The Bone Cave Read online

  “For once we agree,” the Masterhealer declared. “A black-feathered bird is unclean, a flawed thing in the eye of the one god.”

  “Demon,” Baldebert suggested, showing white teeth in a grin. “Why, it tried to sink my ship, and my sister the Rani will swear it woke Old Man Mountain with its croaking.”

  “It was your elephant guns that shook the mountain. The bird is just a bird,” Mal retorted. He flicked a quelling glance Avani’s way, but she, too, was scowling in Jacob’s direction and didn’t see. The raven fluffed his inky feathers, preening beneath her puzzled stare.

  “Shall we return to the business of matrimony?” Mal continued. Mug of wine in hand, he climbed stone steps until he stood equal with the king. It was a pointed reminder to everyone in the chamber that he was well aware of his value to the kingdom. “The deal is all but done, Masterhealer. It wants only His Majesty’s seal beside the Rani’s own to make it binding.” He looked between the scroll on the table and Renault. “Which I admit I expected to happen this morning while I rested.”

  “We were interrupted,” Baldebert explained. “In the midst of finalizing a few important codicils.”

  “Roue wants to expand her navy from three ships to six,” Renault told Mal. “I want the secret behind a weapon so powerful that one can shake a mountain and four can rout an army of desert sell-swords.”

  “Hardly an army. Without my father to goad them to courage they were naught but cowards in muddy camp,” Baldebert demurred. “But your instincts are impeccable. If we’re to war together against the encroaching desert you’ll need every advantage I’m willing to sell.”

  “Encroaching desert.” Renault leaned forward in his seat. “It’s true I have little experience in war but I hardly see how a growing navy will help Roue win an overland war.”

  “Now that we’ve come to agreement,” said Baldebert, “I’ve an eye toward the future. Roue’s been isolated too long. In my grandfather’s time she did a bustling sea trade as far south as the Black Coast; in oud, and spices, and true gold. Before Khorit Dard we thrived in the truest sense of the word. Thanks to Wilhaiim we will again.”

  The Masterhealer gripped the back of his chair with one hand. “I tell you once more: the temple will not stand for it. Your Majesty, you sparked God’s ire when you chose Lady Kate to warm your bed. Wilhaiim suffered for it. The Red Worm was but a warning. Take a heathen wife from across the sea and the heavens are like to spit blood and fire down upon us all.”

  “My sister was a proud and pious woman.” The raven had not noticed Peter Shean where he sat weary against the wall near the hearth. “I’ll thank you not to dirty her name with your politicking.” Kicking back his stool, Peter rose. “We’ve heard your arguments, Masterhealer, over and over throughout the night. His Majesty has given them his consideration and decided there is more benefit in allegiance with Roue than there is likelihood the god in the heavens will strike us dead for faithlessness.”

  “It’s but a marriage of war and convenience.” Renault shifted on his throne, stretching muscles gone stiff with sitting. “In name only. The Rani is no more inclined to cross the waters to my bed than I am to hers. You’re worrying yourself over nothing, Paul. No issue will come of the bond.”

  “My sister has heirs aplenty,” Baldebert agreed. “She’s no need for another, and no wish to dilute the line with flatlander blood. Begging your pardon, of course, Majesty.”

  “What of Wilhaiim’s line?” The Masterhealer was quivering again, this time with rage. “That is more than half of the problem. You sit the throne with no care at all to the future, Renault! You’re a young man yet, but hardly invulnerable.”

  “Enough.” Mal spoke softly but every head in the chamber was compelled to turn his way. “Masterhealer, the king has heard your complaint and made his decision. You and I shall speak alone in my chamber. The day is not yet over; His Majesty has other responsibilities.”

  The vocent hastened back down the steps. The Masterhealer huffed his distress aloud before he followed Mal across the flagstone, pulled haplessly in the smaller man’s wake. The double portals split wide before closing again on their heels with a muffled boom. Jacob couldn’t help but cackle amusement.

  “Be quiet,” Avani snapped. “You’re hardly helping the situation.”

  “Is it wise,” Baldebert said at the same time, “allowing the two of them alone together? The Masterhealer hardly seems a temperate man, and we all know Mal’s not yet recovered from his trials over deep water.”

