I don’t want to talk, he’d said. I just want the pain to go away.
Sonara had taken his hand and led him into the dark. There, they’d traded their pain: kisses to cover up the lies they were telling themselves, tangled breaths to take the place of heartless words. What followed was a whirlwind romance, one that would never last, for they were too broken to love each other truly.
The double doors next to them opened suddenly, brightness and laughter spilling out as two drunken patrons stumbled into the sands.
“This is the job of a lifetime,” Markam said. “She needs us to do one thing, Sonara. One little job, and we’ll be cleared. Names wiped from the scrolls, life ready to go on in blissful oblivion, and someday, when she takes his place… Don’t you want to be a princess, Sonara? She could make you one.”
She recoiled at the word.
“Give me a bigger, better job out there,” Markam said. “I dare you to come up with a prize that large.”
“The sword—” Sonara started, but she knew he was right.
“We work for her,” Markam said, “we do whatever it is she asks, especially if it’s against her father’s wishes… It’s a win-win, Sonara.”
He was right.
She hated him even more for being so… but he was. She gave Markam her very best Duran-worthy look. “Fine.”
“Alright!” Jaxon clapped his hands. “That’s settled, then.”
Sonara thought of Soahm, with his nice clothes and his lavish castle and the mystery surrounding him; a mystery she may never be able to uncover. Unless, perhaps, she had the riches to help. There was no mystery money couldn’t buy the answer to. Or at least get her far closer to the truth.
She just hoped she didn’t get killed in the process.
“The King has been in contact with the Wanderers,” Azariah said, back in the saloon. A fresh bottle of oil sat opened on the table before her, along with a tray of roasted meats that were surprisingly delightful, unlike most backwater saloon food tended to be. “As you know, the treaty signed long ago is about to expire, and the Three Kingdoms have decided to renew it, as per their initial contract. The Wanderer leader will soon arrive on Dohrsar to complete it. The signing will take place at the Garden of the Goddess. Specifically, at the upcoming Gathering. It is there, after the treaty has been signed, that the Wanderers will begin their mission. The Gathering, as you know, is a very blessed experience. A coming together of the Three Kingdoms. A celebration of our similarities, despite our differences.”
The treaty between the Three Kingdoms of Dohrsar was still in place, but it was a shaky thing, in near-constant imbalance.
Years ago, when Dohrsar’s main continent only comprised Soreia and the White Wastes, Jira’s father had discovered Gutrender, created an army, and razed his way through the entire middle of the continent. He created the borders around the Deadlands, declared himself king, and summoned both queens to his fortress walls.
The three rulers spent five days discussing the treaty that would keep peace in place, that outlined the new borders. It still held to this day, but the hatred between the three leaders was palpable. It was a skirmish between the Deadlands and Soreia that had called Soahm away to the front lines, that had resulted in his injury. There were other skirmishes like it, but someday, Sonara guessed that her mother and the Queen of the White Wastes would likely join forces to dissolve the Deadlands and take back what was once their ancestors’ lands, splitting the desert between the two.
“I’ve been to a Gathering before,” Sonara said. “Any good outlaw ensures they’re in attendance.”
Gatherings meant traders from all over Dohrsar would come, bringing their wares, ripe for the taking with the thick, bustling crowds. And the Garden of the Goddess, specifically, was one of the most fascinating places on Dohrsar. Plenty of places to hide, as it marked the entrance to the twisted network of mines that dove deep beneath the surface of the planet. It was there that many dug for gold, which was used to fashion into coin: the ever-driving force of man.
“But this is no common Gathering, Devil,” Azariah said. “For the Wanderer leader comes not only to extend a treaty of peace. He intends to take something from the planet.” She paused for a moment, just as Suzie Quick’s tune changed, growing louder and more raucous with the night crowd. “My father doesn’t know where it lies, this object… Long has he sought it, but to no avail. He will wait for them to uncover it. And then he will steal it out from under them.”
