Worldshaker

by J. F. Lewis

  “Something . . .” He breathed frost through a maw from which only a short time past molten rock and superheated air had flowed. Now, his gargantuan muzzle was frost-rimmed, jagged lengths of ice dangling from the corners of his jaws; icicles the size of a human’s arm terminating in deadly piercing points. “Something is wrong with my breath.”

  “We don’t need it,” Dryga snapped. “We’re almost done here.”

  “Something is wrong with my breath,” Coal repeated dully.

  “Don’t give me a running tally of your bodily injuries, Betrayer,” Dryga snapped. “Just do as I command. Understood?”

  How dare that insignificant little lizard speak to me in such a manner?! I—

  Coal paused, partially to feign taking a few moments to process such a simple command and also to rein in his temper at the Sri’Zaur’s use of the name given him by his own kind before they left him alone on the world they had once shared.

  “Understood,” Coal repeated.

  Still quick and ready, that one, Coal warned himself. While he didn’t believe it would be easy for Uled to seize complete control of him, it seemed unwise to bring Uled’s lack of dominion to the wretch’s attention prematurely.

  Clusters of empty-clawed Sri’Zaur took their positions in columns once more, awaiting their leader’s inspection. They had found all the bone-steel and Life Forge fragments they were likely to uncover, the simple wretches. It was an impressive feat, or would have been if Coal hadn’t been able to scent several small caches of the precious metals that had been missed. They even seemed to have managed to complete the disassembly of the local Port Gates, which had remained in partial alignment even after the destruction of Port Ammond.

  “North,” Captain Dryga bellowed, Skreel blade upraised.

  To the mountains or to lay waste to another Eldrennai city?

  Coal found himself curious in a vague way, but most of his thoughts turned to the Aern. How was the daughter of his old friend handling the command Kholster had so longed for her to have? And up to what had the death god himself gotten? Was he still watching even now?

  Yes, if Coal squinted he could still make out the deific forms continuing to observe him from just outside the material plane. He chuffed at the sight and tried to keep his thoughts from the one thing about which he had become most curious, just in case—a purely needless precaution, surely—just in case the thing Uled had become managed to pull it from his mind.

  Body moving northward at the head of the dead army, Coal’s mind turned to west. How long? he mused. How long until Zhan comes for the bones?

  CHAPTER 4

  LAST OF ONE HUNDRED

  An hour before first sunset, the steady cadence of patience wed to purpose rang out from the soles of the Ossuarian’s armored boots. Zhan’s eyes flashed, sunslight catching his amber pupils, sending reflected light flaring brighter than usual through some quirk of atmosphere or emotion. As Zhan sped to a run, Keeper, his warsuit, opened itself to release him, the sound like the hiss of steam from a Dwarven conveyance down south in Midian. Bone-steel plates of armor split into a series of interlinked bands of metal, rejoining seamlessly as soon as its rightful occupant was completely free.

  “Why the hurry?” Alysaundra bit back a whistle at the sight of the Last of One Hundred out of his warsuit. Where others of the One Hundred, and indeed most Aern (Armored or not) tended toward the same steam-loomed denim favored by Kholster, Zhan’s pants were leather and more form fitting. His devotion to craft caught her, too. Few other Armored bothered to make their own clothes, much less use bone-steel for the buttons up the front. The boots were his own work as well, showing the same careful maintenance and attention to detail present in all aspects of Zhan’s life.

  Most Aernese females viewed Kholster or Vander as the masculine ideal, even many among the Bone Finders, but for Alysaundra it had always been Zhan—a wasted yearning given the peculiarities of his creation.

  Kholster, forged first among Aern, was raw and primal, his right to kholster, his will, his everything, the essence of what it meant to be in, to use the old word for it, command. Uled had wrought that power and responsibility into him from the bones out. Vander, as the first Overwatch, had been the most mentally powerful, the one capable of the greatest connection, with the Third through Fifth of One Hundred possessing less raw Overwatch ability, each more refined, as Uled mastered the new type of Aern.

