Bone War Page 3

  Which meant, of course, that something did.

  A great bubbling came up from underneath Danr’s feet. The water blooped and burbled, washing around them like a laundress’s tub. A great green bulk rose from the ocean floor and burst to the surface just in front of them. It opened, revealing the biggest flowering lily pad Danr had ever seen. It spread across the suddenly still waters like an emerald carpet with a golden flower in the center the size of a cart horse. Danr furiously treaded water. Standing near the flower were two women. The first wore a cloak of pale spring green, and over her shoulder she wore a leather seed bag of the kind farmers used to sow fields. The second wore a rich green-brown cloak of summer and carried a gardening hoe over her shoulder. Their faces were neither pretty nor ugly, not old or young, and their hands were worn with work. Danr, of course, recognized both of them. They were the Gardeners, the Fates who tended the Garden, which ordered all lives, mortal and immortal both. The woman with the seed bag was Nu, and the woman with the hoe was Tan. Their time was up.

  “No,” Danr whispered. “Not yet. You can’t.”

  “We can,” said Nu.

  “We do,” said Tan.

  Danr’s breath shortened and his throat thickened. He had wielded the Iron Axe, kissed Death on the cheek, and faced down Grandfather Wyrm, but this moment turned his entire body to ice. He looked at Aisa, and his own fear and sorrow were reflected in her eyes. All the things he hadn’t said in the last eighteen months piled up under his tongue, but it was too late to say them.

  “Great Ones,” he said, and automatically tried to bow, even though he was still treading water.

  “Is it … is it time?” Aisa asked. “Have you come for me?”

  “We must speak,” said the woman in spring green. Her name was Nu.

  “Converse,” added the woman in summer brown-green. Her name was Tan.

  Danr, long conversant with careful truth, quickly noticed the Gardeners hadn’t actually said they were coming to take Aisa away from Erda. Instead there was a long pause, as if the women were waiting for something. Danr tried to latch onto this small fact for reassurance, but had little luck.

  Aisa hauled herself onto the edge of the lily pad and wrung water out of her hair. Danr’s mouth was dry from both the fear and the salt water. He couldn’t read her expression.

  “Talk?” she said. “It has been six seasons since you came to us to say that Pendra disappeared, six seasons since you said you wanted me to take her place. Six seasons I have waited and wondered when you would come, and now you have. But you say you only wish to talk, Great Ones?”

  Both Nu and Tan looked relieved. Nu said, “Indeed. Our sister Pendra is still missing, and the Garden weeps at her loss.”

  “Not the best news,” Aisa sighed. “I was hoping you were coming to tell me she had returned.”

  “And now,” said Tan, “we need you.”

  “We call on you,” said Nu.

  Another silence fell over the group. The lily pad rocked slightly, and the two Gardeners looked unhappy. Then Aisa said, “You require me.”

  This cheered them up. “You must come to the Garden and help us,” they said together. “We will show you the way.”

  Startled, Aisa grabbed Danr’s hand. There was a wrench, and the ocean and the lily pad were gone. The water vanished, the sunlight dimmed, and Danr stumbled as he found himself standing on dry ground. Nausea sloshed through his stomach, and he went to his knees for a moment, breathing deeply. No matter how many times he did it, Twisting made him sick, though if he was careful, he could at least keep himself from throwing up. After a moment, he got his stomach under control and pushed himself to his feet. Water dripped from his bare chest and the old trousers he’d worn on the boat, and he gaped at the lightly wooded field stretching before him. Tall trees poked up here and there, along with stands of smaller ones. But it wasn’t grass that grew between them. It was a riot of plants. Thousands and thousands of different plants growing in a great mass. Carrots rubbed roots with wheat stalks. Peanuts tangled in pumpkin vines. Bean sprouts languished in the shade of gooseberry bushes. Unseen breezes made the leaves dance and writhe with soft sounds that hissed in Danr’s ears. Or maybe it was the plants themselves, squirming to get loose, whispering to anyone who might listen.

