Bone Magic (15 page)

"I need to come
in."

"Well, get out
of the way, then."

Tira pulled
herself back up and perched on the dormer roof while the window
swung wide open beneath her. Then she stepped to the sill and slid
into the room.

People moved in
the darkness around her, closing the window and covering it with a
heavy curtain. Then someone lifted the cover on a lamp and the room
filled with a soft yellow light.

She was in a
bedroom. A man and a woman stood before her in long nightshirts,
eyes wide. The man had a knife in his hand. The woman held a small
lamp. They were elderly, with grey hair covered by sleeping
caps.

"Who are you?"
the man said. "He didn't sound worried, just curious.

"Never mind
that," said the woman. "She's hurt, Georham. Get her a chair."

Their names,
Tira soon learned, were Georham and Marlin. They sold sewing
supplies from a cart most days, but they were staying indoors while
they waited for someone to deal with the goblins. So far they
hadn't been bothered, but they were getting hungry, so they hoped
the king would send troops soon.

Marlin was very
businesslike as she got Tira out of her trousers and examined her
legs. "Don't mind Georham, dear, he won't look. Not if he knows
what's good for him. I would just cut these trousers off, but I
don't think you have anything else to put on, am I right? Georham,
bring the water, would you? I'm sorry we can't heat it. Now, hold
still."

She cleaned
Tira's cuts, bandaged them with strips of fabric from something she
called her "quilting bag," and leaned back to examine her
handiwork. Fresh blood was soaking through the bandage on Tira's
thigh, but the smaller cut just above her knee had closed.

"There. We
really should wash out your trousers, but water is in short supply
just now. The closest pump is down in the street, and we're trying
not to go out if we can help it."

"That's all
right," Tira assured her. "They will be fine." She leaned on Marlin
for support as she worked her trousers up over her bandages.
Marlin's pan of wash water was dark with blood, and the right leg
of Tira's trousers was noticeably heavier than the left, from the
blood soaked into it. A cold hand squeezed Tira's stomach every
time she thought about just how much blood she'd lost. She was
still bleeding, too, though slowly, and her night's work was
nowhere near finished.

"Will you be
staying here to hide?" Marlin asked.

Tira shook her
head. "There's something I need to do."

Marlin nodded.
"Well, Neris keep you safe."

"Thank you."
Tira looked down at the bandages showing through the cuts in her
trousers. "How can I ever thank you enough?"

"Oh, never mind
that. You got those cuts fighting the goblins?"

Tira
nodded.

"Then that's
all the thanks we need."

They let her
out into a dark corridor. The stairs were close by, and they led
her down two flights to the ground floor. She crept to the street
entrance, opened the door a crack, and peeked out. A handful of
goblins hurried past, headed in the direction of Tam and Elanyn's
last stand.

Tira eased the
door shut, murmuring a prayer for her friends, and moved to the
back of the building. The alley was dark and empty, and she slipped
outside into the cold night air.

The castle was
close now, the bulk of it looming above her in the darkness.
Ordinarily it would have been the most closely-defended part of the
city, but the goblin invasion was barely a day and a half old, and
the goblins, hardly a group known for their discipline, were
sloppy. Tira stood in a doorway and watched a handful of goblins
come out through a sally port in the castle wall. They meandered
out into the town, and she breathed a silent thanks that not every
goblin in the city was rushing to kill Tam and Elanyn.

When the
goblins were out of sight she hurried to the sally port. They'd
left the door ajar, and she peeked inside, seeing only blackness.
She slipped through, pressing her back to the wall.

The curtain
wall enclosed a small bailey with the mass of the keep rising fifty
feet high in the center. Moonlight glinted on the walls of the
keep, but everything else was in deep shadow. Tira headed for the
keep, unable to see her own feet, taking small, cautious steps with
her hands outstretched before her. There was grass under her feet,
then cobblestones. She encountered no sentries, and her straining
ears caught no sounds closer than the streets outside.

