Bone, Fog, Ash & Star

by Catherine Egan

  “Hush,” Rea said to her sharply, which startled Nell to silence.

  “Foss.” Eliza struggled to keep her voice steady. “Tell me what you know.”

  “I do not know anything,” he replied. “But Great Magic was worked in the Citadel recently. I had no part in it but I felt it of course, we all did…the kind of Magic that might be used to summon a great being. Or call the Thanatosi.”

  Eliza shook her head. No words would come.

  “I do not know,” Foss repeated. “But it seems possible, even likely, that the Mancers called the Thanatosi to kill your friend.”

  Chapter

  ~3~

  Charlie woke with a start and shouted, “Help me! I’m drowning!”

  Somebody grabbed his hand and the world swam into view. He was lying in a tent lit with candles and the somebody holding his hand was Eliza. The candlelight threw shadows across her face, with its pointed chin, beaky nose and serious black eyes. She had such an odd look on her face, like she’d just put something very hot in her mouth and couldn’t decide whether to swallow it or spit it out.

  “Bad dream,” he muttered. “What’re you doing in here?”

  “Do you remember what happened?” she asked, her voice high and strained.

  Charlie thought about this a bit, then said, “Something definitely happened. I cannay move. Why cannay I move?” He kicked his legs in a sudden panic. “Oh. I can move. Then what’s wrong with me? Something’s different, aye.”

  “There were…assassins,” began Eliza.

  “Forsake the Ancients!” Charlie sat up in the bed and stared at her. His face had gone quite white.

  “Charlie?” she said anxiously.

  “Eliza…I cannay change. I cannay change. Why cannay I change?”

  “I couldnay…I could only save part of you. This part. The human part. I’m so sorry, Charlie.”

  “Start again. Oh, by the Ancients. Start all over again, Eliza. Why cannay I change?”

  She told him what had happened and he held a hand to his chest as if aware of his beating heart for the first time.

  “I’m just a person,” he said dully when she had finished. “Lah, I’m just a person. What good is that going to do me?”

  “Some of us manage to live with it,” said Eliza. “The real question is why the Mancers would send assassins after you.”

  “You’re nay just a person, you’re a Sorceress,” said Charlie. “It’s nay the same thing. You can do Magic.”

  Eliza took a deep breath.

  “How are you feeling, Charlie?”

  “Like I’ve been shot with arrows and killed and drowned and then dragged back. I cannay change, I cannay protect myself and there are assassins after me. Otherwise, fine. It hurts to sit up, though.”

  “Then dinnay sit up.”

  “No. I want to sit up.” He looked at her for a moment. “So you brought me back from…lah, being dead.”

  “Yes.”

  He paused to ponder this, and then said, “Thank you.”

  She gave a nod and he laughed feebly.

  “Ouch. It hurts to laugh too. I dinnay recommend being shot with arrows, Eliza. Keep that in mind. And thank you doesnay begin to sum it up of course. I dinnay know what to say to you.”

  His hand was still in hers. She looked at it.

  “I couldnay let you go. Charlie, do you remember just before the assassins came? I was about to tell you…” Her sentence trailed off as Foss swept into the tent.

  “Ah!” he said. “You are awake. And alive! Well done. A far better state than the alternative, or so we tend to think, though we’ve no empirical evidence to back it up. The Thanatosi are back.”

  “Already?” cried Eliza. She ran to the entrance of the tent. It was just after dawn. Outside the camp, the desert was obscured by fog. The wheeling white bodies of the assassins spun along the edges of Foss’s barrier.

  “Thank the Ancients we have a Mancer here,” said Nell, who had been waiting outside. She was pale, and there were shadows under her eyes. “Is he awake?”

  “Yes.”

  Eliza could not tear her eyes away from the swift-limbed Thanatosi. They moved in a white blur, feet flashing, bright blades swinging. But they could not enter.

  “We need to discuss our next move immediately,” said Foss. “Come, Eliza Tok. And you too…Eliza’s friend.”

  “You still dinnay know my name, do you?” said Nell in disbelief. Foss pretended not to hear her, and the two girls followed him back into Charlie’s tent.

  “Everything OK?” Charlie asked weakly.

