Bones of the Empire

by Jim Galford

  Liris screamed as she fought to gain ground. Ceran smiled in a motherly way as she stopped every attempt Liris made. In the back of his mind, Raeln wished Ceran had been among those who had trained him in his youth. A hundred more like her in Lantonne could have changed everything.

  Coming up behind him, Yoska hooked his arms under Raeln’s shoulders and dragged him away. Almost immediately, the Turessian forces broke through the last of the undead and raced past them, straight at Liris.

  Her anger apparently forgotten, Liris dismissed her weapon, giggled, and waved good bye before backing away into the crowd of zombies. As soon as Liris was gone, the remaining undead froze where they were, mindlessly staring straight ahead and blocking any attempt to follow.

  Raeln tried to thank Yoska and Ceran and look for Dalania, but he passed out as soon as he knew they had won the day. He dimly felt hands carrying him for what felt like hours.

  *

  “Is fuzzball well enough yet?” Yoska asked somewhere nearby.

  “Yes, but…”

  A stinging slap across Raeln’s jaw snapped him awake. He growled and reached out, catching Yoska by the collar of his shirt.

  “…he will likely try to kill you,” Ceran finished, sighing as she sat back in a chair at Raeln’s other side. “Raeln, you have my permission to hit him back. He has earned it, and I would not defend him. Perhaps this time he will learn something.”

  Raeln eased his grip on Yoska to lay back on the bed and look around, his exhaustion and dull aches throughout his body making it difficult to keep his eyes open. He lay in a Turessian home, though the style was far different from the ones he had seen back at Ceran and Yiral’s village. Regardless, he could see very little past Ceran at one side and Yoska at the other. He then realized someone was holding his other hand, and he shifted enough to see Dalania sat next to Ceran, clinging tightly.

  “How do you feel?” she asked, smiling sadly. “Ceran did what she could—”

  “I’m alive,” Raeln responded quickly, not really wanting to know what Dalania had been about to say. “I can feel my fingers, toes, and tail, so she did just fine. You saved my life out there.”

  Sniffling and rubbing at her eyes with her other hand, Dalania nodded and said nothing. She looked to have been awake for days, judging by the deep lines that creased her face.

  Squeezing her hand gently, Raeln turned his attention back to Yoska. “Now why the high hells did you slap me?”

  Yoska offered him a tin cup filled with what smelled like pure alcohol, but Raeln ignored it and waited for a reply. Yoska set aside the cup. “The lovely Ceran tells me you need to wake soon or your body may die from healing so much. Is limit to healing in that the one healed must eat if they are to keep up strength from big amount of magic. Beside, was owed after you ran off to have all the fun with our old friend the crazy bitch, Liris, no? You bring your friends and you live longer. I think we make this clear long ago.”

  Rolling her eyes, Ceran explained, “What he’s trying to say in his overly simplistic way is that your body contributes to the healing. The longer you stay unconscious, the weaker your body will get, no matter what I do. We need you to wake and eat before you can rest further, or you might never wake. Water can be poured down your throat, but food is more difficult. I recommended gently shaking you…the slap was entirely his idea.”

  “I am simple man, and you do not explain well enough for me to understand, so is somehow your fault,” Yoska countered, winking at Ceran. “My way wake him faster, yes?”

  “Yes, that it did,” Ceran replied, narrowing her eyes as she watched Yoska. “The next time you slap anyone under my care, I will incinerate you.”

  Yoska laughed, but his grin slowly faded as Ceran did not laugh in return. He coughed and turned his attention back to Raeln. “Undead were all burned, but Liris was not found. Trail ended at the woods. Scouts say they see ghosts in woods, so we did not chase. You should know, we also burned remains of great many slaves and clansmen who fell that day.”

  “How long has it been?” Raeln asked, realizing just how stiff his arms and legs felt. “Did any of those from the other clans stay with us? Did our own clans even stay?” Dalania’s sniffle made Raeln wonder how bad things had been in his absence. When he looked up at her, she quickly looked away. “How many did we lose?”

  Ceran made a curt motion with her fingers, and Raeln saw Yoska clench his jaw. They were going to try to lie to him.

