Gabe swallowed. David had snuck into his tent moments after the explosion and hadn’t left until an hour or so before dawn. More than enough time for him to get across the camp and into this hut. He didn’t doubt the man could do it.
But why?
For some reason Gabe trusted Carufel in this matter. He’d seen the way the lieutenant had treated Ismael during his ordeal and he had come for Gabe now, Ismael’s best chance of surviving. It wasn’t the lieutenant’s fault Ismael was dead.
“Can you give me a moment?” he asked the enemy officer.
Carufel studied him with that carefully neutral expression, then nodded. He directed the men to search the hut, then stood by the door, giving Gabe some privacy.
Even though Gabe’s world felt as if it had stalled, the sun was still rising, golden light creeping across the wet ground. A few soft fingers of light touched Ismael’s face. Gabe knelt by the small man, his head empty of thoughts, his chest heavy with disbelief. He’d thought he’d stopped the killing. He’d sacrificed his honour to save them all, and still Ismael was dead.
If David had done this, Gabe would kill him.
But why? He couldn’t imagine what reason anyone, even a magically cursed soldier, would have to kill Ismael. The man had been the most inoffensive thing about this whole stupid deal. He and Gabe had had their differences, but that didn’t stop Gabe from acknowledging Ismael was perhaps the best person in the entire camp. If any of them deserved to survive this, it should have been Ismael.
Gabe replaced the bandage, covering up the ugliness of death. He straightened Ismael’s legs and rested his hands on his chest. As he did so, Gabe felt a small bulge under the dead man’s shirt. The pouch. His life, Ismael had called it. If it had that much meaning to him, his family would want it back. Gabe palmed it before Carufel could see. He didn’t want to chance the enemy getting their hands on something so important to Ismael.
The two soldiers emerged, shaking their heads. Nothing untoward in the hut. Gabe might have trusted Carufel, but he didn’t trust those soldiers. He got up and went into the hut.
The stink was horrendous. Poor Ismael, spending his night in here. Relaxed bowels and bladders, the beginnings of rot and putrefaction. Fresh spilled blood, splashes of darker fluids, marked the sight of Ismael’s attack. He’d been by a row of bodies next to the door. The splatter pattern indicated he’d been facing inward. His attacker had come at him from in front to get such a deep gut blow.
Backing out of the hut, a familiar face caught Gabe’s eye. Palo de Torres. He lay across the top of the bodies, tossed there casually. His sightless eyes stared at the ceiling.
Gabe fled, pushing past Carufel so he could throw up last night’s dinner. Shock and grief, he reasoned as his stomach heaved again and again. Tears burned his eyes as he remembered teasing Ismael about the smell of rotting bodies.
“Ndargo.” Kimotak stood a little bit away, a stretcher under one arm. Fetched to carry Ismael where? They were already at the home of the dead. Kimotak shook his head sadly. “It has arrived.”
“What’s arrived?” Gabe asked numbly.
“Your death.” He came over and patted Gabe’s shoulder in a gesture he’d learned from the Delaluzians. “Don’t worry, ndargo. You good man. We dance for you. Then we sing for you.”
Gabe tried to smile. “Appreciated, Kimotak.”
“Come,” Carufel said gently. “I’d best return you to your tent and report to the general.”
Gabe let the lieutenant lead him away. At his tent—Ismael’s tent—he was given water to wash, which he did. They brought breakfast, which he shoved right back at them, and then they left him alone.
He sank down by Ismael’s chest, leaning on it as he took out the small pouch. What could it hold that meant so much to the Dean? A religious relic? A memento of home? Gabe toyed with the pouch, feeling the small object within, confused and upset.
Just when he opened it, he didn’t know, but he tipped it up and caught the small, white object as it fell out.
It hit his flesh like a spark from a lighter. Reflexively, his hand tipped over, dropping the thing to the floor. His skin tingled where it had touched him, a blurring, aching sensation running up his arm and into his shoulder. Shaking his hand, he looked at the object on the floor.
