Enemy (On the Bones of Gods Book 1)

by K. Eason

  Don’t think that. Just don’t.

  Snow jabbed again, into the gap between ribs. Drew down hard and fast. For a moment the blood gushed, uncontrolled, drowning the wound rot in its bright copper tang. Two more scores, long across the ribs, so that the skin would yield. And then Snow reached into the slits, one side and then the other, and peeled the ribs away from spine. Stretched them sideways, so that they looked like obscene wings. Blood pooled in the body cavity, spilled out around her boots. Ehkla shuddered hard and stopped moving. Not dead, no, not yet. See her lungs in there, fluttering.

  The room congealed into stillness. The candles stood up, rigid and frozen and weakly white. The glyphs on the wall stopped wriggling. The light had gone almost totally violet now. She could feel that power, that waiting.

  Snow shifted the tooth to her right hand. Reached, carefully, into Ehkla, drew out her lungs and laid them on her shoulder blades. Had to balance the right one when it wanted to slip off the shattered ends of bone.

  A body couldn’t live like that. Not long. Ehkla didn’t surprise her. One more quiver, and she died. Snow felt it, knew it, with a chirurgeon’s certainty.

  The wurm’s tooth crumbled. Dust and ashes sifted through her fingers.

  The glyphs glowed brighter than the candles. The blood did, changing from red to purple, running into all the corners and up the walls.

  On the floor, Ehkla’s peeled-back ribs flexed. Stretched. Changed. The ruined right shoulder smoothed out as the rib-wings stretched wide as Snow’s fingers, then wider as the bones grew and stretched.

  Snow stood up. Retreated toward the door, as what had been Ehkla writhed on the floor. Shadows sprouted out of Ehkla’s back, strung themselves across bone, making wings. A coiled shadow between her legs that might be a tail. The avatar—that’s what it was, yeah, on its way to becoming a toadfucking dragon—turned its head and looked at her, one-eyed.

  “Snowdenaelikk,” it said, and the air itself creaked like old boards under too much strain. Ehkla’s voice, bent and raw, as if the throat couldn’t quite hold the syllables. Her neck stretched and uncoiled, raising a face that was still recognizably Ehkla—if Ehkla’s remaining eye was orange, sure, with two black-slit pupils—level with Snow’s own.

  Snow bared her teeth. “Tal’Shik,” she said. “Time to keep your bargain, yeah? Let me go.”

  “Sssssss.” The jaw that had been Ehkla’s unhinged, dangling loose, held only by flesh. A tongue curled from the mouth, thick and pointed and absurdly pink between teeth that were growing, curving into weapons. Laughing at her, maybe. Or imagining how she’d taste.

  Snow retreated another step, two, put her back against the door. The wards were still in place. She touched them and felt burning all over her skin, nausea, her flesh grown too small and too tight. They’d kill her if she forced them.

  So she was trapped in here, because Tal’Shik wasn’t going to drop them. Let Snow go, sure, those were the terms, but Snow hadn’t asked let down the wards. She’d said, Whatever happens, you don’t come after me. And whatever was the wards still up, and Tal’Shik laughing, growing, spreading, a shapeless, boiling violet that matched the glyphs. Against that light, the candles cringed.

  Fuck and damn if she’d wait here to die.

  Snow took a bite of breath and reached her wounded hand toward the candles. Fire was the apprentice’s first friend, yeah, and she was well past apprentice. She crooked her fingers, then flexed them long. The fire fled the candlewicks. Streamed across the open space gap like it had when she’d burned the ropes; only, this time it skipped past her flesh and coiled under the skin of her hands, binding itself to her bones.

  Hold that hand still, go fast. She flexed her other wrist. Conjuring wasn’t godmagic, bound by blood and bargains. Conjuring relied on talent and skill, on whole hands and whole wits.

  And luck. Maybe that.

  She drew power from the pattern of wooden beams crossing the ceiling, from hearthstones, from planks under cracked plaster walls. Bright lines that she gathered together and held, just so, in one cupped hand. The patterns skeined between her fingers, visible to a conjuror’s eyes.

  What is shaped once can be reshaped.

