“Thanks,” she grunted. He only nodded.
Over Kinrae’s shoulder, Artysaedra could see Draven. He was a similar mess, pulling his blade from a hollowsoul carcass. He stumbled back a little when it came free. Both of her brothers looked as exhausted as she felt. Their hearts were hammering, and their breathing was coming in fast puffs. She considered trying to use spellcasting to heal the aches and bruises they must have been littered with, just to keep them fighting, but she wasn’t very good at the practice and she didn’t want to waste the time or effort trying. They would just have to persevere.
Even though Guardians could mimic other demons’ natural-born gifts if they practiced, that was the extent of the powers the Council had bestowed upon them. They could supplement those powers with spellcasting if they could manage it, but few bothered beyond learning to cast wards. Spellcasting was hard for demons, hard enough that Artysaedra had abandoned it in pursuit of more rigorous training with the talents she did have. She spent a majority of her time fighting practice dummies at the Iron Keep in a variety of styles and with a wide cache of weapons, dueling guards there, lapping the city, lifting ships down at the shipyard, and brawling at the docks. None of it truly prepared her for the long strain of battle, though. Her stamina still needed work.
When another round of snarls sounded off down the street this time, she sighed. The excitement that had thrummed through her was beginning to fade, replaced by anger and annoyance. In seconds, she and her brothers were overcome by another wave of hollowsouls. They took the beasts down as a team. Kinrae and Draven hacked into them with swords. Artysaedra cut into them with Mercy, though the power behind her strokes was noticeably weakened to herself. She pushed herself harder.
When a hollowsoul dodged her blows and slipped close enough to stop Mercy by grabbing her scythe’s shaft, Artysaedra seethed. She relinquished her weapon and forced herself past breaking. Hands out toward the hollowsoul, she pulled at the threads of Guardian magic inside her. They stretched like violin strings a second from snapping. Suspended in front of her, she could feel the hollowsoul’s soul. It was a dense mass—an extension of herself now. Its aura overwhelmed her senses.
The beast’s soul snapped wildly from thing to thing: a hypersensitive, mindless fluidity. It became whatever was in the beast’s immediate focus. Its soul was stone and blood, a winter sky, pounding veins and polished metal, the whites of Artysaedra’s own eyes— It was black as night and empty as snow, gored iron and the browned enamel of fangs, leaking marrow and cracked cobblestones, the steady toll of a lonely bell and—
Snarling, Artysaedra twisted her hands and pulled. She felt the second the beast snapped under her control. Its limbs moved to her will.
The hollowsoul obeyed her like a puppet and dropped to its knees, dipping its head under her gesturing command. Then, when she bid it with the jerk of her arm, the beast didn’t hesitate to tear out its own throat. Its body flopped down onto the dusty cobblestones. Dark blood gushed out underneath it.
As the beast’s spirit rose from its slack body—a crude shadow of the demon the hollowsoul had once been—Artysaedra was reminded of how the word hollowsoul had come about in the first place. It was a bastardization of a word that originated from the language of darkness, Makvt. Hkllojwssfyll. Untranslatable, but what the spirits of the Abyss called themselves.
There was no soul gleaming from the center of the dark spirit hovering in front of her. There was no soul’s light, either. Both soul and soul’s light had been consumed by this shadow: the part of a soul that was supposed to be buried deep within it, unseen. It was the part of the soul Artysaedra overlooked in the Abyss, the part that was separated from the whole and given over to her care. She should have ferried this one into the Three Afterlives, but she didn’t have time. This dark spirit would have to haunt the land with the countless number of others.
Looking out, the fallen city was now a city of the dead thanks to her. Shadows haunted the streets. They poured out of buildings. They circled their mutated corpses mindlessly. If the spirits of the people who’d lived here hadn’t been missing, the city would have overflowed with roaming souls. A sea of spirits would have flooded the area. Artysaedra wouldn’t have been able to take step without brushing into one. Even her brothers would have felt the cold note in the air.