  “Whom have we to blame for that?” Peter inquired. He left the hearth and paced a single circle around Baldebert, suppressed fury clear in the line of his jaw. “His Majesty is not wrong. It’s only Mal’s word on your behalf keeping you from the dungeons. If it was up to me, I’d have your head on a guardsman’s pike for all to see.”

  Baldebert was no longer smiling. He stood easy, one palm cupped around his chin as if in idle thought, but his yellow desert eyes, so like those of the absent Masterhealer, burned with contempt.

  “I’d like to see you try,” he said. “Of the two of us, my lord, I suspect I have the advantage. I sharpened my milk teeth on war. Have you even set foot upon the field of battle?”

  “Enough,” Renault said from his throne, echoing Mal’s bored tone precisely. “Come, Baldebert. Let’s see this finished.”

  He descended the throne and plucked the royal signet from his thumb as he bent over the scroll on the table. Baldebert joined him on the dais, taking the steps two at a time. Roue’s admiral had his own stamp on a small golden cylinder attached to his belt. Without fanfare each man dipped and set his seal in crimson wax on the first scroll, and again on the second beneath it. Renault nodded, then waved a hand at Peter.

  “Take them away,” he ordered. “Add the codicil. Have Roue’s copy bound for safe travel. Admiral, we’ll meet again tomorrow with my shipmaster at hand.”

  “As you wish.” Baldebert bowed his head then made his exit without further comment.

  After a moment Russel paced after the admiral, hand resting lightly on the hilt of her sword. Both Avani and Renault had worked to keep the details of the vocent’s abduction quiet but eventually word had leaked out, and Wilhaiim’s Court had taken an immediate dislike to Roue’s small contingent. No one thought Baldebert’s life was in danger but Renault had insisted he take on a guard for protection. Russel’s attention was more symbolic than necessary; Baldebert was right in saying he had more battle experience than anyone else in the city.

  “Well.” Renault smiled small in Avani’s direction. “That went better than I could have hoped. Go after them, would you? If Mal loses his temper and strangles our dear Masterhealer things will get complicated.”

  “He’s not dangerous,” Avani insisted, as Jacob knew she had ten times over already. “If I show up at his door he’ll know you’ve sent me—again. You used to trust him.”

  “I love him,” the king corrected sharply. “Trust has nothing to do with it. I won’t see him hurt further, and at the moment he is dangerous—if only to himself. While you still wear the black you are as much mine as he is. So get you gone and see him safe.”

  Avani bristled. Jacob waited for the inevitable eruption but for once it didn’t come. She only shook her head, brow furrowed in distress. She bent her knee in grudging respect and left the throne room without further argument. Peter hurried after, scrolls tucked neatly under one arm.

  Once Renault was alone in the chamber but for his guardsmen he groaned and pressed his palms to the small of his back, arching until his spine popped. When his gaze caught on Jacob above he pursed his lips in thought.

  “I find your recent attentions troubling,” he admitted. “And not because I believe black feathers bring ill luck.” Watching Jacob, he plucked the silver circlet from his brow. With one hand he massaged his scalp. “Rather, I must ask myself: for whom are you spying? For I recognize a snoop in my midst, be it man or beast or bird.”

  Jacob turned his head si
deways and regarded the king with one beady eye. He rocked from foot to foot, clattering his tail feathers. A single black pinion shook free, falling in a lazy spiral toward the throne. Renault caught it in his fist and held it up, examining the shiny black barbs in the light through the oriel.

  “Not so large as to make a fine quill.” The king tucked the feather in his shirt. “But I’ll keep it just the same, a token of your good faith. Or so I prefer to believe, for the nonce.” He set the circlet of his office once again on his head. “Pay attention, now. The day is not yet over; there is plenty still for you to observe.”

  Renault nodded at the guards, and the great double portal split open, admitting a river of sweating men and women made impatient by the wait. They came at the throne in a dignified rush, shepherded into order by grimly determined Kingsmen. Jacob, watching the courtiers squabble over pride of place in the king’s line, thought that human desperation was dull indeed.