“An interesting turn of events, to have the Wanderers in attendance,” Jaxon said. He glanced sideways at Sonara, as if he knew that the very word plagued her.
She was already leaning forward, itching for answers, the image of the Wanderers on her mind. Their skeletal armor, their strange, otherworldly weapons and starships. Their faces, if they even had faces, hidden behind dark helmets. They could have been goddesses, as some liked to believe.
Sonara thought they were the true devils.
But if the Wanderers were to be in attendance, she would be closer to answers about Soahm. Closer to a chance of recovering her brother, once and for all.
Wait, Sonara!
Wait!
She pushed the ghostly memory of Soahm’s voice from her mind and focused on the group before her. “What is it they come to steal?”
Azariah paused. She looked to Thali and nodded.
“Antheon,” Thali said. “A powerful orb that lies hidden beneath the planet’s surface.”
“An orb,” Jaxon echoed. “Hidden inside the planet. It sounds like a tall tale.”
Thali nodded. “And so does the tale about the Children of Shadow. Yet here you all sit, with darkness coursing through your veins.”
“What does it do?” Sonara asked instead. “The Antheon.”
Silence, from both women.
“My father does not uncover all of his secrets, Devil. Just as you do not uncover all of yours.”
Jira was as wicked as they came, a man who lusted for power, would do anything to secure more of it.
“Your job is to lie in waiting until they uncover it. The Wanderers have blessings from their world, blessings that will allow them a far better chance than we could ever have at finding the Antheon.”
“So your father is double-crossing them,” Sonara said. “The King is allowing the Wanderers to do the heavy lifting for him. Then he intends to take the Antheon. And you… will triple-cross him?”
Azariah nodded. “He is unaware that I overheard his conversations and plans. And unaware that I intend to stop him.”
“Why stop him?” Jaxon asked.
“Because he is a monster,” Azariah said. “And I fear what amount of power my father might rise to, should he get his hands on it.”
The collar scar on her throat confirmed the former part of her words. Still… Sonara couldn’t help but think back on Markam’s words. She is to be queen.
What if Azariah was just as wicked as her father?
Blood doesn’t always copy blood, she told herself, thinking of her mother, and the fate she’d endured at the Queen of Soreia’s hands. She wasn’t like her mother. She never would be.
Perhaps the same would be true for Azariah.
“How many Wanderers?” Sonara asked.
“A single starship,” Azariah said. “With our abilities combined, we shouldn’t have trouble securing the Antheon. We simply have to be clever, and not get caught by either party.”
She made it sound simple enough. And yet Sonara knew no job was ever as it seemed, once the tide got moving. She looked at Jaxon and Markam, then stood. “When do we leave?”
“Sunrise,” Azariah said. She reached into her jacket, and revealed an overflowing coin pouch, which she gently slid across the table. “Take the night to enjoy yourselves, to rest and replenish your supplies. We leave at first light.”
Sonara snatched up the coin pouch before Markam could.
“Shall we, gentlemen?” Sonara crossed the room, the men trailing behind her. B
ut she paused, glancing back over her shoulder to smile at Azariah. “If I find out you’re lying, and you’re working for your father… I’ll cut your scar wide open.”
Chapter 9
Karr
Curiosity was a traitor.
For no matter his hesitation about a job, landing day would always tug at Karr’s mind. Today was no different.
He’d sat there in the bridge, in his normal seat towards the back, buckles snapped and straps taut, as they’d broken through the atmosphere into Dohrsar.
It was a dwarf planet, with only a single large continent, surrounded by sea. The continent itself struck him as strangely beautiful, enough that he found himself pulling at his straps to see better as the Starfall passed through the clouds.
He could draw this planet, as he’d drawn countless others. But to dip it all in blue would steal its glory.
The continent was split into three distinct shades: the top, an expanse of white and ice blue, a tundra that dipped into a frozen sea at the north, pocked by icebergs so large they could have been continents themselves.
