Cobweb Forest (Cobweb Bride Trilogy) (35 page)

“Well then, weep, Mother of mine. But do sit down at my side, and let us be ‘civilized,’ as Hecate would like us to be—that is, while we wait long enough for Hecate’s strength to fail her so that I might get up and proceed with my business here.”

Demeter sighed and sat down next to Persephone, casting her gilded aura against the upholstery.

From the outside came the noise of soldiers running through the streets and the clash of metal and the screams of the mortally wounded who now could not die.

“Can you not remember what it was like to feel compassion?” Demeter said.

“I remember being miserable.” Persephone stretched luxuriously. “And now, I feel delightful because I feel
nothing
.”

There was liquid brimming in Demeter’s eyes. “What of the ashes of your own shadow child? Does the memory of Melinoë bring anything to you? Does it not touch your heart?”

Persephone slowly turned her head to look at Demeter and the room started to darken once again. “Speak not, Mother, else I will once again cover you with cobwebs of mortality and you will sleep a long sleep filled with endless dreams, while you grow brittle and diminish—”

“Is that what you’ve done to me the last time? Why, child? What kind of hatred can you bear that would cause you to do this dark thing to me, alongside those poor mortal maidens?”

“Ah, but you do not remember now, Mother of mine. . . . No, you do not. . . . In the same way you have wanted to take away my memory of
her
—how does it feel, not to
remember?
”

“But it was done only to ease your grief! Hades and I and all the gods could not bear to see you thus any longer, not after a hundred mortal years of grief—for that is how long it has been—and you were neglecting your divine function—not willingly, for you were always true, but your creative strength of life and regeneration was failing you.
 . . . And the vitality of the mortal world was poorer for it. It was best for you to forget—”

“Let me tell you a secret—I have not been
grieving
—I’ve been gathering power for a hundred years, taking the life force of so many, reaping my own Spring Harvest from the maidens whom I’ve visited since their childhood . . . softly, gently, taking a tiny droplet from them every time . . . a ghostly kiss, a faint breath . . . weaving it into filaments of power, draining their mortal flesh of every last spark of energy over the years. . . . Oh, the sweetness of the life force! This same life force that I’ve been bringing into the world every time I arrived Above, why, it is only right that it is mine to do with as I please! Indeed, I have learned so much over these hundred years, Mother! So much of what I can really
do!
”

“And yet you cannot do the one thing you want, which is to resurrect your daughter in the world Above, for it is against the fundamental laws of being! Had we but known you were doing this, working on such an abomination, we might have stopped you earlier!”

Persephone gazed at her divine mother with intense hatred. “Ah, but you never could stop me! For instead I have made the Cobweb Bride! Now death itself is bound to my whim, and all the souls that cannot pass on are fixed in the mortal world, and with them is the life energy! It stays here at my disposal, no longer to be dissipated and recycled—instead it is all mine!”

Demeter looked at her with horror. “Is that what your really want, daughter? You want to wield your own power of life and death and reject your divine function?”

“I want to rule life and death, yes—without the
sacrifice
.”

“But it is impossible! You know it cannot be done!”

Persephone smiled a fey smile. “It is done already.”

Demeter shook her head in disbelief. “We wanted to heal you gently by making you forget, by taking away your pain and grief. Instead you have spread your soul’s contagion into the fabric of the mortal world.
 . . .”

“You had
no right!
No right to take away the only thing I had left of her!” Persephone’s face of perfect beauty was despoiled by a twisted expression of agony. “But oh, I speak not only of my memories of my sweet shadow child—I speak of what was done to her
ashes!
”

“Persephone
 . . .” said Hecate from her rocking chair. “It is time you tell us what has happened really. “What is it that you speak of? Where are Melinoë’s ashes?”

But Persephone raised her hand and pointed it at her mother. “She! She has taken them!”

Demeter looked back at her without comprehension. “My child, as far as I recall, I merely took the real box of ashes from my shrine at Ulpheo where you hid them away for a hundred years, but only to keep them safe—”

“
No!
You took them and you—”

Persephone’s anguished voice failed, and instead there was again a storm in the room, and everything started flying.

