A copper cone whisked into my hand, the object modeled after those held to ears to amplify sound. I placed it on her belly, and then I Created a cloth with which to cover her breasts, as I found their size distracting.
Leaning my ear down to the narrow end of the cone, I waited for the spell to tell me the parentage of the child in her belly, if it was a child. A duke once had hired me to identify if the baby his wife carried belonged to him or to her lover. I had neglected to collect a hair of Harend’s for the test, yet I still listened to the disembodied child’s voice as it spoke through the cone.
“I am a boy. For my father, no comparison present. For my mother, this is not a match.”
My pulse accelerated. I had created the second test to ensure the spell worked, as I never had expected to find a child who was not related to the woman who carried him. The fact that the spell had recognized whatever she carried as a boy did not reassure me.
Gathering my courage, I summoned the blue diamonds and positioned them around Faliti’s belly. As her tissues began to fade from sight, I forced myself not to look away, expecting too soon to gaze down at another unchild, something malformed to the point of being inside out.
The blue diamonds tumbled to the operating table, and Faliti’s skin reappeared, hiding the womb from my sight. I had lost control of my spellcraft.
Such an embarrassment never happened, not to an elder enchantress. As my surprise receded, a sense of being watched prickled down my back, the same feeling I had experienced when in my laboratory with Sri. It reminded me of the moments in a dream before the realization struck that it was a nightmare, although over a decade had passed since I had experienced such a nocturnal grievance. I glanced at the walls, even upward at the skylight, yet I saw nothing but blackness, baubles, and prismatic stars.
Frowning, I decided that whoever was peering into my dream had annulled my detection spell. I had no intention of losing a battle of will here, however, and I hopped above the comatose Faliti to seize her abdomen. Gowns fanning around my levitating body, I Attracted the diamonds into the air then Repulsed them to their proper positions around her womb.
Membranes faded to reveal a white object that would have petrified me if I had not known what to expect. Even so, my abdominal muscles convulsed in disgust.
Multiple baby skeletons were bent and disfigured into the shape of one egg. Rows of ribs cluttered against foot bones; arm bones wrapped around pelvic bones, and wrist and finger bones filled in the gaps. Spines curved throughout the ovoid, except where a band of cartilage divided the bone egg lengthwise into halves. By my understanding of bone growth, I predicted the two halves would not fully merge and fuse until after birth, leaving soft spots like those on the skulls of human newborns.
Commanding myself to focus and not shrink back, I pushed the spell farther; the bones faded from sight, providing a glimpse of the insides of the unchild, of muscle tissue, violet gland sacs, and—
Magic from an external source invaded my dream. It felt like a pin stuck into the back of my spinal cord, a spell entering my laboratory and slipping into Faliti’s body.
Her abdomen lurched, and something splattered my face. Bewildered, I wiped my chin to see translucent droplets on my hand darken into blood. I Repulsed the blue diamonds from Faliti, her belly blinking back into sight with a gash running from navel to groin.
Hysteria skittered through me as I felt myself crushed between confusion and horror. I did not know what had occurred, yet the color was draining from Faliti’s skin, warning of massive internal bleeding. I had to concentrate, or this woman would die in my dream.
A platinum clamp flew into my hand. Waving it at her belly caused a dual Attraction between the edges of severed skin, closing the wound. At my will, the blue diamonds flurried around her abdomen, revealing intestines and organs cut and pierced from bone shards that had lanced outward from her womb.
I Attracted a bloodstone from a laboratory shelf, and combined with the silver clamp, it constricted all her abdominal arteries and veins to stop the bleeding. Hands moving from one side of her belly to the other, I Attracted the bone shards back into the womb then confined them in a repaired birth sac. Whenever I found a major blood vessel torn, my magic bound its edges together.
Tracing and retracing her circulatory system, I convinced myself I had found all the leaks, and I Attracted my magic chisel then touched it to the bloodstone, which restored her blood flow.
