Patreon Year 3 Collection REV

by Kameron Hurley

  He eased his grip, but did not let up his guard. “You understand?” he said. He jerked his head at the young body filled with arrows. “That was me. Now I’m here.”

  She mouthed something at him. A curse?”

  “What?” he said.

  “Corpse soldier.” Soft and smoky. Not fearful. Factual.

  His mouth twisted, even after all that time. “We prefer to be called body mercenaries.”

  “Thought you were all dead. My grandmother –”

  “I gave her the stone that can summon my soul.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought I was dying. If she got it back to the guild, they could summon my soul from the darkness. Bring me back. It’s where my soul goes if I can’t find a body to house me.”

  “You’re already dead.”

  “I’ve been dead many times, yes.” He saw her swallow; the starlight made her eyes seem luminous. “I’m going to let you go,” he said.

  “You said that.”

  “I said there was no reason to attack me.”

  “All right.”

  He released her. Took two long steps back. In this body, he was much larger than her; he stood a head and shoulders above her, and outweighed her by eighty pounds. He tried to give her space.

  Mez sat in the dirt. Gazed up at him. Then at the body. She got up and went to his old body. Knelt beside it. Pushed the hair from the face, noted the wounds. Then Mez began to methodically remove all of the bronze rings Nev had kept on those skinny little fingers.

  “Your remorse is touching,” Nev said.

  “About as polite as you running off in the middle of the night. You fucking idiot.”

  “I know about women like you.”

  “Women like me? Like me?”

  “It didn’t seem wise to stay.”

  “I was being polite. You have a massive stick up your fucking ass.”

  “I have been around a long time.”

  “No doubt.” She snorted. Pocketed the rings. Leaned back on her heels. “You just kill people when you’re attacked? Just like that? No wonder we hunted you all until you were dead. Really dead. After the war. How did you live?”

  “Not every country believed the genocide of people like me was humane.”

  “You mean not every country wanted to give up their tactical advantage.”

  “I don’t fight on purpose. The bodies I take… most are as this was. Defense. Or those already dead.”

  “Stealing the dead is better?”

  “They are dead. What do they care? You certainly didn’t care about the dead when you took those rings just now.”

  “I can’t believe I fell for this.”

  “For what? I’ve told you nothing untrue. If someone has that stone, someone alive, they are in danger. Because yes, you are right. People like me are being hunted. If they find someone with that stone –”

  “If they find someone with that stone, it leads them back to you. I wasn’t born on a slow boat. You’re worried about your own guts.”

  Nev shifted from foot to foot. The adrenaline was draining from his body now, leaving him feeling exhausted, hungry. “I need to find alpaca. Keep the rings.” He bent and took the dead girl’s heavy knife. He felt a coin purse knotted against his own shin. He would have money enough, provided it was coin in there and not something more nefarious. It was horrifying, some days, to realize what sorts of bodies one had jumped into. Who they had been.

  He headed down the way he had seen the alpaca go, humming softly for her. It was not long before he heard Mez crashing around behind him. She was nimble as a bear, that one.

  “What?” he said without turning. “You want to knife me in the back? You’ll need to creep better than that.”

  “Why didn’t you kill my grandmother? You gave her that stone and hoped someone brought you back, but why not just kill her? Then you’d know you’re coming back for sure.”

  Nev lifted his gaze to the crowns of the trees. Little blossoms fell from the canopy, collecting around his feet like dying stars. “It was not necessary,” he said.

  She grunted.

  He waited.

  “I take you to the gravesite,” she said. “That’s it. That’s what I agreed to.”

  He nodded, already turning his attention to the flash of creamy white in the distance.

  #

  The site of the massacre was mundane. All such sites were, in the end. He remembered a war from some time ago, when they buried all the dead beneath birch trees. For two decades after, he had avoided birch trees, made uneasy and anxious by their breezy forms.

  The place where the little child wizard’s family had been killed was a tall field of grass, a clearing overlooking the little settlement they had hoped to settle, Fortezia. How terrible, to get so far, to be within sight of salvation, and to be cut down.

