“Run.”
Zera started to sprint away, but Kreya hauled her back and they ran toward the tower. Why always toward the tower? Behind them, the unnatural soldiers burst out of the grasses.
“Strength,” Kreya ordered.
Zera passed her the talisman, and Kreya didn’t slow—she bashed shoulder-first into the bent door. It held for an instant and then popped open. They raced in, with the soldiers close behind.
Pivoting, Zera and Kreya slammed the door shut.
“Up,” Kreya said as the soldiers piled against it. The hinges strained and creaked.
“It won’t hold them long.” We’re going to die, Zera thought. And unlike before, if we die here now, no one will know. They won’t know how. They won’t know why. We’ll just be gone, and that’s it. She wished she’d never followed Kreya here. No, she wished she’d never gone to her tower; then she wouldn’t have been facing her nightmares.
“Up quickly,” Kreya said.
They ran up the spiral stairs.
Zera tried not to think about the similarities of this tower to Kreya’s hermit tower and what it could mean. Grime on the walls. Stifling air. Cobwebs. She tried not to touch anything as they ran up, past closed doors.
Behind them, an enormous crash shook the tower—the soldiers had bashed the door down. She heard their claws scrambling on the steps behind them. We’re trapped! This was it. And she hadn’t said goodbye to Guine and . . . No other names came to her mind, but there were plenty in her life she hadn’t said goodbye to.
She’d always planned to die in her bed, with music and wine, with the chatter of people who adored her. She’d planned to be so old that makeup couldn’t fill her wrinkles and so famous that random children would burst into tears at her demise.
With a burst of speed, Kreya and Zera pounded up the remaining steps until they stood at the top of the tower. It had been a library—half the walls still stood, with charred and empty shelves. A tree grew, gnarled, in one corner.
“Kreya?” Zera hated how her voice squeaked. She was supposed to be a professional! Get a grip, Zera, she told herself firmly. They’d been in worse spots than this, hadn’t they? Have we?
Either way, she’d been much younger and much more in shape then.
“Flight,” Kreya ordered.
Yes! Brilliant. The atrocities wouldn’t expect that. Such a power bone hadn’t existed twenty-five years ago. She drew out the talisman and brought it to her lips. But Kreya stopped her.
“On my count. Three . . .”
The soldiers were halfway up.
“Two.”
“Kreya? Now?”
The first of the soldiers burst into the room.
“One!”
Hand in hand, they leaped from the tower, shouted the activation word, and soared over the grasses. All of the soldiers who had poured themselves into the tower and stuffed themselves into the stairs now had to shove their way back out. But those outside sprinted across the grasses.
Soaring above them, Zera thought she heard a familiar sound ringing out.
A laugh that she’d last heard twenty-five years ago. It crept inside her ear, nestled in her brain, and echoed there, the horror of it building inside her. My imagination, Zera thought. But she couldn’t shake it.
Landing, they raced toward the wall, with the inhuman soldiers close behind them. Gaining on them. Her breath scraped her throat as she gasped in air, and she shoved her hand into a pocket, searching for the next speed talisman—and felt nothing.
“We’re out!”
“Keep running,” Kreya panted.
Zera glanced back. Swords out, the soldiers were closing the distance between them. A few had fanned out, to prevent their prey from switching directions. Ahead, she saw the wall—still a mile away, maybe two miles, though now she could make out the outline of the catapults and the guard towers. Her leg muscles burned, and her side seized, but she kept moving.
“Got anything?” Kreya asked.
“Stealth. Steadiness.” They’d used up their speed and strength talismans.
“Got anything useful?”
“No.” She wished she’d brought every talisman she’d ever made. She thought of her storeroom back in her palace at Cerre. She’d intended to bring enough for whatever crisis Kreya faced, but she’d underestimated their enemy.
Or overestimated herself and Kreya.
We’re not going to make it, she thought.
But then—“They’re falling back!” Kreya cried.
