A Shard of Sea and Bone

by L. J. Engelmeier

  The witch-soldier’s eyes slanted over to Svahta, and her smirk took on an edge. “Oh, I think I will. In time, I will.”

  Nori-Rin’s mouth pinched together, and Svahta knew nothing good would come of it. It would be a long mission for them if they couldn’t learn to work together as a fluid unit. They needed to come to an accord, for now.

  “Grimyaenath,” Svahta said, and extended her free hand as a peace offering. “That’s your name, yeah?”

  “Grimyaenath,” the witch-soldier corrected, the letters buzzing against her teeth. She took Svahta’s hand in her gauntleted own, but she didn’t shake it. She merely held it. “I prefer Grim, if you do not mind. It suits me better, no?”

  “Grim,” Svahta agreed. “Are you from the capital?”

  “By the stars in the heavens, no. I hail from Sainte Adder, a city-state much further to the east, nearly to the coast. My parents own a quaint estate in Innatown. My younger sister is a councilman’s apprentice there, and the other is a handmaiden to a duchess in Ytolla—”

  “And you’re a guard and a seer,” Nori-Rin said, her voice laced with false politeness. She stared down at Grim’s hand, still gripped firmly around Svahta’s, until Grim let go. “Svahta’s aunt-mam is one. A seer. It will be useful, I suppose—”

  All the cheer sapped out of Grim like a flame sapped of air. “The sight is more a burden than a gift, Guardian Baakutunde. I see a great many things that strike me with dread, but in so little detail there is often nothing I can do to prevent them. I have watched many people die, knowing it would happen, but not how. I could not save them. I would consider that tragedy, would you not?”

  The hall took on a colder air with the witch-soldier’s words. Suddenly, the sconces weren’t inviting. Their orange light was hollow, an empty promise that only emphasized the winter chill in the castle. Svahta couldn’t help but ask, just like she couldn’t help but ask her aunt: “Do ya know what’s gonna happen to us all?”

  Grim’s deep red mouth thinned out into a line. “The wind whispers many things to me, you will find in time,” she said, “but the words now are quiet. Scared. They tell me little but bring images, like memories, vague, narrowed. Impressions. Truths I do not know until they leave my lips. Those I cannot rid myself of. Those things I see on the backs of my eyelids. In those, there is blood in the snow. Blood in the snow.” Her voice cradled those four infant words, her stormed eyes lost somewhere for a moment, fixated on some point beyond what Svahta could see. Her gaze cut back to Svahta harshly. “I see corpses marching like armies into the afterlives. So many that they stretch beyond the horizon. Beyond the beyond. I shift through their bodies with my eyes, but every time I think I have reached the last one, another waits behind. I smell death like meadows of flowers. I see ice and a dagger, a poisoned cup. I feel the air so thick with a war of sand and bone and bodies we can scarcely breathe it—and that last one,” she said, “that means something to you, no? It is what you fear.”

  Svahta gave a stiff nod. She and Nori-Rin had been interrupted in the greenhouse before they’d had the chance to accept or decline the Saeinfinae’s orders to join him, but she knew that their choice had been made now. They would see this to the end, and that meant sand was their destination. Sand was Bal-Hakur. Sand was the city of Khajal, the city of a million prying eyes, where they would have to go to interrogate High King al-Loriaris.

  There was no telling what would follow them into the belly of every sun-cut shadow there—no telling if the High King would remain their ally—no telling if those light-beings were already there, hiding inside someone’s flesh, waiting for them, biding time. The only thing that was certain to Svahta was that there would be no refuge for them there—no place to lie low or hide—no safe corner to turn—and now, with this witch’s words, with the images she’d strewn together with blood and sand, Svahta knew that this journey was inevitable, and that it would not end well for them. Disaster awaited. Death awaited.

  “Ain’t nothin’ we can do to stop it,” Svahta said, shoving her flail into the ether. “Everythin’s been put into play. All we can do is try’n lessen the damage.”

