Bonesmith (House of the Dead, #1)(6)
“What do you think?” she called over her shoulder.
While Wren’s attention was on the ghost itself, Sonya’s attention was lower, on the ground, seeking the body the spirit was still tethered to. She dropped onto her knees in the snow, a small spade in her hands.
The shovel hit the dirt below with a soft thump and scrape, but it wasn’t long until Sonya was scrabbling through the snow and soil with her bare hands, relying upon touch and magical senses as she sought the ghost’s bones.
Wren watched, itching to help dig and speed things along, but that went against a cardinal rule of valkyr-reapyr training. No matter how seemingly benign, never turn your back on the ghost. Never let your guard down.
It was also why she didn’t just slash at the specter as she had that many-elbowed arm.
She might get the ghost to disappear entirely as it recoiled from the dead bone, but such a reprieve was only temporary. There was no telling how quickly it would return… or where. Better to keep it trapped in her line of sight than to dispatch it now and have it turn up behind her back or directly on top of them.
So Wren did as she had been trained and withdrew her second bone sword, holding them before her like scissors, trapping the spirit within. A stronger ghost would fight back, but this one only ebbed and swirled with mild and uninspiring menace.
To Wren’s delight, Sonya made a soft exclamation of pleasure and lifted a muddy femur from a pile of bones in the dirt.
The anchor bone.
With her attention split between the wobbling, silently trembling ghost and the reapyr at her feet, Wren watched as Sonya lay the mottled, off-white bone against the stark white snow. She withdrew her scythe and closed her eyes. Her muddy hand ran the length of the bone once, twice, three times. On the fourth she brought the weapon down on the invisible ley line, cracking into the bone and severing the connection between the ghost and its earthly remains.
There was a familiar, sucking sensation, leaving the air in Wren’s lungs sparse, and a heartbeat later, the ghost disappeared in a puff of cold air and ether.
As Sonya collected the now-dead bone and got to her feet, Wren cleared the area, swiping her blades through the air to make sure nothing remained, then gathered her scattered knucklebones for later use.
As she did so, she caught sight of a spectator between the trees.
“One already,” she said, smiling smugly at Inara. “Try to keep up.”
THREE
The deeper they moved into the Bonewood, the more tightly packed the trees became, their swaying branches knocking together and snagging the fabric of Sonya’s robe. She brushed the bone aside with a casual wave of her hand, while Wren preferred to keep her swords raised to discourage their grasping reach.
The ghosts, too, were more plentiful, though the majority were tier ones, hanging in the air like fog or swirling in an unseen current like woodsmoke. They spotted what looked like a tier two, but it was too far off the path—trying to lure them into the darkness like a will-o’-the-wisp—and a tier one that glowed so brightly Sonya had to look away until Wren dispatched it.
Their next reaping came nearly an hour later.
They spotted the bones before they saw the ghost, so when the glowing form suddenly appeared out of nowhere, angry and violent, both Sonya and Wren—much to her embarrassment—leapt back in alarm.
Wren recovered first, swords raised, but the ghost wasn’t interested in her. It had surely been a bonesmith in life, its vaguely human shape draped in a wispy fabric that could have easily been a reapyr’s robes, and it focused on Sonya with single-minded intent that suggested it knew exactly what they were about. Reaping might provide peace, but the undead wanted to live, just like everything else.
When it crashed against Wren’s swords with a physical impact strong enough to make her boots slide in the slush beneath her feet, Wren realized it wasn’t just a self-aware tier three. It was able to affect the world around it. Only a tier four—also called a geist—and higher could do that.
Sonya quailed, neglecting her task as the ghost drew nearer.
“Hey,” Wren barked, glancing away from the ghost for a split second—but that was all it needed. The next time it slammed into her bone blades, heedless of the damage such contact did to its form, Wren dropped one of her swords thanks to her distraction.
Sonya cried out and took a hasty step backward, ready to bolt in fear, forgetting another fundamental rule of the death trade: Never run.
The simple, terrible truth was that tier-three and higher ghosts were fast. They were able to disappear and reappear in the blink of an eye, or streak across an open field in half the time it took a horse galloping full tilt.
Running was far too dangerous and risked the person running directly into the ghost, which would mean instant death or such severe deathrot that they’d be a shell of a person, immobile and in constant pain until they eventually succumbed. Wren had seen the victim of such an attack once—her father had, on Lady-Smith Svetlana’s orders, dragged her out of bed and hauled her to the infirmary to witness it firsthand. Wren had hardly ever spoken to her grandmother before then—she hardly ever spoke to her now, either—and had approached with wary fear.
“I’m not sure—” her father had said, trying, perhaps, to protect Wren, but Svetlana quickly shut him down. Then he just stood there, silent and unflinching, while the woman’s clawlike hands gripped Wren’s narrow six-year-old shoulders and forced her to hover next to the bed until the dying man’s last, choking breath.