She glanced again and saw she was right: the soldiers had slowed. But why? Zera allowed herself to slow, catching her breath, and Kreya caught her arm. “Stealth to pass the wall,” Kreya said. “We don’t rest until we’re on the other side.”
“Right. No rest until we’re safely with the deadly monsters.”
“Exactly,” Kreya said, but there was hope in her voice now, and Zera felt hope course through her too. Maybe they would get out of here alive.
Still, she kept hearing Eklor’s laugh, mocking impossibly in her mind.
Chapter Eight
Keeping the pack of human bones close beside her, Kreya bore down on a chunk of river lizard bone with her knife, carving as fast as she could, as the crawler carried them into the valley. She heard the deer scatter in between the trees and the birds take to the sky, and she hoped the monsters hadn’t noticed them yet.
At least the unnatural soldiers hadn’t followed them to the wall.
He wouldn’t have risked allowing the guards on the wall to see his creations. They’d halted a few miles from the border, to protect the secret of their existence. That’s why we were able to escape them, Kreya thought. The only reason.
“You know I am right,” Kreya said, not looking up from her work. Any second, the river lizards and other predators would begin hunting them. She had to carve quickly.
“I know no such thing.”
“He lives.”
“How? Who would bring him back? Even if someone else miraculously discovered the same secret you did, who would do it? Why would any bone maker want him to live again? He tried to destroy them all, remember?”
Kreya had no idea. And Zera didn’t even know the cost of the resurrection spell. If she did, Kreya was sure she’d agree there was no bone maker who would pay that price—the years of their own life—for Eklor. Blowing on the bone, Kreya cleared bone dust from a groove and continued carving.
“It’s not as if he could have resurrected himself,” Zera continued. “That would be technically difficult, I’d think.”
“If he somehow cast the spell on himself before he expired . . .” Theoretically, she supposed the spell could be adapted to heal oneself using one’s own future, or to be precise, the future one would have had if one’s life hadn’t been shortened by violence . . . but even if such a thing could be done, she’d witnessed his death; he’d been choked by a construct she’d made. There had been no time for him to save himself. He’d had no breath to utter the words.
Could his apprentice have done it? No, she couldn’t believe that explanation either. Even if Eklor had shared his most secret knowledge, which would have been highly uncharacteristic of him, the boy hadn’t been anywhere near the tower at the time of Eklor’s defeat. When he’d been captured, the boy had said Eklor had ordered him away the night before the battle. And he couldn’t have come back to do it later.
Not after what the people of Cerre did to him.
“Marso confirmed Eklor’s death both to us and to Grand Master Lorn,” Zera said. “He never misreads the bones.”
She knew that. But she knew what she’d seen on the plain: fully functional constructs, made in Eklor’s signature style, patrolling his former home.
“Eklor is dead and never coming back,” Zera said. “Those atrocities were remnants, that’s all. He was the most powerful bone maker who’s ever lived. Surely, his creations could have outlasted him.”
You have to admit it’s possible, she told herself. And mu
ch more likely than the alternative.
As badly as she hated him, she knew Eklor had been a genius. He could have found a way to extend the lives of his monstrosities. He could have intended for his soldiers to outlast him, to torment his enemies, for decades.
Yes, that had to be the explanation. Eklor was of course dead. She’d let paranoia get the better of her. “You’re right. Of course you’re right.” Finishing the carving, she began installing it in the floor of the crawler, between their feet.
“Obviously.”
“His creations still need to be destroyed,” Kreya said. Such dangerous abominations couldn’t be allowed to roam the plains. They dishonored the dead by their very existence. They should have been purged from the world after Eklor’s death—the guild should have seen to it. “And I swore to you I’d burn those bones.”
“Exactly what do you want to do? Take them on just the two of us? Or, ooh, visit Guild Master Lorn and say, hey, we were just out for a picnic in the forbidden zone and noticed—” She broke off as a river lizard roared.
Nearby, another answered.
