Empire of Bones

by N. D. Wilson

  “Where is Phoenix?” Rupert asked. “Were you going to meet him?”

  “I am no traitor,” Bellamy said calmly. He looked into Rupert’s eyes. “And I am no coward. My work in this flesh is now done, and I have been faithful to my father, Phoenix.” He pulled up his sleeve, displaying his bare forearm. Ghosts of removed bone tattoos were still visible on his sun-rough skin. “I shall be Reborn,” he spat. “You will be offal on the floor of a dragon’s cage.”

  Bellamy Cook lunged forward onto Rupert’s sword. Gritting his teeth, snarling, he threw his arms around Rupert’s head and drove him back toward the open window. For a moment, the two men teetered, and Rupert let go of the sword and punched his open hand into Bellamy’s face, ducking out of the wild embrace and falling to his knees.

  A sword hilt on his chest, a blade out his back, Bellamy Cook slipped away, grabbed at Rupert, grabbed at wind, and fell, swallowed by the night.

  Low flames crackled, dying in the rubble. Wind swirled dust around Cyrus’s feet. He blinked at the open window, at the airstrip, at the harbor, at the moonlit lake. Then he turned to Rupert. The big man crouched slowly and buried his face in his hands. He looked like he was going to be ill.

  Niffy stepped up beside Rupert, and Cyrus saw tears on the brawling monk’s face. The monk closed his eyes, and then he spoke, his voice lilting with Irish sadness.

  “You who knit me in my mother’s womb and plucked me into life, be not far from me. I am alone in grief’s broad sea. My brothers are fallen, their laughter is stopped, their voices are silenced. The pride of Monaster is poured out like water, and my courage is no more than ash. Be not far from me. Dogs encircle me. Bulls surround me. Troubles melt my heart like wax. Evil has drained a draught of greatness, and I am left alone, to be pierced and broken.”

  Rupert rose. “Be not far from me,” he answered. “Walk with me through the shadow of the grave. Tear this curtain of darkness. Make your face to shine upon our fallen, and give them peace.”

  The silence was long. The men were still. Cyrus listened to the wind and mixed it with his own slow breathing.

  The Avengel had slain the Brendan.

  The dragons were coming.

  fifteen

  SCURRY

  MERCY RIOS OPENED HER EYES. She was on her back. The ceiling above her was made of people. Women. All of them. Limp arms hung down with perfectly finished nails and glittering rings and delicate watches. Above the arms, the ceiling was a carpet of dangling hair.

  Mercy remembered the rooftop and the man with the dragon chest and the chains. She remembered throwing the package she had come to deliver, and she remembered the tall woman with the fish-scale tattoos and the scarred cheeks touching her—and in that touch, she had felt seas crashing and cliffs crumbling and crows calling and men shouting and bones breaking and cold wind daggers on her face and the hot sticky warmth of blood pooling in her mouth. And then it had all vanished and she had vanished with it.

  Now … this room of bodies. The place was hot and moist with breathing, sweet with perfume, sour with the stink of the living, edged with the reek of the dying.

  A heavy black crow hopped onto Mercy’s chest and she jerked, trying to smack at it with both hands. But her arms were only made of smoke, and the smoke broke around the bird.

  The crow’s feathers barely rustled. It cocked a twitching yellow eye at her and gave her nose a quick peck.

  Mercy ghosted up and through the bird. Sliding off a table-high platform and onto her feet, she looked down at her smoky arms and hands, and then faced the bird. She had to be dreaming.

  Or she was dead.

  The crow wasn’t looking at her. At least not the smoky her that had jumped away.

  The flesh-and-bone body of Mercedes Rios lay on a table of stacked gray-haired men, all facedown. She was still in her letter-carrier uniform, but the sleeves had been cut off of her shirt and her shorts had been cut much shorter; below the knee before, now they only came down to her midthigh.

  Scales had been traced in sea-green ink onto her bare arms and legs, two small cuts had been made just below her cheekbones, and black feathers had been woven into her black hair. Crow feathers.

  The crow pecked the body’s cheek. Smoky Mercy felt it.

  “Hey!” She billowed forward, waving her arms and stomping, trying to shoo the crow away.

