Scavenger of Souls

by Joshua David Bellin

  12

  Nessa had hidden her knife beneath her chest covering.

  When her arm lay flat against her side, you could barely see it. She kept her arm by her side almost all the time.

  Still, I couldn’t convince myself Mercy was right. The blankness in Nessa’s green eyes, the eerie floating movements of her tanned limbs made it seem she’d surrendered. Try as I might to catch a hint of anything familiar, she ignored me entirely, gliding behind Asunder up the silvery stairs as if he was a heavenly body guiding her orbit.

  At least she was spared the manhandling me and my companion suffered. “Come with me” apparently meant something unique to the colossus Mercy called her brother: he’d no sooner spoken than he yanked us to our feet by the cords around our wrists and wrenched us around to face their children and ours, who jeered at the sight, their faces pale in the light of the moon. Then he shoved us up the stairs, paying no regard to the fact that they yawed dangerously, gaps showing where stone had crumbled away. The children followed us to the altar’s summit, muttering a low, wordless chant in tune with the cadence of their feet. Mercy cried out to our giant captor as his rough hands threw us ahead of him.

  “Ardan!” she said. “It’s me. It’s Mercy. You don’t have to do this!”

  He looked away, her words only doubling the force he applied to our backs.

  “Ardan.” She tried once more. “This isn’t you. I know this isn’t you. Don’t listen to him!”

  But he didn’t respond, and though I wanted to believe his averted eyes meant he was ashamed, I’d have had an easier time believing a rock could feel shame. When I glanced across his broad chest at Mercy, I saw she’d given up her efforts to reach him, a calm resolve settling on her face that I tried to match. It dawned on me that I might have to choose between her and my colony, the family I’d found seven months ago and the friend I’d sworn to help. I might even have to choose between her and Nessa. The choice had seemed a lot easier when it wasn’t right in front of me.

  Another few steps, and we exited the staircase at the altar’s peak.

  We stood on a bare, circular sheet of stone, as much as fifty feet across and hundreds of feet above the plain. The twin horns of the altar loomed above us, seeming to sway in the red glare of the torches. Twenty or more members of Asunder’s colony crowded the platform, the children deserting us to join them. It was then that I saw Nekane, her hands behind her back and a rope around her neck, standing with bruised limbs and frightened eyes in front of the horns. There was still no sign of the old woman. I had no time to communicate anything with Mercy before Asunder stepped forward, Nessa moving to his side. He threw his cloak behind him and raised his arms to the torch-lit sky, the staff of bone pointing upward like a claw protruding from his closed fist.

  “Now you come to your trial at last, Querry Genn,” he said. “You have imagined you might elude the one who waits. You have trusted to the ways of the despoilers, thinking their power the only one that holds sway over these lands. But as ever, you underestimate the might of the Scavenger of Souls, and you hope in vain.”

  Flourishing the staff, he pointed at the altar’s horns.

  “Behold!” he cried. “His vengeance comes!”

  His voice echoed and died. Nekane was flung aside as if the sound had physically struck her. I struggled to free myself from Archangel’s grasp, but I couldn’t do it without risking a burst of power. Then I saw that something hung between the horns of the altar.

  It took me a second to recognize the shape as a human body.

  Its skin flared as red as the flame-soaked rock, so that its naked arms and legs seemed to form an X of flesh and stone. At first I thought it was covered with blood, until I realized the red was the color of its own flesh, a solid red without the tiniest hint of whatever hue its skin might originally have been. Its head had fallen to its breast, masking its features. But it wasn’t dead. Its chest gasped for air, and its blood-red hands, bound tightly to the surrounding rock, flexed feebly. Something on its chest caught the light of the torches and flashed with a light not their own.

  Archangel’s hands fell away. Asunder smiled and let me approach. The apparition raised its head, and though its face was puffy and scarlet I knew who it was.

  Wali.

  I tried to say his name. The word grated in my mouth like shards of stone.

  He swayed, unseeing, unhearing. The ring on his chest swung with his body’s motion. His mouth opened in a groan, his teeth and tongue the same deep, shocking red as the rest of his body.

