Path of Bones

by Steven Montano

  Kala is in the tower. The deposed Imperial Princess is powerful and angry, and she waits inside Chul Gaerog.

  Ijanna steps closer. She has to be sure. Her heart knows the answer, but she can’t accept it, not yet. She’s come too far.

  She draws within inches of the walls, the closest she’s ever been even in her own dreams. Streams of oil pulse down the mortared stone. She smells burning animals and slaughtered carcasses, and dark pools stain the blanched courtyard.

  Ijanna steps inside. There’s no door, and no need for one. The stone parts before her.

  I’m the Dream Witch. I am not afraid.

  Falling into those slithering fogs of emotion is like stepping into fire and smoke. She feels fear and pain, loss and damnation. A sense of destiny.

  There is no destiny.

  The voice isn’t hers, but a child’s voice. A little girl, singing.

  There is no chance, there is no fate, only the careful work of hate…

  Images flash around her, memories carefully locked behind the walls of Kala’s nightmare oubliette: tapestries of flesh, pits of white shadow, dolls with hollow eyes.

  A girl’s face. An angel of blades. The tree.

  “This is only the beginning.”

  I know that tree.

  Bodies dangle from the branches like rotted fruit. A mask of silver teeth, a mother with eyes of fire.

  The Empress.

  The tree.

  A heart of black ice. Men in shrouds surround a throne of crimson skulls.

  She beholds the vast interior of the tower, a dismal network of shadow corridors and bladed halls. Ramparts of bone, rivers of blood. Doorways leading nowhere, a fortress of time-crusted iron and unbreakable doors.

  Splitting pain tears across her mind. She spirals into the maelstrom of another woman’s memories.

  Kala Azaean is a young girl, maybe eight years old, so like Ijanna in her features that for a moment the Dream Witch’s breath catches in her throat. She sits on a pile of pale pillows in a pale room. Light like angel’s breath spills in through the high-arched windows. She’s lovely, with snow-white skin and hair like a tide of midnight.

  The Imperial Princess sits and reads to rows of petite dolls wearing elaborate dresses, their hair of many colors wound into delicate locks. She tells them stories of trolls and knights, history and magic. Her eyes glitter like gems.

  There’s a darkness inside of her, something so thick it turns the air leaden. Ice-sharp breath, a pulsing dissonant beat like a faint and distant heart, diseased and dying, fading with the sound of men falling into hell. The Veil builds within her, boils her blood without her even knowing it.

  She’s no ordinary Bloodspeaker.

  Years pass. Kala and her powers grow. At first the child seems unaware of her magic, but as time goes by she can’t help but wonder why strange things happen around her – blankets float on their own accord, torch lights dim or blaze in her presence, she hears thoughts that aren’t hers and finds she can bend even the keenest-minded adults to her will.

  Empress Azaean is a powerful Veilwarden, so at first the Princess’s gifts are attributed to her merely inheriting her mother’s talents. But as she grows older Kala realizes this isn’t the case, that the power she yields comes not from the Veil but from within herself, and even with her shielded existence in Kai-Ren Thoth she knows this isn’t a good thing, that people like her are evil. The One Goddess hates those born with magic inside of them, and she sends them to a very special hell.

  So Kala keeps her powers concealed. She does her best to learn why she’s different, what it is about her that makes her bad. She asks questions with great and subtle guile for a ten-year-old, listens in on conversations and debates, sneaks into cubbyholes so she can find out what happens to Bloodspeakers...to people like her. Sometimes they’re brought to the castle to be interrogated, and young Kala knows where to go so she can listen in on those sessions. Sometimes she even uses her magic to spy, and before long she mentally views her first torture. The image of a man’s hands being flayed as his blood is siphoned from his body haunts her dreams for years to come.

  By the time she’s twelve Kala lives in fear. She sees and hears terrible things that make her cry herself to sleep. She can read people’s minds, and it isn’t always easy for her to turn the ability off, which forces her to learn about the Bloodspeakers who are taken away and drowned in their own blood, whose children are brutally executed, whose friends are tortured for information so more of their kind can be burned out of hiding.

