Brood of Bones

by A. E. Marling

  “A boy dressed as a woman.”

  “But without a dress on!”

  He gripped my sides more strongly, and I noticed his fingers now appeared as black fangs, which pierced my dress to prick my skin. I ignored the needling, knowing it illusion.

  “The Soultrapper will recognize you,” he said. “Once he does, he will kill you, instantly if he’s touching you. Remember your Spellsword!”

  “I remember Deepmand very well, no thanks to you.”

  “How could you sleep, knowing that any second your insides might begin to rot, your skin decay to slime, your brain shrivel to dust?”

  “I fell asleep with my throat cut. I am a professional.”

  “This death will be faster and far less enjoyable. And to what purpose? He will spot you.”

  “He will not. He must not.” I winced as Tethiel’s fingers bit into me, and another idea sparked in my mind. “You will distract him, with your magic. Craft an illusion of me in my gowns, and the Soultrapper will never notice the true me lying against him.”

  Tethiel pushed himself away from me, his arms shaking and shadows crawling up his sleeves. “Don’t ask me to do this. I must Feast on him. The Seventh Flood is the only way.”

  “You would be saving thousands of lives. Tethiel, you will be a hero.”

  “That is the problem! I’d be doing good, and my magic will make me regret it.” His shoulders contracted into a slouch. “Far better to satisfy it now.”

  “By killing nearly everyone in a city? What could be worse?”

  “I don’t know, but it will be.”

  “You said you could resist your magic by focusing on me.” I reached toward his trembling shoulders but hesitated, unsure of where one was supposed to touch another for reassurance. I wondered if other people knew these things instinctively or only through careful observation. My fingers brushed his neck, where I had touched him before. “I know you can be a hero. You saved me.”

  “I have saved no one.” He pinched his eyes closed. “Now you’ll get yourself withered by the Soultrapper, and I’ll have to Feast on the city a day earlier.”

  “The Fate Weaver decides the future, not your magic. And she would never allow the Soultrapper to rule Morimound.”

  “What if I die? Your plan puts me at greater risk.” He backed away, his boot dipping to splash in a lily pool. “Don’t you understand? My magic wants me to die, I keep it too well leashed.”

  “Then rein it in now. Do not Feast on the whole city, merely create one contained illusion of me.”

  “I mustn’t cast you in shadow. My magic will remember you.”

  I said, “I care more of Morimound’s women than the hypothetical memories of your magic.”

  “No! My magic must be influencing you. It worms its way into people’s minds and deceives them.”

  “My thoughts are my own, even if yours are biased.” I offered him my hand. “Will you trust me? Your magic could not both inspire my plan and entertain designs of Feasting on the city, as the two goals are exclusive.”

  “Are they? Nightmares always find a way.”

  As he frowned at my hand, the fangs at the end of his arms clicked together. When his gaze lifted, his eyes no longer reminded me of common aquamarine. Reflecting the moonlight, they stunned me with the adamantine luster of silver diamonds.

  The teeth attached to his palms transformed back into fingers: scarred and misshapen fingers, although decidedly human ones.

  “I think you are stronger than I, my heart.” He clasped my hand between both of his, nerves thrumming up my arm. “But you must promise not to look at your illusion.”

  “I promise, Tethiel.”

  “Then we must hurry, before wisdom catches up to me.”

  He strode down the garden path and downstairs. As I followed, I glanced once more at the glittering wreckage of my gowns; spotting a shawl embroidered with a purple iris, I snatched it before hurrying downstairs.

  I covered my hair with the shawl on my way outside the manor, where a brown horse kneeled before us. Tethiel mounted first, and as I situated myself to sit sidesaddle behind him, the horse vaulted forward.

  I clung to Tethiel, having a legitimate suspicion that the horse meant to kill me. We raced down streets glowing with moonlight, leaping over garden plots and walls, plunging through the darkness of groves. I felt like a bat, flying blind.

  At every turn in our path, silent figures waited for us. Some Feasters gleamed in their flamboyant clothes, and the horse snapped its teeth at them. One beautiful maiden glowed like starlight, bobbing down the street with her feet skimming the ground; she spoke in a curiously deep voice as we passed.

