A Shard of Sea and Bone

by L. J. Engelmeier

  Oliver kicked out, choking as his neck was wrenched at an unnatural angle. He dropped his pepperbox and clawed two-handed at the hollowsoul’s slimy skin with his blunt nails. Wet warmth bloomed from the furrows. The creature knocked Oliver’s left hand away and manacled his wrist with its scalding hot fingers. He tried to pull his hand back but couldn’t, red spots forming at the edges of his vision. In the hollowsoul’s grasp, his neck was now supporting all of his body’s weight. And then he heard, but didn’t feel, the snap of his wrist.

  It was only after a beat—a moment frozen in time—that pain flooded his body.

  His vision went fuzzy as the hollowsoul ground his broken bones together, his breath leaving him slow and heavy. He felt like his consciousness was seeping out through the pores of his skin. The only reason he knew he had pissed himself was because he could feel the heat dripping down his leg and into his sock.

  “Åmnachteş njel’nė,” he whispered with a slur in his voice, his head pounding and sight spinning. He could feel vomit in his throat. The hollowsoul beat down against his coat as Oliver dangled there uselessly, the coat’s wool hardening like an armoured shell against the blows. The blows still reverberated through his chest, but he felt removed from them, the world moving too slowly around him. He could see the saliva strung between the creature’s fangs, inches from his face. Sour breath puffed between him and the hollowsoul. He could taste it. He felt drunk on it. The creature’s tongue twitched. “Åmnachteş njel’nė,” he continued to slur. “Póveş njel—Póveş njel fîka’nė. Uualeş nin ti vwólle jaat den fîka.”

  An invisible hook threaded through his gut and pulled, ripping a whine from him, and then the hollowsoul hoisting him up burst into flames. Oliver flinched as the fire flashed against his face and hands. The creature dropped him.

  From the ground, Oliver stared as the creature writhed and squealed. The blue and orange flames wreathing its body blinded him. The taste of its flesh was sweet on his tongue as he gasped for breath and coughed hard enough to shred his throat. He burped, and stomach acid flooded his mouth. His only choice was to swallow it back down with a grimace. The heat of fire seeped through his coat and warmed the backs of his hands. It made the urine soaking through his pants colder, along with the tears pooled in the hollows underneath his eyes, now tacky behind his mask.

  Magic gave me fire? He stared at the burning hollowsoul, coming back to himself in slow degrees. He was shocked. Magic, not defensive. Weaponized.

  The hollowsoul had collapsed in a charred pile of ashy flesh and bone, and the flames eating its body flickered out like they’d never been there. Between the cracks of the hollowsoul’s black skin, embers flared like a breath and then, like a breath, died.

  When Oliver looked over to where the second and third hollowsouls had been, he found the street empty. He got to his knees and let his broken wrist hang, wincing as it shifted. On the ground, he scrambled for his discarded pepperbox and stood.

  Pressed back against a building, Oliver considered how to reload his gun, eventually snapping it open one-handed, knocking the jangling casings to the street, and tucking it between his knees. His fingers fumbled with the bullets looped into his belt, and hurriedly, he reloaded his pepperbox, sliding all five bullets into place. With all the racket the dying hollowsoul had made while burning to death, surely there were more of them on their way now. It was just a matter of time until they got here.

  Oliver hoped he would get lucky—the air thick with so many smells—that the creatures would have trouble tracking his scent within them immediately.

  Never rely on luck, his father had told him often, though. Only yourself.

  The ground rumbled again, the quakes growing more violent with each passing second. Oliver watched as a small colony of scraggly potted plants fell from a set of balconies across the road. They shattered against the long street in a strange music. Then all at once, it felt as though the world had exploded around him. Colours flashed behind Oliver’s eyes as his face slammed off the street, teeth clacking together hard, nose smashing against the inside of his mask. Blood filled his mouth, and his head spun. He gagged, puking a watery bile through the slat of his mask.

