Lips Touch: Three Times(21)
Author: Laini Taylor

Vasudev hopped around in an agitated dance, crying out, "You can’t! Yama will never sanction this!"

"A life for a life," Estella said. "That’s how it works." Ill as she was, skin taut over her fine bones, she still looked like some kind of goddess, the brilliant filaments of her hair riding the drafts of heat that pulsed through the passage. Her eyes were hard and clear and insistent. She repeated, "A life for a life," then added, "Mine for his."

Anamique stared at her. Pranjivan’s shadow clung to its mistress. The demon growled, "No! It won’t do! Stop this nonsense at once!"

With grave intensity Estella looked into Anamique’s eyes and said, "Speak, child, and send my soul to the Fire. Follow, and I’ll find your soldier for you. You can lead him out. Speak now," she said urgently, pleading. "Say anything. Say his name. Please?

James, Anamique thought, holding his name on the tip of her tongue like the seed of an entire life that might, from that moment forward, grow entwined with her own like a lovely vine. But she couldn’t say his name, not now. She wouldn’t use it as a murder weapon. Estella’s face was hopeful, pleading. Anamique wouldn’t say James’s name, but she had another idea. She exhaled slowly and then took a deep breath. And for the second time in her life, she let her voice out of its cage.

She sang.

When Estella heard her voice, in the moment just before her eyes rolled back in their sockets, she was transfigured by a look of joy. Then she collapsed. Pranjivan’s shadow caught her and gathered her up.

Anamique had to blink. The shadow held the body in its arms, but Estella’s soul still stood before her, weightless and joyous. Free. For a long moment she stood and listened as Anamique’s voice soared, then she beckoned and turned and started toward the Fire on light, silent feet. She dove into the flames and the long tendrils of her gun-metal gray hair were the last to disappear. Gleaming like lit fuses, they wavered and snapped as the flames enfolded her completely.

Still singing, heart racing, Anamique followed.

Into the Fire.

It drew her in. It raged around her. She felt heat, but it didn’t burn her. She felt as hard as a diamond. Distinct. She went on singing.

Behind her in the black tunnel, Vasudev was again stunned into a stupor by the sound of her voice. His eyes lost focus and his mouth fell slack, slaver stringing between his pointed teeth. Pranjivan’s shadow still held Estella’s frail old body in its arms. It glided slowly into the Fire behind Anamique, and unlike the stuff of souls, which may subsist within the inferno for ages untold, shadow and skin were of earthly make and were instantly incinerated, leaving nothing behind, not even ash.

In the Fire, Anamique’s eyes were open and she saw countless souls drifting all around her, souls like alchemist’s metal being transfigured in this great crucible, souls made molten, made new. She floated, following the tendrils of Estella’s hair through the flames. She sang. With each and every note her soul knew a pang of joy, as if her voice escaped again and again from its accursed prison with every word.

And then, suddenly, she became aware of a presence nearby in the sea of flame, a magnificent and blistering intelligence hidden from view. It was Yama, Lord of Hell, and he was everywhere, invisible all around her, listening, and she went on singing every role she knew. Carmen, Manon, Euridice, Musetta, Isolde. The "Liebestod," that lament for a dead love. She sang it all the way through this time.

And she was still singing when she found James spinning slowly in the flames. His eyes were open but unseeing. Her voice faltered to a stop.

"Exquisite," said Yama.

Anamique looked around but saw no great shape or silhouette in the Fire. Perhaps, she thought, he was the Fire.

"Take your lover and go," the Lord of Hell continued. "And take the others too. Estella’s soul shall suffice in trade for them all. But there is an additional price."

"I will pay any price," Anamique said. These were the first words she had ever spoken that came not from an opera libretto but from her own heart, and she meant them. Any price.

"You will serve in her place as Ambassador to Hell."

Anamique felt a spasm of fear but she nodded. "Anything," she repeated. The heat was rising. She began to feel the muted movement of the flames against her flesh as the tonic lost its potency. At that moment she was shunted backward very quickly, tumbling head over heels until she was thrown clear of the Fire. She fell and felt the hot onyx floor against her face. She rose to her feet, saw Vasudev standing by the tea table, coming out of his trance. She didn’t see James or the others and she didn’t turn round to look for them. She began again to sing, and she picked up the scorched end of Pranjivan’s kite string and followed it out of Hell. She had learned from Orpheus’s mistake, and did not look back.

TWELVE The Ambassador

James’s wife never told him that she loved him, not out loud, but he learned to believe it anyway. There are other ways of showing someone you love them, such as fetching them out of Hell. Their wedding was small, just the two of them with Pranjivan — eternally shadowless now — and Anamique’s parents and sisters, who recalled every moment of their strange resurrections. They all stood with the minister in the garden, and Anamique mouthed the words of her vows in silence while James spoke softly, his voice husky and tremulous with emotion.

After, there was a wide white bed with a cocoon of mosquito netting stirred by a punkah fan, and cool limbs entwined beneath a white sheet. This time when Anamique and James kissed, there was no dread or haste or clash of teeth, but only lingering and sweetness, and lips straying from lips to taste the curves of each other’s throats and shoulders, the palms of hands, the fluttering fragility of eyelids, the smooth, arched valleys of backs. The silent bride bit down on her lip so nothing could coax a killing sound from her, not pleasure and not pain, and she discovered both without a murmur.

As the years went by, a cradle was thrice filled and Anamique bit down on a leather strap for each birth: two boys, then a girl. The boys were born without so much as a moan from their beautiful mother, but the girl, a wily stargazer, drove a single cry from her and she had to stagger down the onyx passage, wild-eyed and wrapped in the blood-stained sheet of her childbed, to win back her baby from the Fire. Vasudev cowered behind the tea table and made no attempt to barter with her, and once her tiny girl’s soul was cradled safe in her arms, Anamique sang her a lullaby. It was the only lullaby she would ever sing, and it was sung in Hell.

Unlike her family, Vasudev heard Anamique’s voice often and it had the same hypnotic effect each time. He found, to his everlasting bitterness, that his spicy little curse had had an unintended consequence: It gave this new Ambassador a power her predecessor had never ever dreamed of. All she had to do was sing and Vasudev was lost. The music flowed into him like a river and swept all his malice away, and when he awakened from his trance, he would hear himself muttering preposterous things like, "Whatever you think best," or, "Of course, my dear, all the children shall survive the flood."