Brood of Bones (18 page)

Her brows high in curiosity, she asked, “You’re preparing the magic? Is it almost ready?”

“No. Not yet.” I touched my hair bun to check that no locks had slipped.

Faliti scowled at the gowns fluttering on the clotheslines, their enchanted fabrics twisting and coiling in the air current from my maid’s scurrying. Janny had filled the five hanging cords with my honorary gowns, and now I wore the last two.

As Janny began unbuttoning my back, I held my eyes on the floor. “You must also disrobe, Faliti.”

“Will the magic burn my clothes?”

Janny took my cane, and I stood, shrugging my shoulders from the gown then stepping out of the skirt. Only my innermost gown remained, the only one I liked independent of its usefulness in hiding me. Silk dyed purple shimmered with gloss between the amethysts woven across my chest and sleeves. No one but Maid Janny had seen me in this creation, my own synthesis of sleek fit and jeweled elegance, and dressed from foot to neck in flowing purple, I felt naked.

“The greater surface area for skin contact,” I said, “the easier for me to draw you into...into my spells.”

“I guess that’d make sense to someone.” Faliti pulled off her blouse and unwound the long sheet of fabric that constituted her skirt.

Her nakedness took me by surprise. I found myself staring at breasts with stretch marks and veins made prominent by motherhood, the blood vessels branching out from areoles of enviable diameter and darkness.

“Try to kiss me,” she said, “and I’ll punch you in the mouth.”

“You should lie on the cot and look away,” I said as Janny tugged at the last lacings on my back.

“Why? You’re looking at me.”

I felt myself blushing, and I suspected I would have spiraled into a faint if not for the circulation of air so close to my skin. Squirming, I had no choice but to lift my arms for Janny to slide off my amethyst gown.

Faliti’s eyes widened. “What’re those?”

“My undergarments.”

“They’re so red. And is that
silk
?”

“What difference does it make? Lie down.”

Faliti nodded to Maid Janny. “What about her?”

“She is pleasantly ignorable.” I took Faliti by the arm. This all seemed unreal; sensations of floating and spinning left me shaky. I had never held people like this, when they were conscious.

She lay on her side, and I nudged into her back, my legs pressed against hers. She said, “By the Ever Always! You’re scrawny as a boy.”

Faliti exaggerated, I reassured myself. I wrapped my arms around her warm sides to grip her belly, and she stiffened while I prepared myself for sleep.

“Will I feel anything?”

Her voice came from far away, and I did not answer as I had already reached the forty-third step. I glanced back to see the marble stairway stretching upward, and through the top archway, I could distinguish Faliti’s black hair and massive shoulders. She had not tried to free herself or pull away yet. I hurried down the remaining steps, jumped, and towed her after me into the laboratory.

Although I appeared above the diamond dais in all twenty-seven gowns, Faliti came into being on the operations table naked, her arms and legs held in place by gold manacles. A blindfold wrapped around her head.

She
gasped,
no doubt from the coldness of the basalt stone. “What have you done to me?
Resha,
let me go!”

My voice resounded in the domed room. “Here, you will be silent.”

Attracting the silver pillow to my hand, I touched her with it, and her struggling limbs went limp, her hands unclenching.

A copper cone whisked into my hand, the object modeled after those held to ears to amplify sound. I placed it on her belly, and then I Created a cloth with which to cover her breasts, as I found their size distracting.

Leaning my ear down to the narrow end of the cone, I waited for the spell to tell me the parentage of the child in her belly, if it was a child. A duke once had hired me to identify if the baby his wife carried belonged to him or to her lover. I had neglected to collect a hair of Harend’s for the test, yet I still listened to the disembodied child’s voice as it spoke through the cone.

“I am a boy. For my father, no comparison present. For my mother, this is not a match.”

My pulse accelerated. I had created the second test to ensure the spell worked, as I never had expected to find a child who was not related to the woman who carried him. The fact that the spell had recognized whatever she carried as a boy did not reassure me.

Gathering my courage, I summoned the blue diamonds and positioned them around Faliti’s belly. As her tissues began to fade from sight, I forced myself not to look away, expecting too soon to gaze down at another unchild, something malformed to the point of being inside out.

The blue diamonds tumbled to the operating table, and Faliti’s skin reappeared, hiding the womb from my sight. I had lost control of my spellcraft.

Such an embarrassment never happened, not to an elder enchantress. As my surprise receded, a sense of being watched prickled down my back, the same feeling I had experienced when in my laboratory with Sri. It reminded me of the moments in a dream before the realization struck that it was a nightmare, although over a decade had passed since I had experienced such a nocturnal grievance. I glanced at the walls, even upward at the skylight, yet I saw nothing but blackness, baubles, and prismatic stars.

Frowning, I decided that whoever was peering into my dream had annulled my detection spell. I had no intention of losing a battle of will here, however, and I hopped above the comatose Faliti to seize her abdomen. Gowns fanning around my levitating body, I Attracted the diamonds into the air then
Repulsed
them to their proper positions around her womb.

Membranes faded to reveal a white object that would have petrified me if I had not known what to expect. Even so, my abdominal muscles convulsed in disgust.