  “For the moment,” said Foss. “I assume you have realized that you are no longer a Shade.”

  Charlie nodded. Nell gasped and began to ask a question but Foss carried on, cutting her off: “You will live out your life as a mortal human now. No doubt you will adjust. However, if we do not hide you from the Thanatosi it will be a very short life indeed.”

  “Hide me where?”

  “Ah! Excellent question, quite to the point.” Foss paused. “I do not know.”

  “Foss,” said Eliza, “do you have any idea why the Mancers would be trying to kill Charlie?”

  He shook his head briefly, a gesture that might have meant no or not now. She let it drop, a cold creeping feeling around her heart. She thought perhaps she knew the reason.

  “The Mancers!” exclaimed Charlie, recovering from his shock just enough to get angry. “Typical crazy controlling Mancer behaviour! No offense, Foss. Kyreth said they were going to let me off the hook for spying, aye, but I should have known better than to believe it. Still, sort of late for them to change their minds, nay? I mean, that was years ago.”

  “We can come to that later,” said Eliza. “A hiding place is the most important thing now.”

  “The Thanatosi are relentless,” said Foss. “They will never stop seeking their prey.”

  Charlie slumped back against the pillows.

  “I know where we can go, aye,” said Nell suddenly.

  “We?” said Charlie. She ignored him and held out her hand to Foss, as if offering it to him to kiss. He looked at it in surprise. On her finger, she wore the ring Jalo the Faery had given her when they parted ways in Tian Xia.

  “The Realm of the Faeries!” she said. “Jalo can give us sanctuary. These Thanatosi or whatever you call them, lah, they wouldnay be able to follow us there, would they?”

  “True,” said Foss. “If the Faeries were willing to give you sanctuary, you would be safe. The Thanatosi cannot enter that Realm uninvited.”

  “What’s this we and us business?” asked Charlie. “You dinnay need to hide.”

  Nell turned on him, her violet eyes flashing angrily. “Do you really think the Faeries would take you in by yourself? If I go with you, Jalo will help. But I dinnay remember him being terribly fond of you, lah. Seeing as the first thing you did when you met him was try to kill him.”

  “If you can call finding him with a sword at your throat meeting him,” huffed Charlie.

  “Stop it!” said Eliza. “Nell is right. Jalo would help her but I’m nay sure he’d help you alone, Charlie. Can you do it, Nell? I know you’ve got this exam coming up.”

  “I’ll bring my notes. I can study in the Realm of the Faeries as well as anywhere,” said Nell lightly, as if they were proposing a drive to the seaside. “As long as I’m back in time for the test. I’ve got a month, aye.”

  “Then I’ve got a month to stop the Thanatosi once you two are safe. We should leave right away.”

  “We?” said Charlie again. “So you’re coming too? We’re all going to the Realm of the Faeries together?”

  “Someone has to get you safely to Tian Xia,” said Eliza. “Once you’re in touch with Jalo, I’ll be comfortable leaving you alone. But until then I’m nay letting you out of my sight. Will you come, Foss? We’ll need barriers.”