  Everyone thinks that Bloodspeakers are a disease, which means she is a disease, that she’s wicked, evil, and cruel.

  She doesn’t feel evil. She feels afraid, and alone, because there’s nobody she can talk to. Her own mother speaks ill of Bloodspeakers. They are spawn of the Blood Queen, she says, and everyone knows Carastena Vlagoth was a frightening lady who used to live with monsters and boil children alive so she could eat them.

  Kala is terrified of the Blood Queen, but she’s even more terrified of the Empress. Every time her mother visits her chambers she thinks her secret has been discovered. She has nightmares of being sent down to the prison, where Nigel Crann will peel back her fingernails and smash her bones with his hammer. She’s seen Nigel in court, a gentle-faced man with a hawk’s features, but she knows how cruel he can be. And even he doesn’t frighten her as much as her mother.

  Most nights she falls asleep crying. Thoughts of the Empress ice her skin with fear, and every time they’re together she feels as if something terrible is about to happen. Her mother is a Veilwarden, after all – she knows things, can see things, and it’s only a matter of time before she recognizes the evil in her daughter, before she sends her down to Crann so he can make her cry and scream, because that’s what they do to Bloodspeakers.

  Only that doesn’t happen. Her secret is safe.

  This doesn’t stop the Princess from being afraid. She always expects someone to come for her, to learn about her, and as she continues to develop her powers she learns that the magic inside her responds to her needs, to her emotions. It does what she wants, feeds off her desires and fears, chief among them a drive to conceal her nature from everyone around her. She uses magic to hide her own magic.

  She never fully trusts anyone, and has no confidants. How can she? Who can she trust in an Empire so focused on the horrors Bloodspeakers bring to Malzaria? What would it be like for her mother to have the world discover her only daughter is a child of evil? If anything her punishment would be even more severe than that of an ordinary Bloodspeaker. They’d do anything to silence her, to make sure the people of Jlantria never discovered her true nature.

  She is a hollow soul, surrounded by teachers and matrons and playmates and guards but never trusting any of them, always assuming they mean her harm, that they’re probing her for secrets. She grows up trying to be good, to behave like a lady and the Empress-to-be, but deep down inside she knows her soul is as rotten as old fruit, and that she’s nothing but garbage in the eyes of the One Goddess. She senses the hatred the world feels for her kind and keeps it bottled up inside of her, reciprocates it.

  How can it be she who is evil when it’s the good people of Jlantria who make her feel this way, who force her into a shell of herself, a prisoner of her own mind and body? Why should she grow up like this when she’s done nothing wrong aside from being born?

  She hears stories of Bloodspeaker uprisings and secret plots, Veil-yielding assassins and towns put to the torch. But she knows the truth – hatred drives her mother and her subjects to do what they do, hatred of what they don’t know, of what they fear. Maybe Bloodspeakers were reviled and despised before the coming of the Blood Queen, or maybe she’s brought it upon them – ten years of slaughter and death have left people wanting someone to hate, someone to blame, and they’d never blame the White Dragon. But all of that hate has to go somewhere.

  The hate Malzaria feels swells within Kala. One day she’ll release it, and she’l
l watch the world burn.

  As she grows into a young woman and becomes more adept at the skills she’s inherited from her mother – deception, guile and bending others to her will – her ability with the Veil increases tenfold. Kala commands servants and bodyguards without ever having to speak to them, and she seeks out places where she can practice her talents without being spied on. She grows powerful, and soon discovers she’s not bound by the normal limitations faced by Bloodspeakers: not only can she produce profound physical manifestations the same way that Veilwardens do, but her life force will not – cannot – run dry.

  She devours tomes of arcane knowledge, scours libraries and arranges for books of lore to be brought to her chambers from all over the Empire, and once she’s exhausted those texts she uses her magic to make contacts beyond Jlantria’s borders with smugglers who provide her with forbidden tomes. She makes allies in the criminal underworld, meets dark individuals with dark talents. Like-minded individuals.

