Bones of the Empire

by Jim Galford

  From the corner of his eye, Estin realized Dalania was literally taking root in the small patch of dirt exposed by his fall. Her body took on more and more of a bark-coated look, and she smiled as she ran her fingers over the feather. From the knees down, her legs merged into one, her toes and bare feet breaking open into hundreds of smaller roots.

  “A god plans for mortals to do something stupid and allows them to succeed if it serves a greater goal,” Dalania continued, the fingers of the hand holding the necklace dividing and looking more branchlike each second. “A god sees to it that if the forest is his life, one sapling that was born in that forest finds its way to the doorstep of his enemy. He then sends the whole of his magic along in another body, waiting to resurrect himself. He makes himself invisible to his foe, possibly even spreading a rumor of his death. He might even punish an innocent to make sure that the furred fool tells the world that the god has died.”

  Her attention abruptly shifted to Estin. “I told you that the fae never forgive, Estin. The wolf at the mine was not meant to punish you. It was meant to ensure you made Dorralt believe I was dead. I apologize for what happened to you and your children as a result of my deception. Many of your kind have suffered to make this deception as real as it could be. My people may not understand pain and mortal emotion, but Dalania has shown me what I need to understand.”

  Dalania turned slightly to look at Feanne, who lay near the magical wall, staring wide-eyed. “My child…the only family I chose to create…will you give me back my strength? You have safe-guarded it well.”

  All of the shock and fear faded from Feanne’s face. She smiled as she turned to look at Dorralt. “Yes. Take what you need. Master.”

  A rumble shook the entire temple. When Estin blinked, a massive shadow hung over Dalania. It was unmistakably a wolf, nearly twenty feet tall. The semitransparent wolf let out a howl that made Estin’s skin actually ache. As he watched, the barrier cracked on all sides and air began to rush back in. Somewhere outside the temple, Estin could hear hundreds of wolves and bats howling and screeching in reply. Every one of the surviving werewolves dropped to their knees in supplication outside the courtyard.

  Dalania stood somewhat limply, her eyes staring sightlessly at the ground, as the ghostly wolf stepped forward and lowered its face to the edge of the barrier. Though still somewhat transparent, the wolf was as solid as Estin remembered it to have been when he first met it years earlier.

  “A god can die,” the Miharon whispered at Dorralt, without moving his jaw. “A god can also choose to alter the course of a world’s fate. I may or may not be a god, human, but I am far more than you, and I choose life for all of Eldvar over your or my own survival. A god must sacrifice to ensure what it believes in will live beyond even a god’s last days. I have spoken with those who serve me, and they agree. You may have the might of a god, Dorralt, but another god can still weaken you because it was not earned. Today, I choose the people you wish to subjugate over my own existence.”

  The Miharon raised its muzzle to the sky and let out another howl. Almost immediately, Dorralt began screaming, clutching his chest as though stabbed, releasing Estin in the process. Stones split all across the temple’s pillars, and the entire barrier around Dorralt and Estin collapsed. As the Miharon faded somewhat, Estin saw the mists were no longer circling closer and closer—they raced in toward the temple. The Miharon had called them straight to Dorralt.

  Dorralt pulled back the arm that had held Estin’s jaw and tried to punch Estin in the face, but his fist hit the pillar beside Estin’s ear as someone struck the back of his arm, throwing off his aim. Stone shards tore into Estin’s head and neck, deafening him slightly. A second later, a large form slammed into Dorralt’s other side, knocking him off Estin and throwing them both to the ground.

  People were everywhere, trying to get a swing at Dorralt before the mists closed in on them all. Yoska was slicing with knives while Raeln kept Dorralt from getting back to his feet. Feanne was practically on top of Dorralt’s back, her claws raking his face and neck. Estin tried to slide away, keeping his broken arm over his bloodied ear as he attempted to get to safety.