  Pressure built behind her eyes, an ache worse than any sending of Briel’s, like the first threat of backlash. The walls trembled. The ceiling beams moaned. Plaster sifted down, fine as flour. She couldn’t quite hold the power, one-handed. The fire strained her other hand, throbbing through bone and tendon, raising fine blisters on the finger along the bone’s broken seam. To reshape a thing—wood, stone, fire—a conjuror needed perfect control, hands and mind together. But to unmake. Well.

  “I’ll let myself out,” she told Tal’Shik. “You stay there.”

  Then Snow slammed her hands together, twining her fingers, never mind the white shock of broken bone. The skeins of timber and stone tangled together. Knotted. Then Snow tore them apart, ripping her fingers away from each other, loosing that power. Let herself yell as the finger bone grated. The walls fluttered like lungs—strained against the wards—and burst outward, taking with them the door and the wards on the lintel.

  Snow sprang for the hallway. For a moment the ceiling remained intact behind her, sagging over Tal’Shik. Then it came down, a burst of floorboards and plaster and the stone from the hearth in the room above.

  Tal’Shik howled.

  Snow paused then, looked back: a pile of debris where the room had been, violet godmagic oozing through the cracks. A bubbling snarl that said living avatar and angry dragon and be somewhere else.

  In a toadfucked heartbeat, yeah. But first.

  Snow stretched her broken left hand back to the rubble. Turned the palm open and up and released the fire. It spilled out of her bones, rushing through flesh too fast to burn it. Raced along the walls, the floors.

  Burn, Snow wished it. Burn.

  Which was all fire ever wanted. It surged across the debris, across the violet shadows, up the ruined walls. Found old wood, burst to kindling, and roared as loud as Tal’Shik.

  Then she ran.

  The whole house was glowing. Swollen, its walls bowing out and splitting at the seams. Fingers of light reached up toward the sky, spearpoint violet stabbing into the clouds. A section of thatch sluiced off the roof. Then another. But there was honest fire in that mix, too, flame reaching through the seams, catching on the thatch. Something howling inside, something huge, in rage or pain or both.

  Dek tried Teslin’s grip. “Snow,” she said. “Snow’s in there.”

  No, said Teslin. Dek, no.

  And then, there: a shape staggered out of the alley, a pale smudge of hair. Snow stopped in the street, half a breath, steadied and came right at them.

  “Got to go, Szanys. Let’s move.” Following her own advice, no stopping.

  Dek shot her hand out. Caught a fistful of sleeve and wrenched. “Where’s Ehkla?”

  “Gone,” Snow said shortly. “We want to be somewhere else, yeah?”

  “Dammit, Snow!” as the other woman pulled loose and swept past her.

  What’s got into her? Barkett wore the scowl that meant something’s happened I don’t understand.

  “Don’t argue with Snow,” said Istel. “If she’s scared, you should be.” And went after her, steady legion trot, as if Snow wore the rank.

  Nothing to do but follow Istel, with the ghosts beside her. Down the street, as if they hadn’t left a house on fire behind them, glowing. As if half those flames weren’t purple and Ehkla wasn’t back there.

  The sky chose that moment to split. Lightning sheeted across it, followed by waves of thunder that rendered the world temporarily deaf. Then rain that made the earlier storm seem like morning mist.

  Dekklis sped up. Easier to run downhill, to catch up with her partner and the motherless half-blood at the next intersection. They had their shoulders together against the rain, some murmured exchange that couldn’t get through the storm and the pounding behind Dek’s eyes. A witchfire hung over
Snow’s head like her personal lantern. Water streamed down her face, soaked her topknot to rattails. She leaned close to Istel. Opened her mouth while Istel pulled the spare sword, naked, off his belt and passed it to her.

  Briel shrieked, and Dek felt her panic like a kick to the chest.

  Then Snow was spinning to face

  nothing there

  the shadows collected at the border of witchfire. And not shadows, no, not just: a Dvergir man stepping out of them. Trick of the light, must be, that his eyes looked like live flames.

  But the seax in his hand wasn’t a trick or imagining. Illhari black steel, Snow’s own weapon. Snow managed to catch his cut on the flat of her borrowed legion blade. They stared at each other as the metal scraped and stuck. Shock, recognition, spread across the half-blood’s face like fire in oil. Her lips shaped a word, a name, a prayer.