  Glayne, as Sixth of One Hundred, was intended by Uled to have been the first full Soldier, but had been capable of being an Overwatch. His dual nature resulted from a natural learning step between Overwatch and Soldier, where the Seventh of One Hundred through Ninety-Ninth were Soldiers, sharp canines and well-placed strikes to their opponents’ vitals, straight up fighters through and through, excellent at receiving their kholster’s orders and working together with Overwatches.

  Each time Uled had created a new type of being he had tended to overcompensate with the first attempt. By the time he’d turned his thoughts to Zhan’s creation Uled had become an old hand at making soldiers, and it had been theorized (because who would dare ask Uled himself?) that Zhan’s creation had been more of an exercise in what could be done with the connection between Aern and bone metal rather than the filling of an actual need. For the first time since Glayne, Uled had actually been excited about forging an Aern. As the Aern during whose creation Uled was most experienced, was it any wonder that—

  “I do not like this.” Zhan’s words silenced Alysaundra’s musing as he gestured to the ruin of Port Ammond around them.

  The once-white towers were fallen, the Lane of Review shattered, cracked, and pitted by the battle that had taken place a month earlier. No stone lay stacked upon another, and in many cases huge chunks of rubble had been smashed apart since Alysaundra and her ex-husbands, Teru and Whaar, had been here last. The only good thing she had noticed thus far was that the dead had moved on to other purposes, and their route did not seem to have taken them back toward Fort Sunder.

  “Small game is better than no game,” Alysaundra muttered to Bone Harvest, then she swore as she stepped into one of the glassy tracks dragon fire had cut into the ground.

  Alysaundra could almost picture it: Coal, the great gray dragon (should he still be called that when his last burst of youth had turned his scales a vigorous black again?) unleashing columns of violent heat and flame, razing the city as he slew the invading Zaur and sought to kill Hasimak, the High Elementalist, and his apprentices—the five Elemental Nobles who’d remained behind to hold off the Zaur and give both the Aern and the Eldrennai (Aiannai now?) time to retreat to Fort Sunder out on the Sundered Plains, to the safety of bone-steel plated walls and fortifications that had survived the Demon Wars even before Kholster had become the Harvester and refortified it with the bone metal of the Aern slain when Wylant shattered the Life Forge.

  Alysaundra tried not to dwell on images of the dragon as she had last seen him, his breast torn open, a parboiled Sri’Zaur planted atop the great wyrm as if he were a mundane mount to be ridden and not feared or respected.

  “Run,” Coal had told her, “for I fear I am not my own.”

  And run she and her former husbands had. All the way back to Fort Sunder with what little of the melted and cooled remains of Glayne’s soul-bound weapon they had been able to recover.

  Below them at the splintered docks, the waves crashed and the wind howled. Zhan stood at the overlook, where once the Royal Towers had loomed, and peered down into the debris field. Cold wintery sea air riffled his short red hair, the scars on his back plain for all to see. They were not his father’s scars. Like the other Hundreds, his scars were his own, the origination of the patrimonial scars borne not by his descendants, because unlike other Aern he was incapable of reproducing normally, but by all Bone Finders, because all Ossuarians were his family, whether their parents had been Bone Finders or not.

  At first, to the casual observer, it was the mass of bone-steel one noticed, not the pattern of sca
rs connecting it. Some imagined it a web, but to Alysaundra it seemed more a stylized wave, with the largest bead of metal at the center of his back, a sample of Kholster’s bone metal, with each surrounding bead born by the waves extending from it as if they were rippling outward from the source of the water’s disturbance, ripples caused by Kholster, by his creation, his life . . . one for each of the first ninety-nine.

  “I come for the bones” was carved in clear block symbols arcing from Zhan’s right shoulder to his left, accenting the bronzed flesh.

  Alysaundra reached back to remember the last time she’d seen him this way. Had it really been over six hundred years? Shirtless and brooding, he was the Zhan of old, not the reserved and severe figure who favored silk shirts with bone-steel buttons, but the one who shunned all clothing save his true skin, his warsuit . . .

  Holding out his open palm, Zhan tugged at the bone metal around him, pulling so hard Alysaundra took an involuntary step toward him before she could shift her weight and resist. Three tiny scraps of pearlescent metal shot from the rubble like bullets from a jun, embedding themselves in his outstretched hand.