  The bird looked at her, and then went back to pecking.

  “No!” Mercy screamed. “No, no, no, you stupid bird!”

  She smoked up onto her own body and puffed a barrage of fists and knees and elbows all around the crow. Then she sat on the bird. At least, she sat all around it. Finally, the crow cawed and hopped backward. She sat on it again. It flapped and hopped back. Mercy sat on it all the way down to her body’s feet. The crow dropped to the floor. Mercy stayed on her own legs, staring at what was between her feet.

  The little package she had delivered had been neatly opened. Inside, there were four small compartments. In one, fine white powder had been partially mixed with what looked like blood. In the next compartment, there was a torn and creased paper with a sketch of a stone floor. On the floor, human bones had been arranged in a large circular design crisscrossed with strange symbols. An inner circle had been formed with skulls. In the third compartment, there was a tiny glass vial with no label and a small syringe. The syringe had been used. The fourth compartment was empty.

  Beside the package, a small note was resting against the bare foot of her own body. It had been unfolded, but the edges had contracted part of the way back in. Mercy grabbed at the paper, but it barely moved with her touch. She crouched and craned, and finally just shoved her face into the letter so that one eye was inside the folds. The handwriting was scratched out neatly in small, sharp cursive.

  Honored Bey, Breaker of Chains and Men, Flesh Companion of the Great Serpent Azazel, Builder of Bone Cathedrals, Chief Among the Ordo Draconis, greetings.

  Please accept these tokens of my goodwill toward you and of my ill will toward our mutual enemies, the dogs of Ashtown. For too long, they have resented the truly powerful, suppressing greatness wherever they found it. It is my sincerest wish that the Burials be opened and your people freed. There need be no enmity between us. I possess the tooth and the power thereof, but should you destroy the persecutors in Ashtown, I swear that I shall not use it against you or any member of the Ordo Draconis.

  To this end, I include: I) Bone flour milled from blood relatives of the entombed victims in the Burial of Babd Catha. II) An ancient sketch of the bone rune shaped from seven (six men and one woman), on the very floor of the Burial in which Babd Catha is bound in sleep. III) A tooth potion as evidence of my own power. Test it only on one you do not need for a day or more. IV) Feathers plucked from the sleeping head of Babd Catha herself.

  You know the rite. You have gathered the strength. Wield it.

  With respect and admiration,

  Phoenix

  Smoke Mercy drifted back from the paper and the table of men on which her body slept. Six men. She was the one woman. And she had black feathers woven into her hair. Feathers plucked from the head of Babd Catha? Who was Babd Catha? Now the table of men seemed a lot less like a table and a lot more like an altar. She backed away, and for the first time, she looked down at the smooth tile floor beneath her smoky feet. A large design like a star had been faintly traced onto it with gritty blood—blood and bone flour.

  She tried to kick it, to rub it off with her feet while the crow watched—hopping, cawing, cocking its black head.

  Mercy Rios wanted to scream, but her insides were too soft with fear. She shook without a body to shake. She felt cold sweat without skin or pores. All around her, the women in the walls breathed.

  And then one wall opened. Unconscious people rippled and parted. The tremendously tall woman who had called herself Anann the Morrigan stepped into the room—freckled and scarred, bare arms and bare neck all tattooed with scales. She still wore her cracked and worn leather studd
ed with sea glass and stones, but her long red hair was loose and wild, and her feet were bare.

  The huge man with the broken chains on his ankles and wrists stepped into the room after her, and the bloodred dragon blister twisted on his chest. Anann stepped to the body of Mercy. The crow fluttered up onto her shoulder.

  Radu Bey turned dark eyes onto the Mercy of smoke, and he smiled.

  “There is much life in this place. Her soul takes on a body of vapor.”

  Anann turned, looking into Mercy’s eyes.

  “Let me go,” Mercy said. “Please.”

  Anann said nothing. She turned back to the Mercy on the altar and began delicately tracing every scale that had been drawn on the girl’s arms. Smoke Mercy writhed, slapping at her own arms, feeling every touch.

  “You were not meant to be awake,” Radu said. “But so many souls, so much breathing, so much life draining into this air, daughter, you are the moisture of many lungs.”

