The Bone Maker

by Sarah Beth Durst

  She yanked on the door—locked. Pushing her aside, Stran punched through the door. It shattered. She stepped inside. “Shit.”

  The shelves were empty.

  Of course they are, she thought. Eklor must have moved them shortly after he showed her. He was a smart man, and he had to know showing her his stash was a risk. Kreya pivoted. “They have to be close. He wouldn’t have hidden them outside the palace where he couldn’t easily access them.”

  “We’ll never be able to search it in time,” Stran said. “If we had Jentt to speed-search it . . .” As a former thief, he would have known exactly where to look for valuables.

  But she’d sent him to the hospital to, hopefully, save lives and secure witnesses. Unless Eklor was one step ahead of them there as well. “We’ll have to persuade the guards to help—”

  In a small voice, Marso said, “I think I can do it.”

  Both Kreya and Stran looked at him.

  “It’s a single question: where are the stolen bones? I can ask that. I can’t read in battle conditions anymore, but if I have quiet and one straightforward question to focus on . . .”

  Kreya hesitated for only half a heartbeat. She trusted Marso to know what he was ready for. Gesturing to the closet, she welcomed him in. “We’ll guard you.”

  “Don’t watch,” he requested. “I have to concentrate.”

  Both Stran and Kreya stood in front of the broken door, backs to the interior, their arms crossed. The palace was eerily quiet. Everyone had taken their advice and either fled or hidden. Kreya tried to keep her thoughts from chasing in circles.

  If Eklor had anticipated they’d come for the bones, he had to have anticipated they’d find out about the hospital. What if Jentt and Zera were walking into a trap? What if the doctors were already dead? What if Eklor had a backup source for his blood already lined up?

  And: what if she’d guessed wrong? All their evidence was thin at best—Grand Master Lorn wasn’t wrong about that. She’d hoped, though, that they’d investigate Eklor and, with the might and intelligence of the entire guild, uncover what he planned in time to stop him.

  Now it’s up to us, Kreya thought.

  Behind her, Marso gasped.

  Leaving his post by the door, Stran knelt beside him. He put his hand on Marso’s back. “Deep breaths. Breathe. That’s it. Even breaths.”

  “What did you see?” Kreya asked.

  “All their lives, all their deaths,” Marso gasped. He doubled over, his forehead touching the floor. His chicken bones scattered as he caught himself on his hands. Stran helped him sit. He rubbed his back until Marso was breathing evenly instead of in short gulps of air.

  “Did you see the bones?” Kreya asked.

  He looked up at her. “Yes.”

  He led the way. Stran supported him every time he wobbled, but he headed unerringly down the hallway to a stairway. Again, they faced palace guards. This time, though, Marso looked so haunted that they didn’t hesitate to withdraw when he told them there was danger within.

  In a burst of inspiration, Kreya told the guards, “Come with us. Be ready for anything.”

  One guard unlocked a door and threw it open.

  Inside, a young boy jumped to his feet. He dropped the book he’d been reading. Kreya stared at him, and he stared back.

  “You’re the dead boy?” Kreya guessed. “Grand Master Lorn’s son?” She remembered Zera had told her his name. “Yarri?”

  “Don’t hurt me!” he squeaked.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Kreya said. “All we want are the bones.”

  His eyes widened. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Marso, where are they?” She didn’t take her eyes off the boy. Damn Eklor for involving a kid in all this. And damn Grand Master Lorn, for putting his own heart above the good of the world. He knows, she thought. The persuasion talisman could only excuse so much. On some level, Lorn had to understand what he was doing. He knows the cost of it all. But he doesn’t care because his son lives.

  She asked herself what she’d do if it were Jentt, and then she ruthlessly banished that thought. She’d crossed lines, yes, but there were limits. There had to be.

  With a shaking arm, Marso pointed at the bed.

  Kreya drew her knife and stalked toward it. Falling back, the boy screamed, but she ignored him. She stabbed the mattress and dragged the blade back, slitting it open. Beside her, Stran yanked at the quilted top until it was open.