  The man reversed the blade, made a sweeping cut toward Snow’s face. Less graceful than before, less focused. Snow caught it again, this time edge on edge. Held him there for a heartbeat while he leaned into the crossed blades and shoved. Snow skidded backward in the mudslick streets. A moment’s recovery, to get both feet solid under her. Only a moment.

  Forever, in a fight.

  He chopped the blade crossways at her neck, his full weight behind the stroke. Should have killed her, would have, if he’d connected. But Istel was there suddenly, surging out of the rain, reaching around to swat the attacker’s blade. Not a perfect deflection, just enough to knock the strike aside; and then Istel reversed his grip on the sword and punched it through the man’s chest.

  The stranger’s fire-eyes got very wide. Flames—they were, fuck and damn, real fire—flared up. His mouth rounded. Blood gushed between his teeth. A normal man would’ve clutched at the wound. Would’ve stared at it, and understood he’d just died, and waited for his body to catch up to that realization. Not this one, no, he dropped his sword and thrust his empty hand out and flat-palmed Snow in the chest as if he meant to tear out her heart.

  An instant’s white daylight as lightning cracked across the sky. Briel arrowing toward them, caught motionless. Teslin and Barkett washed almost invisible. Then the storm-dark crashed in again, crowding in on the witchfire’s borders.

  The stranger’s body slid off Istel’s sword. Snow dropped to her knees.

  The witchfire abruptly went out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Veiko stood on the riverbank and looked at the empty skies. At the flat grey where there had been swirling dark. At the empty air where the sigils had burned a moment ago. The wurm—Tal’Shik—was simply gone.

  He was grateful for that. But he wondered where she’d gone. Worried what her disappearance meant for his partner.

  Helgi oofed. Poked his nose hard into Veiko’s thigh. Did it a second time, harder, and a third, until Veiko looked down at him. Then Helgi nipped his breeches and tugged.

  Follow me, that meant. All right. Veiko shifted his grip on the axe. Held his breath against the pain he knew was coming—and realized, belatedly, that there was no pain. No heat when he ran his palm across his thigh. It was as if Ehkla had never marked him.

  He wondered what had happened to break Ehkla’s power. Imagined the answer might have midnight eyes and a talent for violence. But that did not tell him where Tal’Shik was. She had been coming. The sky over the forest had been—

  He blinked. The forest was gone. It was hillsides now, across the black river. Striped bands of white-and-grey stone jutting up out of the earth at angles. Barren, blasted, with a scatter of warped trees clinging among the crevasses. It was more desolate even than the glacier. No spirits, except the weary trees. Even the sky seemed dimmer. Greyer. A slow fade to twilight in a dull iron sky.

  Helgi yipped. Pranced toward the black river and circled back. A slender tributary joined the black river here, trickling out of that barren land. It twisted through the boulders, originating from a massive gash of warped and jagged stones, like a mouthful of broken teeth. The cave opening stretched as tall as Still Waters, gaped wider than an Illhari road. Solid black maw that swallowed the light and the river.

  Then Veiko realized where he must be. What souls swam out of that cavern. He wondered if this was what Kenjak had seen first when he died. If this was where Teslin and Barkett had come from when he called them back. He might ask them next time. He could do that. He’d gotten very good at speaking to the dead.

  Veiko’s chest hurt very much, of a sudden. He breathed past it. Grief was a luxury, and it was too soon for mourning. He would not be here, on this bank, if it were otherwise. Helgi was hunting a woman’s soul, not a ghost.

  The river was narrow here. Veiko stepped over it. Helgi’s paws kicked up dust on the path, little clouds that hung for a moment before they settled again. Moving with speed, but not urgency, toward the cavern.

  Take that for a comfort, and follow him.

  Snowdenaelikk was drowning. She wasn’t afraid, although she thought she should be. She remembered the Laughing God in the Warren, wearing Tsabrak like a pair of old boots, and how he’d come at her with her own fucking blade. She remembered a red wedge of steel coming out of Tsabrak’s chest, with Istel on the other end of it. She remembered a moment’s relief before the God had reached for her. And then she remembered the tearing pain in her chest when he touched her, and thinking that must’ve been what Ehkla had felt, that was dying.