  “We lost a few people,” Ceran said, and Yoska looked away, apparently unwilling to join in. “Do not concern yourself. It was only about fifty—”

  “Dalania,” Raeln turned to her, and she reluctantly looked at him. “How bad?”

  “A hundred and eighteen dead. The clans wanted us to only tell you how many clansmen died, but that is what we lost. I promised them nothing and would not deceive you.”

  Ceran’s deep frown told him Dalania was not exaggerating at all.

  “I need to see what we have left,” Raeln said, trying to get up. When he did, pain radiated through his side, and the arm he used to prop himself up nearly gave out. Looking down at his aching arm, he saw wide scars near his elbow. He had seen similar marks in older warriors, usually after they had broken bones badly enough that the bone tore through their flesh.

  Lifting his hand, Raeln stared at the notches that ran along the pads of his palm and fingers, where the sword had cut deeply. He then slid aside the blanket covering his legs and found more large scars on his thigh, where Liris had stomped his leg. He had never even considered that with a clan filled with potential healers, there might be such lasting damage so long as he lived. Idly, he wondered if Estin could have done better before bringing Feanne back. He put the thought aside as he remembered Liris claimed both of them were dead.

  Raeln kept the blanket over his midsection, given that they had left him with little more than scraps of his old clothing—in hindsight, he doubted he had been wearing much more than that after the fight. Sliding to Yoska’s side of the bed, Raeln tested a little bit of his weight on his paws, making his thigh, hip, and knee throb. Taking a deep breath to ready himself, he stood, ignoring the pain throughout much of his body. He struggled to stay upright as he tied the blanket around his waist.

  “As I said,” Ceran said quickly when Raeln put a hand to the wall to steady himself, “the limits of our magic are largely based on whether you will be able to handle having your body mended that way. There are limits. Whatever we cannot heal at once is often…permanent. The aches where bones were broken should fade after a few more days of rest. The scars will never fade. Honestly, it is beyond belief that you survived at all.”

  Searching around the room as he limped along, trying to test his strength, Raeln stopped near the only cabinet. “Where is a mirror?”

  “The Turessian people do not believe in such vanity,” Ceran replied quickly, sounding offended.

  Turning to Yoska, who was pointedly examining his boots, Raeln said, “Give me something, Yoska. You shave daily…I know you have something.”

  Yoska gave Ceran a helpless shrug and drew one of his knives. Wiping it on his shirt, he passed it over his shoulder to Raeln.

  Taking the weapon and holding it up to the light, Raeln could make out his face in the polished metal. Deeply twisted flesh along one side of his nose and muzzle hinted at how badly broken his face had been. He touched his teeth with his tongue one by one, finding many were badly chipped and his cheek did not sit the way it once had. Sniffing, he realized he could not breathe quite as easily through one nostril.

  Raeln went to hand the knife back, but hesitated. Tilting it slightly, he saw his right ear was little more than a scarred stump, though thankfully he could hear decently out of it. All of the remaining wounds were cosmetic, something he could deal with.

  Sighing, he said, “I never claimed to be pretty. I only need to be able to fight. How I look doesn’t matter. Thank you for doing what you could,” he told Ceran as he put the knife’s
hilt back in Yoska’s hand. “I’ll try not to let that happen again.”

  Dalania’s miserable expression let him know she was upset about more than his face getting mangled.

  Gingerly kneeling in front of her, Raeln said, “This isn’t your fault. I charged in. It was my choice. I needed them to see that I wasn’t afraid to face their enemies.”

  “I wasn’t strong enough to help,” she whispered back, hanging her head. “I tried…”

  Putting his hand to her cheek, Raeln insisted, “You saved my life out there. Think what you want, but I’d be little more than a pelt by now if you hadn’t stopped her.”

  Nodding sadly, Dalania added, “She killed the bat.”

  Laughing despite the tone, Raeln hugged Dalania, and she put her arms around him, snuffling miserably into his shoulder.

  After a minute, Ceran spoke up again. “Once you are able to walk and have dressed, I would also show you something. I believe you will find it of importance, but it can wait until you have eaten.”

