The Bone Shard Daughter (The Drowning Empire, #1)(96)

Gio had already engaged the next guard. I stepped to his side, bringing my staff down on the woman’s head. Her helmet took the force of my blow, though I saw her teeth grit with the pain. It distracted her enough for Gio to bat her sword to the side. I swung the other end of my staff about and jabbed her in the throat. She went down choking.

Battles were never pretty.

Four guards left. They formed a line between us and the governor. I could see a flash of his frightened eyes by the lamplight, his robe wrapped loosely about broad shoulders. He had a full head of disheveled gray hair and a thin beard. Something about his face reminded me of the goats I used to see on the mountain slopes at home. He wasn’t young, but he wasn’t old. Doubtless he’d expected to rule for many more years.

He still might. The line of guards advanced, their swords held at the ready. I reached for the power in my bones again and felt nothing but weariness in them. I’d told Emahla once that I would fight off a thousand armies just to be at her side. She’d laughed and had kissed my cheek. “Jovis, you’re not a fighter.”

“I would be for you.”

Back then I’d thought hopes and willpower could make a thing be so. Now I knew the limitations of body, mind and heart.

Above us, I heard shouts, a few clangs of metal against metal. Another step toward us. I wondered if they recognized me from the posters, or if they recognized Gio. They might hesitate, but this wouldn’t go well for me. Without Mephi’s strength, I had only a rudimentary understanding of weapons. They would cut me down like I was a patch of overgrown grass. I couldn’t blame them for just doing their job.

I brought my staff up to block as one of the guards swiped at me. The clash rang out, reverberating down the hallway much as the impact reverberated down my arm. My very bones vibrated. Before I could react, the man took another step, inside my guard, and seized my staff. He wrenched it from my grasp and sent it skittering across the floorboards. His great big hand seized the neck of my shirt. I wriggled to free myself but found his grip unyielding.

The other three guards converged on Gio. He fought like a whirlwind, his blades flashing, blocking a blow here, nicking an arm there. But the three guards were relentless. They wore at him until sweat dripped from his brow.

What were the Shardless doing right now? Were they on their way to help?

I’d never had anyone else to rely on as a smuggler. Don’t know why I was hoping for that now. I clenched my jaw and kicked back at the man holding me, hard as I could. He grunted as the blow landed. But instead of letting me go, he wrapped an arm about my throat, tightening it until the edges of my vision went dark.

It was through this haze that I saw Gio kill one guard, his knife dancing across her throat. And then I watched, helpless, my hands clawing for purchase, as one of the remaining two guards knocked Gio’s cheek with the hilt of her blade. Gio stumbled but didn’t fall. Not until the other guard buried his foot in Gio’s stomach.

The room went silent. The governor straightened, pulling the two halves of his robes tighter together, refastening the belt. Failure, even though it had seemed inevitable, was still a shock. Mephi . . . No answering power swelled in my flesh.

The man holding me cleared his throat. “Should we question them?”

The governor shook his head. “There’s no time. We need to leave before the rebels get here. Kill them.”





35





Lin


Imperial Island

He knows.

I bit my lip until it bled, clutching at my sides with clawed fingers. Something I’d done, something I’d said, a spy construct I hadn’t seen. Something had tipped him off, and now everything was wrong. I wanted to weep. To scream.

Ilith’s body deflated in front of me, her face sagging, her legs curling beneath her. She’d not said anything since. I wasn’t sure she could still speak. Her body was turning soft, malleable, even her exoskeleton losing cohesion. There was something both terrible and familiar about the way she was falling apart.

That night Bayan had come to me. I remembered the give of his ribs beneath my fingers as he gasped at me for help, as his flesh fell away from his eyes.

Had Father done the same thing to Ilith as he’d done to Bayan? No – Father hadn’t done anything to make Ilith fall apart. I’d done this to Ilith. I’d failed in rewriting her commands. I dug my nails into my palms, unable to breathe. The way Father had failed in rewriting Bayan’s.

Bayan was a construct.

I could barely wrap my mind around the thought. He was real; he wasn’t a thing cobbled together from animal parts. But he must have been sewn together from human parts, the seams smoothed over with bone shard magic, the commands written into his bones.

I didn’t live in a palace. I lived in a dollhouse of my father’s making, a living graveyard. Despite the fact that Ilith’s lair was the size of the dining hall, I felt I was being crushed by the weight of the surrounding stone. If he knew, why let me continue? Was this all some sort of test? And if the sickness hadn’t come from Bayan, where had I gotten it from? Tears gathered in my eyes, though I didn’t know why. Were they for Bayan, or for myself?

Ilith didn’t move. I didn’t know how to bring her back, and I wasn’t sure I could figure it out before daybreak.

Think, I had to think. Push down the horror, accept the truth, move to the next action. Stealing the keys was pointless. Bringing them to Numeen to copy was pointless.