Revenant

by Kat Richardson

  “Good morning, Rafa. How are you?”

  “I am very well, thank you. It is good to see Dom Carlos as he should be.”

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  “In the garden.”

  Carlos in a garden in the daylight. This I needed to see. I started to go, then turned back. “Rafa, where did Dom Carlos sleep last night?”

  She frowned. “In his bed. Where else should he sleep?”

  “I mean where in the house. The cellar?”

  She shook her head. “No. In the master’s chamber on the second floor. I had to take him there myself.”

  “How did you lift him? He must weigh more than two hundred pounds.”

  She blushed. “Avó helped me. He is light as a child with her hand on him.”

  “And where is she now?”

  “Oh, I think she won’t come for some time. It was very hard for her to bear him up after all that happened.”

  There seemed to be more questions opened than answered, but I let them go and nodded to her, thanking her and starting for the door to the back garden.

  “Oh, the key!” she cried. “Take the key.”

  That was interesting: The garden apparently didn’t lie in her time frame of the house. I took the key off a hook by the door and went out.

  In the modern daylight, the garden was shabbier than it had seemed the night before. Jasmine climbed up broken trellises against the house walls, growing from pots that had seen much better days. Three dwarf orange trees set in a shallow V were dusty and seemed in need of attention while the bougainvillea had overgrown the wall and was encroaching on the tiles around a fountain mounted to the surface. The pool and fountain were dry, the tiles and plaster cracked and chipping here and there. Carlos sat on the rim of the empty pool and squinted upward at the sun through the dusty leaves of an orange tree. A shaft of light struck blue highlights off his hair and warmed his skin with a ruddy glow across one cheekbone. It was like seeing some young relative of the Carlos I knew, one who hadn’t yet gained bitter knowledge and a taste for blood and power.

  “You’re not supposed to look directly at the sun,” I said.

  “I am also not supposed to be alive and sitting in my own garden. It’s run-down—I shall chastise the management company for that—but as I am somewhat run-down myself, I shan’t be too harsh on them.”

  “I’m afraid I overheard part of your conversation with Quinton.”

  “I know it. As, I suspect, does he. But we each pretend the other does not and thus we save our foolish male pride.”

  “Why aren’t I attached to you, blood-bound, because of what I did?”

  “Always direct, Blaine.”

  “Why should I be otherwise?”

  He replied with nothing but an ironically raised eyebrow.

  “Come on, man of mystery. Tell me.”

  “I’ve already told you. I am not blood-bound to another because I did not die of the Bliss—of the blood addiction. I Became, my blood poured onto the ground to feed something else. While I can—or could before this change—create blood kindred, it must be carefully and deliberately done. You gave me your blood. I gave nothing back—or at least nothing that I intended.”

  “There’s still something more to this. . . .”

  “Yes, but I cannot tell you what it is. I don’t know. I think I know what I’ve received from you, but what may have passed to you, is unknown. But it isn’t the blood tie, nor any form of control. You are not in thrall to me. Although it might be interesting if you were. . . .”

  I rolled my eyes. “Please.”

  He smiled a perfectly ordinary smile, the sun showing every bone-white scar where the glass of the church window had cut him, and finding tiny wrinkles around the corners of his eyes and mouth that darkness had never revealed. The smile faded quickly; then he shook himself and stood. “Let us not bait your beloved any longer. We should go inside and speak of dragons.”

  He put his right hand out in a courtly, old-world gesture and I, laughing at it, put my left hand onto his, aligning our fingers.

  For a second, our hands were one oddly shaped construction of four overly long fingers and two opposed thumbs that sprouted from both our wrists like the overlap of conjoined twins. I gasped and flinched, yanking my hand up and back without thinking.

  The bizarre double hand divided at the knuckles of our middle fingers as if hinged there. All the rest of our hands were free and normal, the fingers sliding past one another, but our middle fingers remained connected at the medial joint. It was creepy to look at and impossible, like some kind of optical illusion where it appeared that my finger passed through the knuckle of his, without displacing either of our bones more than a micron or two. But it wasn’t an illusion. Our middle fingers were somehow locked together at that now-aching joint, mine pointing slightly downward from the plane of his hand.