Finally her
questing fingers hit the wall of the keep. She crept along in the
darkness, one hand on the wall, looking for a door. She came to a
corner, peeked around it, and saw a broad flight of steps, lit with
a pale yellow glow. The main entrance to the keep was unprotected,
the big iron-banded doors wide open, light from the interior
shining across the steps.

Tira crouched
at the corner for a long time, listening and watching, but nothing
moved. Walking up the front steps in plain sight seemed foolhardy,
but there was no sign that the goblins were keeping any kind of
guard. The city wall was relevant, since that was where a
counter-attack would come. It seemed the castle wasn't important to
the goblins at all.

At last she
took a deep breath, walked around the corner, crossed briskly to
the steps, walked up and entered the keep.

The entry hall
might have looked grand by the light of day. With only one light
burning somewhere deeper in the keep, the hall was all murk and
shadows. She saw the first signs of battle here, arrows sticking
from walls and a pathetic barricade made of furniture blocking one
corridor. There was a heap of human-sized armor in one corner, but
no bodies.

She would find
the bodies with the necromancer, she supposed.

Tira walked
through the ground floor of the keep, sword in hand, finding no
sign of life except a rat feasting boldly atop a table in the
kitchen. There was a broad staircase leading up, and four more
staircases, one in the tower at each corner of the structure. Tira
ignored all of them. She had a sense of what the necromancer liked,
and it wasn't heights.

Faint smears of
blood on the floor gave Tira her first clue. The bodies of the dead
had been dragged deeper into the building. She followed the smears
and found the stairway to the dungeon hidden behind a battered door
just off of the kitchen.

A faint glow
showed her a corridor at the bottom of the stairs. She crept down
the steps, sword in hand, fighting an impulse to hold her breath.
The air was musty and humid, the smell of raw earth and mold mixed
with something darker.

Death. The
dungeon level stank of dead bodies beginning to spoil.

She reached the
bottom of the stairs and moved down a narrow corridor. Cells lined
the walls right and left, the doors ajar, the cells empty. Then she
came to cells piled high with corpses, human and goblin, civilian
and soldier, all mixed together. It was the necromancer's raw
materials, waiting to be reanimated.

Silent as mist,
Tira inched her way along the corridor. There was a door of bars at
the end of the corridor, standing wide open. Beyond it was a larger
room, well-lit. She could see a stone-flagged floor and a bit of
the far wall. She paused when she reached the barred door,
gathering her courage. Then she took a deep breath and sprang into
the room beyond.

The underground
chamber was a big square, maybe fifty paces by sixty, almost the
size of the keep above. The ceiling was low and damp, and the air
was thick with must and death. Lamps burned on poles in each
corner, leaving the center of the room dim. Four massive pillars
supported the ceiling, huge brick structures as wide as Tira was
tall, and in the zig-zag pattern of shadows she almost didn't
notice the creature.

It was big,
huge, a vast monstrosity standing against the far wall. It was
hunched forward because it was much too tall for the room.
Shoulders five feet across nearly touched the six-foot-high
ceiling. It was bearlike, with a small head and vast, hairy arms
hanging nearly to its knees. The body was thick and pudgy, the legs
solid and short, and it had paws ending in claws that had to be
three inches long. Small, black eyes, close set, peered out above a
broad snout and a mouth that couldn't fully close because of a
forest of jagged teeth.

Tira had never
seen anything like it. There were stories of windigos in the
forests of the North, and creatures even stranger from far to the
west. She had always dismissed such tales as fantasy, but it seemed
at least one story was true.

The creature
seemed to be staring at her, but it didn't move. She took a
cautious step toward it, and her disquiet grew. There was a pale
red aura around the creature, reminding her of the cursed knife at
the palisade. Some sort of magic was at work on this creature.

The thing
lifted its head, sniffing the air, and she saw a deeper hue to the
aura under its chin. The fur was gone from the creature's throat,
and she saw an almost metallic sheen to its skin. She stepped
closer, and it reached a paw toward her, seeming to strain against
some invisible bond. It growled, a bass rumble that echoed with
rage and suffering.

