The Brittle Bones of Gods (Fractured Everest Book 5), page 1
The Brittle Bones of Gods
Fractured Everest Book 5
D.H. Dunn
Copyright © 2020 by D.H. Dunn
Cover by Marta Dec
Editing by Joshua Essoe
Additional Editing by Diann Read
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Created with Vellum
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Epilogue One
Epilogue Two
Also by D.H. Dunn
One
Flat on her back while pain ran up and down her body in waves, Nima stared into the depths of the dim cavern, feeling the water seep into her back while her mind and heart argued like squabbling children.
Though her perspective had changed, the vast chamber inside the temple of the Manad Vhan hero Orami maintained its majestic proportions. Far above, the ceiling was lined with massive, white, curved supports, each dozens of meters in length. With ancient earth and stone molded around them, they looked like exactly what Nima believed them to be.
The bones of Sessgrenimath, the dark god who created both the Dragons and the world of Aroha Darad. Inside this temple, built around the very skeleton of his enemy, Orami had hidden his most powerful and deadly secret.
That ancient and terrifying power was trapped inside a small stone vial, clutched in Nima’s shaking fist.
Just moments before, she had stood much closer to the giant bone supports that curved above her, their massive weight held up by some lost engineering marvel of the Manad Vhan. With Odan’s help, she had recovered the Tears. Her goal completed, all that had remained was to return to the surface and Lhamu. She would return the terrible artifact to the Manad Vhan queen, who would see them destroyed.
Then Nima could return her focus to her little sister, their route back to her home of Sirapothi, and maybe answers.
All of her plans changed just a few heartbeats ago, all for the worse.
This temple had stood untouched for thousands of years, yet with one shocking action, the Apex Adarsa had changed everything, the treasure vault of the Manad Vhan people’s greatest hero now crumbling into nothing more than a prison cell for them all.
A feeling of age and malevolence seeped through the mist that hung over at the bottom of the chamber. There was a smell to the air here, stale and damp inside Nima’s lungs. A faint hiss seemed to come from the rocks around them. Perhaps the bones themselves whispered to Nima.
The place offered her only death, and with each of her senses, it begged her to accept it.
Moonlight peeked in through gaps in the ceiling, offering glimpses of a night sky that was much too high for them to reach. Nima had already examined the walls of the vast circular chamber. Smooth and damp, they offered little hope of ascent.
She had rolled with the fall from the bridge when Adarsa had sundered it, lessening the blow of the impact with the mixture of dirt, bones, and shallow water she had landed upon. She was sore and bruised, the copper taste of blood was clear and strong in her mouth, but she felt nothing broken. No internal pains, nothing shattered or torn that she knew.
Her body seemed whole, but she had not yet summoned the energy to move. Despite the cold dampness seeping into her skin as she lay, the pain and worry that pulsed through her kept her still, forced her to listen to the cavern, focusing past the constant drizzle of a hundred columns of trickling water. Searching for signs of the others.
She had heard them fall with her, as well as the sounds of each of their landings. Odan’s surprised cry and Sil-Nae’s pained gasp had come in rapid succession, as if they had fallen together.
To her left, she detected Sil’s feminine cough, a wet sound as if the Itrali were expelling water, though the distance was hard to determine. Nima struggled to move, to turn towards the sound, but her body refused.
A second grunt of pain reached her ears, male this time. Odan’s voice, calling out to Sil. She heard a few splashes, perhaps the sounds of Odan getting to his feet. Nima felt relief in knowing they had both survived the fall, though her heart reminded her that survival was likely temporary.
The three of them were trapped in multiple ways, locked inside a temple carved from the monstrous skeleton of a mad god with no way to escape, yet even if they did, Nima had no idea where they would go.
The temple was on an unknown island surrounded by a dizzying vortex and a vast sea, neither of which they had any means to cross.
Inside the palm of Nima’s hand was another problem, the one that had gotten them into this mess in the first place.
The small stone vial containing the Tears of Orami, an artifact so powerful that even touching it with her bare skin would subject Nima to a fate she considered worse than death . . . eternity converted into some kind of crystal. The Tears were a weapon that could destroy entire races in the wrong hands, and yet somehow, they had come to be in hers.
None of those threats and terrors were what her heart focused on, had obsessed on even as she fell. None of it mattered above Lhamu.
As Nima had stood on the bridge and faced Adarsa, as she put the pieces together and finally understood that the Tears had truly never been what the Apex desired, she had felt as if she were being compressed into in a tiny ball. A ball made of nothing but anger, worry, and regret. A compressed alloy of emotions that pulsed and beat with a life of its own, like a heart made of tears.
One thought echoed in her mind, one fact. One mistake.
We could have left.