  “Who killed them?” Nev said. Beside him, the alpaca hummed. Her saddle bags were empty. She had either lost, or someone had stolen, all of Mez’s beer and musty cheese and jerky. Of all the things that had happened the night before, Mez seemed angriest at the loss of the beer.

  “Temple people,” she said. “You know what they do to those kid wizards in the temple.”

  “Matild said that too… but no, I don’t know what they do.”

  “Oh.” She shrugged. “Bad things. They think you have to hurt kids to make them powerful. Make them mean. You know, toughen them up.”

  Nev knew all about that.

  He found the fresher, humped ground over the graves. “They buried them?” he said. “Didn’t burn them?”

  “You don’t burn wizards. Does bad things to the air. Miasmas.”

  “Let’s dig,” Nev said.

  They spent two hours digging. Brought up the corpses. A man and a woman, only a few months in the ground. Mez did not gag or complain, but searched the corpses thoroughly with him.

  “Where’s the boy? Did we miss him?” Nev said.

  “Maybe they didn’t get the boy.”

  “Where did you hear about these deaths anyway?”

  “The tavern. Old soldier I know from some jobs last year. He was in the party sent out after them.”

  “And he said they got all three?”

  “Maybe they were supposed to, so that’s what he said. Word gets around. He’s old enough not to yak in a tavern that he didn’t kill someone he was supposed to.”

  Nev came up empty; the pockets and pouches held some old snuff and a decomposing map. As he dropped the map he noted the cord around the female body’s neck. He tugged it. It came up with a little bronze pendent. Nothing.

  “Her hand,” Mez said.

  Another cord trailed from the woman’s hand, filthy like the rest of her. He uncoiled her rotting fingers and slid the cord free.

  A blue stone shot through with green glass gleamed from the end of the cord. As it dangled there, shimmering in the light, Nev remembered what Matild had said about the woman buying it as a good luck charm for her son.

  He imagined this scene as it had played out here, some desperate family trying to save their child from harm. The soldiers drawing the boy away, the father dying, or already dead, the mother wounded, clutching at her boy, her fingers tangling in the pendant hanging from his neck. The soldiers yanking the boy away, and the pendant, there, curled up in her palm, all she could save of her child.

  “Nev?”

  He let out his breath. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding it.

  “That it?” Mez said.

  “Yes. Thank you.” He knotted the broken cord and hung the stone around his own neck. It felt warm against his skin. It had been so many decades since he parted from it; he expected to feel some jolt of power, a tingling of recognition. But there was nothing. It was just a stone. Until it was needed.

  “Well, let’s cover them back up.” Mez rolled the woman back into the shallow grave and began heaping dirt over her again.

 
After a moment more, Nev helped her. In half an hour, the bodies were covered again, leaving Nev and Mez filthy and breathless, sweat pouring down their bodies.

  “Guess that’s it,” Mez said.

  “I guess so.”

  “What’ll you do next? Go creep back to a hole somewhere?”

  He pressed his fingers to the stone beneath his tunic. As long as the stone existed, they could come back for him. He could live, yes, it was true. But he would be theirs. Always theirs. What was he really, now that the war was over and he’d fled the guild that had once shielded him and his kind from the obliteration of their immortal souls? What was he, but a corpse soldier running away from the same fate that dogged them all, mothers and children. He closed his eyes, and remembered Matild’s singing.

  Nev took the stone from his neck and dug into the alpaca’s saddle bags. He had kept a few chunks of volcanic glass there, sewn into the bottom, just in case. Now he took them out and lay a flat piece on the ground. Put his soul stone on top of it.

  “What are you doing?” Mez said.

  “Making sure they never find me. Making sure they never use me again.”

  He brought down the hunk of glass in his hand. Smashed the soul stone.

  It shattered into half a dozen fragments. They scattered, bits and pieces lost in the uneven terrain of the field.

  “Shit!” Mez said. “Are you… wait, you’re still alive?”

  “Yes.” He smeared the dust of the stone between his fingers. “But there’s nowhere my soul can go but a body now. No stone. No other way to bring me back.”

  She shivered. “Yeah, well, if you get sick, don’t come near me. I’m not some extra body.”

