The Bonedust Dolls

by Unknown

  I sat back, looking to the concerned faces above me. "I'm sorry. He is dead."

  "I'll be the judge of that," snapped Byanka. She hunched down, removing her compact from her sealskin muff. She popped it open with a thumbnail and held the mirror before his mouth, examining it for breath. Then she held it before his dead staring eyes and examined it again. She checked his pulse.

  "The alchemist spoke correctly," she told her grandchildren. "Your playmate is dead. But there may still be time. What would you sacrifice to save him?"

  The brother and sister's lapis eyes exchanged frightened looks.

  Valya spoke first. "I would give my mother's ring." She held forth her right hand upon which sparkled a beautiful diamond heart.

  Byanka nodded. "And you?" she asked her grandson.

  "Anything," Kyevgeny begged. "Everything. Whatever I-"

  Her palm struck his cheek with a resounding slap. "Foolish boy! Never promise such a thing! You never know to whom you might be speaking! Be thankful it was your grandmother who heard your rash offer-but all I will take from you are your secrets. I will have the whole truth, all of it-no lies , no omis sions, no deceptions. Swear it! By powers we both will respect!"

  "I swear it by the Three Riders, and by our ancestor Queen Morgannan, who walks the worlds forever with Baba Yaga."

  Byanka nodded, then placed her fingertip on Kyevgeny's lips. "I will have your truth later. For now we must gather Holgrim's soul while it is still close." She pointed to Orlin. "You, witch child-you have a familiar spirit. Can you see souls ?"

  "No," Orlin admitted, "I only smell them, sometimes. But Norret can spot them with his monocle."

  I swapped the relevant lenses. "On it."

  I looked about the theater. I could see the brightness of my own aura and the nimbus of light around Byanka and the others, the smaller aureoles around the familiars and dolls, and the glows around the spiders-not dead, only paralyzed.

  Holgrim's body had no aura. It was only meat.

  Rhodel waved frantically, pointing near the boy's head. I looked, seeing nothing out of the ordinary.

  Then I saw it-a tiny mote oflight, dancing like a moth in the lantern-light. It was already fading, the last vestiges of the mostly departed soul detaching from his body.

  "He's here," I said. "But fading."

  "Quickly," ordered Byanka. "Give me the lantern and the ring. There's little time left."

  I placed my bullseye lantern on the floor before her as Valya handed her the ring. Byanka placed it on the ring finger of her left hand, the heart worn inward toward her palm. She placed her compact on the floor, angled so it reflected the beam to the diamond.

  She turned the lantern's knob, adjusting the wick. The light dimmed. She began to chant.

  "Blood to Blood and Bone to Bone,

  Eye to Eye and Heart to Heart

  By these Four, Ensoul this Stone!

  By these Four, I Bind my Art! "

  Byanka produced a penknife and nicked her ring finger, the one whose vein ran to the heart. Heart's blood dripped onto the diamond. She lay the tip of her ivory walking stick against it. A tear splashed down from her cheek, intermingling.

  She reached out and turned the lantern's knob.

  A final flash burst from the lens, drawing the tiny soul fragment toward it like a leaf being drawn along in a stream's current. Holgrim flew into the diamond. Byanka closed her fist.

  The witch let out a long breath, her shoulders slumping, as if exhausted by a great effort. She opened her hand again.

  Valya's diamond shone with a beautiful light. It radiated out of the facets , and in the lens of my monocle, it seemed to proj ect a dozen spectral images of Holgrim. One looked kind. Another proud. A third wary. A fourth mischievous. Happy, sad, confused-all facets that might make up a boy's life.

  "We've saved as much as we can," Byanka said. "Most of him has gone on. But we have enough."

  "What about the spiders?" asked Tinka, hugging close to Orlin.

  " Spiders tend to hole up when it gets cold," my brother said. "Could we just open the windows?"

  Byanka looked to me. "Would that work?"

  "In theory," I said. "You'd need to have someone hunt them down while they're torpid."

  "We can do it!" Emilie pressed her cool porcelain cheek against mine. "Dolls don't get cold!"

  Fires were doused. Windows were opened. The Ivory Tower very quickly became as cold as the air outside, far below freezing, for the sun had now set on Whitethrone.