It was a finger bone. A middle phalanx by the shape of it, possibly from either the first or second finger. But wherever it came from, it wasn’t normal. No bone Gabe had ever touched before had felt like that. Nothing ever had.
Nothing except what he’d felt around David’s heart.
Shuddering, Gabe reached tentatively for the bone again. As his bare flesh came close to it, he could sense it. A thrumming emanation, such as he might feel around an uncontained engine, the same shiver down his spine he got whenever Ruben created fire. But not just Ruben’s magic. He got the same sensation from Ofelia, Vendaval and Jacinta when they applied their magic to the world around them.
Magic in a bone? Magic resided in every part of the body, but it dissipated when the body died, no longer controlled by the will and mind of the mage. This was impossible.
What was Ismael doing with something impossible?
Memory awoke within Gabe and he went back to that night he and Ismael had got drunk. There was little he could recall of what they’d discussed, but he could still clearly see Ismael clutching the wad of letters in one hand and the pouch in the other. Gabe looked at the chest. He hadn’t wanted to invade Ismael’s privacy the night before, but things were different now.
Wary of the bone on the floor, Gabe opened the chest and surveyed the neatly folded clothes. It touched something raw inside him to see the order with which Ismael lived his life. Robes here, socks there, underwear tucked into that corner. Gently he lifted out the clothes and found spare boots, several copies of Saint Ciro’s writings, another bottle of potent Talamhian spirits and a compact shaving kit. Under those he found the letters. A tidy bundle tied with string and kept inside a water-proofed satchel.
Gabe sorted through the letters, finding the oldest and reading it quickly. It dated back well before the conflict in the Valley had begun and was from Raquel Maria. She addressed Ismael as her brother. The letter was short but heartfelt, plain and held nothing of great significance to anyone other than the siblings.
The next letter was much the same, as was the third, though the writing had lost some of its neatness and the spelling was degrading. The fourth letter was five pages long and rambling, switching from one topic to another with little logic. As Gabe made his way through them, the quality of the letters went through many highs and lows. One was simply a page of Ismael’s name repeated over and over; another a passionate and intelligent discussion on Saint Ciro’s stance on the state of Talamh. The very next one was as if a child was learning to write, speaking of flowers and birds and the spiders that crawled into bed with Raquel and ate her fingers and toes.
The pages were spotted with dried tears, worn to a satin-smooth finish on the edges where Ismael had held them so many times. Whatever had been wrong with Raquel, it was a cruel illness, giving her days, or perhaps only moments, of intense clarity, before stealing it away and leaving her simple minded, innocent and ignorant like a young child.
Then the letters changed again. Raquel spoke of a woman she’d met. A Sacerdio who said she could help her. And indeed it seemed as if that were the case, for her letters returned to the highly intelligent woman only briefly glimpsed before. Her hand writing was neat and precise, her thoughts ordered and swung from a cutting wit to a deeply probing philosophy. She and Ismael entered into a lengthy debate over some of the ideals of the church and once more, the tone of the letters changed.
Raquel retained her mind this time, but her arguments began to shift around to a way of thinking that made Gabe cringe.
Demons.
Her last letter mentioned demons outright. She neither claimed they were bad or good but the very mention of them must have been enough to condemn her, b
ecause the final piece of paper in the bundle was a declaration from the desk of Abbess Morales, notifying Raquel’s family she had been taken as part of the inquisition.
Poor Ismael. His sister might still be in a cell somewhere under the cathedral in Ibarra City. Or more likely she was dead, killed by the strain of undergoing the tests of the inquisition. If she was already ill, she wouldn’t have lasted long.
Gabe opened the bottle of liqueur and took a slug. It burned on the way down and sat uneasily in his stomach, but the buzz that hummed through his veins gave him something else to think about. He put away the letters and sat back. The story of Ismael’s sister was tragic but it still didn’t explain the strange bone.
He picked up the pouch again, feeling around inside it for anything he might have missed. There was nothing, but as he smoothed the fabric through his fingers, he felt a small rough patch. He turned and twisted it about in the light until he could make out what it was. Something had been embroidered there, something painstakingly picked out at a later date. Squinting, he made out two letters. R M.