Glancing up, Kreya saw the canopy of trees quiver above them as a hundred tiny birds and tree mice fled. “Raca,” she ordered the crawler, and then tightened the bolts holding the bone in position.
“Or were you thinking more of an anonymous note?” Zera continued. “Because those are always well received.” She shook her head. “No, we should just forget about what we saw.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’m the only one being serious. They’re doing no harm.” Zera held up one hand while clinging to the crawler with the other. “Hear me out: They’re beyond the wall and obviously haven’t even come close enough for the guards to notice them. They’re not going near any populated area. All they’re doing is roaming an area inhabited purely by the dead. Let them roam. Eventually, in a year or a decade or whenever, their power will fade, and that will be it. No one will even know they outlived their maker.”
The idea of leaving those monstrosities free . . . “They’re designed to kill. They should be destroyed. An innocent person could—”
“Literally no one innocent will ever be in the forbidden zone. Honestly, those atrocities are a better deterrent than the guards on the wall. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Grand Master Lorn knew about them and left them alone to take care of trespassers.”
Kreya opened her mouth and shut it. Knowing Lorn, it wasn’t impossible. He could have decided it was an effective deterrent. “So we tell no one?”
“Well, you can tell Jentt when we get there.” Patting the pack of human bones, Zera beamed at her with a sparkling smile, and then she waved airily behind them. “You know, assuming we outrun whatever herd of river lizards wants us for breakfast.”
Shooting her a look, Kreya allowed herself to smile. She gestured at the newly installed lizard bone, now carved with steadiness symbols. “How about we just outclimb them?”
“Ooh, you finished! Will it work?”
Valid question. This wasn’t the traditional use of the animal, but Kreya had a few tricks up her sleeve for adapting bones. She hadn’t just been pining over Jentt for the past twenty-five years. “Do you trust me?”
“I know you want me to say ‘with my life,’ but in the interest of complete honesty, I’m going to have to go with ‘sometimes.’”
Leaning over, Kreya activated it.
The crawler pivoted sharply and made its way toward the cliff that hemmed in the valley. They tilted backward as it began to climb.
“Yikes, that’s unsettling,” Zera said. It jerked as it slipped, then caught itself. “Or terrifying. Your choice.” She braced herself, clinging to the log bench.
“Hold on,” Kreya said.
“Really? That’s the extent of your advice?”
“Hold on tightly.” But she passed Zera a rope before tying herself to the crawler, a makeshift seat belt. Muttering to herself, Zera looped the rope around a bar and knotted it around her waist. The crawler continued to climb steadily upward.
As they left the valley behind, Kreya heard the river lizards below them howl their dismay. She didn’t look back. “It works.”
“I love you.”
“You know my heart belongs to a dead man.” But Kreya couldn’t stop smiling. Soon, she’d be with Jentt again, and they’d have another chance at the future they were supposed to have. And it was thanks to Zera and her talismans and a friendship regained.
“That is both sweet and deeply disturbing,” Zera said.
Kreya felt as giddy as a ten-year-old who knew she was about to be given the present she’d desperately wanted—in her case, at age ten, that dream gift had been a collection of marmot bones. Unusual, yes, but it was what any budding bone worker would have wanted. And the gift had meant even more than that: when her aunts gave her that skeleton, she knew they were saying they approved of her dream.
Becoming a bone worker was one of the only choices available for a smart kid from a mining village. Her mother had been adamant that Kreya wouldn’t waste her life within the heart of the mountains, and when her mother was killed in a cave-in, Kreya swore she wouldn’t disappoint her. So she’d asked for a marmot skeleton, and her aunts had delivered. Aunt Lirra had trapped the marmot, prepared the bones, and gifted them to Kreya on her birthday, wrapped in leaves Aunt Neen had painted with pictures of woodland creatures. Later, they’d pooled every bit of gold they had to buy her an apprenticeship in the Bone Workers Guild. But it was that first moment—that gift—that she was most grateful for.
This felt like that day.
It even involves a skeleton, she thought.