  Carlos winced but didn’t move otherwise. I felt a stab of hysteria as well as pain through the joined finger and up my arm.

  “Don’t twist,” he warned. “The joint isn’t meant for that.”

  Quinton stepped out of the kitchen door, looking puzzled as he walked toward us. “What’s up? You guys look spooked.”

  “I misspoke about there being nothing between us,” Carlos said.

  Quinton glanced at our oddly joined hands and blinked, then stared. “What the hell is that?”

  “The ghost bone. It appears this is my gift to Blaine in exchange for my life. I haven’t seen the phenomenon in a considerable time. I had thought it died out.”

  “Apparently, not so much. And it hurts,” I said, holding still at the expense of growing discomfort in my forearm and hand from extraordinary pressure on the conjoined digit. The rest of my finger was below Carlos’s hand and I couldn’t see it, though I was sure it was still there from the tingling ache. “Is the rest of my finger still attached? I can feel it, but . . .”

  Quinton ducked his head to see. “Well . . . it’s there. What it’s attached to is in question, since it looks like it’s just growing out of the middle of Carlos’s knuckle on each side.”

  I curled the finger, causing Carlos to take a sharp breath and close his eyes.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “It’s wiggling, so if you’re doing the bending, it’s still your finger, babe.”

  “I’m not sure how much of a relief that is.”

  “It is better than the alternative,” Carlos said. “Perhaps we can reverse this action.”

  “Worth a try,” I said, lowering and rotating my hand back to the position where my fingers had aligned with his. I could feel each finger brushing past his and back into position. The conjoined knuckle hesitated and balked like a tumbler in a rusted lock. I let out a little whimper and squeezed my eyes shut for a couple of seconds. The agony in my hand and arm was less, but the intensity of the ache in the finger was profound and after losing blood the night before, I felt a bit more weak in the knees than I wanted to admit.

  Carlos scowled at our still-joined hands. “Hmm . . .”

  I peered through the Grey at the knuckle. The bones looked like glass pipes filled with steam and outlined in white light. Thin red filaments of energy stretched along the bones and tangled at the joint, creating a mess I couldn’t make sense of. I leaned closer to the knot and slid a bit more into the Grey. The joint became less solid as I became less corporeal and the tight wires of red energy loosened, uncoiling slightly. I could see how the two bones of his hand and mine had—impossibly—slipped past each other and rotated just a little, locking the rounded ends together in the complexity of the joint. I twitched my hand a touch counterclockwise and arched the finger. . . . With a pop and a spark of discomfort, the bones slid free and our hands separated.

  “Ow!” I yelped, jerking all the way back into the normal world.

  I clasped the aching fi
ngers in my other hand and looked up to see Carlos doing the same, cradling his right hand in his left. His eyes were still closed and he wore a thoughtful expression. “I see . . .” he muttered.

  “What?”

  He didn’t seem to hear me. He just said, “This could prove useful.” Then he opened his eyes and turned to the house. “We had best go back into Rafa’s memory of the house before anyone we would prefer not to talk to takes an interest.”

  Inside, we walked up to the tower, having agreed that privacy was necessary for what we were going to discuss even in Rafa’s version of the house. Carlos opened the heavy curtains over the windows and pushed the casements wide, reveling in the touch of sunlight. A hushed flurry of minute rustlings and shuffling sounds rose at the intrusion of the light, and died away again, leaving an odor of newly turned earth and cut grass behind.

  The chamber was cleaner than the last time I’d seen it, which surprised me at first, since I had expected the remains of whatever conjuring had drawn Carlos to Carmo to still linger in place. When had there been any time to straighten up? But the nevoacria—the shadow creatures that Carlos had drawn forth—had consumed and hidden away all traces of dust and disorder. Even the cobwebs and dry-rotted wood beside the fireplace were gone. Of the creatures themselves, there was only the smallest trace—persistent shadows in corners and under objects that cringed from sunlight and smoked when it touched them.