  Chapter 1

  When Avani rapped on Mal’s chamber door there was no answer. Unsurprised, she spelled the latch open with a murmured cant and slipped into the vocent’s room. She could feel Mal in her head, a subdued storm buzzing always at the base of her skull. In his water-madness he’d tried to sever their link. He’d nearly succeeded, but the root of the bond remained. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation. When before Avani had found joy in the warp and weave of their connection, now the feel of him made her teeth ache. On the rare occasion he—unknowingly—invaded her dreams she suffered his own lurid nightmares and woke feeling drained of strength.

  She’d promised to help him, and she had managed to guide him back from the brink of delirium. Physically he seemed much improved. Her salves had healed his sea-chapped skin, her herbs his addled stomach. Two weeks in bed, three more walking amongst the living, and at last Mal appeared to be putting meat on his bones. He was less the skeleton Roue had returned to Renault and more sinew and muscle.

  If he seemed a muted version of the man she remembered, less free with a smile, more often withdrawn, Avani knew that was to be expected. She’d walked in his dreams; the sea had changed something inside Mal, and not for the better. By all accounts the Lord of the Flowers had been quickly routed, but Avani feared her friend was yet battling a far more insidious foe.

  The vocent’s first hours back home had been hard. Even after Baldebert had taken the ivory cuffs from Mal’s wrists he’d continued to rant and strike out at dangers only he could see. Unable to shake him from madness, the Masterhealer had counseled time, patience, and a strong sleeping draught.

  “They say deep water will break a magus,” Renault told Avani as they sat together at Mal’s bedside, keeping watch. “I didn’t believe it until now.”

  “He’s not broken,” Avani declared angrily, even as Mal thrashed in his sleep. She caught his flailing hand, holding it safe between her own, afraid he’d damage himself as he fought off his nightmares.

  But Renault wouldn’t meet her eye. The king looked as diminished as Mal. And Liam, for all his joy at homecoming, had refused his old cot on Mal’s floor.

  “He doesn’t want me here,” the lad insisted, distress turning his cheeks ruddy and making the scars on his face stand out. “He told me so himself, many times. I’m to stay away. I gave my word. I’m to sleep in the barracks with the soldiers’ lads.”

  Neither Avani’s imprecations nor Renault’s quiet reassurances would change his mind.

  “He’s not broken, or crippled. He’s not dangerous,” Avani said now to the deserted chamber, a challenge and a promise.

  Her gaze alighted on Mal’s desk. His journal was gone from its usual spot on the tabletop. Wherever he’d taken the Masterhealer, they’d stopped first to retrieve the vocent’s black book.

  She frowned thoughtfully at the empty, sunlit leather chair. She’d spent many an hour there in Mal’s absence—fretting, studying. Learning how to think like a magus. Doing her reluctant best to fill the space he’d left behind. She’d proved herself useful, and also proved a point to herself.

  Renault may have thrust vocent’s black upon her, but she had no desire to keep the uniform. That office belonged always and only to Malachi Doyle. Avani meant to ensure he kept it.

  “You’ve changed your clothes,” Mal said in greeting, looking up from the naked corpse arranged on his slab. A small obsidian blade glinted in his hand; his green eyes flashed under lowered brows. “Red suits you better.”

  “You’ve altered your tune,” retorted Avani. Frost glistened on the narrow cell’s ceiling and walls. Old, forgotten spells kept the space cold and prevented dead flesh from rotting. The ceiling shed soft white light, illuminating the workspace below. “Only last winter you wanted me for your student.”

  Mal smiled. She’d always recognized the hint of wistfulness about his mouth—and blamed Siobahn for that rueful tilt—but now she saw that pensiveness was sliding toward austerity.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “I’ve had some time to reconsider. You don’t need me schooling your power, Avani. You’ve done better than I could have hoped all on your own.”

  “I had help.” She drifted close, noting the journal in place on its stand and the stylus, dipped in ink, waiting. “What did you do with Master Paul?”

  The dead woman on the slab was old, her skin wrinkled. Her eyes, one brown, the other a cloudy blue, were open and staring. Her hair was sparse, brushed back from a high brow and hanging in long gray hanks; age spots freckled her hands, and face, and the tops of her feet. There were holes in the lobes of her ears for adornment, and circles of paler skin around most of her fingers where she’d worn rings.

