The Bone Cave

by Sarah Remy

  “From the kitchen,” the lesser sidhe explained. “We’re to fill them all.” It took his plump waterskins back toward the tower at a lope.

  Everin dipped and Drem carried laden crockery to Faolan, bringing the vessels back empty to be filled and carried off again. Everin’s hands grew numb in the cold water. Drem was splashed often and well in its haste, but the sidhe did not complain.

  “Enough,” Drem said at last. It beckoned Everin toward the tower. “He needs you.”

  Faolan had arranged the woman on her back at the foot of the old tower in a bed of black vine pulled from the stone. Her yellow eyes were wide open, staring and blank. At first Everin thought they were too late. But her chest still moved and when he dropped to his haunches by her shoulder he could hear the faint rattle of air in her lungs. The feathers in her hair were bright against the black plant cushioning her head.

  “Open her mouth,” Faolan said. The aes si squatted in front of a large pot, likely once used by the garrison cook to keep the Pass guardsman always in boiled gruel. He’d rolled the sleeves of his robe up past his forearms and was using his fingers to massage a mixture of barrow soil and pool water into clay.

  The soil, culled from secret places in the deepest earth, smelled like tar and rotting vegetation. It was black but for a sprinkling of reflective mica, and it was an aes si’s most valuable tool.

  “Press your fingers against her tongue,” said Faolan. Everin did as he was told, holding the woman’s jaw open while gently wedging his thumb into her mouth, pressing her tongue down against her teeth. She groaned weakly and blinked at last, stirring, but she had no strength left to fight him.

  “I’m sorry,” Everin said, although he doubted she could hear him. He’d heard stories of such magic preformed and thought he could guess what was coming. He was suddenly and desperately glad Faolan had managed to heal the wound in his throat with only a poultice made of soil and intent, and had spared him more extreme proceedings.

  “Her damage is internal,” Faolan said, awarding Everin a brief, mocking glance. “For all the blood you were much less hurt. Hold her down.” And he scooped the black, foul-smelling sidhe potion by handfuls into the woman’s open mouth.

  She gagged, her heels drumming in the dirt. One of Drem’s kin, spear set aside, massaged her throat until she swallowed. Faolan fed her again. The lesser sidhe worked her throat. Black water ran over the edges of her lips and down her chin. Where the mixture touched Everin’s thumb against her tongue it burned.

  Her eyes fixed again on the clouds. Everin felt it when she stopped breathing. But Faolan continued to calmly scoop the mixture out of his pot and down her throat until Everin was sure her entire insides must be full.

  “You’re too late. She’s gone,” Everin worried, reaching with his free hand for the pulse point in her neck.

  Faolan shook his head. “Be patient,” he said. “There is a pattern to recovery. The body must stop to heal before it can begin again.”

  Everin frowned. “This is what the sidhe did to Liam.”

  The lesser sidhe working the woman’s gag reflex snarled.

  “Hush,” Faolan murmured, to Drem’s kin or to Everin. “That was a mistake, a magic wrought by those too young to know better. This? This is a success.” And as he declared it so the desert woman’s pulse began to jump beneath the pad of Everin’s finger.

  She twitched then rolled abruptly onto her side, knocking Everin away with her elbow, pressing up on the heels of her broken hands onto shale as she vomited black goo onto the ground. Between coughs her snarl was a study in hatred and by the sound of her violent wheezing her lungs were strong again.

  Faolan’s deliberate tread on the tower stairs woke Everin from contemplation. If the rising moon and the cramp in his back were indication he’d been staring at down the eastern side of the mountain and across the desert steppes for far too long. His stomach rumbled, reminding him that it had been days since he’d eaten anything but hardtack and apples. He turned his back on the view below, leaning against the battlements, and waited as Faolan climbed the final step.

  “She’s resting.” The aes si sounded ineffably weary. The sidhe were a hardy people, but Faolan had used the last of his reserves in keeping their captive alive; he’d not had an abundance of strength to begin with. “It will be hours before she returns completely to her senses, but Drem’s kin have her under guard. They won’t be fooled twice.”

  “You didn’t save her fingers.”

