Brood of Bones (33 page)

Jewels raced over the walls of the laboratory and up into its dome, their speed embodying my anticipation. I could tell I was close to viewing the Soultrapper’s face; soon I could point to one man and name him responsible.

No precedent existed for acolytes of the Fate Weaver to touch women with talismans or finger-sized objects. Even if Priest Salkant had invented one, application of four dismembered fingers would have taken a month or more, given the number of women; in the God’s Eye Court, I had noted the conceptions tended to center around one week for all but those of wealthy families, who had begun gestation a month later, on average.

The disparity in conception times could be explained, if the four dismembered fingers were applied later to those living on the Island District, perhaps to delay suspicion in the authorities, yet I could not believe this method could affect so many women within a span of a week. If women had stood in long lines to receive the “blessing” of the Fate Weaver, acolytes of the other god would have squealed to me about it.

Given that a task could not be done fast enough with four vectors, the obvious solution would be to create more of them, or in this case, subdivide the fingers. I cringed, imagining the fingertips dissected into pieces then disseminated among the women, and I wondered at the method of dispersal. All the women I had examined in the Court had been pregnant, and to achieve that degree of morbidity, the pieces had to have reached them through a means in which all women engaged.

All women ate, and I considered the possibility of minute quantities of the fingers implanted into foods, poisoning the women with pregnancy. This method had the advantage of explaining the disparity among the rich, as they would eat different foods.

I steepled my hands in concentration then twined my fingers at the thought that my womb too had begun to foster an unchild, meaning I might have consumed a sliver of a human fingertip. The concept of having inadvertently been a cannibal gave me no little displeasure.

The piece of the Soultrapper
would need
be infinitesimal, both for reasons of covertness and because there was only so much of him; however, the smaller the piece, the greater the chance it would be digested before its magic took effect. The Soultrapper’s magic corrupted the flesh, not strengthened it, and the ingested-finger theory began to seem less probable, unless the modicum had a means of protecting itself.

This gave me an idea. I replicated myself and gestured for my clone to lie on the operations table; she did so, wearing only her red undergarments. Blue diamonds flurried around my fingertips, and I used their enchantment to bisect her stomach at intervals of one thousandths of an inch.

Even though I had expected it, I gasped when I found a morsel of the Soultrapper imbedded in my stomach lining. Two-sevenths the size of a grain of sand, a mote of bone floated in a cyst in the wrinkled mucus membrane, shielded in a bubble of inflamed tissue.

The bone mote contained units with formative fiber matching those of the unchildren. More than that, I sensed the Soultrapper peering at me; he no doubt knew I scrutinized a piece of him.

“How much,” the replica asked, “do you think he perceives of our laboratory?”

He likely only received a vague sensation of my attention. I refrained from saying this aloud for the sake of my replica, as I was not in the habit of responding to myself.

The red diamond lifted itself out from my collar to my hand. I expanded its enchantment to search out traces of the Soultrapper throughout my body then eradicate them. Having a piece of him inside me made me feel filthier than if I had eaten all the dust in the Academy, which I had calculated at never less than a total of seventy pounds.

This bone mote was the seed, the connection between Soultrapper and each woman that initiated the Bone Orbs. By cutting out a piece of himself and tricking us to eat it, he had touched us without touching.

“What about Tethiel?” The replica gazed up at me with my own eyes. “Do we trust him?”

Irritated that I would interrupt myself, I waved my hand, and the replica vanished. I refocused on the trails of inference, knowing with every moment that I converged on pinpointing the Soultrapper.

If I had swallowed the bone mote in a bolus of food then I might have expected to find it transported into my circuitous intestine before it touched my flesh and formed a cyst. I had begun to suspect that it was not eaten but drunk. Most women in the city ate rice, yet not from the same seller, removing any ready method for the Soultrapper to pollute the grain with his bones.

The city had three water reservoirs, which pumped into a hundred and thirty-five public wells. With the help of followers, the Soultrapper might have visited all the wells in one day, lowering into the flows presumably empty urns that instead contained thousands upon thousands of bone motes.

Even with the diminutive size of the motes, the total volume of bone required staggered me. Some motes would dissolve in stomach acid before touching, and many would be drunk instead by men and animals. Allowing for a wide margin of loss, I estimated that at least six pounds of bone would be needed, far more than a few finger bones, closer to the combined weight of the bones of a hand, the arm attached to it, four ribs, and one foot.

In fact, I knew exactly which bones had been sacrificed because an image of the Soultrapper now stood in my mirror. Reviewing my memories had revealed him in less than a second.

Anlash Niklia, wine merchant of the “Liquid Diamond” vintage, had hefted wine barrels with his one arm the night I first saw him. The arm appeared to be compensating for the missing one with a length that bordered on grotesque, his fingertips reaching within an inch of his knees. He favored his right foot, and his left never flexed, and the boot struck the brick street with a subtle “clack” of woodenness. His potbelly hung out of his open vest, and on occasion, the vest slid back on a hairless chest and revealed scars on either side of his bulging navel: The jagged white lines provided evidence of his self-inflicted rib amputation.

He had flinched in fear at his first sight of Spellsword Deepmand, causing his hand to slip on a barrel; a brass hoop had slit his thumb, from which he had sucked the leaking blood. That alone would have convinced me he shared none of Priest Abwar’s hemophobia, even without the fan of white scars on his palm, from repeated, self-inflicted cuts.