Kinrae shook Artysaedra’s shoulder very gently, and her eyes snapped up to him. It was then that she realized she was kneeling in the rubble. She had no idea when she’d fallen. The aches of her body rushed back into her consciousness. Her chest felt crushed. She was certain blood was dripping down from her nose, but she couldn’t be certain. She wet her half-numb lips with her tongue. They found both copper and salt. When she tried to stand, she collapsed halfway through the movement. Her body was beyond exhausted, regardless of how her will wished to push forward.
“Take care of yourself,” Kinrae said, sheathing his sword. He helped Artysaedra to her feet again, Draven taking her other arm. Together, they hoisted her up. “You are not infallible.”
“I’m a Guardian,” she said with a glare.
“Even gods bleed.”
Before Artysaedra could come up with a retort, a raspy scream cut through the city a half-mile out. Her head snapped in its direction. Beyond the buildings and carcasses laid out in front of them, Artysaedra could hear more hollowsouls moving around. She could hear the crackles of unseen fire. Numerous pillars of smoke rose over the pummelled factory at the end of the street. There was a gaping silence, and then the scream came again, this time louder, full of agony, twisting and breaking off.
Her blood went cold.
She recognized it.
Naliah.
PLEASE, MASTER
_______________________________
I saw you once in a dream. You were a flaming apple tree that heralded the end of days.
patient NR-21-022-6, Havenfield Sanatorium, the Realm of Eaves
THE MULTITUDINOUS REALM OF BLACK WATERS
ANGSCLOVEN STREET, CENTRAL LINDENNACHT,
COUNTY KAVETT, NORTHERN OSNASTEDT, FJORDE
Naliah screamed until his throat was ripped raw from it.
He felt like he was burning to death underneath his armour, his skin lit up like a red-hot branding iron. Shards of rubble cut into his knees and hands as he curled in on himself, collapsed in the chaotic street next to the hollowsoul he’d beheaded. It was hard to breathe through his sobs. The air was scorching here. The blazing orange of encroaching fire ringed the edges of his blackening vision, closing in. He realized too late that he was begging between his screams, his voice echoing off the buildings and back to his own ears, frantic and broken.
“—won’t do it again. Please, Master. Please don’t—”
A brown leather boot crunched down in the rock in front of him and cut off his pleading. Against the overwhelming pain, Naliah struggled to rise to his knees, but the unmistakable cold barrels of a gun pressed against his forehead. Naliah froze.
Without moving, Naliah glanced up, past the hand and sleeve taking up most of his line of sight. He could see a sliver of the figure holding the gun to his head. The figure was wearing a grimy metal mask with bars over the mouth. A reflection of flames writhed on the mask’s surface and in the stranger’s bright eyes. His coat was an unnatural silver, long and hooded. Over the left breast, an insignia was fixed: two rifles crossed, ringed with ivy.
“Ståmmetteş ómdellghgen vi njon’nė,” the stranger rattled in a muffled voice, and the gun pressed against Naliah’s head dug in harder. On the trigger, the stranger’s finger twitched, and Naliah’s heart tripped in his chest. A bullet to the brain would kill him in an instant, demon or not.
The stranger barked another word at Naliah that he didn’t know, but when Naliah went to speak, he found he couldn’t speak at all. His lips wouldn’t move now. His tongue was paralyzed in his mouth. He tried to curl his gauntleted fingers, but he discovered his entire body was locked around him. His breath came quick. He couldn’
t shift his head, his arms, his legs, or even his toes. He couldn’t blink, the heat making his eyes water. He was locked in place—his own prison, his own slaver.
The man snapped another word at him, and Naliah felt his body seize up further. His heart was pounding. This was spellcasting—very advanced spellcasting. He recognized its power over his body, so familiar despite the passing of two centuries, and it terrified him. This wasn’t like the curses whipped at him in Anderton’s streets. Those curses were nothing more than pain—and pain he could suffer. Pain had to end. This, though? It had been a long time since he’d been in this position: immobilized in his own body, a silent ultimatum carried in the weapon pressed to his head and in the eyes trained on his face—
“Pick it up,” Master Elias snarled. Naliah stared down at the long knife on the floor glittering underneath the kitchen’s lamplight, his face still throbbing from the blow of his master’s meat tenderizing hammer. A spur of magic shot through his body, and he jolted. Without him telling it to, he found his hand moving forward toward the knife. He tried to resist, but it strained his mind and his muscles. “Pick it up, boy.”