  “Idiots!” Dorralt roared, flinging his arms out to his sides. With the surreal abruptness that only magic could manage, everyone flew away, tumbling and sliding across the floor. Estin had apparently already gotten far enough away, as the spell did little more than roll him onto his back. Dorralt got back to his feet. “You have mere minutes before the mists kill all of you, simply because a dead fae chose to sacrifice itself and risk dying again. Make your moment worthy of all this effort.”

  Estin finally reached a spot near the edge of the courtyard and pulled himself up against the stone wall. As he watched, Dorralt gestured toward Mairlee and slammed her flat to the ground. Just seeing her so soundly controlled made Estin’s whole body shiver, as if a breeze were rising right out of the stones themselves. The Miharon might have weakened Dorralt, but he was far from powerless. All the nature spirit had accomplished was giving them a chance to reach Dorralt and draw the mists’ attention to him.

  Then Estin realized there actually was a thin trickle of cold air coming from between the stones, shifted by the battle in the courtyard. Somewhere along the way, a stray spell had split a massive block set into the courtyard floor, allowing damp air to rise from somewhere beneath it.

  Laying on his side while fighting continued nearby, Estin felt the edges of one stone. Larger than many of the others, he realized, it was relatively thin. When he put his fingers near the edges, he could feel a steady breeze coming from around it. It was not so much a paving stone as a cap over a hole.

  Estin looked over at Dorralt and saw he was hurling spell after spell, tearing away great chunks of the courtyard with each. One spell ripped through two of the werewolves, killing them instantly in sprays of blood and bone. No one could approach him, and even Mairlee was struggling to get out from under his spell. Turess was faring far worse, ducking and hiding, while Feanne, Raeln, and Yoska were trying to stay close enough to strike without getting hit. The Miharon’s eyes were on the mists far above, ignoring the battle completely.

  Thinking back, Estin realized he was lying right where Dorralt had been standing when he had gone after Feanne. He had held his ground there, choosing not to leave when there was no reason to stay behind. Humans in Altis had been much the same when they had hidden treasures or coin. They would make a show of not caring where they were, all the while giving away their secret by lingering too long. As if confirming his belief, Estin saw Dorralt glance nervously in his direction more than once.

  Rolling over to the outside of the stone, Estin dug his claws into the gap and pulled, trying to move it aside. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he was forced to use his broken arm to lift the stone.

  As soon as it started to move, Dorralt’s attention snapped to him. “Stop!” he screamed, forgetting the others in the courtyard, who were still trying to get at him. “Drop that, wildling!”

  The stone shifted just enough that Estin could see there were stairs beneath it, descending under the main temple rather than the courtyard. With one final push, he opened it and tried to run down the steps, but gloved hands closed on the back of his neck and hoisted him off the ground.

  “Death is too good for you, Estin,” Dorralt growled while swords hacked at his back. Not far off, Estin could see Raeln dive onto the corpse of a werewolf. It looked almost as though he were running his claws through the its blood. Feanne was running toward Estin and Dorralt, but she was too far away. Behind Dorralt, Estin could see it was actually Yoska and Alafa who were trying to stab Dorralt with their knives and a sword.

  Dorralt stood in the middle of the melee, the blades doing so little damage to him that Estin never even saw a bit of Dorralt’s flesh as his robes were sliced and mended almost instantly.

  “Once was lucky. Twice was foolish. Three times…we will see if luck still favors you, Est—” Dorralt abruptly grunted and stumble
d, losing his grip.

  Estin had no time to consider how he had been spared again. As his feet hit the ground, he rolled sideways into the opening he had created by moving the stone. He fell several feet onto the steps and nearly tumbled down them before managing to catch himself on his hand and paws, using his tail to counterbalance.

  Searching in the near dark, Estin made out the line of descending steps. He scrambled down as quickly as he could manage, slowing once he was well past the light of the opening above. Though his eyes were rapidly adjusting to the lower light, he could not move too swiftly yet without falling down the steps. Not knowing how far the stairs went, he was unwilling to risk it.