She and Lhamu never needed to be in this situation. The plan had been to take the map the two of them had pieced together and head for Sirapothi. There they had hoped they would find the answers to all the changes that had been running through Lhamu, giving her strange powers neither of them knew how to control.
Nima was no Caenolan, and she felt in her heart only Lhamu’s people could help her, somewhere on the lost world of Sirapothi.
Among her own kind, Nima had hoped Lhamu would finally know peace, even if that peace meant a life without her.
Yet they had not taken that choice. After a cryptic yeti warning from the Speaker, they had decided to help Odan and Sil-Nae instead, to try and stop Jan from seizing the Tears.
Now Nima was stuck here, the Speaker was either dying or dead on the island above them and the Apex had their prize, the one goal the mysterious organization had been after all along.
Lhamu was lost, and nothing mattered except finding her.
That will never happen with me laying here. Pushing the stone vial of the Tears into her vest pocket, Nima took a deep breath and prepared to move.
With a groan, she pushed herself up on her elbows, testing the pain in her joints. Twinges hard enough to make her wince ran through her muscles, but she had felt worse. Gritting her teeth, she gathered her knees under her and stood.
A few meters away, Sil-Nae was bent over by a large collection of debris. The tall woman’s wispy, ivory hair lay straight upon her torn alabaster cloak, her thin limbs reaching down toward the ground, her hands and feet lost in the mist. The Itrali seemed a ghost, a gaunt form floating above the shallow water like a phantom.
Nima could see the wounds etched into the thin ethereal woman’s arms and legs. They did not bleed, but rather resembled tears in a cloth or a bedsheet.
She supposed Sil-Nae could have used her Itrali abilities to inflate herself and float safely to the bottom. The fact that she did not suggested that she had cushioned Odan as they fell, and had taken the brunt of the damage.
As Sil-Nae helped Odan to his feet, Nima could see a long, bleeding gash across Odan’s forehead, a twin injury running down the length of his left arm. He ran his right hand through his long, dark, hair. He was unsteady, but standing.
Odan glanced over to Nima with concern, a small smile forming on his face as she too stood, his thin mustache and beard framing the gesture.
That hopeful smile had been enough to convince Nima and Lhamu this was a fight worth taking up, Odan insisting his goal was to simply keep the Crown from obtaining the Tears and using them against his enemies.
Like most things with Odan, the truth had proven more complicated. The road to this moment had been paved with deceptions, misdirection, and outright lies, each placed in front of her with care by Odan Zuren.
Yet Nima could not let go of the feeling in her heart, that behind all the smoke and illusion, this was still a man who wanted to help people.
“Thank the Hero, at least we are alive,” Odan said, hobbling over to her with Sil-Nae close behind. The Itrali was now clearly favoring her right side, one hand delicately holding the rips in her side shut.
“But are you all right, Nima?” Odan wiped his hand across his brow, a long smear of blood pulled across his face like a mask.
“I think so,” Nima said, looking around in the dim cavern. There was one more person unaccounted for. Someone who was as much to blame for this as anyone, yet still she felt her heart’s clench of concern for him, finding room alongside her worries about Lhamu and the Speaker.
“Jan?” Her shout echoed against the massive bones that lay embedded in the rocky ceiling of the Hero’s lost temple, bouncing off surfaces that may have been untouched for centuries. Nima, Lhamu, and Jan had searched through dozens of temples and vaults like this, but that friendship had been another casualty of the Fracture.
“Jan!” She repeated her cry, ignoring the surprised look Odan was giving her. She understood the shock her companions likely felt. The man she shouted for had held a blade to Sil-Nae’s belly after all.
Nima began to push her way through the field of debris from the bridge’s collapse, stepping around large sections of carved rock that had fallen into the shallow water, peering into the shadowed darkness of the interior.
A small moan caught her ears. Turning toward the sound, she saw one dark, muscular arm grasping at the air, the rest of its owner’s chest and face buried under the weight of a massive, shattered bone.
“Odan!” Nima yelled as she ran, her feet splashing toward him, sending a small spray onto her shins. “Sil! Over here!”
Squatting down, Nima placed her hands under the bone, surprised she was able to slightly move the large structure, its curved form was as long as her body and nearly as wide, yet it wobbled in her grasp.
Odan came alongside her, Sil-Nae moving slowly to join them as they grasped onto the obstruction.
“Help me!” Nima said. Underneath the large bone, Janakas moaned a second time, seemingly in response to their efforts.
Odan’s expression looked incredulous, but he squatted down next to her all the same, placing his arms underneath the bone, blood from his head spattering on the ivory surface.
Odan was hard to understand. Nima shook her head as she pushed against the heavy bone. If he doesn’t agree with me, why is he helping?
“You know,” Odan grunted as the bone began to slide off Jan. “He was just trying to kill us.”
