Blood Metal Bone: An epic new fantasy novel, perfect for fans of Leigh Bardugo

by Lindsay Cummings

  Part Two

  Metal

  Chapter 16

  Sonara

  Darkness had never bothered Sonara.

  In her earliest days in the Deadlands, she’d clung to it, for it was in the darkness that she’d honed her curse. Where she’d sat, for hours on end, pulling at the air around her, trying to decipher aura after aura; where each one came from, be it beast or man, and what they were feeling.

  Jaxon and Markam had spent plenty of hours hiding out in the darkness with her, so she could train.

  “Left,” Sonara would say, “twenty paces from me,” and Jaxon’s voice came from where he’d been hiding.

  “Very good. Now tell me what I’m feeling.”

  “Proud,” Sonara said. “But not of me. Proud of your own damned self, for thinking you’re the one who taught me this trick.”

  His answering chuckle lit up the darkness.

  Sonara sighed as she stoked the fire in front of her, suddenly hating her memories of Jaxon. Because, after all these years… he was starting to feel like Soahm. She’d lost them both to the Wanderers, to the same exact ship.

  The fire crackled merrily across from her now, embers dancing upwards to fade into the shadows of the towering cave. A pair of bright red eyes flashed as a wyvern pup hissed and scurried around to the dark side of the jagged stalactite hanging over the fire.

  Sonara sighed as the pup faded from sight. Was the goddess of fate tangled up in all of this? She’d always thought the goddesses to be just stories. Lights in the night sky that cared nothing for the people beneath them, or a series of clever little tales to explain the strange happenings on Dohrsar.

  But perhaps she was wrong, for there were too many threads weaving together and tying their knots tight.

  And then there was the curse in her veins, a curse that had caused all of this in the first place, combined with some new, unknown power… and the threat was far stronger than she’d ever thought before.

  “Damn it,” Sonara hissed as she tossed a stick into the fire. The embers danced skyward, causing more wyvern pups to scurry quietly after them, testing their new claws and wings. “Damn Jaxon for getting me out of there. Damn him for falling from Duran’s back. And damn my useless curse.”

  She’d stabbed a Wanderer in the chest at the Gathering, succumbing to some new level of her curse as if she’d been a prisoner of her own. She should have been killed for what she’d done. And yet she was the one walking free.

  But Jaxon… he was her blood brother, her counterpart, as essential to her as the suns were to the moons. Without him…

  “You should not call your gift useless, Devil.”

  Sonara glanced to her right, where Thali sat leaning up against the cave wall, her Canis mask gaunt in the firelight.

  “You’re wrong,” Sonara growled.

  They’d resorted to hiding in the shadows, in a cold, forgotten cave just beside the Garden of the Goddess. It stank of wet earth and rotting bones.

  And when she closed her eyes, Sonara could still imagine the sound of the screams from the prisoners in the Garden, and the small campfire Thali had made, crackling merrily, only served to remind her of the attack.

  The deep eye sockets of Thali’s Canis mask looked hollow as she stared at Sonara from across the flames. “It took over your senses. It had the power to control you. A power that strong, a magic that intense, Devil, is not useless. You should learn to wield it like a weapon.”

  “It couldn’t save him,” Sonara said softly. “It couldn’t save any of us.”

  Footsteps sounded from the shadows as Azariah and Markam appeared, having returned from the network of tunnels carved out around the cave. There were miles and miles of them throughout the Bloodhorns, snaking all directions into the dark. They’d been carved out by miners that had passed through with shovel and axe in hope of uncovering priceless gold. But now these tunnels were abandoned, picked through as the search for gold had driven further north, towards Deadwood.

  Sonara had sent Markam and Azariah out together with a torch and a sword, to seek food, blankets, or anything of real worth to help them survive while they came up with a plan.

  And to talk through whatever cold tension hung between them, so palpable it made it impossible to be around the two.

  But it seemed they had found only a single mountain rat, the carcass stinking and crawling with white maggots as Markam slammed it down beside the fire.

