Brood of Bones (9 page)

Sri smelled of scented soap. I tucked my chin over her shoulder, reaching around her watermelon waist and easing myself closer for maximum skin contact. We both wore nothing, only our undergarments. I closed my eyes and found myself on the stair, my hands empty for the moment.

I walked downward, alone, darkness undiluted on either side of the marble steps. Upon reaching the last step, I grabbed at the air, and Sri appeared in my arms as I lifted into my laboratory.

The elderly woman disappeared from my grasp just as quickly and materialized on the indented stone of the black operations table. Even though I no longer wore my gowns in the real world, they swirled about me here in their full copper-and-silver-threaded majesty.

“Hiresha?”
Sri blinked awake, her eyes following the yellow topazes flitting past her nose. “By the gods, where are we?”

“Your consciousness is not required.” I reached toward a shelf and
Attracted
a silver pillow. The magic bauble sped through ten feet, to my fingertips, and I brushed it over Sri’s cheeks.

She closed her eyes again with a sigh. The spell would hold her in a deeper sleep and prevent her from remembering anything.

My first order of business was to search her hair. In one second, I had found thirty-four lice; one had even crawled onto my arm. A spell of Attraction crushed the nuisances against a quartz crystal I held between two fingers.

A sapphire honey jar leaped from a shelf to float above the operation table, followed closely by a series of vials holding powdered gemstone. Together they contained spells that would clear her blood of bodily contaminates as well as any residual wormwood. Flecks of light leaked down from the glowing trinkets to sift over her while I prepared to repair her liver.

I
Attracted
a cluster of blue diamonds from a shelf and positioned them in a sparkling pile atop the right side of her belly. The diamonds spread outward, circumscribing her abdomen in a revolving circle. The skin they passed over became invisible. Yellow globules of fat nestled against a reddish plaiting of abdominal muscles, all of which faded from sight below the descending diamonds.

The liver
appeared,
a bulging, slimy thing the color of sulfur. I pinched my nose although I could not in truth smell it through the transparent flesh. The organ bore no tumors, and was crowded by a bright pink womb, which I would investigate shortly. I lifted my hand, and a scepter with a purple jewel spun, end over end, into my grasp.

The scepter embodied my most coveted enchantment: regeneration. The spell involved hundreds of Attractions and Repulsions over infinitesimal distances, targeting bits of matter I did not fully understand in units of flesh I could not see, the process multiplied a vast number of times per inch of intended re-growth.

Once I had set a few parameters in the spell, I lifted Sri’s hand with the diamond ring. It was the only real gemstone here, the one thing capable of maintaining the enchantments once I woke. I touched it to the scepter then to a rack of vials, and the diamond began to glow pink.

Her health now assured, I gathered my courage to view the state of her child. I was less than hopeful and felt a buzzing twinge in my stomach. Focusing my mind, I willed the blue diamonds to reveal another section of her abdomen.

The smooth muscles of her womb entered my view, followed by a layer of spongy crimson. I held my breath, preparing myself for my first glimpse of a godsent child.

I blinked, realizing I had pushed the jewels too far. The spell had removed from the visible spectrum not only the anterior of the womb but also the child’s skin, revealing a tiny bone hand, its finger joints glistening with cartilage. Often, babies in the womb would clench their fists, yet these fingers lay flat, its wrist resembling a collection of white pebbles. I pulled back and noticed that the skin between the fingers was a translucent yellow, a surprisingly similar shade to cartilage.

To obtain a better visual of the child’s skin, I withdrew the spell a tenth of an inch and saw the gelatinous membrane of the birth sac. Again, I had gone too far. Even as that thought flitted through my consciousness, I observed something that caused my mind to scream, adrenaline gushing into my arteries like sparks exploding from my heart.

Through the filmy covering of the birth sac, I could still see the whiteness of the skeletal hand. No skin covered those fingers.

Moving my diamonds forward bared the sight of the hand surrounded by more bones, cartilage connecting finger bones to what appeared to be leg bones and ribs. Neither believing nor understanding what I saw,
I
flung aside the blue diamonds. Sri’s spotted skin reappeared, hiding whatever lurked inside her.

Panting, I found myself chewing on gloved knuckles. My head seemed to pulse with flashes of white, the white of the interlocked bones I had seen. The mishmash of ribs and femurs dug into my mind, and I gripped my temples.

I asked myself what I had seen. Not a stillbirth, I thought, but something fleshless, a pandemonium of bones.

All at once, I grew aware of a pressure, the sensation of a stranger’s hand on my shoulder. Alarmed, I pirouetted, gowns sweeping aside gemstones. No one was behind me, yet I still felt the presence.

I could be feeling the hand of a god, the Ever Always. The divinity, or something else, had wormed its way into my dream laboratory, into my most protected of places. I felt vulnerable, horrified for my safety as well as by what I had found in Sri’s womb.

If a god peered into my dream, he could kill me with a thought.

“I—I did not mean to interfere.” I kneeled awkwardly in mid-air. “Forgive me. I will...I promise to....”

I could not think of what to promise, only of the gaze that felt like molten wax dripping on my skin. I had to escape, had to get free. In a blink, I smashed down through the diamond dais and left the dream.