  “Of course,” he said. “We will leave at once.”

  ~~~

  They packed up their few belon
gings quickly. Of her birthday gifts, Eliza brought with her the peculiar weapon Swarn had sent, the scabbard Nell had made her, into which she fitted her dagger, and the backpack her grandmother had woven, which she filled with supplies. The rest she left with her father. Charlie limped out of his tent, Sorma herbs packed against his tightly bandaged wounds. He looked at the Thanatosi, still leaping and spinning and swarming along the barrier in eery silence.

  “Makes me dizzy watching them, aye,” he said flatly. “Do they nary stop moving?”

  “Look at that! They can turn right upside down. Like gravity doesnay apply to them!” exclaimed Nell. “It would be fascinating to be able to study one of them in a lab. See how they work, aye. Like those jumps they make. How do they do that?”

  Charlie gave her a faintly disgusted look. “You’re creepy when you get all scientific,” he said.

  “Come,” said Foss. “They cannot stray far from the ground. We shall be out of their reach in no time.” He gestured towards the waiting dragon.

  Charlie grimaced. “I’m nay sure how I feel about sitting on some flying beast’s back. I’m usually the back, aye.”

  “Nay anymore,” said Nell, a bit cruelly.

  Rom came out to see them off, supporting Rea with one arm.

  “So you’re off again,” said Rea, squinting in the sun. “You’ll be careful?”

  “I always am,” said Eliza. She kissed her mother on her cool cheek, struggling to ignore the hum of the Urkleis as she did so. Then she threw her arms around her father and hugged him goodbye.

  “Take care, my girl,” he whispered.

  “I’ll be back soon,” she said. “We’ll play chess with my new set.”

  He kissed her and smiled. “You’re all right, then?”

  She nodded. “It was a good birthday, up until the assassins.”

  Foss helped Nell and Charlie onto the dragon’s neck and seated himself just before its wings. Eliza climbed up the gold-scaled back. The dragon swiveled its neck and watched her with one brilliant eye. Dragons knew a being of power when they encountered one and this dragon had flown with Eliza before. She seated herself on the middle of its back, behind Foss, gripping the golden spike in front of her. Foss called out a command and the dragon leaped into the air, its huge wings accordioning out. Below them the barrier crumbled, but the Thanatosi were no longer interested in the Sorma camp. In a swirl of white limbs and flashing swords, they came leaping across the desert after the dragon. The dragon beat its massive wings, climbing higher and higher into the sky and leaving the Thanatosi behind.

  ~~~

  They crossed the great stretch of desert to the eastern coast, stopping only briefly for silent meals. They ate quickly, stretched their legs and then resumed their positions on the back of the dragon.

  When Eliza spied blue sea on the horizon she felt tears spring to her eyes. How she missed the sea! The dragon began a joyful downward swoop towards the white-capped waves, but rose again at a stern command from Foss. It was another hour before they reached a chain of volcanic islands. The archipelago, and Holburg, lay to the north. Their destination was a long-dormant volcano, whose crater had collapsed into a deep cavern, large enough even for the dragon to enter. They descended with slow wing pulses to a pool of black water, the ring of dusky sky receding above them.

  “Fascinating,” said Foss, climbing off the dragon and splashing in the water up to his knees. “I do not think the Mancers know this entry to the Crossing.”

  “Charlie knows all the entries, aye,” said Eliza.

  “We cannay know if he knows all of them,” pointed out Nell, ever logical. “I mean, he wouldnay know about the ones he doesnay know, would he?”

  Charlie snorted.

  “I must confess I’m rather excited,” said Foss. “I’ve been an Emmisarius for a short time only and there has been no cause for me to make the journey to Tian Xia. This is the first time that I will see that other world. May I command the Boatman, Eliza?”

  “Be my guest.”

  Foss began to intone the words: My power spans the worlds and that between the worlds, my power spans the skies and seas of Tian Di, my power is undivided. He seemed to find it effortless. Though he was her teacher and a source of seemingly endless knowledge, it was rare that Eliza was able to witness displays of his power. The tremendous barrier that morning, covering all the Sorma camp, and now this commanding of the Boatman, reminded her what a powerful being he truly was.

  A boat took shape on the water as he spoke, its sail full, its boards ash white. The ghoulish boatman, knotted muscle and bone and blood vessels visible through his translucent flesh, stood at the helm to greet them.

  “So this is the Boatman!” said Foss.

  “Emmisarius of Water,” the Boatman greeted him in an awful scraping voice, like a blade on stone.

  “Greetings,” said Foss, bowing. The Boatman stepped aside and all four of them were permitted to board the wide, flat sloop, unchallenged. The boat slipped away through the water and the darkness of the cavern, emerging quickly onto a misty grey sea. Nell settled down near the front of the boat and took her folder out of her satchel.

  “Can you give me a light, Eliza?” she asked. “Or praps Foss could just look over my shoulder and keep his eyes nice and bright.”

  “Dinnay you want to get some sleep?” asked Charlie.

  “I’m fine,” she said, barely looking at him. Eliza conjured a light for her friend to study by, then lay herself down on the pale planks. She felt a chill around her, within her: a memory of the dark water of the river of death, as if it were flowing through her and mingling with her blood. When she closed her eyes, she saw hundreds of ravens trying to take flight and yet somehow fastened to the ground, while somewhere there was a sound like a great tail lashing the air.