  Estin reached out to steady himself on the wall to his right and had to clench his jaw to keep from screaming as pain returned to his hand. He had managed to ignore it right up until he put pressure on it. Silently cursing himself for wasting time, he wrapped his other hand around his broken wrist and concentrated. The magic was getting harder to summon without making himself dizzy, but it slowly trickled into his wrist. After a few seconds, he felt the bones knit and the pain eased considerably. A rush of fresh strength came, reminding him that the dragon had said he would have its power. It was about all that kept him moving.

  Padding slowly down, hoping he was not abandoning his mate and friends for no good reason, Estin found himself in nearly absolute darkness. Only a faint glimmer of light from somewhere below allowed him any chance of finding the steps with his toes. Even with that light, he could make out little more than the lines of the walls and some of the steps’ edges. Years living on the streets had taught him to trust his footing even in the darkest alleys, but it was unnerving to try to find his way down uneven steps with nothing more than the pressure of the stone under his pads to guide him.

  Estin continued for what felt like hours, until he began to see more clearly as the light grew brighter at the bottom of the stairs. From what he could tell, there was some form of chamber below him that had its own light source. Looking up the stairs, he could still faintly see the gleam of light at the top, with no hint of anyone following. Somehow, the others had distracted Dorralt. Knowing they might be getting torn apart for his stupid hunch made him second-guess his decision. After a moment’s hesitation, Estin continued a little faster. He had to know if it was a good decision or a bad one before he could turn back.

  Soon Estin could see the bottom of the steps, possibly as much as a hundred feet below the temple. Past that last step, he saw uneven stone and what appeared to be a cavern, lit by flickering light that he assumed was from a torch. Aside from the staircase, it appeared naturally formed.

  When his foot came down on the last step, the voices of the spirits that gave him his magic came in an abrupt rush, dizzying him with their intensity. Screams filled his mind, drowning out the usual whispers. He backed up one step, and the voices faded. When he continued down, they returned even louder. Struggling through, he stepped into the cavern.

  Looking around, Estin found the place was not overly large. The cavern was perhaps twenty feet round, with a small pond set deep in the floor at the far end. Following the beam of light, he could make out a disc of sunlight almost directly above him. A rope hung down far overhead in tatters as though something had once hung from it. A well, he realized. Whatever water had once filled the place appeared long gone, likely through several deep cracks in the floor.

  Inside the cavern, there were only two things he could see. One was a broken, crumbling old wooden throne. On it, the withered remains of a human lay, its skeletal head lying to one side, with its jaw hanging open. On the other side of the room, a shimmering cloud of dark mists hung in a night-black tear that hovered above the floor. He could make out shapes within the mists, but having walked through them too many times in his life, Estin ignored the cloud once he was sure it was not moving. It appeared that the mists were providing almost no light of their own, though their flickering gave the impression of a torch, casting long moving shadows. These were unlike the ones at the edge of Turessi, with these still tethered to the hole between worlds.

  Estin started to move toward the throne, but stopped as the cavern wall caught his eye. The carving of the walls was uneven, likely not made by water or regular tools. In spots, deep gouges marred the stone. He touched the marks and realized they were in sets of four and five, as though someone had tried to claw their way through the walls. They had torn at the stones until the rock had given way. He saw no tooling marks at all, only the claw marks and broken stones, as though whatever had been down there kept pulling at the rocks until it created the entire cavern. Looking back toward the stairs, he saw the entire passage up had been torn open in much the same way. Something had either dug into the chamber, or out of it.

  “You find so many ways to interfere,” hissed a breathy voice, and Estin looked around frantically for the source. From the corner of his eye, he saw the empty sockets of the skeleton’s skull flare red as it sat up in its throne. “Welcome to my little secret, Estin. You are arguably the last person I would have intended to have come down here. It was supposed to be Turess who I led into my sanctuary. We were to hide down here from the mists. Even if the more intricate elements of my runes above fell to the mists, this room would likely avoid their attention.”