“What?” Hecate said loudly above the wind. “What has happened? What has the Mother of Bright Harvest done?”

“Tell me!” Demeter uttered, tears streaking the curves of her face. “Once and for all, tell me what it is that I have done that I do not remember and for which you hate and punish me so!”

“You took Melinoë’s ashes and you scattered them . . . to the four winds . . . in the world Above.”

And then there was absolute silence.

Persephone sat with her hands folded, and her face was dead.

Demeter’s lips parted and then trembled. “No
 . . .” she said. “I could not have done such a thing. No. . . . for I know better than to bring
something
from Below into the world Above and permanently leave it there—thus, no! It is impossible!”

“But you
didn’t
know better, Mother of mine . . .” Persephone continued in a voice of driftwood and fallen leaves. “You have just drank the water of Lethe, and you were fresh-minded and clean as a slate and innocent of the many truths of the immortal world just yet, as you were slowly recovering the knowledge of your divine function and little else. . . . It was then that I had taken you swiftly from Ulpheo to the Palace of the Sun—while you were still innocent enough not to resist or protest my will—and I made you sit on the Sapphire Throne and use your powers of the Bright Harvest to attempt to revive Melinoë. You focused your golden radiance upon the ashes, filling the Hall with impossible light, but even so the effort failed . . . Melinoë remained dead. Instead, this attempt of yours broke the Sapphire Throne completely!

“For yes, when I first brought Melinoë to the world Above, killing her in the process, the Throne attained its first hairline crack.
 . . . But it still worked to transport me to the Underworld and back for a hundred years, each time, admittedly, making me less of myself, leaching me of the fullness of my true being. Even before I decided to drink the three swallows of the cursed water of Lethe just this season, I was already
different
, much reshaped. I have been transformed enough, over the decades of repeatedly using the imperfect Sapphire Throne, to already be
someone else
. But then you broke the Throne completely, and it infuriated me. Furthermore, you were going to try again with Melinoë—or so you told me—and when next I turned to look, you were gone!

“I should forgive you for your innocence alone, back then, only I cannot. For you knew enough to know how much it meant to me—the very sight of those ashes was precious to me, and yet you took them away, and you stole from me the only means of recreating my daughter!”

“No!”

“In an act of rash folly, from the loftiest vantage point of the city of Ulpheo, you have cast her to the winds—first calling upon the golden force of the sun and your own divine power to imbue the ashes with life. And when it failed to work yet again, you were taken with unholy exuberance. This time you called upon the winds, telling them to carry her as far as the ends of the Realm and the Domain in both directions, as you stood up on the tallest roof in Ulpheo, reveling in your newly rediscovered immortal powers, as you commanded the winds to obey! I had arrived too late to prevent you but not too late to witness the beloved ashes floating like black snow in the wind.
 . . .”

“And thus,” Hecate mused, “it explains why the mortal world is fading.
 . . . An atrocity against the world has been committed inadvertently. A thing of Below forced to remain Above. Melinoë is a child of the Underworld, and neither she nor her remains are permitted Above—they cannot be stored or left upon the earth. And now—”

“And now the earth itself is being pulled down, taken Below, heavy with the weight of her subterranean ashes that have covered every place that the wind flies, within the borders of these Kingdoms.” Demeter spoke in despair. “And I have done this thing!”

“Yes, Mother.
You
have done it all yourself, and the blame rests upon your pretty golden head. But not all is lost! As soon as all the earth laden with her ashes and all the incidental mortal refuse that it contains returns to the Underworld, I will gather them from Below and recreate her, my beloved child.”

“It is why you wish to return to the Underworld!”

“It is one of several reasons.”

“No,” Hecate mused, “there is something wrong here in what you say, something else you have not yet admitted—”

“Enough!”
And with that Persephone stood up suddenly, and Hecate felt herself frozen in place, while a powerful force was directed at her, and she had to put all of her immortal strength into remaining seated upon the wooden chair.