A jar glittering with sapphires floated into my hand. The spell stored within it began the process of finding all units of infection that had entered her blood from her cut intestines, crushing each contaminate with precise, paired Attractions.
The magic that held her body together would not persist if she left my dream. I had to stimulate her tissue to mend itself, and I beckoned flocks of silver pins toward me. When any two pins pointed to the same spot, they prompted multiplication of bodily units and the formation of connective tissue.
I arranged the first hundred pins in the air; the silver needles revolved around my fingers to point at the location of each blood vessel I had sealed with Attraction. Remembering the areas in need of mending was not a problem, yet as I had never before dealt with an injury involving so many organs, I ran out of pins at five hundred.
Creating more pins and imprinting enchantments on them required all my attention. A half an hour passed before I completed a batch of a hundred, and I turned my focus back to Faliti to find her not breathing. Her blood did not flow, and her heart had stopped.
She had been dead for twenty-three minutes.
I maintained my composure until I determined the cause: A toxin I had not looked for had paralyzed her lungs, its source the violet gland sacs in the womb.
My enchanted implements retreated to the shelves as a weight drove me to the ground, my gowns rippling outward in my collapse. I lost my grip on repressed revulsion and anxiety, a nausea rising from my quaking insides to my gasping chest. The bedlam of emotion advanced farther into my skull, where I felt my brain stem would rot, and I would never move again.
My error had killed her: I should have examined her vital signs every few minutes. I had to accept that either my bias against Faliti had undermined my attentiveness, or I was capable of miscalculating in my dream. Both possibilities disturbed me equally.
Worse than either thought, the “boy” in Faliti’s womb had been deformed past humanity. A creature inverted, with bones on the outside and an interior filled with venom, had fractured and killed her. I would not wish that fate on any woman, not even Faliti, who had tormented me, and her husband.
A glance at the corpse on the operations table forced me to believe it had really happened. The thing inside her had possessed a magic bond with an entity outside my dream, a man or god, and whoever it was had peered into my laboratory, seen me prodding the unchild, and evoked death in Faliti.
All the women in Morimound likely carried such an unchild. For all I knew, the mothers had all died by now. If the Ever Thriving, Always Dying had generated the unchildren, then he had given not a boon but a blight. If a man and his magic were responsible, then Morimound was under siege.
I crawled to the diamond dais and fled the dream.
Night Five and Day Six, Third Trimester
Maid Janny’s fingers trembled on my gown laces, her eyes darting to the cot and Faliti’s corpse.
I said, “Pay attention, you buffoon!”
Janny pinched her lips together. Upon leaving my dream, Faliti’s abdomen had split open again. Not too much blood had trickled across the floorboards onto my gowns.
At last dressed, I waited for Janny to open the door. Then I swept past Spellsword Deepmand to find Harend Chandur sitting at the table, his hands clamped on his knees.
He leapt to his feet. “Where is Faliti?”
I ignored his question. “Check on Alyla expeditiously. Instantly. Now!”
After a moment of befuddlement, Harend ran up that atrocious ladder to the second story. I
waited to hear him shriek, and I did not stop pressing my arms together until he returned to view.
“She’s asleep.”
“Asleep? Are you sure? Wake her.”
Harend thumped out of sight, and my fingers gripped my face around my eyes. At last, I heard his voice again.
“She’s feeling better. I think she’s getting her appetite back. Is something wrong?”
He had witnessed me sighing, with my hand over my heart, or as near to that location as my gowns allowed. I took my cane from the crook of my arm, leaning on it and trying to think of a palliative way to tell him, yet nothing came to me.
“Faliti Chandur is dead. I could not save her.”
No sooner did his mouth open in shock than I fled outside into the darkness of night. Sitting in my carriage, I failed to think of where I should go and soon found myself in my laboratory. Drifting from one black wall to another, I realized I could not risk drawing another woman into my dream, as it might elicit her death, yet outside my dreams, I was powerless.
