A Chime for These Hallowed Bones (Chapter 2)
Yadleen had worked under Master Baig for half her life, ever since her twelfth birthday. She didn’t need a full afternoon to autopsy a skeleton. It was one of the first things every apprentice necromancer learned, well before they were allowed to commune with bhūtas. Midafternoon had barely arrived when she emerged from Catacomb Four.
To her surprise, the main workshop was a frenzy of activity. All twenty of Master Baig’s apprentices were present, along with nearly every wight from the cadre in his office. Eight lamp-wights – human skulls filled with dirty yellow ghostfire – were lined up along a fabrication table to one side of the room. The scribe-wight who served as Master Baig’s stenographer and the warrior-wight who guarded the office door sat on chairs along the opposite wall. The clothes had been stripped from their skeletons to reveal the jade ghostfire burning within them. The apprentices swarmed around the wights, brandishing brushes and wires and various reagents for cleaning bone.
Four of the Yadleen’s five fellow journeymen supervised the labor. It didn’t take long for the tallest, her cousin Gagan, to notice her and stomp over. He demanded, “Where have you been?”
Yadleen gaped at the madness. “Master Baig had me doing an autopsy. What’s going on here?”
“The Master ordered the apprentices to clean all of these by midnight. Chorus knows why, but he was adamant.” Gagan sighed, and his shoulders slumped a bit. “Could you supervise the work on the bone augurs? We can’t find Akal, and after him, you know them best.”
“You hauled the bone augurs down here, too?” Yadleen raked the room. To her shock, she spied two clockwork edifices of bone and golden ghostfire shoved into the back corner of the shop. Each was nearly as large as Cyrus. Neither had been removed from Master Baig’s office since their installation.
If the bone augurs were here, then there should be nothing left in Master Baig’s office that contained a bhūta – and thus, no witnesses whom another necromancer could coax into spilling his secrets.
“I have to deliver my report to the Master, but I’ll return to help,” she promised.
Yadleen slipped past Gagan and skirted the periphery of the chaos. A flight of stairs brought her to the ossuary’s second-level corridor. Someone had hung extra wind chimes in front of the windows at either end of the hall. These tinkled softly while Yadleen knocked on the door to Master Baig’s office.
“Enter,” Master Baig called.
It was shockingly dark within. The curtains were drawn, and with the wights cleared out, there was no ghostfire to push back the gloom. That task fell on a trio of dusty candelabras. These created three small pools of light: one for Master Baig’s desk, one by his divan, and one for a table that was along the shortest path from the door to the desk.
Master Baig didn’t look up from the ledger he was marking. “Close the door.”
Yadleen obeyed, cutting off the indirect sunlight from the hallway. The air was stuffy. Spring was too far along to keep curtains drawn in the middle of the day, especially with all these candles burning. Yadleen picked her way across the room, not speaking until she was in front of his desk.
“Well?” he prompted her, keeping his gaze on the ledger.
Yadleen gave her report in an undertone. “The skeleton is from a human woman. She was well into her seventies when she died, judging by the progression of osteoporosis. Cause of death couldn’t be determined from the bones alone. She’s structurally fit for fabrication into a wight, but when I was doing the psychometric analysis, I identified old injuries with significant trauma bound into them. Taken together, they could be strong enough to compromise a binding.”
“Cracks in the ribs and right femur, fractures in the left arm, and either crack or a fracture on the left side of the skull?” Master Baig finally set aside his quill.
Yadleen shuffled her feet. She wasn't surprised that he knew the results, not if he knew whose skeleton it was, but there was still something ominous about his prescience. “Yes, Master.”
He rested his hands upon the arm of his chair. Not for the first time, Yadleen realized how much he resembled the sultan. He certainly looked as though the full weight of Kabarāhira rested upon his shoulders.
“She was my sister,” he explained.
Yadleen blinked. “But you only have brothers.”
“Indeed. She was Unnamed nearly fifty years ago.”
Yadleen’s first impulse was to rush down to the catacombs and smash the skeleton with a hammer. No wonder Master Baig was being so secretive. If word got out that the bones of an Unnamed had crossed his threshold, it would stain his honor, his family’s, and by extension, the Sultan himself. The scandal could lead to Master Baig being Unnamed as well. If that happened, he’d be executed via stoning, then his bones would be dropped into a preservative jar and hidden in an unmarked grave, ensuring his transition to the afterlife would be as slow and torturous as possible. His name would be stricken from all records. If his relatives and peers failed to carry out this punishment, the dishonor would spread to them, too. Yadleen and his other students would have no choice but to be his executioners.
“Master …” Yadleen hesitated. Demanding if he’d lost his mind seemed a bridge too far. Instead, she asked, “Why didn't you carry out her sentence?”