  “Enchantress, if you’ve spoiled the banquet....”

  She had mouthed the words, I realized, which had come from behind her. A black stalk connected the maiden to the forehead of a monstrosity comprised of spear-sized fangs and a gaping mouth large enough to swallow an ox and wagon.

  The horse’s hooves left the toothy maw and maiden lure behind us, and the next Feaster bled in a frightful manner from a gash on her chest, lifting the blood in her palms in homage. She seemed unconcerned with her own mortal wound. Hanging roots of banyans hid an even more sinister presence, and I heard an oozing and glimpsed something pale and human-sized slithering around the trunk.

  I clutched Tethiel tighter, with the sole goal of positioning my jostling chin closer to his ear. “The acolyte said city guards surround my manor.”

  “They won’t dare leave their tents,” he said.

  The horse leaped from the road into a park. Two Feasters with jeweled swords pointed us through the strangler fig trees, and the horse slowed, stalking between pavilion tents situated in my gardens.

  My manor rose before us, lamps brightening the east wing. The horse stopped in a shadow of a mango tree, and Tethiel lowered me to the sod.

  “Hiresha, I will enter by the front door with the illusion. Whatever you do, don’t look at it. And in case this is the last night for either of us....”

  He lifted my hand and kissed it. I was proud that his fingers did not even blacken with magic.

  I padded into the garden, squinting up at the manor windows. The moon shadowed this side, yet two lamps shone in the crystal panes. Guards peered out into the night, and I felt obligated to subject myself to the incivilities of ducking behind colonnades and crouching behind topiary.

  Tethiel’s voice whispered through my mind. They will see you.

  Instead of crossing between two hedges, I froze in mid-step, out of surprise more than acknowledgement of his warning. A light from a raised lamp flickered over the ground ahead of me, and I exhaled at the near miss.

  A glance behind showed no sign of Tethiel, only moonlit branches and shadows. I shook my head and bent over, clutching my skirt, and hustled the last distance to the manor wall.

  I had no choice but to exhibit my calves while scrambling up to a window. It was locked, and I could not reach anything higher on the wall. I pressed my hand against a crystal pane, wondering if I would have to break it after so recently replacing my windows.

  A skull with blond hair grinned through the glass. I bit on my knuckles to keep from screaming, and in that instant I noticed the bone head also possessed sunken eyes and was supported by an emaciated body. Skeletal arms pried open the window to let me inside.

  I asked, “Physis?”

  Her ratty dress lacked a single jewel. “Father said no casting. Not this close to the soul collector.”

  “Do not presume yourself welcome in my home, merely because I am relieved to see you.”

  Her arms trembled as she closed the window behind me.

  A casual observer might have mistaken me for an enchantress of modest ability with her underfed servant, striding down the hall. The onlooker could not know I had attained the rank of elder, nor that Physis could—at a thought—become a statuesque beauty or a hideous monster.

  Notwithstanding, no casual observer would have spotted us, as Physi
s closeted us out of sight whenever guard or servant approached. In one such delay, I spoke to her in a whisper.

  “We must find the boys’ dressing room.”

  “You told me that already, fluff head.”

  I had grown weary and begun to forget details. “If you had located it, I would not be forced to repeat myself.”

  The Feaster had a disturbing tendency to sniff at doorways, licking her lips, yet we soon found the dressing room. One boy sat sobbing; he clutched the blouse he wore and twisted the fabric, while another youth was attended by a servant painting spirals on his face.

  Physis extended her fingers like claws. “Anyone scream, and I’ll eat your tongue out of your mouth.”

  She appeared hungry enough to follow up such a threat. A boy muffled his yelp with his hands, and the servant dropped her paintbrush.

  “Such incivilities are hardly necessary. Now, Physis, assist me with these buttons. And, you, I want something elaborate on my face.”

  The Feaster fumbled with my gown buttons, fingers shaking. When she at last had done, she whistled at the sight of my red undergarments. “Any whore would poison her sister for those.”

