I See Fire | Wattys 2021/22 Shortlist | ✔

Chapter Forty-Three

I skidded to a halt behind the first hill with Grifo at my side. He still wanted to flee, so I gripped his scruff and pinned him to the ground at my side. He gave the smallest whine at the heat of my hand, but he didn't try to make a break for it. We both fell silent as something shifted up ahead. From the shadows where we had stood moments before, a skeleton emerged.

It was a woman's form, walking as only a dead body should not be. Her shirt was loose and simple, but the cloth of her skirt was made of shells, decorated with bones arranged in X-like patterns. Glowing blue lights hovered in the sockets where her eyes should be. She held up a hand as if to stop others behind her. Claws like a rat's graced her fingertips. After scanning the slope, she lowered her hand. Several more skeletons of similar form and dress joined her. Their headdresses of paper banners rustled over the tinkle of their skirts as they prowled across the top of the hill and back into the darkness.

Grifo gave me a despondent look as I released his scruff. I scooted backwards on my stomach. When I had reached a patch of brush, I rose to a crouch and got myself well away from the slope and the river.

The hills here were parched and barren like the grass of the plain where Xochi had faded. Pockets of bushes like skeletons themselves spread dead fingers in the deep twilight. Already the coal-red of the underworld's sky was behind me. It was probably best that I didn't have my stick anymore—its smoke would be a beacon in the still air—but I desperately wanted something more than my knife to defend myself with. Despite the shadow all around, I felt like prey scuttling through a predator's territory. I wished there was more cover.

I wished I could use my fire magic so cover wouldn't matter.

If I could just burn—

I cut that thought short with a clench of my burned hand. I replaced the mental image with Jem's face and trained everything I had on that until the urge waned. The press of the two remaining charms in my pocket reminded me why I was here. I had lost the gods' trail somewhere among the rivers, but I knew where they were headed.

When I felt confident enough to move, I set out further into the hills. Somewhere back here lived Mictlantecuhtli and his wife. The gods had come here to ask for their help. The lord and lady of the underworld were rich from the gifts the dead brought them, and powerful from the fear humans had given them in the world-before days. The flow of death's energy here in Mictlan had sustained that power. They would have plenty to spare.

I had no use for that energy, but if the gods had left already, Mictlantecuhtli and his wife could tell me which way they had gone. Tochtli reappeared with her tail between her legs as I slithered through the hills. Grifo licked her muzzle, and she huddled close to him. We all dropped to our stomachs as the tinkle of shell skirts reached us from up ahead.

It was the skeleton-women again. I could not tell if they were the same ones or a different cluster; they all looked identical and my vision had blurred long ago with the hammer of my pulse and the effort of keeping my fire-bent mind fixed on my goal. The women's heads turned this way and that like bats in search of an insect's footsteps. They faded into the gloom. Again, somehow, I had evaded detection.

I fought to keep my movements slow as I forced myself deeper into this horrid place. My hand nearly brushed a bone jutting from the ground, and I stifled a whimper. A human femur. Embedded in the soil beside it was a human spine. I wanted to get up and run back across the entire underworld, but the heat inside me expanded at the thought. I couldn't run away and feed it any more than I already had. I pressed onwards. I had to.

I had not gone much further when a faint crackle made me freeze. I checked the ground around me, but it wasn't my doing. I doubted the skeleton-women made fires. That left only two alternatives: the gods, or the god they were seeking. I crawled until I could get a handle on the sound. It was somewhere not far away, behind a hill or two. Two soft voices held a conversation over it. I recognized neither, but with my hearing as occupied by my heart as my vision was, I could be mistaken.