Bone War

by Steven Harper

  “Do you every wonder if we are doing the right thing?” Aisa asked from the crook of his arm.

  “I don’t understand the question,” Danr was forced to say truthfully.

  “We are mortals making decisions like gods,” Aisa said. “Look at what we have done! We have changed an entire tribe of orcs, and through them, all orcs everywhere. We gladly interfered with the way a prince runs his kingdom. Rather than execute a man who turned people into toads for robbery, we increased his power and turned him over to the army as a weapon. Everywhere we go the world becomes wildly different, and this will affect the Nine Races in ways I can scarcely comprehend! Now we are exhorting the orcs to go to war again—more changes.”

  Danr sighed. The dark tent was warm, and Aisa was warm against his body, and the furs were warm under his skin, and these things combined with the long day and night were making him drowsy. “Gwylph is making even bigger changes,” he said. “We’re only trying to repair the damage she’s doing.”

  “I haven’t even seen her,” Aisa said, “except that one day you faced her down with the Iron Axe. Even then, she had little to say to me. And here I am, working hard to stop her. It feels so strange.”

  “It’ll be even stranger when you’re a Gardener, won’t it?” he said. “You’ll change even more lives than we are now.”

  “Yes,” she said seriously, “but I will do my best to ensure that the changes are the best for all and try to leave everyone as much free will as possible. I … I make a poor judge, Hamzu. I remained angry at Welk for turning you into a toad even after I learned how he arrived at such a place in his life. I will be setting events into motion that make people do dreadful things in order to survive. I can see this. Every thousand years, the Tree tips, forcing such things to happen, and I will be a part of it. It frightens me.”

  “You can still turn the position down,” Danr said. “Let someone else do it.”

  “Do not say that aloud,” Aisa cried. “I think of it every day. But Death and the Gardeners said there is no one else in the world except Queen Vesha and Queen Gwylph. Death will never accept Vesha, and Gwylph as a Gardener would be disaster.”

  Danr sighed again and hugged her closer. “That’s what I love about you. You can’t give up, even when you should.”

  “I am with child,” she said.

  Danr froze in the dark tent. His mind stopped working and tried to run in a hundred different directions but staggered about as if drunk instead, and his tongue became a block of wood in his head. A baby! Aisa was going to have a baby! His baby! Suddenly, the Tree tipping seemed small and insignificant.

  “The child will be yours, you know,” Aisa said when he didn’t respond.

  His tongue freed itself. “The Nine! A baby! That’s wonderful news! Aisa, I can’t believe … well, I can definitely believe it, but I’m … Vik, I don’t know what I am!”

  “The term is father, I believe,” she said, but there was a smile in her voice.

  “My Aisa!” He kissed her, trying to tell her in that single gesture how he felt. A new life would enter the world soon. Iron Axes and Bone Swords were lumps of metal and slivers of ivory compared to this. The sun and the moon and a thousand stars blazed inside him, and he reeled with the enormity of it.

  When they separated, she was breathless. “Perhaps I should become pregnant more often!”

  They lay for a moment in silence, enjoying their own company and the thought of impending parenthood.

  “I wish I could tell my mother,” Danr said at last. “She would be so happy to know about this.”

  “So would mine,” Aisa said.

  “Though Kech the troll will be a grandfather. A grand-troll.” Danr laughed a little. “I wonder what he’ll think of that. Oh! And my brother will be an uncle!” The world seemed to tilt a little at the edges.

  “Hmm,” said Aisa, and squeezed his hand.

  “Now I have a hard question,” Danr said.

  “Where the baby will live,” Aisa replied, “after I become a Gardener.”

  “You read my mind like an orc reads a wyrm.” Danr was trying to keep his tone light, as Talfi would, but it came across as heavy anyway.

  Now Aisa sighed. “We do not have enough information to decide,” she said. “If the baby is mortal, it will not be able to live in the Garden, where no mortal can survive long. But I … I will be there every day. I do not care what Nu and Tan might say, or what Death might think. I will be there for my child.” She rubbed her belly, perhaps in unconscious anticipation. “Not only that, but he or she will anchor me to this world so I do not forget what it is to be human.”

