Bone Magic

by Brent Nichols

  She worked her way through the hatch and hopped across to the dormer roof where Elanyn had crouched. Behind her, she heard the elf locking the hatch.

  Tira wanted to stop and get her bearings, but she was bleeding onto the roof tiles, marking the spot where she'd come out, making it easier for goblins to find her friends. So she scrambled upward, catching the ridge and pulling herself up. She badly wanted to crawl, but there was no time. She made herself stand, and took a couple of mincing steps along the ridge.

  Wood slid against wood, and Tira turned her head, scanning the building across the street. Someone was opening a window. That could only mean archers.

  The roof dropped away on either side, quite steep, with nothing but a two-story drop to hard cobbles beneath it. Vertigo pulled at her, and she started to kneel, wanting to get back on her hands and knees. But a vision of Sari's undead face flashed before her eyes, and she straightened. For a moment she stood upright, waiting for the city to stop spinning around her. Then she started to run.

  Every step was terrifying, but keeping her balance actually wasn't too difficult. The ridge line was covered in flat tiles, making a pathway wider than the palm of her hand. If it was at ground level she could have balanced on it all day without effort. Only the paralyzing terror of falling made it challenging now. She kept her eyes on the tiles directly in front of her feet, did her best to ignore the yawning void in her peripheral vision, and ran.

  It seemed to take years to reach the end of the building, but in could have been no more than moments. To her right was the street, to the left an alley. She could hear shouts and running feet from the street, but only silence from the alley side, so she turned that way, dropping down onto a dormer roof. She hung by the roof with one hand, leaning down to peer into the window. The room inside was dark. There was no way the window would be unlocked, not when a burglar would have such easy access. She drew the dagger from her belt and drew her hand back, ready to drive the pommel through the glass.

  The window swung outward, opening a couple of inches and bumping against her arm. A voice in a loud whisper said, "What do you want?"

  "I need to come in."

  "Well, get out of the way, then."

  Tira pulled herself back up and perched on the dormer roof while the window swung wide open beneath her. Then she stepped to the sill and slid into the room.

  People moved in the darkness around her, closing the window and covering it with a heavy curtain. Then someone lifted the cover on a lamp and the room filled with a soft yellow light.

  She was in a bedroom. A man and a woman stood before her in long nightshirts, eyes wide. The man had a knife in his hand. The woman held a small lamp. They were elderly, with grey hair covered by sleeping caps.

  "Who are you?" the man said. "He didn't sound worried, just curious.

  "Never mind that," said the woman. "She's hurt, Georham. Get her a chair."

  Their names, Tira soon learned, were Georham and Marlin. They sold sewing supplies from a cart most days, but they were staying indoors while they waited for someone to deal with the goblins. So far they hadn't been bothered, but they were getting hungry, so they hoped the king would send troops soon.

  Marlin was very businesslike as she got Tira out of her trousers and examined her legs. "Don't mind Georham, dear, he won't look. Not if he knows what's good for him. I would just cut these trousers off, but I don't think you have anything else to put on, am I right? Georham, bring the water, would you? I'm sorry we can't heat it. Now, hold still."

  She cleaned Tira's cuts, bandaged them with strips of fabric from something she called her "quilting bag," and leaned back to examine her handiwork. Fresh blood was soaking through the bandage on Tira's thigh, but the smaller cut just above her knee had closed.

  "There. We really should wash out your trousers, but water is in short supply just now. The closest pump is down in the street, and we're trying not to go out if we can help it."

  "That's all right," Tira assured her. "They will be fine." She leaned on Marlin for support as she worked her trousers up over her bandages. Marlin's pan of wash water was dark with blood, and the right leg of Tira's trousers was noticeably heavier than the left, from the blood soaked into it. A cold hand squeezed Tira's stomach every time she thought about just how much blood she'd lost. She was still bleeding, too, though slowly, and her night's work was nowhere near finished.

  "Will you be staying here to hide?" Marlin asked.

