“Cade, what’s going on?” Karr’s voice ached from disuse. He sat up slowly, feeling like his head might topple off of his shoulders. It wasn’t just his head. His entire body felt like it had been hit by a runaway Rover. Karr reached up, placing a hand over his aching chest. “What the hell happened?”
Cade sniffed and straightened himself again. “It’s my fault. I never should have brought you here. I should have left you on the ship with the others, kept you safe from it all.” Tears and snot streamed down his face, stealing years from his appearance. He looked, not like the seasoned captain he was, but like a scared child.
That shocked Karr more than anything else, for he had never, not even when their parents were murdered, seen Cade lose his composure like this.
Cade lifted a wet hand and placed it on Karr’s cheek. Then he pulled back. With haunted eyes, he said, “You died, Karr. You were… you were dead.”
“Dead?”
The word hung there between them.
It took Karr a moment to conjure up the memories, twisting and tugging at the lock on his mind. But finally it broke and the memories tumbled forth.
A blue-haired girl drove a sword into Karr’s heart. It sank right through his S2, splitting the armor like a hand parting through cool waters.
There was pain, but not as he’d expected. A cold, creeping feeling washed over him.
Jameson screamed from beside him. Cade ran over, his face warping in horror beneath his visor.
“He’s gone, Captain,” Rohtt said. “Leave him.”
“Do it!” Cade screamed. “Take them all down!”
Shots rang out, and an all-out war began.
“I’m not dead,” Karr wanted to scream. But his voice was gone. His body was cold. He’d hovered above himself, fading away as he rose, like he was soaring towards the stars. He saw Rohtt hauling Cade away, shoving him into the safety of their bulletproof transport, Cade howling and stretching for Karr amid the chaos as the Dohrsaran warriors closed in.
His body was left there, lifeless on the valley floor.
But as Karr hovered there above himself, he swore he saw fingers of black that swept up from the ground. They wrapped themselves around his lifeless body like they were alive, swarming into the gaping hole in his chest until they filled it again.
Then he saw nothing at all.
Panic took over. Karr’s heart slammed against his ribs, and then he was fumbling for the sheets, tearing them away from his torso. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, tugging at the white medical gown he wore.
Cade was still speaking, apologizing until his words all rushed into one—I’m-sorry-I’m-so-sorry, my-God-you-were-dead—but Karr wasn’t paying attention.
He yanked the gown over his head, not caring that he sat naked in the stark white room.
He stared down at his chest, searching for the dried blood. The scar. The mark of death upon his skin.
No slash marks on him, no puckered skin where a sharp warrior’s sword was driven through, to send his soul into that strange place of darkness and light, where he had the faintest memory of not being completely alone.
“Dead, Cade?” Karr heard himself say. “Then how do you explain this?”
He looked up at his brother, revealing the place where the scar should have been.
But there was only fresh skin.
Chapter 20
Sonara
“Fifty Wanderers, not counting Jira’s soldiers,” Sonara said. “And a hell of a lot more Dohrsarans. One hundred and twelve prisoners, to be exact.”
The moment she’d come to after passing out in the tunnels, she’d left a still-unconscious Markam in Thali’s care, took the bloody Lazaris from the cleric, and she and Azariah had set out to watch the Wanderers again.
Sonara swung the salamander glass to the left now, following the perimeter of the light-wall. Her head throbbed, and her body was exhausted.
She hadn’t experienced that level of power from her curse before. Not in such a way. What had happened at the Gathering was different. This time… she’d almost felt like she’d controlled it.
She’d pulled the hatred right out of the Hadru, in a breath.
Then she’d pushed her own feelings, her own aura, right back towards it. Almost like she gave it peace. The energy toll it had taken was great, for Sonara felt like she may vomit up the meager rations she’d eaten on the walk back up here. And she still needed a night of true sleep, a luxury she hadn’t received since the Gathering.
The sooner they ended this and got out of the Bloodhorns, the better.
The mountains had offered nothing but trouble, thus far.
“It’s like a net,” Azariah said softly now. “Keeping everyone inside.”
She looked different, in the moonlight… like an outlaw, filthy and bruised and still willing to put up a fight, so different from the polished princess she’d been, when she rode into the desert to help save Sonara from the prison wagons.
This was the first bit of time they’d spent alone together since they’d joined forces.
Sonara had no female friends, and no desire to gain any.
Most men were relatively simple to understand, often wanting glory or gold or a lover. They said exactly what they felt, and Sonara understood them as much as she understood herself.
But women... She saw them all with a face that looked like her mother. All that ever did was push her away.
Sonara sighed as she looked at the light-wall, still finding no way inside. “We need to find a blade that can cut through it.”
“Certainly not metal,” Azariah said stiffly. “I’m afraid that would blow you backwards. Stop your heart.”
“Then we’ll send Markam,” Sonara said.
The Princess lifted a brow.
Sonara shrugged. “He has no heart.”
Azariah’s eyes glittered with the hint of a smile. “May I?” She held out her hand, her gloves still intact to hide her scarred skin.
Sonara held the eyeglass out to her, and together, they watched in silence.