Persephone turned to Demeter with a countenance of immortal evil—so empty, so dark and cold that no ice in the world could match it, no light could ever escape its gaping maw. “It is best that you leave now, Mother of mine.”

And she gestured forcefully with her right hand, sending a bolt of power at Demeter, which then cast her out
elsewhere
.

“Now, sister Hecate.” Persephone returned her attention to the other goddess, for they were alone in the room. “Now you will stand and give up your Throne.”

Persephone turned her palm up, and upon it grew a soft shimmer of life energy. It thickened within a span of moments, took on physical shape, and became . . . cobwebs.

P
ercy Ayren stood in the snow-covered forest, holding a farmer’s pitchfork. Her mind was crawling with the corruption and darkness that was the dark Goddess, always at the edge of her mind now, whispering, whispering. . . .

They had fallen back, in a large group of ordinary peasants and townsmen, a mixture of San Quellenne Tanathe and Goraque and Lethe and Styx and Morphaea and heaven only knows what other peoples, the children and the elderly herded in a central part, while around them the able-bodied adults stood, men and women armed with clubs and sticks and farm implements.

“Remember, cut off their limbs, or use fire to burn them down—it’s the only way to protect yourself,” the civilians were told by the soldiers. “And stay low, keep safe from musket fire. For unlike them, if they put holes in you, you die. . . .”

Beyond them, the formations of Goraque cavalry knights, the columns of pikemen infantry, and stragglers from the Morphaean divisions had finally organized in a phalanx and were holding off the streaming mass of the dead Trovadii.
 . . .

Just a little beyond the trees in the clearing, began the plain around Letheburg. However they could see, even from their position at the outskirts of the forest, that something was significantly wrong. Instead of the walls of
one
city, there were now
three
—three cities clustered together in an unnatural placement right next to each other, and one of them was literally jammed into Letheburg, so that their walls were touching, and in places intersecting.

Civilians and soldiers crossed themselves at the sight, for in their wildest imaginings this was not something anyone would choose to see. And to many it signified, truly and completely, the end of the world.
 . . .

Lord Beltain Chidair had been asked by the Duke to lead a vanguard formation, but he refused, falling to the back with a smaller troop of knights placed under his command to protect the flanks and the ordinary people.

“I forgive you for striking me down last year, Chidair,” said one Goraque knight, Sir Marlon Wedeis, saluting him with his sword. “For I know you will lead us well and true in this fight.”

“I am honored, and my thanks,” replied the black knight, closing his visor. He threw one secret intense look at Percy, only a hundred feet back with the others, for he knew now that she could no longer help with the dead, and she was vulnerable, and it terrified him.

“The Goddess Persephone has forced herself inside my mind,” Percy had confessed to him minutes earlier. “She seems to know all I think, and she will not allow me to put the dead to rest, oh, I am so sorry!”

It had happened only a few moments ago. They were fighting to come to order within the trees, and Percy had granted the final death to one dead man. And then she was somehow
 . . . 
changed
.

“Percy, what is to be done?” he said uselessly. “I need to protect you, then! Come, let me get you back up into my saddle and—”

But she shook her head negatively and her ordinary eyes wore the most extraordinary expression of all . . . and it broke him right through to the heart. She looked at him with intense love and despair, and then she went and got herself a pitchfork from a nearby peasant, and she said, “See, I am armed and all is well! Go, my love! Defend us all!”

“But what of the Cobweb Bride?” he whispered. “What will you do now?”

But she exclaimed, “Go!” And her eyes brimmed with water.

And now, there was no more time to think, not for any of them.
 . . .

The dead were relentless in their attack, yet this was only a lesser Trovadii battalion sent to the edge of the forest, while the bulk of them, in their trademark pomegranate, were in the great plain, and they were attacking Letheburg. Soldiers of Goraque could not comprehend why only Letheburg was being taken and swallowed by the Sovereign’s armies and the volleys of catapults, while the other two walled cities—identified soon enough by disbelieving soldiers as the Silver Court of the Realm and the enemy Sapphire Court of the Domain—remained uninvolved in the battle.

