The Bone Cave
Page 27
“I didn’t believe them, when they told me,” Mal confessed. “I thought it must be a farce, or a replica.”
“Holder has seven of them kept in his barn,” the armswoman’s ghost replied. “Seven of the original army, kept back from destruction. His family was proud of their artistry—too proud, mayhap.”
Mal approached the Automata. Bones broke beneath his feet. Lane drifted after, dragging a train of dead children. Goodwife Farrow limped along with them, ghostly brow furrowed.
Jacob perched on a withered sidhe corpse, dug his claws into leathery white flesh. No dead sidhe loitered in the Bone Cave. The Tuath Dé were gods amongst themselves.
“Imagine what seven walking machines would have meant to our cause,” Lane continued. Her blue eyes burned. “We would have had full run of the city, if not the entire flatland. And Holder thought he could build more, in time, with his nuncle’s old scrolls to guide him.”
Mal tapped a thumbnail against the Automata’s breastplate. Jacob spat the silver coin from his beak and muttered. The metal monster was not dangerous on its own, not any more so than a Kingsman’s sword or theist’s spell book—but like any tool, it waited upon the whim of a master.
“And your plan was, what?” Mal wondered. “Toss Renault from the throne, set yourself there in his stead? You never struck me as the sort who cared much for worldly power, Lane. I thought you were happy shaping soldiers.”
“Until the king’s impiety took happiness from me by way of the plague,” said Lane, gruffly. She stroked a hand over the head of a ghostly lad in a page’s uniform. “Renault believes himself above temple decree and so the god sends the Red Worm to steal what we hold most dear. The Masterhealer warned him again and again, but still he insists on ignoring the temple’s counsel. If he’s not soon stopped Wilhaiim will surely fall in the face of the one god’s fury.”
“You didn’t think you would draw the god’s fury by putting a sword through his highest priest?” wondered Mal, staring up into the face of the ferric soldier. The metal creation was a full half man taller than the magus. Jacob didn’t like the way Mal’s face had brightened with avarice. He rattled his wings, uneasy.
“Paul betrayed us,” Lane spat. Her dead eyes burned blue. “I but hoped to remove a godless man from the throne. Paul made promises to the desert tribesman.”
Mal hesitated, attention briefly drawn from the Automata. “Did he? So you killed him. And the others? Baroness Belmas, Farrow, the prostitutes?”
“Holder said we needed new bone to animate the walking machine, in the way of the old magi. No one misses a whore or five. This tomb was perfect, for the butchering and the conjuring. Holder’s place is nearby, the cave afforded us privacy. And it worked, at first. Paul managed to spell dolls into walking, and then the straw men. But that was as far as it went. The spell was clumsy, the ferric soldiers too wieldy. We needed something more powerful.” Lane, too, gazed up at the walking machine. “Farrow and his wife were lately bedeviled by sidhe amongst their foul. Paul thought, mayhap, sidhe bones would work a stronger magic—” She rolled her shoulders. “Greta came across one of our traps whilst out riding, saw the barrowman within. She meant to go to her husband. I stopped her. After that Farrow lost his nerve. Everything began to fall apart.”
“Things do,” mused Mal. “Sooner or later.”
“I don’t regret what I did.” The armswoman stood stolidly amongst wide-eyed children. “I serve my god when so many in court follow His Majesty’s lead into faithlessness.” She took a deep breath. “I’ll stand before him in judgment soon, and I’m not afraid. Will you break the seal, my lord, and let us leave this place, let us rest?”
Mal stood still for so long that Jacob thought the magus hadn’t heard her plea. Lane shifted soundlessly. The small spirits around her began to drift restlessly. Jacob launched from the ground to Mal’s shoulder, only to be knocked again to the sand when the vocent raised silvery-green wards.
“Nay,” Mal decided, as Jacob tried to regain his feet. “Wilhaiim has need of you still, Armswoman.”
Lane’s brow creased. “I don’t understand,” she began, and then she gasped in belated recognition. “You wouldn’t!”
“I have,” Mal said grimly. From the pocket of his plain trousers he drew a single knucklebone, newly cleaned of flesh. “They laid your corpse upon my table last night, old friend. I had the forethought to keep a piece, in the off chance what I learned from your escaped barrowman was true.”
Fear was not an emotion Jacob knew. He was prince among ravens, lord of the wind, chosen by the Goddess for his courage and wit. But the pounding of his heart recalled a long ago dawn when he was thrown from the nest by his mother to try fledgling wings and the terror he felt as the ground came up too fast to meet him.
He’d found his wings then and he found them again. He flew once more at Mal’s face, talons extended to rake and scratch. One more Mal tossed him away, this time with enough force to leave Jacob broken and panting.
Mal began calmly to chant, and as he did so he added a fistful of bone scooped from the floor to those in his hand. His mage-light snuffed out, only to burn again within the Automata’s helm. First Lane and then, one by one, Wilhaiim’s dead children snuffed to nothing as the necromancer stole their essence and used their strength to kindle the ferric soldier. They cried out as they were consumed. The Bone Cave swallowed their wails.
Jacob made it through the gate and into the morning an instant after the Automata woke.
He saw it stir as he fled, one wing gone limp and useless. Its gauntlet fingers moved first, tentative, a slow flexing. Then its tail twitched, a lazy uncoiling. Its chest began to rise and fall with a sound like a farrier’s bellows. At last, as Mal’s chanting rose to shouting, its head turned to watch Jacob as the raven fluttered toward safety.
He felt the stain of its regard on his feathers long after he crawled into the field and hid amongst the wheat.
Acknowledgments
Thanks as always to Paul, Katherine, and Aidan for keeping me warm. Thanks to Mary, and to Eric for the Writer’s Chair, and the mint flavored M&Ms. Thanks to the Hobblings, the Sherlock Tumblr fandom, and SFF Junkies for endless hours spent in procrastination. Extra special thanks to my editor, Priyanka, for keeping me on track, and to the rest of the HVI team for all their hard work.
About the Author
SARAH REMY writes fiction to keep real life from getting out of hand. She lives in Spokane, Washington, where she shows horses, works at a local elementary school, and rehabs her old house. Follow her on Twitter at @sarahremywrites.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the bone cave. Copyright © 2016 by Sarah Remy. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, no known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.
Digital Edition NOVEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780062473745
Print Edition ISBN: 9780062473752
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