Deepmand drove me to my manor, and I stumbled inside to spend a few hours sleeping in the silk harness.
I stood atop my laboratory, in chill night gusts below the red moon, and I wanted to weep. Every woman in Morimound might die from the unchild within her.
I tried to convince myself that they could not all expire, at least not all at once, yet the fatal spell I had sensed had been simple, merely one of activation. Many such spells could be cast at the same time, even by a mortal. I pondered if I could distinguish a spell cast by a man from the power of divinity but decided I would at least need to see it done again, to search for human variation, and I had no desire to provoke another death.
Waking up, I felt as weary as if I had not slept in days. I had a hard time seeing my breakfast, and when my eyes focused on broccoli, I gagged. The thought of wombs sloshing full of venom put me well out of appetite.
A shattering noise from the front of the house was followed by a tinkling. Servants ran down the hall. The sound repeated, and I realized I heard windows being smashed.
“What is happening, Mister Obenji?”
His brow drawn, he rushed out, Deepmand looking after him. More windows broke, and I thought I heard shouting.
Mister Obenji returned in a huff. “There are some men outside. I’ll gather the help, and we’ll keep them out of the manor. Dhatrod can run for the city guard. Not to worry, I’ll handle everything.”
Deepmand asked, “Is it a mob?”
“No. Not at all. All the same, I trust Elder Enchantress Hiresha would be most comfortable closer to the back of the manor.”
“I should think not.” I left the table, walking toward the breaking sounds. “There must be some mistake. The people of Morimound are reasonable.”
Angry voices from outside filtered between the shards remaining in the crystal windows, and glass crunched as Deepmand strode in front of me. A young man had fallen below a window, gripping a cut on his forehead.
Mister Obenji strode toward him. “Are you hurt?”
“I don’t think so, except for this blood.”
A servant woman rushed forward to help, slipping on the glass. She recovered before landing on her pregnant belly.
“Careful! My girl, do you feel any pain?”
“I’m fine.” She removed a scarf and pressed it against the young man’s head to staunch the bleeding. “Just worried over Dhatrod.”
“Avoid stepping on this glass. Remember that you carry a...something breakable.”
A window down the hall exploded inward in a shower of crystal, and a stone clattered against the wall. I turned away from the servants.
“Spellsword Deepmand, attend me on the balcony.”
I walked upstairs and out to the marble balustrade. Men danced below me among the gardens; only, I began to suspect that they were not dancing but stomping flowers and kicking over statues. Several waved oil lamps in the direction of the front doors.
“Should I encourage them to leave, Elder Enchantress?”
I could form no answer, as a numbness overtook my mind and spread down my spine in a tingling. The people of Morimound could not be defacing my property. Their anger could not be meant for me, their benefactress, unless all these men had misunderstood Faliti’s death. I tried to think whether news of it could have spread in the few hours of morning.
Voices shouted below. “Why should she have this, after all she’s done to us?”
“She’s no Flawless neither!”
“Look, there’s the lily toad!”
“Kill her! It’s the only way for our daughters.”
Deepmand stepped in front of me and caught something, and I saw a brick in his gauntlet, encouraging me to wonder if it had been aimed at me. The brick crumbled in the Spellsword’s enchanted grip, its pieces raining on the men below the balcony.
The effect was a silencing one.
“I appreciate the gesture, Deepmand, even though it was unnecessary.” No brick could have hurt me, due to the enchantment in my golden hump.
“Certainly, Elder Enchantress.”
A familiar voice boomed over the estate grounds. “Stop, men of Morimound! This is not the way, for there is no guarantee the death of the apostate will appease the Ever Thriving, Always Dying.”
Priest Abwar flounced down the path, his arms and green sleeves swinging about him as if he wished to communicate with those appendages alone.
“The apostate designed the Flood Wall, but our hands built it. By shutting out the sky-sent waters, we spurned the gift of death and rebirth. We defied a god.”
