A Shard of Sea and Bone

by L. J. Engelmeier

  Only after she’d firmly hacked the target into butchered pieces and reduced it to a steady shhh of pouring grain did she go back to the weapons rack for her flail—her favourite weapon—and return to bring the spiked ball down with all her demonic strength on the dummy’s demolished torso. The force behind the blow was so powerful that the flail’s spiked ball buried itself in the damp dirt, pinning the dummy into the ground. The hole the flail made must have been two feet deep, Svahta’s strength unchecked, excessive. She stared at the dummy’s blank, destroyed face and gritted her teeth.

  Do not pursue this enemy, the Council had said, but Svahta wanted to do nothing more.

  I’m a sitting duck, and there ain’t nothing I can do about it.

  It was for the best, though, she imagined. The Council wouldn’t have ordered it otherwise. Svahta only hoped Nori-Rin and Naliah came to the same reluctant conclusion. Both of them had a notorious reputation for disobeying authority, but going against the Council would only result in one thing: them being stripped of their Guardianship. That in and of itself was counterproductive.

  Svahta knew that none of them would ever willingly give up the mantle the Council had bestowed on them, not even if it might spare their own lives now that the Order had a target on its back. They had a duty to the multiverse, and sometimes, like now, that duty meant following orders they disagreed with.

  After prying her flail’s spiked ball free of the dirt and wrecked burlap, Svahta wiped the sweat from her brow and out of her stinging eyes with the sleeve of her tunic. A fly nagged at her ear as she did, and she swatted it away. She felt like more sweat than skin at the moment. Her tunic was damp, the undersides of her breasts dripping. Even the backs of her tattooed forearms were beaded with perspiration. She needed a long soak in the bathtub to wash it all away and to soothe her expended muscles, but she didn’t feel like hauling water up from the street trough to her rooms on the second floor of the town hall quite yet. Even if she forwent a bucket and used her Guardian abilities to move the water like an elementus, it would be exhausting.

  Really, all she wanted to do was bask in the sun like an exhausted old dog or have Vahtiki set up another dummy for her, but she was too on edge for either activity. Relaxing would make her nerves worse, as would keying herself up by swinging at imaginary enemies—but she needed to do something. The news about her friends dying dug up too many ghosts for her. It brought back a day from the past she tried hard to forget. Even now, that old memory singed the periphery of her mind. Grief was quick to follow, settling in her stomach like rotted meat, squirming with maggots. She reburied it.

  She’d served with each Leorias, Orrhen, and Maluviahl on assignments in the past. Orrhen had even given her a wedding gift when he’d heard the news of her nuptials: a hairclip of magpie feathers traditionally worn by new brides in his dimension. She couldn’t imagine him bleeding out in some foreign Realm, all alone. She didn’t want to. He was a good man—had been a good man, she corrected herself, downtrodden.

  It made her worry about Nori-Rin and Naliah even more. The thought of something happening to either of them was too much.

  She sat down in the street with a sigh and steeled herself back to stoicism. She couldn’t give in to fear. Not now. Not ever. Fear won half the war for an enemy, and she wasn’t going to lose an inch of ground, not this time.

  By steady degrees, the sun seeped through her tunic and baked her skin. While she didn’t want to move, she knew if she stayed out too long she’d end up burnt cardinal-red. Still, she sat and let the heat hang from her clothes, let it lull her into a complete calm.

  It was first-summer in the Realm of Swamps. Boughs rustled with thick caches of green and purple leaves. Prairies grasses waved in the intermittent breezes. Deer loped into the treelines with fawns, calling to each other with throaty maas. Young squirrels sprawled on their stomachs in the shade, their heartbeats rapid and small, dancing on the head of a pin. Near their posts, tied-up shorthorses grazed lazily at the sparse grass. They snorted and whinnied. Around Svahta, the air was full of buzzing insect life, but mostly full of humidity. The scant breezes smelled predominantly of algae, honeysuckle, and petrichor. Midtown Bóttannaugh itself, though, smelled of tomatoes, fresh herb bread, and smoked alligator. It made Svahta’s stomach growl.