  “It is time,” Anann said quietly. “Babd Catha, my sister, has waited long.” She leaned slowly forward, draping her red hair over Mercy’s body. Smoke Mercy shivered in the corner with the ticklishness of the touch that blanketed her.

  “Soon,” Radu said. “The others are coming. She can wait a little longer.” Dragging his chains, he stepped toward the smoky girl in the corner, huddling beneath the arms that dangled from the breathing walls.

  “This isn’t real,” Mercy said. She wrapped her ghostly arms around her ghostly knees and began to rock in place. “It isn’t. I’m asleep. I was hit by a car. Something. This isn’t real. There aren’t people like you. There aren’t. No one is called Babd Catha.”

  Radu Bey extended a huge hand. “It is time you left this place.”

  Mercy reached for it, and as she did, flame sparked in the huge man’s palm. Heat jumped through her. Her hand and arm swirled away in twisting steam. Her world, her pain, her worry—it all evaporated into nothing.

  Antigone sat with her legs crossed on the roof of the bridge of the S.S. Fat Betty. Below her, the ship deck rustled in the evening wind. Off to her right, the island’s palm trees shook their fronds at the moon, while to her left, as far as she could see, the moon was painting the world’s straightest road across the sea.

  Beside her, an enormous orangutan sat like a rug mountain, peeling bananas. The huge animal smelled like—she groped for any possible comparison—like the flooded interior of a car left in the sun with the windows up. Like a carpet so tired of being peed on that it had eaten the cat. Like the girls’ locker room at her old school had somehow been trapped inside a hay bale. Even in the warm tropical night air, he was sitting close enough that she could feel the heat coming off his body.

  Cadders and Jane had been steering clear. This one was Jerome. Lemon had sworn that he was as friendly as a tired dog, and she hadn’t been far wrong. But he was a tired dog that had decided to follow Antigone everywhere. His lower lip hung low as he hunched over a single banana, peeling it carefully with fingers the size of traffic cones. When he’d finished, he turned his huge, leathery moon face to Antigone and extended his backhoe-size arm, holding the naked banana directly in front of her mouth.

  At first, Antigone had resisted—bananas were not her closest friends in the fruit world—but Jerome had persisted. No, thank you meant nothing to him. Finally, she’d nipped off a tiny bite with her teeth, and the happy ape had shoved the rest into his own mouth. Then he’d plucked another banana off the bunch at his side and had begun the process all over again.

  Antigone had now eaten more banana in one night than in her previous five years. And while the orangutan worked, she stared out at the saltwater world around her, and up at southern constellations she had never seen, and she thought about everything Lemon had told her, everything she had shown her, and the volumes of terrified warnings that the nervous woman had issued with every other breath.

  Antigone had spent the whole day grilling Lemon with Rupert’s questions, poring over pictures and files, and listening to her grow hoarse. It had been awful stuff to hear, but she hoped it would be helpful to Rupe, helpful in preventing horrible new layers of awfulness from being added to the story of Radu Bey. So far, no magic bullets.

  Of course, there was also the chance that she was only on this boat because it was warm and far away and safe. Thinking that made her angry. So she didn’t.

  A banana appeared in front of Antigone’s face and she bit it. She still had Rupert’s list in her pocket. She pulled out the creased paper and looked at her Keeper’s handwriting in the moonlight.

  Radu’s Dragon. Azazel. Really, really bad news. But she’d known that already. She’d seen Radu’s dragon form. She’d felt the crushing weight of its tail, and if not for the Angel Skin, it would have been the last thing she ever felt. According to Lemon, now that Radu was unchained, he and his Dracul would be collecting vast quantities of pain, huge numbers of devoted victims, and their slowly expiring lives would be the strength behind his sorcery, assembled into a temple of their still-living bodies. It was a gross thought—gross in the pictures with all the skeleton walls, even grosser when Antigone thought about those bodies with their flesh still on, still alive, still breathing, crushing each other slowly. In such a place, Radu would be virtually untouchable, and capable of old, old sorcery beyond even what Lemon could imagine. But according to Lemon, the right blade could cut Azazel from Radu’s chest. Then Radu could die, but the dragon and the man would have to be faced separately.

