Brood of Bones (40 page)

She appeared hungry enough to follow up such a threat. A boy muffled his yelp with his hands, and the servant dropped her paintbrush.

“Such incivilities are hardly necessary. Now, Physis, assist me with these buttons. And, you, I want something elaborate on my face.”

The Feaster fumbled with my gown buttons, fingers shaking. When she at last had done, she whistled at the sight of my red undergarments. “Any whore would poison her sister for those.”

By the time I thought of a retort, the moment had passed.

Physis flashed scissors toward my eyes, grinning at my fear,
then
lifted them higher to begin clipping my hair short. The servant painted a bird of paradise design on my face, with a yellow dot above each eye and red frills swooping down from my brows to my cheeks. While her brush tickled my skin, I regarded myself in a hand mirror and decided that Tethiel had been correct: No one could confuse my proportions as masculine, although my belly would match a boy’s tautness. I would need to rely on the expectation that all the women in Morimound were pregnant, as well as the distraction of the illusion.

A guard opened the door, and as it swung inward, Physis scurried behind it to hide. “One of you monkeys,” he said, “
get
in here.”

I followed the guard barefoot, wearing nothing but my undergarments, a shawl, and the red diamond. My vision constricted from sleepiness; I bumped into a doorframe and once lost the guard altogether.

“You shouldn’t be drinking so much at your age.” He kicked me in the right direction.
“’Course, might as well drink.
No woman will marry you after this.”

I stumbled into a dining room, and the first thing I noticed was that my furniture had been moved. With the tables shoved to the sides, a wide walkway led down the room to an ostentatious chair, on which a follower sat. He wore silk and the dead priest’s paragon diamond. The Soultrapper sat on a stool beside him, in his poorer clothes.

“Your Lustrous, er, Your Divinity,” a guard said, jogging down the room and kneeling to the follower, “she...she killed them at the doors. She’s inside.”

The Soultrapper rose and kicked away his stool.
“By the goddess’ tits!
The enchantress will be here soon. If she casts any spells, cut off her head.”

Thoughts of my vulnerability and mortality spread through me like a poison, and I trembled uncontrollably. Many guards—I could not manage a firm count—stood in the room, and the moment one gave me a second glance, he would realize I was a woman. The sense of my doom burned inside me. I would die—I would die—I would die.

It occurred to me that I was feeling the approach of Tethiel’s illusion. Nobody had noticed me yet, and I told myself that the men were distracted and as fearful as I.

The Soultrapper shoved the follower off the chair, taking the diamond from him.
“Might as well wear this.
She
knows who I am.”

I padded my way past two guards to the Soultrapper’s side, my arms trembling so much that I could not hold the shawl, and it slid off my shoulders. Only my undergarments covered me, in front of all these men; my throat constricted, and I felt one of them would have to notice my gasping, my shivering, or my hips.

All the men stared at the door, waiting. The feeling of death approached.

The Soultrapper presented a problem, in that he had not yet sat down in the ostentatious chair. If he planned to face the illusion standing then I could do nothing. I wondered if I might act in some way to lure him into the chair, without drawing much attention to myself; if any answer to my quandary existed, it lost itself in the chaos of my thoughts.

A whimper drew my eyes to a table, where two abdomens protruded upward. After blinking, I realized that men held down Sri and Alyla, their legs forced to a spread position as if in preparation to give birth.

The Soultrapper could kill them in a moment with a twist of his unchildren. The thought left me swaying against the chair, gripping my brow.

The guards sucked in their breaths at a rising sibilance from the doorway. The sound reminded me of hundreds of snakes slithering closer.

The Soultrapper grabbed me with his disturbingly long arm, and he pulled me down as he sat. His fingers left trails of oil on my belly, and the paragon diamond dug into my back.

“You’ll protect me, won’t you, girlie?” He crushed me closer against his slimy chest. “The enchantress would have to burn you first, but you won’t mind dying for Your Divinity, would you?”

Elation filled me because now I would have the chance to draw him into my dream. The Fate Weaver must have her hands on my thread. Unfortunately, the excitement and disgust of lying against the Soultrapper had woken me fully.

Forcing my eyes closed, I set my bare foot on the first step on the stairwell. When I reached the fifth step, the Soultrapper’s words filtered down from behind me.

“You’re a good girlie, aren’t you? Not a squirmer at all.”

I felt the Soultrapper tilt in the chair and release gas. The stench chafed my nostrils and yanked me back to wakefulness.

Gowns swarming with jewels seethed into view in the doorway, and I glimpsed a black glove before squeezing my eyes shut. On the stairwell again, I scrambled downward; I had to concentrate and sleep, as I had when dying. I reminded myself that my peril was as great now: I lay against a man who could rot my insides in a moment and trap my soul for an eternity of torment within my corpse.

My feet slapped the steps on the way down while the Soultrapper spoke behind me. “Enchantress, displease me and both those sows will die. Now kneel.”

I reached the twentieth step when a chillingly familiar voice answered him. “It is you who should fear to displease.”

The words were my own, and I paused on the twenty-ninth step, to reassure myself that I had not in fact spoken while falling asleep.

“My imprisonment was an indignation that I will not suffer again.” The voice matched my pitch, yet it was more forceful and laced with malice. “Abuse one more woman of Morimound and I will incinerate you, regardless of the consequences.”

I wished to turn around, to see the illusion speaking with my voice, yet I remembered Tethiel’s warning and proceeded to the fortieth step.

