The Bone Shard Daughter

by Andrea Stewart

  Something screeched, and Gio swore. He let me go.

  Mephi had sunk his teeth into Gio’s boot and was doing his best to unbalance him. I thought Gio might kick at him, or pull away. Instead, he knelt and looked Mephi straight in the eyes, his demeanor flowing from surprise into calm. “I mean him no harm.” He held both hands upright, palms out. “I’m not hurting him, I promise.”

  It seemed I wasn’t the only one who’d fallen into the trap of addressing Mephi like he was a person.

  Mephi, for his part, unhinged his jaw and let the boot go, though he stayed crouched on the floor, all the hair on his back on end.

  “Your pet doesn’t like me much,” Gio said.

  “He’s particular.” I rubbed at my throat. I’d not seen Gio move before he’d attacked me. And he was deceptively strong. It seemed the leader of the Shardless Few had earned his legends. “Give him a fish though, and he’d forgive you for murdering me. Fickle beast.”

  Mephi turned narrowed eyes on me. Did he understand “fickle” now too? I hoped not.

  I glanced around the cavern we’d been practicing in. This hideout the Shardless had acquired was vast – larger on the inside than I’d thought possible. In a few places, light filtered in through vines, tinted green. I scooped my staff from the ground. “How did you know this place was here?”

  “We were lucky. When we came to Nephilanu, one of my scouts found it.”

  Lie.

  I pressed him on it. “One of your scouts saw the crack in the cliff face and decided to go for a pleasure outing into its depths? Whoever this scout is, they have a death wish.”

  He smiled. “Don’t all of the Shardless Few? Those of us who escaped the Tithing Festival live in constant fear of discovery.”

  I let the change of subject pass. “And the rest of you?”

  His grin faded into his usual grim expression. He picked up a lamp, beckoned to me and strode from the room. I followed, Mephi on my heels.

  Faded murals adorned the walls of the hallway, remnants of silver paint catching the lamp’s light. I could make out some of the scenes, though some of the walls had been damaged, leaving chunks of the paintings missing. Men and women in flowing, high-necked robes, their hands upraised. Waves crashing against a cliff. Wind bending trees. And then a series of paintings that took me a moment to process. Four islands, each one lower in the water.

  Not four islands. One. Sinking.

  I put a hand to the wall, feeling suddenly dizzy. The ground beneath me shaking, dust clogging my nostrils. Men and women and children screaming. Animals swimming away, trying to escape. Hands clawing at thatch and tile as water rushed into homes, as the Endless Sea claimed city after city, life after life.

  I wanted to vomit. It had happened before – somewhere in the long history of the islands. Back in the time of the Alanga or before.

  The brightness of a lantern struck my eyes. Gio had stopped and turned. “Are you all right?”

  Mephi rose to his haunches and patted my leg, little worried sounds in the back of his throat.

  “Fine.” What was I to say? I would never be all right again.

  He didn’t believe me, but he didn’t pry.

  He led me into another cavern, this one with a hole in the ceiling that let in some light. Pallets were set up near the light. “I wanted to show you,” Gio said, setting the lamp down. “We don’t all escape. The rest of us live in fear of the day our shards are pressed into dead flesh.”

  Several men and women lay on the pallets, their thin limbs held tight to their bodies, curled like the legs of dead spiders. Three of them craned their necks at the sound of Gio’s voice. The last one lay still, perhaps no longer able to hear anything at all.

  “Their shards must have been in use for some time,” Gio said. “But the sickness and the weakness don’t often strike until the end. It’s so gradual, most of us don’t notice. A twinge here, a bout of exhaustion there. By the time it’s noticeable, the decline is quick.” He approached the pallets and knelt, checking in with a woman who hovered over them with a pitcher of water and a damp rag.

  “Lenau passed last night,” she said to him. “We buried her in the jungle.”

  I kept my distance, though Mephi did not share my hesitation. He bounded forward and slipped his head beneath the hand of the man closest to the light. The man laughed and obliged, stretching out his gnarled fingers, rubbing Mephi’s ears.

