A Shard of Sea and Bone

by L. J. Engelmeier

  “While all that is damn riveting, Kinrae,” Artysaedra said flatly, “can we worry about it later? I vote we head home and parse out this riddle.”

  “What?” Staatvelter asked. He stared at her. “You want to abandon this Realm?”

  “Well, yes? There isn’t anything else we can do for it. We haven’t found a single survivor. This Guardian’s dead as dead can get. Our resources are best spent moving toward what did it all.”

  “Shouldn’t we at least look around the Realm some more?” Staatvelter asked.

  “What’s the point? Everyone’s dead, and the Realm is disappearing. By this time tomorrow, it could be gone completely, and I’d rather not be stuck here when it does.”

  “Which is why we should take this chance to search the area and figure out what’s going on before it’s too late.”

  “I disagree.”

  “Here we go again,” Draven said with a sigh.

  From behind him, Beaker growled. It quickly turned into a nasty snarl that Draven had never heard out of her before. “What’s wrong?” he asked her, spinning around. She was hunched into a defensive stance, the fur on her neck standing on end, making her look even bigger. “Beaker, what is it—”

  In answer, the debris ahead shifted. Rocks rolled over rocks and rose up, mounded. Then, through the mess, a boney hand erupted. Its long, clawed fingers flexed. Draven took a step back, calling for Beaker to get away, but she didn’t move. He could hear the others shifting behind him—the crackling of a flame coming to life, feet sliding into fighting stances—but in front of him, he could hear only a heartbeat, faint and quick.

  “What the hell is that?” Draven asked.

  Violently, the debris exploded outward in a shower of stone and dust, clogging the air. Before Draven could so much as flinch back from it, a shadow shot through the hazy cloud and barrelled into his body. His head struck the ground hard, and a set of pointed teeth buried themselves in his face.

  He screamed.

  GLORIFIED LIGHTBULBS

  _______________________________

  I told my son! I told him the smallest drop of human blood would turn him! That wretched wife of his nicked her tongue on his fang. Just a nick! That’s all! It has been four crescent moons since. My son has transformed on all of them. Eighteen people are dead. Tomorrow, he hangs at the gallows.

  letter from Anabelle Blackwood to Mary Margaret Hill on her son Peter, the Realm of Firs

  THE MULTITUDINOUS REALM OF PERMAFROST

  TWO MILES OUTSIDE XIANDANOR,

  THE MIDDLE OF THE DIANOR OCEAN

  Nori-Rin only stopped rapid-fire reconjuring when she rematerialized in her thirtieth Realm in under two minutes. She barely had enough time to take a breath of the dimension’s freezing air before she was being barrelled into and knocked down to the blinding white ice. Her niqwar went skittering. She caught herself before her head could smack off the ground.

  “Jyan-Po’s blesséd arse,” Nori-Rin said. She glanced over her shoulder at her su-lanah, who was a solid weight along her back. Svahta’s panting was loud and broken as she rolled off Nori-Rin and flopped over on the ice. Under Nori-Rin’s hands, the thick sheet of ice she was sprawled out on hurt to touch, just like the air hurt to breathe and the entire landscape hurt to look at. Nori-Rin could feel the seawater that had soaked through her leggings back in the stock field with a painful awareness now. Her bare feet burned. “Look what you’ve done, you clumsy tit. We’re a bunch of roodry chets now,” Nori-Rin said, smiling. “Stars be damned, and my mam’s hands, too, we might have a chance of winning a right fisty now if they show, but only because the louts’ll choke on their own blasted tongues laughing at—”

  “Where’re we, Ri?” Svahta interrupted. Her pale eyes speared Nori-Rin into silence. Loose strands of hair haloed around her head. “We been followed? Are we okay?”

  When Nori-Rin gave a shrug, Svahta levered herself up, her hands on her knees as she hunched over and caught her breath. She was trembling.

  “We haven’t been attacked yet,” Nori-Rin said, and blew the curls out of her face. She looked around at where they’d landed. “That lends itself to positive interpretation I would think.”

