Path of Bones (31 page)

Kyver held his last personal possession in his cold dry hands: his sketchbook.  He’d kept it hidden deep in the folds of the cloak he’d been wearing when he’d arrived.  Kyver had enjoyed drawing ever since he was very young.  Books didn’t really hold his attention unless they were read to him, and he wrote little aside from silly stories he made up to go with his pictures.  The thin leather-bound book only had about twenty sketches in it, but that was because Kyver drew slow, taking his time with little details and paying attention to backgrounds.  The book was only a quarter of the way full even though Kyver had been working in it for almost a year.  He drew with pieces of charcoal he’d managed to smuggle into the Orphanage, and most of the pictures were of people he saw on the streets or in shops. 

The last image he’d drawn had been special, and though he’d finished it the night before – the shuttered moonlight had been just enough for him to work by – he’d spent most of the morning looking over the piece and touching up the details. 

It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.

He quietly leaned over the bed and ducked halfway down so his head hovered close to the bunk below.  Genna lay on her side, her long hair spilled across the pillow.  Her dress was as grey as the sheets, a soft granite hue covered with stains. 

“
Genna,” he whispered.  “You awake?”

She slowly turned over and looked up at him, sleepy and confused.  Faint light bled through the room. 

“What are you doing up so early?” she asked with a smile.

Kyver held his hand down for her. 

“Come see the sunrise,” he said.

“
Oh, Goddess, you’re worse than a girl,” Genna laughed quietly.  She gripped his hand – she was as light as a feather – and he pulled her up next to him on the top bunk.  The orphanage was always cold, but her proximity warmed him.  They sat cross-legged and faced the shutters of the nearest window as the world outside brightened.  “You know you can’t actually see the sunrise from here, right?” she asked jokingly.

“
True,” Kyver said.  “But there’s enough light for you to see this.”  He held the sketchbook up and set it in her lap.  Genna looked at the picture and nearly blushed.  It was a black and white rendition of her profile, standing before rolling hills with the sunrise behind her.  Dark birds fluttered against the sky, and she wore a white gown.  “Do you like it?” he asked.

“
I love it,” she said with a smile.  Something inside him melted.  “You’re not going to ask me to marry you now, are you?” she said as she jabbed a thumb in his ribs.

“
Don’t worry,” Kyver said.  “I wouldn’t marry a friend.”  Kyver watched her as she took in the details.  That was true joy on her face.  He’d learned how to read people from his mother – it was often easy for him to tell if someone was lying, even if they were much older than he was – and he could see that Genna was flooded with emotion over the gift.  She hadn’t talked much about her life before Castle Street Orphanage, but he got the impression it had been a long time since she’d had parents, so she probably wasn’t used to receiving presents.  Most of the other children there weren’t used to material possessions of any kind.

Genna looked over at him and smiled, but there was an undercurrent of worry in her eyes. 

“Kyver, where will I keep this?” she asked.  “If Mistress Kara or Grunt find out about it…”

Grunt was Mistress Kara’s assistant.  His real name was Gunther, but all he ever did was growl and grunt, and though the nickname had stuck everyone knew if Grunt ever heard them call him that they’d receive a lashing the likes of which they’d never known. 

“I’ll hang onto it for you,” he said.

“
And what if you get to leave here before I do?” she asked with a wry grin.

“
That won’t happen,” he said. 

“
Why?” she asked.  “You might.”

“
No,” he said.  “If anyone
might
get to leave it’s you.  You’re smart, you’re pretty, you’re a good person…”

“
And I’m old,” Genna said quietly.  “You haven’t been here long enough to see it, Kyver.  No one older than twelve ever gets adopted, unless it’s by some warehouse owner who wants cheap labor or for one of the brothels.”  The promise of tears hung in her eyes.  “I don’t think I’ll be leaving.”

After the age of fifteen, she’d told him, the children were taken away, though no one seemed to know what happened to them.  Based on what Kyver had seen of Mistress Kara and Grunt he couldn’t imagine they went anywhere scrupulous – his guess was they were sold as slaves to the Black Guild (which wouldn’t be all that bad, considering who his mother was) or to pirates bound for Kaldrak Iyres. 

He wasn’t sure what to say.  He wanted to tell her she was wrong, that everything would work out for the best, but he knew better.  Genna had been there almost a year, while Kyver had only resided at the Orphanage for barely a week.  His time at Castle Street had already felt like an eternity…he couldn’t even imagine how long Genna’s stay must have felt to her. 

Kyver squeezed Genna’s hand and held it tight.  She didn’t say anything, just stared out at the daylight beyond the bars.

“I wish there was a way I could get everybody out of here,” he said.  “You know…escape.”

It was impossible, of course, and they both knew it.  Besides the fact that Mistress Kara and Grunt patrolled the orphanage like pack dogs and never seemed to sleep, the place was locked down tight, a veritable fortress in the middle of the city.  To make matters worse, Kyver knew he was being watched, and not just by the orphanage staff – Jlantrian soldiers had dropped him off, and every now and again he saw one on the street outside when he looked out from the window or the yard.  They were keeping an eye on him.  Sure, they never looked like soldiers, but Kyver had been exposed to enough of his mother’s illicit activities to see things others couldn’t.  There were only a handful of them – two men and a woman, apparently working in shifts – and he guessed their job was to make sure he didn’t leave.

Kyver was young, but growing up in the shadow of the Black Guild had made him wise beyond his years, and he had no illusions as to how precarious his situation was.  If the Jlantrians had placed him there it meant he was being used as leverage against his mother, or as bait.  He couldn’t even begin to fathom what sort of trouble Vellexa must have been in to have landed him in the Orphanage. 

This story doesn’t end happily
, he realized. 