  “It’s been happening to more of us,” Gio said. His voice echoed across the cavern. “This is the fate that awaits many of the Empire’s citizens. Not death at the hands of the Alanga, but death at the hands of the man sworn to protect us.”

  I’d seen the shard-sick, cloistered in the corners of houses, cast aside in alleyways. Sometimes, it had been a person I knew. I stood there, unsure of what he wanted me to say, unsure of what I wanted to say. But I knew what he would say next.

  “You can help us.”

  Everyone – always grasping, always wanting more, always needing more. I didn’t have it to give. My fingers slipped on my staff, my hand grown slick with sweat. I was a liar, but I kept my promises. And I’d promised Emahla I would find her. “The blue-sailed boat,” I managed.

  Gio nodded. “Yes, I know you’re looking for it.”

  “You’ve set spies on me?”

  “I didn’t need spies. Only ears. You’ve not made a secret of your search.”

  One of the men coughed. His eyes were sunken, his skin stretched over his cheekbones like tanning leather. I tried not to stare. The man was withering away. My fingers itched. I wanted to touch the scar behind my ear – the scar where the soldier had struck me with his chisel. I’d told my mother and father and no one else. “I didn’t take bone,” the soldier had whispered, his breath hot against my ear. “I know what happened to your brother and I’m sorry.” He’d held a shard of bone in his hand – not mine. “They’ll find out someday, but today isn’t that day.” And then he’d pushed me toward the other children, weeping and bleeding, waiting for their mothers or fathers to bandage them.

  No one had saved my brother. Even if he hadn’t died, he might have been one of those bodies on the pallets, wasting away as his shard was used.

  “Care to tell me your thoughts?” Gio’s voice broke through the memory.

  “No, not really.”

  He sighed. “So you don’t want to join the cause. But tell me this: what happens after you find the blue-sailed boat?”

  I’d find Emahla. I’d go home. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “A person who can’t see a future doesn’t have a future,” Gio said.

  “Is that a proverb? One of Ningsu’s?” I turned away from the sick men and women, gesturing for Mephi to follow. But Gio followed me too.

  “No,” he said. “Someone I knew once said that. She was right.”

  I looked at him sidelong, studying his face. A scar ran over the milky left eye, interrupting the line of his brow. Despite the gray hair and the lines of his face, he somehow didn’t strike me as old. Not as old as he looked anyway. “What’s your story? You apparently know mine.”

  He reached down to scratch Mephi’s head absentmindedly. Mephi chirped and bumped his knee. Oh, so they were friends now? “It’s long,” Gio said, “and mostly uninteresting. Suffice to say, I thought I knew my destiny. I thought I knew what was right. But I made mistakes. A good many of them. I’m just trying to set things right, and to find people who will help me do that.”

  I held my hands out, as if to show a beggar I had no coin. “You’re asking the wrong person.”

  Gio nodded. “It seems perhaps I am. But what will you do, Jovis, when the shards of your family are put into use? The shards of those you care about?”

  My heart felt like a stone, sinking into the depths of the Endless Sea. “Who says I care about anyone?” I was a good liar, but this lie sounded hollow even to me.

  “Gio,” one of the women called from her pallet.

  He turned to tend to her, liftin
g her head to help her drink. Who would help my parents if they both fell ill? Maybe the Shardless Few would serve that duty since I was absent, chasing Emahla across the Endless Sea. They would be better family than I was. I pushed the bitter thoughts aside and slipped away. Mephi padded silently at my side. He said nothing as I took a lamp from the wall and strode back down the passageway we’d come. I knew he was bursting with questions, just as I was, but I didn’t trust the room they’d assigned me as a place to speak. So I crept through darkened corridors, the echoing voices fading behind me.

  The lamplight disappeared down the ends of hallways, receding into emptiness and silence. Gio’s questions drifted from my mind, replaced by my own. “There aren’t any doors that I can see. How far do you think these go? How deep?”

  Mephi wove around my legs, stopping me in my tracks. “Don’t know.”

  Of course he didn’t. “I was just thinking aloud,” I said. “His scouts didn’t just find this place. He knew about it some other way.”