  He scrabbled at the cobblestones with weak fingers, trying to leverage himself up, but his body was heavy and fought him every step of the way. Just as he got to his forearms and knees, he fell over, unable to keep his balance as the quake continued to rip through the ground. He rolled onto his back.

  Above him, the night sky revolved slowly.

  He choked on his own blood as it streamed into his mouth from his broken nose, warm and sticky where it was trapped against his face. The tip of his tongue throbbed, a point of white-hot pain. Around him, buildings creaked and groaned, collapsing. The ground vibrated like a bed of a thousand war drums. A howl filled the air.

  This is it, Oliver thought. This is how the world ends. In blood and darkness. To the call of a wolf.

  Then without warning, a high-pitched scream broke through the night, and Oliver’s blood chilled in his body, his breath sputtering in his chest. He knew that scream. He knew it like he knew the rounded angles of his own face—like he knew every curve of his father’s revolvers. He hadn’t heard it in over ten years, but he knew it in his aching bones.

  Lana.

  For the first time tonight, he felt true fear sink its teeth deep into his heart.

  BET ALL MY COIN

  _______________________________

  We, the attendants of the late Guardian Jeremiah O’Keefe, express not our regrets, but our duty, to deny you, Usurper, our service. May the office fail you.

  final correspondence, addressed to Naliah Staatvelter

  THE GUARDIAN REALM OF FOGS

  THE GUARDIAN TOWER, PLAZA DISTRICT, WARD ONE,

  ANDERTON, CAPITAL OF SOUTH ANAVEN

  “Vachkass. You’re still at that?” Naliah heard his attendant Rickard grunt through a mouthful of stew as Rickard entered the top floor of the tower, his boots clicking to a stop on the stone.

  Through the tarnished mirror Naliah was gripping for dear life, he watched his attendant’s dark, slanted eyes light up, Rickard’s mouth slipping into a crooked-toothed smirk. Propped against the doorjamb, Rickard looked like a stick bug, nothing but thin bones and sharp angles. His linen clothes hung off him. He belched.

  “It’s been fifty years, pratta. How haven’t you figured out those powers of yours yet?”

  Naliah glared at him through the mirror and continued trying to catch his breath. “Guardian powers don’t—exactly come—with an instruction manual.” The mirror was lukewarm against his forehead as he leaned forward and squeezed the sides of it until they creaked. His breath fogged the surface. In his chest, it felt like his heart was going to give out after the amount of magic he’d just exerted. His entire head was throbbing, right down to his teeth. Even blinking hurt.

  He’d succeeded in morphing his skin from its normal yellowed tan to a sickly milk-white to—finally—a deep, rich brown, he noted with some pride, but he still couldn’t figure out how to shift his bone structure. “How in the worlds—do morphii do this?” he panted against the mirror. “Do you just—just think about it really hard? Do you have to talk to yourself? Nose, I’d really—really like you to—to grow into a different shape. Maybe hooked like that—that gorgeous tanner boy’s—the one down on the river—with the thick arms.” He stared at his nose: still straight, still flat, and still narrow.

  He groaned and released the mirror to grip at his knotted hair. The only thing he could do was change his skin colour. His eye and hair colour were beyond him, stuck in the same matching chestnut brown, and he had no idea how to go about convincing his bones to reshape.

  He flopped down on the hardwood floor, warm with the winter humidity, and closed his eyes as his heart began to slow. He stretched out his tense muscles until his whole body felt like porridge—and very sore porridge at that. A loose nail in the floor dug into his lower back. From the other side o
f the room, he could hear Rickard chewing. The prayer orb that floated in the middle of the room filled the space with its steady pulsating hum, casting a pinkish glow that Naliah could see through his eyelids. It would have been all too easy to fall asleep. It was already after midnight he knew from the tempus hanging from his neck—the watch’s weight now settled on his breastbone—and he’d managed to calm himself down after no guards or rioting Andertonners had beaten down his door. He assumed he was safe for burning the manor, for now at least.