  Kala is sixteen years old when her secret is finally revealed to her mother. But before that happens, she has the dream.

  Ijanna is ripped back through time. Before. A concealed memory, powerful and frightening. It's a dream. The dream.

  She sees the Janus Tree.

  Kala looks small before it, naked and alone. The tree is a monstrous presence, a monument of pale wood stretching into the twisted sky.

  Ijanna watches, not really there, just an observer hidden by folds of shadow and dripping iron soot.

  The scene shifts underground, where a second tree, a black twin, dangles upside down from the ceiling of a massive cavern. The air is thick with the scent of rotting meat.

  Kala waits. She’s younger, barely a teenager, and even from a distance Ijanna sees the fear in her, the hesitation. The world around them is black and vast, a smoking ruin of rock and smelted lead. Strange sounds echo off the distant walls. The ground is stained with scorch marks.

  At the center of the subterranean wasteland are hundreds of skulls, charred black and forced together into the ugly semblance of a chair. Seated upon the throne is a human girl, maybe ten years old, draped in a red cloak. Her blonde hair is stained with streaks of blood. Ijanna doesn’t need to guess at her identity.

  Carastena Vlagoth. The Blood Queen.

  Her dead eyes watch Kala with sadness. An air of pure power floats around her frail body, twisted and tainted magic that warps the air and fills it with drifts of shadow. Everything seems drawn towards the throne.

  Panic races through Ijanna’s body. Her breaths freeze in her lungs and her skin goes rigid.

  It’s only a dream, she tells herself. And yet it feels so real.

  Advisers surround the child – a gangly Arkan, a battle-scarred Tuscar war chief, a grim-faced Voss – but they communicate through some telepathic means, their exchange heated but silent. They seem not to give the Blood Queen any deference at all.

  She’s their prisoner.

  Ijanna isn’t sure if the thought is hers or Kala’s, but it doesn’t matter. Carastena sits quietly. Even from a distance Ijanna sees the darkness behind Vlagoth’s eyes. Dead shadows leak from her black soul.

  She is as disinterested in the trio of monstrous advisers as they are in her. Vlagoth’s gauntleted hands curl around the skull armrests of the throne.

  The Blood Queen shifts her gaze and looks out. She sees Kala, and Ijanna. Her mouth opens and bloody smoke pours out, enveloping them all. Ijanna’s eyes can barely penetrate the dripping brume.

  Sounds crash through her mind: screams and metal, razors and ripping. Suddenly there is silence, a shockingly cold void. The sound of utter darkness.

  Memories play in the blackness, the Blood Queen’s memories.

  A raven-haired beauty is raped on a cold stone slab. Claws tear at her clothes. Her body is riddled with scars, and the oozing tongue of a wolf-mawed creature lashes her flesh with acid slime while she’s being violated.

  A cry from the dark. A prison without walls. A child born of this crime. Darkness wears the mask of a pale Goddess, and he slowly shapes the world in his own image as he tears humanity apart, piece by piece.

  Vlagoth is their prisoner, fuel for their foul machines, not the leader she’s made out to be. She’ll never age while her magic is harvested to power Vossian war machines and fertilize Arkan blood fields. They’ve captured her through trickery and guile, and using her terrible magic – the power of two deities, her parents, for she is a child of rape born to a world she’ll never understand – the three dark races wage a decade-long war that comes to an abrupt end when the source of their power is killed by a hapless human.

  Corgan Bloodwine didn’t find the cutgate that led him to Vlagoth by accident, Ijanna realizes. Vlagoth brought him there. She was ready to die.

  Help me. My children.

  The Janus Tree.

  Two trees bound at the roots, one pure and one twisted, white and black, both born of Corvinia’s sacred blood, blood that was tainted by the seed of the black monster who captured and raped her during the Turn of Night, the God’s war that claimed the lives of all other deities. It is believed Corvinia prevailed, that she turned the tide against Nazarathos and destroyed him, becoming the One Goddess.

  She’s a prisoner still, Ijanna understands. Nazarathos rules in her stead, allowing us to believe it’s Corvinia. And every day the world comes closer to its destruction.

