Bone Magic (7 page)

"And each
night, as we made our poor camp in a new place, my father played
the crewth, and his friends and kinsmen brought out drums and horns
and pipes. And they played the songs that my grandfather played,
and his grandfather before him. And we remembered that we were
dwarves! And for just one night, wherever we were, we were
home."

A cheer went up
from the assembled dwarves, the children clapped, and the musicians
started a lively jig. A score of dwarves clapped in time, and
someone tapped a beer keg. The gathering grew louder and more
festive as the drink began to flow.

There was
dancing on the grass, the small number of women in great demand as
partners, the men linking elbows and dancing in circles when no
ladies were available.

Tira saw Sari
and Lena in the thick of it, laughing and whirling, dancing without
skill but with great enthusiasm. She smiled at the sight. The girls
had been through a rough time, and it was good to see them happy
and relaxed.

Yanil caught
her arm and dragged her toward the dancers, and she shrugged and
decided to give in. The more sober of the dwarves were doing a
traditional reel. Tira had done similar dances at home before the
wars, and she picked up the steps easily.

A loud cry went
up, and she turned her head. A couple of dwarven men were on a
table, elbows linked, each with a mug in his free hand. The crowd
around them clapped in time as they spun, nimbly avoiding the
plates and platters on the table.

She saw Tam
carrying Lena away from the group. Mikail followed, leading Sari by
the hand. Both girls were yawning helplessly, barely able to keep
their heads up. Tam led them toward the cart, and she smiled. There
was no need to tell him that she was hoping to sneak across the
bridge in the dead of night. He had figured it out, and he was
keeping the little ones close to the cart.

The animals
would be challenging. The dwarves had put them in a stable, and
even if no one was watching, getting Daisy to leave a warm stall in
the dead of night would be no small task. Tira wanted to grind her
teeth in frustration, even as she danced. These dwarves were
bandits with a thin veneer of respectability. Five crowns to cross
a bridge? What nerve!

A metallic
squeak caught her attention. The town gate was closed, but the
portcullis was up, and a guard was letting a human man in through a
small door set in the gate. He was far from the fire and poorly
lit, but he looked familiar, and Tira broke away from the other
dancers. Was he really that big, or was it just because he was
standing beside a dwarf?

He strode
forward, and the firelight gleamed on a jacket of red leather.
Tira's hand went to her hip, but her sword was with her bow in the
cart. She turned, walking toward the cart, watching the man from
the corner of her eye.

The mayor and a
couple of dwarves detached themselves from the crowd, moving to
intercept the man. He broke into a run, heading straight for Tira,
and shoved the mayor aside when she got in his way.

Tira started to
run, and a shout went up behind her. She heard voices, and cries of
outrage, and Tam's face appeared, looking around the side of the
cart. He hopped into the cart, and when she got there, he handed
her the bow. She strung it, and he passed her the quiver.

She slung the
quiver across her back and turned. The big man was surrounded by a
crowd of drunk, angry dwarves. His attention was focused on her,
and he tried to push past the dwarves, stopping only when someone
planted a shoulder in his stomach and shoved him back several
steps.

For a moment he
stood, staring at the dwarves around him. The side of his face was
marred by scabs in a thick line that started just below his eye and
stretched back to his ear. His face was filled with anger and
frustration, and she found herself hoping that he would let it go.
He could still walk away from her and continue his life.

It was not to
be. He planted his foot in the chest of the nearest dwarf and
shoved, sending the dwarf stumbling back. Then he drew his sword.
Tira could see a couple of guards behind him, running from the
front gate with swords in their hands, but the dwarves who
surrounded the man were armed with nothing more than belt
knives.

She could hear
the sound of steel on leather as knives came out, and the man, his
face twisted with anger and frustration, brought his sword arm back
to swing. The dwarves were blocking her line of sight, so she aimed
high, picking a spot six inches below his chin where the top button
of his jacket was done up. She let fly just as he started to swing,
his body turning so that the arrow went in sideways, hitting him
high on the left side of his chest and penetrating toward the left
side of his back.

