Chapter 13: The Door of Bones

They carried Fel back into the Court of Doors on a stretcher, and Karmina was waiting.

She had arrived while he was still on the causeway, with two grey-robed orderlies and a wheeled cart of bandages, and she did not say a single word as they lifted him onto a bench. She simply cut away his coat, examined the hole in his thigh, the open line along his ribs, the split lip and the swollen left hand, and closed her eyes for a very long moment.

“Five,” she said. “I have five empty cots now.”

“I won,” Fel said thickly.

“I am aware. The whole Sanctum is aware.” She began to pack the wound. “Do not speak. Do not move. Do not, under any circumstances, try to be clever.”

Across the chamber, Boru waved his hand at the wall, and a vast disc of black glass that Fel had taken for decoration woke and rippled like a pond. Shapes began to swim in it. Orpheus was being lifted onto a stretcher, gently, his broken legs strapped, a wet cloth across his eyes. Somewhere behind him the little blue sparks of his dead steed were still drifting upward through the dark like embers.

“Two Doors remain,” said Kirn. “Candidate Ortumo. The Door of Bones.”

Loria stood.

She had been sitting on the stone steps with her back against a pillar, her wrapped arm in her lap, and she rose now as if someone had lifted her with a string. She glanced once at Fel. She looked at the hole in his leg and at the blood on his chin and his ruined lip. Her face did not change at all.

“You look terrible,” she said.

“You look worse.”

“I look exactly as I always do.” She turned toward the door with the little knucklebone carved into it, and the three eyes of the gun on her hip glowed faintly through the leather. “Keep your eyes open. It would be a waste to close them.”

She walked in without looking back. The Door of Bones shut behind her.

On the black glass, a picture bloomed.

The Chapel of Bones was round, and its floor was a game board.

It was a vast circular table of pale carved bone, sixty feet across, divided into hundreds of small squares, each inlaid with a tiny black sigil. Around its edge rose tier upon tier of stacked skulls, climbing into darkness, grinning down at the field like the audience of some vast and terrible theater. Overhead, an iron chandelier the size of a house turned slowly on a chain, hung with a hundred black candles that gave off a cold, thin light. There was no pit at the board’s edge. There was only a very long drop into a dark that had teeth in it.

At the center of the board, in her lavender dress, stood Marie of Krishcove.

She curtsied. It was a perfect curtsy, the kind taught to girls of good family, one small foot behind the other, one hand raised to a nonexistent veil.

“Mademoiselle Ortumo,” she said. Her voice was sweet and soft, faintly musical, with the slow rounded vowels of a coastal town. “What a pleasure. I have heard so much about you. Everyone is afraid of you. I do love it when a game has stakes.”

Loria drew the gun. The three eyes opened, one after another.

“You talk too much.”

“I do, I’m told. It is my only vice.” Marie unhooked the velvet pouch from her hip and tipped its contents into her palm. Twelve ivory dice, yellowed and slightly greasy, each one carved with a tiny sigil. “My grandmother’s grandmother’s bones, and her grandmother’s before. The Ossari bargain with Fate, mademoiselle. We do not fight it. We simply… play.”

She threw the first die.

It bounced once, twice, across the pale squares, and came to rest with a small dry click. Something on its face glowed.

The entire board tilted.

It happened all at once, with a shudder that made the skulls on the tiers rattle in their niches. The far edge dropped, and the near edge rose, and the whole table became a steep and rapidly sharpening slope, running straight toward the toothed dark at its lip. Loria’s boots skidded. The gun-arm flailed. She dropped to one knee and slammed her left hand against the bone, and a black, writhing tendril of her own shadow shot out of her sleeve and drove into a groove between the squares like a nail.

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She held.

“The Tilt,” said Marie, from the high side of the board, perfectly balanced on her tiny satin boots. “I win the first roll. But I do promise to be fair.”

Loria raised the gun and fired.

The black flame ripped across the slope in a molten line, hot enough to make the air scream, and Marie snatched a second die from the air and flicked it in front of her without looking. A wall of pale ribs erupted from the board, thick as tree trunks, and the shot struck it in a burst of black sparks. The ribs cracked. They held.

“Wall,” Marie sighed. “Do keep up.”

The third roll was thorns.

Bone spikes exploded up from every square Loria stood near, jagged, white, wet with old marrow. One punched clean through her left calf. She screamed through her teeth. It was the first sound Fel had ever heard her make that wasn’t flat, and it went through him like a blade, and beside him Vili had stood up without noticing.

“She is losing,” he said quietly.

“She is playing,” said Karmina, not looking up from Fel’s thigh. “Watch.”

Loria tore her leg off the spike, dropping to one knee in a spray of blood, and looked at the dice in Marie’s hand, and Fel saw something change in her face. It was not fear. It was arithmetic.