  By the time I thought of a retort, the moment had passed.

  Physis flashed scissors toward my eyes, grinning at my fear, then lifted them higher to begin clipping my hair short. The servant painted a bird of paradise design on my face, with a yellow dot above each eye and red frills swooping down from my brows to my cheeks. While her brush tickled my skin, I regarded myself in a hand mirror and decided that Tethiel had been correct: No one could confuse my proportions as masculine, although my belly would match a boy’s tautness. I would need to rely on the expectation that all the women in Morimound were pregnant, as well as the distraction of the illusion.

  A guard opened the door, and as it swung inward, Physis scurried behind it to hide. “One of you monkeys,” he said, “get in here.”

  I followed the guard barefoot, wearing nothing but my undergarments, a shawl, and the red diamond. My vision constricted from sleepiness; I bumped into a doorframe and once lost the guard altogether.

  “You shouldn’t be drinking so much at your age.” He kicked me in the right direction. “’Course, might as well drink. No woman will marry you after this.”

  I stumbled into a dining room, and the first thing I noticed was that my furniture had been moved. With the tables shoved to the sides, a wide walkway led down the room to an ostentatious chair, on which a follower sat. He wore silk and the dead priest’s paragon diamond. The Soultrapper sat on a stool beside him, in his poorer clothes.

  “Your Lustrous, er, Your Divinity,” a guard said, jogging down the room and kneeling to the follower, “she...she killed them at the doors. She’s inside.”

  The Soultrapper rose and kicked away his stool. “By the goddess’ tits! The enchantress will be here soon. If she casts any spells, cut off her head.”

  Thoughts of my vulnerability and mortality spread through me like a poison, and I trembled uncontrollably. Many guards—I could not manage a firm count—stood in the room, and the moment one gave me a second glance, he would realize I was a woman. The sense of my doom burned inside me. I would die—I would die—I would die.

  It occurred to me that I was feeling the approach of Tethiel’s illusion. Nobody had noticed me yet, and I told myself that the men were distracted and as fearful as I.

  The Soultrapper shoved the follower off the chair, taking the diamond from him. “Might as well wear this. She knows who I am.”

  I padded my way past two guards to the Soultrapper’s side, my arms trembling so much that I could not hold the shawl, and it slid off my shoulders. Only my undergarments covered me, in front of all these men; my throat constricted, and I felt one of them would have to notice my gasping, my shivering, or my hips.

  All the men stared at the door, waiting. The feeling of death approached.

  The Soultrapper presented a problem, in that he had not yet sat down in the ostentatious chair. If he planned to face the illusion standing then I could do nothing. I wondered if I might act in some way to lure him into the chair, without drawing much attention to myself; if any answer to my quandary existed, it lost itself in the chaos of my thoughts.

  A whimper drew my eyes to a table, where two abdomens protruded upward. After blinking, I realized that men held down Sri and Alyla, their legs forced to a spread position as if in preparation to give birth.

  The Soultrapper could kill them in a moment with a twist of his unchildren. The thought left me swaying against the chair, gripping my brow.

  The guards sucked in their breaths at a rising sibilance from the doorway. The sound reminded me of hundreds of snakes slithering closer.

  The Soultrapper grabbed me with his disturbingly long arm, and he pulled me down as he sat. His fingers left trails of oil on my belly, and the paragon diamond dug into my back.

  “You’ll protect me, won’t you, girlie?” He crushed me closer against his slimy chest. “The enchantress would have to burn you first, but you won’t mind dying for Your Divinity, would you?”

  Elation filled me because now I would have the chance to draw him into my dream. The Fate Weaver must have her hands on my thread. Unfortunately, the excitement and disgust of lying against the Soultrapper had woken me fully.

  Forcing my eyes closed, I set my bare foot on the first step on the stairwell. When I reached the fifth step, the Soultrapper’s words filtered down from behind me.

  “You’re a good girlie, aren’t you? Not a squirmer at all.”

  I felt the Soultrapper tilt in the chair and release gas. The stench chafed my nostrils and yanked me back to wakefulness.