  Some attempt had been made at order. Danr noticed how the plants had been seeded in plowed rows, and the plants followed them, more or less, but even the original furrows dove and swooped like chaotic ripples on a sandy beach, and the plants themselves behaved badly, growing where they pleased and twining about each other in an orgy of golds and greens and scarlets and azure blue. It was tame wilderness. It was orderly chaos. It was ugly beauty.

  It was the Garden.

  The sight stole the breath from his very soul and twisted his heart around inside him. This was the most sacred of places. He was glad he was barefoot—and what a strange thought that was to cross his mind here and now; indeed, it was.

  Aisa had told him of her visits to the Garden. It grew along the trunk and branches of Ashkame, the Great Tree whose roots drilled down to the dark realm of Glumenhame, whose upper branches cradled shining halls of Lumenhame, and whose trunk curled around Twixthame, where mortals lived. Every plant, every blossom, every fruit and seed was a mortal life somewhere in the mortal realms, and the way each tangled or twisted around the others showed how lives were intertwined.

  And something … bothered him about the Garden. He couldn’t put his dripping finger on it, but it was there, like an itch he couldn’t scratch or a shadow at the corner of his eye. What was it?

  “Danr came along, too,” said Nu. “That is … interesting.”

  “Fascinating,” added Tan.

  “Delightful,” said Aisa. He had lost his grip on her hand, and she was sitting beside him, her damp tail pressed against his legs. “My love, would you give me a hand to my feet?”

  Automatically, he reached down and pulled her upright. It took effort, more than it should have. But he was human, and his human shape was considerably weaker than his birth shape.

  As Aisa came upright, Danr felt a bit of his own personal energy leave him. It slipped down his arms, out his hands, and into Aisa. He shivered delicately. It was an intimate sensation, like pulling on a shirt still warm with someone else’s body heat and fragrant with their scent. When Danr was in his human form, Aisa could and often did take energy from him to power her own magic. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. With a faint glow and the sound of moving flesh, she … changed. Her tail split into a pair of legs. The scales and tattoos faded, leaving smooth, dusky skin behind. In a few soft moments, Aisa stood as a naked, bare-faced woman among the twisting plants of the Garden. Like Danr, Aisa herself was a half-blood, with a mermaid mother and a human father, though her ability to change her shape was much more extensive than Danr’s. She stretched and ran her hands through her hair with a sigh.

  Danr looked at her, and decided privately that she was more beautiful than anything the Garden might have to offer. Her long night black hair spilled down her back, complementing her dark eyes and slender nose and full red lips. Her breasts were high and round, and her hips tapered down to long, smooth legs. An incredible sight in an incredible place. It was hard to remember her as the slave girl he had known when they were younger, her body always layered in multiple dresses, her hands wrapped in rags, her face and hair hidden under scarves. At that time, he had thought himself an ugly, inhuman monster. But over time, she had changed. They had changed. Now it seemed foolish that she had ever hidden herself and that he had thought the Stane were ugly. Now he was standing in the Garden of the Fates, she stretching her naked body and he admiring it, and neither of them self-conscious.

  “Perhaps you would join me in changing shape, Hamzu,” Aisa said, using the nickname she had given him years ago. It meant “strong one.”

  Danr nodded once and stretched on his own. He closed his eyes, reached inside himself, and called to his birth shape. Aisa touched
his arm, and some of her power came to him, though it was more difficult for her to share when she was in her own birth shape. Her power slid around and through him, boosting his spirit and making him feel almost buoyant, as if he might float away. His birth shape came easily to him, more easily than his human shape did. His back and limbs lengthened and grew heavy with muscle, splitting his trousers until they dropped away in rags. His chest grew thick and powerful. His jaw jutted forward, and his lower teeth grew upward enough to give him a pugnacious look. His own didn’t become as large as a full troll’s, but they tried. Shaggy black hair covered his head and fell a good way down his chest and arms, and his skin darkened. He towered over Aisa, with more than a full head of height on her. But his eyes remained the same—large and dark and liquid.

  “Much better,” Aisa said, taking his much larger hand in hers. “Your human shape is handsome, my Hamzu, but I like your true shape best. Especially when it has no clothes.”