  Faolan came to stand at Everin’s side. “I kept her alive,” he said. He propped a chin on one hand, resting against the walk wall, and looked down at the army massed below. “And for good reason, I see. How many?”

  Everin had given up on counting distant campfires long before the sun finished setting. “More than I ever imagined. The desert is vast, the tribes myriad, loyalties divided. I never thought to see so many come together in one place. That is not a gathering of mercenaries intent on raiding a few flatland farms.” He rubbed his chin and sighed. He could smell the smoke of a multitude of fires on the wind: acacia and mesquite burning in the evening. “That is an army.”

  “Beneath whose banner do they mass?” Faolan wondered. He yawned, delicate as a cat. “What are they planning?”

  “There’s only one way to find out.”

  “Take the wolf cub back to Wilhaiim and your magus will undo the good I worked.” Faolan nodded, resigned. “You’ll be wanting to leave at once, I think. There’s no easy way to move an army of that size up and over Skerrit’s Pass. You’ve time, but not much of it.”

  “They can’t be planning to march up and over the Pass.” Everin tugged restlessly on the bandage around his throat as he thought. “Why, Renault only need station a flank of archers below to pick them off as they come over the ridge. It’s not feasible, it never was. Why do you think peace was brokered so easily? Until now, the mountains have been deterrent enough.”

  “Until now,” Faolan mused.

  “There are tunnels,” Drem said from where it crouched near the stairs. Everin hadn’t heard the lesser sidhe approach. It was a splotch of shadow in the twilight, marked by a stolen blue hair feather clutched in one hand. “Not many. We went east first, before we went deep. The desert is hot, inhospitable to our kind. But the original ways are still there—” it rolled flat, black eyes in Faolan’s direction. “Or so one assumes.”

  Faolan stiffened. “Well hidden,” he said.

  Drem’s silence was damning. The sidhe mounds beneath Stonehill had been well hidden until Andrew Lorimer had used necromancy and guile to bluff his way through a gate and in so doing had bared the flatland barrows like a child kicking up an ant’s nest. Thanks to Andrew, the flatland warrens were now sealed by mortal magic, the sidhe suffering for it.

  “I’ll go down,” Everin said.

  Faolan’s brows disappeared beneath the folds of his scarf. Drem scurried close, feather dangling between its fingers.

  “Into that?” Faolan said. “I cannot allow it. Your life belongs to me, and you’d not survive a day undiscovered.”

  “I lived a lifetime in the desert,” Everin replied calmly. “I can pass amongst them unremarked, listen and learn. A day, maybe two, and I’ll be back up over the mountain with word.” Now that he said it aloud, he realized he’d known since he’d first looked out on the army that he’d set foot again on white sand.

  “Whilst we wait upon you here? Nay.”

  “You will take our desert wolf at once to Wilhaiim, through the flatland barrows, and you’ll have her in Avani’s hands before I’m half a day on the desert floor.”

  “Why should I?” asked Faolan, as casually as if they were debating a turn in the weather. But Everin, who knew him well, could feel suppressed fury rolling in waves off the aes si. “What is Wilhaiim to me and mine that I’d risk entering the city and further engendering the sidhe elders’ wrath? What are you to me and mine that I’d trust you to fly free and yet return to my wrist, fettered willingly again?”<
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  “Wilhaiim is nothing to you,” Everin confessed. “But if the desert comes rolling over these mountains you’ll never regain the flatlands; they are the sun and you are dark places. They will route you and burn you just as they do my own people, and they will not be content to let you hide out beneath the earth. They will see the Tuath Dé destroyed once and for all.”

  Faolan tossed his head at the night sky. “And as to the other?” he demanded, breathing through his nose.

  “I will come back to you,” Everin said, “because I have no choice.”

  Everin sat on the battlements and listened to Faolan making preparation to ride out. The small troop would be quickly gone, and Everin better for it. He wanted them gone before their captive roused enough to make real noise and alert any ears on the eastern path below.

  The moon would be at peak in the sky soon. He needed to be safely on desert sand before the sun rose.

  “Fish?” Drem inquired, popping up out of the stairway.

  Everin bit his lip to keep from cursing.

