Arrayed before the candletree, the three eldest men of the village in their ashy gray robes stood in stern judgment over the young couple who knelt before them. They alone wore the wooden masks, each depicting a solemnly stylized depiction of the true visage beneath.
She was dressed as all the others, her vest of rough wool dyed a brilliant violet and her loose trousers the lightest of blacks, more nearly gray. She had long, silken black hair that hung over one shoulder in a thick, intricate braid. The markings on her face were delicate and circled round her eyes above and beneath, converging at the outer corners of the eyes and trailing from there down behind the jaw to descend her neck in two narrow bands. The blond-haired man who knelt at her side, little more than a boy, wasn’t of the People Who Swallow the Souls of the Dead.
He wore tight fitting breeches and a shining coat of amber silk. The cut and design was unusual and unfamiliar, but Shel thought she saw just the tiniest resemblance to certain traditional fashions back home in Vallen. His tanned face was turned up in politely restrained defiance at the three elders.
The girl looked only at the floor. She cradled an infant to her breast and blew soft, quiet noises to her child. She made no other sound.
The babe was no more than a week old and wrapped tightly in a woven blanket. The First Elder reached down for the baby and when she gave him over the old man twitched aside the blanket and examined the naked child he held. The baby was pink-skinned, but his flesh bore the markings of a Shadowman, concentrated almost entirely on his chest.
The Second and Third Elders insisted this had never happened before. It was an entirely new thing, quite aside from being inherently bad. The First Elder remained unconvinced. Before Naykela’s pregnancy, he hadn’t believed it was possible for their people and the hotbloods to create a new soul. The evidence of his own eyes showed otherwise, and the First Elder was no fool. If it could happen, it had probably happened before. In another village, another corner of the Great Midnight Forest.
Perhaps even across the waters in the Other Land, the old land where the Forest was all. It was said there were no hotbloods there, only the People Who Swallow the Souls of the Dead. But the hotbloods went everywhere. It was their nature to spread themselves into each new place they could find.
It saddened the First Elder. He could read between the lines of the Most Ancient Teachings. He knew his own people had been like that once. He suspected the trickster demons of his people’s oldest stories had once been real, and that the first of the tribe had truly stolen the world from them. He suspected that ten thousand years from this night, some hotblood elder would have similar notions about his people.
This was the beginning, the First Elder knew. He held it squirming in his hands, and now it began to howl and bawl. The hotbloods changed the things they chose to claim. When they decided to make their home on the land, they changed the land. When one tribe decided to take the home of another tribe, the conquered people soon wore the same bizarre clothes as the invader.
With his people, they would do more than cut down the trees and dress them in strange clothing.
The First Elder looked down at the innocent child in his hands. He beheld the tiny, midnight blue birthmarks which swirled on the infant’s torso in the shape of the sun. He knew the child itself wasn’t evil, whatever the Second and Third believed. Nor were its parents, not even the hotblood father. That fact magnified his sorrow, for he was forced to agree with his colleagues. This child, and all children like it, must not live.
If they did, one day the people of the Midnight Forest would disappear forever.
When the Elders announced their consensus, the child’s mother lifted his eyes for the first time from the floor. In a panic, she rose from where she knelt and reached for her baby. She wailed and there were no words in the sound, only the most terrible wound imaginable. They wouldn’t give her the baby, for they knew she would do anything to save its life.
The First Elder turned, carrying the baby away from its mother. She rushed forward, and the other two Elders restrained her. She threw out her arms and howled, “Daerydd!”
The spell which had held Shel frozen in place as all this unfolded snapped, and with a sympathetic cry she leaped forward. But the meeting house dissolved into swirling black mist and she lunged through wisps of nothing.
Spinning around, she saw Sanook still with her. She shook her head, choking on what she wanted to say. There were too many words, and they tangled in her throat. In the silence she realized there were no words, nothing she could say.
She knew these visions had been real. This thing had happened. That it was long ago made little difference. She had seen her people, as they once had been. And they had been ready to murder an infant for the sin of its blood. That Elder had known – and somehow, Shel had known all that he knew – yet he had still done it. And for what?
“Yes,” Sanook told her. “He was wrong. But he wasn’t incorrect.”
Chapter 28 - The Eternal Emperor
“That’s a terrible thing to say!” Shel spun angrily away from Sanook. The Shadowman glided to her, put his hands on her shoulders.
“That child – that very same child – destroyed our people, Shel.”
“What?” She turned back around, but the next question died on her lips. They no longer stood suspended in infinite nothingness. The world had reformed around them. They stood on the walls of a city. Beyond the walls, over Sanook’s shoulder, she could see the distant forest of black and purple trees.
“Our people made peace with the hotbloods,” Sanook told her, gesturing for her to look behind. Shel turned again, and saw the city laid out beneath her. It was a tiny city, she thought, barely a dozen streets within its walls. Most of it was given over to a horde of merchants pushing around carts and shouting their wares.
“This isn’t…is it? Solstice?”