  “We aren’t alone, you know,” he replied mildly.

  “We have nothing the Gardeners haven’t seen.”

  “I know. I just wanted to point it out.”

  “And we still need your assistance,” said Nu.

  “Aid,” amended Tan.

  “Help?” offered Aisa.

  Nu nodded. “Look about you, sister. What do you see?”

  “What do you observe?” said Tan.

  There was a long pause. At last, Aisa said, “I do not feel comfortable in this role, Great Ones. It has been more than a year and a half now since Hamzu and I stopped the harbormaster’s golem from destroying Balsia. Before then, I spoke with Pendra and even wielded her sickle. She said that every thousand years, one of you Gardeners steps down and a mortal takes over the role to keep you balanced and compassionate to mortals.”

  “Yes,” said Nu.

  “True,” said Tan.

  Aisa said, “Pendra said that because I lived first as a slave and then as a woman of power, that because I had lived among the Fae and the Kin and was a friend to the Stane, that because I could wield the sickle and cut life without flinching, I was best suited to take her place. But then the two of you came to my and Hamzu’s bedroom the morning after the golem’s attack and you said Pendra had disappeared. And that was the last we saw of you. If you are not asking me to take Pendra’s place, why are you coming to us now?”

  “We were hoping to find her ourselves,” said Nu.

  “Keep up the Garden ourselves,” said Tan. “But we could not. And so we need your help for the moment. Look about you. What do you see?”

  Although the remark hadn’t been addressed to him, Danr looked. The Garden stretched in all directions, until it curled downward and away to Danr’s left. Behind him, the Garden crawled up a massive wall that vanished into the distance above, and the plants didn’t seem to notice or care that they defied gravity. Danr felt he could have walked straight up that wall himself, and it was probably true. It wasn’t actually a wall, but the trunk of Ashkame itself. The branch the three of them were standing on was so huge that it looked like a mountain covered with a riot of trees and plant life.

  The branch Danr stood on was tilted a bit. Quite a lot, actually. It was like standing on a gentle but persistent slope, and he had to lean in order to stay upright. Even after everything he had been through, it was more than a little difficult to understand that someone who had grown up a half-blood thrall in northern Balsia was standing in such a powerful place.

  The air was cool and crisp as a new daffodil, and a light spring breeze blew—Danr’s favorite weather and favorite season. The sunlight was indirect, as if filtered through leaves high above, and it didn’t hurt even his light-sensitive, trollish eyes. Really, despite the chaos and the splendor, it was the perfect garden for a half-blood onetime farmer, and he felt at once at home and relaxed in this fine and beautiful place, indeed, he did.

  But that itch, that shadow, was still there, maddeningly at the edge of awareness. And then, cursing himself for an idiot, he closed his right eye and looked only with his left.

  Nearly three years ago, Danr had encountered a trio of giants who had granted him—or saddled him with—the power of truth. The power prevented him from telling even the smallest lie and forced him to answer fully any question put to him, no matter how painful the truth might be. It also granted him the power to see the truth through his left eye. When he looked at the Garden with his right eye shut, it … changed. The shift was small and subtle, but now it was clear, and he couldn’t understand how he had missed it before.

  The Garden was dying. Leaves were curling up or turning yellow. Some were blackened and slimy. Danr’s left eye spotted insects and disease—end rot that blackened tomatoes, downy mildew that yellowed lettuce, aphids that devoured roses, and rust that reddened grass. The breeze blew wafts of a thick musty smell now and again, and Danr wrinkled his nose in disapproval.

  Nu and Tan noticed his expression, and they turned to him. “What do you see?” they asked together.

  Danr couldn’t help answering. “This place is falling into ruin,” he said in his low, husky voice. “What’s the cause?”

  “It started in Twixthame,” said Nu.

  “It began in the middle,” added Tan.

  Then both women paused, as if waiting for something. Then Aisa stepped forward.

  “It … commenced in the center,” she finished in her lilting accent.

  Nu and Tan looked visibly relieved.