  The mortal staff was sent to Morgannan Abbey for the night. The dolls, except for a few favorites, went off to hunt spiders and egg sacks while we retreated to Byanka's private attic.

  The layout was much like the round gallery where we had first been, with the same placement of windows and fireplaces, but in the center stood a firepit with a great copper cauldron of ancient design, burnished to brilliance. The now familiar "M" sigil of the Morgannan clan was hammered around the rim, and four cracked, smoke-blackened tusks served as its tripod.

  Kyevgeny sat on the edge ofthe firepit and sobbed. "It was Poskarl's idea," he moaned. "I had the cloak and slippers from the jorogumo ladies, but the scarlet spiders they sent were just like the rabbits-none of them wanted to be my familiar. But Poskarl bought an egg sack for dream spiders and said we could get rich. They were easy to raise-I gave them storybook pages to line their nests and they liked puppet shows-but they grew so big and so hungry! They ate all the geese! And now they've eaten Holgrim!"

  "And you were doing all this to make drugs," Byanka concluded. Her face was cold, as hard and pale as the ivory lining the walls.

  Kyevgeny nodded. "They were so expensive! Poskarl already ran through all his pocket money and every bit of credit the Elvanna name can buy. He said the recipe was supposed to be simple: just spider venom, webs, water, and alcohol boiled together."

  "Kyevgeny always has been good at mixing things," Valya offered in defense ofher brother.

  "Some brews are more difficult than others, my dear," her grandmother said, then asked me, "Have you made sense ofanything yet?"

  I was looking through Kyevgeny's notes. Witches may not need spellbooks and formularies, but I knew the scribblings of an amateur alchemist when I saw one. There was some brilliant work here, the youth having tried experiment after experiment to create shiver. Properly brewed, the drug was a potent narcotic that knocked the imbiber into a hypnagogic trance. It was also exceedingly addictive.

  Kyevgeny had failed to create it, but in the process had made some marvelous alchemical discoveries, including a formula for hallucinogenic gas and notes on the illusory effect of combining a homeopathic dose of venom in cocoa while listening to a storyteller and looking at shadows projected on a screen woven from dream spider webs.

  I looked at his huge hands. "How did you weave the silk?"

  Kyevgeny looked stricken, then Madenya spoke up. "I did that." We all looked at Valya's doll. "He asked me. There's nothing I wouldn't do for my sweet children."

  The fervency with which she said it made me pause. Then I had an epiphany. "You're their mother."

  Madenya's mouth fell open, but she was mute. Her porcelain head turned toward Byanka.

  Valya's head turned as well. "Grandmother!" she gasped. "You captured her soul-shard for a doll, then forbade her to ever tell us?"

  It was Byanka's turn to look stricken. "I-I was waiting until you were the right age."

  I looked at Klaufi, the toy barbarian who sat next to Kyevgeny like a bodyguard. 'Tm gues sing that Klaufi is their father."

  "No," said Kyevgeny, "our father is in the Iron Guard. We seldom hear from him, but he still lives."

  "No," corrected Valya, "my father still lives."

  Kyevgeny stared.

  His sister explained, "Your father was Kurteis, mother's bodyguard, who was once father's whipping boy. You have his hair and his height. I heard them quarrel when you were three and I was six. Father left. I never saw Kurteis again." She looked to h
er grandmother. "You gave Klaufi to Kyevgeny not a week later."

  "It's true," said Byanka stiffly. "I made Klaufi with a shard from Kurteis's soul. It was a tattered, divided thing, but stronger for all that. Your father did not deserve his loyalty. You children did." She looked grim. "You are Morgannans."

  She held up her hand, the diamond heart glowing against her fingers. "I captured part of Holgrim's soul. He was a good boy and did not deserve his death, but we can give him new life. It is high time you both learned the secrets of the family business." She looked at me. "The duke already knows many of them. His brother is his blood." Her eyes flicked to Tinka. "Whipping child, do you know how to play towers?"

  Tinka shook her head, eyes wide.

  "Then it is time you learned. Baba Alechka can teach you. Klaufi and Madenya? You should play as well."