  Carlos leaned against the edge of a table near the front window, so Quinton and I took the seats we’d occupied the last time, on the bench in front of a nearby table. The breeze through the window was pleasant, but the perfume of the garden had been muted by the odor of hot dust and old buildings.

  “What about this ghost-bone thing?” I asked.

  His expression was grave and remote. “We have little time for details. You will have to accept what I tell you without much explanation.”

  “All right. Give me the short version.”

  “It is a rare phenomenon—an affinity, not spell work. It’s related to but not the same as the bone magic you saw two nights ago. You noted then, I’m sure, that bones have resonance. If the practitioner can match the resonance and an appropriate bone is available, the bones can be exchanged or grafted to a degree. They do not have to touch or lie atop each other as ours did, but in this case, it appears the position completed the requirements. One of the bones of your hand and one of mine share the same resonance—as unlikely as it seems.”

  “It doesn’t seem very useful to me,” I said.

  “It is limited. True bone magic is more complex and broader in scope, but it requires tuning or reshaping the bones—utilizing them as the material and instruments of the spell work—as well as the ability to match resonance and draw a bone, living, from the body. This phenomenon is more use in healing bones—that was my mother’s skill.”

  “I’m not sure I’m getting it,” I said.

  “She would heal people of broken or diseased bones by grafting a small portion of her own bones to theirs through this ghost bone. Like you, she healed very quickly and barely noticed the loss of her bone matter most of the time. If the injury was severe enough, she would replace the bone with her own and bear the injury herself for a while. It was not pleasant to observe and I learned a great deal about pain, damage, and death by her side.” He saw me frown. “Not all of her experiments were successful and some of those she would have helped were too greatly injured to live. Some didn’t deserve her attention—I took them.”

  I shuddered and felt the same reaction in Quinton, beside me. “How did this happen? Today, I mean—I think I know all I really want to about your relationship with your mother.”

  Carlos chuckled. “In our case, it was simply luck. The hands of men and women are usually so unequally sized that one bone or another would have to be carved or reshaped—usually in the body. Grafted bones must be of the same status—living or dead. A dead bone doesn’t quicken in the body. But in our hands, there is something similar enough that the bones slipped past each other for a moment.”

  “Because I’m tall and have large hands for a woman.”

  “Paws,” Quinton added.

  “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

  Now Carlos didn’t smile. “Regardless, tuning and assembling the correct bones—living and dead—weaving the appropriate spell through them, and binding them by power and sound are the processes of the Kostní Mágové. Theirs is a learned craft and the discipline doesn’t require that the practitioner have the ghost-bone affinity. It was not one I seemed to possess, but it appears that I’ve passed my mother’s latent ability on to you, temporarily, in exchange for what you’ve given me.”

  “I’m not sure that there’s any . . . use for this ability, if I do have it. I mean, how would you even know you had the right bone to swap?”

  “Practice and tuning. You should be able to hear the bones, if you have the skill.”

  “Ugh. That’s a sound I’d like never to hear again, thank you.”

  “Then you did hear it, even without this strange gift.”

  “In the bone temple? Yes. The whole room was full of these tuned bones you’re talking about. It whispered everywhere. Every time Griffin cast or adjusted a spell, the whole room . . . wailed.”

  Carlos turned an inquiring look on Quinton. “Did you hear this?”

  “I heard something, but it only got loud once. Otherwise it was like a constant low whistling or whining that made my skin crawl.”

  “I heard more, but not what Blaine describes.” Carlos returned his focus to me. “As a Greywalker, you hear the voices of Grey things more clearly, even without this strange, new gift.”

  “All the damned time,” I said. “Lisbon sounds like it’s crying. Seattle hums. Mexico City rattles and whines like a steel guitar. I used to hear voices in the Grid itself, but I don’t anymore—which is fine by me. They almost drove me insane. Noisy is manageable, chatty . . . not so much.”

  “It is something to bear in mind as we deal with the Kostní Mágové and their drachen.”

  “Drachen?” Quinton asked. He looked at Carlos. “You mentioned something this morning. . . .”

