Lethe!”

L
ady Melinoë stood
holding in her trembling hands the flask filled with a strangely
swirling liquid that appeared at times dark and yet colored with
silver, and at the same time transparent. Since it was permanent
twilight here, the water in the flask was visible.

“Will you do this?” Death asked. “This is
the most potent water of all the sacred rivers. It is never to be
taken lightly, and I may not insist that you drink, only offer you
this choice.”

But Melinoë looked up at her Bridegroom and
she whispered: “I drink gladly, for I must know what kind of mother
it is who did this to me. She is no mother of mine! And yet, I must
know.”