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

by Lindsay Cummings

  “She’s burning out,” Karr yelled.

  Sonara blinked as she came back to the present, and focused on Azariah.

  Help her, be brave, the voice in Sonara’s soul whispered. Do it now, before her time runs out.

  The Princess’ skin was beginning to flake away, like ashes on the wind.

  Her dark hair was aglow, the ends rising all around her as she fought. She had become more than a comrade, more than a deal made in Sandbank. She’d become a friend, the only female Sonara had ever trusted.

  She stepped forward, without thinking, and lifted her own hands.

  Yes, her curse purred inside. Release me now, Shadowblood.

  With a shout, Sonara blasted open the cage inside of her. Her curse soared outwards, stretching for Azariah, little shadow hands grabbing ahold of the princess’ aura. It was pure terror, surging through her, hot and sticky and impossible to scrape from her skin.

  But Sonara began to reel back the tether, remembering what had happened on the night she’d faced the Hadru. She harnessed the princess’ fear, the terror Azariah felt now as she faced the atlas orb.

  In one breath, Sonara pulled the aura of fear right from the princess.

  She hauled it back towards herself, letting her curse attack it, devour it… and in a breath it was gone.

  Azariah’s body seemed to shift.

  As if the fear that had been holding her back was the final weight that had to be lifted.

  She drew herself to her feet, her entire body trembling with the effort as she kept her hands before her.

  Sonara watched, amazed, as the princess shaped her lightning into a sword.

  A mighty sword of pure Shadowblood power, far better than Gutrender could ever be. She lifted her hands above her head, the sword following with it, until it was poised above the atlas orb, ready to strike.

  Take it down, Sonara thought to her.

  The Princess slammed her hands down, and the lightning sword drove straight through the atlas orb.

  A great explosion threw them all sideways as the ship shuddered.

  The electricity fizzled out, collapsing in upon itself, fading from existence until it was no more.

  Azariah collapsed, and somewhere beneath the ship, a great hum fell silent.

  Sonara peered through the circular opening, the space where the atlas orb had just been… as the light-wall faded, its power gone.

  The Dohrsarans were trapped by a cage no more.

  The rush from the engine room was muddled and breathless, a moment of blurred time, full of uttered curses as Karr and Sonara hauled the princess up the stairs and back into the storage bay.

  Her body was charred, smoke trailing from her hands, but she was alive… alive, and a savior.

  Karr carried her towards the escape pod that sat waiting, the scent of Soahm no longer hiding inside. Sonara dragged an unconscious Markam in, too, strapping them both in haphazardly.

  “You’re sure this thing works?” Sonara asked, as Karr frantically started it up.

  The lights guttered and came to life within.

  The door sealed shut, just as Sonara heard a boom.

  To their right, the door was blasted open, smoke pouring through the entryway as Cade and his soldiers sprinted in.

  But Karr was not paying attention.

  For the escape pod shook, a feeling that sent Sonara’s stomach dropping to her toes, and then they were tipping forward, as the very side of the storage bay opened, practically spitting the pod out, shoving it away from the Starfall like a swatted fly.

  Sonara screamed, clutching the straps in terror as they fell. As her stomach shot into her throat, and the small glass window in front of them revealed the ground drawing ever closer.

  “Hold on!” Karr yelped.

  At the last second, the pod jerked upwards as if it had sprouted wings. Sonara swallowed her scream as it carted them across the sky, through where the light-wall had once been.

  Past the Dohrsarans below, they soared, over the valley and the hundreds that had been imprisoned, but were no longer held within the electric cage.

  “Oh, hell,” Karr groaned. He slammed a button on the dash, then pulled up on the small wheel before him, but the pod did not respond. The lights guttered out again, and then they were sputtering, bouncing like a wagon driving across uneven sand, as the pod died. Karr looked to Sonara with a strange sense of eerie calm as he said, “We’re going to crash.”

  They’d defeated the atlas orb.

  They’d shut down the light-wall and escaped.