His words gave me mental indigestion. Priest Abwar seemed to be calling me an “apostate,” yet I did not understand how he could when he had named me the city’s savior only days ago.
“The Ever Thriving, Always Dying cannot be controlled,” he said. “His will is absolute, His design irresistible. When the floods could not reach us, He cursed the wombs of our women. None have quickened because they do not carry life. They carry the blessing of the Always Dying.”
“Spellsword Deepmand, is he suggesting that my Flood Wall caused the mass pregnancies?”
“He might be, Elder Enchantress.”
Priest Abwar turned to point downslope, to the base of the city; the back of his robes depicted the moon on a background of undyed white, the color of death. “No hope remains for our daughters and wives as long as one stone of the Flood Wall remains stacked upon another. Men of Morimound, tear down that wall!”
“Deepmand, did he tell them to dismantle the Flood Wall?”
“I regret that he did, Elder Enchantress.”
“But they are all leaving. They are going to destroy it, and they mustn’t. Tell them they mustn’t.”
“Halt!” Deepmand’s bellow forced the men to glance back at me.
Although unaccustomed to the impropriety of shouting, I tried to speak so the men could hear me. “The summer rains will arrive next month. We require the Flood Wall to keep them out, or the city of Morimound may be inundated.”
Most of the men’s faces stayed blank, and I feared my voice had not carried. Abwar of the Ever Always lifted his hands, palms outward as if to block me from his sight.
“Do not listen to the apostate. Her magic tricked me into naming her the Flawless, and she has brought this evil upon us. Her hubris has polluted this city. Now, to the Wall!”
The men returned the shout, “To the Wall!” as they left the ruins of my gardens. My trembling legs could not support me, and I slumped onto the marble tiles, my gowns slowing my descent as they plumed upward, blocking my view of the world.
I did not much mind the damage to my estate, as it still had fewer flaws than I. A flood, however, would bring catastrophe, and I dreaded that Abwar of the Ever Always could be right in proclaiming I had caused the unchildren through my audacity in believing I could stop the Seventh Flood and avert the will of a god.
After flourishing for over a century, Morimound might have reached
its prime. Perhaps I was doomed to witness its fall into squalor and desperation. By citywide flood, or by death of all our women from unchildren, the Seventh Age might end in a matter of months.
“I will see to repairing the grounds,” Mister Obenji said, “and I’ll pay guards to protect the manor.”
“Deepmand, if you please. I feel I must retire to my room.”
The Spellsword lifted me to my feet. I teetered my way to the guestroom, to sleep and exert myself to understand how the men could so willingly invite their own destruction.
I reasoned those in the mob were affluent and not dwellers of Stilt Town, where waters had licked at house floorboards. To those in elevated brick homes, the threat of floods would seem distant, a stray historical fact, while the conditions of their female relatives obscured their every thought.
I searched for any possible course of action. The city’s only chance was that Abwar of the Ever Always was wrong, that the gods did not conspire our doom, and we faced only the designs of men.
If magic had created the unchildren then its users had employed a method that I did not understand. I had to turn my inquiry elsewhere, investigating not method but motive. Someone might wish to bargain the lives of our women for a ransom of the city’s diamonds, or another nation might plot to undermine Morimound. I loathed the idea of being in the power of foreigners, yet better them than a mishandling by gods.
In bitterness, I recalled that the Fate Weaver’s priest had also prophesized the coming of the Seventh Flood. Morimound might be fated to fall.
Waking, I learned that Priest Salkant himself had arrived and now waited for me in the ballroom.
“You should have left him in one of the parlors, Mister Obenji.”
“He claimed he was meant to meet you there, Elder Enchantress Hiresha.”
I found the priest picking through his mess of grey hair and casting an appraising eye on the ballroom’s chandeliers and vaulted windows. “Ah, Flawless Hiresha. Abwar of the Ever Always has withdrawn his support for you, which, to me, is the highest of recommendations.”
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