  “You shouldn’t be able to do that,” he complained. “You lot never used to sneak up on me so easily.”

  “Only Bail was better at ‘sneaking’.” Drem’s white teeth flashed. It tossed him a fish; fat, silver, and raw. Everin caught the gift automatically and sighed. He couldn’t risk a fire for cooking but his gut was bellowing hunger. Grimacing, he reached for his belt knife.

  “I’m to come with you into the desert,” the lesser sidhe continued.

  Everin paused in gutting the fish. “Faolan’s an interfering bastard.”

  Drem shrugged bony shoulders. “It is as it is,” the lesser sidhe agreed.

  “What happened to ‘the desert is hot, inhospitable to our kind’?”

  “A day, you said. Two at the most.” Drem ran a clawed finger over the blue feather now secured to the inside of its wrist by multicolored thread. As it brushed the indigo barbs Drem’s body changed, lengthening, growing sturdy and muscular. The sidhe’s black eyes brightened to fierce amber. Its mouth became human and lush, its skin darkened several shades, and its shoulders pulled upright, proud and strong.

  Drem’s clothes were subject to the same sorcery, changing from ragtag motley to snakeskin and linen. Its legs were long and brown beneath a warrior’s kilt.

  “A day or two I can survive,” the sidhe said. Drem had become the desert woman in every respect, a mimic so perfect Everin couldn’t help but shiver. “You’ll be glad of me, I expect.”

  Chapter 18

  Young victims of the Red Worm plague crowded the old shepherd’s den. They stood alone or in groups, or sat atop piles of bone. Some pressed so close together their ghostly forms intermingled. Many wore the likeness of their last days in life, spectral forms disfigured by lesions. Others appeared as they must have in happier times, hale and unmarred. A few clutched phantom copies of the toys and flowers left in tribute near the Bone Cave’s front entrance.

  Their eyes burned blue flame. They turned as one toward Avani in mute appeal as she edged the iron grille slowly open. For a moment the dead children—so many!—were all she could see.

  Avani and Baldebert had come too late to catch the armswoman at Wilhaiim’s north gate, and Avani had briefly despaired. But she’d asked the right questions of the Kingsmen watching the portcullis. They’d been flattered by her attention and quick to answer.

  “Aye, my lady. She’s gone out, not long ago, and east toward squatters’ row. Quizzed Rolf here on the state of his boots, she did, and made him swear to buff them up some soon as he’s off shift.”

  They’d ridden hard after that, protected from undue attention by Baldebert’s bone trinket, although once they spotted Lane’s stocky form stopped on squatters’ row the admiral had insisted they dismount.

  “On foot, from here,” he’d suggested, tying the temple horses to a shady tree just off the highway. “There’s no guarantee she’ll not notice the sound of pursuant hooves on cobblestone otherwise. Finesse is the key.”

  Avani didn’t disagree. She was far more interested in Lane’s odd behavior.

  “Is she buying lamb’s meat?” She frowned, watching Lane trade coin for a haunch wrapped greasy butcher’s parchment. “On squatters’ row? It’s like to be days old and near-rancid.”

  “Mayhap she plans to poison her next victim,” replied Baldebert, but his eyes were narrowed in thought. When Avani made to step onto the highway, he stopped her. “Not yet. Wait. She’s a practiced soldier, that one. Too quick and she’ll guess something’s up, even with Renault’s fine magic pin on our side.”

  It pained Avani to do so, but she hung back while Lane exchanged pleasantries with the beggars on the road, stopping to smile or chat. The gruff armswoman seemed surprisingly well liked by Wilhaiim’s less fortunate. The ragged men and women living against the wall regarded Lane with muted affection and outright respect. It was obvious they considered her a friend.

  “She’s a local hero, one of the old guard,” Avani said, feeling sick. “Even Renault speaks of her with awe and affection.”

  “She’s an old dog with a few good tricks still up her sleeve,” Baldebert replied. “And in my experience your local hero is just as likely to go bad as your local fishmonger, if not more so.” He tapped restless fingers against one thigh. “Any word from Mal yet?”

  Avani scowled. “I told you, it’s not like running messages to and from court. It’s an unreliable method and he’ll be furious when he finds out I’ve let it slip.” A link such as we have means certain execution. “I can’t reach him every time.”