  And then he spoke. I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me, or himself, or someone else. His words came out as cracked and dry as the scorching air.

  “Forgive,” he said. “Forgive me.”

  His eyes opened. Solid red, they stared at me in blind agony.

  “Let me go,” he rasped. “Please, I beg you. Let me go.”

  I hesitated, reached a hand toward him, saw the torchlight glint off the memory ring. Then Asunder lowered his staff, touching Wali on the forehead, the same place he’d marked him before. A violent shuddering gripped my chest as I watched it happen.

  The spot where the staff had touched him throbbed as if something alive moved underneath the skin. Wali tensed, throwing his head back, gritting his teeth so hard I heard them grind against each other. My mouth and nose filled with the tinny taste of blood, and I couldn’t tell if it was real or imagined, if I was the one being attacked or the one doing the attacking. Wali’s arms and legs stretched irresistibly taut, until at last the joints of his hips and shoulders began to tear. A scream filled my ears. The spot on his forehead ripped open, and I saw the thing beneath bulge outward.

  For a final second Wali’s mutilated body hung in the altar’s grasp, his sightless eyes turned to me. “Querry,” he said. Then the scar split from his forehead down the length of his chest, and the creature emerged from the host it had consumed.

  The newborn Skaldi fell to the stone. The ring Wali had worn spun for a moment and lay still.

  The power in my chest erupted, and the Skaldi ignited with a ghostly moan. It tumbled from the precipice, flaming through the night sky like a falling star.

  Asunder watched it all happen with a triumphant smile. Without a word, he gestured with his staff, and the children of Survival Colony 9 separated themselves from the crowd. Ignoring the hands I reached out toward them, they marched to Asunder’s side, spreading out to form a ring around him. They faced me, an army far stronger than the warriors Mercy and I had slain.

  “The Scavenger of Souls reigns for all time,” Asunder said. “You may kill one or many, but always he will call more to come to him, always he will claim the flesh of those who oppose him. You have seen what becomes of those who challenge our ways. Now you must choose whether others of your people will follow the condemned one into darkness.”

  I turned to face Mercy, saw her struggling in her brother’s arms, her curses bouncing off him as ineffectually as her blows. I calculated what would happen if I attacked Asunder, but I already knew: the children would die with him. I tried to meet his eyes, but as always they evaded me, slipping away like a lost memory.

  “What do you want from me?” I said.

  He laughed, a hollow, mocking sound. An image clawed into my mind, an image of myself caught between the altar’s horns, my body being torn to pieces, a vast gulf of blackness opening to swallow the world. My knees buckled at the imagined pain, far worse than anything I’d felt in real life.

  “And then what?” I spat out.

  “And then it ends,” Asunder’s voice sounded in the burning air. “All doubt, all sorrow, all suffering. The Scavenger of Souls will gather all into his embrace, and the world will be renewed.”

  “And my people?” I said. “What happens to them if I agree?”

  He smiled the smile of the Skaldi, a scar and a skull.

  “It is not given to you to know the future,” he said. “Choose, and the all-powerful one will prepare your judgment.�
��

  I looked at the children, imagined them squirming in the altar’s grip, helpless as toys shaken by a giant’s hand. My eyes fixed on Nessa’s, and I saw in their green depths an intensity none of Asunder’s slaves could have possessed. Her lips shaped the word no, but I had already made my decision.

  I stepped before Asunder, holding my hands out.

  “Take me,” I said.

  His smile yawned impossibly wide. Two of his warriors stepped forward, holding bonds to tie me to the altar. As they positioned me between the horns, Nessa moved to Asunder’s side, her long blond hair screening her face. For a second, I saw the shape of her stolen knife through the wrapping she wore.

  Then the knife was in her hand, the blade glinting red as it plunged into Asunder’s chest.

  His eyes flew open as if in pain. But a moment later his body shuddered and split from chin to stomach, wrapping Nessa in the Skaldi’s bloodless embrace. She screamed, and I could have sworn I saw the glowing currents of her life being sucked into the depths of its body.