  Gowns swarming with jewels seethed into view in the doorway, and I glimpsed a black glove before squeezing my eyes shut. On the stairwell again, I scrambled downward; I had to concentrate and sleep, as I had when dying. I reminded myself that my peril was as great now: I lay against a man who could rot my insides in a moment and trap my soul for an eternity of torment within my corpse.

  My feet slapped the steps on the way down while the Soultrapper spoke behind me. “Enchantress, displease me and both those sows will die. Now kneel.”

  I reached the twentieth step when a chillingly familiar voice answered him. “It is you who should fear to displease.”

  The words were my own, and I paused on the twenty-ninth step, to reassure myself that I had not in fact spoken while falling asleep.

  “My imprisonment was an indignation that I will not suffer again.” The voice matched my pitch, yet it was more forceful and laced with malice. “Abuse one more woman of Morimound and I will incinerate you, regardless of the consequences.”

  I wished to turn around, to see the illusion speaking with my voice, yet I remembered Tethiel’s warning and proceeded to the fortieth step.

  “Good thing this girlie isn’t a woman,” he said in the distance.

  I lifted my hand to the right side of my head, feeling as if an earthworm coated with mucus rolled about in my ear. Glancing halfway back to the stair, I realized that the Soultrapper was licking my ear, and the embarrassment caused me to blush and slide up three steps.

  Tethiel might have followed the illusion into the room, and I realized he could be seeing me in my undergarments, with a tongue greasing the side of my face. I feared he had, and to determine the truth, I peered up at the top of the stairway.

  I saw myself.

  In each black glove, I clutched the scalp of a man’s charred head. Blood dribbled from severed necks onto the carpet. My gowns writhed around me, scarves and folds of silk reaching to strangle anyone who strayed close. I sneered at the guards who flinched from my stare, and I relished how even the Soultrapper quavered. I had power over them. They had to obey my every command. At last, I had found another way besides raising children to earn true respect.

  No, I told myself, I was seeing only an illusion. While the real me had gawked, steps had slid under my feet, dragging me toward
the waking world and the shadow of myself. I gripped my head and dug in my toes, forcing myself to focus. The stairs now stung my bare feet as if coated by frost.

  I had done the one thing Tethiel had warned me against, and worry slowed my progress, my muscles turning cold and my limbs coating with ice.

  On step forty-five, I heard the illusion speak behind me. My words—no, her words—sounded closer, and I was uncertain if she spoke to the Soultrapper or to me.

  “After deliberation, I have concluded that we will either ally, or you will die.”

  A shadow passed over me on the fifty-third step, and I glanced up to see a multicolored torrent of gowns swooping above the stair. The illusion landed ahead of me, on the lowest steps.

  Fabric sawed outward as my look-alike spun to face me. She grinned and lifted her arms, shadows crawling out from the folds of silk to flicker on her palms as black flame.

  “Hiresha.” Her voice echoed up the stairwell. “You have no need to rely on your dreams, ever again. We can reduce the Soultrapper to a sniveling wretch and force him to capitulate.”

  Reaching step seventy, I pressed on without speaking. Any words here might cause me to mumble in the waking world, and I would not dignify this dark replica with a reply in any event. I noted her eyes lacked irises or any whites and appeared as enormous black pupils.

  “You are touching him, and he could not resist us. It would be ever so easy.”

  I wondered if the presence of the illusion on my stair meant she had vanished from the waking world, or if a separate entity now blocked my way. If the former then I had to hurry, and I crossed the eightieth step. If the latter then I doubted this illusion, which had pierced my consciousness, was in any way under Tethiel’s control.

  “I will not allow you to choose unwisely.” Black flame and red smoke erupted from her hands, bursting up the stairway. “You must accept my power.”

  The shadow inferno roared, and I felt myself pulled forward as it consumed the air in the stairway. I remembered seeing the two men being cremated in Kishala’s room. That had been illusion, yet this looked real and would feel like unending torment. I could never surmount that kind of pain. I would awake screaming in the Soultrapper’s arms and ruin everything.