  Azariah looked like she might be sick.

  “Well,” the princess said, as she glanced away from the carcass, her lips pursed tight. Dirt was smudged across her smooth cheek, and her cloak was stained with smoke and charred holes from the attack. It made her look, for all the world, like a runaway.

  A far cry from the princess who’d hired them mere days ago.

  “Well, what?” Sonara asked.

  Azariah put her hands on her hips. “The… the plan? Have you come up with anything yet?”

  A plan for what, exactly, Sonara wasn’t sure. “There’s no way in hell we can get through that sort of power.”

  Markam glanced over at her, eyes narrowed as he took out a small blade and appraised the rat’s torso. “Who says we’re going to try?”

  She gritted her teeth and forced herself to speak, not snarl. “Your brother is trapped out there, Markam. And you’d sooner let him die than risk your own skin to save him.”

  “Self-preservation, my dear Sunny,” Markam said. “You must take care to learn about it.”

  He drove the blade into the rat’s belly.

  “Markam has always been good at such things,” Azariah said, as she settled beside Thali and tried very hard not to look at the rat blood pooling on the cave floor. “I don’t know that he needs any help in saving himself.”

  Sonara turned. “You.”

  Azariah blinked back at her.

  “You did this. You brought us to this damned place, and for what?”

  “Leave her,” Thali commanded. “The Lady doesn’t answer to you.”

  Sonara chuckled. “The Lady can speak if she damn well pleases. She hired us to come here. She is going to explain what in the hell just happened at the Gathering, and what we’re to do next to get them to leave this place. No one told us we’d be waiting for a bloody massacre. Did you know it would come to this?”

  “That depends, Devil,” Thali said. “Did the princess know that the very person she hired would murder one of the Wanderers, instigating said massacre?”

  Sonara felt her blood thrumming in her ears. “It wasn’t me.”

  Still, the guilt inside of her raged.

  “Wasn’t it, though?” Markam asked.

  Sonara whirled around.

  He held up his hands. “It’s a simple observation, Sunny. It was your hand that drove the sword in.”

  “My curse,” Sonara said, not for the first time. “It made me do it.”

  “It is because you are weak,” Thali answered. “The Children of Shadow were never meant to be controlled by their great magic.”

  “There you go again, uttering nonsense.” Sonara closed her eyes and forced herself to breathe deeply, to will her pressing need to destroy far, far away. She’d already done enough damage. And that blasted word—magic—wherever Thali had learned it, kept coming up. It sounded like some ridiculous term from the goddesses. From people who stared up at the stars each night and whispered their prayers to something long dead and dormant.

  “It is not nonsense,” Azariah answered softly. “Thali has taught me everything I know. My magic has become an asset. A friend.”

  “Yeah?” Sonara whirled on her. “And where was your asset when we needed it during the attack? You could have blasted them all away with your lightning. You could have helped everyone get free with the power that lives in your veins, and yet all you did was run.”

  Azariah did not move an inch. The flames of the fire were reflected in her dark eyes, as if she were a devil herself.

  “Why?” Sonara asked.
“Why did you do nothing?”

  Azariah’s face remained passive.

  They glared at each other from across the fire as Markam sighed and said, “Because she knew the attack would happen.”

  The words swept across the cave like a secret.

  “Markam.” Azariah looked at him with eyes burning like embers. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He shook his head and barked out a cold laugh. “I’m a fool for agreeing to help you when you came running to me. I think you knew exactly what would happen here. I think you let it happen because you care more about getting your hands on the Antheon than you care about your own kingdom. Your own people.”

  “Oh, you’re one to talk, Trickster,” the princess spat. But there was pain in her voice, pain twisting her features. “Do we need to go over what happened in your short stay at Stonegrave? All you cared about was using me to get wealthier. It didn’t matter that you stomped over my heart in the process!”

  Sonara glanced between the two of them, their auras becoming too much for her to bear.

  Not quite hatred.

  But it burned close enough.