  “Do with Master Paul?” Mal bent over the corpse. Wielding polished obsidian, he slit her neatly throat to groin. Avani heard the hiss of escaping vapors but the incision was bloodless. “What does one do with a man like that but send him on his way with a cautionary word? Paul’s spent too many years on his knees before his god. He’s forgotten that just as the throne relies on the temple, so does the temple rely on the throne. If Wilhaiim falls to their expansion, so too will the temple.”

  “He didn’t like to hear it,” Avani guessed. She looked at the pages of Mal’s journal so she didn’t have to witness the grandmother being taken apart beneath his knife. She saw he’d begun the day’s entry already. He had a clean, efficient hand, pleasing to the eye. She remembered the smell of the fine leather binding, the texture of the costly paper. More than once she’d fallen asleep with her hand on a page, her fingers tracing the shape of earlier entries.

  “Of course he didn’t like to hear it. Nor was he cowed. He’s promised me his god will blot the temple’s enemies from the earth and that Wilhaiim will do far better with the theist’s favor than without.”

  “I’ve heard talk on the streets, and in the temple.” Avani steeled herself and looked up. “There are people who whisper the Red Worm was a sign of the one god’s disapproval.”

  Mal set aside his knife. The magus didn’t crack the corpse’s rib cage as Avani expected but instead reached for a set of matched silver forceps. He bent over the woman’s abdomen and used the forceps to catch and peel back the skin around the edges of the incision, revealing muscle and fat. A flick of his fingers locked the forceps in place.

  “Ai, Goddess.” Avani slapped a palm over her eyes. She wasn’t cursed with a delicate constitution, but Mal’s clinical assault seemed to her the worst sort of indignity. “What are you doing?”

  “Examining Greta’s womb,” Mal replied. “If you’re going to vomit please do so in the basin.”

  “I won’t vomit.” But Avani turned her back to the slab before taking her hand from her face. She tried to concentrate on the shine of frost on the far wall and the comfort of cold air in an otherwise steamy summer, but she couldn’t ignore the slick sounds of Mal’s exploration. Only force of will kept her from plugging her ears like a fretful child. “What are you looking for?”

  Mal made a thoughtful noise. “Greta’s husband believes she was anticipat
ing.”

  “Pregnant, you mean,” Avani inferred. “Impossible.” She resisted an urge to swivel back around and peek. “Why, she must have been seventy if she was a day.”

  “Closer to sixty.” Mal spoke over the damp splat of intestines on stone. “Not impossible but not probable, either. Still. Baron Belmas is convinced.”

  “Belmas?” Avani wrinkled her nose. “I’ve met him. He wanted new curtains for his bed, from which he rarely rises. He’s afflicted with the palsy, if I recall. Barely able to sit up against his cushions, the poor old man, let alone sire a child on his wife, herself past childbearing age.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what makes Belmas think—”

  “Greta told him so. He claims she was obviously increasing, her belly had grown taut. She’d begun to set up a nursery, promised him an heir by end of summer.” Mal cleared his throat. “She was mistaken, of course. Here, be brave. You may not see another such as this in your lifetime.”

  Avani hesitated, but curiosity won out. She joined Mal near the body then goggled at the rounded mass of tissue he held cupped in gore-covered hands. She felt a twist of nausea deep in her own gut, but fascination beat back disgust.

  “What is it?”

  “No idea,” Mal confessed. “I’ve come upon only one other before, and that excised from a young woman’s bowels. Andrew called it a ‘malignancy’ and believed it was a result of black bile run amok.” He hefted the mass in his hands. “It was not so large as this one, but similar. See the tiny vessels running along the surface, feeding the whole? Bring me my scales, I want to get its weight.”

  “Near as large as a newborn babe,” Avani said sadly, looking into Greta’s empty eyes. “Is it what killed her?”

  “I suppose it would have, sooner rather than later,” replied Mal. “But, no—” as he set the malignancy on the scales Avani placed next to the corpse, his visage turned ominous “—Belmas’s wife is on my table because she was murdered. Why else?”