  Brendan’s Breath. Lemon had laughed at the phrase. Antigone had assumed that it was talking about the current Brendan, Bellamy Cook, but it was something much older than that. An old legend about the original St. Brendan himself. An old lie, Lemon had called it. Sappy Victorian Sages had even talked about Brendan’s Kiss. Allegedly, it was the kiss of life, a kiss that could awaken not the dead, but the unliving—stone, wood, steel, cloth. Other stories said that Brendan had sealed his last breaths into two stone jars, which had never been opened. Theoretically, that breath could be used for powerful blessings. But the truest and oldest story—at least according to Lemon—was darker. Brendan’s breath wasn’t life-giving at all. It was judgment. She’d told the story to Antigone after brewing tea, and she had clutched her little cup tightly as she spoke.

  “The touch of life belonged to a repentant Druid, no one knows his name now, who considered it a curse and a burden and begged St. Brendan to give him the sleep of Burial. St. Brendan agreed, but first, he spoke all of the laws of righteousness into twin limestone jars, using the lost tongue of creation. Then he sealed them with Solomon’s name for God, and asked the Druid with the touch of life to make the stone live, to make them giants, and to make the laws he had spoken their hearts, and judgment their only purpose. The Druid agreed, but he was more fearful of such judges than Brendan, and when he livened the jars and the stone began to quicken and grow, he gave them voices. The two grew into stone giants, brothers in shape and strength, and they looked on men and judged them all to be guilty and deserving death. But when they spoke their judgments, Brendan’s breath—their laws, their hearts—left them, and they grew still. Statues of living stone, the Brothers were taken deep into the vaults, where they keep silent watch over the oldest hall of Burials, and only fools have dared disturb them.”

  Antigone had asked questions, but Lemon had refused to say more.

  Jerome held out a banana and Antigone nipped off a bite. Next on her little list …

  Tooth Tools (Weapons). Lemon had taken her to a small armory belowdecks, full of knives and swords and strange spears and muskets and musket balls and flintlock pistols and huge sawtooth traps hanging on chains next to clusters of strange lumpy bombs, all forged in black steel under some kind of influence from the tooth. Lemon had said the blades were nearly unbreakable, and while they couldn’t kill a transmortal, they could inflict intense pain. The closer the tooth was when they were used, the more intense the pain. Skelton had laid them away for years against the day whe
n the tooth should be recovered. And Lemon wanted them all gone. She refused to touch them, and while Antigone had walked the racks of black steel, Lemon had looked away.

  Antigone had been excited. Weapons were obviously helpful. And then Nolan had picked up one musket, recoiled when the steel touched his skin, and thrown it onto the ground.

  Antigone had seen the old anger erupt in his normally weary eyes, the blue veins seething beneath his paper skin. She could see it still. Antigone looked at Jerome, the orange ape. He had run out of bananas and was now carefully stacking empty peels.

  Nolan had practically snarled at her.

  Antigone had backed away, watching the ancient boy clench his fists and grind his teeth. Slowly, Nolan calmed, exhaling the storm inside him one steady breath at a time. His hands unclenched. Sweat slipped down his temple and onto his cheek.

  “I’m sorry,” he finally said. “Antigone … pass such cursed and Reaper-charmed steel through my blood and I will still be screaming in a year. It is charged with a pain and madness I can feel from here.”

  Antigone sighed. Rupert might want them to collect weapons, but that wasn’t happening. Not with Nolan on the plane. And she was pretty sure she didn’t want it to happen, either. Torture like that felt wrong. Until she thought about Radu Bey …

  A sharp whistle floated up from the deck below. She looked down and saw Dan standing between the trees. Jerome grunted and leaned forward onto his knuckles, peering over the edge.

  “Di’s been talking to Arachne and Cyrus!” Dan shouted. “You need to get down here.”

  Cyrus was pacing in the small dusty room where Rupert had left him. There was one chair, one light, a small folding table dotted with oil cloths and a gun-cleaning kit, two walls covered with books, and two walls covered with loaded gun racks. The sagging bookshelves surrounded the locked door. More bookshelves had even been mounted directly onto the door. Rupert had called the place his lesser study.