  Tira shook her head. "There's something I need to do."

  Marlin nodded. "Well, Neris keep you safe."

  "Thank you." Tira looked down at the bandages showing through the cuts in her trousers. "How can I ever thank you enough?"

  "Oh, never mind that. You got those cuts fighting the goblins?"

  Tira nodded.

  "Then that's all the thanks we need."

  Chapter 10

  They let her out into a dark corridor. The stairs were close by, and they led her down two flights to the ground floor. She crept to the street entrance, opened the door a crack, and peeked out. A handful of goblins hurried past, headed in the direction of Tam and Elanyn's last stand.

  Tira eased the door shut, murmuring a prayer for her friends, and moved to the back of the building. The alley was dark and empty, and she slipped outside into the cold night air.

  The castle was close now, the bulk of it looming above her in the darkness. Ordinarily it would have been the most closely-defended part of the city, but the goblin invasion was barely a day and a half old, and the goblins, hardly a group known for their discipline, were sloppy. Tira stood in a doorway and watched a handful of goblins come out through a sally port in the castle wall. They meandered out into the town, and she breathed a silent thanks that not every goblin in the city was rushing to kill Tam and Elanyn.

  When the goblins were out of sight she hurried to the sally port. They'd left the door ajar, and she peeked inside, seeing only blackness. She slipped through, pressing her back to the wall.

  The curtain wall enclosed a small bailey with the mass of the keep rising fifty feet high in the center. Moonlight glinted on the walls of the keep, but everything else was in deep shadow. Tira headed for the keep, unable to see her own feet, taking small, cautious steps with her hands outstretched before her. There was grass under her feet, then cobblestones. She encountered no sentries, and her straining ears caught no sounds closer than the streets outside.

  Finally her questing fingers hit the wall of the keep. She crept along in the darkness, one hand on the wall, looking for a door. She came to a corner, peeked around it, and saw a broad flight of steps, lit with a pale yellow glow. The main entrance to the keep was unprotected, the big iron-banded doors wide open, light from the interior shining across the steps.

  Tira crouched at the corner for a long time, listening and watching, but nothing moved. Walking up the front steps in plain sight seemed foolhardy, but there was no sign that the goblins were keeping any kind of guard. The city wall was relevant, since that was where a counter-attack would come. It seemed the castle wasn't important to the goblins at all.

  At last she took a deep breath, walked around the corner, crossed briskly to the steps, walked up and entered the keep.

  The entry hall might have looked grand by the light of day. With only one light burning somewhere deeper in the keep, the hall was all murk and shadows. She saw the first signs of battle here, arrows sticking from walls and a pathetic barricade made of furniture blocking one corridor. There was a heap of human-sized armor in one corner, but no bodies.

  She would find the bodies with the necromancer, she supposed.

  Tira walked through the ground floor of the keep, sword in hand, finding no sign of life except a rat feasting boldly atop a table in the kitchen. There was a broad staircase leading up, and four more staircases, one in the tower at each corner of the structure. Tira ignored all of them. She had a sense of what the necromancer liked, and it wasn't heights.

  Faint sme
ars of blood on the floor gave Tira her first clue. The bodies of the dead had been dragged deeper into the building. She followed the smears and found the stairway to the dungeon hidden behind a battered door just off of the kitchen.

  A faint glow showed her a corridor at the bottom of the stairs. She crept down the steps, sword in hand, fighting an impulse to hold her breath. The air was musty and humid, the smell of raw earth and mold mixed with something darker.

  Death. The dungeon level stank of dead bodies beginning to spoil.

  She reached the bottom of the stairs and moved down a narrow corridor. Cells lined the walls right and left, the doors ajar, the cells empty. Then she came to cells piled high with corpses, human and goblin, civilian and soldier, all mixed together. It was the necromancer's raw materials, waiting to be reanimated.

  Silent as mist, Tira inched her way along the corridor. There was a door of bars at the end of the corridor, standing wide open. Beyond it was a larger room, well-lit. She could see a stone-flagged floor and a bit of the far wall. She paused when she reached the barred door, gathering her courage. Then she took a deep breath and sprang into the room beyond.

