Brood of Bones (27 page)

“Can’t take those back, you silly prig.” Physis pinched me, her nails sparking and popping with orange light. She motioned to a gazebo. “Wait in there.”

Rubbing where she had shocked me, I trudged toward the gazebo. My gowns had begun to weigh down with rain. Droplets ran between my fingers; I had forgotten my gloves. I wished to go back for them, although that was out of the question. As I neared a garden statue, I noticed that it was not a statue but the dandy brute.

“Oh,” I said, with all the eloquence I could gather.

He crossed his arms above abdominal muscles that bulged in twelve places, and water glistened like glass beads over his sofa-sized chest. I felt him staring after me as I scurried into the gazebo. The empty interior permitted me to drag inside the full train of my sopping gowns. Rain pelted the roof and formed curtains of droplets. I was rather exposed, without my gloves on, and for modesty’s sake I hid my hands in my draping sleeves.

Two figures stepped into the gazebo, splashing in the puddles my gowns had shed. A swordsman pulled a cloak from the shoulders of the Lord of the Feast then left us alone.

“You promised to leave the city,” I said, “yet here you are.”

“I did leave, Enchantress Hiresha. Then I returned.” His eyes gleamed in the blue light. “Time is dwindling. You discovered me with little trouble, and now you will ferret out the would-be god. I’ll put you on his trail.”

His confidence emboldened me to envision all the women with unencumbered bellies, free of unchildren. Anticipation of their safety fluttered up my spine.

I pulled my mind away from the future to the present danger clad before me in lace. “First, Ambassador...But I can hardly call you
that,
can I?”

“My name is Tethiel.”

“And your last name? Your family name?”

“I no longer have one.”

“How does a man lose his family name?”

“The same way he loses anything,” he said.
“By trying to save it.”

His nonsense displeased me, although I was sorry to hear he had lost his family name. I recalled him saying last night that he had lost everything, and I wondered if this was what he meant.

Having but one name always made me
feel
impoverished. As a woman of Morimound, I had lost my family name at birth, and I would gain one only after marriage.

“Before we proceed,” I said, “I wish to know the cost of your assistance.”

“I never mentioned a price.”

“You said you were not here for our sakes.” I fought to hold my voice calm. “I believe you covet my regeneration services, and, if true, you will admit it now.”

The Lord of the Feast glanced at one of the gazebo’s benches, in which I had no chance of sitting. He remained standing.

“I do want to be whole,” he said, “that’s why I adopted Physis. Once she learned what you did in the Academy, what was involved, I realized it was impossible.”

Regenerating teeth and ears was easy enough. Instead of blurting that out, I lifted a brow.

“You would have to share my dream,” he said, “and my nightmares would shatter your mind.”

I very much doubted that, and he would be in my dream, not the other way around. Again, I was proud of how I held my tongue.

“You disagree?” He peered into my face.

My expression must have given away my thoughts. I felt compelled to speak, as if the Fate Weaver tugged on my life’s thread.

“As novices, we defeat all our nightmares.”

“But not mine.” He gazed into my eyes now, and I had to look away. “You do not fear death, but that’s not enough.
No, quite impossible.”

That the Lord of the Feast would have nightmares had never occurred to me. I exhaled a long breath, knowing I could keep my dignity and still save the mothers.

He turned away, facing the wall of rain. “I only want one thing. For you to find the man, so I may kill him.”

Whether conscious of it or not, he had hidden his face from me at this critical moment. He might have just lied.

I asked, “What would you gain from his death?”

“This city is ripe with fear.” He breathed as if savoring the rain-scented air. “And none of it was caused by me. I can’t have someone more terrifying than I. It would ruin my reputation.”

A spasm in my chest sent air bursting out my mouth. I thought I had sneezed, yet I could not recall my sneezes carrying such a high, ringing tone. No, I had laughed. The Lord of the Feast had tricked me into laughing over this serious matter. His manipulative rudeness had coerced me into neglecting the decorum of my offices.

“Your antics are inexcusable,” I said, “and I insist you apologize.”

“Do you?”

“Laughter is audible complicity, and you are wrong to evoke it in others.”

“This is not a ballroom, Enchantress Hiresha. No one is judging you.”

His words blended into the downpour. I glanced outside the gazebo but saw no trace of Feasters, or anyone else. I did feel quite isolated.

“We must always judge ourselves,” I said.

“I leave self-judgment to the experts.”

His right hand opened, and something glittered between two broken fingers. My eyes widened as I realized he held the red jewel from last night, although without its chain.

“But I will admit one thing,” he said, “that I appreciate gems only as much as an illiterate appreciates illuminated books. Their language is lost on me, but to you, they speak.”

My breath caught as the jewel dropped from his trembling fingers onto a wooden seat. He did not appear to have noticed his mistake.

“I also admit
a certain
clumsiness. Things slip from my grasp, and I forget about them. Truly negligent, wouldn’t you say?”

I nodded, unable to find words. The jewel rested on the edge of a wooden slat, and I worried it would fall out of reach between the boards.

He stepped over my train of gowns to the other side of the gazebo, facing away from the gem. “Enchantress Hiresha, I will give you time to gather your...thoughts. Then we will speak of business.”

