Brood of Bones (3 page)

In order to turn, I walked forward and sideways, following the course of a semicircle to ensure that my gowns swept behind me. The Once-Flawless’ words left me befuddled, and I would have fallen over on the way to the carriage if Maid Janny had not leaned over my gowns to steady my shoulder.

Children chased each other over the square, laughing and pretending to snarl as they chanted a rhyme:

“The Lord of the Feast comes,

How many heads has he?

One, two, three,

One, two, three.

When sun sets, he hungers,

Will you escape, my boy?

Wait and see,

Wait and see.”

The children halted their games at the sight of my gowns. Some clutched at one another and exclaimed in astonishment; the rest ran after me to touch the satin and silk trains. Usually, the sight of children would have provided a pleasant respite, yet my encounter with Sri had upset me beyond diversion.

Once I stepped into the carriage, I revolved in place, one foot moving at a time, to wind my trains inside. Maid Janny wrestled in the last of my folds. “You may open the curtains,” I said.

The Once Flawless had spoken the most intolerable claims. A few minutes observation of the city would provide all the evidence necessary to prove her wrong. With a clack of hooves, the carriage rolled up the street, and I gazed out a window.

Morimound rose from the savanna on a man-made hill of golden-brown brickwork. A pair of step pyramids crowned the city, one ziggurat for each god. The highest third of the White Ziggurat gleamed with the sun behind it, the fiery orb appearing to balance on the structure’s highest terrace.

Wood smoke from kilns enticed my nose, teasing me with memories of childhood that tiredness kept just outside my mind’s eye. Above the rooftops, canvas blades revolved on windmills, which drove pistons to sluice water into the city’s wells and flush refuse through an unsurpassed sewer system. I felt joy at the sight of Morimound, the greatest city in the world, alongside my fear that someone would recognize me, point, and laugh.

On the street, men backed into merchant tents to let the carriage pass. Three children ran after us, their pregnant mother struggling to keep up. I clicked my tongue in annoyance, although one more woman with child hardly attested to anything. I would need a larger sampling to form a judgment.

My eyelids began to droop. Deepmand’s shouting from the front of the carriage faded to a mumble as if liquid filled my ears.

“The elder enchantress returns! Make way for the....”

My blurry eyes distorted the world, and I felt I was underwater and gazing up through the rippling surface. Brick houses three stories and taller seemed to sway and bend over the street. My head lolling with fatigue, I floated away from reality.

Once I had seen a girl who fell into a city well; her head had struck on the way down. She had sunk with arms open, hair fanning around her, peaceful because of the concussion. Now I wondered if she had been struggling in her mind, but had only been able to twitch her fingers as she drowned. I felt as helpless.

Flashes of wakefulness came like gasps of breath; I watched in numb terror as the next woman entered my view, leaning back in her gait to counterbalance the weight of the child inside her. The following woman was similarly blessed, her belly bobbing at each turn of crank as she drew water from a well.

I dipped back into my own private well, the transition between world and dream.

This time, I did not fight the sinking sensation. The heat had saturated my innermost gowns with sweat, and drowsiness never failed to numb my mental faculties to the point that a ten-year-old could outthink me. I must not have really seen seven pregnant women in a row, one old enough to be a great grandmother; my own bias had mistaken their plumpness for motherhood. To dry myself of sweat and to gain perspective, I would sleep.

In the blackness of my mind, marble steps appeared before my feet. I descended them, feeling heavier and heavier as I trudged closer to dreaming. Upon reaching the hundredth step, the stair vanished, and I leaped.

My weariness dissolved, the muddle of my thoughts clearing. I became weightless.

I brushed one slippered foot on a circular dais comprised of one thousand glittering diamonds. The black slab of an operations table lay before me, the stone indented to accommodate the average human figure. A wall of the same basalt rock ringed the laboratory, with a series of stone platforms rising up to them; in each step, a shelf glowed with a luminance of tools and baubles.

The wall possessed no ornamentation, and neither doors nor windows marred its black surface. Above the shelves, my favorite jewels drifted through the air, lighting the round room with their multicolored hues. Sapphires in flight shone like the blue of hot flames, while clusters of rubies and amethysts orbited like flocks of songbirds.

I
Attracted
a towel embroidered with gold to my hand, and it flew from a shelf through the air to my outstretched fingers. An enchantress’s primary power was to draw objects toward her, and Attracting came so naturally to me by now that I did not consider it a spell so much as a polite invitation for an item to jump into my palm.

All the shelved baubles stored memories of complex magic scripts, and the golden cloth I held was no exception. At my touch, the cloth shone, and hundreds of targeted Attractions pooled the sweat in my gowns into droplets, which were
Burdened
until they rolled down my stockings and away.

I swiveled in the air, streams of bright fabric trailing my arms, until I faced a full-length mirror. The levitating looking glass did not reflect my image but my memories; it would reveal visions of my past, whether or not I had been sufficiently clear-headed to acknowledge them at the time.

Sri the Once Flawless appeared in the mirror, and understanding flashed into me. A tumor in her liver had swelled within her abdomen, mimicking the shape of pregnancy.
Its corruption had spread to her brain and there increased the production of her feminine oils, which stimulated her hair follicles and mammary glands.
Dementia then explained the rest of her ravings.

