Bone Magic

Bone Magic

By Brent
Nichols

Copyright 2014
Brent Nichols

Smashwords
Edition

This is a work
of fiction. A novel. Totally made up. Any resemblance to actual
persons, places, goblin hordes or skulking necromancers is purely
coincidental.

Cover art
courtesy of Deedee Davies at www.3dfantasyart.co.uk/.

There was a
dead man walking down the side of the road, with the body of a
woman slung over his shoulder.

Tira Archer
reined her mule to a halt and stared at the man as he plodded
along. Surely, she told herself, he wasn't actually dead. Just
dirty, and haggard, and a bit bloody. There were flies, but the
woman over his shoulder would explain that. He didn't so much as
lift his eyes as he went by, but then, he was busy.

The road was a
straight line cut through deep forest. There was nothing on either
side but trees, alive with the chirping of birds and the barking of
squirrels. It was, all in all, about the last place she would
expect to encounter the living dead.

He had to be
alive. Appearances and odors notwithstanding, he had to be.

"Good day," she
said to his retreating form. He ignored her.

He seemed
harmless enough, but she didn’t turn her back until he was a good
long way away. Daisy, her mule, stood placidly in the middle of the
road as she waited.
It’s not magic,
she told herself. Magic
made her skin crawl. Earth magic was bad enough. It could help
crops grow, or make mice and crows shun a field. In the wrong hands
it could be used to wither those same crops, or make weeds
flourish. Air magic was much worse. A sorcerer using air magic
could blast charging cavalry out of their saddles, or incinerate
companies of hard-working archers who were just trying to earn an
honest wage.

But bone magic
was the worst. When the dead rose up from the ground and fought the
living, it was time to find a new war.

Tira shook her
head, turning away from the man with his gruesome burden and
heeling the mule into motion. She was done with sorcerers, and done
with war. After enough adventure for a dozen lifetimes, Tira Archer
was finally going home. It wasn't the triumphant return she'd once
dreamed of, mounted on a charger with her pockets stuffed with
gold. She was penniless, and riding a swaybacked old mule that had
once pulled a plow. Still, she was going home, and it felt
good.

Except for a
nagging feeling that she was being watched.

She twisted
around in her saddle. The man and woman were a distant speck,
barely visible. The road around her was empty. She could see for
most of a mile up and down the road, and she was the only person in
sight.

It was early
spring, the branches of the trees just beginning to bud with new
leaves, patches of snow showing here and there. The tall, straight
trees, still wreathed in the dried remains of last year's vines,
grew thick and close on either side, though. There could be an army
within a stone's throw and she would never see it.

Not that an
army was likely to stay hidden. Tira knew a thing or two about
armies. For ten years she'd fought in foreign wars, starting out as
a pikeman for a prince named Larik. Any fool could hold a wooden
pole with a spike on the end and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a
hundred other fools, even a teenage girl fresh off the farm. She
hadn't seen any action in that role, except at a distance.

A good archer
made triple the pay of a pikeman, so she'd gotten herself a bow and
set to work practicing. In addition to better pay, the job proved
more exciting. She had the scars to prove it. Eight years as an
archer was enough for anyone, and when Larik got his neck stretched
by an indignant older brother, Tira decided it was time to go back
and see if the old farmstead was really so bad.

But paydays had
become downright irregular in the waning years of the war, and
thrift had never been one of Tira's strengths. So she found herself
now alone, on an empty stretch of road winding through a shadowy
forest, without a single coin in her purse and with the little
hairs on the back of her neck standing up and telling her that she
was in danger.

She took her
bow from the boiled leather case on her saddle and swung to the
ground so she could string it. Her quiver hung from the other side
of the saddle, and she slung it across her back. Then she climbed
back into the saddle and urged the mule to walk a bit faster.

Daisy was quite
a few years past her prime, and time had robbed her of any
cooperative spirit she might once have possessed. She twitched an
ear in Tira's direction, but made no other response to the drumming
of heels on her ribs.

"Miserable
nag." Tira twisted around in the saddle to peer behind her.

Nothing.

"Come on,
Daisy, just a little faster, please? I'll make it up to you
later."

Daisy
snorted.

"Now, that was
just rude." She broke off the conversation as branches crackled
somewhere to the right. She drew and nocked an arrow in one fluid
motion, and waited.

More brush
crackled behind and to the left. Someone was making a fairly clumsy
attempt to surround her. If she'd been on horseback she could have
galloped out of the trap. As it was, she had plenty of time to
prepare.

It wasn't hard
to track the progress of the people on the right as they blundered
their way through the undergrowth. Branches broke, leaf buds
fluttered back and forth, and she even heard a voice mutter, "Put
your head down, she'll see you!"

Finally a man
came into view, grunting as he heaved himself over a fallen log. He
was fortyish and fat, armed with a cudgel that he almost dropped as
he clambered over the log. A teenage boy scrambled after him, thin
as a heron and armed with an axe. Not a war axe. A woodcutter's
axe, and he almost cut himself getting his feet back on the
ground.

By the sound of
things, there were two more men stumbling onto the road behind her.
Tira didn't bother turning to look. She kept her arrow pointed more
or less at the fat man, but didn't draw back as he walked into the
middle of the road and raised his hand.

"We..." There
was a long pause as he caught his breath. Climbing over the log had
taken a lot out of him. "We want our children back. Turn them over,
and we'll let you live."