  "Come with us, child," said the babushka doll who had spoken earlier on the stairs. "I will be your partner." She pointed a walnut- spotted porcelain hand toward a low game table checkered with ivory and black horn and set round with cushions, Katapeshi-style. A stack of gilt edged ivory harrow placards waited beside pawns and other game pieces.

  Tinka went hesitantly, but soon was sitting on the pillows as Klaufi shuffled the deck and Baba Alechka explained the rules.

  Byanka turned to me. "Do you have any questions, 'Norret Gantier'?"

  I thought. "You are going to make what's left of Holgrim into a doll." This was not a question but a statement. "His hair into a wig, his bones ground and mixed with the clay, his blood and flesh mixed with some of the glazes, yes?" My last word met with no answer, simply icy silence. "When you made Emilie fifty years ago, what did you add to the clay? I believe I left Irrisen with all my bones."

  "Think. Don't you remember, Duke Devore?"

  I thought of what I knew of Dabril's duke, what I had read in his formulary. The mascot of House Devore was Patapouf, the unicorn who had saved my hometown of Dabril by killing Coco the cockatrice, but had been petrified in the process. Most adults as sumed the story was entirely mythological-and certainly it had become a ribald favorite over countless generations ofretellings. Yet the jewel in my glove matched the one said to grow from the base of Patapouf's horn, and I had found fragments of alicorn in the duchess's laboratory as well.

  "Unicorn ivory," I said.

  "A marvelously useful substance," Byanka agreed, "but for one descended from the unicorn? Well, the marrow holds the blood, the blood holds the soul." She reached out and tugged the stubble of hair on my chin, which would be an impressive goatee if I let it grow.

  Lately it had been getting more impressive still.

  "'You can always tell a man of Dabril by his beard.' That's what you said." She reached to my glove and stroked the silky fringe.

  I put my hand to my chin, stroking it on reflex, realizing that the posture placed the fringe where my beard would go. Patapouf's beard.

  Could I actually be related to Duke Devore? Moreover, could I be related to the town's patron unicorn-the living product of risque tavern tales? Or was it simply that Arjan Devore had placed a fragment of his soul in the glove's gem, which in turn, by the laws of sympathetic magic, bore a trace of the unicorn's soul? Pretending to be a man long dead was twisting my mind in unfamiliar ways, making me wonder ifl even knew myself at all.

  Then Byanka dropped the other shoe: "Emilie may of course leave with you, as she is bought and paid for and her soul is not oflrrisen. But sweet little Tinka is a child of Baba Yaga's lands, and I would not wish to explain to my ancestress that I let her go, especially with all the secrets she's heard."

  "You're going to turn her into a doll," Orlin stated flatly.

  "Only if you leave," Byanka admitted. "Dolls are utterly dutiful." She picked up Murzik and petted him. "But if you choose to stay and allow me to tutor you in witchcraft, she may remain as your whipping child."

  Chapter Six

  The Ivory Tower

  Two chipmunks dwelled in a cage on the mantel. One stuffed its cheeks with pine nuts. The other hid in a nest of storybook pages.

  The fact that both recently had been monstrous spiders was less disconcerting than the revelation that one of my forebears may have been a unicorn.

  Before, the only peculiarity I had entertained was some elven heritage, Dabril being acros s the river from Kyonin. I earned a couple black eyes before I learned that "whores on" and "half- elf" were not synonymous.

  The only other complication I had contemplated was a drop of noble blood. The Unicorn's Carbuncle, ancestral jewel ofHouse Devore, supposedly only shone on the hand of a true heir.

  The telltale ruby glowed indiscreetly as I scraped the unicorn's beard of shaving cream from my chin, rinsing my razor occasionally.

  I examined myself in the mirror. Was my face a bit more equine? Did I stand a fraction taller? My beard had certainly grown heavier. But that happened with many young men, even ones who did not swill mutagenic tonics.

  This was the trouble. Before I had discovered the Devores' treasures, I had been a crippled wreck. The duke's formulary had helped me heal my body. The duchess's stone? My heart. So I could empathize with Arjan Devore, slowly losing his faculties.

  Having witches put some of him in a gemstone seemed almost common sense.

  "You are very handsome, Papa," said Emilie. "Even more than your portrait."

  I turned, wiping my face with a towel. "Which portrait?"