  “Nessa!”

  Her name burst from me at the same time as the flash of light. The pulse swept over the Skaldi and its victim, flinging the creature back, leaving Nessa gasping on the stone. I reached for her, but before I could touch her I felt an irresistible pull latch onto my arms. The warriors with their bonds were down, their flesh red and smoking, but something else drew me toward the altar’s horns, a force as strong as a magnet. I couldn’t resist as my hands gripped the stone of the horns, couldn’t pull myself loose as a power stronger than any I’d ever felt reached down into my gut and began to feed.

  It was the altar, I realized as pain tore through me. The altar itself was draining the power from my body. I tried to make it stop, but something deep inside the stone drew it from me like blood from an open wound.

  Mercy’s face flashed before me, her eyes and mouth open wide, but I couldn’t hear a word she was saying. A second later Archangel appeared behind her, and she disappeared in his arms, still shouting wordlessly. The Skaldi had risen from the stone, a grotesque combination of man and monster, Asunder’s shape cloaking a hollow core. Its skeletal arms clutched the staff, and when it touched my forehead, I saw Asunder’s older daughter frozen in the rock, her mother cocooned around her, the child’s frail arms held up in a plea or a prayer before they turned to ash and sloughed off to reveal the pallid bone.

  That was the last thing I saw before golden fire exploded around me like a supernova.

  Warriors fell before the onslaught, some landing on the platform with bodies charred beyond recognition, others flying from the altar’s peak. A pulse shook the stone, a vibration like the buzz of Udain’s beam, only as strong as a tremor and growing stronger with each passing second. I turned my head to see my shoulders straining against the horns, my arms consumed by the fiery glow. My eyes dropped to my chest, and I saw only the vaguest outline of my own body swathed in pulsing, streaming light. It was as if I had no body, as if I’d been turned to pure energy. Dimly, through pain and terror, I realized what was happening.

  The altar was the rift, the portal to the Skaldi’s home world. My own power flowed through it, and I couldn’t stop it from feeding on me.

  The pain rose to a scream in my ears. I felt the threads of my life begin to tear. I bit my lip in an effort to shut the power down, to hold myself together. But I was growing weaker by the second, and my flesh seemed to dissolve into nothingness.

  I was no longer I.

  I was a flicker, a thought, a final memory.

  I was an explosion of fire.

  The sky filled with a deadly yellow light. It spread until it erased everything, blotting out the torches, the altar’s horns, even, while the light lasted, the moon and stars. I floundered in an absolute void, unable to see my own body, fearing that when it ended I would find myself not only blind but erased like the rest of the world.

  A howling gale blew over me, and the light vanished.

  The altar shuddered. Sensation returned to me just as the horns let go, pitching me forward onto punishing rock.

  Pain shot through my frame. I hardly dared look at my arms, but when I did, I saw that they remained attached to my shoulders. The burning field of energy had disappeared, leaving only my weak, aching flesh. When I tried to call the energy back, a few feeble sparks played at the tips of my fingers before dying out completely.

  I struggled to stand, failed, rolled onto my stomach. The altar was empty except for a few skeletal remains I couldn’t identify. The Skaldi that had taken Asunder’s body had been reduced to a pile of black cinders, the bone staff lying streaked with fire on the glassy stone. I choked on my own bile and the taste of ash. Then I saw, through a haze of tears, someone clinging to the altar’s summit, just above the stairs. Every inch an agony, I crawled to the figure’s side.

  It was Archangel, his cloak burned to nothing, his mighty shoulders charred like a tree half-consumed by fire. But he was alive, and when I neared him he pushed himself upward and stood, wobbling on legs that had been burned as badly as his back. That’s when I saw others on the stairs beneath him, people his body had shielded from the explosion: Mercy, the unconscious Nessa, and the six missing children of Survival Colony 9. Nessa’s long hair seemed to have been singed at the ends. Farther down the stairs, Nekane clung to the rock, shaking but alive. The kids’ faces were frozen with fear, but they looked at me with the first sign of recognition I’d seen all day.