Multiple baby skeletons were bent and disfigured into the shape of one egg. Rows of ribs cluttered against foot bones; arm bones wrapped around pelvic bones, and wrist and finger bones filled in the gaps. Spines curved throughout the ovoid, except where a band of cartilage divided the bone egg lengthwise into halves. By my understanding of bone growth, I predicted the two halves would not fully merge and fuse until after birth, leaving soft spots like those on the skulls of human newborns.

Commanding myself to focus and not shrink back, I pushed the spell farther; the bones faded from sight, providing a glimpse of the insides of the unchild, of muscle tissue, violet gland sacs, and—

Magic from an external source invaded my dream. It felt like a pin stuck into the back of my spinal cord, a spell entering my laboratory and slipping into Faliti’s body.

Her abdomen lurched, and something splattered my face. Bewildered, I wiped my chin to see translucent droplets on my hand darken into blood. I
Repulsed
the blue diamonds from Faliti, her belly blinking back into sight with a gash running from navel to groin.

Hysteria skittered through me as I felt myself crushed between confusion and horror. I did not know what had occurred, yet the color was draining from Faliti’s skin, warning of massive internal bleeding. I had to concentrate, or this woman would die in my dream.

A platinum clamp flew into my hand. Waving it at her belly caused a dual Attraction between the edges of severed skin, closing the wound. At my will, the blue diamonds flurried around her abdomen, revealing intestines and organs cut and pierced from bone shards that had lanced outward from her womb.

I
Attracted
a bloodstone from a laboratory shelf, and combined with the silver clamp, it constricted all her abdominal arteries and veins to stop the bleeding. Hands moving from one side of her belly to the other, I Attracted the bone shards back into the womb then confined them in a repaired birth sac. Whenever I found a major blood vessel torn, my magic bound its edges together.

Tracing and retracing her circulatory system, I convinced myself I had found all the leaks, and I Attracted my magic chisel then touched it to the bloodstone, which restored her blood flow.

A jar glittering with sapphires floated into my hand. The spell stored within it began the process of finding all units of infection that had entered her blood from her cut intestines, crushing each contaminate with precise, paired Attractions.

The magic that held her body together would not persist if she left my dream. I had to stimulate her tissue to mend itself, and I beckoned flocks of silver pins toward me. When any two pins pointed to the same spot, they prompted multiplication of bodily units and the formation of connective tissue.

I arranged the first hundred pins in the air; the silver needles revolved around my fingers to point at the location of each blood vessel I had sealed with Attraction. Remembering the areas in need of mending was not a problem, yet as I had never before dealt with an injury involving so many organs, I ran out of pins at five hundred.

Creating more pins and imprinting enchantments on them required all my attention. A half an hour passed before I completed a batch of a hundred, and I turned my focus back to Faliti to find her not breathing. Her blood did not flow, and her heart had stopped.

She had been dead for twenty-three minutes.

I maintained my composure until I determined the cause: A toxin I had not looked for had paralyzed her lungs, its source the violet gland sacs in the womb.

My enchanted implements retreated to the shelves as a weight drove me to the ground, my gowns rippling outward in my collapse. I lost my grip on repressed revulsion and anxiety, a nausea rising from my quaking insides to my gasping chest. The bedlam of emotion advanced farther into my skull, where I felt my brain stem would rot, and I would never move again.

My error had killed her: I should have examined her vital signs every few minutes. I had to accept that either my bias against Faliti had undermined my attentiveness, or I was capable of miscalculating in my dream. Both possibilities disturbed me equally.

Worse than either thought, the “boy” in Faliti’s womb had been deformed past humanity. A creature inverted, with bones on the outside and an interior filled with venom, had fractured and killed her. I would not wish that fate on any woman, not even Faliti, who had tormented me, and her husband.

A glance at the corpse on the operations table forced me to believe it had really happened. The thing inside her had possessed a magic bond with an entity outside my dream, a man or god, and whoever it was had peered into my laboratory, seen me prodding the unchild, and evoked death in Faliti.

All the women in Morimound likely carried such an unchild. For all I knew, the mothers had all died by now. If the Ever Thriving, Always
Dying
had generated the unchildren, then he had given not a boon but a blight. If a man and his magic were responsible, then Morimound was under siege.

I crawled to the diamond dais and fled the dream.

Night Five and Day Six, Third Trimester

Maid Janny’s fingers trembled on my gown laces, her eyes darting to the cot and Faliti’s corpse.

I said, “Pay attention, you buffoon!”

Janny pinched her lips together. Upon leaving my dream, Faliti’s abdomen had split open again. Not too much blood had trickled across the floorboards onto my gowns.

At last dressed, I waited for Janny to open the door. Then I swept past Spellsword Deepmand to find Harend Chandur sitting at the table, his hands clamped on his knees.

He leapt to his feet. “Where is Faliti?”

I ignored his question. “Check on Alyla expeditiously.
Instantly.
Now!”

After a moment of befuddlement, Harend ran up that atrocious ladder to the second story. I waited to hear him shriek, and I did not stop pressing my arms together until he returned to view.

“She’s asleep.”

“Asleep? Are you sure? Wake her.”

Harend thumped out of sight, and my fingers gripped my face around my eyes. At last, I heard his voice again.

“She’s feeling better. I think she’s getting her appetite back. Is something wrong?”