  They were on the edge of an ice field that dozens of feet away dropped off in an immense cliff. Cerulean water stretched out below toward the curved horizon. It was peppered with broken sheets of ice and glaciers. Surveying it, it finally clicked for Nori-Rin where she’d brought them to. The memory of this place must have been a solid enough spark in her mind to have taken hold as they’d slipped through the ether. How she hadn’t gotten both of them stuck in the void of the multiverse was beyond her. She’d never reconjured so many times in such a short span of time before—and with such weak visualizations on top of that. The fact they’d landed here at all was astonishing.

  They were outside the underground city of Xiandanor, a bustling, icy metropolis. It had been known for and sought after for its advances in enchanted runes. The main entrance to the city was about a mile or so to the west if Nori-Rin remembered correctly, carved into the side of a jagged mountain of ice. She’d been sent by the Council to investigate the mysterious disappearance of the entire city’s residents some years ago. There’d been no leads to follow, and the investigation had been dropped soon after.

  “We’re safe, I wager,” Nori-Rin said, breath puffing through the air. Her skin hurt. “Unless you’ve a crippling fear of penguins, that is. Wouldn’t blame you. Nasty buggers.” Her half-numb fingers burned against the ice as she pushed herself up to her feet. She tucked her hands under the fat of her chin for warmth and rotated her jaw to bring blood back into her stiffening face. “No civilization for miles. Just hypothermia and windburn. And penguins, of course. They’ll see you before you see them, though. Dodgy bastards. They’re probably spicking us now.”

  Svahta gave a weak laugh, which quickly became a sigh, almost the first hitch of a sob. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then she looked out at the land straight ahead. Her golden braid was loose against her shoulder and caked with bits of plant matter. Her dollish face was streaked with mud. Behind the mud, her crystalline eyes were sad, her thin mouth angry. The sun, unhindered by a single cloud, beat down on her. It glinted off her steel cuirass between the patches of mud that smeared it. The glare put spots in Nori-Rin’s vision.

  At Svahta’s sides, her hands balled into fists.

  “We need to move,” Svahta said. “S’only a matter a’ time till those damned traitors scent us off the field or find someone to do a trackin’ spell on the dirt. We can’t stay anywhere for long. Day at most, even in warded Realms. Ain’t safe to settle more’n ’at.”

  She swiped at her face with her hands and let out a violent exhalation, then paced a circle around her flail, which was still lying on the ice. Her boots slid over the top layer of the cliff’s ice, and then without warning, Svahta turned and let out a bellowing, throat-shredding scream. The cry echoed off the ice and punched into the distance. It built and built until veins bulged at Svahta’s temples and her face swelled with blood, and then with whip-crack finality, it ended. Finished, Svahta heaved for breath and swiped the spittle from her mouth.

  “Sun an’ fuckin’ stars, how could those bastards? Betrayin’ the Infinity. The Saeinfinae. Betrayin’ us! Two thousand years a’ service—a’ sleepin’ with both eyes open, no friends, no family—workin’ myself to exhaustion cleanin’ up their wars an’ blessin’ their children an’ healin’ their ails. An’ what? Now they wanna kill us? ’Cause what? What’n the hell a’ we done to deserve bein’—bein’ defiled like that? Violated?” She balled her fists against her eyes. “An’ how could I a’ been so damned stupid with the wardin’, Ri? We had one chance to keep an eye on ’em—to stop these bastards from killin’ the whole damn world, an’ now they know we were there. That man saw your sword ’fore ya grabbed it—”

  “Those arse-faced ghaha didn’t see me, though,” Nori-Rin assuaged. She wanted to reach out for
her partner, but she kept her distance. “I warded myself, tiki. They don’t know who was th—”

  “—an’ that ain’t my point, Ri,” Svahta snapped, whirling around. “I made a mistake, an’ now those bastards know someone was watchin’ ’em. They’ll be searchin’, an’ it ain’t a damn leap a’ logic for ’em to figure out it was us. We interrogated their High King an’ left with our lives. They’re already tryin’ to frame ’im. They obviously don’t trust ’im. They’ll know he ratted ’em out. An’ then they’re gonna look for us—an’ anyone we know.” Svahta’s words were drawling and slurring worse and worse the longer she talked. A shiver rattled through her body. “I ain’t got hardly no one left, but you got family, Ri. Your ma’s out in that home. You got sisters. What if those people go after ’em?”

