The Unfinished Song (Book 5): Wing (26 page)

“A quarter turn of a moon… plus a day or two….”

“That’s a new low of stupid, even for you.”

“I have magics from my Lady that sustain me more
than mere food ever could.”

“Worse and worse. You’re drunk on her magic on an
empty stomach. Sleep, you idiot.”

“I’ve already lost too much time.” He meant to force
himself to his feet. Instead, Finnadro fell asleep.

The problem with traveling was that there was
nothing to do all day except walk and think, and every kind of
thought hurt. Memories prickled, every face attached to them a
thorn in her heart. Mama—where was she, how was she coping with the
near destruction of Lost Swan clan? Hadi, Jensi—had they survived
the war? Had Tamio and Kemla?

Spinning threads into the future was no safer. All
that loomed ahead was the possibility of her own death or failure
(followed by death). She could not even take comfort in
surrendering to that inevitability. She had the obligation, heavy
as a stone, to fight for the White Lady, for the future of the
Aelfae, and therefore for herself, even when it would be easier, so
much lighter, to admit she put on war paint for a battle already
won by the other side.

She dared not edge sideways toward thinking of
Kavio. Though in fact, she found it hard to think of anyone else,
given Umbral’s mask.

Kill Umbral then. Kill him over and over again in
her imagination. Only…that game had lost its luster too. She
sickened herself with her own gore. If she could have rested her
thoughts anywhere else, she would have stopped killing him in her
mind. If every other thought hadn’t hurt more.

The Boglands seemed endless. The weather dressed in
drear, under a cloak of grim. Peat hills alternated with watery
marsh. They had only a few roots left to eat in the packs, so they
skipped the morning meal. Embarrassingly, Dindi’s stomach rumbled,
loud enough that Umbral glanced at her.

Once they were away from the hobgoblin clanhold, but
well before the sun’s Western descent, Umbral halted in a copse of
trees.

“Our stocks are low. I should hunt now.”

“I will gather roots,” Dindi offered. “And berries,
if I can find any.”

“I doubt you can this late in the season,” Umbral
frowned.

“There might be blueberries or cowberries.”

“You can look, but don’t stray far.”

“I gave my word,” Dindi said stiffly. She felt all
the more prickly about that since she had come close to breaking it
when she was with the hobgoblins.

“That’s not what I meant. That black thread…. Just
be careful.”

Umbral set the packs and blankets against the trunk
of an oak, on a carpet of dense sphagnum moss. He unpacked some of
his weapons. He had an incredible assortment of daggers, clubs,
dirks, picks and more, all of the finest quality obsidian. Umbral
chose his bow and quiver. He handed Dindi an obsidian ax for
clearing away the underbrush. They left the packs in the clearing
and went their separate ways.

Dindi searched through the trees for bushes that
might have saved a few last berries from the snows. She did not
find any blueberries but something better: a cranberry bog. The
patch of shallow water had a thin layer of ice frozen over the
cranberry vines. Dindi whacked the ice open with the ax, to search
the vines for late blooming cranberries. After taking off her fur
boots, she re-hitched the folds of her legwals so that her legs
were bare from the knees down. With bare feet she braved the chilly
water, wading into the pool. She thought she saw enticing little
red globes under the ice. An odd sound, like creaking ice and a
gurgle of water, made her pause. It seemed unlikely that any large
predators were active in the frozen lake, however, and the berries
were just a little further out in the water…just a little
further…

Something under the water grabbed her ankle and
yanked. Dindi lost her balance. She managed only one startled
scream before it pulled her down into the cold water tangled with
vines.

Dindi fought back. The thing was trying to drag her
deeper, and she struggled to remain in the shallows. The sediment
was sandy and thick with plants.

Her foe reared out of the water. Dindi screamed
again.

It was a bog mummy. Dindi had heard of such things
but had never had the ill fortune to encounter one before. Nasty
fae who were caught by humans were sprinkled with salt, tied down
with stones, and left in bogs. Salt ate away all their flesh,
leaving nothing but bones, but as with burning in a kiln, it could
only keep their immortal bodies dead for a few dozen decades.
Slowly their magic flesh would rebuild itself—rotting in reverse,
as it were.