  The underground chamber was a big square, maybe fifty paces by sixty, almost the size of the keep above. The ceiling was low and damp, and the air was thick with must and death. Lamps burned on poles in each corner, leaving the center of the room dim. Four massive pillars supported the ceiling, huge brick structures as wide as Tira was tall, and in the zig-zag pattern of shadows she almost didn't notice the creature.

  It was big, huge, a vast monstrosity standing against the far wall. It was hunched forward because it was much too tall for the room. Shoulders five feet across nearly touched the six-foot-high ceiling. It was bearlike, with a small head and vast, hairy arms hanging nearly to its knees. The body was thick and pudgy, the legs solid and short, and it had paws ending in claws that had to be three inches long. Small, black eyes, close set, peered out above a broad snout and a mouth that couldn't fully close because of a forest of jagged teeth.

  Tira had never seen anything like it. There were stories of windigos in the forests of the North, and creatures even stranger from far to the west. She had always dismissed such tales as fantasy, but it seemed at least one story was true.

  The creature seemed to be staring at her, but it didn't move. She took a cautious step toward it, and her disquiet grew. There was a pale red aura around the creature, reminding her of the cursed knife at the palisade. Some sort of magic was at work on this creature.

  The thing lifted its head, sniffing the air, and she saw a deeper hue to the aura under its chin. The fur was gone from the creature's throat, and she saw an almost metallic sheen to its skin. She stepped closer, and it reached a paw toward her, seeming to strain against some invisible bond. It growled, a bass rumble that echoed with rage and suffering.

  Tira was in the middle of the room when movement caught the corner of her eye. She whirled, lifting her sword. It was an undead man, a big, broad-shouldered brute, his hair brushing the ceiling as he backed away from her. She watched him, but he didn't seem threatening. He backed against the wall, holding his hands up, palms toward her.

  There was a table near him, built like the table in the necromancer's abandoned lair under the monastery, and Tira smiled. She had the right place. Next to the table she saw a dozen or more barrels, cut in half to make wooden buckets. Each bucket bristled with short, thick arrows. They were crossbow bolts, she realized. There had to be hundreds of them. She tilted her head, squinting at the buckets. There was a faint glow around each one. The heads of the crossbow bolts were cursed.

  She scanned the rest of the room, moving around, looking behind every pillar. There was nothing else there. One undead man, one monstrous creature held in some sort of magical bonds, a table, and nearly a thousand cursed bolts. The necromancer was not there.

  Tira sheathed her sword and put an arrow to her bowstring. If the wizard appeared in the doorway, she wanted to be able to kill him from across the room. Then she walked to within five or six paces of the beast. She turned so she could keep the doorway and the undead man in her peripheral vision, and examined the creature, trying to figure out what was happening with its throat.

  As she watched, a tuft of hair drifted down from the creature's neck. The skin beneath was silver-grey, and it writhed a bit where the fur ended. And another wisp of fur fell away.

  Tira lowered her bow, holding arrow and bow with her left hand while she used her right hand to draw her sword. She advanced on the creature, and it growled, thrashing at the air with its paws. She avoided the swings, and reached out, jabbing at the silvery skin with the tip of her sword.

  The sword clanged as metal hit metal. The silvery skin bent inward, but the sword did no damage.

  The beast swatted her sword with one vast paw, knocking the blade out of her hand. She picked it up and sheathed it. The creature slashed the air, and a drop of blood hit her chin. Its paw was cut.

  "I wish Tam was here," she muttered. He was much better at figuring things out. She raked her fingers through her hair and asked herself what Tam would say if he was there.

  "It's a magical process," she said to the creature. "The necromancer is turning your skin to metal." She shook her head at the nightmare image of an unkillable beast rampaging through the city streets. "Gods preserve us."