Beneath it, spanning miles and miles wide, was a red-brown desert. It looked like a sea of its own, rippling sands with red and purple mountains zigzagging across its northern half like freshly sewn stitches.
Beneath the desert, in the south, the sands were separated by a jungle of lush green that bled into pale sand. Almost white, but not as stark as the north. It was white in a softer sense. The kind Karr wanted to sink into, as the ocean sand dipped into the southern sea.
The closer they drew towards the Dohrsaran ground, the more the continent began to take shape. The north and the south faded as they zeroed in on the center. Small townships were interspersed throughout the desert, multiplying towards a large circular central fortress surrounded by golden walls. Red-topped buildings and a few towering structures paled in comparison to the golden castle. It stood proudly atop a towering hill in the middle of the city, the castle itself topped with a domed ceiling that sparkled like it was made of diamonds.
They soared above it, still so small from such heights, as they barreled towards the center of the desert. Towards a sight that Karr knew he would draw, this time without his signature blue.
“Landing zone, boys.” Cade tapped the viewport, the glass rippling as it zoomed in on a specific area of the desert. “The Garden of the Goddess.”
The flight crew set the gears for landing, and the Starfall soared over one of the most alien sights Karr had seen in ages.
Jagged red rocks jutted into the sky like fingertips, all formed in a wide circle that was too perfectly placed to be an accident.
The mountain range that had moments ago looked so small, now looked monstrous, swirls of red and purple rock just barely missing the underbelly of the Starfall as the pilots sent her down for landing.
Too quickly, it was over. Too quickly, they hovered above the sand. The viewport slid shut, and they were cast back into their metallic world, lit by the steady glow of the ship’s lights.
Karr swallowed a lump in his throat, realizing, suddenly, that this was the last exploratory landing he’d ever make with Cade.
It was not sadness. It was relief. As long as they finished the damned job and got Geisinger his Antheon. And put enough hope in the man to see that he’d deal with Jeb for good.
“Rock and roll, kid!” Jameson, the ship’s communications manager, shouted from Karr’s left. She was lean, mean muscle paired with a tiger’s smile. She patted Karr on the shoulder as he unbuckled himself and stood, his legs uneasy as ever on landing day. No one else could call him kid and get away with it. But Jameson was like an older sister to Karr, one of the few aboard the crew who’d joined at the start and never left. Some of his sketches even hung in her quarters. On holidays, she always gifted him flagons of foreign alcohol, and they drank together until the edges of the world blurred.
“Sky legs?” Jameson asked now, raising a triple-pierced brow as Karr paused to look at Cade. The Captain was normally the first to rise, but he hadn’t moved from his seat. He simply sat there, staring ahead at the closed viewport.
“You’ve got them, too,” Karr said with a grin, gently pushing Jameson sideways. She teetered a little, but he had a feeling she’d done it just to entertain him. She could destroy him in games of muscles and wit, and they both knew it. His smile softened. “But no, I’m good. Go ahead, Jameson. I’ll catch up.”
She shrugged, then followed the rest of the piloting crew out of the bridge, where they headed down to the loading dock to don their S2s. They’d need them, before they set foot on the poisonous planet.
Karr waited until the bridge emptied, then slid into the pilot’s seat next to Cade.
“Hey,” he said, nudging him. “You alright?”
Cade blinked, nodding as he seemed to come back down to earth. He was always stoic upon landing day, in the way that Karr imagined a surgeon might prepare themselves for surgery. Or a soldier might sit in silence before a battle that would surely bring death.
“We’ve spent a lifetime in this ship,” Cade said softly. “Our father—you may not remember the way he used to prepare for an expedition.”
“I remember,” Karr said.
He could picture it; their father, seated in the very same seat Cade was in now. Scrolling through a manifest with worn leather piloting gloves on. If he closed his eyes, Karr could still remember the smell of the leather. The squeak of it as his father flexed his fingertips and murmured softly to himself, going over notes, preparing to embark on another journey across alien soil. Their mother, with her ever-kind eyes, would stand behind him, humming as she stared out the viewport and admired the beauty of another place waiting to be explored.
