Above her, it looked like roots were entangled to form a ceiling. But was that … was that fur stuck between them?
She blinked, and her vision cleared slightly. More than a dozen animal carcasses in varying stages of decay were suspended above her, strung within the web of a tree. Bones, skin, eyeless sockets.
Corinthe quickly turned away, wincing. The gnome looked at her, then up.
“Pets. They be good tests. But not always success,” he said, frowning. Then he shrugged. “Feeds tree. Keeps her happy.” He reached up and patted a bit of the twisted wooden ceiling affectionately; Corinthe now recognized that they were in the hollowed-out ground directly beneath the tree’s vast canopy of roots. The creatures trapped in the roots were ones she didn’t quite recognize—they didn’t exist in Pyralis. Or Humana, for that matter. The gnome returned to his task, bending forward to continue removing the stingers from her body. There were dozens and dozens of them remaining in her legs; Corinthe couldn’t stand to look.
“I always listening for the hornets. They’s very hard to find. They’s very hard to trap.” He rubbed his hands together. “Then I hears them and—I finds an Executor! So many questions, which to ask first?”
Alarm shot up her spine. He knew she was an Executor. She tried to force her fingers to move, but the command got lost somewhere between her brain and her hand.
“You be lucky Beatis find you in time.”
Something pricked her arm again. Before she could protest, a small tube was guiding her blood into a clear glass vial, which the gnome quickly filled and corked. He tucked it into his pocket, rubbed a greenish liquid into the spot he had bled, and waddled to the other side of the room with his jar. Carefully, he placed it on a shelf lined with an eclectic mixture of bottles, cans, jars, and boxes, each with peeling labels made of leaves and paste.
He pulled the vial from his pocket and slipped it inside a wooden box, then pushed it back behind several large bottles. When he returned, he held out a clear jar full of moving black things. He reached into the jar and pulled out something that looked like a slug. He held it between his stubby fingers for a moment, grinning as the slimy creature twisted and turned.
“What is that?”
“Leeches. They be good at sucking out the poisons,” Beatis said. “Don’t worry, pretty thing. Beatis be taking care of you.”
“Please …” Now she couldn’t help it. Her voice quavered. Stars danced brightly behind her eyelids, and she felt herself sinking, falling back into unconsciousness. She fought to stay awake, to stay alert.
Beatis carefully placed the slimy creature over one of the welts left by a hornet’s stinger. A faint tugging sensation, not wholly unpleasant, came from where that thing had attached to her skin. Leeches, she knew, existed in Humana as well. Often, things were blown along the Crossroad and passed between worlds this way—like litter, like dust clinging to the shoes of those who traveled through the universe’s infinite realms.
He attached the creatures all over her bare arms, where ugly bruises and welts showed evidence of the hornets’ attack. Inside her chest, something began to burn. Fire trickled down her arms. Her legs. She wanted to scream but couldn’t drag in enough air to make more than a whimper. Was this how the earth felt when she stitched from it, sucked from it?
Corinthe’s stomach rolled. The room dipped and swayed.
“Please,” she moaned again, half delirious with pain.
The carcasses above her began to move, swinging, disjointed, from their heels. One grinned down at her, its face half gone with rot. She slammed her eyes closed, though the image remained burned behind her eyelids.
But then the fire inside her died down and the frantic pounding of her pulse slowed to a normal rhythm. The room stopped spinning, and the dead animals stopped dancing above her head. She tried to move again. This time, her hand twitched.
After a few minutes more, full feeling began to flood back to her hands and fingers, trickling down her legs to her toes. It was working. One by one, the leeches released and fell to the dirt floor, curled into tight black balls. Beatis carefully picked them up and returned them to the jar.
“Good test subjects, yes? Full of venom. Perhaps they die. Perhaps not.” He shuffled to the shelves again and replaced the jar on the shelf.
Corinthe slowly pushed to sitting, ducking her head to avoid bumping up against one of the half-rotted skeletons above her. Now that she was upright, she practically grazed the ceiling of roots with her head.
Gnome grottoes tended to be small and sparse: holes in the ground, literally. Now that Corinthe was thinking more clearly, she noticed a hole in one portion of the ceiling, a tunnel barely visible beyond the roots. That must be how the gnome came and went and how he pulled her into the grotto.
It occurred to her that she should be grateful.
“Thank you,” she said. The leeches had left faint bruises all over her skin, but as she flexed her fingers, she was amazed that most of the pain had abated. She could move again. “For saving my life.”
Beatis laughed until he wheezed. “Thank you, thank you!” he parroted gleefully. “I just buy you time. No cure for hornet’s sting. You still die, just not so fast. Two days, maybe …” He counted on his fat, stubby fingers. “Three, maybe, if you’re lucky.”
She felt a jolt of panic. No, she couldn’t die. Fates didn’t die.
But she wasn’t a Fate anymore.
She’d been cast out into Humana as an Executor. Had she lived there so long that she had become like them? Finite. Mortal. She had already bled like them, had been wounded and fatigued.
Had wanted to sleep.
The hornets’ venom had stunned her, rendered her unconscious. What if the gnome was right?
What would happen to her after death? Where would she go? She knew that other people, mortal people, believed in many different outcomes, but what did she believe?
She had never had to consider it before.
The patron saint of lost causes … She suddenly remembered the words of Sylvia, the principal.
But if she could make it back to Pyralis in time … if she was restored as a Fate before the venom took hold …
“Please,” Corinthe said carefully. “I’m looking for someone. Do you know where I can find a gateway?”
The gnome’s lips curled back into a smile, revealing those awful, jagged teeth. “Not time enough. Beatis take care until you die. Never had Executor before.”
She stared at him. “How did you—?”
“Aha! Hahaha! I be right, then.” He leaned forward and sniffed. “I smell human on you. But no human blood. No. Different blood.” His eyes seemed to swell even larger. He picked up a bottle of a greenish fluid. “Perhaps we test some potions. This made from nectar of green bell flower. Very rare. Might be fatal. Either way, you die.” He let out a raucous burst of laughter.
Corinthe pushed into a crouch. She felt stronger now. “You can’t keep me here,” she said. Her head bumped against the roots and a shower of dirt rained down on her.
“Oh yes. Yes, I can. I find you. You are mine now.” He pulled a dirty knife with a long, blood-spotted blade from behind his back and leveled it at her. “You stay.”
Corinthe tried to swallow and found she couldn’t. Blood pounded in her ears. Trying to fight unarmed in this tiny space, with venom thick in her veins, would be hopeless.