  She sniffed at the air, head swivelling toward the scent. The storefronts surrounding her stared back like bluffing faces at a card table. Sunlight glinted off their windows.

  Something about being home made her feel better. Familiar buildings, familiar faces, all as a part of her as her own bones. It was grounding in the same breath that it was terrifying. To lose any piece of it would be like losing a piece of herself. She took it in.

  Midtown Bóttannaugh was at the border of a largely uninhabited grassland and a deciduous forest. It was no more than a set of thirty interconnected storefronts, fifteen on either side of the long dirt road. In the early afternoon light, the buildings cast thin shadows across the dirt. All the buildings were varying heights, some brick, some sandstone, some with windows arched and hooded, some with windows bayed. Cornices were elaborate, a few gables were crow-stepped, and storefront windows were hand-painted with business names. The shop farthest down the road on the left-hand side had a hexagonal tower that sprouted up from it and a trellis up its wall that bloomed with vibrant indigo clematis; the shop was a quaint general store where Svahta bought her grain and sugar at the end of every week. Thain Jari Ó Lochlaigh ran the business, a nice old opossum demon who belonged to a Clan within her alliance, a man who had bent the knee for Svahta without hesitation after her election. He wore a sash around his waist—one of braided gold and prairie blue—one that Svahta had given him in exchange for his fealty. Every one of her people wore it.

  Unfortunately, not all of the inhabitants of the Realm of Swamps were her people. Only six of the Seven Clans had pledged loyalty to Svahta and now lived beneath her rule, their numbers spread out across the Rasplands, contented, peaceful, their soldiers in reserve, tending to the land instead.

  Clan Faobháin was the only deviation, having secluded themselves in the Swamplands to the south, their fealty to the monarchy revoked two thousand years ago when Svahta had been chosen to succeed Guardian Ogin of Clan Faobháin by the Council. Their defection had been an act of rebellion—the wars, the raiding, the fires and slaughter. It had been jealousy. Indignation. Child’s play.

  Svahta had tried to follow her husband’s advice back then—Let kindness be your fist—but in the end, it had been a fool-hearted strategy, ending only in bloodshed and massacre.

  Let pragmatism be your fist, she had decided afterward, and kindness be your arrow. Strike with both until one finds the crack in your enemy’s armour.

  That philosophy served her more truly these days.

  The last trouble Clan Faobháin had caused for her had been almost three hundred years ago, and since then, they’d been too terrified to come after her or her people ever again. They knew now that if they took one step into her land that she’d slit their throats and water the earth with their blood without blinking.

  “Svatalina,” came a call, drawing Svahta from her thoughts. “M’little liege.” At the sound of her aunt’s familiar, honey-warm voice, Svahta looked up against the glare of the sun. Any trace of anger still in her sapped out immediately, and she let it go.

  “Audhi,” she greeted, mouth smoothing out into a smile. “How was your mornin’?”

  Her aunt Serayah waddled down from a low porch and crossed the wide berth of the street to stand in front of Svahta, casting a fat shadow. She looked like a lumpy feather pillow, Svahta thought, the sun threading itself through her wild silver curls. Her green tunic was ringed with sweat where it was bunched beneath her heavy breasts, and a torc enclosed her corpulent neck, along with another set of necklaces that denoted her as a seer of their people: strands of pearls, quartz, and peridot. Tattoos striped and curled on her wrinkled face, further denoting her spiritual role in thei
r Clan, but they were as weathered and faded by age as she was. Her aunt’s smile was toothless and kind. She pulled the unlit cigar from between her gums.

  “Showed them birds down at Yahra’s how to play a proper hand a’ Bowls today,” Aunt Serayah said. “Ain’t got a wit about ‘em, them broads don’t. Still think they can get past my third eye, an’ ya bet I won myself a poached egg an’ a stog from the round just to prove ’em wrong. Ain’t nothing better’n ’at.”

  “Sounds like a good day.”

  “Be better once Old Pog chats me up in front a’ the drugstore. He don’t know it yet, but it’ll be a month now ’fore he saddles up the courage to ask me out for some slop.” She waggled her non-existent eyebrows. “And then cáoghin a tám uolleích ey whadhea. All night, honey.”