And even if by some miracle Kyver and the other enslaved children actually managed to escape…what then?  Kyver had spent plenty of time on Ebonmark’s streets running with youth gangs and living large off of his mother’s influence and reputation, but how far would that carry him if she was in trouble?  When he’d been taken the city was on the brink of an all-out crime war, but being in the Orphanage had shielded him from any of the truth of what was happening.  For all he knew the Black Guild was gone, the Iron Count was in chains and Colonel Blackhall had taken revenge for all of the soldiers he’d lost. 

My mother might be dead
, he realized.  He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.  He should have been sad, but for some reason the notion only made him feel empty inside.

“
Are you all right?” Genna asked him.

The glow through the shutters grew brighter and the other children started to stir, rubbing their eyes and pulling their sheets tight as they shivered against the morning’s cold.

“No,” Kyver said.  “I woke up angry and afraid.  I was hoping it would get better.”  He tried not to cry.  His mother always told him not to cry.  It was a sign of weakness, she said.  He needed to be strong.

“
Maybe it will,” Genna said.  “Get better, I mean.”

Kyver stared at the tightly sealed window. 

“Maybe,” he said, but he didn’t really believe it.  “Maybe.”

Forty

Mezias Crinn sat upon the throne of Ironclaw Keep.  It was an imposing artifact, with jags of edged bone blackened by funeral flames.  The chair stood in a removed chamber Crinn kept sealed except when he needed to use the device to keep himself alive.

Thin spikes and strong needles pushed up from the throne at the touch of a button, designed to slide into the tiny chinks in Crinn’s solid metal frame.  Once inserted the needles injected thaumaturgic drugs into what meat there was left on his body.  Those drugs – Crimson Sky, Azure Angel, Coldrazor
–
did little to relieve his pain but they calmed his raging mind, which was something he desperately needed.  He sat, wincing in pain as the spurting fluids made his body convulse.  Ripples of light played across his vision, vibrant hues of purple and green. 

He was half-automaton, more Veilcrafted metal than true flesh, and all that was truly left besides parts of his face and skull were his organs and crippled bones, which were held together in a black framework of nigh unbreakable iron, an armored body standing nearly eight feet tall and terrifying to behold.

I’m a monster, outside and in.

Horrors from his past flashed before his eyes.  He saw the black face smiling from inside the circle of women, their heads bowed low as they awaited their execution.  He felt the roaring flames of the death camps, stoked so high the yellow and red smoke seemed to billow straight up to heaven so the One Goddess could smell the carnage.  He saw Bloodspeaker corpses piled in the forest, left there mutilated and broken by the stoic Dawn Knights, champions of Jlantria, dutifully doing their Empress’s bidding. 

Without remorse, and without thought.  You trained us well, you whore.  And then you threw us to the wolves.

Several hundred Bloodspeakers had been rounded up by the Dawn Knights, acting under Empress Azaean’s orders.  Those prisoners were put in chains and carts, their powers (if they even had any) nullified by specially crafted restraints provided by House Red and then taken to the deadly camp Crinn himself had designed.  The order to execute them all –
Slowly
, she’d said, very specific, very deliberate, the command from her lips to his ears,
Kill them slowly, General, I want them to suffer –
hadn’t come until the prisoners had been secured into tightly guarded buildings, caged pens and covered pits. 

General Mezias Crinn and his Dawn Knights had carried out those orders with cold and calculated efficiency.  They starved the prisoners, beat them, raped them, destroyed their spirits and crushed their hope.  It wasn’t conduct worthy of the most elite knights the Empire had ever known, but that hardly mattered since so far as they were concerned their prisoners weren’t human, and thus were undeserving of decent treatment.  Those Bloodspeakers were agents of the Unmaker, children of darkness, heralds of the Blood Queen and a plague upon the Empire. 

There could be no safety for Jlantria until all Bloodspeakers were dead.  Their crime wasn’t what they’d done so much as what they’d
planned
to do through their subversive imitation of normal people.  They’d wormed their way into Jlantrian communities with false smiles and artificial lives, fooling everyone with their normal-looking farms and shops and happy children, when all the while they’d planned to destroy the Empire from within.  For that, they deserved to die.  Horribly.

Were those his words, Crinn wondered, or the Empress’s?  He no longer remembered.  A part of him vaguely recalled feeling doubt, both when Azaean had finally explained their true mission and then later, when that first day of blood and screams had finally drawn to a close.  He’d looked at the pile of bodies stripped of their clothing and skin: their muscles and frightened faces were naked in the firelight, and some of them still gasped from having been flayed and left to slowly bleed to death in the pits. 

After that, it had only gotten worse.

Crinn still remembered it clearly, that moment when he’d crossed over from the man he’d been to the monster he’d become.  His old life felt so distant now it was like he’d dreamed it.  He had a mother and a father, but they’d died when he was very young.  He’d received an education in Ral Tanneth’s finest schools, paid for by his family fortune.  Crinn had joined the White Dragon Army to become more like his father.  Wars, combat, medals and promotions made his corroding heart swell with pride.  General…even his father had never become a
General
.

And what had he done to deserve this decrepit metal husk?  Only what the Empress had asked of him.  He’d done his duty, and his Dawn Knights had performed just as he’d ordered them to, not questioning their orders until the very end, when it was already too late.

He’d learned as a child that life was cruel, that those deserving punishment were often the ones who escaped, that those with power were the ones who always acquired more.  A lifetime of work and hardship didn’t entitle you to any special treatment: some people were born to do little more than suffer.  The death camps were proof of that.

Crinn’s body shook violently.  His steel fingers clenched tight around the grips of the jagged throne.

He wasn’t alone.  He sensed Jaendrel there, doubtlessly sent to issue more threats on Kala’s behalf.