“They respected every planet, saw them for the beauties that they were. They did their best to preserve them. To wander, but leave no trail. We’ve never honored that legacy, Karr. We steal things. We tear away a piece of every planet we ever visit. And today?”
Karr dared not speak. He placed his hand on the dash, where two sets of initials were carved.
MK. CK.
Myria and Charles Kingston.
“Today will be the last time we ever betray the Kingston name.”
With a sigh, Cade unbuckled himself and stood. His dark captain’s coat was ruffled from the buckles, and he smoothed it out across his chest, repeatedly, as if there were a wrinkle that just wouldn’t quit. When he was satisfied, he held out a hand for Karr to go ahead of him.
But Karr didn’t move.
“Cade.” He cocked his head. “You’re… bleeding.”
Cade frowned.
He looked down at his hand, where a smear of fresh blood stained his fingertips.
“Strange,” he said. He wiped the blood on his lapel.
“Did you cut yourself in the landing?”
It hadn’t been rocky. If anything, it hadn’t even felt like a landing at all, for how smoothly it went. Karr stepped forward, all formalities aside, to check his older brother for the source of the blood.
But Cade suddenly stepped away, waving him off. The strange sense of stoicity was gone, his captain’s smirk back on his face. “The future is out there, Karr. Let’s not keep it waiting.”
With that, he turned and marched out of the bridge without another glance back.
Chapter 10
Sonara
Two days, they’d traveled, and only now was Sonara able to see the faintest glimpse of the Garden of the Goddess dotting the horizon. It was a mile-wide valley halfway up the mountains, where a circle of blood red rocks protruded from the ground like giant fingertips stretching for the sky.
The Garden of the Goddess was a celestial graveyard.
Each time the moons went dark, it was in remembrance of the time the goddesses slayed one of their own: the youngest, who rose up against the others in her greed for more. With great force, the goddesses slew her, and placed her body in a bed of stars.
As she lay dying, the goddesses began
to mold Dohrsar around her, shaping the planet bit by bit until it became her tomb. Her last breaths were met with a curse: for eternity, she would find no rest.
The dying goddess stretched out her hand as the last pieces of the planet formed around it. Only her fingertips remained, poking through the earth as if she’d used every last bit of her strength to reach them.
“They’re not as morbid as I thought they would be.”
Sonara glanced backwards.
Azariah rode several strides away, with Thali perched behind her on their pale steed.
“The fingers of the goddess,” Azariah said as she stared at the shadowy outline on the horizon. They were still a day’s ride away from the Bloodhorns, and half a day’s ride from heading up into the mountain valley. “People tell tales of them, all across the Deadlands. The details change, depending on who delivers it. The way the tale goes in Stonegrave, I always imagined you’d feel sad, looking at them. A goddess, cast out. Left to rot for eternity. But looking at them…” She tucked a tendril of dark hair behind her ear, and smiled sadly. “There’s a strange sense of beauty to it.”
“There are a great many tales about a great many things,” Thali answered. “It is up to us, my Lady, which tales we choose to believe.”
The two women were so starkly unalike it made Sonara smile.
Thali, on the back of the mare with her lazy, relaxed posture, her Canis mask protruding from her face, bone gauntlets wrapped around Azariah’s middle. The picture of a Deadlander, though missing a much-needed weapon. And Azariah, riding sidesaddle, as rigid as a princess could be. It wouldn’t surprise Sonara if she had a pole for a spine.
“Do you believe the tales you’ve heard about me?” Jaxon asked.
He’d purchased a mare in Sandbank before they left. And with how quickly he’d ridden out of town, Sonara guessed it had been with illusioned coin provided by Markam. The mare was a pretty thing, a white-and-black overo. Her multicolored mane was braided up to show off the intricate swirling patterns on her neck.
Blood Metal Bone: An epic new fantasy novel, perfect for fans of Leigh Bardugo Page 11