  “Audhi,” Svahta chastised, blushing. She stood up and brushed the clumps of wet dirt off her pants and palms, leaving her weapons where they lay in the road. No one would touch them. “Ain’t proper for ya to talk like ’at.”

  “This old bag a’ bones still got some life to ’em, hun. You ain’t gonna turn me into a right old bore like them broads down on the stoop. No way, no how.” She tucked the cigar back between her gums and held out a gnarled, liver-spotted hand. “Come on. Rodi’s got a fresh calf on the spit. Ain’t gotta be no seer to know that.”

  Svahta took her aunt’s cold hand and let herself be led to Rodi’s restaurant further down the street. The wooden porch was rickety, its awning torn down long ago. Its absence let the sun cook the building’s facade so that the brick radiated heat. It also let light beam through the wide storefront windows, the open door, and even the transom window above it. Smoke hazed the restaurant’s recessed entrance. It smelled heavily of maple wood and seared beef.

  Entering, Svahta and her aunt took a seat at a pub table in the middle of the narrow room, between the long bar that lined one side of the space and the staircase that lined the other. The staircase led up to a smoky loft with a mute piano and a large charcoal sketch of Boahna the Great in all her busty beauty, a rifle over her shoulder. Next to it was a preserved still life of the Guardian church that had rotted away in its little field up north seven thousand years ago, back when Svahta had been just a child.

  At the front of the restaurant, the painted word Rodi’s from the store window was shadowed upside-down across the hardwood floor, and in the back of the room, Rodi and his wife Ahnita were turning a calf over in the crackling spit. A few burly clansmen had already gathered for a late lunch, sipping at ciders and horse water. They lifted their freckled and calloused hands in a casual wave to Svahta and her aunt.

  Svahta liked the lax atmosphere of her Realm. It made it easier to breathe, easier to stay centered. In other Realms, she was held up to godly standards. People bowed when they saw her, cried tears of joy, kept their distance as though she might smite them for daring to step into the sphere of holiness that seemed to exude from her presence. She was a deity to them, someone who quelled wars with an apocalyptic wrath, someone who blessed children and commended ailing bodies to the Golden Fields. Here, she was just Svahta—Gahda and Moyren’s daughter, a marksman, a foot soldier, a huntress, a school nurse, anything the village needed her to be whenever they needed it. She was their queen, but more than that, she was their neighbour and friend. Their love for her had resulted in her election to clanhead, which had resulted in her automatic nomination for Guardianship when Ogin had died.

  It was her skills, however, that had won her the title.

  She’d gone up against six other contestants in a series of trials that day—up against the heads of the other Clans: Faobháin, Domhnathuín, Ó Lochlaigh, Brünnen, Eanairr, and Oidhéalle.

  All but Faobháin had bowed to her at the conclusion of their Realm’s quaint coronation ceremony. All but Faobháin’s two thousand clansmen had bent the knee for Svahta of Clan Muiraighaille, and foolishly, she’d let them.

  It was her fault for letting their disrespect grow like a canker in the resulting years. She’d been younger then, softer, more optimistic, and she’d suffered for her kindness.

  She’d dealt with the Faobháin too late, long after the casualties had begun. Maybe that was why she was reluctant to make the same mistakes with this Guardian killer now. Sitting back and letting others die—it solved nothing. But what could she do? She had her instructions from the Council, and disobedience to the Council wasn’t permitted.

  Sighing, Svahta realized her aunt Serayah had ordered them glasses of cider and was tapping her unlit cigar against the scratched varnish of the tabletop, smiling knowingly.

  “Ya seem worried, little liegelin’.”

  “I am,” Svahta admitted freely, and licked away the sweat gathered above her lip. She wiped the wetness from her smoke-irritated eyes while she was at it. “The Order received some news from the Council today. Ain’t good news. Ain’t good at all really. Lotta people been hurt, Audhi. A whole lotta ’em. Can’t say more’n ’at. But it’s… It just ain’t good.”

  “If it’s got ya worried, darlin’, no, can’t be,” Aunt Serayah commiserated. She reached out and squeezed Svahta’s hand. “But don’t let it get to ya, darlin’. Stay strong. No point’n torturin’ yourself before someone else gets ’round to it.”