  Emilie, garbed in ivory samite three centuries out of fashion, perched on the dresser, playing with a scrap of iridescent silk. "The one you and mama left." She put on her hennin, the conical cap once popular among Galt's gentlewomen, and tossed her head, the silk now forming the cointoise, the pennant veil. "I memorized all of it, along with the other gifts you left me."

  "Remind me," I said, "what were they?"

  "Silly Papa," she laughed, "don't you remember?"

  "I want to hear you say it."

  She recited like a schoolgirl, "You gave me your joy of discovery. Mama left me her love of learning. Together they made me." She looked sad. "Will we never see her again?"

  "I have not seen her since the Revolution," I lied truthfully. "It was a tumultuous time." I put on a cheerful face and changed the subject. "When we're in Galt, you must be careful to not let others know you're alive."

  "Oh, yes!" Emilie nodded, fluttering her cointoise. "That was the first lesson Baba Alechka taught in Deportment: When a person enters, unless he is our master, a Jadwiga, or one who knows the secret of the dolls, we must hold perfectly still. Like this." Lightning fast, Emilie snatched a pair of tiny spectacles out ofher pocket and jammed them on, simultaneously taking out a miniature book thumbed open to a familiar page. Her mouth froze open in a round 0 of wonderment while her eyes went wide with delighted surprise. Her face was the visage of a wizard discovering a spell or an alchemist cracking a formula.

  I had an epiphany as well: This was how Emilie looked before she was brought to life.

  She smiled then, putting away her book and glasses. "The only times we are allowed to move are when we need to protect ourselves or someone we've been ordered to guard. Or ... " She trailed off and a pink blush of glaze rose in her porcelain cheeks.

  "You're not supposed to say because it's another secret."

  "Yes," she admitted, "and Lady Morgannan hasn't performed the Rite ofAdoption yet, so you are not properly my papa yet. Even though you are!"

  "If I guess, are you allowed to say?"

  "Well ... we are allowed to use our judgment."

  I mulled it over for a moment. "You're ordered to kill someone."

  "Only the bad dolls do that!" Emilie exclaimed, then clapped her hands over her mouth.

  'Tm gues sing the bad dolls are another secret."

  Emilie nodded. "They're horrid. They've been torturing the spiders." She glanced about the guest room, then confided, "The wicked and unruly dolls take separate classes from the sweet and mindful ones. Lady Morgannan doesn't want us getting into fi
ghts."

  She did not say any more, but I could read her expression. "And you spied on the bad dolls' classes."

  "How did you know?"

  I grinned. "Because it's precisely what I would do."

  "It's been fifty years, papa! " Emilie exclaimed. "Mama sent letters for the first ten. She said you were unwell, but as soon as you were better, she would send for me. But then that horrid Revolution came and the letters stopped! I had to do something! There's nothing worse than being an unwanted doll!"

  She began to cry then, real tears down porcelain cheeks.

  "There, there." I picked her up, putting her head against my shoulder and patting her on the back. "Let it all come out."

  Fifty years of bottled tears poured down my shoulder. While I wondered where the water came from, I also wondered where the food the dolls ate went. It was like wondering where the snow went and why Irrisen was not buried under a glacier after a thousand years of snowpack. Witchcraft. No further explanation was needed.

  A more troubling question was what had transpired with Duke Devore. So far as I had heard, he died of old age shortly after his marriage, a decade before the Revolution. That death was not one from which anyone ever "got better"-unless, of course, you considered undeath a preferable state.

  Then again, I had resurrected the dead with alicorn shavings and the duchess's philosopher's stone. If the equally fabled sun orchid elixir were added to the solution?

  But there were more pressing questions. "So, what did you learn from the bad dolls' classes?"

  That got her to stop crying. "Oh, tricks too wicked to tell," Emilie demurred, then confided with an embarrassed grin. "My favorite is the one where you pretend to be a mundane doll but move a person's possessions around when they're not looking to make them think they're going mad!"

  I was curious what other tricks they'd taught, but was interrupted by a knock at the door. "Are you ready?" It was Valya.

  "Just a moment!" I called. Some of Duke Devore's clothes from his last visit had been located. A richly embroidered kaftan and silver fox fur coat aired on a clotheshorse before the fire. They smelled of cedar chips, but the fit was good. I unlocked the door.