Tira chuckled.
"Sure. Children. I've got them right here in my saddlebag." The
smile dropped from her face and she put an inch or two of tension
on the bowstring. "What are you talking about, you fat idiot?"

He gaped at
her, then scowled and gestured at the road behind her. "There's
four of us, you know."

"Yes, and I
have more than four arrows." She tightened the string another six
inches and lifted the bow. "What I don't have is any children, so
start making sense or get out of my way." She knew his type only
too well. He was a bully and a lout, and if she tried to placate
him she might end up in real trouble. Besides, she was annoyed. Who
was he to accost her, and accuse her of... what, exactly? Stealing
children?

His face
darkened, and he nodded into the empty air beside her. She heard
the scuff of feet behind her, and she turned in her saddle. There
were two men coming up behind her, a father and son by the look of
them, united by great mops of straw-colored hair, vast, bulbous
noses, and vacant expressions. The father had an axe, the son had a
hatchet, and they were closer than Tira liked. She fired at the tip
of the older man's shoe, and the broadhead arrow punched through
the soft leather and into the packed dirt of the road. The man
stopped short, letting out a howl, and Tira turned her back.

The fat man
blanched, but his hands tightened on his cudgel, and he didn't move
out of her way. "I want those children," he said, his voice hoarse.
"You give 'em back."

She had another
arrow nocked by this time. He was no more than a dozen feet away,
too far to hit her and close enough that she couldn't miss, but
still he wouldn't back down. Was it courage, she wondered, or a
truly astonishing level of stupidity? He seemed to think she had
children in her pockets.

Stupidity,
then.

"Get out of the
way," she said, "I'm running out of patience."

He stared into
her eyes for an endless moment. Then his face twisted, the cudgel
rose, and he leaped at her.

She drew the
string back and fired, acting on instinct, not consciously aware of
her aim. The string left her fingertips, the bowstring thrummed
against her wrist, and the cudgel vanished from the fat man's
hands. He froze, gaping at her with his hands held high above his
head, and the boy beside him, the skinny one with the axe, reached
out and grabbed his arm. He tugged the fat man to the side, pulling
him to the edge of the road, and rested the head of the axe by his
feet.

"Ah!"

The exclamation
came from behind her, and Tira turned. The son, jaw hanging slack,
held her first arrow in his hands, staring at it. Beside him, his
father stood on one leg, examining his big toe where it poked out
of a long cut in his shoe. Blood welled out of a cut just behind
his toenail.

Tira snapped
her fingers. The son gaped at her, and she gestured him forward. He
walked up to the mule, and she took the arrow from his hand. Then
she nudged Daisy forward.

Her second
arrow was embedded in the cudgel that lay in the middle of the
road. She caught the pommel of her saddle in her left hand and
leaned down, picking up cudgel and arrow. She worked the arrow
loose and tossed the cudgel into the trees. Then she rode away and
didn't look back.

"Well," she
said to Daisy as they rounded a bend in the road, "that was
interesting." The hair on the back of her neck was still standing
up. She was pretty sure those four knuckle-draggers hadn't seen her
until a moment before they started making noise. There was someone
else in these woods, and whoever it was, they now knew what Tira
could do with a bow.

Another mile
brought her to a pasture where cows grazed among tree stumps. She
saw a cottage in the distance, with laundry flapping on a line and
ducks flapping in a pen. The road curved around a low hill, and she
came to a village.

A dozen
cottages surrounded an open grassy square and a wooden building
with a domed roof. A white cup painted on either side of the door
identified it as a temple to the goddess Neris. A bridge stood on
the edge of the village, a narrow river flowing under it.

A couple of
children were beating a rug hung on a rope between two trees, and a
heavyset woman weeded a vegetable plot beside one cottage. All
three of them stopped what they were doing to stare at Tira.

She swung down
from Daisy's back, unstrung her bow, and cased it. Then she put on
her best smile and strolled over to the woman. "Good morning. It's
a nice sunny day today, isn't it?"

The woman
stared at her, not speaking.

Tira bit back a
sigh. She had grown up in a place similar to this, and she'd had
good reasons to leave. Still…

"I'm
traveling," she said. You could never go wrong stating the obvious
to country folk. "I've run out of money, and I'm hoping to do some
work to earn a meal."

The woman
stared at her, not speaking.

"I can see
you're going to be a treasure trove of information." Tira took the
wide-brimmed leather hat from her head and ran her fingers through
her short blonde hair. "Let me rephrase that as a question. Do you
know where I can do some work to get a meal?"

A long, silent
moment stretched out. Finally the woman said, "You're not from
around here."

"No, but I
wanted to improve myself by visiting the intellectual capitals of
the world."

A man's voice
spoke. "You talk funny."

Tira turned.
Villagers were peering out of their cottages like prairie dogs
popping up out of burrows. It was a sea of slack jaws and vacant
eyes. None of them looked much brighter than the vegetables in the
woman’s garden.

"Where'd you
come from?"

She didn't see
who asked, but it didn't matter. "Carsia," she said. "I fought in
the wars there."

"Where's
Carsia?" someone asked, but before Tira could answer, someone
interrupted with, "You can't be in wars. You're a woman!"

"I guess they
were desperate," Tira said. "Anyone who can use a bow can find
employment where the fighting's hottest."

After that the
questions came thick and fast. Wasn't it dangerous? Had she ever
killed someone? Was it true that there were elves in Carsia? Did
she fight elves? Were elves real, or just legends? Was she rich?
Wasn't she scared? How come she didn't have babies and a
husband?