Having restored reality, I beckoned to the mirror. Images of the other six women blinked by within its crystal-covered silver, their imminent motherhood revealed not only in their bellies but also in the fullness and vibrancy of their black hair. Two even flaunted pregnancy masks: The darker pigmentation speckling their cheeks and brows would have arisen in the second trimester.

I could not believe it. The probability of seeing six pregnant women one after another was a thousand times less likely than one in forty-eight hundred. I calculated the vast numbers by visualizing beads in piles and then counting the colorful mountains all in a glance.

Desperate to break the trend, I batted a few floating rubies away from my head and commanded my mirror to show a memory from earlier in the day. I had parted a window curtain as the carriage had rolled through a gatehouse in the city’s Flood Wall. Seventeen feet tall and seven and three-quarters thick, the wall would protect Morimound from summer torrents as well as from greedy invaders. I knew its specifications because I had designed them and planned its construction in an idle hour at the Academy, and my gold had paid for its stone.

We had entered the fringe of the city, Stilt Town, where shanties and shacks stood on wooden platforms, five feet above the ground. The elevation would prove unnecessary now, due to the Flood Wall, and thus newer buildings squatted closer to the mud. Wooden structures rotted in this climate; an odor of mold
tingled
the back of my throat when I recalled the scene.

Men had stared at our passing, as had one woman, who had paused in stringing fish out to dry. I jerked my eyes away from the reflection of her round belly.

“Your point is made, goddess,” I said. “No need to direct more pregnancies into my path.” The Fate Weaver must be punishing me, for returning to Morimound before ridding myself of the sleeping disease.

My somnolence was part of the goddess’ divine plan. It had to be. Her gift—her curse—gave me tremendous advantage in the study of enchantment because the magic could only be accessed during sleep. Only when I had fulfilled my role in the Academy would the Fate Weaver allow me to find a cure and return to a life of wakefulness in my birth city.

I had even hosted the funerals of my parents outside the Flood Wall, amid ripened rice fields, in order not to offend the goddess. I never should have heeded Sri’s letter. Passing through the gates had been a sacrilege.

Each pregnancy I saw was a penance, a reminder of my own insufficiency. I had always imagined myself with a family, yet everything came in its proper time. Before children should
come
marriage, and before marriage should come a bride’s capacity to stay awake at her wedding.

Ache spread from my chest to my abdomen, and my throat contracted by thirty-five percent as a desire to cry tingled behind my eyes. I disallowed myself tears in my dream.

Forcing my mind away from thoughts of childlessness, I willed my mirror to depict what I had seen in the Bazaar of Fallen Stars. Sri’s yellow skin warned me that I would need to obtain help for her immediately: If the Feaster did not kill her tonight then her wormwood-destroyed liver would drown her in her own toxins tomorrow.

The people in the crowd now appeared before me in perfect clarity. The faces of the men were strained, the skin below their eyes swollen from poor sleep; I detected more alcohol in their collective breaths than I would expect. They eyed each other with distrust, one scowl even suggesting murderous wishes. When they looked upon my gowns and me, they displayed a mix of hope, avarice, and uncertainty.

Not particularly pleased, I shifted my concentration to the women. The first I observed sold green and orange melons, and her belly was comparable in shape to the sizable fruits. Another female lifted sheets of blue and pink cloth, draping them for display over her prominent midsection.

Feeling increasingly breathless, I focused my mirror on the faces of the women. Even when they smiled to entice customers, their facial musculature displayed undertones of apprehension common to potential mothers. Less usual were the daze and paranoia detected in their wide, skittering eyes.

One woman’s visage opened in fear when a man cornered her between two merchant stalls to demand who had fathered her child. I should have liked to remind him to be civil, yet the carriage would have moved well past by now.

In the cold serenity of my laboratory, I could control my panic. The explanation for all the pregnant women needed not be divine in origin. Morimound’s priests perhaps had ordained that only women bearing children should venture outside today, for some inscrutable reason.

This would also account for why so few women traversed the streets, a mere one for every eight men. The rest would be residing in their homes. My focus swept over the buildings, up ladders leading to doors that stood an average of ten feet above street level. Per custom, people had painted messages beside the ladders, conversations between residents, passersby, and guests.

“At their table I ate the finest melon-seed curry in my life,” read one line.

Below it was scrawled, “You are always welcome, Saral Manjeet.”

“I hope to enjoy it again tonight. May your bricks never crack and your gems ever shine.”

On another home’s wall, I read, “The Fate Weaver has blessed Uma with beauty. May she bear many
sons.
”

Lower down appeared, “Basu Trillspa and Uma are wed on this day. Let them Ever Thrive.”

Those salutations I expected. Closer to street level, the more-recent messages caught my attention.

“Yami either swallowed a nest of crocodile eggs, or she should get married.”

“The home of Parth, a bad thread who has wronged my sister.”

“She is no Flawless.”

“Preeta couldn’t keep her skirt on.”

“They are all rotten threads.”

“Damodar will die for what he did to Kanti.”

“Never Flawless.”

“Fate Weaver spins ugly web, not even Flawless spared.”

The view of my mirror zoomed from one wall to another, from painted insults to anger chiseled into brick. I had never seen such hatred here, and all were written within the last two months.