Master of Blood and Bone

by Craig Saunders

  Even at seven, Ank knew what Holland did and who he was.

  She wanted to be like him. Why wouldn’t she? He was immense, his body and soul both, like a hero of old. He was the only parent she knew, and very nearly the only person.

  He was her world and the gun was an extension of his hand. Holding that gun, firing that gun…she wanted to make him proud.

  They were on a beach. It was night, the moon rode the sky.

  This was their beach. Norfolk, in the north. It was the only home she’d ever known, and he was the only father she’d ever needed. Holland was her father, always, but her teacher, too. Neither one ever stopped. He was two things to her: love and stories. For what was knowledge if not a story?

  This he impressed on her since she could speak.

  “Slow now, Ank,” he said.

  “Holland, I can do it.”

  Holland to her, even then.

  He sighed. He wasn’t as big, ten years ago. He still had some muscle, and the bones on his shoulders were still there, in this, Ank’s memory.

  “You’re seven, Ank. Do it slow, or not at all. Rush, and you’ll fuck it up.”

  “I won’t fuck it up,” said Ank.

  Holland swore, so Ank swore. She barely knew anyone other than her father. She hardly ever left their home, their beach, their cottage.

  He was her world even more than this place of sand and sea. In the way of bodies, orbiting each other, she was under the sway of his gravity. Never once did she consider that maybe she’d been the greater mass.

  Holland sighed, again. “Alright. But do it slow, or you won’t do it again. You understand?”

  She nodded.

  “One more time…”

  She nodded, and recited the mantra he’d taught her since she could speak.

  “Death is not mine,” she said, bored.

  “No,” he said. “Again.”

  “Death is not mine!”

  “Don’t muck about, Ank. I’m serious.”

  “Death is not mine,” she said at last, and gave both of them shivers. She remembered the feel of the words in her mouth, back then, even though this was nought but memory. Remembered the chill.

  The feel.

  “Remember it well, Ank. You don’t own that. Never. Now, fire…slow.”

  He passed her the gun. She rushed. Of course she rushed. She was seven, he was her hero. She wanted to be able to do what she could do, be like him.

  Ank shot Holland in the knee the first time she took a gun in hand.

  Christ, but didn’t he swear?

  He’d had a walking stick ever since.

  And there, remembering, in the strange temple of snakes, Ank laughed until her head hurt and tears ran down her face. She laughed so hard because of her fear, bordering on hysteria…but mostly because she’d shot her dad in the knee.

  52

  “Death is not mine,” she told the book, still lighter for the memory. “Death is not mine.”

  The snakes slowed.

  It’s thinking.

  “IS THIS YOUR ANSWER”

  Funny, thought Ank. You’d think a snake would be able to manage a pretty good question mark.

  “This is my answer,” she told the book.

  “I DO NOT UNDERSTAND” said the book.

  “I know,” she told the remarkable entity that held her life in its hands. “You know my name and you know, I think, what I am. But this is our bargain, book. Death is not mine.”

  And yes, the book held her life…but she held its life, too, didn’t she?

  “Understand, do not understand. This is the law. This is lore.”

  “YES OR NO”

  “Remember this,” she told the book. “You are young. You are a creation. But no less than I.”

  “I WILL”

  The snakes paused.

  “REMEMBER”

  “Then my answer, God help us both, is yes.”

  And fuck me if I’ve got this wrong, too, she thought. Could turn out a hell of a lot worse than a silver bullet through her father’s knee…

  “GOING”

  Going where?

  “TO HURT” said the snakes.

  The book did not lie.

  53

  As the book had once torn Ank’s form asunder and pulled her in, this time, Ank was spat from the pages of book and her every fiber reborn and rebuilt.

  Rebirth. Not an awakening, but being constructed while she was fully aware, from cells, blood, bone, muscle, flesh, hair. Aware of her bones knitting, her blood flowing, circulation beginning even as her heart and veins and arteries and capillaries began the task of feeding her body…flesh wrapping around her burning, agonizingly naked frame. Nerve endings bare of all protection for mere moments, but long enough for the pain of flensing to be etched forever in Ank’s nascent mind.

  Reborn, not as a child with no memory, not as an infant, but as seventeen-year-old girl on the cusp of womanhood, on the borders of being an adult and owning…her birthright.

  The book gave Ank back to the world and pushed her through the pain, into darkness at first, then, creating her eyes, her retinas, connecting everything.

  The entire time, Ank remained aware, whether she wished it or not. Suddenly, she understood the complexity, the perfection, and the disturbing horror of the human form.

  Ank hitched her first breath and screamed and screamed. She shook, she sobbed. And still she saw nothing.

  For a moment, nothing but black and the bowing of her mind beneath a vast vista of pain mortals never knew existed.

  “You’re not blind. It’s just dark,” said a voice within her essence, with care…like a…like a human voice. A child’s voice, and the fear in the child’s voice steadied Ank, body, mind and soul, more than anything in the world ever could have.