  “There is still some of it missing.” Zhan turned to face her, frowning as he picked the metal from his flesh, oblivious to the orange, iron-deficient blood welling up from the wounds even as they healed. “A near-smooth nugget, the size of my thumb.”

  Placing the fragments in the palm of his right hand, Zhan covered them with his left, cupping them.

  Alysaundra sensed what was happening even though she’d never managed it very well herself, could feel the rapidly shifting pulses from Zhan’s hands as the bead of metal grew hotter and hotter. Near the end, his fingers parted, palms still close, to reveal a solid orb of glowing, white-hot bone-steel hovering between them. Shifting his stance, dance-like, twisting and turning his hands from one side to the next, he worked it into a perfectly round orb.

  Once it had cooled enough to hold its shape, Zhan let the heated mass drop into his left palm, tearing a gash in his right with his canines, using the blood to cool it.

  “If you were trying to impress me . . .” Alysaundra teased. But he wasn’t, of course. The Ossuarian did not care for such things. His control over bone metal, the physical need to collect and retain it, so much stronger than even other Bone Finders, had rendered him effectively sterile. As a result, living Aern were of no interest to Zhan in the sorts of ways that might lead one Aern to show off in front of another.

  “No.” Zhan tossed the ball to her, and she felt his hold on the metal even as it flew through the air, only actually releasing his unseen grip on it once she had asserted her own. “But you always impress me, if that is of any consolation. No one could have expected this new turn of events.”

  “The dead rising?” Alysaundra laughed. “No, the idea is ludicrous, or would be if it hadn’t happened. It’s just not the sort of thing Torgrimm would allow: dead people being not, well . . . dead.”

  “Yes,” he nodded. “It concerns me greatly that Kholster permits this, even more so if this has been managed against his will.” Pivoting, Zhan held his already healed palms out to his sides, shifting them closer together, further apart, more one way, then another, until they faced northwest and up. “The missing bone-steel is in flight.”

  “So either the dragon has it—” Alysaundra growled.

  “Or the creature on his back does,” Keeper spoke, its voice deep and reverberating in a way it did not when Zhan occupied it. “Do you think the army is with it?”

  “I know not.” Zhan shrugged, moving to let the warsuit encompass him once more. “But it does not matter. One way or another—”

  Alysaundra smiled beneath Bone Harvest’s helmet. “We come for the bones.”

  Ossuarians know— Zhan’s mind reached out, touching each Bone Finder. —one of the One Hundred has bones in the wind. I suspect we will have to destroy a dragon who is dead yet moves, a dragon at the center of an army of quickened corpses. The Ossuary is at war.

  What did he just say? Bone Harvest asked in Alysaundra’s mind. The Ossuary doesn’t wage war, we—

  The last time it happened you weren’t even a schematic, Alysaundra thought back, but I assure you, in the pursuit of his duty, I can think of very few things Last Bones wouldn’t do if he felt the need. He— A string of commands cut her conversation short, images, instructions, schematics, plans, work assignments . . . not just hers, but how her part related to the whole, its impact, its importance. Zhan was nothing if not thorough.

  *

  Elsewhere, Aern with Zhan’s scars on their backs, many wearing skull-like helms of bone-steel, but all Armored and intent on the retrieval, storage, and protection of bone metal, began moving in ones, twos, and threes. Their paths diverged, a seemingly random scattering, like blood oak seeds at the edge of winter, but all of the Armored Bone Finders, save for the recently stripped and dipped Caz, converged on the Eldren Plains.

  Noiseless and alert, Caz the Silent stood clad in his warsuit, blocking the door to Fort Sunder’s Ossuary, a bone-steel long knife in each hand.

  “You see what Zhan’s doing?” Vander asked one of Kholster. The two stood together in Vander’s version of Aldo’s study. Similar in concept, a library, but one consisting of shelves of bone-steel tiles, each one containing volumes of data. It was open to the elements, lush blue-green grass forming a primitive maze between the tiles, the whole thing surrounded by a low stone railing, allowing one to stand at the edge and look down on the mortal realm below.