“Good thing this girlie isn’t a woman,” he said in the distance.

I lifted my hand to the right side of my head, feeling as if an earthworm coated with mucus rolled about in my ear. Glancing halfway back to the stair, I realized that the Soultrapper was licking my ear, and the embarrassment caused me to blush and slide up three steps.

Tethiel might have followed the illusion into the room, and I realized he could be seeing me in my undergarments, with a tongue greasing the side of my face. I feared he had, and to determine the truth, I peered up at the top of the stairway.

I saw myself.

In each black glove, I clutched the scalp of a man’s charred head. Blood dribbled from severed necks onto the carpet. My gowns writhed around me, scarves and folds of silk reaching to strangle anyone who strayed close. I sneered at the guards who flinched from my stare, and I relished how even the Soultrapper quavered. I had power over them. They had to obey my every command. At last, I had found another way besides raising children to earn true respect.

No, I told myself, I was seeing only an illusion. While the real me had gawked, steps had slid under my feet, dragging me toward the waking world and the shadow of myself. I gripped my head and dug in my toes, forcing myself to focus. The stairs now stung my bare feet as if coated by frost.

I had done the one thing Tethiel had warned me against, and worry slowed my progress, my muscles turning cold and my limbs coating with ice.

On step forty-five, I heard the illusion speak behind me. My words—no, her words—sounded closer, and I was uncertain if she spoke to the Soultrapper or to me.

“After deliberation, I have concluded that we will either ally, or you will die.”

A shadow passed over me on the fifty-third step, and I glanced up to see a multicolored torrent of gowns swooping above the stair. The illusion landed ahead of me, on the lowest steps.

Fabric sawed outward as my look-alike spun to face me. She grinned and lifted her arms, shadows crawling out from the folds of silk to flicker on her palms as black flame.

“Hiresha.”
Her voice echoed up the stairwell. “You have no need to rely on your dreams, ever again. We can reduce the Soultrapper to a sniveling wretch and force him to capitulate.”

Reaching step seventy, I pressed on without speaking. Any words here might cause me to mumble in the waking world, and I would not dignify this dark replica with a reply in any event. I noted her eyes lacked irises or any whites and appeared as enormous black pupils.

“You are touching him, and he could not resist us. It would be ever so easy.”

I wondered if the presence of the illusion on my stair meant she had vanished from the waking world, or if a separate entity now blocked my way.
If the former then I had to hurry, and I crossed the eightieth step.
If the latter then I doubted this illusion, which had pierced my consciousness, was in any way under Tethiel’s control.

“I will not allow you to choose unwisely.” Black flame and red smoke erupted from her hands, bursting up the stairway. “You must accept my power.”

The shadow inferno roared, and I felt myself pulled forward as it consumed the air in the stairway. I remembered seeing the two men being cremated in Kishala’s room. That had been illusion, yet this looked real and would feel like unending torment. I could never surmount that kind of pain. I would awake screaming in the Soultrapper’s arms and ruin everything.

I would have to accept the dark replica and begin Feasting.

I placed a hand over each of my ears, my head trembling from side to side. My eyes were so dry from the heat that my eyelids chafed them. I remembered Tethiel had said he once saved his nation with Feasting, only to later lose it. I reminded myself of the ramifications of using that magic, the disgrace and banishment as well as the anguish and distrust that governed Tethiel.

I could not take the easy way. It would be too difficult.

Running toward the fire, I told myself that figments of my mind could not harm me: I was master of all the insubstantial. I plowed into the flame, pressing on even when I felt the agony of my scorched skin peeling from my arms, while the red smoke scarred my lungs and spread toxins into my veins.

The pain faded in the next instant, the flame disappearing, and I reached the ninetieth step unharmed.

“Someday, you will need me.” The illusion smiled up at me with my own face, except her teeth bristled like needles. “I am willing to wait.”

She
Lightened
herself and leapt, reaching for my face, and her black-gloved fingers gouged my eyes.

I flinched but continued into what felt as cold as a blizzard gust.
A darkness
blanketed my vision, and I had to descend the last steps by the feel of my numb toes.

Believing I had at last gained the hundredth step, I jumped upward and reached behind my back. My frigid hands closed on the oily warmth of the Soultrapper, yet I felt him slipping in my grasp. Sitting on his lap in the waking world, I did not have as complete a contact with him as I normally had with people when bringing them into my laboratory.

I flexed my arms behind me and caught him by his shoulder. He threaded his arm between mine and wriggled away as I continued my ascent. My hands snapped down on the last available place to grab him: his neck.

I had to hold on. He must sense something was happening to him; he was struggling. If I entered the dream without him then I would be safe from his magic attacks, yet he could still shove my real body off him. Then Tethiel would see my plan had failed and begin Feasting, to the death of the city.

The Soultrapper’s hand ran down my spine, pushing me. It was more a mental shove than a physical one; I continued moving upward in the same trajectory, yet he flickered in and out of existence. My grip failed, my hands clamping together with nothing between them.

I felt as if the city itself had fallen from my grasp, as if Morimound were a glass miniature that would smash onto the floor and spray back up in a gale of shards to cut me in a thousand places.

Something touched my thigh—his elbow, perhaps—and without thinking I reached my legs around and caught his head between my calves. I crushed my legs together, locking my feet in place under his flabby chin.

Not the most decorous way to catch a Soultrapper, I thought, while towing him upward into my dream. Yet, it would suffice.