  “Our gratitude,” said Nu.

  “Our gratefulness,” said Tan.

  “Er … thank you,” said Aisa.

  “The sickness is the fault of someone in Twixthame using magic most foul and dread.” Nu twisted the top of her seed bag. “We cannot see the source. Not without Pendra. But we need help.”

  “With what?”

  Nu clutched at her seed bag. “The two of us cannot keep up with the weeds and tangles in the Garden. The two of us cannot root out disease and unease. With only two, the power is incomplete.”

  “We are Three,” said Tan. “We are two who revolve around one in the center, a compass needle balanced on a fulcrum, a single-spoked wheel turning around a hub. Without the center, we cannot move.”

  “What is that to do with me?” Aisa asked.

  “You are not Pendra,” said Nu. “But you are close. You can help. When you are here, we work better.”

  “And you can work as well.”

  Here, Aisa looked taken aback. “I can? How?”

  “Tend the Garden.” Tan swept a hand at the distance. “Touch it. Feel it. Smell it. Become one with it. You will know what to do.”

  “But even if you do not, sister,” said Nu, “your presence allows us to tend the plants better.”

  Danr swallowed hard. “So you’re saying Aisa has to stay here now. Forever. Or until you find Pendra.”

  “No,” said Aisa.

  “Never,” said Tan.

  “Not yet,” said Nu. “Mortals cannot survive in the Garden for very long. You cannot eat here. Or drink. Or sleep. Eventually, you will go mad and die. So no, you may only stay for a few hours at a time. But even that will help. As will any work you do, sister.”

  “And now we must work,” said Nu.

  “Labor,” said Tan.

  Another pause, and Aisa said, “Drudge.”

  The two Gardeners gave a pair of wan smiles and slid away. The Garden swallowed their cloaked forms up, and they were gone.

  Danr watched them go, then sank to the ground with his forearms on his knees. He felt weak and washed out, and he was still naked.

  “Well,” he said at last, “what do we do now?”

  She sat beside him. “I feel a great deal of power in this place,” she said absently. “It did not take much energy for me to become human.”

  “Then why did you take mine?” he asked with a grin. He knew the answer.

  “Because I like it, my Hamzu. It is like drinking fine wine, and it feels almost as good as when we share …
other things.” Her hand ran down his leg, and his body responded. He grinned again.

  “I can’t think of anything better to do in this garden,” he said.

  “Then we think the same way,” Aisa said. “And I do love a man who knows my mind.”

  “Before you get too far, sweeties,” said a new voice, “I thought we might have a chat as well.”

  They both twisted around. Standing behind them was a short, plump woman in a scarlet dress and a white lacy shawl. Her gray braids were coiled in a mass about her head and held in place with a pair of bone knitting needles. Even though the Garden light was steady, the woman’s face was somehow thrown into shadow, not quite visible. She held one hand out before her, palm up, and over it hovered a glowing figure the size of a human head. The figure twisted and shifted, its shape never settling for long.

  “Death,” said Aisa.

  “With a sprite,” said Danr breathlessly. The day was proving more and more extraordinary, even for him.

  “What are you doing in the Garden?” Aisa asked.

  “Who is guarding your door?” Danr said at the same time.

  “I haven’t left my door, dear,” said Death. “No need to stand. I’ve seen you naked already and don’t need to see it again.”

  “Er … right,” said Danr, wondering what would happen to some poor soul on Twixthame if he snatched a branch off a nearby bush and used it for modesty. “Sorry. We got caught in the middle of the ocean, and—”

  “She does not care, Hamzu,” Aisa interrupted. “My lady, you have a reason to interrupt us, I am sure.”

  Danr blinked at her, then made his face into an impassive mask. He and Aisa had met Death several times and had completed several tasks at her request, including killing a giant squid that had nearly killed both of them. Despite the number of times he had spoken directly with her, Danr had never lost his awe of Death, but Aisa seemed to find her more and more exasperating as time went on, a trait Danr found endlessly unnerving.

  “Have you seen your sisters?” Death countered.