  So why, Sonara thought numbly, as the pod neared the ground… why are the prisoners not running free?

  The answer never came.

  Sonara’s body lurched forward into darkness as the pod slammed into the sand.

  Chapter 33

  Karr

  Karr woke in the half-place again, standing on the grey sand shore.

  “You’re nearing the end, lost soul. See how the sky falls?”

  The Child of Starlight stood beside him, her nebula eyes turned to the night. The wind tugged at her hair, shaking the stars and planets that made up the strands. She pointed, a ringed planet shining on the tip of her finger.

  Karr followed it with his gaze.

  Above them, far above… a tiny star turned from its place in the sky. It shifted. Then it began lowering itself towards them, a tail of firelight sparkling in its wake.

  “The sky isn’t falling,” Karr said with a small smile. For he’d seen that image countless times before. He’d been the boy inside of it, staring out a viewport as a new world beckoned below. “It’s a starship breaking through the atmosphere.”

  The girl sighed and closed her eyes. “Can’t you feel it?”

  “Feel what?” Karr asked.

  Across from them, the waves, in half-roiling white and half a calm, cool black, continued their constant dance. “Your magic calls to the planet itself. Reach out with it. Touch the breeze. See that it trembles as the darkness draws near.” She reached for Karr’s hand.

  Pain slammed into his chest, a piercing stab of blazing fire. But before he could gather the strength to scream, the scene shifted.

  And suddenly they were standing in the shadows of a cave, peering out at the half-sea from within.

  “Memories are hard to come by, when you have lived so many lives,” the girl said sadly. She tucked a star-strand behind her small ear. “Come, little Shadowblood. Let us see what will be revealed to us this time.”

  She pointed, and to the right, two blurry figures arrived. They looked to be little more than ghosts, their color sapped, their voices muted as if they were behind a veil.

  The first was tall and lithe. A young man, perhaps seventeen, with a jaw so handsomely square it could have been stone-carved. His cloak trailed behind him, snapping in the ocean wind as he walked. Slowly, with great pain, he seemed to move, as if he’d been injured in battle.

  Beside him appeared a smaller figure, smiling as she flipped through a worn journal, not caring where she walked. She was a young woman, perhaps still considered a girl, her curls concealing her face as they tumbled about in thick, unruly waves. “You’re getting better.” Her voice felt like it was underwater as she pointed at a leather-bound journal in her hands. “This one looks exactly like me.”

  “Keep it,” the young man said. “Try your hand at a sketch, Little Sister. It’s kept me busy during my recovery.”

  “If I could spare you from the pain, lost soul,” the Child of Starlight whispered, her lips warm and glowing against Karr’s ear, “I certainly would. But pain is what grows us and shows us who we truly are.”

  A cool wind crept through the cave, kissing Karr’s ankles as he peered out at the scene. The hair on his arms began to stand on end. Beyond the mouth of the cave, the starship closed in on the beach.

  “The darkness,” the Child of Starlight sang beside him. “See how it blots out the stars in the sky?”

  She’d just uttered the words when the
ship slowed, finally noticed by the two figures, who’d taken a seat on the sand. They looked skyward, their eyes wide with terror.

  Karr saw, unmistakably, the insignia stamped on the ship’s belly in boldest red.

  The phoenix. It was the Starfall.

  “Run.” The girl’s voice trembled, the echo of her word fluttering like it had wings as she grabbed the young man’s hand, abandoning the journal in the sand. “Run!”

  She turned, leaping to her feet.

  “Slow down!” The young man’s outline blurred as he tried to stand, too.

  Her hand slipped from his. For where she was fast and lithe, he stumbled, his gait unsteady as he winced and tried to keep up. “Wait, Sonara! WAIT!”

  She was ten steps ahead. Then twenty, as she raced towards the mouth of the cave.

  With a loud cry, the young man fell and crashed hard into the sand, his leg twisting beneath him.