  It was a long time before she slept and it felt like a very short time before she was woken again by the spine-chilling baying of the hounds of the Crossing. They were deep in the white mist of the Crossing now but she could still make out the forms of the others. Charlie was on his back – she had to look closely to make sure his chest was rising and falling. Nell was slumped over her folder, fast asleep. Foss sat against the gunwale, his eyes bright discs of flame in the mist. She glanced at Charlie again, to make sure he was sleeping.

  “Foss?” she whispered, crawling closer.

  “Yes.” His deep voice soothed her, gave her the courage to ask the question that was tormenting her.

  “Do you really think the Mancers are responsible for calling the Thanatosi?”

  “I do. Not all of them, naturally. I cannot know for certain who took part.”

  “Kyreth.”

  “I assume so. But not alone. He could not have done it alone.”

  “Because they’re afraid…they’re afraid I’ll do what my mother did.”

  This was terribly vague, but Foss understood.

  “I believe so,” he said. Eliza’s heart sank.

  For thousands of years the Shang Sorceress had lived with the Mancers, learning to use her power under their tutelage. When she came of age she married a Mancer and bore a single daughter, heir to her power. Once the continuation of the line was established, she went into the worlds and performed her duty, guarding the Crossing from any being who did not belong in Di Shang. This had been the unfaltering way of things until Eliza’s mother, at the time an unusually powerful and rebellious young Sorceress, fell in love with a young Sorma man, Rom Tok. She married him in secret and bore him a daughter, thus diluting the line of the Sorceress as far as the Mancers were concerned. Though none of them had ever spoken to her of the matter of an heir, Eliza had known she would be expected to marry a Mancer one day. It was one of the reasons she would not go back to them. She would not be told whom to marry. But somehow they knew, Kyreth knew, that she had feelings for Charlie. They were eliminating the competition, hoping to prevent her eloping with a non-Mancer as her mother had done. Now that Foss had confirmed her fear, she did not want to d
iscuss it further. The fact that Kyreth would enlist some of the Mancers in a plot to murder Charlie, her dear Charlie, for fear that she might one day choose him over them, made her nearly sick with rage. If she was to stop the Thanatosi, she would have to begin with the Mancers.

  The whiteness closed about them, until they could not see one another at all, and then blew away all at once. They were sailing on the green lake of the Crossing, the fiery sky of Tian Xia blazing above them. Around the lake curved the great black cliffs, carved with images of unrecognizable beings and unreadable symbols.

  Nell woke up and put her papers back into her folder in a hurry. She looked a bit green.

  “This is your third time, aye,” said Charlie gently. “Shouldnay be so bad.”

  Eliza handed her a little sack of herbs from the Sorma. Nell held them close to her face and inhaled deeply.

  “Not an easy journey for a human,” noted Foss.

  “Or anyone going where they dinnay belong,” said Charlie. “I got hellishly sick crossing over to Di Shang the first time, but it seems like after a few times you build an immunity. Like you have enough of that world in you to make you belong a little more. Then there’re people like Eliza, aye, who dinnay get sick at all, either way. Belonging to both worlds, I spec.”

  “There are no people like Eliza,” Nell said, glancing up from her sack of herbs for a moment. “Oh, the Ancients, I feel awful.”

  “And the Mancers?” asked Foss.

  “Lah, you’re really Tian Xia worlders, nay?” said Charlie. “But you live in Di Shang. So you should be all right either way, I spec.”

  Foss looked thoughtful. As they drew closer to the towering black cliff that frightened Eliza every time, Foss became very interested in the symbols carved there.

  “If only I had the Book of Symbols with me!” he cried. “I do not think all of these have been deciphered, you know…though it ought to be possible, with the book.” His face fell, light fading from his eyes slightly. “It is one of the Books Nia drained. It has been a tremendous job, Eliza, trying to repair the Old Library, and we have only made the smallest beginning in a year’s time. We have repaired the Book of the Ancients and many other Great Texts. But the Book of Symbols is still empty. Such a shame.”