Brood of Bones (7 page)

Janny gulped her wine in a fashion less than civilized. “Wonder if the city has any lady Feasters with the big bump.”

“Excuse me?”

“There are lady Feasters. I’ve seen Bright Palms nail them onto temple doors,” she said. “Think any here have the breeding belly?
The jug full of trouble?
The nine-month bellyache?”

“Why would they not?”

“Heard they couldn’t.
If peppers give me the burns, eating all that fear must blacken their insides. You know, shrivel their wombs, no children. Now that I think of it, might not be half bad.”

“Do not be absurd. They have all the requisite reproductive organs.”

“Just how much do you know about their re-productive organs?”

“I have received an education at an academy of higher learning, the benefits of which you could not begin to appreciate.”

“I’ll drink to that.” She upended her wine glass.

I turned my eyes away from the vulgar woman. My study of Feasters had begun after one of those mornings when my drowsiness swamped my perceptions, shut out all potential for satisfaction, and forced me to consider the benefits of killing myself. This avenue of thought had focused my attention on Feasters, whose magic was rumored to cure all deformity and afflictions. As a Feaster, I might escape my endless fatigue.

My ruminations of becoming a Feaster had spiraled into obsession, which I had escaped only by reassuring myself that no theory existed as to how a magic of fear and nightmares could cure so much as a hangnail. True, a disproportional number of lepers became Feasters, yet their illusions might cover their disease rather than cure it. I reminded myself of that now, as best I could with my gelatinous thinking, because I would soon face temptation.

My gaze rested on the sleeping Sri. She faded in and out of view as my eyelids fluttered closed, yet I saw her clearly in my laboratory, through the hovering mirror.

Her white hair reached her ankles, or it would if its tangles were brushed straight. The hair had thickened near her scalp because of her pregnancy, yet otherwise the condition did not become her. Stretch marks crisscrossed with wrinkles over her abdomen, while her nails had cracked and dulled, and her skin had discolored to the pale yellow shade of a toadstool.

I could purge her blood of wormwood and restore her liver. Even so, I judged she would not survive the last months of pregnancy, let alone the birthing. My magic could save her but not all the city’s elderly matrons. Each family would lose its grandmothers.

I remembered with fondness my grandmother Sandu, the only female relative who had not beat me for forgetfulness and oversleeping.

Although a frown line etched the brow of Sri the Once Flawless, she slept with a smile. She believed she could bear her child, raise it, and find happiness. I could not help but wonder if I would feel the same way if I had resided in Morimound six months ago and had become pregnant like the rest. I had sufficient strength to bear a child. I was not too old to raise it. My somnolence might not be inherited. The possibilities cramped my stomach.

Worst of all, I suspected increasingly that the children would be stillborn. I imagined what I would feel after carrying a baby inside me for nine months, pouring a thousand hopes and affectionate thoughts into her, braving constant fears of miscarriage then the trial of childbirth, only to hold my daughter for the first time and find her shriveled and lifeless.

The pain of that possibility was too great, and I had to wake to dampen my thoughts.

The carriage stopped, and Deepmand helped me step down to the street.

Maid Janny said, “You expect me to go out there? The Feaster might
pounce
me.”

“You may stay with Sri the Once Flawless,” I said, turning to read the writing on the wall of the home before me.

“Alali Mitul,” the wall read, “the Ever Thriving bless you. Your caring is most deserving, your generosity true.”

Under that couplet, flecks of paint and discolored bricks indicated passages had been scrubbed away. A persistent someone had carved a message, “This roof hides a....” The final word had been removed by chipping bricks from the wall.

Stars in the east sky faded. The street behind us brightened from nearing day and the incoming lamps of the crowd, lead by the Bright Palm and his raised scimitar.

I lifted a gloved hand to the house door. “Deepmand, we cannot wait. I must speak to the Feaster, before the Bright Palm interferes. Bring him to me.”

Maid Janny spoke behind us. “You expect me to stay in the carriage by myself? Sri hardly counts, she’s old.”

The door shuddered when Deepmand thumped it with his plated hand. “Open this door, by command of the Flawless.”

“I am not the Flawless,” I said.

“Open the door, in the name of Elder Enchantress Hiresha.”

The Spellsword’s vociferations and knockings failed to bring about a response, although I believed I saw a light move behind the shutters. The east sky had turned pink. Deepmand smashed the door to splinters with an armored shoulder.

Women screamed inside, and I heard Deepmand’s muffled apology. Outside, men waved scimitars and yelled, “Get the shadow swallower!”

“Bring ’im out so he can see the dawn!”

Despite their words, the men abstained from following Deepmand into the house. The Bright Palm’s neck flashed with the magic flowing up his arteries as he eyed the second story windows.

I followed his gaze to see shutters swing out and a man jump to the street. The black-bearded man landed on his feet, but the sight of my gowns seemed to startle him. I wondered if this was the Feaster. When two citizens charged him, he snapped his gaze away from me and threw a sack; it opened in a burst of hornets.

Buzzing insects landed on the citizen’s faces, and the men dropped their weapons and howled, slapping at their cheeks. The man I presumed to be the Feaster gulped in air, and his belly expanded, his paunch slumping over his belt buckle. More disturbing than the sudden growth was a darkness that swirled beneath his stretched skin like spilled sewage.