I staggered from the doors of Sri’s room, Maid Janny lacing the last of my gowns onto my back. Mister Obenji, the elderly servant with the black turban, bowed then tried to look past my tide of fabric.

“Lustrous Enchantress, I hope there is chance for the good lady’s recovery.”

“She will progress,” I said distractedly.

My wobbly legs took me to a parlor with green upholstery. I could not back up and sit in my gowns, so I leaned sideways onto a couch, my face pressed against the cushions as I focused on breathing through chest spasms.

I no longer felt watched by an unseen force. All I felt, rather, was sickness on an empty stomach. Squeezing one eye closed then another, I tried to rationalize the thing that was not a child lodged in Sri’s womb. I had been too frightened to view more than its closest part. Nor did I feel any desire to rush back and investigate.

Shivering despite my six layers of gowns, I now understood why Sri had not felt a quickening. The not-child had fused bones and could not move. My head trembled from side-to-side at the thought. The strangeness, the nonsense of what I had seen tore at me, and I could not believe that every woman in Morimound carried what I could only assume was a curse of the Always Dying.

“Sri has to be an exception,” I muttered.
“A fluke.
A horrid, horrid—”

“Did you speak, Elder Enchantress?”

“No, Deepmand.”

After several minutes sprawled on the couch, I convinced myself that I had witnessed a very rare birth defect. The other women most decidedly carried healthy babies in their wombs. The presence I had felt in my dream might not have been a god. A magic user could have interposed his will.
In theory.

I turned my attention to all those in the city who might suffer from childbirth, although I had no reason to suspect they would bear anything but normal children. True, the mothers I had spoken to last night had denied quickening, yet they could have been in error. Others might have felt life within them.

I had to focus. I could not lose control. I had to stay calm and stay silent about what I had seen. If any breath of it reached the people then they might panic. A terrified citizenry could attract Feasters and cause even more problems.

My thoughts were spinning away from me. Increasingly, I dreaded the thought of more not-children—of unchildren—within Morimound mothers, inside my people, ensconced in their daughters.

Only twelve years had since passed since an old friend, Harend Chandur, had told me of the birth of his daughter. During my residence in the Academy, I had exchanged several letters with him, one of his first detailing
pride
in his newborn son, another of his daughter five years later. The news had pained me more than I would ever admit.

I decided to visit Harend Chandur today, to reassure myself that his daughter had quickened and could not be pregnant with anything untoward. Maybe she was not even pregnant. She would be only twelve.

As I heaved myself up from the couch, Spellsword Deepmand cleared his throat. “Would you wish to view Sunchase Hall, Elder Enchantress?”

“I am in no mood for frivolities.”

“You look glassy,” Maid Janny said. “You’ll feel better with a meal in you.”

“I will take my breakfast at the estate of Harend Chandur.”

“My apologies, Elder Enchantress,” Deepmand said. “It is past noon, and I was unaware you had received their invitation.”

“I will receive one, once I arrive.”

Janny obtained directions to the Chandur estate, and we departed from my manor grounds. When the carriage passed through the gates leading down from the High Wall, I rapped my cane on the roof.

“Maid Janny, your diminutive mind has misremembered the directions. Harend Chandur lives in the Island District.”

“And he couldn’t have moved, in
the who
-knows-how-many years since you’ve last been here?”

“He would not have, downhill of the High Wall. His family is one of the most established in Morimound.”

“Then I’ll ask the gate guard over there, as his figure looks rather well established.” She winked at me. “Wouldn’t you say?”

Averting my eyes, I resolved to sit and doze while Janny’s incompetence sent me to the wrong address. I was relieved to find that the unnerving presence from my dream was now gone, although I avoided looking into my mirrors.

We arrived at a house with three stories but in all other ways deficient of a manor. Janny shuffled to the door and back.

“Faliti Chandur said they’d be delighted and honored and whatnot for you to dine with them this evening.”

My mind labored over the concept of Faliti being the wife of Harend Chandur, who both temporarily lived here, outside the Island District. I assumed their manor was undergoing repairs.

Faliti I remembered all too well from my youth. Leering over me with her aggressive and mannish chin, she had said, “Resha, you don’t deserve to be a mother. You’d smother your children by falling asleep on them.” She had stolen Harend, the only man who had tolerated my falling asleep between dances and, once, in mid-conversation.

“Maid Janny, did you neglect to tell Faliti Chandur that it is not now evening?”

“Must’ve slipped my mind.”

“You may take my hand as I exit the carriage.”

“Mind that I don’t take both hands. The honor would be too great for my weak heart.”

The door of the house opened when I approached, and Faliti glared down at me. The sight of her broad shoulders and square chin sparked fear through me, even after all these years, and I missed a step.

Faliti closed her open mouth, and I realized that she had not glared so much as gaped in shock. The sight of my gowns morphed her face through several different expressions, and although I could not distinguish them now, I planned to savor them later.

“I am not prepared to receive you, Resha—uh.” Faliti balked as if surprised she had called me by my childhood name and knowing she had blundered.

“Faliti Chandur, you may address me as ‘Elder Enchantress.’ I have come on behalf of the priests and the divine gods to see to the safety of your daughter.”

At the mention of her daughter, Faliti dropped a hand to her own pregnant belly, and despite myself, a flush of resentment crept up my cheeks. I swept past her, and she skirted away when one my gowns rippled past her legs.