Amber and Ashes - Margaret Weis [3]
Chemosh sat on the lid of a sarcophagus and flicked a fragment of bone off the black velvet of his breeches.
“Where are the young, the strong, the beautiful?” he demanded. “Why don’t they come to me? I’ll tell you why.” He cast a disgusted glance at the departing skeletons. “The young don’t think of death. They think of life, of living, of joy and happiness, youth and beauty. Speak of Chemosh, and they laugh at the thought. ‘Come back to talk to me of him when I am old and ugly,’ they say. Those are the worshippers I attract—arthritic old geezers who haven’t a tooth in their heads, cackling old crones who chant my name and wave black cats at me. Cats!” he muttered. “What do I want with cats?”
Chemosh kicked at the skull and sent it rolling. The rat went skittering off into a dusty corner. “What I want is youth, strength, power. Converts who come to me willingly, eagerly. Converts who will frequent my temples in broad daylight and proclaim that they are proud to worship me. That’s what I want. That’s what I need.” His fist clenched. “To gain the seat of power in the heavens, that is what I must have.”
He stood up and roved restlessly about the vault. “Sargonnas has his minotaur empire that grows larger every day. The namby-pamby Mishakal. How they adore her, all flocking to her worship with cries of ‘Heal me, heal me!’ How can I compete with that?”
He paused to brush strands of sticky cobweb from his black velvet coat. “Even Zeboim, that wanton trollop, has the heart of every sailor in the fleet. Me? I have large quantities of mold and mildew. And spiders. How can I become a king among the pantheon when the most intelligent of my followers are the maggots who feed off them?”
Chemosh wiped the dust from his hands, shook the dirt and bone fragments from his boots, and stalked out the broken-down door that led into the vault. He wound his way up the stairwell that led back to the surface, back to sunshine and fresh air.
“I am going to make changes,” he vowed. “Death will have a new face. A face with bright eyes and ruby lips.”
He emerged into the night and paused to gaze up at the stars, the newly formed constellations, the newly returned three moons. Chemosh smiled.
“Lips people will be dying to kiss.”
ina buried her queen beneath a mountain.
The queen had raised that mountain, molded it, shaped it, lifted it up with her immortal hands. And now she lay beneath it.
The mountain would die. Gnawed by the teeth of the wind, savaged by the drops of rain, slowly, over time, century upon century, the magnificent mountain Takhisis had created would crumble into dust, mingle, and become lost among the ashes of its dead creator. The final ignominy. The final, bitter irony.
“They will pay,” vowed Mina, watching the sun set beyond the mountain, watching its shadow steal across the valley. “They will pay—all those who had a hand in this, mortal and immortal. I would make them pay, if I weren’t so tired. So very tired.”
She woke up tired; if one could use the term “waking,” for she never truly slept. She passed the night in a restless doze in which she remained conscious of every shift in the wind, every animal grunt or cry, every dimming of the moonlight or flicker of the stars. Sleep lapped at her feet, ripples wetting her toes. Whenever sleep’s waves, silent and calm, restful and peaceful, would start to carry her away, she would jerk to wakefulness with a gasp, as though she were drowning, and sleep would recede.
Mina spent the daylight hours guarding the Dark Queen’s burial site. She never moved far from that tomb beneath the mountain, though Galdar nagged at her constantly to leave, if only for a little while.
“Go for a walk among the trees,” the minotaur begged her, “or bathe in the lake or climb the rocky cliffs to see the sunrise.”
Mina could not leave. She had a terrible fear that some person of Ansalon would find this holy site, and once that happened, the gawkers would come to stare and poke at the body and giggle and smirk. The treasure seekers and despoilers