  “Ya know I gotta worry. Ya know why I hafta.” Svahta’s throat constricted unexpectedly. She could almost feel those fires singeing her hands again, feel them burning away her hair, her skin healing as fast as it seared, flaming wood breaking off underneath her fingers, stairs crumbling beneath her feet, smoke choking all the air from her lungs—their bodies—their bodies burning, the smell of them, so sweet, so sickening, so sweet—

  Aunt Serayah gave her hand another squeeze, pulling her out of the memory. Svahta shuddered and took a deep breath, but the smoke in the room made her feel like she was still back in that cellar. It took a while before her heart stopped hammering in her chest, before she felt grounded in the present. The bile in her throat stayed where it was, though.

  “Ain’t nothin’ like that ever gonna happen again,” her aunt said sternly. “Ya got my word.”

  “Ya can’t promise that. No one can.” Svahta let her head hang. “I ain’t gonna lose no one else ’cause a’ my bad decisions. Not like ’at. Not again. Not this time. But I dunno what to do, Audhi. Ain’t sure what I can do. Just know I can’t stand doin’ nothin’. Not if it means I gotta watch more people I care about die. I gotta protect ’em. Protect y’all.”

  “Well, ya got some pretty capable clansmen. They can handle themselves. An’ ya got me—an’ I could fight my way outta a barrel with a greased rat,” Aunt Serayah said with a toothless grin. She patted Svahta’s hand. “Gonna take a divine act to get rid a’ me in particular, honey. Infinity seems to like me just a tad.”

  Svahta wanted to believe her—wanted to believe that as a seer her aunt knew things for a fact—but it was hard to believe in absolutes. Aunt Serayah was the last member of Svahta’s family still living. Svahta’s parents had given birth to Svahta and her two sisters very late into their lifespans, and complications had killed both of Svahta’s sisters almost immediately; age had killed her parents within the next few centuries. She’d had no grandparents, no cousins, no uncles—only her aunt, who’d raised her like a daughter.

  Aunt Serayah was her father’s sister—more her mother than her own had been. She’d been the one to tattoo Svahta’s skin with the history of their Clan when Svahta had been selected as its head. She’d been the one to stain Svahta’s lips with inkberry for her wedding to Tavin of Clan Brünnen, the one who had washed the feet of Svahta’s twin boys in honey and muttered the blessing of the multiverse to christen their births.

  But they were gone now. All of them. Everyone but Aunt Serayah. People I love suffer, Svahta thought. People associated with me die. She remembered the Council’s warnings at the end of the meeting earlier, how she should ward her shrine, keep on guard. Should she ward more than that, she wondered? Was she the only one in dange
r of being lured, or—now that the Guardians were aware they were being hunted and killed—would their murderer resort to new tactics? Would they come after her without the smoke and mirrors of fake prayers? Would they come after her head-on, sword drawn?

  Will they come after my family if given the chance?

  Svahta’s worry grew. It would be easy for them to kidnap someone she cared about and hold them hostage in exchange for her life.

  I can’t put anything past them. They’re daring enough to attack Guardians. They’ll be daring enough to do anything. Murder has no courtesy. I got no right to expect it.

  “I probably ain’t safe right now,” Svahta admitted. She knew the other clansmen in the room could hear her, but she didn’t mind. They might gossip amongst themselves, but they wouldn’t interfere in anything or spread it beyond the borders of their Realm. It wasn’t their way. “Not to be around.”

  Aunt Serayah gave a laugh like a dove. “Weren’t scared off by the Faobháin, little cub. Ain’t gonna be cowed by nothin’ that Council a’ yours is high-tailed about.” She reached out and patted Svahta’s cheek with a frail hand. “Don’t you panic now, young’un. Y’ain’t gonna be any safer by worryin’, an’ y’ain’t gonna solve nothing by beatin’ in the head a’ that old sandbag out there, neither. Ya just gotta think, ya gotta plan, an’ ya gotta trust.”

  Svahta frowned at the advice. She hated vaguaries. “Trust in what?” she asked, half-sarcastic. “My heart?”