  She’d tried, as they’d crashed through clogged streets on horseback, for Liam’s sake and to a lesser extent, for the sake of the dead Masterhealer. She’d touched Mal’s mind and found it alien, empty of coherent thought and gone turbid with flashes of deep places, dank water, and ancient hatred. It had taken her only a moment to understand she had somehow reached the barrowman through Mal, or that in his quest for answers Mal had gone so deep into the sidhe’s center that magus and barrowman had become one and the same, or so close as to make no difference.

  Get out! they’d roared, the two of them together, man and sidhe, when Avani had trod sideways on a memory of sleeping entwined and content in a pack of bony, flat-eyed sidhe siblings somewhere far beneath the skin of the earth.

  And then Mal, briefly himself: Avani, go. It’s not safe for you here.

  She’d fallen out of his head and almost off her horse in the shock of it, the barrowman’s mind, strange but not so feral or frightening as she’d assumed.

  “We can’t rely on Mal,” she told Baldebert as they watched the armswoman say her goodbyes and leave squatters’ row. “We’ll handle this on our own, or you’ll ride back and grab the north guard and let the Kingsmen take her.”

  “Do you suppose—” Baldebert strolled back onto the highway. Traffic through squatters’ row was light, and Lane was easy to pick out twenty strides ahead “—that Rolf of the dirty boots and his overeager friend will believe us when we say their beloved weapons tutor just murdered the Masterhealer over his own desk and, oh, by the way, we’ve reason to believe Master Paul was not her first victim?

  “Whatever else we may be we’re not native to this land. Different. Unknown. And the armswoman? She’s a—beg your pardon—what was it you just called her?” He smirked.

  “A local hero,” Avani confessed.

  “Exactly.” Baldebert’s grin was bright and brittle. “But don’t you worry, we’ll get your lad back, if he’s still alive. You see, I’m a bit of a hero myself.”

  The lamb’s meat was for Holder’s brindle hound. Avani recognized the large dog at once, and blinked to see it stationed there.

  She and Baldebert watched as Lane had tossed the haunch into a hollow dug into the ground near the back of the Bone Cave. They’d trailed her without incident along the highway and over a merry creek. When Lane had lit out across fields of whispering wheat neither Avani nor Baldebert could guess her re
asoning, until they’d come at last across the grass-covered dimple in the crop, the shepherd’s mound become crypt.

  They stood amongst the crop, afraid to speak for fear of being overheard, and watched as Lane bribed the hound, extracted a key from a loop on her trousers, and unlocked a small gate set into the back of the tomb. The key stuck in the tumblers, making Lane shake her head and mutter. The gate was cleverly hidden away, far enough behind the crypt as to be unnoticed by anyone come to pay homage to the dead. The hound, worrying happily at gamy meat, paid no further attention to Lane or her struggles with the padlock. When at last the shackle popped free, Lane yanked away a heavy length of chain and let herself through the gate.

  “Well, and well,” Baldebert murmured, once Lane was out of earshot. “The old dog runs straight to her den, just as I predicted. Are you ready?”

  Avani spoke the cant that summoned her wards, wrapping them together in silver light. Belatedly she remembered to draw her sword; it trembled almost imperceptibly in her hand. Baldebert blenched and she knew he saw her incompetence.

  “If you must fight, stab and twist,” he suggested, smile stretched tight. “It’s the twist that matters. And stay close to me, you’ll fare better if she can’t see you.”

  But as they approached the Bone Cave the silver brooch pinned to Baldebert’s front began to smoke. The silver heated to orange and then white. Baldebert ripped the pin from his breast with a strangled cry. It cracked when it hit the dirt, snapping in two, revealing yellow bone beneath melting silver.

  The hound looked up from its meal and began to growl. Baldebert clutched at the smoking hole in his shirt, face pained.

  “Only the living may pass.” The ghost was portly, dressed head-to-toe in fine velvet, and wore a silver circlet upon his brow. He reached for the broken bauble but his hand passed through silver and bone. He peeked at Avani, mournful. “Within or without, only the living may pass.”