Bone War (12 page)

“Slynd!” Kalessa struggled against the chains. “I will kill you! I will slice you in half and drain your blood!”

“The child hasn't learned her lesson,” Sharlee said. “She must earn her penance. May Kalina shine evermore!”

Lif pulled the knife out and thrust it in again, deeper this time. Slynd hissed and bellowed, but he couldn't get away from the knife or the pain.

“May Kalina shine evermore!” repeated the other monks.

“Stop it!” Danr cried. “You're hurting him!”

Kalessa's face had lost all color. “All right. It is as you say. I . . . I beg Lady Kalina's forgiveness.”

“For?” Sharlee prompted, and Lif raised the knife again. Thick blood ran down the blade.

“For . . .” Kalessa was breathing hard, and she swallowed. Every word was wrung from her. “For wronging you. For committing blasphemy.”

“And?”

“And?” Kalessa repeated, confused.

Lif thrust the knife back into the second wound and twisted it. Slynd made a hissing scream that raised the hair on Danr's neck and twisted his guts. It went on and on until Lif pulled the knife back out.

“Vik! What do you want?” Kalessa cried.

Sharlee leaned in close, and Danr barely heard her. “Ask forgiveness for being born a crawling wyrm not fit to lick the moon lady's feet.”

Rage flared in Kalessa's eyes. “You . . .” Lif raised the knife again, and Kalessa bit her lower lip until it bled. Danr silently pleaded with her to go along with it. They were only words, empty ones. But to Kalessa, an orc who would be remembered for her words and her deeds, every syllable was blood. Kalessa panted hard with fury, but finally, with aching slowness, she said, “I ask the lady's forgiveness for my birth.”

Sharlee's smile was both triumphant and beatific. She spat on Kalessa's forehead and drew a circle with the spittle. “You are forgiven, child. May Kalina shine forevermore.”

“May Kalina shine forevermore!”

“And more than that,” Sharlee continued, “I must
thank
you. All of you.”

“For what?” Danr asked with a wary eye on Lif.

“If you hadn't tried to kill my sweet husband, none of this would have happened.” Sharlee gestured at the monastery and the grove and the eagle-lion. “I would not have found
the blessings of Kalina and I would not have been chosen as the abbess. Kalina's will would go undone.” She pressed her palms together above the eagle-lion's head. It slitted its eyes. “We are all nothing but tools in her blessed hands.”

“Your mouth makes words that your heart does not believe,” Kalessa said.

“If I did not believe,” Sharlee said, “Kalina would not have blessed me with her power. Or my sweet husband. Or the brothers and sisters of her monastery.”

Lif raised his knife over Slynd again. Danr thought about changing his own shape, using his smaller human form to slip the bonds so he could go for Lif or even Sharlee, but Danr was badly outnumbered and he was bound to lose. Instead he spoke up. “Why do you talk about Hector as if he were alive, Sharlee? We watched him turn into a piece of slime and die.”

At Sharlee's gesture, Lif strode over and gave Danr a good sideways kick in the stomach. The air burst out of him, and hot pain exploded across his belly. At least Lif wasn't stabbing Slynd. “You will address her as Abbess, half-blood bastard.”

“We must not lay blame, Lif,” Sharlee said mildly. “He can't help that his mother was a troll's whore. Though perhaps this one should also ask forgiveness. He'll probably need persuading, too.”

“Stop it!” Aisa pushed herself groggily upright within her cage. “Do not . . . touch him, you piece . . . of filth!”

Sharlee turned. “Not your best insult, child. It shows a rotting intellect.”

“The poison . . . makes it a challenge,” she said, and a troll's rage built in Danr at the weakness in her voice. It burned the pain away. He pulled at the shackles, but they were too solid, even for him.

Aisa managed to turn herself all the way to face Sharlee. “You cannot . . . cage a shape mage . . . woman.”

“That is the cage of humility and pride, child,” said Sharlee. “We use it for novices who are coming into their
power. The mesh is too fine for even the most humble shape you might take, and the bars are so heavy that you'll crush yourself if you take a proud one.”