  Inside lay the bones.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Amurra paced in front of the ridiculous artificial waterfall. Zera’s servants had given up offering her refreshments after she refused them again and again, and she’d been left in peace with her own thoughts and worries.

  She wasn’t certain that was a good thing.

  Without the children and the farm to distract her from Stran’s absence, she couldn’t stop imagining everything that could go wrong, from the guards at Lorn’s palace arresting Stran to an army of the undead cornering him and killing him. She hated being stuck without anything to do except worry. The whole point of coming to Cerre with her husband was so that she could be useful. In marriage, you were supposed to face life’s challenges as a team. It’s supposed to be the two of us, together, Amurra thought. Not me here, useless and worried sick.

  She had made the choice to stay, however, so this time there was no one to blame but herself. She wasn’t a bone maker, and besides, someone needed to be here in case Kreya’s constructs returned with news of Eklor’s army, as unlikely as that was. But still, she wished . . . I don’t wish I were one of them. I don’t wish I were fighting alongside him. I wish we were both home, in the life we built, in the life we chose, with the family we made. He’d left all of this behind—happily, she’d thought. She missed her children so badly that it felt like a physical ache. Why are we here? Why was Eklor his problem again? Couldn’t someone else do this? He’d risked enough!

  Often at night, Stran still woke, covered in sweat and shaking, and when she asked, he said, “Nightmares.” But she knew they weren’t. They were memories. When they’d married, she’d sworn she’d help him make new memories, better memories. And they had! Was all that about to be erased by fresh trauma that neither of them had asked for?

  She told herself that she was being selfish. She should be proud that Stran was noble and selfless. But I don’t want him to be noble and selfless, she thought. I want him to be home! I want all of us home, a family together. Whatever Eklor did in Cerre wasn’t going to affect them way out on their farm.

  She scolded herself for such thoughts. Lives were at stake. Other people’s husbands, wives, and children. She merely had to be patient. After this was over, they’d go home and be with their children again.

  Across the room, Amurra heard a clicking noise. She crossed to the window and opened it. One of Kreya’s constructs, a mechanical creature made of gears and bones that loosely resembled a tree squirrel, climbed inside. As it chittered and whirred at her, she felt a cold horror close over her heart. The search had been going on for days with no results, and she’d expected that to continue. However, the Five had gone to poke the hornet’s nest.

  She knelt beside the construct. “Master Kreya isn’t here right now.”

  A confused chirp.

  “But you can tell me what you found.”

  Another chirp, this one with a down note, as if it were agreeing with her.

  “Did you find Eklor’s army?”

  It chirped, whirred, and nodded its mechanical head so hard that it toppled over. She righted it, while her heart hammered hard in her throat. She pivoted toward the door and shouted, “Guine!” Please don’t let it be too late yet, she thought. There had to still be time to warn Stran and the others. “Guine!”

  Behind her, the window shattered. She screamed and ducked as shards embedded in her skin. And a monstrous construct leaped through the broken window. It was massive, with spiderlike legs like a crawler but also te
ntacles made of twisted wires extruding from its back. Its head spun and its mirror eyes fixed on her. Amurra ran for the door, still screaming for help.

  A tentacle shot out and wrapped around her waist.

  She grabbed the nearest pillar, but the pull of the tentacle was implacable. She felt her hands slip as it dragged her toward its maw. “Help! Someone help!”

  Another wire wrapped around her waist and then another. She felt them squeeze. It was hard to suck in air. Crunch—the massive construct crushed Kreya’s scout, the one who’d tried to bring a warning. A warning she’d failed to deliver.

  Stran . . .

  She heard footsteps pounding in the corridor outside.

  Then she heard shouting.

  Then Guine’s voice: “Get it off! Grab her!”

  They hammered at the construct with whatever they could find—someone shattered a pitcher on its side, another hit it with a chair. A few ran. But those who stayed pounded at the horror.