  Archangel took a wobbly step then fell, thudding to his knees on the platform. Mercy flew to him and tried to hold his body upright, but he was too heavy. He collapsed, eyes closed, breathing roughly. She reached down and touched his cheek, and for a second his lips moved in a hint of a smile. Then she turned to me, and through a mask of grime and tears, I saw the look of anguish in her eyes.

  At first I thought it was because of what had happened to her brother. But when I peered over the altar’s edge, I saw the real reason.

  From horizon to horizon, the black land erupted with flashes of fire. The plain crested like a wave, and when it fell the stone cracked open, peeling back like the scar of a gigantic Skaldi. More fissures appeared, smaller, glowing with pale yellow light, stitching the ground with an infinity of scars. Shadows split the fire, and from each of the holes a figure wriggled: pale, stunted, catching itself with skeletal arms before dragging its wormlike body to the surface. As the Skaldi fought free into the burning air, the wounds on their chests opened hungrily, and even from my elevation, I nearly suffocated on their death stench. The moment one creature made its way to the surface, another materialized behind it, and another, and another. There was no counting them. They covered the plain like maggots on the carcass of a leviathan.

  I knew instantly what had happened.

  The portal had opened again. I had opened it. My own power had been drained by the altar, and the creatures had flooded back through the hole in space and time.

  I remembered Udain’s words: The consequences are beyond anything you can imagine. He’d been right. I’d thought only of saving my colony, and this was the consequence he had foreseen.

  The army of Skaldi squirmed on the broken ground at the base of the altar, their claws scratching against the glassy stone. I felt weak as a baby, with no power left to face them. I watched as the first one set its clawed fingers on the altar steps.

  Mercy’s hand gripped my arm. “There’s still a way,” she whispered.

  “How?”

  Her eyes grazed the creatures below. “Stay here with Ardan and the little ones. I’ll see if I can draw them away. Then you go.”

  I glanced once more over the edge, saw the thousands of creatures swarming the impact zone. “There’s way too many. You’ll die.”

  A trace of her old smile touched her lips, and she rolled up the arm of her uniform, showing me the tracker. The pulse had grown so strong her skin undulated like a desert flower opening to the light.

  “I’ve still got a few tricks up my s
leeve,” she laughed.

  I opened my mouth to say something, but she leaned forward and closed it with a kiss, a real kiss, letting me feel the softness of her lips and taste the salt of her tears. I had no memory and no idea how to kiss her back, but her touch taught me the way. When she pulled back at last, I felt a tiny flicker of strength filling my body, and I knew what I had to do.

  “You’re staying here,” I said. “I’m the one who did this. And I’m the one who’s going down.”

  For once, she stared at me, speechless.

  “I’ve got the best chance against them anyway,” I said. “And Ardan will need your help. He’s your brother, Mercy. You owe it to him.”

  Her dark eyes filled with tears. Then her arms went around me, and she squeezed so hard it hurt. I felt the tracker against my back, fluttering like hope.

  “So go, get out of here,” she said, releasing me. “Kick some Skaldi butt. I’ll take care of the others.”

  She gave me one more kiss, just a light peck on the cheek. Then she playfully shoved me toward the stairs. I rose on legs that quivered with more than weakness and was about to take my first step down when a sparkle on the stone caught my attention. I stooped, touched Korah’s ring. Cold and lifeless at first, it warmed when I gathered it up, as if responding to the beat of my heart.

  I held it in my palm, weighing. I looked back at Mercy, who smiled and whispered a farewell.

  Leaning heavily against the rock, I descended the spiral staircase. By the time I reached the bottom every part of me was trembling. I took the last turn and scanned the plateau.

  The Skaldi had gone still and silent. Moonlight rimmed their backs, an ocean of them in the dry, dead land. I closed my eyes, took a deep and halting breath. I knew I couldn’t fight them all. But I also knew I had to try.

  Gripping the ring like a promise, I summoned all the strength I had left and took one final step down.

  PART THREE