Raquel Maria?
The bone sat on the floor, a perfectly white phalanx that had burned to the touch.
Not quite sure what made him do it, Gabe took off his glove and reached for the bone. The pulse of magic he’d felt with his right hand was nothing compared to this. It seemed to reach out and wrap around the wrinkled skin of his left hand, magic seeking magic. But this was unlike any magic he’d ever felt before. It wasn’t bone magic, wasn’t fire or earth, air or water. It was just power.
His finger tip touched the bone. A spark leaped from the bone to his skin, but he didn’t remove his hand. He felt the pain but it didn’t bother him, too interested in the change it had caused in the bone.
The phalanx shivered against the ground, moving of its own accord. It rolled away from his touch and bounced from end to end, then sprang into the air. The bone hovered in front of his eyes, wreathed in a silver glow, which grew in intensity until Gabe had to look away. Then it faded.
He blinked the glare out of his eyes and turned back. There was a woman in the tent with him. She was tall and slender, with long, elegantly slim arms and legs, as naked as the day she was born. Long waves of sable hair cascaded over her shoulders, covering her breasts and almost reaching her groin. Her face was starkly beautiful, with no hint of warmth in her eyes, which were a colour somewhere between rust and blood.
“Who are you?” Gabe asked.
She tilted her head at the sound of his voice, a slight frown pinching her thick brows together. Her strange eyes looked him over, then took in the whole tent in a single sweep. At last, she looked down at her body and seemed to notice her state of undress. With a twitch, she was clothed in the robe of a Sacerdio.
“How strange.”
Her voice was soft, her words clipped as if she wasn’t certain how to say them.
“You’re telling me.” Gabe pinched himself. Not dreaming. He looked for the bone, not finding it.
“It is here,” she said, lifting her hand. She had all five fingers.
“Who are you?” He enunciated each word very clearly this time.
Her head titled the other way. “I am...” A shiver ran through her shoulders and her attention shifted again to the tent. “How strange.”
“Yes,” Gabe muttered, standing up. “We covered that.” Maybe he was going insane like Ismael’s poor sister. A connection dropped into place in his jumbled thoughts. “You went to see Raquel Maria, didn’t you.”
“Raquel Maria Rios Gaitan de Ibarra.” Her hesitation over the words vanished and the name fell from her lips smoothly, then her difficulty returned. “She was ill.”
“Was?”
The woman turned on the spot, coming back to face him, the frown back in place. “Where is this?”
Clearly he wasn’t going to get a straight answer. “This is a tent in the camp of Tejon Company, a support unit in the Valley.”
“A tent?”
“Yes. It used to be Ismael’s.”
That caught her attention. “Ismael Donato Rios Gaitan de Ibarra.” Again the sudden ease with words.
“You know Ismael?”
A soft light came into her eyes and a smile almost touched her mouth. “Know him.”
“He’s dead.”
“The debt has been paid.” If she felt anything about Ismael’s death she didn’t show it.
“What debt?”
“The debt of Raquel Maria Rios Gaitan de Ibarra.”
Suddenly it made sense. He backed away from the woman, jaw working but no words coming out. Her inestimable russet eyes followed him, empty at a glance but full of unknowable knowledge if you looked a little longer. He dropped his gaze, unable to meet hers.
She was a demon.
Gabe dug through his memories of Abbess Orellana’s sermons, searching for any information on demons to help him. About all he could remember was that they looked human and used their mysterious abilities to make deals with those foolish enough to approach them. What else had Orellana said? Damn him for his inattention, for spending all these years thinking demons weren’t real. How did you kill a demon? You didn’t. They didn’t die. That was what the inquisition based most of its tests on, the ability of demons to sustain grievous injury and survive, heal in the blink of an eye.
Much like David.
No. He couldn’t afford to be distracted now. Not with a demon right here with him. Of all the places he could have been when this happened, it had to be here, in this Luz-forsaken wasteland...