  She turned to Azariah. “Did you or did you not know what it would come to when the Wanderers made a move?”

  Azariah’s shoulders seemed to sink in. “I… I didn’t know the full details.”

  Sonara felt her hand slide onto Lazaris. “Jaxon is gone because you didn’t warn us about what was to come.”

  Azariah scrambled to her feet, kicking dust on the fire. It flickered for a moment as she held out her hands, her fingers trembling as an aura of fear swam towards Sonara, sticky and sharp with the tang of iron, almost like blood. “I swear. I didn’t know they would trap them in such a way, that they would do what they did! That… Dohrsarans would die. I only knew that they would come, that they would use force if they had to. But never this.”

  She looked at her hands as if they were foreign to her.

  “They are my people,” she whispered.

  And suddenly her fear became sorrow, the aura’s scent like a flower pressed in a book. Present, but no longer alive.

  “I tried.” She swallowed. “I tried to summon it, but I’ve never felt fear like that. I’ve never felt…”

  “Like a coward,” Sonara said.

  But her voice lacked the harshness she’d originally spoken with. Because suddenly she was speaking of herself. In her mind, she saw the ghostly memory of Soahm again, and Jaxon beside him, two hands stretching towards her as she ran away. Was there more she could have done?

  She already knew the answer. There was always more, always another way out, a solution to every problem. But she hadn’t solved either one of them.

  “A coward,” Azariah said, and nodded. “I suppose… that is exactly what I am.” She gently sat back down as she seemed to notice the threat in Sonara’s voice had faded.

  “It’s a sob story, ladies, it truly is.” Markam leaned back onto his elbows. “But there’s nothing we can do to save them. We should be halfway across the Deadlands by now, holed up in a better cave, drinking the day away. We’ll simply wait until this little feud with the Wanderers passes. Jira will get his Antheon when the Wanderers uncover it, and then they’ll let the prisoners go. The end.”

  “Always so cold,” Sonara said.

  “I prefer realistic,” Markam corrected her with a shrug.

  “It won’t pass,” Azariah said. “That’s… that’s why we came in the first place. The Wanderers have only just begun. And once they uncover the Antheon, they’ll come back, time and again, to replenish their supplies.”

  “And the king will allow this?” Sonara asked. “He’s trapped in there with the rest of them.”

  “Not trapped,” Azariah said. “They have a deal. He is on their side, waiting for them to find the source.”

  Somewhere beyond the mouth of their cave, out in the tunnels, a creature cried out in pain. It was distant, the threat far away, as if something bigger and stronger was devouring it, with no hope of being saved.

  “They’ll use the prisoners to dig up the Antheon,” Azariah explained. “It’s somewhere near the valley, from what my father’s partner can tell. A great source of power, but it remains unseen.”

  “What partner?” Markam asked.

  “His name is Geisinger,” Azariah said. “A powerful Wanderer from another world. I’ve overheard them speaking. He sends messages by the Gazers that soar the skies. The plan is to make the prisoners work until their backs break. They’ll take nearly all of it, and my father will receive a cut. And once he gets his hands on it… it will change him.”

  “How?” Sonara asked. She narrowed her eyes as the princess spoke, searching for any sign of a lie, or more truths to be uncovered. The aura usually came as a scent with another hiding beneath it. Like a cup of wine with a bitter poison mixed in.

  “I saw him with it, only once,” Azariah said. “I watched from my hiding place as his messenger arrived, with one of the Gazers. The orb has a hollow interior, I suppose, because I saw it open wide, a hidden compartment of sorts, to give my father a bit of the Antheon. I’ve no idea what trickery the man did to it, for it was originally just a bit of black stone… but he gave it to my father in the form of a small black pill. And when my father swallowed it…”

  “What?” Markam said, leaning forward.

  Azariah wrapped her arms around herself. “He changed. I could have sworn… I could have sworn his eyes turned to shadows, black as the night sky.”