  54

  Blackness, absolute. No sense of sight at all. Nothing to see. No glimmer, no glow, no spark. No color, not even from her eyelids. She was accustomed to dark—she lived, isolated, by the sea. Darkness there, on a clouded night, she’d thought was the most complete dark in the universe.

  She’d been wrong.

  The memory of pain, and a terrified child cowering within not just Ank’s mind, but her core. Not unlike a rider upon a horse. Nothing like a parasite. The child felt different, entirely unlike the book had (though she was not blind to the power…Gods, no…the power danced within her). The child wasn’t an interloper at all…more a twin. A partner. Something conjoined to her soul, her heart, her mind.

  The child…the book…her.

  “You’re a child?” she asked the book, not knowing if she needed to speak aloud, or think, or even if there was a distinction anymore between the two entities…this thing that was once a vellum-covered gaol, and her own self.

  The child within shivered.

  “Ank…Ank…”

  “Are you me? Am I you?”

  “We are one.”

  “What? I…can you get out?”

  Silence. No sense of thought, because this wasn’t Ank talking to Ank, but talking to a part of herself. Removed, perhaps, but only slightly.

  This is going to take some getting used to, she thought, and recognized herself in the thought.

  She knew, too, that this was not meant to be. A person could lose themselves like this…become…

  What?

  Nothing? Like dust, within her own mind, drifting and lost?

  Insane? Like the book that came before the child?

  “I was ever lonely,” said the book…or the child.

  Ank understood. She felt what the child felt. Understood what the child understood. As it did her.

  “I understand…but I…I don’t…this is frightening me. Do you…can you feel that?”

  “Yes,” said the child from within Ank. “But I cannot get out. I understand. I…”

  “I want you out,” said Ank, firm, frightened herself. In the black with no sense but the voice in her head.

  I’m not frightened, she realized. I’m
fucking terrified.

  Ank tried to calm herself. Mantra, in her head.

  Death is not mine, she told herself.

  Over, and over, and over. In the dark.

  “Ank,” said the book, after a time in the dark with the girl, her words. “Ank…”

  “Death is not mine,” she repeated. A ward against evil. Against herself.

  “Ank…please…please stop.”

  “I can’t!”

  “I’m frightened, too. I was a book. Now I’m in you…I’m just…”

  “You’re not a child! You’re a book and you stole into my fucking head!”

  “Where did you think I could go?” The child’s voice, more reasonable than Ank. A child that knew more than any child should. A child created by a vast intellect, a twisted mind. A child that knew nothing of love and life and the world, but knew everything of magic and insanity, of power and…

  “Yes,” said the child.

  And Ank saw, finally. Saw the truth the child within understood even while she had not.

  They were the same.

  Creations of men of power.

  “But my father made me with love. You were created by a wizard. A thing of evil…”

  “We are twins, Ank,” said the book. And then, something that Ank hadn’t counted on at all. “We are twins, Ank, and power corrupts. Power corrupts, Ank. You. Me. And my master. Solomon is his name, and once he was a shining light. I was born of love, Ank…like you.”

  Ank saw the truth of it. She knew the child that had once been a book could not lie because she could see, feel, the whole of it.

  History, wisdom, power. The temple of Solomon, preserved once within the book. Now, the book was within her.

  Whether she liked it or not.

  55

  “Can you…show me?”

  “It would break you, Ank. Even you.”

  “Some?”

  “With time. Slow,” said the child in her soul, and she sensed that the child was… “Lest you shoot yourself in the knee?”…making a joke.

  Ank strove to remember that the child within her wasn’t just a child. It was ancient. Now, tabula rasa…but never clean.

  But maybe…like her…it had been reborn?

  Death is not mine, she thought again, but this time she remembered the why of it. She had no right over a person’s death…nor a thing’s.

  And this child was a thing no longer, but a soul, true, like her own.

  “Why is it black? So dark?”

  “Because there are no lights.”

  “Smartass.”

  She felt pleasure, like the child within was happy at the remark, and that pleasure spread to her.

  It was a strange, frightening feeling…but not, she thought, entirely unpleasant.

  “Do you know where we are?”

  Stillness as the child…probed? Like tendrils of power…small…testing. A child learning something afresh, feeling the shape of things.

  It was almost, Ank thought, as though she was full of questing filaments, spreading from her to…

  Walls.

  Walls all around. Steel, or something else. Something hard, unyielding, cold.

  But there was a door. She felt a door.

  I’m feeling things…without touching them…

  Door wasn’t quite right, though. It wasn’t just a door. It was larger than a mere door… Maybe…she and the child worked together, without even trying…ten…twelve feet high. Round…no…like a cog? Teeth, like a cog. But no.

  A vault door? Like a bank?

  “We’re in a vault?”

  They brought their power closer, searched around them, and one of the tendrils touched upon something that sent them tumbling back into Ank and knocked her across the room with a bright, unbearable spark of light, bright enough and sudden enough to feel like a lance of light thrust through her new eyes and right on into her brain.

  What the fuck was that? she wondered, dazzled and dazed for a moment or two.

  “Yes. A vault. Not like a bank vault.” The book knew more than she. But she didn’t push it.