“Deepmand, your presence is requested.” I failed to keep a frantic note out of my voice. A hornet’s large, segmented body crawled on my arm, and I felt it bite through my glove. Telling
myself
it was an illusion only partially lessened the sting.

Two men with nets approached the Feaster, who reached into his own mouth and pulled out a sword, an obsidian blade sliding between his lips like an overlong dark tongue. In a sweep of shadow, the black sword chopped off a citizen’s hand. The man stumbled back, clutching the stump of his arm.

The Bright Palm shoved his way through the crowd, and when he passed me, the hornet on my glove vanished. The Feaster spotted him, and the fear-eater’s face twisted with horror. He turned to try to run, his sides swaying and jiggling with his sudden fatness.

Scimitar raised, the Bright Palm closed the distance between them, his veins shining through his skin in a blur of white.

“Stop him!” I reached toward the Bright Palm with fingers hooked, knowing he would catch the Feaster in seconds and decapitate him.

In a spray of bricks, Deepmand leapt through the second-story window; rather than falling, he sailed overhead. He had activated to the fullest his armor’s enchantments of Lightening, and for a moment, a man wearing two hundred and twenty pounds of arms weighed nothing.

He arched through the air, overtaking Bright Palm and Feaster. His flight stopped when he
Burdened
himself, plunging straight down. I admired his technique; he smashed between
pursuer
and pursued, pulverizing the bricks he landed on. His armor absorbed the impact and channeled its force up his legs to his torso. Deepmand batted away the Bright Palm’s scimitar with his gauntlet, yet when he swung his arm to do the same to the Feaster’s blade, the obsidian edge sliced through Deepmand’s enchanted bronze.

A disembodied arm clattered to the ground.

Obsidian could never cut metal. I knew it was impossible, an illusion. Apparently, Deepmand knew it, too, because he reached for the Feaster with his seemingly missing hand and bludgeoned him to the street with a fist temporarily unseen but nonetheless weighted with gold knuckles.

Deepmand’s arm reappeared, and before the Feaster could wriggle away, the Spellsword planted a metal foot on him and compressed. The Feaster writhed, gawking up at a sky that brightened with dawn. I moved toward them through the mass of citizens. When my gowns rippled around their feet like flowing water, the bystanders sucked in their breaths and shuffled back.

“Masterfully done, Spellsword Deepmand.”
I inclined my nose to the Feaster. “Now, degenerate, I suggest you answer my questions.”

Day Four, Third Trimester

“I never hurt anyone.
Never killed them.”
The Feaster wiped at an inky substance dribbling from his lips. “I’m just cursed. Please don’t—”

“That is quite sufficient sniveling,” I said. “First, did you witness anything untoward during the night, between five to seven months ago?”

“No, nothing.”
He clamped his pudgy hands over Deepmand’s boot, failing to budge it.

“You have sufficient time, degenerate, to consider your answers, yet none to try my patience. Did anything seem out of place on your nightly escapades?”

“Wait, yes, there was demons made of flames.”

“There
were
demons.” I corrected him.

“They chased me down the streets, the demons did, always after me with their knives, and me just hungry and drenched in the rain and always so hungry.”

Deepmand asked, “Flame demons, in the rain?”

“No, no, no, it wasn’t raining then.
Only later.”

I did not know if he spoke truth, yet I would in my dream. “As a Feaster, you have an olfactory perception of fear. Correct?”

“No, I swear by the Fate Weaver I never did!”

Deepmand leaned farther over him. “The elder enchantress asked if you can smell fear.”

“No, no! Well, a little.”

“Then,” I asked, “
has
any home contained occupants who seemed particularly fearful in the past months? Or, when the pregnancies became obvious, did any household lack fear?”

“Do not listen to it.” The Bright Palm edged toward the Feaster with his scimitar lifted. “Their kind will say anything to avoid justice. I insist on the right to avenge the meek.”

The fat man wailed. “Lord of the Feast, save me!”

Deepmand glanced to me for approval then caught the Bright Palm’s descending scimitar, yanking it from his grasp. By activating an Attraction between the dorsal sides of his gauntlets, he snapped the blade in two.

The Bright Palm’s face never changed as he watched his sword broken, and with a voice that might have commented on the relative humidity he said, “You are aiding a thing of lies and despair. Desist, or the Order of the Innocent will condemn this city.”

“Does this look like aiding to you?” I waved to the pinioned Feaster. Fortunately, I had anticipated this point of contention and planned in the dream what I would say. “I have enchanted seven swords for Bright Palms, which together will have slain dozens of Feasters. I am not their ally.”

“What you have done in the past is irrelevant. Morimound is shielding this Feaster and harming the meek.”

I did not like how he attributed my actions to the city, although I admitted that he might have some grounds for doing so. The Bright Palms had already condemned me multiple times, for the prices of those enchanted swords, and their toneless disapproval no longer bothered me. More flustering was the thought of my city receiving condemnation, the first step on the path to a declaration of righteous war.

Unsure of myself, I glanced to the Spellsword, yet he only bowed his turbaned head. I heard a woman’s voice behind me.

“He can’t help himself. Arsumi is a good boy at heart, and never wanted to cause hurt.”

A woman I understood to be the Feaster’s mother wrung her hands among the wreckage of the house’s door. Four children
peeped
their heads out from behind her.

The Feaster pawed at Deepmand’s boot, gasping for air with which to speak. “Let me go! Or my sisters and brothers will kill you.”