  “The King will use the Antheon to gain power over all Dohrsar,” Thali said. “He lusts for it, just like he lusts for the abilities of the Children of Shadow. It is why he arranged for the Wanderers to strike during the Gathering. So the queens of the north and south would be taken captive, an easy way to remove them from power in one fell swoop.”

  “No one is coming to save the prisoners, then,” Sonara said. “No army to get word, no great leader to journey here to fight for them.”

  She felt like a hollow pit yawned wide inside of her, threatening to pull her in.

  Jaxon will die in there.

  You will be alone again, without him, without Soahm.

  You are nothing, and no one, just as your mother once said.

  Sonara glanced at the dark cave mouth.

  She could run, right now. She could climb onto Duran’s back, where he waited safe and sound outside the tunnels, and be away from here in an instant, a speck of dust carried away by the wind. For one moment, she imagined it. Allowed herself to close her eyes and see it. Perhaps that was true freedom, being alone, with no one to tie herself to.

  But when she imagined it, all she saw was Jaxon’s bloody hands reaching down to help her up, ten years ago, when he’d found her dying on the cracked ground. His smile, as he oversaw her plucking her first purse from a noble’s pocket. His encouraging words, as he stood beside her and taught her how to release an arrow from a bow with enough accuracy to hit a fowl mid-flight. She saw herself teaching him how to wield a warrior’s sword, using the same steps Soahm had once taught her. She saw him standing before a mirror as she taught him how to dress like a Lady’s guard, how to speak like a noble, and how to get a steed to listen when the beast flattened its ears and pranced in disdain.

  Sonara looked carefully at the group around her. A princess, a cleric wearing a wolf’s skull, and a smooth criminal wearing a Trickster’s grin. They weren’t much. But they were something.

  And she herself was the Devil of the Deadlands. Devils didn’t run from fear. They created it. They shaped it into a weapon to use against whoever dared stand in their way.

  And there had to be a way to break through that light barrier. There had to be a way to save Jaxon from the monsters on that ship, to get them to leave this place for good. Sonara sighed.

  “Then we will save them,” she said.

  “Oh, stars above… Sonara, I see the look in your eyes, and I don’t like it,” Markam ran his hands over his face i
n disdain. “We’re a few people. We have no resources, no army, no chance.”

  “There’s always a chance,” Sonara growled. “Jaxon is your family. He’s… he’s my family.”

  She shocked even herself by using the word.

  “What good can we do against an army of Wanderers?” he asked. “What good can we do against their weapons?”

  That pleading tone, the truth of his words. It made Sonara’s insides curl.

  “Just help me,” Sonara said. “For once, help me, without a deal or a prize on the other side. That’s all I’m asking of you. Just help me find a way to free them.”

  Silence, as Markam stared at her.

  It was Thali who finally spoke. “The Great Mother has tied us all to this.” Her voice was so strangely out of place, so youthful and bright in the darkness of the moment. “For whatever reason, we are all bound to this place. I will stand with you. I will help you.”

  “And I,” Azariah said, lifting her chin. “I will fight to free my people and stop my father.”

  Perhaps it had been her plan all along, to get Sonara and Markam here, to see the horror of what lay before them, with the king and the Wanderer’s plan. But Sonara didn’t care.

  “Then we start from the beginning, as we always do,” she said.

  She turned to look at Markam, who’d been watching the entire moment unfold with what looked like an ever-building sigh.

  “Intel first. You’re up, Trickster. And if you walk away from this, away from Jaxon…”

  “I know, Sunny,” he said, and got to his feet, swiping the dust from his pants. He adjusted the hat back on his head, settling it just so. “If I screw this up, you’ll make me regret the day I was reborn.”

  “No,” Sonara said, surprising him. She smiled sweetly. “I’ll tie you up and hand you to Azariah instead, and I’ll enjoy watching as she tears you apart, limb from limb.”

  “Spyglass,” Markam said.

  Sonara looked to her right, where he was sprawled on his stomach beside her on a rocky overhang of the Bloodhorn Mountains, his face shadowed beneath the wide leather brim of his hat. The suns hovered overhead; high noon.