  There was no more time to waste, she figured. They couldn’t put this off any longer, so she grabbed Nori-Rin’s arm while at the same time slipping her hand into the warm sheepskin lining of Grim’s gauntlet. When she went to reconjure them away, however—when she felt that first telltale tug of her soul toward the veil between all dimensions—she remembered something. She remembered in a sudden flash the threat that Robin Eisyedl had spoken back in that stock field. His words had carved themselves into the night, an unhealable wound: Your pet autarch, who has deigned to steal from us the name of Saeinfinae, will stain the snow with his blood. Her heart tripped in her chest.

  Sand in the air. Blood in the snow.

  That future is waiting for us then, too, certain.

  She only hoped Grim had been wrong about what she’d said, that there was hope they could put a stop to the tragedy she’d foretold, that they could do everything in the world to end the madness swallowing them all, that they could save at least one person, but then, in a blur of ether and soul, the three of them were gone.

  NO MORE TIME

  _______________________________

  I know you, stranger. I recognize your path. The pain lurking in the mirrors of your eyes. We have both experienced death. Heartbreak. Tragedy. The fickle flames of hope. Only in names and chronology are our lives marked different. So when I see you, I know you are just another me.

  excerpt from the novella The Stranger by William Bracken, translated from Osnata

  THE MULTITUDINOUS REALM OF BLACK WATERS

  ANGSCLOVEN STREET, CENTRAL LINDENNACHT,

  COUNTY KAVETT, NORTHERN OSNASTEDT, FJORDE

  The two strange demons in Oliver’s custody knelt in the crumbling street, hands held up in surrender. He kept his pepperbox trained on each of them and blinked the sting of ash from his eyes. He could feel himself swaying with fatigue.

  “State your identities and your purposes here,” he commanded for the third time, which made the wolf-eared demon he’d shot minutes earlier laugh again. He gritted his teeth. “State your identity and your purpose here, kaarik, or I shoot your comrade in the throat and you can watch him choke on the bullet.”

  “You wouldn’t,” she said with a smile. Her hair was as black as her almond-shaped eyes, a deep scar set underneath the right one. Dried blood spattered her face. The only reason Oliver knew she was female was because of the pitch of her voice, but her accent was foreign, thick and lilting, one Oliver had never heard, not even in the thick crowds of immigrants that overflowed inside the Eastline station or that came in on shipments down at the docks. He didn’t know where she’d come from, especially not in that archaic armour. “You wouldn’t hurt him. Not if you value your life, little human.”

  Little human. The words struck his last nerve.

  Oliver crunched his way through the debris in the street and jammed his revolver against the demon’s damp, dirt-smeared forehead. He ground the barrels into her skin for good measure. “Don’t tell me what I would or wouldn’t do, you piece of filth. You don’t know me. You’re prisoners of this country until you produce immigration papers, kaarik, and that’s me being nice, because Fjorden Constitution, Amendment Twelve, Section Three, Subsection B: if I deem you a threat, I retain the right to shoot you on sight on the grounds of illegally entering the Fjordlands. Do you want to test my aim?”

  “Oh, I love a righteous man,” she cooed. “Gets me all hot and bothered. I can feel it right down in my special place. But seriously? I’m not one to tell you how to do your job. But don’t you have bigger concerns right now than illegal immigration? Like all these fucking hollow-souls?” She reached up to push the barrels of his pepperbox aside, and Oliver seethed.

  “Hadyeteş’nėl,” Oliver ordered her, and magic tugged through his gut. It was a small tug, but it was enough to send pain racking through his body. He bit his to
ngue as it ran its course, blinking back the haze hanging over his vision. His wrist throbbed anew, and his stomach seized him in a sharp, nauseated cramp. It had stopped growling this morning at least, after he’d woken with a crick in his neck and subsequently forced himself to scarf down the waterlogged remains of a stray cat. He’d thrown up raw innards and his own stomach acid afterward, which had drawn the attention of the hollowsouls he’d somehow managed to hide from up until then.

  He’d barely had a moment of respite since.

  He didn’t think he could do this for much longer. The hollowsouls doubled in number every time he turned around. Magic was taking its toll on him. His ammunition was now down to the last bullet waiting in his pepperbox, and his body was barely holding itself together.