  Amurra struggled, but it was becoming harder and harder to breathe. Black spots danced in front of her eyes. Stran, she thought, I’m sorry. She didn’t know why she was sorry—that she wasn’t able to help, that she wouldn’t be able to say goodbye, that they didn’t have more time, that she was leaving him alone to face the world, to be a father alone, to be a man who had lost his wife, to have pain when he should have had joy. And her, she’d wanted more time, more time with him, more time with her children, to see them grow, to help them and hold them and love them. More time in the world. More springs, to see the buds on the trees, the fresh shoots bursting out of the ground. More summers, lying side by side looking up at the stars with the warm breeze all around them. More autumns . . . Her thoughts scattered as the tentacles squeezed harder.

  She tried to form words. “Tell. Stran.” But then there wasn’t air. She couldn’t force the words out of her throat. Air, water, blood gurgled in her throat.

  She heard Guine begging, “Don’t kill us. Please, don’t kill us.”

  “You will not all die,” a man’s voice said—the construct? She hadn’t known they could speak. She wondered at that, clinging to the question as if it were a rock in a raging river. “You must deliver a message. The five so-called heroes will recant their false accusations immediately, and in exchange, Master Eklor will restore this woman’s life.”

  “Don’t—” Guine began.

  And then Amurra felt a sharp pain in her neck as a wire pierced her throat. Darkness consumed her vision, and death swallowed all else.

  In Yarri’s room, Kreya wrapped a bundle of bones, including an obvious human skull, in a sheet and tucked it under her arm. “Proof of what we’ve witnessed here,” she told the boy and the guards. “We’ll present these to the guild. Let Eklor try to squirm out of this now.”

  The boy was whimpering. “Bones. In my bed. My father—”

  “Don’t blame your father,” Kreya told him. “Master Eklor is the one who brought horrors into your home. And our city.” Blame your father for inviting him inside, she thought, but she wasn’t going to say that to Yarri, who seemed traumatized enough. Imagine sleeping on a cache of human bones and not knowing it. Nightmare fuel for years. “We’ll burn the rest.”

  “Of course, Master Kreya,” one of the guards said. He looked nearly as wild-eyed as the boy. “We’ll bring them to the pyre.”

  She stopped him. “It’s not that I don’t trust you. But I don’t trust Master Eklor. He’ll be here any minute to check on his supply. We need to destroy it before he gets here.” Every second mattered. She wasn’t taking any chances with Eklor. Never underestimating him again, she promised herself.

  The guards didn’t argue. At all. One rushed out into the hallway and returned with a lit torch. The others helped her, Stran, and Marso shift the furniture away from the bed.

  Taking the torch from the guard, Kreya lowered it to the bedding and the bones. Dry as kindling, it lit easily, and the fire spread, skipping from bone to fabric and racing across it all. She watched it burn. Only when she was satisfied that the bones were charred enough to be useless did she feel the tightness around her chest loosen. This would have to slow down Eklor. “Keep the fire going until they’re ash,” she instructed the guards. “And see that the fire doesn’t spread beyond this room.”

  The boy began to cough.

  “Don’t breathe in smoke,” she told him. “Outside. Now.”

  Shooing the kid out of the room, she strode into the hallway. Stran and Marso fell in behind her. Now they had proof. They just had to get it to the guild headquarters and present it, ideally jointly with the testimony of the doctors from the hospital. Combined, it had to cast doubt on Eklor’s claims, perhaps even enough to overcome the effects of the persuasion talisman. “We’ll regroup with the others. Present everything at once for maximum impact. If we can keep him off balance enough, we might be able to create an opening to destroy the talisman. At the very least, we should be able to delay him.”

  Outside, by the broken door, Kreya informed the guards about the fire. They saluted and rushed in to help. Belatedly, she noticed that Lorn’s son was still following her. A young boy shouldn’t be wrapped up in all of this. “You need to stay here,” Kreya told him.

  He blinked back tears. “But what if Master Eklor comes back? What if he’s angry? What if he blames me? What if he blames my father, and uses me . . .”

  He’s right, she thought. Master Eklor wouldn’t hesitate to use Grand Master Lorn’s son as a hostage against him. In fact, he’d already done so. “Fine. Come with us.” The boy could stay at Zera’s palace until this was all over. He’d be safe enough there.