The bog mummy must have been here for decades,
perhaps even centuries, tied down at the bottom of the bog until
Dindi had inadvertently cut him free. This was no naughty pixie. He
was as tall as a human, a head taller than Dindi. Though his flesh
was eroded with sog, and in places, completely eaten away, his body
structure was mostly intact. His rib cage was a gaping hole, with
disgusting pulp oozing inside, garishly aglow. Half of his head was
rotted away. Nevertheless, his resemblance to a human corpse in the
process of steady deterioration was deceptive, because the fae
would actually continue to grow more and more whole with each
passing year.

His eyes gleamed with a feral light. Talons
protruded from gruesomely veined hands. Dindi could see no more of
the fae’s true substance, so thickly was he encrusted with mud and
crumbling peat.

No time for screaming. Dindi skipped back from her
assailant, trying to find room to dance, but the waterlogged
cranberry vines betrayed her, tangling her ankles. She fell back.
The bog mummy grabbed Dindi by the hair and whipped her around so
that she now fell towards him. With a raspy roar, he wrapped a
desquamated arm around her neck. He squeezed.

Agonizing pain jolted through her.

The mummy did not just strangle her. It sucked the
light from her aura. She felt herself wilting, and saw the mummy
gaining flesh and strength. The face flushed into life. Less and
less did it resemble a corpse. More and more, it grew into a
handsome young man, now with just one rotted cheek, with wings like
a dragonfly and an aura of six Chromas.

The thing was no ordinary bog mummy, no simple fae
trapped and left to decay.

It was an Aelfae.

But that’s impossible.

Time slowed. She could see nothing but bright dots
in a haze. The mummy’s squelching steps thundered loudly in her
ears. Her heart felt too tight. Her lungs felt ready to burst.

Then someone punched the mummy in its putrid cheek.
Umbral, thank Mercy!
The mummy did not release Dindi, but
its grip was loosed enough for her to gasp for a breath.

With a growl, Umbral splashed into the bog and
bodily attacked the mummy, slashing at it with the ax which Dindi
had dropped. Umbral chopped off the arm that held her by the
throat.

The disconnected arm still did not release its
grip.

Dindi stumbled from the rest of the mummy. The
animate arm continued to do its best to choke her, but for all its
enthusiasm, it now lacked effective homicidal leverage. She ripped
it off her and threw it on the ground where it flopped around
indignantly.

A hissing screech, almost too high-pitched to hear,
made Dindi wince and cover her ears. Threads of blackest shadow
streamed from the mummy’s mouth, like a snake’s black tongue, as if
it were sucking in the lifeforce of the whole world. The vile
tongue of darkness lashed out and curled around Dindi’s ankle.

Another jolt of shear pain racked her body. Once
again, she felt her energy draining out of her body. The mummy
regrew its lost arm. The hole in its cheek healed over. There was
no mistaking the mummy now: an Aelfae lord, in all his shining
power and glory, his lip curled in an arrogant sneer. The more
power he stole from her, the stronger he glowed and the fiercer he
glowered.

“Behold, I have returned to Faearth, mud-made human
scum!” the Aelfae bellowed. “Now you and all your kind shall pay
the uncounted deathdebts you owe my kind!”

Umbral sliced the black coil around her ankle. The
tongue of darkness thrashed, but he grabbed it and knotted it,
which made it wither up and withdraw.

“Go on, go, get out of here!” Umbral ordered
Dindi.

“But you—”

“It can’t take Chromas from
me
, it’s after
you
!” Umbral shouted. “Go!”

The Aelfae launched onto Umbral’s back, its claws
digging at his eyes.

“Watch out!” Dindi cried, too late.

Umbral flipped the Aelfae off him, but it came right
back, clawing and kicking. When Dindi hedged closer to help, Umbral
shouted angrily, “It feeds on your light! The only way you can help
is to get out of here! That is a command!”

He was right. The Aelfae lashed out its terrible
tongue again. It strove to reach her. She had to skip backwards to
evade the questing tendril of darkness, while Umbral wrestled the
Aelfae alone.