  I’m not going to die in this city, Oliver swore to himself, not until I have justice for my sister.

  On her knees in front of him, the wolf-eared demon huffed out a laugh. Her hand was frozen in the air, but there was the unmistakable hint of a smile at the edges of her mouth. He wondered if how long it would take her to break free of his weakened spellcasting and then gave a cursory glance to her companion. He could see the ghosts crawling back into the man’s slanted eyes.

  Good, he told himself, a little uncertain. He tried to ignore the strange feeling in his chest. Keep him subdued.

  It was the female he was worried about, in all honesty. Demons were quick—dangerous—but this one was matted with layer upon layer of congealing blood, only a foot away from a gory scythe with blades as long as he was tall. He didn’t trust her. Looking into her oil-black eyes wasn’t like looking into the eyes of a caged animal. There was no anger, no resignation. There was only amusement. Pure and simple. Even after he’d shot her.

  The only demons he’d met with so much spirit were the ones he’d tracked into the mountains alongside his brothers-in-arms and put down like the rabid dogs they were, and they had been alive with rage, not laughter. In town, demons never dared to so much as raise their heads to meet the eyes of a Lindenwatchman, whether they were being marched to the gallows or to the firing squad, whether they were taking an evening stroll or sitting in a restaurant.

  “State your identities,” Oliver ordered the wolf-eared demon again, “and your purposes here, or I shoot.”

  Her eyes told him no.

  Sweat rolled down his face behind his mask. The pearl grip of his pepperbox was slick. Every few seconds, a gust of winter air cut through the wall of heat suffocating him, but the breezes were sapped away as quickly as they came. Bursts of embers whipped through the air, and around him, the cacophony of crackling flame and growling hollowsouls grew to a steady din. If he stayed here much longer, his own fires were going to consume him, or the hollowsouls were going to get bold enough to approach. He was running out of time. He needed answers. He needed justice.

  “Ståmmetteş ómdellghgenz vi njona sumi yhathan-ponseurz vi njona bjaa’nėl!” he commanded out of desperation, but there was no answering tug of magic this time. He tightened his grip on his revolver and repeated the order, but again, nothing happened.

  The wolf-eared demon shifted an inch to the left, and then her smile grew. His hold over her was slipping, and now, she knew it.

  It was quick work to backhand her with the grip of his gun. The force of the blow jolted up his arm, and the demon laughed. He watched her sway toward his knees. When she lifted her head, she had a red mark rapidly forming at her temple. It disappeared just as quickly as it formed. The shadows of the buildings and the flickering light of the fires made her smile sinister.

  “That all you got, pretty boy?”

  He pressed the barrels of his gun to her forehead and thumbed the notched sight in its hammer. If she so much as twitched, his last bullet would strike her between the eyes. “Move,” he told her, “and I’ll fire. I won’t hesitate to kill you, kaarik. You wouldn’t be my first.”

  “Pity. I do love a good virgin,” she said. “You know, now that I see you up close, I’ve got to say, you don’t look like an Oliver.”

  “A bullet travels faster than a demon,” he told her, his patience wearing thin. His vision was blurring at the edges, and his eyes were stinging from the heat again. “The shorter the distance between us, kaarik, the greater my success rate.”

  “And the greater her chances of getting to your throat before you can get to your trigger,” said the demon from the sidelines waveringly. Oliver had almost forgotten about him. He let his eyes leave the wolf-eared demon long enough to flick over to her companion, a tangle of unexpected emotion erupting in his stomach.

  Earlier, this strange man had barrelled into the street, flames spewing from his hands and fists drilling holes in chest cavities. He’d been an unrelenting, vicious whirlwind of deadly power. When he’d turned to Oliver, Oliver had panicked. He’d done the first thing that had come to mind: attack. The last thing he’d expected was for the man to beg for mercy on his knees, crying.

