The dust-wife took one hand off the sarcophagus and took up her staff, which had been leaning against it. The brown hen flapped her wings. “Then I will fight you,” she said.
You? You who have lived a puny mortal lifetime would fight me for a witch who should have died a thousand years ago? The king began to laugh. It was a deep, roaring laugh, even more like a hammer on metal than his voice, and Marra started to feel like her skull was on the anvil. Go away, little deadspeaker. I am older and greater than you.
The dust-wife ran her fingertip across the crack in the death mask and the laughter in Marra’s head stopped abruptly.
“There,” said the dust-wife as calmly as if they were discussing where to place a stitch. “There, I think. Yes.” She reached up to the brown hen, who stepped onto her hand. Marra had held goshawks on the wrist that did not look so proud as the demon hen in that moment. The dust-wife set her down on the sarcophagus and the hen stabbed her beak down into the crack in the mask.
The king’s scream sounded like a sheet of iron being ripped in half, a long metallic shriek that made Marra’s teeth rattle in her jaw. Her head pounded. Bonedog barked, not an alarm bark but the high, rapid bark of a dog in trouble and desperately calling his pack for backup. It was barely audible, but it hung in the air around them.
What are you doing, witch?!
“Fighting,” said the dust-wife as if it should have been obvious. The hen began to hammer at the crack, occasionally pausing to lift her head and rake her claws across the death mask.
“There’s something else happening,” whispered Fenris. “Isn’t there?” He slumped against the wall next to Marra, holding his temples. “It’s not just a chicken and a mask. She’s doing … something…”
“Oh yes,” said Agnes. Alone of all of them, she seemed to be enjoying herself. Her eyes were bright with interest. “You can see it—oh dear, I suppose you can’t see it! But it’s very good. His magic is all laid out like swords on a rack and she’s … no, that’s a terrible analogy; it’s not like that at all. But it’s good, though!”
“Good?” said Marra weakly, her skull still ringing with the dead king’s scream.
“Let go,” said the dust-wife. “You tried to protect your descendants and instead you shortened their lives for generations. Their souls are feeding the spell that keeps the godmother alive. I can see it. Can’t you?”
Her voice was so confident that Marra found herself looking at the air over the sarcophagus as if there might be something that mortal eyes could see. There was only dust and the brown hen busily cracking open the death mask.
The spell works. It has worked for a thousand years. My descendants are strong and they have endured. I will not allow you to break it.
“You are dead,” said the dust-wife coldly. “Your time to control your family is done.” The demon hen cackled as chips flew from the broken mask. “They cannot live in your shadow any longer.”
The king gathered himself. It felt as if the tomb were breathing in. The painted warriors lifted their swords and the archers let fly their arrows, aimed at the dust-wife. They were trapped in the wall and it should not have been possible for them to reach her, and yet for a moment, it seemed as if she would be drawn into the wall, as if the arrows must reach her …
Moonlight flashed as she held up her staff and the painted arrows fell apart into scattered pigment across the floor.
I will not bend! hissed the dead king, rising from his throne.
“Then you will break,” said the dust-wife, and slammed her staff across the painted wall.
It sounded like a thunderclap in that small room. The moonlight went out. Something metallic hit the floor. For a second time, Marra stood in complete and utter darkness. She heard Bonedog’s ghostly whimper and then Fenris fumbling with his tinderbox. “Candle…” he muttered next to her. “Candle, candle. Where is the— Aha!”
Light flared. The dust-wife was lying half-sprawled across the sarcophagus, her hair wild around her shoulders. She pushed herself up, looking annoyed. The brown hen stood on the death mask, which had split in two, looking as serene as only a chicken can look. As Marra watched, the hen lifted her tail, voided her bowels on the king’s broken face, and then strolled to the dust-wife’s shoulder with a satisfied cluck.
Fenris lifted the candle. The sword had fallen to the floor. On the wall, the king was back in his throne, the archers back in their original positions, but there was a long, jagged mark across the paint, like a lightning bolt, that cut across the king’s face and broke the shield of the guard beside him.
“Is it over?” asked Marra. The air seemed very still and the room somehow smaller. “Is he gone?”
“Gone, no,” said the dust-wife. “People like that hang about for ages. I pried his fingers loose from the world for a bit, though, and that should be enough for the godmother to slip her bonds.”
“Just like that?” asked Marra wonderingly. “That’s all it took?”
“That’s all,” said the dust-wife, striding confidently forward, and promptly crashed to the floor in a semiconscious heap.
Chapter 20
“Well, it was a little bit more than it looked,” said Agnes, when they had rescued the indignant hen and made certain that no bones were broken. The dust-wife protested weakly as they propped her against the wall and poured water down her throat. “You don’t just knock out a dead sorcerer-king and then go for breakfast after.”
“I’m fine,” grumbled the dust-wife. She tried to push herself to her feet and failed spectacularly.
“You poured yourself into the magic and knocked yourself to fainting, little fool,” said Agnes in a remarkably good imitation of the dust-wife herself. “Isn’t that what you said to me?”
The hen cackled. The dust-wife glared up at Agnes and snatched the leather bottle of water out of her fingers. “Fine. Possibly I deserved that. Possibly.”
“Definitely.”
“Can you walk?” asked Fenris. “I can carry you on my back if need be.”
“I can walk,” she growled. “Give me my staff. And give me a minute.”
“I do not know how many more minutes we have,” he said. “My sense of time is not working well, but I think that we are very close to running out of it.”
“I might be able to still enchant the babe,” said Agnes a bit doubtfully. “Even if we miss the christening. But it doesn’t take as well, not with humans. You lay a name on them and suddenly their whole future is rolled out like dough in front of you, but it doesn’t last. Life starts to bake it pretty quick.”
“That,” said the dust-wife witheringly, “was a terrible analogy. Someone give me my staff so that I can beat her about the head and shoulders.” Agnes giggled.
Fenris went to pick up the staff and paused. The sword lay on the ground beneath it. “The sword fell,” he said.
“Take it,” said the dust-wife. “Mine by right of conquest. But I’ll let you have it. You might need a sword, and not even the thief-wheel could think that was grave robbery.” She took the staff from him and this time managed to get upright, with the help of Fenris under one arm and the questionable assistance of Bonedog bouncing around her feet.
“What happens now?” asked Marra. “Is the godmother dead?”
“I imagine so,” said the dust-wife. “I wouldn’t stick around if I were her.” She took another limping step forward. “I’m most curious about all the other spells that people have cast over the years. If any of them are active, now that the godmother’s gone, they might come home to roost.”
They all shuffled to the door of the tomb and then stopped. The hallway stretched out before them. Three openings on one side, two on the other.
“Now what?” asked Agnes. “I got turned around when that screaming thing dragged me along.”
“Going back to the source was one thing,” said Fenris, holding up the candle. “We could follow so many dead ends … Can Finder help?”