  “You’ll get better in time,” Rickard said. “You know what the nuns say—”

  “Hauten das kig yärra ol brech dragahauten illäs,” Naliah recited gruffly, shaking a fist and mocking their stern demeanors. It was hard to forget the phrase. Rickard rattled it off two dozen times a day; it was one of the only things left from his childhood growing up as an orphan in the Bone Church, and while that upbringing had saved Rickard from a life of slavery, it hadn’t saved him from a life of persecution for being a demon. “Failure is the bud from which success blooms—I know,” Naliah said. “Trite quotes aren’t really comforting.”

  Rickard hummed through his stew. “How about a hard kick to the head? You know it took me half a decade to forge a sword that didn’t break when I breathed on it, pratta. My teacher thought I was a fool back then.” Rickard belched. “Certain you thought I was a fool, too.”

  “Confident with that past tense, are you?” Naliah quipped, and he knew by the silence that Rickard was glaring at him. It made him smirk, self-satisfied.

  “You’ve got a lot going for you, wel stech,” Rickard said with an exasperated sigh. His spoon hit his bowl hard. “You were a damn good fighter down in the Pits from what I used to hear. And it was you the Council picked out of our militia and gave some fancy powers to. You, pratta. And no one paid ‘em to.”

  “I know,” Naliah said, and rubbed at his eyes until he could see fuzzy static spots behind them. Sometimes, his life felt too much like the old myth about a river carp his mother used to tell him as a child, the story he’d received his name from. He was an ordinary little fish, that Naliah was, his mother always said. As ordinary as you, but he was still capable of great things. Except he doubted he was capable of anything other than screwing up.

  “Before you start wallowing in self-pity again, pratta, remember: you figured out reconjuring without any help,” Rickard said. “You got mimicking all those elementii down in a couple years, too. And you aren’t absolute shit at healing. You saved my life.”

  “I appreciate the vote of confidence,” Naliah said sarcastically. He tried not to remember that particular incident: Rickard’s head half-split open by a slaver’s cleaver in the middle of a riot—the very last in the city. That day, Naliah had forgone political manoeuvres and treatises and resorted to outright violence. He’d used his Guardian powers to clear the streets alongside the militias, and by that evening, the Anderton prison had been filled to capacity with slavers. For the first time in history, hundreds of slaves had walked collarless and unattended down the riverwalk.

  It was the beginning of a new age in Anderton nowadays, one where—for every bill that passed in the parliament protecting the abolishment of slavery—an effigy of Naliah burned in the plaza.

  Rickard was still talking when Naliah tuned back in. “—with a ripe melon. And there was that animalus form you took a couple months ago. Though that’s probably the most fucked up looking horse I ever saw, pratta. Like a really big dog with mange and—”

  “I get it,” Naliah cut him off, glowering at the ceiling. Quieter, he added, “Thank you.”

  “How much more do you really need to learn?” Rickard asked, and Naliah tilted his head back to look at him. Rickard was staring at him through his mess of knotted black hair, his favourite paring knife tucked behind his ear. A wide, shiny scar slanted downward from the left side of his forehead to the hollow of his right eye. “You’re already a better Guardian than Old Remmy was, pratta. And a better man by far. Pjet das noll faeutsch an mollens, bedt kopper.”

  It is not strength that conquers, but heart. The motto of the Militia for the Abolishment of Anaven Slavery, the ranks within which he and Rickard had met.

  Naliah was certain his predecessor, Guardian Jeremiah O’Keefe, hadn’t won anyone over with his heart. The first time he’d met the fat old podge, the man had ordered Naliah thrown into a prison until some master buys his freedom back for him, all for protesting on government property. The man’s ancestors had been no better than him, all crafted from the same mold.