  She brought her bow up, taking aim, and the undead man moved in the corner of her eye. She swung her aim to him, and he shrank back, hands up defensively. Tira lowered the bow. She only had four arrows, and these two, though dangerous, weren't the primary target. She would save her arrows for the necromancer, she decided, then finish these two off afterward.

  The undead man shrank away as she walked toward the line of barrels. She took the nearest lamp down from its stand, opened the little reservoir on the base, and dribbled lamp oil into the first barrel. Then she opened the front of the lamp, took an oil-spattered bolt from the bucket, and thrust the bolt into the flame. The bolt ignited, and she dropped it back into the barrel.

  The bolts burned fiercely. She went to the next barrel, grabbed a fistful of bolts, and dropped them into the fire. Each one was a potential undead soldier, and she destroyed them half a dozen at a time. When the barrel fell apart she dumped more bolts on top of the flames, making a bonfire against the wall.

  The amount of magical energy that had gone into creating so many cursed weapons had to be tremendous. She thought of the bodies piled in the cells outside. Maybe they weren't waiting to be reanimated, after all. Maybe they had been used up.

  Wherever the necromancer was, Tira reflected, he had to be prostrated with exhaustion. Maybe he was nearby, collapsed in an exhausted sleep. She decided she would make a careful search of the keep when she was done here.

  The big undead man was in the corner, staring at her with unblinking eyes. She hefted another barrel of cursed bolts, shuffling sideways toward the fire, keeping an eye on the man and the doorway. It was awkward moving the barrel with one hand, but she wasn't willing to let go of the bow in her left hand, or the arrow between her first two fingers.

  She knelt, scooping bolts onto the fire. The smoke was getting bad, but the air was fairly clear lower down. She watched the undead man as she worked, trying to understand his behavior. He was listless, almost sleepy. He certainly didn't behave like any animated corpse she'd ever seen. She had a nagging sense that there was something important about him, but she had enough to deal with. If he wasn't going to attack her, she was going to leave him be.

  The last of the bolts from the second barrel dropped on the fire. She stood, stooping to keep her head below the worst of the smoke, and started counting the remaining barrels.

  And the undead man coughed.

  Tira reacted without thought, bringing the bowstring back to her ear and sending an arrow at his heart. The arrow struck, and the man disappeared. One instant he was there, the next he was gone. It took Tira a moment to see the woman standing where the m
an had been. She was short and thin, her skin quite pale, with black hair drawn up in a bun and a long black dress. Tira's arrow jutted from the triangle of muscle where her shoulder met her neck.

  She glared at Tira, a look of utter hate with her bloodless lips pulled back from her teeth. Then she spun and fled for the door.

  Chapter 11

  Tira shook off her astonishment and grabbed for another arrow, stepping sideways to see past a pillar. The woman dodged as Tira fired. The arrow buried itself in the woman's shoulder, and she staggered against the doorway, then darted out.

  And the ground shook with the impact of large, running feet. The monster was free.

  The red aura was gone now. The impact of the arrow seemed to have disrupted several spells at once, the spells that were holding the creature and transforming it. It lumbered straight at Tira, snarling with that enormous, toothy mouth.

  She sprang to the nearest pillar. The creature came around the pillar, and she raced in a tight circle, keeping the pillar between herself and the beast. Terror made her light on her feet, and for the moment she was able to hold her own.

  Then the creature changed directions. Tira fled the pillar, running toward the center of the room, managing several steps before it rounded the pillar and took off after her. It was faster on a straightaway, and by the time she rounded the opposite pillar it was right behind her.

  She looped around the pillar, regaining her lead. She was able to make sharper turns. She fled for the next pillar, darting behind the column of bricks, and the creature gave a bellow of rage. It was still at the previous pillar. She had evaded it for the moment.

  Her hands trembled as she took one of her two remaining arrows from the quiver on her back. There was no room for error. She had no idea if she could kill the thing even if she did everything exactly right. She took a deep breath, then another, and when her hands were as steady as they seemed likely to get, stepped around the pillar.