Twelve dice, thought Loria. She has used three. Each roll is a law. Each law lasts until the next roll. She needs the dice.

She reached into her coat and pulled out a single black slug from the pouch Old Tallow had given her. She fed it into the Cerberus’s chamber, and all three of the gun’s eyes turned to look at it.

Marie rolled the fourth die.

It struck the board and glowed, and the whole chapel went dark.

“Dusk,” said Marie, delighted. “Oh, that one is yours, mademoiselle.”

Every candle in the chandelier went out. The cold light died. Loria’s eyes flared in the black like two coals in a furnace, and the crown of void unfolded around her head, drinking what little light remained. From her sleeves and hem and hair, long tendrils of her own shadow lashed out across the board, blind and eager, and one of them found something soft.

Marie gasped, a small, startled sound.

When the candles flickered back to life, she was standing with her left sleeve torn from shoulder to wrist. A long gash ran along her upper arm, deep enough to show pale bone. It was the first blood she had spilled all day, and she looked at it with genuine astonishment.

“Well,” she said. “How rude.”

“Grave-iron,” said Loria, and raised the gun.

She did not aim at Marie. She aimed at the die in her hand.

The shot was a black streak, too fast for the eye. It struck the fifth die dead center as it left Marie’s fingers, and the little yellow cube burst in a spray of splinters. The law it carried died in the air with a sound like a snapped string. Marie’s mouth fell open.

“That was my great-grandmother’s…”

“She should have taught you not to gamble.”

She fired again. A second die shattered. Then a third, before Marie had even thrown it. Marie fell back, throwing the remaining dice in a scatter, a flurry of ivory across the bone. The laws came thick and fast: Frost, and the squares went slick with ice; Wind, and a howling gale knocked Loria sideways; Weight, and her arm sagged as though it were made of lead. She fought through all of it, the black flame flickering in her gun and her tendrils cracking like whips, and Marie, laughing now, bleeding, hair coming loose from its pins, refused to stop.

It was the best fight Fel had ever seen.

“Two dice left,” said Vili softly, on the bench. “She is winning.”

“She’s not,” said Karmina.

“The Ossari girl has two dice left.”

“And Ortumo has two rounds. Look at them.”

They were tearing each other apart. Loria’s coat was in ribbons, her left leg dragging, her right arm hanging near-useless at her side from the Weight law. Marie’s lavender dress was soaked in blood, her left arm a ruin. Between them, the bone board lay cracked and burning.

Marie plucked the last two dice from the floor. Her eyes shone.

“I will tell you a secret,” she said, panting. “I always keep one die that isn’t a law. It is a bet.”

She threw it.

The twelfth die hit the bone and glowed a deep, sick purple, and the floor opened.

A great bone coffin lid rose out of the board, twelve feet tall, studded with iron spikes on the underside. It hung in the air above Loria for the length of one heartbeat, casting its long black shadow across her body, and Loria had just enough time to look up at it and whisper something to the gun.

The lid came down.

It hit with a sound like a house falling. Splinters of bone exploded outward. Fel felt it in the bench under his own body.

“Loria!” Vili was on his feet.

The lid did not lift.

Then it bulged. A thin line of black light split through the seam, then another, and then the whole thing detonated outward in a roar of infernal flame, and the black fire of Hell’s Gate tore through the chapel from the inside. The chandelier fell. The skulls on the tiers cracked and burst. Marie of Krishcove, standing two paces from the blast, threw up her arms and was hurled across the board like a doll.

She landed in a heap in the smoke, and did not move.

For a long moment there was only the fire.

Then Marie stirred. She lifted her head, and half her face was gone, burned to the bone on the left side, the eye a smoking crater, her left arm severed clean at the shoulder where the last grave-iron round had arrived. Her lovely lavender dress hung from her in scorched ribbons. She was smiling.

“I win,” she rasped, in a small, cracked voice. “I… stand.”

Across the ruin, Loria lay at the bottom of the crater. Her right arm was crushed to the elbow, bone showing through the black of her sleeve. Her chest heaved once, twice, with a horrible wet sound. Her eyes were closed, and the crown of void had gone out like a snuffed candle.

“Winner,” said Boru’s voice, softly, from far away. “Number nineteen.”

The Door of Bones opened, and the orderlies ran in.

Vili had not moved. He stood with his silver-wired hand clenched into a fist so tight that the wire creaked. Karmina was already on her feet, hurrying toward the second door with her bag over her shoulder, and Fel, for the first time in his life, wanted to throw his own body across a room.

“Get her out,” said Vili, very quietly, to no one. “Get her out.”

“It’s one to one,” said Kirn, from somewhere behind them. His voice was flat and steady. “Candidate Wyrnia. The Door of Ink. The trial is yours.”

Vili let out a long, slow breath.

“Yes,” he said. “I know.”