  The man had looked genuinely terrified, cheeks streaked with tears, calling Oliver master in such a broken voice, pleading for him to spare someone named Druya and punish him instead. It had taken Oliver aback, so much so that he’d actually felt a spark of shame alongside his confusion. Even now, this man looked like a fragile thing. He was sweating profusely, greasy brown hair windblown around his bearded face. He had the slanted eyes of the Normanese, but his accent was all wrong, too guttural and rough around the edges to belong to the land. Still, he was striking, in the way a shard of glass glinting in the sun was striking. It caught the eye and demanded a second look. A closer investigation. A gentle cradling in the palm, wary of sharp edges.

  The slant-eyed man kept his shaking hands held aloft in surrender. “I’m not threatening you,” he promised Oliver. “Sae just isn’t very smart, and I’d appreciate if you didn’t paint the street with what little brains she has. We’re here to help you. You have my word.”

  “Definitely not an Oliver,” the wolf-eared demon said. “More like a Harold. Or a Sarah. Don’t you think?”

  “For all our sakes, Sae,” the man shot off at her with a sidelong glare, “let’s hope you never have children. Unless we’re to expect a Prince Sarah sometime soon, with twice the looks and half the intelligence.”

  “Sarah is a very dignified name.”

  “You wouldn’t know dignity if it stuck its hand down the front of your dress.”

  “I don’t think you know dignity if you think it’d stick its hand down the front of my dress.”

  “It’s what I would do, darling,” the man said, words like syrup, “and I assure you, I’m a very dignified person. It’s practically my middle name.”

  “You don’t have a middle name.”

  “I do now.”

  When a new voice interjected from down the street, Oliver rounded on it, gun raised. “Touch my sister, Staatvelter,” the voice said, “and I’ll make sure your middle name is printed in nice, even letters on your tombstone.”

  To Oliver’s horror, the voice belonged to a man clad in the same archaic, foreign armour as the two demons in his custody, but the man wasn’t alone. Another walked at his side, just as formidable. Without any sense of urgency, the two newcomers cut down the street, gleaming longswords brandished.

  Fuck, Oliver thought simply. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  He barely had a handle on the two demons at his feet. He couldn’t manage two more, and it was obvious that these two men were demons, even from a distance. Their heads didn’t swivel to the hollowsouls encroaching on the area. They were confident—unworried—and as they came closer, more about them became discernible through the ember-whipped street.

  Rapid-fire, Oliver took them in. Both men had hair that was abnormally long, tied high on their heads and caked with gore. Both of them were tall, too—at least six-foot-five a piece. The one on the left was darker skinned, with horns curving back from his scalp, most of his face coated in congealing blood. His hair was the same oil black as that of wolf-eared demon
at Oliver’s feet. The other demon approaching him, though, radiated an air of elegance. His hair and skin were so white that it looked as though someone had drained him of colour. He was a ghost walking through fire. If he’d held still, Oliver might have mistaken him for a bleached statue, like the ones of General Rietcoffer in the plaza.

  It was unnatural. Every one of them was unnatural.

  “Halt!” he barked when the men were only a handful of feet away, but they kept walking. He ordered again, magicless: “Hadyeteş’nėl! Yin! Yhataig nin hadyeti nel!”

  The pale demon held out an arm like a barricade, and the horned one at his side came to a stop. They both openly assessed Oliver, who took a step back, keeping all four demons in his sights. The wolf-eared demon eased herself to her feet with a smirk, and Oliver slid back another foot and a half in the rubble.

  “Watch him,” she told the men. “He’s feisty.”

  “He’s our rescue,” corrected the slant-eyed man.

  “He’s currently a pain in my ass, is what he is.” She levelled a glare at Oliver, flames dancing in her pitch-black eyes. “Are you going to listen to us now, or do you insist on keeping up with the whole ‘Shoot First, Ask Questions Never’ shtick? It’s not a horrible strategy, I admit. I’m partial to it. But let me tell you—it is so much harder to get answers out of a corpse, little human.”

  “Stop calling me that,” Oliver bit out at her. “Kaarik.”

  “Again with the gibberish.”

  “You should respect his home dialect, Artysaedra. It’s the language of his people.”

  “Oh, respect his home dialect, my ass,” she said. “He shot me.”