  “And if the baby is an immortal?” Danr said.

  “That opens up an entirely new line of thought, does it not?” Aisa said. “She—or he—will outlive you, but all children do that, and I will not see my own child outlive me. How is that in any way a bad thing?”

  “Now you sound like me when someone asks a direct question,” he complained. “The baby isn’t even born yet, and already you’re looking ahead to the day I die.”

  “You did ask, my Hamzu,” she laughed. “But truly—what if we brought another immortal into the world?”

  It was half a question, which allowed Danr some freedom in answering it. “I don’t know. I don’t think it’s ever happened before. Except for Tikk. He changed into a fly and landed on Fell’s knee just as Grick was birthing him and Belina, and then he changed into a baby so the Nine would think she had triplets instead of twins.”

  “In the version I heard, Tikk landed on her vulva,” Aisa said with a shudder. “When I go into labor, I am giving you the job of guarding against insect incursions.”

  “Should I swat?” he asked.

  She smacked him on the shoulder. “I suppose we can only wait and see.”

  “And stop Gwylph,” Danr added. “If we don’t, the baby won’t be born at all, because there won’t be a world for him—or her—to be born into.”

  Aisa fell quiet. Then she said, “I wonder what would happen if you looked at my belly with your true eye. Perhaps you can tell if the baby is healthy. And see if it is a boy or a girl.”

  He sat up, surprised. Aisa was sensitive about Danr’s true eye, and he had long ago sworn to her he would never use it on her without her express permission. “Do you want me to look?”

  “No,” she said, rubbing her stomach again. “And yes. I only want good news from you, but in that case, hearing nothing is just like getting bad news.”

  “I won’t look if you don’t want me to,” he said.

  She breathed out heavily. “Now that the thought has occurred to me, it will bother me greatly if you do not look. Get it over with.”

  “We’re only going to see if it’s a boy or a girl,” he said, forcing his voice into a calm he didn’t feel. “Probably nothing else.”

  “Just look.”

  Danr closed his right eye and looked. A long silence stretched through the tent.

  “Huh,” Danr said.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ranadar arrived at the Gold Keep with his lungs burning and legs aching. The two red and gold guards were standing outside the main gate along with the two golems. On the spiked wall above them in a cloud of flies were three impaled heads. Their swollen tongues hung grotesquely from their mouths and their hair was streaked with dried blood and their eyes were already milky, but all three were easily recognizable as Talfi. Ranadar’s guts turned to water. Was one of them the real Talfi? Ranadar was panting now, and not from exertion. Talfi had been unable to return to life when he was crushed under the chimney stones. He would not return to life with his head separated from his body. Ranadar tried to keep himself under control, but it was difficult under the dead gaze of three men who looked exactly like Talfi. Who might be Talfi.

  He forced himself to look up at the dead heads. The left ear on the first one looked partly melted. It was not Talfi. The bloody hair on the second one was ragged and badly cut. Also not Talfi. The third one �
� the third one had no flaws on his face. His hair was cut the same way as Talfi’s. He was missing a front tooth, but that could have been knocked out during the arrest. Ranadar’s throat caught. It could not be. Ranadar told himself to be calm. All the flesh golems looked like Talfi, and this one—

  Ranadar caught sight of a blue strip of cloth around the head’s severed and bloody neck. It was the remains of a high shirt collar. When he left, Talfi had been wearing a pale red shirt—his favorite color. This was not Talfi, either. Ranadar’s knees went weak with relief and he leaned against the wall of the Keep for a moment.

  “What do you need?” asked one of the guards at the gate.

  Ranadar dropped the glamour so the guards could see his face. “Tell the prince that Ranadar of Alfhame demands an audience,” he barked.

  The guard summoned a page, who escorted Ranadar inside the gates and into an antechamber, then dashed off to deliver the message. Ranadar waited impatiently. At last, the page returned to the room. Following him came Lady Hafren, accompanied by two ladies-in-waiting. The ladies closed the door. The room had no furniture in it, forcing all of them to stand.