Gabe’s mad thoughts came to an abrupt stop. He was in the Valley. Demons couldn’t cross the borders of Delaluz. At least that was what the church believed.
He snuck a peek at the woman. She stood exactly where she had appeared, hadn’t moved, except to turn around on the spot. Gabe reached for his magic and listened to it for the tell-tale signs another living, breathing body was close by. Nothing. No sense of another pulse, no warmth of flowing blood.
“You’re not here,” he whispered.
Her head tilted.
Now he knew to look for it, he saw she was an image, partially transparent. She didn’t stand on the floor, rather floated an inch above it. He focused on the hand she’d held up when he’d looked for the bone. There it was, sitting in her index finger, the only solid part of her body.
She looked at her hand. “Here it is whole.”
“But wherever you really are, you’re missing a finger, aren’t you.”
“For the debt.”
Gabe fumbled for a chair and sat down hard, letting out a slow, long breath. “You went to Raquel and offered to heal her in exchange for something.”
She didn’t deny it, so he continued.
“But she was taken for the inquisition. She spoke about you so they took her away and her debt passed to Ismael.” And now the debt was paid. “What did Ismael do for you?”
“He let the boy go.”
“Rafe? No, Dem and the Alarians had released the prince…” Gabe trailed off as he realised that wasn’t what the demon meant. “Ismael recognised Rafe the first time he was here, but rather than alert anyone and send him home, he let him go.”
Which Gabe should have suspected back then. Ismael spoke to all the healed soldiers; he was a Dean of the Church of Ciro. There was no way Ismael wouldn’t have known who Rafe was.
And this demon had wanted Rafe to stay here…
“Not this demon,” she said.
“Then who?”
“This demon lost.” The words came with greater difficulty, each one an effort that took longer than the last. “Must be found.”
“We all wish to be found,” Gabe muttered, still not quite believing he was talking with a demon. “Who wanted the prince to stay here?”
“Master. The found one.”
“Excellent. It’s all clear now. So this Master used Ismael to keep Rafe here and now you kill him because his debt is paid.”
“Debt paid. Not kill.�
�
“So you reckon you didn’t kill him. Get in line. Someone did and I’ll find out who. The bone, that’s how you talked to Ismael?”
“Debt paid. No more power in bone.” Again she looked around. “This strange.”
“Because the debt’s no longer owing you shouldn’t have been called back here?”
Those red eyes settled on him, head tilted. “You have power of bone.”
Stomach twisting, Gabe said, “I’m a Bone Mage, yes.”
“Mage.” She shook her head, a few short, sharp movements that reminded him of Kimotak mimicking Delaluzian gestures. “Power of bone.” A nod.
“Mage Castillo.”
The stern voice cut through Gabe like a knife. He lurched upright, spinning in surprise. General du Serres stood in the opening of the tent, his usual calm replaced by tightly controlled anger. His hard, grey eyes focused on Gabe, not on the strange woman in the tent with him.
That was probably because she was gone. All that remained was the finger bone, hanging in mid-air. Gabe snatched it up before du Serres could see it. His hand felt like it was on fire. Shoving the bone in his jacket pocket, he turned back to the general in time to get a very hard jab in his chest from two of du Serres’ fingers.
“Today, you will be the one answering questions,” the general snapped.
Struggling for understanding, Gabe asked, “About what?”
“About the demon that’s plaguing my camp.”
Gabe was told nothing more as he was dragged into the central yard. There were several rows of dead bodies lined up before the mesquala’s pole. All of them Alarian. Lieutenant Carufel stood to one side, face closed down, hand on the butt of the gun sitting low on his right hip. Colonel Roulier paced before the command tent, throwing dark, deadly looks at Gabe as he was shoved into place.
“Count them,” du Serres commanded, waving a hand at the dead.
Some bodies were peaceful, no mark on them. Others had sliced open chests and guts, missing limbs, cut throats. Some were burned, some with bloodshot eyes, strangled to death.
“Eighty-seven,” Gabe murmured.
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