Tira was in the
middle of the room when movement caught the corner of her eye. She
whirled, lifting her sword. It was an undead man, a big,
broad-shouldered brute, his hair brushing the ceiling as he backed
away from her. She watched him, but he didn't seem threatening. He
backed against the wall, holding his hands up, palms toward
her.

There was a
table near him, built like the table in the necromancer's abandoned
lair under the monastery, and Tira smiled. She had the right place.
Next to the table she saw a dozen or more barrels, cut in half to
make wooden buckets. Each bucket bristled with short, thick arrows.
They were crossbow bolts, she realized. There had to be hundreds of
them. She tilted her head, squinting at the buckets. There was a
faint glow around each one. The heads of the crossbow bolts were
cursed.

She scanned the
rest of the room, moving around, looking behind every pillar. There
was nothing else there. One undead man, one monstrous creature held
in some sort of magical bonds, a table, and nearly a thousand
cursed bolts. The necromancer was not there.

Tira sheathed
her sword and put an arrow to her bowstring. If the wizard appeared
in the doorway, she wanted to be able to kill him from across the
room. Then she walked to within five or six paces of the beast. She
turned so she could keep the doorway and the undead man in her
peripheral vision, and examined the creature, trying to figure out
what was happening with its throat.

As she watched,
a tuft of hair drifted down from the creature's neck. The skin
beneath was silver-grey, and it writhed a bit where the fur ended.
And another wisp of fur fell away.

Tira lowered
her bow, holding arrow and bow with her left hand while she used
her right hand to draw her sword. She advanced on the creature, and
it growled, thrashing at the air with its paws. She avoided the
swings, and reached out, jabbing at the silvery skin with the tip
of her sword.

The sword
clanged as metal hit metal. The silvery skin bent inward, but the
sword did no damage.

The beast
swatted her sword with one vast paw, knocking the blade out of her
hand. She picked it up and sheathed it. The creature slashed the
air, and a drop of blood hit her chin. Its paw was cut.

"I wish Tam was
here," she muttered. He was much better at figuring things out. She
raked her fingers through her hair and asked herself what Tam would
say if he was there.

"It's a magical
process," she said to the creature. "The necromancer is turning
your skin to metal." She shook her head at the nightmare image of
an unkillable beast rampaging through the city streets. "Gods
preserve us."

She brought her
bow up, taking aim, and the undead man moved in the corner of her
eye. She swung her aim to him, and he shrank back, hands up
defensively. Tira lowered the bow. She only had four arrows, and
these two, though dangerous, weren't the primary target. She would
save her arrows for the necromancer, she decided, then finish these
two off afterward.

The undead man
shrank away as she walked toward the line of barrels. She took the
nearest lamp down from its stand, opened the little reservoir on
the base, and dribbled lamp oil into the first barrel. Then she
opened the front of the lamp, took an oil-spattered bolt from the
bucket, and thrust the bolt into the flame. The bolt ignited, and
she dropped it back into the barrel.

The bolts
burned fiercely. She went to the next barrel, grabbed a fistful of
bolts, and dropped them into the fire. Each one was a potential
undead soldier, and she destroyed them half a dozen at a time. When
the barrel fell apart she dumped more bolts on top of the flames,
making a bonfire against the wall.

The amount of
magical energy that had gone into creating so many cursed weapons
had to be tremendous. She thought of the bodies piled in the cells
outside. Maybe they weren't waiting to be reanimated, after all.
Maybe they had been used up.

Wherever the
necromancer was, Tira reflected, he had to be prostrated with
exhaustion. Maybe he was nearby, collapsed in an exhausted sleep.
She decided she would make a careful search of the keep when she
was done here.

The big undead
man was in the corner, staring at her with unblinking eyes. She
hefted another barrel of cursed bolts, shuffling sideways toward
the fire, keeping an eye on the man and the doorway. It was awkward
moving the barrel with one hand, but she wasn't willing to let go
of the bow in her left hand, or the arrow between her first two
fingers.