  “I do,” Kholster answered, frowning. “But it’s his right. He’s the Ossuarian and the Bone Finders are his. Always have been. I only hope Rae’en notices his deployment strategy in time to take advantage of the situation.”

  “You could always tell her . . .”

  “It’s not my place to do so.” Kholster growled softly at the thought, even though he knew it was the appropriate course of action. “She’ll have to ask him, or he will have to decide to tell her. This is a matter between the Ossuary and the Aernese Army and I, at present, am a part of neither chain of command.”

  Have you decided what you intend to do about that? Vander thought.

  It’s time, Harvester interrupted. I believe they will not turn back from this attempt.

  A moment, Kholster told Vander. I want to pay attention to this.

  Kholster closed his eyes, seeing through those of his warsuit. Harvester stood at the edge of a plane of human paradise. One of the loud ones, but not the loudest. The scent of wood smoke, grilled meats, and other succulent (to humans) aromas. One could find a brawl if one so desired and other more intimate amenities many of the more high-minded of Minapsis’s realms omitted entirely. Marcus Conwrath stood at the edge as well, his notched ear revealing him, even in death, to be a captain in the Hulsite militia. Japesh, bald and blinking, stood a few paces back from the border of the place.

  Kholster wondered how the two spirits could see it. No mark in the grass delineated the point where one dimension became another, but it was there, not at the road but several feet from it, partway up an embankment, where the grass was not more lush than in other places. It was an easy climb even for an inebriated human, or it was for the two human spirits who had dwelt with Kholster since his ascension to godhood.

  A single step took the other Kholster from Vander’s side to Conwrath’s. Kholster’s heavy boots squelched in the wet earth beneath the grass in a way the human’s did not. It wasn’t just the weight of him, the way any Aern weighed almost double that of an equal-sized human, but a reminder Minapsis ruled the next realm, that the horned sister of Kilke was watching.

  “Going?” Kholster asked.

  “We tried it, Grudger,” Japesh spoke up, “but we can’t hang about your realm like this, not without knowing down which trail we’re meant to be hunting.” He took a step, paused, and met Kholster’s eyes. “I don’t wish to cross you, but if I’ve your permission . . .”

  “You have it, Japesh, though you do not requ
ire it,” Kholster said with a nod. “I will not keep you here against your will.”

  Without looking back, the old man clambered up the rise, shedding years and cares as he went. He faded from Kholster’s view as he moved past the border. Kholster sensed he could follow the spirit of the human even there, but he had no reason to do so. Whatever Torgrimm and Minapsis had intended Kholster to learn from the two old soldiers, he had failed to glean. Keeping them about indefinitely seemed selfish and—

  “I’ll stay,” Conwrath offered, “if you think it will help. You once said Torgrimm left us with you to remind you of something, but I’ll be an irkanth’s dinner if I know what it is . . . You seem to have all this Harvester business well hunted, even if you are a little more raw about it than Torgrimm was when he handled both the planting and the reaping of souls.” Marcus looked down at his well-worn boots, moving the grass around with the toe. “Maybe it was the balance that helped him, I don’t know, but I don’t know that he’d handle this Uled creature as well as you would. You’ll put things to right. With or without Japesh and me, but—”

  “Balance.” Kholster laughed, a loud bark that appeared to startle Conwrath despite his ethereal nature. “Thank you, Marcus Conwrath.” Kholster clapped him on the shoulder.

  “For what?”

  “I’d lost sight of the key reason Torgrimm sacrificed a portion of his power.”

  “What was it?” Marcus asked.

  “You may never know.” Kholster reached out to Harvester and made a request he knew the warsuit wouldn’t like. Aloud he asked, “Are you okay with that, Marcus?”

  “I am,” Marcus said, as he scrambled up the hill after his friend. “Good-bye, Kholster.”

  Sir, Harvester intoned, if I may object . . .

  You may, Kholster thought back. You may do anything you want, even refuse my request. You aren’t my slave any more than Bloodmane was.

  Ah. Having been granted the freedom to refuse the request, I find it seems rather petty to do so. But are you quite certain, sir?