He froze in
mid-swing, his sword arm drooped, and he stared down at the arrow
jutting from his chest. Then he dropped to his knees, suddenly the
same height as the dwarves around him. The dwarf he had kicked put
a foot against his stomach and shoved him onto his back.

A subdued
silence fell. Tira unstrung her bow, passed it to Tam, and handed
him the quiver as well. Then she set off across the grass, hoping
to find the man still alive. Dwarves were clustered around him,
blocking the light, so that he was just a dark outline on the
ground. She could hear him breathing, moaning with every inhalation
and exhalation, and her stomach twisted with regret.

The sound
stopped as she reached him.

The five of
them made a gloomy procession as they crossed the bridge the next
morning. They were crossing free of charge, with cheerful dwarves
waving from the walls behind them. Sari and Lina had made friends
in the town, and waved back with long, melancholy faces. Mikail,
though he denied having touched the dwarf beer, was clearly hung
over, sagging in the saddle and wincing with every step the pony
took. Tira was exhausted after a long night of watching the big man
die over and over in her dreams. Only Tam seemed to have come
through the experience unscathed. He sat on the wagon bench,
clucking at the mule, looking as if he was glad to be going
home.

Tira kept her
bow strung for most of the morning, and kept her eyes open for any
trace of goblins. Or bandits, for that matter, but she thought the
threat of goblins would be enough to keep bandits away. She
unstrung the bow at midday when the trees gave way to open
grasslands.

In early
afternoon they passed a dead horse lying in the ditch. There was no
saddle or bridle, and scavengers had picked it down to little more
than bones. A quarter of a mile later, they found two more horses.
Soon after that, they came to a crossroads where they found a pair
of freshly-dug graves and a pile of human remains.

The girls,
already disturbed by the dead horses, kept their faces turned away
as the cart rolled past. Mikail rode over to take a closer look,
then turned away, looking a bit green. Tira's horse laid his ears
back, wanting nothing to do with the smell of death, so she climbed
down from the saddle and walked over to the bodies.

There wasn't
much left. Four or five people had been dumped in the ditch. Like
the horses, the bodies had been largely stripped of flesh. There
were tattered scraps of clothing, and boots that had been gnawed to
pieces. It was not the first time she had encountered corpses, and
she stared down at the bones and bits of flesh, trying to figure
out why her instincts were telling her that something was
wrong.

"What do you
think happened?"

She looked up.
Tam stood beside her, looking pale but composed. The cart and the
children waited just up the road, far enough away to be free of the
smell.

"There was a
fight," she said, working it out as she spoke. "They lost some
horses, and went back later to strip off their gear and drag them
into the ditch." She gestured at the graves. "The winners took some
casualties." She pointed at the unburied bodies. "These were the
losers. But something's not right."

"What could
kill someone like that?" Tam asked.

"What do you
mean?"

"Well, they've
been ripped to pieces." He pointed at the bones in the ditch.
"Look, those two legs don't even point the same way, but it's the
same person. The boots match."

He was right.
Scavengers would have scattered some of the bones, but almost
nothing was intact on these corpses. She made herself move closer,
and squatted to examine the ends of a thigh bone.

"They were
chopped up," she said, suppressing a shudder. "Someone killed these
people, and then cut them into pieces." She stood and backed away,
breathing deeply until the sweet, cloying smell of the corpses was
gone from her nostrils.

"But why?" said
Tam.

"Well… They
might have really hated those people."

Tam didn't
speak, just waited for her to continue.

She took a deep
breath, not wanting to put her next thoughts into words. Some
things were so vile, so
wrong
, that they simply shouldn't
exist. She didn't want to believe that it was happening again.

"Or," she said,
"there could be a necromancer."