  I haven’t spoken to my family in decades, Nori-Rin wanted to say. Her mother had moved away after her father had died from a demonic fever that had swept through the Kingdom centuries ago. Within the following year, her mother had remarried and left for the countryside. Nori-Rin had only met her mother’s second and third families a handful of times. She didn’t know all her half-sisters’ names, nor did she know either of her stepfathers’. But they couldn’t really hold it against her. Neither could her mother. Her mother didn’t even know Nori-Rin’s name anymore. She was too gone into old age for that, dementia rooted into her mind like a weed. When Nori-Rin had visited last, her mother had only smiled and asked Nori-Rin if she’d be kind enough to bring her some crushed carnations for the window to keep the dream-thieves out. Then she’d told her she was a nice young Kingdom girl with a face a prince couldn’t love, a common compliment in the royal courts. Right after that, though, she’d asked if Nori-Rin had come to arrest her for stealing the knit blanket the nurses in the room insisted belonged to her, to her mother’s increased confusion and hysteria.

  Nori-Rin had stopped visiting after that.

  The only family she had left lived in the city. Obscure cousins, uncles, and aunts. People who only remembered Nori-Rin existed when they wanted to use her name and their relation to her for some sway in the Kingdom. They were nothing to her.

  The only thing I have left to lose, she thought, looking at Svahta who was still shivering, is my best friend.

  Nori-Rin suppressed the urge to step forward and wrap her arms around her partner, to offer what warmth and comfort she could. It was something her mother used to do for her on nights when her father had been kidnapped by rival gang members. Rin-Da had always brushed her fingers over Nori-Rin’s coarse curls and sung old fishing songs, voice rasping and breaking through the half-forgotten verses until one of them fell asleep.

  Nori-Rin imagined Svahta in her arms now, but the image wasn’t right. Svahta was strong. She was a warrior with hard eyes and unflinching blows. She was a woman who locked her past inside her, who was as good with a blade as she was a rifle, who could bind a wound in her sleep, who looked at war orphans with a forced removedness that Nori-Rin knew shielded her heart. She was slight and boney, barely eight stone in armour, a morose drunk and a master at cards, and Nori-Rin had known her long enough to know an embrace wasn’t what she needed when she was like this. A plan was.

  “We need to talk to the Saeinfinae,” Nori-Rin told her, laying her hands on the cold metal of Svahta’s shoulders, shaking her once to get her full attention. “The Council isn’t here for us, the blasted tits. He’s our only option to put a stop to all this, and it sounds like he’s in danger to begin with. The Realms—yeah, that’s a disaster. More than a disaster. But it sounds like those arses have planned his assassination.”

  “I know,” Svahta said with a deep breath. “But what’re we supposed to tell ’im? Those—them things were—you know what they looked like, Ri. You know exactly what they looked like.”

  Nori-Rin did. She’d been thinking the same thing since she’d seen those pillars of light in the field. They looked exactly like the light the Council had once forced inside her, the light she’d eaten during her initiation into the Order, the light that had given her her Guardian powers, the light that was rooted so deeply into her soul that only the Council could remove it. It looked like that light, but sentient and untethered.

  “We’re those things Guardians?” Svahta asked quietly. “Or were they something else entirely?”

  “Whatever they were,” Nori-Rin said, uncertain, “they went into those other three chets. They can hide inside people.”

  Svahta’s shivering increased. “Then they could be inside anyone, right? Our friends. Our other comrades. The authorities. Who’re we supposed to trust? They could be in the Saeinfinae’s court for all we know. In him. Our staffs. Our followers. Hell, maybe even Naliah or a thrice-damned innkeep.” Her words quivered. “We can’t go back to question the High King about it. Not after this. An’ stars, what if ’e was possessed yesterday when we talked to ’im? What if those things already know about us an’ led us to that meetin’?”