“Correct,” Sanook told her. “This is the city that became Solstice, anyway. At the moment, it is named Autumn. The peaceful boundary where summer and winter commingle. Our people and the hotbloods did live in peace. For a hundred years, the hotbloods upheld their promise never to cut the midnight trees. Come and see.”
Sanook led her down into the fledgling city. The myriad people bustling to and fro paid them no attention. Like the people of the Midnight Forest, Shel knew they didn’t see her. She was reminded that this was all a dream, of sorts.
“Why are you showing me these things?” she asked the Shadowman at her side.
“Because you must face him soon,” Sanook told her, pausing near one edge of the street. They stood on hard-packed dirt, not yet paved, and looked into the alleyway between a tavern and a chandler’s shop. There, in the narrow opening between the buildings, stood a rickety kiosk of rough lumber.
Behind the makeshift counter stood a man of indeterminate age. He might have been twenty years old, or fifty. When he turned his head and the light struck him from a different angle, he seemed to age before her eyes. The man looked vaguely familiar. The weird agelessness of the man reminded her of Murdrek Thorne, but this man wasn’t the archon.
Shel gasped in recognition. It was the emperor, as a young man.
“He’s already more than a century old,” Sanook whispered in her ear. “He preserves himself by burning hotblood souls. Watch.”
An elderly woman hobbled up to the ratty little kiosk. The woman cut a weary figure, stooped and favoring one leg. Her face was lined with decades of worry and pain. The young man in the kiosk smiled brightly, but the glint in his eye was dark and malevolent. Did the old woman not see?
“It is the early days, yet,” Sanook explained. “The trading of souls comes much later. The emperor was the first to realize hotblood souls could be taken, swapped, bartered, and burnt. Their souls don’t last the way ours do, Shel. He uses them up, and then must take more.”
The man behind the counter, who would one day be an emperor, told the old woman he could take away her pains. He promised her an end to her suffe
ring. She nodded eagerly and handed over some coins. Sweeping the coins into a bag, the man opened a gate to one side of his crudely constructed shopfront and beckoned the old woman to enter. She did so, and the future emperor pulled a stained and tattered curtain across the opening.
Shel and Sanook glided forward, passing directly through curtain and wood alike. They stood behind the counter now, invisible witnesses to the scene in the alleyway. The old woman knelt down painfully on the bare dirt and closed her eyes. The man who would be emperor unbuttoned his shirt, letting it hang open. The runes on his chest, forming the shape of a radiant sun, glowed faintly white to Shel’s eyes as he reached out both hands to take hold of the old woman’s head.
Her soul was wispy and faint, and he plucked it from her with ease. When it was done, the old woman sagged and opened her eyes, blinking. He smiled down at her darkly. Her cares were gone. Everything that made her human was gone as well. The old woman was Soulless.
Shel knew what happened to the Soulless. They carried on after a fashion. They lived, so long as there was someone around to make sure they kept eating. But everything that made them a person vanished. They lost much of their memory, and were often confused. They lost all motivation, all desire. They were empty shells, as this woman now was.
It was awful. And the woman had paid him for it!
Shel started forward angrily, but Sanook put a hand on her shoulder and pulled her back.
“You could don’thing anyway,” the Shadowman told her. “This is only a vision, Shel. The dream cannot see the dreamer. Come, there is more.”
They passed back into the street, and he led her away. Time sped past as they walked, the people around them blurs of rapid motion. The light faded and the sun went down, and in the space of minutes day passed into night.
They came to an inn near the wall. A single torch flamed in the night beside the heavy door. To one side of the door was a window, a round hole cut through the wall and fitted with cheap, distorted glass. Light burst through the blurry window, and shapes moved in the common room inside. Shel leaned closer, and found she could see clearly through the glass.
Inside, not far from the window, a trio of Shadowmen sat at a rickety table. Two of them cradled steaming mugs of spiced wine in their hands. The third sat staring at the front door, hands clasped in his lap.
They each wore carved wooden masks. The masks were ceremonial within the villages of the Midnight Forest, but the People Who Swallow the Souls of the Dead wore them at all times when they went among the hotbloods. It was a sign that the peace was uneasy, that the Shadowmen were not at home in the hotblood cities.
“Aeron should have returned by now,” said one of the men with spiced wine. He lifted the mug about halfway to his lips, but set it back down without drinking.
“He should not have gone at all,” said the one with his hands clasped in his lap. His eyes flickered away from the door for only a second. “We should have quit this place the moment our business with the hotblood prince was concluded.”
The other two exchanged a knowing look. Though he wasn’t looking at them, and couldn’t have seen, the third man scowled as if he knew their thoughts.
“Aeron knows the law,” he continued in a low whisper, eyes still on the front door. “He should not have let himself be drawn in by exotic eyes and pale hair.”
Sanook tugged at Shel’s sleeve. She turned reluctantly from the scene inside the inn. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“Come.”
Sanook led her to the corner and down an intersecting street. After a few moments, he led her into an alleyway. Hiding in the shadows there they found a young couple. She was blonde and light-eyed, slender and buxom. He was Aeron, the missing Shadowman.
Shel’s eyes widened when she saw the young woman. Like the old crone from before, this woman had no soul.