He opened his
mouth as if he wanted to argue, to say that animating the dead
wasn't real, that it was something from stories used to frighten
children. But he slowly closed his mouth. He nodded. "Cut up the
bodies so that no one can use them." He gestured at the graves.
"Before they buried their friends…"

She nodded.
"Probably."

They stared at
each other for a long moment. Then he said, "Don't die. That's not
a chore I want."

She gave him a
crooked grin. "Hey, you're the one who brought the axe."

A grin quirked
his lips, then vanished. "Why would anyone raise the dead?"

She shrugged.
"It gives you a slave, ready to carry out your every command. A
pungent slave, to be sure, and one that slowly falls apart, but a
slave without conscience or remorse, who never needs to rest, who
can be controlled remotely. If you had an army of corpses, you
could conquer a kingdom."

Tam grimaced.
"Neris preserve us!"

"Don't worry,"
she said. "Raising a corpse takes time, and you can't do it
remotely. By the time you finished reanimating an army, the first
ones would be crumbling to dust."

"Maybe it's not
a necromancer," he said, not sounding convinced. "Maybe they just
really didn’t like those guys."

"Maybe," she
said. "We can hope."

They continued
on their way, leaving the stench of death and the buzzing of flies
behind them. The sun was warm, the sky was a cheerful blue, but
Tira couldn't entirely shake the chill she felt. There was one
final thing about necromancers that she hadn't told Tam. Bone magic
was powerful magic. Powerful, and costly. Mages summoned magic in
different ways. Some used silver, some used psychic energy. Most
could draw small amounts of magic from the air around them, or from
ley lines in the earth. Not enough to animate a corpse, but
some.

A few mages,
the worst ones, could extract magical energy from blood, or from
the extinguishing of a life. Especially a human life. Someone who
was reanimating corpses might have need of prisoners who could be
sacrificed as a source of fuel.

But it wasn't
safe or practical to take people from the streets of your own town.
It didn't take people long to notice something like that. A prudent
mage, if he had the coin, might hire a few rough men and send them
far afield. To the other side of a big river, perhaps, with
instructions to gather victims from isolated places. Like Raven
Crossing.

She glanced
back at the intersection, wondering if she'd seen the last of that
kind of horror. Thoughts of the undead were pushed from her mind by
the sight of a plume of dust on the road behind. She dismounted,
strung her bow, and remounted.

Whatever was
raising the dust, it was moving fast. The open grasslands offered
no kind of cover, so Tira shrugged and kept riding. Eventually she
could make out a column of riders on the road behind, catching up
quickly.

There were ten
horsemen in total, all of them in gleaming matched breastplates,
their horses decked out in green barding. Tira ran through her
memories of the past several weeks. She'd crossed any number of
borders, moving through kingdoms and empires and duchies, paying
little attention to who ruled where. She thought green might be the
colors of the local king, but she wasn't sure.

The lead rider,
his breastplate marked with three horizontal stripes to denote
rank, lifted a fist as the riders came close. The horses pulled up
in a billowing cloud of dust and the riders spread out, surrounding
Tira and her companions.

Tira folded her
hands over the pommel of her saddle, moving slowly and being
careful not to touch her sword or bow. There was a rider on either
side of her, and another directly behind. They wore swords, and
they looked hard-eyed and alert. She remembered the graves at the
crossroads. These would not be men to trifle with.

The officer was
a man in his forties, with the supercilious look of someone born to
privilege and rank. He ran his eyes over the group, and addressed
himself to Tam. "Where are you going?"

Tam shot a
quick glance at Tira, then wiped his palms on his thighs. "Ah,
Raven Crossing. It's a town south-west of here."

"Who are
you?"

Tam's eyes
narrowed a bit at the peremptory tone. It looked as if his awe of
the shining breastplates was fading. "Tam," he said, and broke eye
contact, gazing off at the horizon as if bored.

Tira smothered
a grin. She knew by now that Tam had good judgement. He wouldn't go
too far in provoking the officer, but the man needed a good
tweaking.