  “Why would they lead us there?” Nori-Rin asked, trying to rein her su-lanah’s panic in. When Svahta kept silent, Nori-Rin shook her shoulders. “Hey.”

  “I don’t know,” Svahta said at last. “To give us false information. To trick the Saeinfinae.” She slumped like the world was riding her back. “I don’t know. I don’t know anythin’ anymore.”

  Sighing, Nori-Rin finally let herself reach out and lift Svahta’s chin, cupping her face with both hands. Her partner’s skin was freezing, and there was a slight tremble in her jaw. When their eyes met, warmth bloomed in Nori-Rin’s chest, but it was a painful warmth. It felt like the holiest of connections and the harshest of wounds. It reminded her of the first time she’d realized she’d wanted to protect Svahta with every fiber of her being—a summer morning so many years ago, a rankfrut hangover pounding through her head, the sun hanging cold over that meadow, Svahta’s face creased from sleep and her half-awake blue eyes sparking with laughter like the season had crawled into them and bloomed.

  “It’ll be okay,” she told Svahta. “I promise.”

  “Sure.” Svahta gave a weak laugh. “I’m terrified, Ri. Everythin’s a mess. What do we do?”

  One phrase came back to Nori-Rin out of the depths of her memory. When a man takes a step back from a fight, he’s knocking into his own teammates. It was something her father had used to say before his hitjobs. She could still remember the smell of gunpowder, the salt of his fingertips grazing over her lips. A single kiss pressed to her forehead. Your cowardry hurts everyone but your enemy, tikiti. You blaze forward or you die on the ground you stand.

  “What can we do but fight?” Nori-Rin found herself saying. She stared down at Svahta and leaned forward to press their foreheads together. Warm, wet breath swelled between them. “Do you trust that I’m myself right now? That those glorified lightbulbs, whatever they are, haven’t gotten into me?”

  Svahta closed her eyes. Gossamer lashes fanned across her cheeks. After a beat, she nodded, once, a strong jerk of her head. She opened her eyes again. They were hard, full of determination.

  “Then,” Nori-Rin said, “we get through this together.”

  FIRE IN THE DISTANCE

  _______________________________

  Water is soft, until struck.

  motto of House Ser’avhi of the Realm of Crescent Lake

  THE MULTITUDINOUS REALM OF BLACK WATERS

  THE INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT, SOUTHEASTERN LINDENNACHT,

  COUNTY KAVETT, NORTHERN OSNASTEDT, FJORDE

  Screams.

  His brother’s screams.

  They rang through Kinrae’s body like the toll of a bell.

  The air was thick enough with stone dust to blind him, the particles scratching at Kinrae’s eyes as he tried to blink through the haze. His sister shouted orders at Naliah, but neither of them was moving toward the wet ripping sounds coming from the cloud of grit ahead. Neither of them was heading for Draven.

  Kinrae didn’t tell his feet to move. He didn’t even register he’d lun
ged forward until his shoulder hit something full force, the shock jolting through his body. Whatever he hit snarled at him, and he took it to the ground and pinned it, snarling back. He could smell his brother’s blood on it—the sharp of iron. His vision went red. Nothing—nothing was allowed to touch his brother.

  Underneath him, the thing was one solid, struggling mass. It tried to buck him off, but he growled. He punched down into it with the spiked knuckles of his gauntlet, then scrambled for what felt like its neck. He squeezed and then squeezed harder. When his brother gave a wet gurgle from somewhere behind him, Kinrae ground his teeth together and pressed down with all his strength on the neck in his grasp.

  If my brother dies—

  Claws glanced off his armour and fought for a hold, but flesh and bone gave way beneath Kinrae’s hands with a sickening crunch. He kept growling and squeezing and dug in the points of his gauntlets until flesh split with a squelch. Blood splattered across his face, steaming hot compared to the winter air.

  He straddled the limp creature until the dust around them cleared. Then the creature was revealed: a hollowsoul. Its skin was slick like exposed muscle, but grey. Its mouth jutted out in a slack snout, tongue lolling to the side. Red eyes streaked through with yellow bulged obscenely. Its neck was a mangled, bloody mess. Kinrae pulled his hands from it, jolted.