She was grinning as she and Zera rode the crawler out of the pine forest into the clearing of her tower. And then she felt as if her face, her blood, her every thought had frozen inside her as she looked at her ruined home.
Charred and blackened, the broken door lay strewn in pieces on the moss. The window shutters had been burned away, and the windows were shrouded in shadows. The roof was gone, also burned.
“Fuck,” Zera whispered.
“Jentt!” Kreya flung herself off the crawler and half-ran, half-stumbled toward the tower. All she saw was the window of the bedroom, dark above her.
“Kreya, come back! Whoever did this could still be here!”
But she already knew who had done this. The villagers of Eren. They must have been searching for her ever since that girl’s funeral. She should have known they wouldn’t have given up. She should have moved Jentt into one of the caves. She should have left stronger constructs to protect him. She should have taken him with her, or been here with him, or . . .
“Jentt!”
She knew he couldn’t hear her, but she couldn’t help screaming his name.
Racing into the tower, she ran up the steps. The stone was cold to the touch—the flames must have died down hours, even days, ago. Only the stench of smoke still lingered in the air. She tasted the bitter tang as it coated the tongue.
A few steps up, she found the cleaning construct. Its bones and gears had been broken, as if it had been stomped on, and it too had burned. It lay on its smooth step, motionless. “I’m sorry.” She was crying now, hard enough that it was difficult to see, and she slowed so she wouldn’t trip and fall.
Zera’s voice drifted up from the base of the tower. “Kreya?”
Kreya stopped in front of the door to the bedroom, or what was left of the door. It had been hacked with an ax, either before or after the fire. She touched the splinters, lightly, as if they were hallucinations that would, she hoped, vanish when they encountered reality.
But it was real. And she didn’t want to see it.
She felt as if she’d been hollowed out with a spoon. It was difficult to breathe; every breath she took rattled around inside of her.
Footsteps behind her.
And then Zera’s hand was on her shoulder. “I’ll go in with you. Or for you. Do you want me to go in first? I can do t
hat.”
It was a kind offer, especially since Kreya knew how badly Zera did not want to enter that room. She tried to smile, to show she appreciated the words, but her face felt brittle.
“Are we positive our friendly neighborhood arsonists are gone?” Zera asked. “If I were them, I would have kept an eye on the tower, in case you returned.”
“If they’re here, they’ll wish they weren’t.” Kreya pushed the door open. It stuck, creaking, and she shoved harder. Ash rained down on her shoulders. She blinked it out of her eyes.
Sunlight streamed in through the unshuttered window in a way that Jentt would have loved. She made her eyes shift from the window to the burnt bed—
The burnt, empty bed.
“They took him.”
Kreya pivoted, striding back to the stairs, but before she could take more than a step out of the bedroom, Zera caught her arm. “Who took him? Where are you going? You can’t go rushing off—”
“The villagers. The last ones I stole from. It must have been them.” They’d taken him, presumably to burn him on a pyre and hoist his ashes onto their cliff. “I need a speed talisman.”
“A, we don’t have any left. And B, I’m not going to let you race off and get yourself killed because you—”
“They’ll destroy him! I can’t bring him back from ashes! Give me a talisman!”
“I don’t have a talisman! Kreya—stop. Think.”
Sucking in air, she prepared to yell, and then she deflated. With the amount of time that had passed, Jentt had to be already gone. It was a lost cause. She’d returned too late.
“I’m not saying don’t go after them and kick their asses, but plan first. Please. Or you’ll be on the pyre too.” Zera unloaded several talismans, shifting them from her pockets to Kreya’s. She didn’t know how useful they’d be—one for steadiness, another for flight. “Take these. Use whatever you need. I’ll be right behind you. Just . . . please, one second to think, okay?”
Kreya heard a whirring from the stairwell. Faint. Familiar. She pushed past Zera, homing in on it. She stepped past the crushed cleaning construct and down to the entrance.
The Bone Maker Page 11