  The girl looked over her shoulder, her eyes wide as she realized, in her fear, she’d left him behind. She turned and had only made it a few paces out of the shadows, her hand reaching for him, when a beam of blue light erupted from the belly of the ship. Old tech, outlawed years ago; a transporter. The beam surrounded the young man, lifting him from the ground.

  He screamed and thrashed, trying to escape, but he was powerless against the beam’s hold. His arms stretched, a black amulet on a chain of gold dangling from his tunic, shining in the beam as the ship’s belly yawned wide and pulled him inside before slamming back shut.

  “See how the darkness steals,” the Child of Starlight suddenly whispered. Karr had nearly forgotten she was there. “See how it leaves behind nothing but pain.” Her warm glow flickered as she turned, pointing back towards the girl now hiding in the mouth of the cave.

  Karr could not hear her scream above the roar of the Starfall’s engines as they powered up and readied to soar away. But he saw it, the agony in her eyes as her lips formed a name.

  Soahm.

  She reached out, her hand trembling as the ship rose to the sky and carried her brother away. A blast of hot wind soared into the cave. It pushed the curls from the girl’s face, dried the tears as they fell from her eyes.

  “Sonara,” Karr breathed.

  Her story was true. His parents’ ship had come to Dohrsar. And if it was that long ago, then it explained why Karr thought he’d seen his father’s face, peering down from the hatch in the ship’s belly, where the transporter worked to swallow its Dohrsaran prize.

  “They stole him,” Karr whispered.

  The scene faded. The ship and the girl’s outline soared away like smoke on the wind, until the cave was empty again.

  They had stolen Soahm, just as Sonara said. Abducted him in the dark of night.

  “The darkness has returned again,” the Child of Starlight said. “I’ve given you all the memories I could hold. But now you must wake, lost soul. You must try to remember who you are. For this time… the darkness will destroy all.”

  He knew what came next.

  It didn’t make the pain any less as she drove her starlight finger into his chest, and sent him screaming away from the half-place, back into the blazing morning light of Dohrsar.

  Chapter 34

  Cade

  “String her up inside the brig,” Cade ordered, and wiped beads of sweat from his brow.

  His soldier ran off to give Rohtt the command: to lock up the woman in the wolf-mask—who’d been acting as Karr—to torture her, if need be, and discover why the hell his little brother had taken their side.

  Cade stood at the railing, looking down at the prisoners below, furious at himself for letting his brother get stolen in the first place.

  He didn’t have to guess what happened after that. Karr had probably been tortured by his captors. But then, as he always did, he’d wormed his way into their minds. Found a way to speak to them, figure out their plans, and then decided to take matters into his own hands.

  Somewhere along the way, Karr had sided with the Dohrsarans.

  Now he’d shut down the atlas orb and had soared away in his battered escape pod to do whatever it was he had planned for next.

  Cade should have known. The moment Rohtt came aboard the ship, Karr had seen through the man, seen the darkness in him, and probably decided right then and there that he would stop this.

  Karr… troublesome, clever, good-to-the-soulKarr, Cade thought sadly. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’ve joined the wrong side of a war you cannot win.

  Cade walked towards the brig, feeling weary. Burdened. His steps were heavy, his breaths uneven.

  “She’s asked for you.” Rohtt’s voice pulled Cade from his trance as he escorted him down the stairwell to the brig. “Only you.”

  “Then we’ll give her what she wants,” Cade said. He crossed his arms with a painful wince.

  God, he should have told Karr everything from the beginning. Or better yet, he should have just left him behind, safe on Beta. If he had… it never would have come to this.

  Cade peered inside the glass door that led to the brig. The wolfen girl was strung up by her wrists, which were covered by bone gauntlets. No one was inside with her, for she was laughing. Over and over again, laughing, like the electricity they’d used to question her had gone to her brain.

  “There’s something you should know about her, before you go in,” Rohtt said.

  Cade gave him a sideways glance.

  “We’ve shocked her with so much, you think it would have killed her. Hell, it should have killed her three times over again. But she’s still alive. Still just… laughing.”