  He met her look. Nodded. Stood. Nev took the alpaca’s lead and started down into Fortezia.

  “Where you going?” Mez stood outlined in the afternoon light, her black silhouette large and beautiful in the heat.

  “I’m going to find the boy,” Nev said. “I’m going to bring him back.”

  “He could be dead.”

  “No. He’s useful to them. They will keep him alive as long as possible.”

  “That could take you far from here! The wizard conclave is a thousand miles south of here. You know it gets cold down there! What will I tell my grandmother?”

  “You fulfilled your part.”

  Mez came down after him, huffing. She came up to the alpaca’s other side, put her hand on the alpaca’s neck. “Hey, listen, you hired me to find a thing and a person. I’ll go with you.”

  “We’ve established I work better alone.”

  “So do I. But what else am I going to do, just go back to that tavern and get drunk?”

  “You have exactly one life,” he said. “You spend it any way you please.”

  “I’m going with you.”

  He shrugged, and did not look at her. To look would be to remember how she came after him after he left her. To look would be to think how much she looked like Matild. To look would be to know what she would look like when she was old. To look would be to imagine how she would look when he put her body into the ground or under the torch. The little smirk. The long lashes.

  “You must give her a name,” Mez said as they walked down and down into the widening valley. The alpaca hummed, as if in agreement.

  “Now you outnumber me,” he said.

  Mez scratched at the alpaca’s ears. “See? Listen to her. She has a great little voice. Call her Matild.”

  Matild, Nev thought, the little girl who saved me.

  “All right,” he said, “but don’t tell your grandmother that.”

  “Lips are sealed,” Mez said, and whooped.

  Nev kept his gaze on the blue, blue sky ahead.

  END

  Echo Echo Echo Echo

  Aniu knew he was not a man, though he was clothed in a man’s face. He stood calf-deep in the snow, arms limp and heavy at his sides. No tracks littered the ground around him, only the imprint of his body where it had lain in the snow, as if he had dropped from the sky, or grown fully formed from the earth.

  Aniu moved away from the stand of willow trees where she had hidden when she first saw him, and into his line of sight. He swung toward her. He looked like a shaman in a trance; dark eyes heavy and lidded, lips slightly parted to reveal brown teeth.

  “I’m Aniu,” she said. “What are you?”

  The man stared. His body straightened beneath his parka, and she saw that he was no bigger than her older brothers.

  His lips formed the word, “Aniu.”

  She looked at his bare brown hand; ragged, dirty nails, bruised flesh. She looked at his feet and saw that they too were bare. He was a dead thing, a different thing. Different like she was. A man who came from nothing. A man who knew death. A man who knew the bear. And what came after.

  “It’s cold,” Aniu said. “I have extra mittens.” She reached into her pack, pulled out the heavy gloves. She moved toward him and tugged the gloves onto his stiff hands.

  “I am searching,” he said.

  Aniu glanced up at his dead face. “Searching?” When she had died, she hadn’t wanted to search for anything. She had wanted to rest. But the bear would not let her.

  He placed one of his mittened hands to his chest. “To find where the echo began.”

  Aniu’s frozen breath had stuck her eyelashes together. She blinked her eyes. “My grandmother knows where the echo began,” she said. “She tells the story all the time. I’ll take you to him.” She took the stranger’s stiff hand in hers.

  The way back to her family house was far. She had wandered after a six-legged hare, thinking she would surprise her family with it. The three dim orange suns sat low on a horizon that was smeared yellow and gold, like gazing at the sky through a sheet of ice. Aniu passed no living creature but the three-headed raves. They cackled at her and cocked their heads at the stranger, but did not take flight. Perhaps they thought it peculiar that a dead piece of flesh could walk.

  Aniu certainly did. When it wasn’t her own.

  She came to the snow packed trails that looped about her family house and came to a large rectangular structure of sod. She moved inside where raised benches covered in caribou hide made an uneven ring around the sod walls. Willow switches ran parallel along the floor. Smoke rose from the fire pit.