  “O Dragão do Inferno—the Hell Dragon. It is not the fragile thing that Griffin conjured two nights ago—she didn’t cast that herself, but released it from the small, carved bone she carried with her from the altar. That bone was another form of Lenoir’s spirit box. The Night Dragon and Hell Dragon require drachen bones and the work of a dreamspinner. Griffin is not one of those. But the Kostní Mágové here clearly have drachen bones and a dreamspinner in their company. They still need other bones and the chance to carve them with the appropriate spells and tunings, since they have yet to replace your niece. If they complete the skeleton and give life to the song of the bones, it will be a living nightmare.”

  “And how are we going to stop them?” Quinton asked. “We took back Soraia, but there are other bones out there. We can’t protect every little girl. . . . Whatever they’re up to, they’re moving faster than we are. This morning, there were near riots outside the Jerónimos Monastery about the possibility that the tomb of Dom Sebastiaõ might not have been vandalized, but that ‘the desired one’ is coming back. Which is, frankly, an ‘End of Days’ scenario in my mind. You don’t want the Sleeping King to show up for anything less than—” He cut himself off and turned his head sharply away from both of us, staring out the front window.

  “Less than what? An apocalypse?” I asked. “Why wouldn’t your father want that as well? It would do everything he wants and much faster than his current work with ghosts and undead agitators.” Then I turned to Carlos. “It’s what you said they—these bone mages—are after, too. We saw the master mage from the temple meet with another priest just before we saw the Night Dragon here in Alfama. And he matches the description of a priest seen at the monastery when it was robbed.”

&nb
sp; “Rui,” Carlos said. “Are you certain they were the same man?”

  “Not entirely—no one described his aura in the news report—but the one we saw just down the hill here? Yes. It was him—Rui. It’s not likely there are two priests of the same description involved in unrelated crimes concerning bones,” I said, “aura or not.”

  Quinton and I told him about Purlis’s disruptions in other places—riots in Paris, bombings in Turkey, epidemics in Spain and the United States, the riots at the bank and the air base, the Night Dragons and monsters, and then about the dead pickpocket, the priests who must have been bone mages, and the other ossuaries that had been vandalized, coming at last back to the robbery at Jéronimos and the angry mutterings I’d heard the night before as I ran through the Baixa to Santa Justa.

  “There is no Sleeping King,” Carlos said, but he was thinking as he did. “Sebastiaõ was not entombed in that crypt. But the dust of those bones would still be of use. . . . A great deceit—a pauper buried as a king. And they are aware that they can benefit from fear and unrest without having to cast a single spell to achieve it.”

  “So that’s what my father has been doing in the past months, here in Europe—sowing discord and unrest to benefit the Mágové—as well as working for their ends more directly by acquiring materials and destroying resistance to economic and political decline. Europe is facing a crisis that’s not just about money or national boundaries—it’s the loss of hope for an entire generation. The system is failing them and they’re becoming desperate enough to do something rash. Or that’s what I think, from what I’ve seen in places like Ukraine and Syria. He still needs to create the same degree of division and despair here, but I’m not sure that rousing the hope of a few nuts in Portugal is going to do what the Mágové want.”

  Carlos wore a speculative frown. “The numbers of those who truly believe in the Sleeping King may be small, but it will take very little to convince those whose despair and desperation can be romanticized into supporting a foolish cause. Poverty, unrest, disillusion, dispossession . . . This modern Europe is full of it and the number of those who feel hopeless and angry is growing. And from what I see, my countrymen are not what they once were. The world, the passage of time, has crushed them, reduced them from a people who once ruled an empire girdling the globe to those who barely rule their own country. With the Inferno Dragão, the Kostní Mágové could burn Portugal to ash and that alone would not be enough. But a legendary monster rising in a time of fear? It fits the myth of a coming apocalypse that they have sown, and it amplifies the irrational. It is something so far beyond what normal men and women believe in normal circumstances that many—most, eventually—will reject any more logical attempt at explanation. It will turn their logic against them. They will be hopeless, unable to imagine what to do, in the face of the impossible made flesh. Not all of the relics the bone mages have taken are intended to build the creature—only to sow discord and create other, smaller engines of terror. We will have to deprive them of the remaining pieces of their puzzle.”