The Dohrsarans had begun to move, forming a solid line that stretched towards the rocky side of the Bloodhorns beneath them, the very mountain in which Sonara’s hidden cave sat.
Down below, six workers manned the Wanderers’ great drill. It rumbled and whined as they powered it up, red light surrounding the sharp point of the drill as they pressed it against the Bloodhorns.
The rock melted little by little as the drill spun, and the Dohrsarans shoved with all their might to keep it pressed close. It was backbreaking work. The kind that would have broken a weaker man or woman, but the Wanderers had chosen the strongest to man the machine in shifts, to swing hammers and axes, cutting through the mountain with brute strength. The warriors, the weaponsmaidens, the steed trainers.
The others followed behind, carting away the rock by hand. Soon, they’d cleared an entryway into the mountains, the entrance of a narrow tunnel that faded from view.
Still, those metallic beetles were attached to the backs of their necks. The lights on them glowed red, but every so often, if someone stepped out of line...
They turned green.
And not one prisoner was taken down, screaming and thrashing through the pain of whatever the hellish beetles were doing to them. But all of them suffered together, from a single act of defiance.
“There he is,” Azariah said softly. “Your companion.”
Sonara took the eyeglass from Azariah with a nod of thanks, and there he was again.
Jaxon of Wildeweb.
He looked different without his hat. His eyes, always so bright with life and laughter, were dulled, his long scar stark on his face. He stared straight ahead, just as the others did. Never looking left or right, only focusing on the job at hand. He was injured, his arm wrapped in a bit of dirty cloth. But he marched onwards, carrying load after load of rock.
The Garden of the Goddess had turned dim, too. At night, the flowers that snaked along the fingertips of the goddess usua
lly glowed bright, like stars that had been plucked from the sky and placed in artful spirals around the towering monuments.
But now the moonpetals were gone, having burned to ashes in the attack.
The beasts that had survived the attack, noble steeds and great wyverns that hadn’t flown away, were harnessed and used to haul the rubble.
It was something that would have taken months to plan, and a great deal of knowledge about the Dohrsarans, and how their Gatherings worked, to be able to pull it off. But this was an entire operation, set up in a matter of days.
“Your father will pay for this,” Sonara said, glancing at Azariah to check for a reaction.
The Princess only nodded. “Good.”
Down below, Jaxon took a breath as he dumped another heavy rock into the pile. Then he turned, following the others back towards the gaping mountainside. The silver beetle on the back of his neck reflected the moonlight. His skin was red and swollen where those awful legs dug in deep. Bruises bloomed around it, stretching into his hairline.
Look up, Sonara wished she could tell him. Look up, and see that we’re still here. We’re going to set you free.
The Wanderer soldiers stood around the perimeter, clad in their red armored suits, overseeing the work as it went on into the night.
It had never struck Sonara before, just how different the Wanderers were. What sort of world had they come from, where they could craft weapons that could blow apart a person in a single, earsplitting shot?
Where they could arrive to a kingdom by the sea, and whisk its prince away without anyone trying to stop them.
“It calls to my magic,” Azariah said softly.
It was suddenly not so strange to see her lying on the rocks, her face dirty, her hair disheveled. She was a Shadowblood. She had power that made her, in many ways, greater than the father that had once killed her in hope that she’d come back again.
“What do you mean?” Sonara asked.
“I can feel a current in the air. It is always there, much like the wind; something I can feel but not see. I can sense when a storm is brewing on the horizon. How far away that storm is, whether lightning will rain from the skies. How strong each bolt will be. The blue wall feels like a storm. Like someone took the power that runs in my veins and changed it. Stretched it out, to form a sheet that sweeps across the Garden of the Goddess. There are no breaks, no folds. Its energy never seems to run out, either. As if whatever current runs through it is being powered by something endless. If we can find a way to shut that power down… we’ll have our way inside.”
“Assuming you’re correct,” Sonara said.
Azariah nodded. “All we can do at this point is assume.”
“Your power,” Sonara said.
Azariah smiled softly. “Magic,” she corrected her. “It is called magic.”
“You’re afraid of it.”
The Princess flinched, but did not disagree. She sighed, looking at her hands as they lay side by side on their stomachs, the rock beneath them cooling with the night. “Freedom is a tricky thing, Devil. I’ve spent a lifetime dreaming of it. Hoping that someday, it would be mine. And now that it’s here... I’m not so sure how to handle it.”
“You did just fine when you helped free me from the prison caravan,” Sonara said.
Azariah frowned. “Perhaps it is because then, he was far away.” She looked down at the valley, where her father’s massive frame could be easily picked out of the crowd.
“You’re not his anymore,” Sonara said. “You never were.”
“A statement I know to be true,” Azariah answered, as the wind blew, and Sonara’s curse winked open a single shadowy eye. Sadness, like the withering roots of a plant forgotten and left to die beneath the boiling suns. “And yet, in his presence, I still feel like the chain is around my throat.”
“Then you have to kill him,” Sonara said. Azariah did balk at that. “You have to kill him, as he once killed you,” Sonara explained, as she swallowed the sadness away. “But this time, you must ensure that no being—no goddess or planet or great source of power—will be able to bring him back.”