  I swung the lamp around the corridor. Faintly, in the distance, I could hear voices, though I could not hear what they said. The air here smelled like earth and ice.

  “Like him,” Mephi said.

  “Of course you do. He talks about saving everyone, about making everything better. But do you know how often that works? Setting up a Council with representatives from each island? People want simple solutions. When this all began, people thought the Sukais would save us. Instead, they’ve enslaved us all. I need to look after me and mine. And that means finding my wife. If bringing in a new world order means so much to you, why don’t you stay here with him?” It was a stupid thing to say, petty, and even saying the words aloud felt like tearing my heart into two. I didn’t know how to take them back.

  “Never leave you.” He wove through my legs again, nearly making me trip and forcing me to halt. I hated to admit how much his assurance eased the tightness in my chest. Mephi sat on his haunches in front of me. “But, Jovis,” he said, and the sound of my name in his raspy voice made my spine tingle, “the people here – also your people.”

  I thought of the long hours I’d spent at the Academy at Imperial, the sidelong glances at my skin and features, the way I’d had to always work harder and longer just to prove myself. Who among them had cared about me? I’d spent two lonely years there, watching my back and earning their grudging respect – until I could claim my Navigator’s tattoo. They’d wanted me to fail, and had been disappointed when I hadn’t. “They are not my people!”

  I slammed a hand against the wall and felt, almost too late, the thrumming in my bones. I pulled the blow, sucked in the tremor before it could shake the tunnels around us.

  Mephi had lowered himself to a crouch, his ears flat against his head, his eyes on the ceiling above us.

  I let out my breath slowly, afraid that letting it out quickly might shake the foundations of this place. “I’m sorry. I need to be careful.”

  His gaze still on the ceiling, Mephi crept forward and patted my foot. “We stay together. We leave together.”

  Relief swelled in my veins like a tide. I put out a hand to lean against the wall – and stumbled. The lamp swung wildly from my hand, threatening to slip from my grasp. I tightened my fingers around it, focused on putting my feet beneath me. The wall I’d slammed my hand against was no longer there. “What is this?” I lifted the lamp once I’d caught myself, my heartbeat thundering in my ears.

  Mephi slipped past me before I could stop him.

  “Wait, you don’t—” I cut myself off, shook my head. Mephi’s tail disappeared into the dark room. It wasn’t any use. He wasn’t a pet, no matter what the Shardless assumed. He was a friend. A very foolish friend.

  I stepped in after him, keeping the lamp held high. I needn’t have worried. The room was small, no monsters hidden in its corners. I checked behind me and found a slab of stone for a door. I ran my fingers along the edge. Back out there, in the hallway, I could have sworn the walls had been smooth – no doors or doorways to speak of. Where had this come from then? Had the light just been too dim for me to see the outline of it?

  Mephi had opened a chest and was rifling through it, dust filling the air around him. “Stop it,” I called to him. “You don’t know what’s in there.” But it was as though I hadn’t spoken at all. He tested his teeth on a stone bracelet, and then tossed it aside when it proved not to be edible. His furred form was swathed in bolts of elaborately embroidered cloth – half of which he’d emptied onto the floor.

  I sighed and checked the rest of the room.

  A sinking bed lay in the middle of the room, and in a corner a deep tub had been carved into the floor. It must have been a lovely place to relax a long time ago. Stone shelves lined the walls. They were mostly empty, but when I held the lamp up to them, I could see impressions in the dust where items had once lain. My spine prickled. Someone had been in here, and judging by the dust, it had even perhaps been in the past year. “Mephi,” I hissed to him. Even my whisper seemed too loud. “Get out of there.”

  A couple of scraps of wood lay on the shelves, but there in the corner I saw something else. A book.

  Mephi scrambled from the chest and darted to me just as I pulled the book down. “Food?” he asked. I couldn’t tell what time of day it was, but it must have been close to sunset. Past dinnertime. He’d been eating even more than usual lately, and had been more sluggish in the mornings.