  It wasn’t hard for Naliah to remember back to Jeremiah’s great-great-grandfather, a great bull of a man. The first time they’d met—during a sunny day at the Assembly—Naliah had only been fourteen. Guardian Edward O’Keefe had been red in the face from too much sun and too much wine, and when he’d passed by, he’d had the gall to stoop down and tweak Naliah’s collar, breathing wine-sour breath into his face. He’d called him cute in a tone that still made Naliah grit his teeth in anticipation, remembering the thumbs forced in his mouth to keep him from biting down as he’d gagged—remembering hands in his hair, trimmed nails tracing his cheeks. Then Edward had clapped Master Elias on the back and continued down the road with his parade of tigers, lacquered carriages, and fire-breathing men on stilts, hailed by the crowd as the perfect son of the late Guardian of Fogs, the ideal heir to the title, just as his son and his son’s son and his son’s son’s son and so on would be proclaimed, and had been.

  It was Naliah who had broken that bloodline chain, the only to do so since Guardian Wilhelm Oukefsen had created the Realm of Fogs two million years ago. In the wake of that announcement, Anderton had nearly killed itself overnight—shattered glass, fires, murders in the streets, looting, rioting. Effigies of the Council had burned. Naliah had been hidden away.

  “I’d like to master everything I can,” Naliah admitted after a moment. “I want to help people, but I know that I can’t— I’m not— I can’t—”

  Naliah’s words were stuck. He didn’t know what he was trying to say. That he was never supposed to be more than some slave boy with a big mouth? How was he supposed to be a god for these people?

  The other Guardians of the Order were demonic royalty, high-ranking government officials, members of rich bloodlines. Of course they took to their powers like gulls to water. They were born for it. Naliah wasn’t. He was never meant for more than obscurity.

  He stared at the dark wooden beams of the conical ceiling, his chest heavy. “I don’t know. All I’ve made headway with is mimicking elementii. Animalii, shiftirii, morphii, mythologii—I don’t think it’s ever going to happen for me. Bending Guardian magic isn’t like bending demonic magic, Rickard. It isn’t even like bending the magic in the seams of the multiverse. Magic out there is—it’s like—it’s like air brushing your fingers. It’s got a mind and will of its own, but it’s there, all around you. Demonic magic is this coil of energy in your chest you can wind and unwind at will. Guardian magic, though? Menungakagleich—it’s a light burning in your soul. It’s like trying to scoop up a sea with a fork. The sea is there. You can see it, hear it, smell it. You know the thing belongs to you, but all they give you to drink from it is this goddamn little fork.”

  The room went quiet for a while. The prayer orb hummed, and somewhere outside the tower window, killdeer shrieked through the night skies.

  “I didn’t know you were so poetic, pratta,” Rickard said, and then dissolved into high, crazy laughter that bounced off the walls. “Perhaps you’re in the wrong business after all!”

  “Shut up,” Naliah said, and sat up long enough to rip off a silk weigga and throw it at Rickard. With one hand, Rickard caught the shoe and beamed. Naliah flopped back down. He wiggled his sweaty toes and pouted.

  “If I can help you with anything, pratta, let me know. My sister always said that practice makes perfect. Though I’m certain she was talking about making children.”

  Naliah rolled his eyes at the ceili
ng and tried to will away the weight tugging at his chest. He’d considered asking Rickard for help before. He was a shiftirus—a rare mutation of the animalii branch that meant he didn’t have any physical animal markers and that he could take any animal form he wanted without restriction. He was sure Rickard could at least try to teach him how his innate magic worked so that Naliah could attempt to copy it. He’d even considered asking Svahta, another Guardian in the Order with whom he was close. She was a morphus.

  But I don’t want to admit defeat just yet.

  Naliah knew that his su-lanah Artysaedra could be of some use, too, though he hadn’t seen her in over a month now. She had five hundred years of experience to his fifty, though she was more likely to get horrendously drunk and laugh at all his attempts than to actually help him. He smiled at the thought. He could already hear her now.

  “What the fuck was that, you pansy? My little sister has a better grasp on her Guardian powers, and she’s six months old.”

  There was a knock at the tower door, and Naliah tilted his head back. In the doorway, upside-down, his attendant Janie was giving him a knowing smile. The knees of her shapeless linen dress were covered with dust; her black hair was knotted below her left ear, a sign of her unmarried status; and underneath the stub of her left arm, she was carrying a set of clean linens. Naliah could smell the bland soap and cedar from across the room.