Garrison soldiers of these two enemy citadels stared out in confusion from the walls of their respective cities, armed to the teeth. Yet the Imperial Silver Court waited, not engaging the dead enemy. And the Sapphire Court, for whom the Trovadii forces were native sons, ignored for the time being the Silver Court muskets and cannons aimed in their directions.

Meanwhile, the dead were not the only enemy on the plain. Duke Vitalio Goraque’s vanguard officers spied an approaching enemy line on the southwestern horizon, and it signified another enemy army—this one, as they were later to discover—were the Domain troops from Solemnis, consisting of living men, the same armies who had been camped out on the western shore of the River Styx and watched the City of Charonne disappear into the shadows at dawn.
 . . .

“There is little here that makes sense, and very little hope,” the Duke spoke to his captain knights. “But we will fight on nevertheless, and we will try to hold our ground at least, and protect the last of our people, here where we now stand—for as long as there is any familiar land beneath our feet. As for Letheburg—God be with it. For to come to the aid of Letheburg now, to break through these thousands of Trovadii up ahead, would be an impossibility.”

E
brai Fiomarre was with the group of knights in one of the central portions of the phalanx, as the Trovadii broke through their ranks at last and the fight had come to him.

Armored in light chain mail only, he nevertheless fought well, being a hardy soldier, and his sword arm slashed though dead limbs all around, while his shield had been battered with so many blunt and sharp impacts that it was barely holding up.

Their formation was soon cast into a disordered melee, and they had to fall back, together with the vanguard knights and infantry foot soldiers, and they slowly retreated deeper into the forest, holding back the flanks. Their horses kicked up snow and trampled occasional dead rising from the whiteness of the drifts.

Relentless pops of musket fire sounded, and everywhere, the stench of black powder. Startled birds screeched and circled overhead. The dead who had been formerly musketeer corps had no qualm about using firearms to kill the living who could not return the favor, since shooting the dead was useless. And now the Trovadii were decimating the Goraque cavalry knights whose plate armor was poor protection against gunshots. Ebrai Fiomarre thought bitterly that he would have preferred to remain one of the living for just a few hours longer—for once a dead man, few things seemed to matter any longer, loyalties became uncertain (though not necessarily so, since quite a few recently dead Goraque were still fighting loyally at his side), and all the physical senses were compromised.
 . . .

A few dozen feet behind him, Fiomarre saw a young brash knight fighting like a madman with his longsword, and cutting down the dead as only youthful zeal can justify. Soon, however, he would tire, and there were none in his vicinity to come to his aid. A far more jaded and hence careful combatant, Ebrai steered his mount to assist the young knight.

A flash of movement, tree branches in the way, then he saw the knight’s visor lift for better air, and an exertion-reddened young face, that of a pretty youth, breathing hard. Ebrai looked onward and saw a small group of peasants behind him, including children, and understood why the knight fought so hard in that one place—there was nowhere for the people to retreat, and beyond them were more Trovadii, coming.

Ebrai flew into the fight, bringing his sword down skillfully to sever arms and hands of the nearest dead, and then called out, “Watch your back!”

“My thanks!” responded a young voice in a higher register, and Fiomarre suddenly recognized it as the voice of the lady from Tanathe, one of the San Quellenne. “And you, Sir, watch yours—to the left!”

Ebrai redoubled his defense, and in moments a few more knights joined them, while the peasants used scythes and pitchforks to cut up the dead fallen on the ground.

“Get them back in the center with the others,” Ebrai said to the lady knight.

She nodded, again raising her helm’s visor to breathe easier, and a grin bared her perfect white teeth. Her horse attempted to rear, but she held it down skillfully with one gauntlet sharply on the reins.

She was fierce, electric, like lightning. . . .

Ebrai momentarily thought it, and he said, “Well fought, My Lady San Quellenne!”