  “No,” I said. A brief longing hit me – to be free of this place, of this darkness, to be out on the water again. “We’ll get some food in a moment.” The cover of the book was unmarked, the binding decorated with only a few lines of flaking gold paint. When I opened the pages, they crackled. An earthy scent wafted from the paper. I brought the lamp in close so I could read it.

  I didn’t recognize the script.

  I knew Empirean; I even knew some Poyer. But this was neither of those things. The script was tight and small, words nearly running into one another. I flipped through the pages, looking for something I recognized.

  And then I stopped. Flipped a few pages back.

  This word. I knew this word. It was written differently from what I was accustomed to, but it was the same word.

  Alanga.

  29

  Lin

  Imperial Island

  Uphilia moved like a ghost through the palace. I didn’t know where she lived so I’d had to send my little spy construct out to find her lair. It took my spy three days to report on its location. Three days I spent poring over books, trying to study as my mind filled with images of Bayan melting. I couldn’t figure out what had happened to him. Each time I saw Father in the hallways, he didn’t look at me. I’d dared only once to ask him where Bayan was, and Father had only said “resting”, a warning in his tone. I knew better than to press the issue. Still, I’d gone to Bayan’s room the next night and had found it locked. When I’d placed my ear to the door, I’d heard nothing, not even the sound of his breathing.

  Why hadn’t he wanted to see Father? Why had he wanted to hide from him? The only conclusion that made sense was that Father had done this to him.

  The night air breathed down the back of my neck, bringing with it a few small drops of rain. Of course Uphilia couldn’t live someplace easy to reach. Foxes liked snug little dens, and ravens could fly. I clung to the tiles of the palace roof, slippery with rain. My engraving tool was in my sash pocket along with an extra two shards of bone from the bone shard storeroom. I’d have to be careful what commands I added to Uphilia, lest I upset the balance of existing commands, but this would give me more room to work with than I’d had with Mauga. And I knew Father cared more about trade than bureaucracy. I had the suspicion she’d be a more sophisticated construct than Mauga.

  I stepped across the curved roof, going slowly, doing my best to keep my footing. The rain and wind threatened to topple me from the tiles. The palace was several stories high; I’d break more than just a rib if I fell. My foot slippe
d a little. My heart jumped into my throat. I windmilled my arms, trying to keep my balance.

  I didn’t want to die like this.

  My hands broke my tumble, and I slid only a little way down the roof. My palms were raw, and from the fiery feeling, I guessed one of my fingernails bled. I hated Uphilia and her stupid lair. She nested near the peak of the roof in a hollow my father had made for her just beneath the gable. It would be foolish of me to try walking again. So I crept across the roof on my hands and knees, cursing the rain that fell faster and ran into my eyes.

  The edge of the roof came into view. I made my way to the edge, lowered myself to my stomach and peered over.

  Loose straw peeked out of a hole carved into the wall below the gable. I caught the glimpse of black feathers, the white-tipped end of a red tail. Uphilia had returned to her roost. By how still she sat, she was likely sleeping. Even so, how could I sneak up on a winged fox? I’d never be as quick as she was, I couldn’t fly and getting into her lair would be difficult enough. I needed to find a way to do so quickly and block her escape at the same time. I could lower myself from the edge of the roof but the tiles were slippery, and I’d need to drop into her lair right away.

  There was a decorative piece at the gable, curling iron nailed to the beams. I edged to the peak of the roof and probed it with my hands. It was nailed securely to the beams, and there was a horizontal piece I could fit both my hands around. It wouldn’t be easy, but if I lay on my back, put my hands around this piece and kicked off of the roof – I could get enough momentum to swing around and into Uphilia’s lair.

  I wasn’t an acrobat but I was short and light. However, the piece still might not hold my weight. I didn’t see much choice though.

  The cloud juniper berries were still in my sash pocket. I took one and popped it into my mouth. It tasted musty and sharp, a slight bit of juice escaping between my teeth. Ignoring the taste, I chewed and swallowed it. I wasn’t a cloudtree monk, but I knew the stories. No one had ever assailed a monastery – not even my father – and succeeded.