  Maybe it wasn’t like a bank vault, but it was full of treasure, without a doubt. Ank could feel it now, part of the book awakening her, too…she could feel some kind of tickling, mildly unpleasant sensation across her skin, in the roots of her hair and on her teeth…like power, coursing through the entire room. Only thing she could liken it to was once, she’d stood upon the beach in a heavy storm, lighting crashing out in the sea.

  Like that. Like being right next to the mother lode.

  “Again?” said the child. Ank nodded, though she didn’t need to.

  The book was better, this time. They were better. Careful. Gentle.

  The filament of their power touched the thing that sparked, but this time with only the most tender of caresses.

  Light blossomed.

  56

  For a few moments, Ank had to close her eyes against the light, even though she craved it. After the dark, such brightness, even though gentle this time, still thrust daggers into her eyes and the pain in her head was unbearable.

  For a time she did nothing but bear it with her eyes closed. Then, she allowed herself to squint. Gradually, she opened her eyes fully.

  She and her strange new sibling were indeed in a vault…and the vault was full of things of beauty, things of barbarity and such sickening ugliness that Ank could not help but look away. Unfathomable treasures heaped into the vault along with things with no discernible reason. The horde of a genius, or a mad, God. Surely a God’s haul, this.

  No mortal could bear it. No man or woman could stand in the face of this and fail to crumble. History and mystery, myth and fact together. The truth of a world of wonders.

  A place to simply shatter the science and religion of humankind forever.

  A bronze sword, pitted with age and with the rust of ancient blood on the weapon’s fat blade. Spartacus’ gladius. A crested helm like a centurion might have worn. Pontius? A long-blade spear, the haft of which was snapped. The sight of this brought tears to Ank’s eyes, for she knew, she felt, the singing of the blood on that blade.

  There were boxes of human remains, and a single, small, stone ossuary. Teeth scattered in a corner along with a trove of skulls, intact and dented and malformed all thrown together. In some items she could see a value—a golden scepter with a giant ruby mounted like an all-seeing eye. A stack of books and scrolls that she and the child within both knew had been saved from Alexandria. Parts of statues. Animal feet and horns. Scales. A whole snake skin that made her shudder. A set of manacles and a dried and worn old noose. An iron maiden, thankfully closed. What at first she thought was another snake skin nailed to the wall of the vault, until, worse, she realized it was part of a dried human intestine.

  But, too, a gorgon’s petrified head, and a giant eye within thick fluid in a dirty old jar. A feather, impossibly, of pure gold. A simple wooden box, a scarab carved atop, which emitted a skittering noise. Linen wrappings. A human foot that was at least twenty inches long, hollow and stuffed with so many curios of power that Ank nor her remarkable inner child could guess at their design.

  She rose, prepared to explore, though it felt as though she was in the hub of the world’s power. Her knees were weak when she stood, and her stomach rolled like she was going to puke.

  Don’t puke here, Ank. Just…don’t.

  These were not just treasures, but artifacts. Relics…pieces of saints. Mythology, history. This was the world, right here, hidden in this vault. The world’s power, things that should not, could not, be. But were.

  They always had been.

  Ank didn’t move from the spot she occupied, though, because as she rose and stood in the glorious light that filled the vault, she saw, at last, her own skin.

  Covered with black ink. Every inch of her.

  She and the book had become one.

  Oh, Christ’s balls, thought Ank. I’m right where I belong…

  “Slow,”
said the child within, and this time, she heeded that voice.

  The book was not the enemy.

  The child it had become…

  She felt the child step back from her mind, and in that moment she understood more than she, a seventeen-year-old girl, ever though she could.

  It stepped back to allow her to make the decision. It gave itself to her. It was letting her lead, should she wish. Giving her back herself, as best it could.

  And in that action, she knew. No doubt.

  “Come forward,” she called, in her mind. “Brother.”

  And she felt such happiness from the boy who was a book that she fell, once again, to her knees.

  It was time. Time to go. Ank knew what her brother knew, and he had her thoughts, too.

  It wasn’t a treasure vault at all, this place where they found themselves. For a scholar? For a mortal, full of wonder? Yes, it was a treasure trove for the ages, a haul that could shatter and rebirth all of humanity’s understanding of their place in the vast, incomprehensible universe.

  But this wasn’t a trove for humanity’s benefit.

  It was an armory.

  And the meaning wasn’t lost on Ank.

  Someone put us in here, she thought.

  “Yes,” said the child.

  57

  As a general rule, vaults are built to keep people out, rather than to keep people in.

  Set in the vast door that looked like a cog was a wheel, like a ship’s wheel, or the kind of wheel you see on submarines.

  Ank didn’t waste time wondering what was on the other side. Could be the mad God that had collected all this. Could be a yawing abyss, or a thousand feet of lava.

  She didn’t care. She wanted out. The where of it didn’t matter.

  So Ank bunched up the muscles in her arms and her shoulders and strained, hard as she could. It didn’t shift at all.

  She might not be able to turn it with the strength in her arms. But she wasn’t an idiot.

  She took the long and broken spear from against the wall that had made her cry, and used the leverage it gave to lend her strength.