The carving knife had spattered goat blood across the hardwood after Druya had dropped it. She was crying behind him and tugging at the back of his shirt, begging in Anavene. He wanted to reach back and pat her little leg, but he couldn’t. He levelled a glare directly at his master through his good eye and fought every movement of his inching hand. He would take any punishment his master saw fit later if it meant Druya escaped without one now. He would go days without food. He would take the whip. The handle of the axe. The glass bottle. Anything. But he wouldn’t grab this knife. He wouldn’t turn it on Druya, not like Omil had turned it on him once before.
“Stop fighting me, boy. Pick the knife up, or I swear on the Gov’s red cunt I’ll do it for you and fuck you bloody after I’m done,” Master Elias spat. When Naliah didn’t stop fighting, he said, “Archie, take the squalling drataustech out to the pens.”
Naliah knew what the pens meant. He shuddered at the thought, vomit in the back of his throat. They couldn’t do that to Druya. She was only six. She was only—
The cold gun pressed against his head removed itself.
Naliah stared up at his assailant, confused when he found a metal mask instead of the goat-blood-streaked face of Joseph Elias that he’d expected. He felt tears on his cheeks—the heat of the fires roaring around them. There was bile and blood in his mouth. The stranger said something Naliah didn’t understand, but after a second, the man spoke again, this time as clear as day, “You? Are you all right?”
“What?” Naliah rasped, surprised.
“Are you hurt?” the man repeated, and squatted down in front of Naliah. He muttered a foreign word, and all at once, the invisible bonds holding Naliah into place vanished. He sagged forward, into the weight of the stranger, who caught him. The man’s wool coat was hot and smelled like salt, ash, and mud. Underneath it, the man himself reeked of sweat. It grounded Naliah, and he came back to himself slowly. He could hear the susurrus of the far-off ocean and the whimpers of hollowsouls whose shadows were limping around the edges of his vision. The memories of his childhood receded, leaving him with only a bone-crushing agony and a fear settled in his stomach that he couldn’t dispel. Druya.
“Are you hurt?” the stranger asked one more time, his mouth near Naliah’s ear. His arm was an iron band.
“Fine,” Naliah mumbled into the man’s shoulder. He was still scraped and bruised from his fight with the hollowsouls, and he’d definitely learned his lesson about rounding blind corners straight into spellcasters with guns. His insides and skin ached from magic, but overall, he was in one piece. He got to his feet with the man’s help and felt blood slither down his shins from his knees; it pooled in his socks. His legs shook underneath him as he tried for a weak laugh. “I should be the one asking if you’re all right,” Naliah said. “Shouldn’t I?”
Both of them now standing, Naliah could see the stranger was half a head taller than he was, but it took him an embarrassing amount of time to realize the stranger hadn’t yet let go of his hand. Naliah’s gauntlet was missing. Their warm skin was pressed together.
Through the holes of the stranger’s metal mask, Naliah could see the man’s bright hazel eyes. They studied his face with a stern, unidentifiable emotion. Their eyes stayed locked, and Naliah opened his mouth to say something before the words had even taken root on his tongue. They withered there and died.
It was a minute before Naliah shook himself and took a step back. When he did, he found himself looking over the stranger clinically. At the man’s side, his left arm was splinted with bits of wood and torn fabric. The revolver he’d had against Naliah’s forehead was now holstered at his waist. In the opposite holster, there was an empty space. His belt was full of loops with no bullets.
With a fatigued sway, the man mumbled something to himself and his eyes clouded over. Naliah reached out for him, but a shout exploded from above the street and the stranger skidded back, drawing his revolver and aiming upward.