  Raeln ignored the grumbling of his stomach at the mention of food and stood, looking around for clothing. “I’m ready when you are. I can walk.”

  “I would rather—”

  “I would rather not wait,” Raeln answered quickly. “Do you have any clothes that will fit me?”

  “They are still being sewn,” Ceran replied, pointing back at the bed. “Dalania told me you would be stubborn about this. If she won’t make you rest, I will. You will eat and you will sleep one more time before you go anywhere.”

  “If I refuse?”

  “I am bedding the wanderer, and I’ve already told him that I will turn him to ash for disobeying me. What hope do you have, wildling? You I can simply push over in your current state. Lay down or I will chain you there with magic.”

  Raeln instinctively bared his teeth at Ceran in a silent refusal to be bullied. When he noticed Yoska, wide-eyed and shaking his head, Raeln sighed and sat on the bed.

  As soon as he did, Dalania got up and fetched a steaming bowl from the pot over the fire in one corner of the room and a large cup of water.

  “You don’t need to serve me,” Raeln objected, adjusting the blanket. He almost stood to help Dalania, but saw Ceran tense at the edge of his vision. “Dalania, please stop.”

  Dalania came back with the bowl and cup and put the bowl on Raeln’s lap and the cup in his hand before taking her seat again. “You won’t take care of yourself, so I have to, Raeln. Yoska is beyond my help, and you’re the only one left for me to watch out for. The others are all…I heard what Liris said…”

  “We don’t know if she’s lying.”

  Nodding, Dalania fidgeted with a long strand of vines that covered much of her upper legs. “She probably is, but we haven’t found them yet. It makes me wonder if she isn’t lying. I’d like to know, even if they are gone.”

  “As soon as I’m on my feet, we’ll find them, Dalania. No more preparations for war until we know what happened to Feanne, Estin, and Turess…”

  Raeln closed his eyes in horror as he realized what he had let slip. He had been so careful to that point.

  “What happened to who?” Ceran demanded, and Raeln heard her stand quickly. “Do not even think to lie to me, wildling. You mentioned him before, but I thought you were referring to his teachings.”

  Putting a hand on Raeln’s shoulder, Yoska spoke up for him. “Is not a lie. Turess is…or was…alive and helping us. Was not something that one can simply announce without looking crazy, no?”

  “It actually would have gotten all three of you killed for mocking our history when you first arrived,” Ceran said as she paced the room behind Dalania’s chair. “Now, it actually answers a few questions. The council sent out an edict around the same time they asked all clans to execute their orcs and wildlings, in which they asked us to detain a clanless Turessian man who only spoke ancient Turessian. Given how few of us can even understand that language, the odds of someone speaking it is beyond absurd. Even the last-known description of his clothing seemed preposterous. The refusal of the council to describe his honor markings made it a decidedly odd request.”

  “Does any other think it odd that we live in time when we say many thousand year dead man is walking around and we only get nods?” Yoska asked, shaking his head. “I begin thinking Estin was not so lucky in living through things, and such crazy things are more common than I had thought. Magic is dumb.”

  “Nonsense,” Ceran said, still pacing. “Very few have ever come back from being long-dead, but if any could, Turess would not be beyond imagining. He was one of the greatest magical scholars of all time. To have him come back as the lost clan reappears is also fortuitous…”

  “Lost clan?” Yoska asked.

  Raeln sipped the broth of his soup, enjoying having the attention on someone else, though the heat made his broken teeth ache. Dalania seemed equally amused, her dismay momentarily forgotten.

  “You find another clan in the woods? Hidden in cabinet, perhaps? Behind large rock?”

  Ceran winced and sucked in a breath, looking around nervously. “I should check up on the others…”

  Leaping to his feet and stepping in front of the door, Yoska said, “I tell you many times that game good enough for one is good enough for both. If you just say ‘yes,’ I would have gotten bored and forgotten. You try not to say, so now I must know, yes?”