  From the sap of those trees burns the Veil. It exists outside of space, outside of time, hidden from mortal eyes and guarded in the space between realities. The Arkan and the Voss construct Chul Gaerog around it, sacrificing thousands of lives to bond the Veilcraft that keeps the Janus Tree protected while they conquer the surface world.

  Help me. My children.

  Corvinia is a prisoner. What little there is left of her lies within the tree. Only one of her own blood can release her: the Blood Queen.

  And in order for Vlagoth to live, a Skullborn must die.

  Kala’s head is filled with the same questions as Ijanna’s. She hears their thoughts echo one another, dissonant chords slicing through the deepest dark.

  Must the tree be destroyed so the One Goddess can be free? What will happen to Malzaria?

  But there are no answers, and there never have been. The world marches to its death. Every Bloodspeaker born and every bit of magic used pulls them all closer to their doom, which is exactly what the Unmaker wants. The Veil isn’t Corvinia’s blood, like they’ve always believed – it is Corvinia herself, and she’s being eaten away piece at a time by the creatures she holds dominion over.

  They’re gone from the vision, the nightmare which Kala has about the tree. Ijanna recalls her own similar dream, but by the time it came she’d already spent her life being raised for this purpose – to fight, and to sacrifice herself. If not for the death camps taking everything she held dear Ijanna would be there now, deep in Chul Gaerog, facing the tree and ending her life so the Blood Queen can live and free the One Goddess.

  Kala never had any such intentions.

  The taint on the girl’s psyche has been there for years. The doubts Ijanna didn’t acquire until later in her life are with the Imperial Princess from the start. The world hates her and her kind, and for years she’s searched for something to work in the Bloodspeaker’s favor, some advantage she can gain over her mother.

  And now she has it.

  The Imperial Princess’s disdain for the Empire grows. She refuses to eat, dresses herself in torn rags and confines herself to her suites for weeks at a time. The Empress pays little heed except to cut off the Princess financially (which does little, since Kala has already seduced both the royal treasurer and the trio of men who run the Imperial Bank).

  Kala rarely needs to leave the palace – she has contacts all over the world, and they are powerful. They cull her favor, seeking an end to the Empire and hoping to take its riches for themselves. Soon she holds a veritable empire of her own: drugs, prostitutes, smuggling, and a flow of illegal lore and
information that would make the Spymasters of Blackmoon green with envy. Her contacts make it possible for Kala to set her sights on her true goal: to follow in the footsteps of the Voss and the Arkan and seize the Blood Queen’s power for herself.

  She’s not alone. A black-hearted coalition makes contact with her, a group which desperately craves access to the otherwise impenetrable citadel of Chul Gaerog. The Black Tower is all but empty save for Vlagoth’s champion, Calladar. It is ripe for plunder, if only its defenses can be breached.

  With the aid of the shadowy Cabal – a secret and powerful cadre of dangerous and influential criminals – she’s closer to her goal than ever before. The Scarstones are the final piece, and with them she believes she can enter Chul Gaerog, so long as the proper sacrifice is made.

  The proper sacrifice.

  Ijanna has lost track of where she is. The murky walls of the dreamscape are closing in, and the clouds melt like ice. Colors bleed, and the ground smokes.

  Her eyes sting. She feels her body shifting, so she focuses on twin beads of gilded light.

  They are Kala’s eyes, staring straight at her.

  Walls of razor sound, stains like a bloody whirlpool. Wind ripples against her like she’s falling. She loses control of the dream, but she doesn’t feel Kala has control, either. Falling forward, Ijanna smashes through a sky of glass. Splitting pain tears across her skull.

  When she can see again Ijanna and Kala both stand at the base of the Black Tower. Dark lightning plays in the heavens, and a flat blue moon hangs low in the sky. There are no children in Ijanna’s dream this time, but the ground is charred and smells of burned tar.

  She can’t move. Fear spreads through her chest. She and Kala are both rooted to the spot, and the other Skullborn glares at her with a hateful expression.