His eyes gleamed in the candlelight. “We did our best. The sentence was carried out before the Sultan’s throne. My parents and siblings cast their stones. I tried to show her mercy.” Master Baig rapped the side of his skull, harder than was strictly necessary to make his point. “But then, as the Sultan – our late Sultan, that is, may he dance joyfully with the Chorus – grasped his stone, assassins struck at him. My former sister vanished in the pandemonium.”
“She escaped?” Yadleen guessed.
“She was rescued by the alchemists.”
The alchemists.
Master Baig could only be referring to the Kimian Empire. Their alchemy-fueled war machines were the things of nightmares: cannisters of poison vapors, metal titans in the shape of men, and cannons that could level cities from over the horizon. These horrors had allowed them to devour most of Kabarāhira’s sister-sultanates. It had been three generations since the Great War halted their western expansion, but everyone knew they were preparing for another invasion. Their spies were everywhere.
No further questions needed to be asked about why Master Baig’s former sister had been Unnamed. Anyone in bed with the Kimian Empire was a traitor to not only Kabarāhira but all the free peoples of the Hegemony. Unnaming was the just punishment for such treachery.
“That man who brought her bones is an alchemist, too, isn’t he?” Yadleen asked. “I noticed something about his accent, but I thought he was merely from Phusaphakhā.”
Master Baig nodded. From beneath the ledger, he extracted the dirty letter that had brought the bones to his doorstep. “His name is Rajeev. He’s her grandson.”
This was bad. That letter was more evidence that could stain Master Baig and lead to his Unnaming. The thought of being asked to stone him was too much to bear.
“And you’re sure that letter is …” Yadleen grasped for a word that wouldn’t insult her master’s intelligence. “… authentic? He could be an alchemist spy, merely posing as her relative.”
“He has her eyes,” Master Baig said, with the smallest of shrugs. “And he screamed her nickname for me, back when I was a boy.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s not a spy. Shouldn’t we warn the Sultan? This could be some plot to destabilize the sultanate by targeting the High –”
Master Baig held up his hand. “Just because Rajeev is an alchemist, that doesn’t make him a spy. He may genuinely be a fool who seeks to honor my former sister’s last request. What grandchild wouldn't seek to hallow his grandparent’s remains?”
As soon as his hand fell, Yadleen pressed, “But why bring the bones here, Master? Why to you, and not to someone else? There are back-alley necromancers who would readily take his coin.”
“It was her last request,” he repeated, tapping the letter. “She wants her bones to be fabricated into a wight for the palace.”
The demand was so ludicrous, so brazen, that Yadleen was momentarily rendered speechless.
If Master Baig’s former sister hadn’t been Unnamed, it would have been a straightforward request. Bones anchored the soul to the physical world. Only by repurposing them, such as by using them to fabricate a wight, could the soul be freed to join the gods. It was also standard practice to prioritize the bones of the Sultan’s relatives when creating wights for his palace. Bones carried memories even after the soul departed, so wights made from the Sultan’s own family produced the most hard-working and loyal wights.
“She’s Unnamed,” Yadleen spluttered. “You can’t seriously be –”
Master Baig growled, “I cast my stone, Yadleen. You don’t need to remind me of the tightrope I’m walking. I have no intention of caving to such demands. I merely intend to allow Rajeev to make his case.”
Yadleen swallowed and averted her gaze. “Of course, Master.”
“Once he has spoken, we’ll know for certain what type of man he is. If he’s a fool, I’ll send him and my former sister’s bones on their way. If he is a spy, then yes. I will alert the Sultan.” Master Baig took up his quill again.
Yadleen recognized this as a dismissal. She bowed and turned towards the door.
“I’d like you to sit in on that meeting.”
Yadleen jerked to a halt. Her heart was suddenly jittering in her chest. It wasn’t the request itself, strange though it was. It was what she’d heard behind it. When she pivoted back to the desk, though, Master Baig was writing, as though nothing was amiss.
Carefully, she said, “Wouldn’t you prefer Akal do so, Master? He’s better at reading people than I am.”
“He’s not serious enough for such matters.”
There it was again. Master Baig’s posture gave nothing away, and his quill kept scratching across the ledger, but there was tension in his voice that stabbed into Yadleen’s heart. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think it was desperation. She suddenly felt as if she was staring down into a well, with her master stuck at the bottom.
Why, Master? You’ve already decided how this is going to turn out, haven’t you? So why do you need me here, to throw you a rope, when you can just climb out of this yourself?
Whatever his reason, she couldn’t deny him. He’d been there to throw her a rope once. She’d have nothing if he hadn’t.
Yadleen bowed low. “Whatever you need, Master. I will be here.”
Thank you for reading! Chapter 3 releases next Tuesday, February 10th! I hope to see you then!
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