As she said it, her eyes were focused, not on Jira, but on another figure down in the crowd.
A queen with blue hair who stopped her work and looked south with weary eyes, as if she were searching for a glimpse of the faraway sea.
For the next two days, the group took turns watching, and waited for hours on end to learn all they could about the Wanderers and their patterns, and how to disrupt them.
And each night, the Wanderer Sonara had killed came to the loading dock and stood alone, looking down at the Dohrsarans below.
Sonara watched him, taking note. Each day, without fail, he came.
“He stands in the same place, staring out at the horizon, like he’s just watching. Waiting,” Sonara said.
Beside the small landing dock that jutted from its side, the rest of their skyship was fully enclosed. It was still held aloft by some invisible force, hovering beside the fingertips of the fallen goddess. Their blue light-wall did not falter. It remained intact at all hours of the night and day. The only access to the ship was the landing dock where the Wanderer stood, open to the air.
“My father once had an enemy he couldn’t defeat,” Azariah said, on the way back from their next stakeout together. She and Sonara were more relaxed, their words flowing a bit easier with each hour they’d had to spend together in the sweltering heat, watching the Wanderers. “He swapped brute force for cleverness. He captured his enemy’s son. Tortured him, got the information out of him, and when he was done… he delivered his head in a box.”
She said it so matter-of-factly, as no other princess Sonara had ever met would do.
“Then that is what we must do,” Sonara said. “We will steal the weakest of them.” She pointed behind her, where the Wanderer that was once dead, now alive again, turned back and disappeared into the ship. Like clockwork. “We’ll take him.”
Azariah, to her credit, did not object. “But… how do you propose we do that?”
Overheard, a flock of fowl suddenly flitted past, their presence surprising Sonara. They screeched and turned when they got too close to the light-wall, but they rose with the wind.
Higher.
Soaring above it, until they reached the other side.
Sonara smiled as she finally found their way in. “We’ll get to him the only way we can,” Sonara said. “From above.”
Chapter 21
Karr
He should not be alive.
But Karr’s heartbeat was as steady as it had ever been, a constant thrum in his chest as he paced on the exterior landing dock of the Starfall, his head aching from the effort of trying to discover how.
How—after being stabbed through the chest with the warrior’s blade—had he survived?
Karr had always thought that one would be able to decipher what happened in the afterlife. That some part of him, hidden beneath the stupor of disbelief in the impossible, would reveal to him what had occurred in the moments he’d stood in that strange otherworld.
But he came up empty every time.
He knew only one thing for certain. It was a place evenly split between darkness and light, and he hadn’t chosen a side.
Just as he hadn’t chosen a side with Cade’s plan.
Karr stood on the landing dock of the Starfall and leaned against the silver railing, feeling sick as he stared out at the world.
All around him, the peaks of red and purple mountains stretched into the sky above the valley, jagged and unforgiving. To his left, the strange monumental towers of rock protruded from the valley below.
It had been beautiful when they arrived at the Gathering, only days ago.
Had it been just days?
Karr gripped the railing tightly, his palms sweaty beneath his S2 gloves. So much had already changed.
He closed his eyes to right himself, but the call of the wind made him feel uprooted. His damned h
elmet felt like it was pressing in against him.
The audio transmitter picked up on a strange melodic cry of an alien bird. It echoed across the valley, bounding off the mountains like a mournful song.
Far off in the atmosphere, the planet’s rings shone in the night sky; pastels that seemed to dance with life. He’d always loved ringed planets, as if some great artist had painted them across the sky or taken extra time to mold and shape them. Karr knew he should wish to capture the sight of the rings now, sketch their smooth arches and spread the images across the top of his bunk.
But the magic of the scene was broken by the truth.
For each time the wind blew, it carried the sound of a drill driving into the mountainside. It was a constant, ever-present reminder that signified Cade’s horrific choice.
He’d started a war, and it was one that Karr wished, desperately, he had no part in.
The wind sighed. It was acrid and hot, and Karr breathed deep inside his S2, feeling the strange absence of pain in his chest where a sword wound should have been.
He felt sick. When he looked down below, inside the electromagnetic walls set up beneath the hovering Starfall, he saw the prisoners.
So many Dohrsarans who’d welcomed them to their planet. Who’d been willing to exist, side by side, with armored creatures from another world. And Cade had taken them all captive.
He’d joined with the Dohrsaran king, the monstrous warrior whose one eye glittered darkly as if he were always waiting for a chance to strike. How long had Geisinger been in talks with the king? And how long had Cade held the truth of what he would do when they arrived here?
“Hiding out again, little brother?”
Karr did not turn at the sound of Cade’s voice. He simply sank deeper into his stance as he leaned over the railing.
Cade’s crew-turned-army, so helpfully run by Rohtt, stood guard around the clock, their weapons ready to fire should the prisoners revolt again. But it didn’t matter.
Karr now understood the true meaning of the blueprint he’d seen in Cade’s room. He wished he’d dug a bit deeper, had had time to discover the hundreds of mites hiding in the cargo hold.
Blood Metal Bone: An epic new fantasy novel, perfect for fans of Leigh Bardugo Page 20