  “I want my papa.”

  Stran put his arm around the boy. “We’ll get you back to your father as soon as we can, okay?” he promised. “Until then, we’ll keep you as safe as if you were one of my own kids.” He helped Yarri onto one of the floating stones, and they rode away from Lorn’s palace toward Zera’s.

  Shepherding Yarri inside, Kreya didn’t see the chaos at first. Stran halted, and Kreya had to peer around him. Instantly, adrenaline flooded through her. She rammed her hands into her pockets, pulling out talismans, and half-crouched in a defensive position with the boy behind her. Every muscle tensed. “Stay behind me, kid.”

  Stran was already in motion, crossing the vast room.

  On one side, Guine was tending to the servants. Bodies lay under curtains. A window had been shattered. One pillar was damaged. Juice and blood mingled on the marble floor. Kreya cataloged it all fast.

  Whatever had happened here was over.

  She slid her talismans back into her pockets and straightened. Her heart was thumping painfully hard in her chest. Whatever had happened here . . . It shouldn’t have happened.

  It’s my fault, she thought. I miscalculated. Again. She should have predicted this. Set guards. Made plans. Had contingency plans in case those plans failed. Everyone knew their team was staying in Zera’s palace. She should have realized that would make this place a target. And anyone in it.

  Stran strode between the bodies, yanking back the sheets and bellowing, “Amurra!”

  Behind her, Yarri’s voice quivered. “Who did this?”

  “Three guesses, and they’re all named Eklor.” Kreya stepped forward, and Yarri caught her arm. His grip was so tight that if she raised her arm, he’d dangle off it.

  “Don’t leave me!” he squeaked. “You said you’d keep me safe!”

  “I won’t abandon you,” she reassured him. Yet another person she was responsible for. “But you need to stay by the door. If anything dangerous happens, run outside. Okay? Can you do that? Run instead of freeze?”

  He nodded. Tears flowed freely down his cheeks.

  She wasn’t certain she believed him, but she also thought it wouldn’t be an issue—this was the aftermath of a disaster, not the start of one. Still . . . She stalked through the room, checking out the window, around corners. “Any threats remain?”

  Guine shook
his head. He swallowed hard and looked at Stran. Kreya followed his gaze. The big man looked terrifying as he exposed the dead bodies, looking for his wife.

  Kreya shifted so that she blocked Guine’s view of Stran. “Tell me what happened.” She kept her voice calm and even, as soothing as she could manage. They could fall apart later, but now she needed to assess the scope of the disaster.

  “I heard her calling to me,” Guine said, focusing on her. “And then she was screaming. We tried to fight it, but we’re not warriors.”

  “Take a deep breath, and define your pronouns.”

  His eyes were wide, as if he were reliving the memory. She read the terror etched in his face. “A construct,” he said. “Huge. Lots of metal legs. Wire tentacles protruding from its back.”

  She remembered facing such constructs on the battlefield. Eklor’s specialty. Absolutely terrifying in close quarters. And supposedly burned on the plains. I was right, she thought.

  The thought didn’t comfort her at all.

  “Amurra?” Kreya said.

  “It had her.” He dropped his voice to a whisper, as if afraid Stran would hear. “We tried. You have to believe me. You have to tell him. We tried!”

  Kreya wanted to shake him. If Amurra had been captured, they had a very thin window in which to rescue her before the trail grew cold. Even if she’d been injured, hope wasn’t lost. They could use flight and speed to chase after the construct. Catch it before it returned to whatever hole it had crawled out of. “Guine. If you don’t tell me what it said and did, I will feed your harp to you piece by piece, string by string. What happened?”

  Guine began to weep. “It killed her. Right in front of me. She’s dead.”

  Kreya heard a roaring in her ears. She kept her voice very, very even. “Dead?”

  Across the room, by the waterfall that still burbled as if nothing ever happened in this room except mindless frivolity, Stran stopped moving. Kreya saw him out of the corner of her eye, but she kept her focus on Guine. “And then?”

  “It took her body out the window.” He pointed.