“I am the . . . first shape mage,” Aisa panted. “Mere . . . poison and iron bars . . . will not contain me.” She flowed into a wolf shape and back into a human shape, forcing the last of the poison's weakness from her voice and body. Danr gave a private sigh of relief. Changing shape always healed a shape mage, though no one knew exactly why. Danr privately suspected it was because the body naturally changed into its original, unwounded shape. The difficulty lay in having enough power to change shape when your energy reserves were already low from being wounded.

“Always full of pride, aren't you, child?” Sharlee said. “Not that I'll underestimate you again. You nearly destroyed me last time. Me and Hector.”

Danr worked his jaw. He had the feeling it wouldn't do any good, but he had to say it. “We didn't kill your husband, Shar—Abbess. You forced me and Aisa to hunt down the power of the shape and bring it back to you. He died because of that, not because of us.”

For a moment, his mind flickered back to that dreadful day, when he and Aisa and Talfi had met Grandfather Wyrm at the bottom of the ocean. Grandfather Wyrm, the most powerful shape mage the world had ever known and the only person besides Talfi to survive the Sundering. He had done so by changing from a human into a wyrm and over the centuries had grown massive—and forgetful. He had forgotten what it was like to be human. But in the end, he had given both Aisa and Danr some of his blood. It woke a tiny amount of shape magic in Danr, and rushed a tidal wave of it through Aisa. Anyone who ingested their blood and who also possessed the Kin's dormant shape magic would experience the same thing. Except for some people, the experience turned deadly. Some people lost all control of their bodies and died in a dreadful jumble of shapes. Hector and Sharlee Obsidia had both taken
Danr's blood. Danr still shuddered at the memory of Hector falling to the ground, wrenching around and pissing himself, extruding wretched limbs and even wings, until he died.

“I know, child,” Sharlee said. “You didn't kill him.”

“Really?” Danr blinked in surprise. His troll's eyes saw perfectly well in the bright moonlight, and her face was the picture of calm. He shut his right eye and gazed at her with only his left. To his further astonishment, she changed very little. The darkness he had expected to see simply wasn't there.

“Ah. The truth-teller gazes at me with his true eye. Look all you like, child.” She approached and leaned down to pat his cheek while the eagle-lion watched. The blob thing shuddered with a squishy noise. “Troll magic is nothing to the eye of Kalina herself.”

“Nothing can keep out the truth, Sharlee,” Danr said. “You've just . . . changed.”

“The woman has not changed,” Kalessa snapped, regaining more of herself now that Lif wasn't waving the knife at Slynd anymore. “She has only donned a set of robes. You can coat wyrm shit with sugar, and it will still be wyrm shit.”

Sharlee's face flushed, but she made an obvious effort to keep control and turned back to Danr. “Do you know what has happened to me in the last year and a half you gave Hector your blood and twisted his body through pain and terror, child?”

“I don't know,” Danr was forced to say. “And Hector
took
my blood. I didn't give it to him.”

Sharlee ignored him. “I lost everything. You and your friends smashed all my golems but this one and destroyed my fortune. I fled north and ended up at this monastery, half-starved and dying of exposure. The good brothers and sisters of Kalina the Moon Woman took me in. They taught me simplicity and balance, child, and when I discovered that your blood had given me the power of the shape after
all, they became convinced I had been blessed by Kalina herself.”

“You learned you can change the shape of other things,” Danr said, trying to keep her talking until he could figure out what to do.

“Other
living
things,” Sharlee agreed in a cold, amiable voice. “The lady lets me melt flesh like beeswax, mold it and shape it into anything I like.” The tip of her tongue glided over her upper lip, and her voice lowered to a hiss. “It's why they made me abbess. Would you like a demonstration?”

She reached for Danr's chest, her hands glowing with faint golden light. Horrified, Danr tried to back away, but there was nowhere to back to.

“Do not touch him!” Aisa shouted.

“The lady commands it, child,” Sharlee whispered. A small line of saliva slid from the corner of her mouth and she touched Danr with her glowing hands. More pain ripped through him, squeezed his heart with a red-hot fist. He kicked and squirmed, but he couldn't get away from the awful pain. Danr was aware that Aisa was screaming and rattling at the bars of her cage, but the searing pain was too powerful for him to do more than writhe and gasp.

“Abbess,” Lif interrupted. “The ceremony? Our lady moon is nearly at her height.”