“Ah, you recognize me!” She nodded, and her face became proud, and then she once more lowered the visor. Seconds later, the peasants ran, and she followed them, in the direction of relative safety.

Ebrai followed after, making sure to protect their flank.

P
ercy was next to the D’Arvu family, as they kept to a copse of trees, together with several other townspeople of San Quellenne. The clashing of steel was everywhere, harsh metal-on-metal sounds, and the beating of Trovadii drums was relentlessly ringing from the plain.

The pitchfork weighted heavily in her mittened hand. Percy was no stranger to it, but holding up the farm implement as a vertical weapon was an entirely different kind of fieldwork, and her wrist ached from relentlessly gripping it.

Next to her, the Countess Arabella D’Arvu kept a tight hold on little Flavio’s hand. She showed brave composure, but her eyelids fluttered in involuntarily response every time there was the sound of musket fire, especially when the ball projectiles struck the nearby trees. The Lady San Quellenne and she had an unspoken agreement that at present the boy needed a mother more than he needed a sister, and so he was left in the matron’s care.

The Count himself stood beside them, his sword ready, and a few other peasants had staffs or pitchforks like Percy. So far they had been fortunate that no new enemy breach had occurred in their immediate vicinity.

Lady Leonora stood motionless, behind her mother, and her eyes had become glassy in the cold, while a thin rime of frost started to sheen her pale cheeks. There was little doubt in anyone’s mind now that she was well and truly dead.

Percy cast occasional glances her way, and every time she did, the crawling sense in her mind thickened, as though
Persephone
was watching her every thought, precipitating her every act.

My Champion
. . . .

Percy blinked, forcing herself to shut off this dark perverse layer of her mind, to close herself off from the goddess.

There was a small noise to the left, and Percy turned in alarm to find two dead men who had emerged with otherwise uncanny silence from lord knows where, and were upon them.

The first was a burly foot soldier who had been slain in the head, for his one eye-socket was a frozen mess of spilled grey matter, but all his heavily muscled limbs were intact. And he had a musket slung to one shoulder and a sizeable sword in his hand. He must have been one of Hoarfrost’s Lethe rabble for he wore no Trovadii colors. His death shadow was a thick smokestack behind him.

The other soldier was also one of the unaffiliated of Hoarfrost’s army, and he sported a fixed villainous grin, mercenary unmarked clothing, and a thick club in one hand while in the other a long serrated knife. This one’s death shadow also billowed at his side, in an ugly parody of the human body it flanked.

Both of them headed straight for Percy and Countess Arabella with the boy Flavio.

Percy grabbed the pitchfork with both hands and she shoved with all her strength at the burly musketeer. It felt like she was trying to move a side of beef . . . and temples pounding, everything suddenly became very sharp . . . slate-grey sky, black branches, white snow.

She heard Countess Arabella’s small cry behind her, and then the grunts of the Count as he swung his sword awkwardly in an attempt to sever the arms of the attackers.

Percy saw violent movements in her peripheral vision, but did not know what was happening, was not sure. . . . She maintained an unwavering grip on the pitchfork handle with both hands, and it was still lodged in the soldier in front of her, keeping him out of arms reach, but he was pushing back, advancing upon her, relentless like a mountain of cold meat and torn armor.

God help me
 . . . she thought, numb and at the same time bright and reeling with the terrible inevitability of what was before her.
Lord Hades, help me. Angels in Heaven help me. Anyone . . . help me
 . . .

And then she felt her, the dark Goddess, stirring.

Do it!
the perverse thoughts slithered.
Do it and test me!

At the same time, from very far away, Percy felt the distant echo of a vast grey Hall and the sweeping motion of silent cobwebs, and the voice of Lord Death, faded almost completely.
Make your choice
. . . .

Champion.
 . . .

The God and the Goddess were both speaking now, and the word rang with impossible duality.

Champion!

My Champion!

But Percy heard the little boy, Flavio San Quellenne cry out in pain and fear. And her decision was made.