The merchant had done more than bloodletting. I imagined him deep in a wine cellar, sweat trickling through tangled clumps of his oiled hair as he sawed off his own foot; he would have screamed and used a torch to cauterize the wound. Extraction of his ribs would have been even more agonizing and laborious; he must have lain in a puddle of his own blood, strapped to a table and struggling against the pain and the desire to faint, as his followers bent over him with serrated knives.

Anlash Niklia had admitted that he missed a cut on a paragon diamond, and his arm had been removed in punishment. He must have recovered the limb and kept the bones, storing them until he could find a use for them.

I had first encountered him in the crowd hunting the Feaster. His black eyes had glinted from within flabby skin as he snatched glances at the night’s shadows. Only now did I appreciate his enmity at the mention of the Feaster boy: He must have understood that the Lord of the Feast wished to hunt him down and kill him.

He had warned me of the herbalist who was overdosing the women. By arresting the herbalist, I had saved lives but I had also protected the Bone Orbs the mothers carried; without knowing it, I had done a service for the Soultrapper.

In exchange for the information he provided about the herbalist, I had agreed to purchase Anlash Niklia’s wine. He might have defiled most of the women in Morimound by poisoning wells with bone motes, yet he had needed to deal in wine to blight the daughters living in the Island District, who drank water from private, guarded wells. This explained why the wealthy women had grown pregnant later; the Soultrapper had needed time to sell his Liquid Diamond wine to the various houses.

I had served his wine at my ball, yet I had not drunk any there, only touching it to my lips at the toast. Salkant of the Fate Weaver had unwittingly inoculated me by insisting I taste the “second best wine in Morimound,” the label of which I now read in my mirror as Liquid Diamond. Maid Janny had swigged wine that day but just the priest’s estate vintage, only later indulging in the Soultrapper’s concoction at my ball. If she was pregnant now, it was merely by days.

Priest Salkant only drank his own wine; by extension, he served nothing else to his daughter, who had thereby escaped the epidemic. Many women living in Stilt Town were too poor to buy wine and too far from the public wells, thus avoiding pregnancy by drawing water from rain barrels or straight from holes dug in the mud.

No doubt remained in my mind that I had identified the Soultrapper. I scowled at him in my mirror, wishing to replicate him so I could dual Repulse his heart into two pieces, or Burden him until his remaining bones shattered.

I never permitted myself to indulge in
Creating
replicas of people for gratification in my dream. I would have to content myself with watching Tethiel annihilate the Soultrapper’s mind with waking nightmares.

At last, the Lord of the Feast would lift his hands.

Day Forty-One, Third Trimester

“You should allow me to execute him, Elder Enchantress,” Deepmand said. “The less we involve the Lord of the Feast, the better.”

“Tethiel has promised to neutralize him in one second. The Soultrapper will not realize what is happening until it is too late.”

“I could behead him in one swing.”

“His disembodied head would have several seconds before it lost consciousness. During that interval, he could kill women out of spite.”

“Those without bodies tend not to be in the right state of mind to cast spells.”

“You mock me, Spellsword Deepmand. I should not have informed you of anything.”

Deepmand’s tone suggested he expected me to change my mind now, when awake, something he should know I dared not do. Whereas my thoughts flowed like a river in dream, they now trickled in a desert of drowsiness. I struggled simply to string words together, and analyzing the merit of his argument was quite beyond me.

“I meant no offense, Elder Enchantress. I am only concerned for you, and the rest of us. Remember, this is the Lord of the Feast.”

“I am no forgetful invalid, thank you very much.”

“Elder Enchantress, I could brain the Soultrapper.” Five plated fingers closed on the scimitar hilt over his shoulder. “Split his skull in half.”

“One more word, Deepmand, and I will petition for your immediate retirement without pension.”

The Spellsword’s face changed in a peculiar way, although I could derive no insight from it yet.

A servant knelt before me. “Mistress, a man in funny clothes is in the west gardens.
Said he was waiting for you.”

“You are not educated enough to judge clothes,” I said, irritated. “However, you may take me to him.”

While I walked into the gardens, four servants held a canvass sheet above me with poles to shield me from the downpour. So little light penetrated the rain clouds that my earrings shone, and when I found Tethiel in the gazebo, I was reminded of the night he had given me the red diamond.

Tethiel stood as my gowns squeezed into the gazebo’s arched entrance. When my servants had departed from earshot, he said, “By your glowing face, Enchantress Hiresha, I judge the night a success.”

“The Soultrapper is Anlash Niklia,” I said in a whisper, out of respect for the Flood Moon. “He ground his own bones into powder then sprinkled them into the city’s wells and his fine wines.”

“A wine merchant?
And instead of blood glyphs, he bound with bone.
Promising.
Most promising.”
His lips spread halfway to a red grin of hunger.

“Will you confront him in the Bazaar, or at night?”

“People feel too safe during the day for my taste, and the overcast will make casting more manageable. Go to him now in the Bazaar. I’ll follow on Eyebiter.”

“I will depart without delay.”

“Before you do, Enchantress Hiresha, I would ask you for a promise.”

I felt a crushing sensation. Tethiel had said he would not ask anything of me, and I feared he would renege on his word and demand I sleep with him.
To regenerate his teeth...or something equally scandalous.