  Ceran nodded and looked over at Raeln and then Dalania before turning back to Yoska. “There were ten clans after Turess’s death. These days, there are eight if you do not count all the smaller young ones. The ninth was destroyed for attempting to overthrow the empire shortly after Turess died. The tenth was never located. They fled Turessi in a long line of wagons a week before Turess stopped breathing, taking with them every treasure Turess had created. Our people cursed them for generations for stealing from us, but we never managed to locate them.”

  “Is nice story, but people with wagons have come back?” Yoska asked. “They bring treasures? I may wish to introduce myself—”

  “You are an idiot, Yoska!” Ceran blurted out before covering her mouth and softly apologizing. “Do you remember what you said when you were first brought to the clanhold?”

  “Yes…was ‘get off, get off, let me go,’ or something along lines. I may have cursed lineage of several people. I apologize if my ancestors have haunted any of them.”

  Turning instead to Dalania, Ceran asked, “Do you remember? This man’s mind is addled from drink.”

  “I believe it was ‘Ki’her mon deiru sirek mira ar,’ or something similar,” Dalania said softly, sounding shy when she got to the foreign words. “I don’t know the old gypsy language, so I apologize if I got it wrong.”

  “No, that was almost perfect,” Ceran said, smiling. “And your gypsy friend doesn’t know ancient gypsy either.”

  “Excuse?” demanded Yoska, standing straight. “How dare you! I am bandoleer and was taught by my nana.”

  “What does it mean, then?” she countered, standing up to Yoska and forcing him to back up a step.

  “It means ‘We who wander would seek to be safe together.’ Our people rarely stay in one place long, so was natural to ask if we could help protect others in return for safe place to stay. Very old greeting between families.”

  Smiling, Ceran shook her head. “That was somewhat altered old Turessian, Yoska. Literally, it would mean ‘We who wander come back to our home.’ You announced your arrival home…brother.”

  “We call each other ‘cousin.’”

  “We do not,” Ceran said, turning back to Dalania and Raeln. “The wanderers, I believe, were the lost clan. Turess sent them away for a reason, to do something of importance. There is no other reason I can think of that they would continue to roam two thousand years later, avoiding too much attention whenever possible.”

  “We are simple traders,” Yoska argued. “Very simple. Very not Turessian.”

  “Who better to hide Turess’s relics all over
Eldvar? We don’t even know what they were for…”

  Yoska stiffened and nodded while grinning, backing slight away from Ceran.

  “Yoska, what do you know?”

  “You say many times I am idiot, so I clearly know nothing.”

  Raeln glanced over at Dalania, who stared at him a second before shrugging. Taking that as her blessing, Raeln said to Ceran, “Turess said they were meant to help him recover his memory when he was brought back. We’ve seen what happens to those who have to remember everything on their own…It’s rough. I believe that one of them actually protected me from the mists. The others may have similar enchantments.”

  “That makes no sense, Raeln,” Ceran insisted, shooting Yoska a warning glare. “We know for a fact that some of the relics had far more significance than that. The one Yoska carries, as an example, grants the bearer extraordinary luck when facing death. It is likely the only reason this imbecile is alive.”

  Sliding the cup at his belt around behind his back, Yoska asked, “What relic?”

  Ignoring him completely, Ceran sat across from Raeln and pointed at his soup, reminding him to eat. Once he had a mouth full of vegetables and chicken, she added, “We really must find out what his intentions were with the items. If he is dead or lost to us, the most important thing we can do is be ready for whatever he had planned. We have one relic left, and I intend to use it however he intended. I will find Turess’s plan if it is the last thing I do.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Returning”

  Becoming whole again was not something I needed for pride, though I think my ego could use the boost after Feanne was declared the voice of a god. Instead, I needed to stop being in the way. I needed to be who I had spent years becoming to defend Feanne and the kits the first time around. I had worked so hard to be more than my breed, and it had all escaped me to bring Feanne back.

  Had anyone told me there was simply nothing that could be done about it, I would have been in far better shape. It was the not knowing, not understanding why I was incomplete. Others got by without magic their whole lives, and I had spent most of mine without it too. Once I had learned to master it, being without it made me feel weak and ashamed to accompany the others. Look at who I was to “help”: Feanne, the voice of a god, and Turess, who a nation revered as little less than a god.