I gazed from the back of his jacket to the shining stone on the bench. Last night, I had refused the jewel because it had been attached to an engagement necklace and because many would have witnessed my accepting a gift from the Lord of the Feast. Neither concern applied here.

Certainly, I could not allow such a jewel to be found on my person. I resolved it would not. After determining the composition of the gemstone, I would discard it.

Taking a step, I reached down with a naked hand and picked up the jewel.

My intake of breath betrayed my surprise at finding its relative weight less than a sapphire’s. I would have thought this a topaz, if not for the sharpness of its facet edges.

The lighting had turned the jewel dusky, and as it rolled across my palm, reflected sparks danced over my fingers. Its brilliance prickled my skin and stood my hairs on end, and the sound of the rain faded, the world dropping away to leave me alone with this jewel.

I thought I knew what this was, what it could be, if only it was not another illusion. I hoped beyond measure it was real.

My fingers closed over it, gripping the jewel so its tip dug into my palm. I hid my hand in my sleeve and waited for my mind to descend back to the realm of Morimound and the mass pregnancies. The Lord of the Feast turned, and our eyes met. I spoke first.

“You will dispose of the malefactor, once I find him?”

“One second after I lift my hands, he’ll be highly distracted. You might even say terminally distracted.”

“One second? You are certain about the interval? Sufficient, I should think.
Very sufficient.
Very....”

The chatter petered out as I wrested back control over my tongue. His words had shocked me, yet they also had consoled, in a way, because I had worried what I would do once I had caught the would-be god, afraid he would threaten the lives of the women carrying unchildren. He would not do much threatening in one second.

An inconsistency occurred to me. “Are you worried about the fanfare? You will have helped save a city. Would that not damage your ‘reputation?
’”

“If there is any fanfare, it will be yours.”

After the word “fanfare,” his chest had shuddered a miniscule distance, his ragged breathing evincing sadness. I wondered if he was sorry he could not partake in any celebration, or if something else grieved him.

“What do you mean by, ‘if there is fanfare?
’”

“My magic is not like yours, Enchantress Hiresha. No good can come from it.” His stare never left my eyes, and he blinked only rarely, no more than once every ten seconds. “Should I try to help people, I would only harm.”

“If there is no good reason to use your magic, why ever did you learn it?”

One fold of lace about his neck trembled, likely disturbed as he swallowed, an indicator of intense emotion.

“That,” he said, “I have not told even my children.”

I could scarcely conceive of something so shameful that he would fear to speak of it to night-crawling degenerates. “Are you certain your magic can do no good? If by eliminating one man you can free a city from—”

“I can’t dwell on any good it might do.
Better for all to act selfishly.
I will snuff out the Soultrapper because it benefits me and my adoptive family. Both causes, I assure you, acceptably undeserving.”

“The Soultrapper?”

“Ah, yes. What do you know of Soultrappers?”

“The treatise on Soultrappers was speculative, and, I had hoped, incorrect.” Grimacing, I thought back to my general education course on the magics. “The manuscript claimed they imprison the soul of the dying in his or
her own
corpse. As the soul tries harder and harder to liberate itself from the decaying prison, the resulting soul pressure is appropriated to empower the spells of Soultrappers.”

“I’ve never heard it called ‘soul pressure’ before,” he said.

“Regardless, I fail to see the relevancy. Soultrappers control minds, not create unchildren.”

“They corrupt minds, as well as other flesh.”

The thought of a Soultrapper’s magic festering in so many wombs spread a feeling of rottenness within me like black mold creeping over the inside of a yam. At the same time, both my empty hand and the one clamping the jewel tingled with the excitement of finally progressing; with the help of the Lord of the Feast, I would free Morimound from the Soultrapper.

“He must be very powerful,” I said.
“To have corrupted so many.”

“Not yet. He will be, once the Bone Orbs are born.”

“Bone Orbs?”

“That is what you found in the woman, was it not? A sphere made of a child’s bones?”

“Yes. Why would their birth give more power?”

I thought of the presence I had felt as I examined Faliti. The Soultrapper had been watching me, had activated the unchild—the “Bone Orb”—to kill Faliti, as he would kill all the women unless we followed his commands. If anything, his influence would decrease when the Bone Orbs were born.

The unchild had contained a brain, I remembered, although one not connected to its nervous system. The brain would not serve any function, if the Soultrapper had created the Bone Orb as a weapon.

I wondered why the Bone Orb had resembled a child at all, with its shell of infant skelature, its own heart and brain. Venom sacs alone would have sufficed for lethality.

As those facts turned over in my mind, another thought occurred to me and my arms began to tremble, a cold sweat leaking from my palms. The jewel slipped an inch in my grasp. I had not eaten properly in several days, and I felt the deficiency, as though there was nothing beneath my skin to prevent my shriveling inward and collapsing.

“The Bone Orbs,” I said, “they couldn’t have souls, not like true children? You don’t think the Soultrapper is using them as prisons?”

“Murdering is dangerous, corpses are cumbersome. Better to grow your own cages, and trick souls to enter them.”

The feeling of hollowness spread upward from my chest, and the gazebo’s pillars began to move and orbit me, the rain blurring between them. The Lord of the Feast smeared into a shadow stretching over my vision.