Bonesmith (House of the Dead, #1)(10)
It was certainly the death blow, but the more Wren looked, the more unease she felt.
This person had not wandered into the wood and gotten lost—the crushed skull was proof of that. They had been killed and disposed of in the one place in the Bonelands where a dead body might go unnoticed.
No death rites. No reaping. And hidden in the Bonewood.
Lost, never to be found again.
Until now.
The manner of death fueled a ghost’s spiritual existence. A peaceful death meant a peaceful ghost. An old, tired death meant an old, tired ghost.
A death on a battlefield amid violence and hatred left behind a violent, hateful ghost.
But there was nothing more violent or hateful than cold-blooded murder.
It was clear to Wren that this death had not been peaceful or tired, and a blow to the back of the head meant a surprise attack—a cowardly attack. The Bonewood was no battlefield… at least, not for those outside the House of Bone, which this person surely was. They carried no bones, wore no armor; they had no weapons of any kind that she could see.
For a moment Wren just stood there, frozen, wary of disturbing the body further than she already had.
Ghosts didn’t instantly detach from their bodies with death. That separation took time. How much time usually depended on the state of the body, which acted as a sort of container and camouflage for the soul.
Not only did it trap a ghost, but it obscured a bonesmith’s ability to detect bones. It was one of the reasons why bonesmiths couldn’t sense or manipulate the bones inside a body, because their flesh acted as a shield.
But a body didn’t need to be fully decomposed for the ghost to rise. If the anchor bone was exposed—likely the skull in this case, given the obvious death wound—then the spirit could detach. Just because it hadn’t yet didn’t mean it wouldn’t, either, which made the prospect of turning her back on it in order to climb even more precarious.
But there was nothing for it. She had already lost too much time.
As she turned to go, her gaze landed on a flash of pale white against the muddy ground.
She shifted a piece of stiff, partially frozen fabric to reveal a ring.
It hummed powerfully in Wren’s senses, telling her it was made of bone, except… bonesmiths didn’t make jewelry.
She carefully lifted it from the ground, seeing designs carved into the band’s smooth surface—another thing bonesmiths never did. She thought it was a pattern at first, but the odd shapes and lines were actually glyphs of some sort, spanning the entire band. The images nagged at Wren, and she had the feeling she’d seen something similar before.
Turning the object in her hands, she spotted additional carvings. There were two spread-winged birds, one on either side of the flat bezel top, and where a signet or gemstone might be, something dark and polished flashed in the moonlight.
It looked almost like metal, pointed in a spike, and it protruded from the surface of the ring like a nail through a board of wood, its flat head visible on the underside.
It was too small a point to be much good as a weapon, and the longer she examined it, the more confused she felt. There was something distinctly off about that small black spike, the way it pierced the bone. Something wrong.
Wren knew of only one kind of material that shone black like that.
Ironsmith metal.
But the thought of bonesmith and ironsmith artisans coming together to construct such an artifact was difficult to imagine. The Houses of Iron and Bone had been enemies for decades—ever since the ironsmiths had caused the Breach. Wren’s father hated them with particular vitriol, but she supposed that was to be expected. He’d been on the front lines of the battles that had followed, and his older brother, Locke—the original heir to the House of Bone—had died in the fighting.
The House of Bone was the Dominions’ only chance to stem the flow of walking undead that had poured forth from the Breach, but the bonesmiths had never faced such a threat. There was a reason the ghostsmiths had been exiled in the first place—their necromancy was not only unnatural, but it was a danger to the very survival of the Dominions. The same things that limited ghosts—their incorporeal state and the fact that they couldn’t move far from their bodies—were negated by undead that could carry their bones with them.
Tier fives had always fascinated Wren, who loved the idea of testing her skills against the revenants, but as her instructors constantly reminded her, it wasn’t all fun and games. Countless people had died at their undead hands, including bonesmiths and ironsmiths, as the lands to the east had been lost one by one to the ever-growing Haunted Territory.
In fact, the Border Wall had been built in an attempt to save the rest of the Dominions from being overrun. It was a massive structure spanning the entire island from north to south, and unfortunately for them, the House of Iron was trapped on the wrong side of it. Even though they had caused the Breach in the first place, the king had offered the House of Iron the chance to relocate to the safe side of the Border Wall, but they’d refused.
Then, barely five years afterward, they staged an uprising, determined to destroy the Border Wall and have both their lands and their place in the Dominions—by any means necessary. Once again, the king called upon the House of Bone. Now they were fighting living foes as well as undead ones and were integral in putting the rebellion down and keeping the Border Wall intact.
The ironsmiths had been all but obliterated, the Knights of the Iron Citadel—their ruling bloodline—wiped out, and the House of Bone had lost their shining heir, plus hundreds of other bonesmiths besides.