“That’s true,” Nima said with a throaty gasp as together they threw the large bone to the side. “That doesn’t mean we leave him to die.”
Nima knelt next to Jan, whose eyes began to flutter open. Despite the weight of the bone, his face and chest seemed to be mostly uninjured. Several cuts ran across his cheeks, but they were less severe than Odan’s.
Jan’s left leg was another story.
It twisted Nima’s stomach as she looked at it, the lower calf bent off at the wrong angle. Jan grunted again as if the mere act of Nima looking at it was enough to cause him pain.
A shudder ran through the cavern, sending small bits of stone and dirt tumbling down from the chamber’s ceiling above. Nima glanced back at Odan, worry creasing her brow.
“You know about this place, Odan. Should that be happening?”
“The temple has stood this long,” he said. He frowned as another small tremor ran through, the massive bones embedded all around them vibrating with the action. “Yet nothing like what Adarsa did has likely happened here. I would guess we are deep underground, and of greater concern, under water.”
Nima felt her pulse quicken with worry at the thought of the structure coming down around them. As if they needed another problem.
“Janakas is gravely injured.” Sil-Nae had knelt as well, her hand upon Jan’s brow, her snow-white fingers a stark contrast to his dark skin. “Odan, please get him some water.”
Nima watched Sil-Nae as she hovered over the man, one hand on her patient while the other held shut her side.
“I can help you, Sil,” Nima said. “Tell me what to do. I can see you are hurt too.”
“I am torn,” Sil-Nae said, her voice devoid of its normal whisper. Now it sounded as jagged as her injury appeared. “It will resolve in time on its own. Itrali heal through movement, not rest. I am not sure what we can do for it until it does, but I will suffice.”
Nima braced as the ground shook again. She could hear something shift deep in the structure of the island, a grinding of stone upon stone.
This place isn’t stable. We need to get moving.
Odan returned, his shirt in his hand and dripping with water. With shock, Nima noted scars all across his chest and stomach, crossing over his muscles like a map of some distant injury.
Nima took the garment with a nod of thanks, watching as Odan eyed the shifting forms of bones, wooden support beams, and shuddering stalactites above them.
She ran the cloth across Jan’s forehead, watching the grimaces of pain burn through his face like fire. Normally he and Odan would have healed their injuries off seconds after they had happened, but the Apex and their Dampener had rendered that impossible.
His eyes fluttered again and opened.
“N-Nima?” His voice was ragged, the word competing with the vibration Nima now detected underneath them. “Where?”
“Shush, Jan,” she said, still blotting his head with the cloth. “We need to get you moving.”
“My leg,” he said, looking down at his twisted limb. “It’s not going to hold me.”
Spotting smaller bone fragments nearby, Nima scurried to them, pulling them out of the shallow water. Selecting one that seemed about the length of Jan’s leg, she hurried back and knelt alongside him.
“I can splint your leg with this,” she said, tearing cloth strips from her tattered cloak. Her hands brushed up against the vial of the Tears in her vest pocket, a reminder of the terrible treasure she carried.
Jan wanted them, had threatened to kill Sil-Nae for them.
She began to wrap the brace around Jan’s leg as he cried out in pain. She had done this for Drew once, a long time ago inside a deep crevasse.
Now I’m back in a deep hole again, but there is no big brother here to help me get out.
Just two people she barely knew, and one old friend who had become an enemy over the damage the Fracture had done to his home.
“Nima,” Odan’s head whipped back and forth, as small boulders and skeletal fragments began to fall. “We need to get moving! I don’t want to leave Janakas either, but don’t forget he was going to kill us, kill Sil.”
“He’s right.” Jan’s voice was a weak rasp. “About both things. Leave me.”
“I am absolutely not leaving you,” Nima said, ignoring Jan’s protests as she tied the splint tighter.
“I too have not forgotten, Odan,” Sil-Nae said, her voice firm, though her eyes were still soft as she looked at him. “Yet Nima seems to have a code, as do the Itrali. Despite his crimes, I do not want this man’s death on my conscience. And neither do you.”
“Fine,” Odan said, looking away. “Fine. Whatever. Good thing Adarsa isn’t here or we’d have to save him too. While you two get him on his feet, I’m going to see if I can see a way out of this chamber.”
Nima allowed Jan to throw one arm around her shoulder, Sil-Nae taking the other. Together, they got the Manad Vhan back on his feet, Jan wincing with the pain.
“Thank you,” he said, his voice trembling like the ground around them. “I-I cannot be certain I would have come back for you if our positions were reversed.”
“Sure, you would have,” Nima said, looking at Jan and giving him a wink. “I have the Tears.”
He laughed cautiously, each sound from him seeming to come at a cost of pain. Nima saw Sil-Nae eying him cautiously, yet she continued to help him as well.