  The family grandmother stood by the fire speaking with her primary wife, first and still her favorite. Aniu’s mother sat on her family bench with the grandmother’s second wife and two young daughters. Aniu’s grandmother, great aunt and three older female cousins watched over four of Aniu’s younger half-siblings in a dark corner of the house.

  There were no men here, not so deep into the winter season. Men descended into the valley every autumn, after the first frost. They would not see them here again until the early spring, when they would bring gifts of salted beef and horse flesh, mushrooms, and bits of black volcanic glass shaped into tools and ornaments.

  That warm, prosperous time was still very far away.

  The man here now did not remind her so much of that time; he reminded her of how very far away it was.

  Aniu brought the stranger to her grandmother, his feet swishing across the willow switches on the floor.

  Her grandmother’s black hair lay in thick braids twisted around her head like a crown. Her mouth, a permanent frown, did not waver. She wore no parka inside the house; it was cozy enough for boots and tunics and hats. Most of her left ear was missing; a tangle with a fishing hook that had happened during some long summer many years before Aniu was born.

  “You’ve found us another demon, have you?” her grandmother said.

  “I think he fell from the sky. Like the last one. Or bloomed from the earth.”

  Her grandmother barked out a laugh. “I tell him a story and he’ll leave? You believe that, demon-talker?”

  Aniu huffed. “We should help them. They are lost.”

  “They are demons,” he
r grandmother’s second-wife hissed. “You’d do better to let them lie.”

  “Can it speak?” her grandmother asked. “Where are you from?” the grandmother asked.

  The man who was not a man looked at the grandmother with his dead eyes and said, “I am searching.”

  “You must tell him the story,” Aniu said.

  Her mother watched her from the other side of the room and said, “That man isn’t a man. He has eyes that see nothing. He’s a demon.”

  Aniu held tight to the stranger’s arm. “Maybe he is a demon. Maybe that’s why I can talk to him. Please, grandmother, tell him how the echo began.”

  “I’ll assemble the family to discuss this stranger. Is he cold?”

  “He needs boots.”

  “Give him my boots.”

  Aniu brought the man who was not a man toward the bench where her grandmother and great aunt rested. As she approached, they gathered the young children and left her to follow the grandmother. Aniu made the stranger sit down on a bench as she looked for the grandmother’s boots.

  “What are you called?” she asked.

  “I do not know. I will find that where the echo began.”

  “Then you should name yourself. That’s what I did,” Aniu said. “When I died, I lost my name. I had to pick a new one."

  “Died?”

  Aniu found a pair of boots and began putting them on the cold, stiff feet. “That’s why they call me the demon talker, but I call myself Aniu. They know I have a spirit-helper, a demon maybe, something left by the old ancestors to help us thrive here. They don’t know what it is, but they know I have it. Even when I’m old enough for my blood to come, I won’t be a real woman. They say I might live forever, the way the ancestors did.”

  “That is bad?”

  “There’s no one like me. Hasn’t been since my great-grandmother, they said. She came from… very far. Like you”

  “We are alike in this way. There is no one like me.” He pressed his hand to his chest.

  “I was born as they were. But when my brother and I had nothing to eat but ravens… We had only enough dogs to pull the sled, so we didn’t leave one loose, as we usually do, to draw the large white bears from us. We were hungry, so the bears were hungry, too. I knew the bear was there, even when my father and brother did not. The bear is very clever. He’s all white, and hides his black nose with one white paw so you can’t see him. But I knew. Mother didn’t understand why I left the sled. I started to run, and then he saw white bear uncover his nose. Mother had to leave me to what I had chosen. If she died, my brother and the dogs would die, too. I was just like a rabbit to that bear. I didn’t run long before he caught me. His heavy paw hit me.” She touched the place on her left shoulder. “I fell so hard into the snow that it cut my face. I remember the color of my blood on the snow, like fish blood. I know that I died there, and when I died, I dreamed a strange dream about the bear eating me up and me eating him up from the inside, until I became as he is, and he became as I am, and we were one thing. When my mother brought me back alive and told the story, everyone was afraid. I haven’t found anyone like me, not alive. Just the stories. Maybe you can help me find them. Others. Like me.”