  Rounding on the skeleton, expecting it to attack immediately, Estin found it was adjusting its position on the throne. It looked around at the room, shifting its limited weight carefully. Shaking its head, the old skeleton returned its attention to him as it brushed its ragged clothing free of dust and small stones.

  “Our people are supposed to ignore their pride,” the skeleton wheezed, spreading its arms to show itself fully to him. “This is what I look like after two thousand years. This is what remains without using magic to mask or hide myself in the bodies of others. My children seem unable to give up their vanity and show their true faces, but it has served us well, allowing them to infiltrate our foes’ ranks. In the end, we all look as I do.”

  “Dorralt?” Estin asked, backing up a step before realizing that doing so put him closer to the mists.

  The skeleton nodded and picked up the decaying fragments of what appeared to have been a book, though little more than crumbling bits of parchment remained. “The council rose up to take charge after Kharali vanished when I was attempting to claim the throne of my brother. They buried me down here for more than a hundred years when they could not kill me, choosing instead to pour stones down the well until I was trapped and then seal it with magic. Do you know what it does to the mind to be encased in stone, unable to die or escape, for that long? I could not even move my head those first few years. It was just me and the voices of the dead, whispering endlessly. I had not even grasped the potential of my abilities until I was deprived of all else.

  “I had a great deal of time to plan all of this out. They buried me here to trap me alongside the hole between worlds that I created to empower those like myself and my generals. Now I consider this to be my only true home. Everything else out there, I will see through my puppets. This body will not see the daylight again. Even if I were to retake the world, I will never see it with my own eyes.”

  Estin nodded toward the stairs. “Where are your generals now? It looks like it’s just you and I.”

  Dorralt laughed dryly, the fleshless grin making Estin’s skin prickle. That lack of any way to identify emotion behind that laugh was even more disturbing than the sound itself. “I do wish I knew. You brought me back Oramain, but On’esquin did a fine job of hiding the others. I had hoped to locate them before the mists stripped the world bare. Now I must say good-bye to many old friends, wherever they are. Believe me when I say it pains me to have instrumented the true deaths of so many good men and women. It was not meant to be like this. I had hoped for a swift victory. Now, wherever they are, the mists will claim them sooner or later.”

  Estin looked around the small cavern again before returning his attention to Dorralt. “Come to
think of it, you don’t even have Oramain at your side anymore. I really expected I’d have to fight through him and Liris to reach you.”

  At that Dorralt laughed hysterically, almost sounding as though he were fighting tears. Once he managed to stop laughing, he said, “Funny you should mention that, Estin. There is so much humor in the world when you can see more than one location at a time. The Miharon’s cry destroyed more than a hundred of my children near the temple, weakening me, but for some reason, those two are relatively intact. Is there anything else you would like to mock me about?”

  “Probably,” Estin said before turning to run for the steps.

  Faster than he had seen other Turessians move, Dorralt shoved past him and blocked the hall out of the cavern with one skeletal hand on each wall. “Your friends are coming to save you, Estin. I intend to kill you when they arrive as a final act of revenge for all the trouble you’ve caused me. After that, those above us may find a way to kill me after all these centuries. For now I will allow you one question, given the curiosity you keep demonstrating and your mistaken belief that stalling will aid you. Your father begged for answers to one question, and I did not give it to him before I had Liris hang him beside your mother. You I have more respect for. Ask your question.”

  A distant rumble echoed down the steps, and Estin swore he heard feet pounding down the stairs. Given how long he had taken to reach the bottom, he knew it would be a while before they could get to him. He had to survive another minute or two before he would have aid.

  “Why?” Estin asked, looking back at Dorralt.

  “Your father’s question as well.”

  “No,” Estin replied, moving a step closer to Dorralt and the stairs, refusing to show any fear. “Not why are you killing me or my family. My father probably wanted to know why you murdered my mother and who you were. I want to know why you targeted wildlings all these years. Did you truly hate us that much?”