  “What is your business with the prince?” Hafren asked without preamble or civility. The thin silver circlet she habitually wore as a symbol of her status as the prince’s chief adviser had been replaced with a thicker one of iron, an unsubtle warning for Ranadar to keep his distance. The metal put a putrid taste into his mouth and made his head ache.

  “I wish to speak with your son,” Ranadar said. “Prince to prince.”

  “In this kingdom, we do not recognize the Fae as royalty,” Hafren replied waspishly. “What you wish to say to him you will have to say to me.”

  Ranadar stared at her. It was not difficult to see that she was creating a barrier between him and Prince Karsten. She had no intention of letting him speak with Karsten or even of letting him know Ranadar was here. Still, he had to try.

  “The … men you are holding in the cells,” he said. “I have information about them, and the prince needs it.”

  Hafren made an imperious gesture. “Go ahead, then.”

  “They are a kind of golem,” he said. “Made of flesh instead of stone or clay. But one of them is not a golem. He is human, and you have falsely imprisoned him. I have come to ask for his release.”

  “This man looks exactly like all the other … flesh golems, does he?” Hafren said. “Even though he smells the same as a flesh golem to the trolls?”

  Ranadar nodded. “He does. But—”

  “Then how do you know this man is not a flesh golem?”

  Vik! “My lady,” Ranadar said in a deliberate, even voice, “you have met this man and know him. It is Talfi. I cannot imagine your son would authorize the execution of a friend!”

  “I am overseeing this, not my son,” Hafren said. “He has other duties, and there is no need to worry him with this problem.”

  “The problem, lady,” Ranadar said through clenched teeth, “is that you are executing an innocent man. And the flesh golems themselves have done nothing to earn such treatment.”

  “What does it matter to you what happens to a golem?” Hafren said, spearing Ranadar with an arrow of guilt. “They aren’t alive. They don’t think. We put their heads on spikes outside the Gold Keep so other people can see what they look like and find the rest for us.”

  Ranadar clenched his fists. The idea of slaughtering all the flesh golems wholesale felt wrong, but he could not explain how or why. Had he not himself just argued that the flesh golems were nothing but animated piles of meat? He should not be upset at the thought of their deaths. As Hafren said, they were not quite alive.

  Quite alive. That word quite made a great deal of difference. There was doubt. And Ranadar had never advocated destroying the flesh golems. Was it possible to be alive and not know it? Was it possible to only think you were alive and actually be … not? Ranadar was not sure, but he did know that it was wrong to kill something that might not be alive in order to find out if it was dead.

  And it was not right to kill Talfi.

  “Why have you executed only three so far?” Ranadar found himself asking.

  “They’re strong and difficult to hold down while we cut off their heads,” she said dismissively. “This evening we will bring in some trolls to speed up the process. Though I hear the dwarfs can build a machine that drops a blade to cut off a head quickly and without fuss. Perhaps we’ll hire them to build one for us.”

  A thought came to Ranadar. “How many do you have in the cells right now?”

  “Perhaps eighty or a hundred,” she said with an airy wave. “The cells are bulging, which is why we need that dwarfish machine.”

  You want the prince to arrest the flesh golems? What are you up to, Mother?

  The truth came to Ranadar now. Thanks to the arrests, the Gold Keep was stuffed full of flesh golems, freakishly strong beings who were almost impossible to kill. Beings who could bend iron bars and were unfazed by swords, knives, or iron bars. Beings who would obey the command of his mother and boil up under the very feet of Prince Karsten. Mother could destroy the Gold Keep and everyone in it with a mental word. The flesh golems being arrested was not a flaw in her plan to rule Balsia. It was part of it.

  And what was Ranadar to do? He could not let Hafren execute Talfi and all the golems, but was it any better to let them loose in the city, still under his mother’s control? His insides twisted. Above all, he had to get Talfi out.

  “This is … a wrong, my lady,” Ranadar said carefully. “These creatures … men … have done nothing wrong.” Yet, he thought. “You cannot kill them just because you do not understand what they are.”