The Aelfae’s unnatural tongue did not bleed where
sliced. It lashed out again, this time to strangle Umbral. Perhaps
it could not suck any light from the Deathsworn warrior, but the
Aelfae could choke him. Or drown him. The mummy dived deeper into
the water, dragging Umbral down after it.

“No!” Dindi screamed.

Bubbles and ripples marked the water where they
disappeared, and then the still surface of the water reflected only
the gray sky.

The surface broke: something was flung out of the
water, to land on the shore.

The ax.

Torn with indecision, she almost dove after them.
But what if the Aelfae sought to lure her down to gain more power?
The silence dragged on and she could not bear to do nothing any
longer. No human could survive under water so long. She grabbed the
ax and splashed into the bog.

The mummy burst out of the water. There was no sign
of Umbral. Terrified, she realized the Aelfae had drowned him. Now
it reached for her.

The undead Aelfae dragged Umbral under the slimy
surface of the bog.

Liquid darkness pushed in on him. The Aelfae
grappled Umbral’s jaws open, forcing him to swallow water. His
lungs exploded. The agony lasted endlessly. A wave of dizziness
spilled into the pain. The Aelfae held him down, patiently waiting
for him to drown.

A lost memory floated with him in the darkness. He
didn’t know if it was his own or a thread cut loose from one of his
victims.
Watery darkness…a struggle against a huge and terrible
foe…as large as a house... a shark
. For days he had fought the
fae shark, but how had he survived that long underwater? Perhaps it
was not a memory at all, but a hallucination. The pain was intense,
yet he was beginning to feel giddy.

Umbral knew he was on the edge of joining his dark
Lady.

But he did not.

Gills opened inside his throat.

He gulped the water like air. It tasted foul and
pungent, but it also reeled him back from the edge. He stopped
thrashing, let himself relax, and, finally, the Aelfae released
him. It must have thought he was dead.

Umbral opened his eyes under water. The murk did not
allow much visibility, but the Aelfae mummy glowed with power.
Umbral swam after it until they both reached the shallows
again.

Umbral kept low in the water until he could brace
his feet between two rocks. Then he grabbed the Aelfae’s legs and
flipped him upside down. In the next swift motion, Umbral picked up
both rocks and smashed the Aelfae’s head between them.

The head spit guts like a tossed pumpkin. Brains
splattered on Umbral’s knees…but Aelfae’s head reknit almost as
soon as it burst. It stood up, whole again, and rushed him.

Umbral blocked a series of jabs, then performed a
takedown that flipped the mummy on its back in the water. Umbral
smashed its nose in with his elbow. It should have been a killing
blow, but the mummy just staggered back a few steps. Its nose
straightened.

The Aelfae ripped a tree trunk out of the marsh
water and bashed Umbral across the flank. He fell hard. His hands
and knees sank into the muck under the shallows. The Aelfae jumped
with both feet onto his back, slamming him even deeper into the
slosh and mud. Umbral sputtered for breath again. There was too
much dirt in the water for his gills to work and too much water in
the air for his windpipe.

He squirmed forward. Made the mud work for him. The
Aelfae could not hold on to him. Umbral surged back to his feet.
The Aelfae cut him down to his knees again with slashing hand
chops.

Out of the corner of his eye, Umbral caught sight of
Dindi raising the ax. He wanted to shout at her to get out of
there—why could she not follow the simplest of directions?—but
dared not draw the Aelfae’s attention to her.

She hacked the ax into the Aelfae’s back.

Another killing wound completely wasted on the
mucking undead thing.

Maybe not completely wasted.

The Aelfae was distracted only for the flicker of a
moment, but at last Umbral realized what he had to do.

Moving close as if for an embrace, Umbral placed his
hand flat against the Aelfae.

Umbral drew on his Penumbra more strongly than he
ever had in his memory. He opened the void gathered around him. He
wounded the very fabric of existence, which rippled, shuddersome,
throughout the marsh and sky. He
wrenched
.

The handsome Aelfae lord opened his mouth in
screamless shock. His skin disintegrated, the muscle beneath ripped
and rotted, the bones beneath that yellowed and shattered into
dust. For a heartbeat an unbearable, high pitched keening rent the
sky, then deadened silence.

Nothing at all remained of the Aelfae.