Bone Gods

here.”
    “You know the carvings are Babylonian, right?” Nasiri said. “The things in his skin?”
    Pete sighed. “I got that bit. Babylonia or Brighton, makes no fucking difference to me. All necromancer’s dirty tricks, isn’t it?”
    “Well, you should care,” Nasiri said. “Because this isn’t a spell. Not a hex or a curse or anything that’s usual in the Black. I’ve never seen it.” She passed her fingers over Carver’s cheek. The knife cuts had puckered and widened as his skin tightened with slow decay, and the edges were wrinkled as if he’d just stepped out of a bath. Nasiri sighed. “There’s a long, old word for it. Translated simply, it goes something like soul cage. A binding that tethers a soul to a corpse, but doesn’t animate. Not a zombie or a ghoul. More like … a lure. An anchor for something much larger than a human ghost.”
    “Fuck me,” Jack said softly. He pulled off the sheet and examined Carver more closely. “This poor sod is a bloody mess, in more ways than one, but a soul cage? Those are campfire stories.”
    Nasiri snatched the sheet and smoothed it back. “You, of all people, should know that most ghost stories start out being true.”
    “What’s Naughton going to do?” Pete said. “Roll him out at parties to impress the ladies?”
    “A soul cage is the most ancient of necromancies,” Nasiri said, almost reverently. “The first act taught to the bone-shapers by their dead gods. The man transformed is a soul but not a soul—a soul stripped bare and screaming. It’s more than a lure, really—an offering, a torch in the darkness of the Underworld. The necromancer that did this…” She shook her head. “Well, he’s a bastard you don’t want to meet up a dark alley, that’s for bloody sure.”
    “Figured that out for myself, thanks,” Pete muttered.
    Jack rubbed his chin. His fingers made the sound of match scratching over matchbook. “You’re so smart, Doc, what’s the payday? Who’s this bloke being dangled for?”
    Nasiri kept her hand on Carver. “I know the dead, crow-mage, but I’m not a necromancer. I don’t get involved with their sick little hobbies.”
    “Oh, I wouldn’t be so kind, luv,” Jack said. He showed Nasiri his smile that was like a knife in the kidneys—sudden and sharp. “You’ve got the stink on you, the death stain.”
    Nasiri’s nostrils flared and she backed up against the gurney as Jack invaded her space, but she didn’t blink. Pete had to give Nasiri credit for nerve. Staring at Jack’s blazing blue gaze was like putting your skull inside an oven. His magic flowed from his pores like sweat, and it could drown you.
    “You smell like funeral pyres,” Jack whispered. “Like smoke and ash. So don’t pretend you’re so holy, Doctor. You know the dead as well as old Nicky Naughton does.”
    “I know the dead enough not to twist and deform them,” Nasiri said quietly. “I know the dead through my blood, not my lust.” Her knuckles went pale on the mop handle. “Now back up to a polite distance, Mr. Winter, before I jam this in your arse.”
    Pete thought it was really too bad that she and Nasiri stood at odds. She was beginning to like her quite a lot.
    “Leaving that aside,” Nasiri said. “The necromancer in question made a bollocks of this, since Carver ended up here instead of a vessel for some tentacled beast from beyond time.”
    “She’s right,” Jack said. “His soul is still here. Hasn’t been made an offering. Faint, though. This kind of death should make one bastard of a ghost. I should be screaming.”
    Pete looked at Carver, and though she would have rather shoved her hand into a bin full of hypodermics, she reached out and put a hand on his chest. His skin felt like marble after a rain—hard and cool, but also oddly slippery, like some kind of alien life still pulsed under his pulpy muscles, rigor come and long gone.
    She couldn’t see, as Jack could, the dead, but Carver gave not a twitch to her senses, not a trickle of power into her mind. “So what’s Naughton going to do when he finds out his offering is a pile of scrap?” she said.
    “Not going to be dancing, I’d bet,” Nasiri said. “But he could still recall Carver’s soul and sacrifice him again, if he’s good as he seems. Carver’s out there somewhere, not crossed over and not bound. Waiting for the first clever bone-shaper to pick him up and use him. Your man Naughton’s got his work cut out, but it’s