“Sun and stars!” Artysaedra yelled from a roof. She was standing on a burning two-storey factory to their right. Flames crawled up the building’s blackened façade from empty windows and a massive pile of burning detritus out front. The flames licked at the white lettering painted high on the building’s stone that must have been a company name. With the last reserves of his energy, Naliah sapped out the fire scaling the small factory. The other fires would have to wait until he had the strength to put them out, but for now, they were deterring the hollowsouls from coming any closer to him and the stranger.
It wasn’t as though they needed the blockade the fires provided, though. Each beast had its eyes trained on the stranger, and all it took was the man’s eyes flicking in their direction for them to limp a step back or bare their teeth. Hundreds of their burnt carcasses littered the half-demolished street. Nearly every building in the tightly packed area was in spellcasted flames. The stranger stood at the epicenter of it all like a god of death and destruction.
Above them, Artysaedra leapt down from the factory, her body whistling through the air. Falling shingles shattered against the street just before the cobblestone cracked underneath the impact of her boots. She righted herself, pointing her scythe at Naliah and staggering forward a step. “You utter fucking cock. You don’t ever get to lecture me about running off ahead ever again.” She panted, dried blood under her nose and in her teeth. “Do you know how long it took me to get up there? I can barely fucking walk, you dick. I look like you after a tenth round of whiskey. Draven had to catapult me. Well, no. That’s a lie. Mostly he stood there and I used him as an unexpected springboard, but you get my point.”
When the stranger in the mask shouted a foreign word at her, her attention snapped to him. She glared and hoisted her scythe. “Who’s Shooty McTinFace over there? Did he attack you? Because if he did, I’ll kick his ass—”
Without warning, the stranger fired a wide shot at Artysaedra. Naliah jumped. The explosive sound echoed through the street and over the city. Artysaedra didn’t move an inch, though. If anything, she looked annoyed.
“Really? That’s how you say hello?” she asked with a roll of her eyes. “I was hoping for a thank you, seeing as we did come all this way to rescue your stupid metal ass. Maybe you’d throw us a nice big welcome party, tea and cakes and all that shite. But now, I’m going to have to rip off your—”
The stranger cocked the hammer of his revolver. When he fired this time, Artysaedra hissed and flinched back a step. Then she lifted her hand to her head. Through her left ear, there was now a large, perfect hole. Blood dripped down onto the shoulder of her soot-covered armour. “You little shit,” she growled.
“Oliver,” the stranger corrected. He took a step forward, revolver levelled, and with his splinted arm, he pushed his hood back and unhooked the strap holding his metal mask into place. It clattered down to the street. Naliah was sho
cked at what lay underneath it. It was just a mere boy who was meeting Artysaedra’s eyes, black-skinned, glare sharp, his full lips drawn into an animalistic sneer. Blood, dirt, and sweat smeared his face.
“Lindenwatchman. Officer Second Class. Oliver Bretner,” the stranger said. “I’m taking you into custody, and if either of you run, my face will be the last thing you ever see, kaarikz.”
THEY’RE WATCHING
_______________________________
After the separation of a soul’s three base components and ferrying into the Three Afterlives, a spirit’s consciousness follows one of those three parts, where a spirit then officially takes up its conscious afterlife. A spirit is judged by the multiverse itself. Those full of love and light follow their soul’s light to the Golden Fields. Those full of bitterness and destruction follow their soul’s shadow to the Abyss. Those of the in between live out their lives in the Nebene Asain, my Realm, and are assigned trials in order to do penance for their neutrality.
excerpt from On Death, penned by Makin-Kif, former Guardian of Spirit, published in the Realm of Forty Ravens
THE GRAND REALM OF THE INFINITE
THE THRONE ROOM, CENTRAL CHAMBER OF THE CASTLE OF THE INFINITE ROYAL FAMILY,
MOUNT DRAKIS, LUTANA, CAPITAL CITY-STATE OF THE ONE COUNTRY
A Shard of Sea and Bone Page 33