  This—this didn’t hurt. Cold. Dark. But easy. Let it go and slip away, no effort at all. No fretting whether her conjuring had been enough to kill an avatar, or if she’d loosed Tal’Shik on the world. No matter. Let it be someone else’s problem.

  Except that someone else would be Veiko. Would be Dekklis, and Istel, and the whole fucking Republic.

  Snow struck out with both hands. Bumped something in the dark that slipped her grip when she tried to grab on to it. She kicked herself toward it, reached again.

  A hand grabbed a fistful of her hair. Dragged her—some direction, fuck and damn, couldn’t tell up from down. She flailed at it. Got hold of a wrist, intercepted a second hand that seized on to hers. Then she was sliding up through water, then into air—then landing, hard, on what felt like wet stone.

  It was either dark or she was blind, didn’t matter, hack and choke and vomit up water that burned her throat with its cold.

  Black water, black rock, black.

  She closed her eyes. Didn’t change anything. Opened them again. Called up a witchfire without thinking at all, wished it there and it was without even a shiver of backlash. Conjuring that clean only happened Below, and she was leagues from a decent cavern, so where had the God sent her? And then she cupped the witchfire between her two hands and looked at the man who’d saved her.

  Oh fuck and damn. Not Below at all. “K’Hess Kenjak.”

  Must’ve been the look on her face that made him smile. Showed her the boy he might’ve been when he wasn’t in a legionnaire’s uniform and trying to kill her. His hands, she saw, were wet. “It’s all right, half-blood. I pulled you out of the river.”

  The river. Which river? The witchfire showed her black water, a liquid mirror winding slowly between the rocks. She thought she saw movement under the surface. Dvergiri faces, pushing up through the water. Dead faces, grey skinned, with wide mouths and blank eyes. She thought she might see Tsabrak among them and looked away fast.

  That river. Veiko’s river. Admit a little fear now. Keep it out of her voice. “Am I dead?”

  “You are.” Kenjak shrugged. “And you’re not. I don’t know how it works. Ask your skraeling.”

  “Love to. You know where he is?”

  Frowning now, and older than she remembered him. “Last I saw, waiting for Tal’Shik. He sent me away. Sent me to you.”

  “That would be my next question. Why?”

  “To pay my debt. I owe you a life.”

  “How did Veiko know I’d end up here?”

  Kenjak snorted. “He thought you might do something—what did he
say? Foolish. And here you are.”

  “Right.” A dead woman’s heart wouldn’t beat this hard, would it? A dead woman’s throat wouldn’t hurt every time she breathed. “Is he all right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know much, yeah?”

  “I know you’re trapped in here.” Kenjak pointed into the dark. “The black river runs that way. That’s the way out, but there’s something blocking the path. Or someone.”

  She raised the witchfire, marked the steepness of the path. The narrowness of it. Pulled her feet under her and stood up. Take it slow. A dead woman’s knees wouldn’t shake like this. Concentrate on the slick, black rocks, on keeping her feet underneath her. Not much different than walking a wall, was it? Slip and die. Simple rules. So don’t slip. And don’t ask if she could die here. Again.

  “That isn’t smart.” Kenjak hadn’t moved. Sat where she’d left him, with the river lapping up over the toes of his boots. “You have no guide, half-blood. You have no idea what you’re doing, or who you might meet at the top. Veiko will come. Alive or dead, he’ll come for you.”

  “Oh, I have a good idea who’s up there.” Same one responsible for putting her here, yeah. Motherless Laughing God. And Veiko would walk right into him. “I’ll find my way.”

  Ask what a ghost thought of

  stupidity

  honor in a half-blood heretic. Ask what he thought about loyalty. Ask if he thought she’d lost her wits in the river, probably, from the look he gave her.

  “Then I wish you luck, half-blood. Better than I had.”

  Helgi stopped, stiff-legged, all the fur on his spine ridged. Shadows spilled out of the cave mouth like blood, leaking and spreading along the path and stones. Oozing toward Veiko, living black.

  “The shadows are a child’s trick,” said Veiko loudly. “Any Dvergir can do it.”

  The shadows stopped. And grew, suddenly, gathering themselves into a man’s shape. Vague outline, then hard edges. Turning into the God, whose smile was hard beneath those twin fire eyes.