  Cade swallowed and typed in the code, then slipped inside the brig.

  The woman was waiting for him.

  Her laughing fell silent when he entered. The smell of lightning was strong, like burned hair and singed skin. The girl’s eyes, pale and pupilless beyond her wolf mask, fell on Cade.

  “You fool,” she hissed. “You have no idea what you’re doing to this sacred space.”

  Cade took a stool from the corner of the brig. Its legs scraped against the metal floor as he placed it before her and sat down.

  “Who are you? What were you doing with my brother? And why do you think you’re vital to helping me complete my mission?”

  Oh, the things she told him in that room.

  She cracked like an egg and spilled all the contents: where Karr was, what he was doing, who he was with. The magic they all held. A woman with lightning in her veins, a devil who could taste emotions on her tongue and decipher truth from lies, and a trickster who could weave illusions like a spider would a web.

  She admitted to him that she had no powers of her own.

  But she had the answer… could tell him exactly where the Antheon was. And how to take it, once they got inside its hiding place, in the Bloodhorns. For the battle would not be simply in finding it. It would be in ripping it out of the Dohrsaran ground.

  All she asked for in return was a sword.

  A golden sword that had been taken from a Dohrsaran’s hand in the aftermath of the Gathering, as if it had been cast aside. Cade had kept it in his own private quarters, fascinated with the scorpion for a hilt. Masterful work, a blade he thought he could sell for hundreds of thousands when they got back to Beta Earth. Collectors there were fascinated by ancient alien artifacts.

  “Why?” Cade asked. “Why make this deal with me?”

  “Because,” she said, “I’ve sought the planet’s heart my entire life. But I have never been able to get inside of the sacred space that hides it.”

  Cade thought about it.

  Thought and wrestled and told himself he didn’t need the woman, but he knew inside that he did. For the damned energy trackers weren’t keeping pace with the Antheon, a thing that constantly moved and flickered and was impossible for even the greatest programmers on his crew to pinpoint.

  Without Thali, Cade didn’t think he’d find the mother-source of the Antheon.

  They coul
d dig for weeks. For months, and only find small fragments here and there.

  Geisinger needed it all.

  And with Karr out there… Cade didn’t have time.

  So he walked out of the brig. “Cut her down,” he said to the soldiers standing guard.

  When she was free, she lifted her gauntleted hands to Cade like a queen. “The sword?”

  “You can have it when we find the Antheon,” he said. But he called for it and showed it to her like a prize dangled before a dog. Her eyes had glittered as she beheld its glory.

  “Very well, Wanderer,” she said. “We have a deal.”

  He offered her his hand, but she didn’t need his assistance. She was strangely strong, despite the torture. Her pale eyes were alight as she looked to him from behind her wolf mask and said, “Then it is time we begin.”

  Chapter 35

  Sonara

  Sonara woke with the taste of blood on her lips.

  And Duran licking sand from her hair.

  “Leave it, beast,” she groaned, but she let her hands fall against his soft muzzle, breathing in the taste of him. Her spirit brightened as the soul-ember between them blazed hot and true. He always found her through it, like a siren song that called him home. “Blast, it’s good to see you, Duran.”

  In part because she loved the insufferable beast. But also, because seeing Duran meant she was alive, for there was no way she’d ever see him in Hell.

  She smacked a kiss onto his nose. “You’re just too pure.”

  She propped herself up on an elbow and took in the scene around her.

  The sunlight was blinding, Dohrsar’s double suns beating into her skin as the wreckage of the pod unfolded. It had cracked in half, like the discarded shell of an egg. Wires and computer paneling had gone dim, the entire flight down from the Starfall like some kind of sick dream now. The world had looked like it was melting as they fell, Karr cursing as he barely managed to control their descent.

  Judging by the position of the suns, the long shadows sweeping across the Bloodhorns, it was late afternoon. Sonara shivered as she glanced past Duran, who busied himself with searching for some sort of snack in the wreckage of the pod.