Aeron could tell that something was wrong. The girl had approached him outside the manor of the prince, and even then he had felt something off about her. She was beautiful, and Aeron knew his uncle believed he’d been seduced by her exotic, hotblood wiles. But it wasn’t that which prompted him to meet her again. There was something missing from this woman…
“Merissa,” he said to her now. “Tell me, please, what is it? I can feel an emptiness in you I can’t explain. What has happened to you?”
“I was cast out,” Merissa told Aeron in a voice not entirely her own. The Soulless woman was a puppet whose strings had been cut, then taken up by another. It was the man who would be emperor who spoke through her lips. “Spurned and cursed to die, abandoned by those who were my people.”
“Merissa? I don’t understand…” Something must have alerted Aeron, though, because now he took a step back from the hotblood woman. “What are you speaking of?”
“I speak of vengeance,” the emperor said with Merissa’s voice. The pretty young woman stepped forward rapidly, seizing Aeron by the arms and pushing him up against the wall. White fire burned in her eyes.
Confusion turned to fear and dawning recognition in Aeron’s eyes. But it was too late. In a flash, the pretty blonde woman reached into her skirts and pulled out a thin dagger. Without pausing, she drove the blade into Aeron’s heart. He cried out in pain. Blood spurted across Merissa’s pretty face.
She stabbed him again. And again. Aeron’s struggles subsided and his body slumped down in the dirt. She stabbed him again. The misty essence of his soul seeped from his skin and began to rise on the chill night air. Shel stared aghast as the Shadowman died and his soul lifted away. She followed it with her eyes, and that was when she saw him.
The man from the kiosk, who would become an emperor, crouched on a rooftop looking down on the murder. He smiled greedily and reached out, calling the lost soul into himself. His lips moved in a silent chant, one word repeated again and again. Shel thought he was saying the Shadowman’s name.
“Aeron.”
As he absorbed Aeron’s soul, he shuddered in obvious pleasure. Ten years fell away from his face, and a younger man rose and stepped off the roof to glide gracefully down to the alley. He looked briefly at the dead Shadowman, then turned to Merissa.
The Soulless woman stood still, holding a slim dagger that dripped dark blood on the ground. She didn’t move when the man reached down to take her knife, didn’t resist as he cut her throat with it. Dropping the dagger in the dirt between the two bodies, the man walked away into the night.
***
The Eternal Emperor of the Great and Glorious Golden Empire stood over the still form of the captive Shadowlass, flush with power. His eyes glittered in the darkness. His body thrummed with energy, all the souls his archons had been able to offer.
They burned so quickly, these hotblood souls. Those fools who had called themselves archons knew nothing of the powers that raged at the emperor’s command. They used their souls for petty tricks and charades of power. Which of them could hold winter itself at bay for even a single season, let alone a thousand years? That was power.
There was power in this sleeping girl. He could feel it, radiating from her like the intense heat of a furnace. He could almost taste it.
He could take it from her. The ritual was prepared. Two of his Tophylax Emperia waited in the hall outside this cell to carry her up to the tower where the implements were laid out. The emperor smiled. Murdrek Thorne thought he knew of stealing souls. The man had known nothing. Stealing the souls of hotblood peasants. Faugh!
He could take this girl’s soul, despite her Shadow blood. He knew the ritual, the incantations. He had gathered the instruments. Her delicious power could be his. And such power…She must have absorbed the souls of another Shadow, he knew. One that his purge had missed. One who, in turn, held the souls of many. She burned so brightly in the darkness. And it could all be his.
With such a store of power, he could turn back winter for another thousand years.
Yet the girl must be awake for the ritual to work. Her mind must be present and alert and op
en to him. He couldn’t complete the ritual without her name.
The girl slept. It was no natural sleep. The emperor scowled at the sleeping girl. He didn’t know by what magic she kept herself unconscious, but for so long as she slept her mind couldn’t be opened to him. He narrowed his eyes in the darkness of the cell and spat angrily on the floor.
She would wake. She must wake. She couldn’t evade him forever.
Turning on his heels, the ancient, half-breed emperor strode angrily out of the cell. The Tophylax would alert him when she stirred, and then her mind would be opened. He would plumb its depths to find her name, and then her power would be his.
Chapter 29 - The First Conclave
Jacin Verret led a ragged group of thirty survivors through the verdant edge of the forest, hoping to avoid any Tophylax or rebels. Most of the men had happily discarded the brilliant golden cloaks that would now identify them only as deserters. Verret had a tougher time convincing them to ditch their expensive, high-quality armor along with the cloaks.
He didn’t know why the men followed him. When he came across Barres and Horum about to scale the wall, they had all agreed the best thing to do was get outside the city and then scatter to the winds. But once they made it outside, they grudgingly amended it might be best to stick together at least as far as the woods.
Crossing the distressingly open fields surrounding the capital, always keeping the city between themselves and the imperial palace to the south, Verret and the others had stumbled over other men with the same plan. Singly or in groups of two or three, they had fallen in with Verret, Barres, and Horum. Night descended just as the still-growing column of survivors reached the first edge of the forest.
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