  Harfen looked at him askance. “Can I not? Are the Fae once again telling the Kin how to run their own affairs?”

  “They are alive,” Ranadar said. “I have seen their minds. I have touched them. They do think, just as you and I think.”

  “Ha! Trustworthy Fae magic has the answer.”

  Ranadar pushed down the rising panic that was creeping into his voice and agitating his body. “My lady, I beg you—let me at least visit the cell and show you the one I am seeking. You will see that he—”

  “Is your true love?” Hafren finished. “I know all about you Fae and your regi ways, how you seduce humans with a touch. Perhaps I should just kill you now and end his addiction to you. Or are they all addicted to you? My prince.” She spat the last two words.

  Red outrage mingled with pale panic now. Ranadar drew himself up, and the ladies-in-waiting shied back. “There is no addiction between us. I am a prince of the Fae, and what we have is—”

  “You and your kind have no right to exist,” Hafren interrupted again. Her voice was a hiss. “You are an affront to the Nine, and your seed should be burned from Ashkame itself.”

  Ranadar was struck speechless. It wasn’t just the flesh golems, then. Hafren had another agenda. She hated regi, and she was willing to commit murder over her hatred. Ranadar’s heart moved between despair and outrage. The outrage won. He thrust a finger into Hafren’s face, but she did not flinch. “I came here to find a peaceful solution. I came here to find a way to work with humans and see how we are more alike. You call yourself humans, but I see only monsters.”

  He pushed past her and stormed out of the room, out the gates, out of the Gold Keep. He refused to look up at the awful heads. When he got to the street, he was shaking. Regi. All his life, people had told him how wrong it was to love men, to be himself, to do anything but what they decided was right for him. After Talfi died that first time, he had worked hard to ignore other people, to live as best he could without worrying what they thought. He had paid for it, but in the end, the Nine had rewarded him for it, reunited him with Talfi. Now he was going to lose Talfi again because of hatred toward people like him. The anger and outrage thundered through him even as the iron headache pressed against his temples like lead clamps. He made a fist. Perhaps it was time for this regi to fight back.r />
  “Mother,” he said, and pushed mental effort behind the word, calling her as she had instructed, as her kiss allowed. “Mother! Mother!”

  Moments later, a sprite appeared above the city. The chaotic ball of light skittered down from the sky, rushed around the corner, and vanished from Ranadar’s view. There was a shout of surprise from the keep gate, and Mother came sedately around the corner in her golden gown. Ranadar decided the sprite must have taken the body of the page—the guards all carried iron weapons. He was only vaguely curious about what she had done to stop the guards from pursuing her.

  “My son,” she said in her low, musical voice. “Have you made a decision?”

  “I will come home, Mother,” Ranadar said.

  She clasped her hands together and touched her thumbs to her lips. “Ranadka! You have no idea how much that thrills me! These humans have—”

  “But”—Ranadar raised a finger—“I have two requests first.”

  People in the street stared as they passed, but Mother ignored them in the way a shark ignores minnows. “Anything. Name it! I have power you cannot imagine.”

  “First, the humans have arrested most of the flesh golems, and they took Talfi, too,” Ranadar said. “They are in the cells beneath the Gold Keep, and the humans intend to kill them all. Can you get Talfi out so he can come with me?”

  “Easily done, and gladly,” Mother said. “What is your second request?”

  “I want you to call off this invasion,” Ranadar said. “You must promise not to invade Kin territories—human, orc, or merfolk—with flesh golems or Fae ever again.”

  She fell silent. Her perfect face showed a number of conflicting emotions. Ranadar held his breath. At last, she said, “I will do as you ask, Ranadar. If you will swear to come home to me immediately.”

  Ranadar swallowed. “I swear, Mother.”

  “That is fine news, indeed!” Her eyes grew distant and her voice changed. Ranadar heard it inside his head. My army! My prince and heir has sworn to return to me. Break free of this prison. Then scatter and hide yourselves, more carefully than before.