Sharlee glanced up. The moon was almost directly above them. She pulled her hands back, and the pain ended with an abruptness that left Danr dizzy. He sat shuddering in the chains.

“Thank you, Lif,” Sharlee said. “We must begin. May Kalina forgive my slight.”

“Kalina forgives all,” the others said, all together.

Danr panted in his shackles. His insides felt like scrambled eggs. Had she done anything permanent to him or had she just wanted to hurt him? Vik! What now? The blobby thing in the center of the ring shuddered again, and some kind of sharp-smelling goo oozed down the sides.

Drums beat like a dozen hearts. Other robed men and women and even a few children were filing into the grove now and taking places among the ash trees. They carried a number of sharp weapons—knives and swords and sickles—and they gleamed soft silver in the moonlight. The eagle-lion settled on its haunches.

“What ceremony?” Danr tried to demand, but it came out more as a hoarse grunt. “What is this about?”

Sharlee was shrugging into a silvery outer cloak that another monk was draping over her robe. Dark, heavy runes skated around the edge.

“This isn't a story, child,” Sharlee said. “I'm not going to recite a poem or chant a little song that tells you what my plans are. You'll just have to find out.”

Danr shut his right eye again and stared at her again, more carefully this time. He saw the power of the shape coiled within her like a blacksnake ready to strike. It was different from his own power, and from Aisa's. In her, the shape magic was a poison. Something drew his eye aside, and he saw the same poison within the eagle-lion. Sharlee had created the eagle-lion. Well, he knew that. But when he looked a little closer, he saw the faint outline of . . . a person. His stomach tightened. The eagle-lion wasn't several animals crushed together as Danr had assumed. It was a human being, altered so totally it was unrecognizable. Vik! Had the other creatures also once been people?

He glanced at the other monks, now fully encircling the grove. A number of them were shape mages, but their power was weak, no more than a flicker. Sharlee must have shared her blood with them, and—

Then he knew.

“Your blood isn't very powerful, Sharlee,” Danr said in a slow, measured voice. “I can see it. You gave it to these monks, but it hasn't wakened much magic in them. You've made promises to them. Promises of magic, promises of power. Promises you can't keep. They're afraid of you
because you can change their shapes, but you know eventually they'll overcome that fear. They'll overcome
you.
But now you're thinking,
I have the firsts. I have their blood.
You're dressing it up in a ceremony, but all you're planning to do is cut a vein and give our blood to them so you can keep your position as abbess.”

He raised his voice. “Those who take the blood of the first sometimes die. Their bodies twist and break. It's painful and horrible, and it takes a long, long time. That's the truth.”

Some of the drumming faltered. Sharlee's smile, wooden and unyielding, returned to her face.

“You know nothing, child,” she said. “It's not my blood they carry.”

“Then whose—?” Danr began, but then his eye went to the blobby thing in the middle of the grove. His voice went shaky as a feather in a windstorm. “No.”

“After you left me and my home in a wreck, I crept back to it,” Sharlee said. “You'd left Hector's body to rot like a dead dog in the gutter.”

“A dead dog in the gutter would have been an improvement,” Kalessa put in. “Your husband needed to bathe to qualify as a slob.”

Sharlee ignored this, or seemed to. Danr saw the vein throb at her forehead. “After you left, I went back and found he wasn't dead. My own magic came to me then. I . . . changed him. Stabilized him.”

“Using the magic you took from us,” Aisa called.

“And now you still have Hector,” Danr finished. “You keep him here because his blood is actually stronger than yours. His blood gives your people at least a little magic.”

“Yes.” Not seeming to care that the ring of monks was waiting on her word, she stepped over to the blob and stroked it. It shuddered. “My dear Hector.”

Danr forced himself to look at both Hector and Sharlee with his left eye as the moon climbed overhead and the
drums droned and eagle-lion stared. He saw the pale image of the man Hector had been, saw him writhing in pain, deaf and blind and dumb within the shape Sharlee had given him. Danr's heart sickened. Hector had earned no sympathy. He had done terrible things to countless people, had sent countless people to their deaths. Yet Danr couldn't help feeling sorry for him. And Sharlee. A thick red band tied them together, a love that was as deep and true as his love for Aisa. Deeper, in its way—it'd had years to mellow and thicken, years Danr and Aisa hadn't had yet.