Scavenger of Souls

by Joshua David Bellin

  Aleka spun toward the sound, her weapon on the alert.

  She never got a chance to use it. A dark object came hurtling from somewhere high above and struck her arm with a sickening crunch. The gun flew from her fingers and she dropped to the ground, clutching her wrist. Her right hand dangled like a limp weed.

  I shook off my paralysis and leaped down the hill for her gun, but before I could reach it, a pair of powerful arms pinned me from behind and lifted me off the ground. I struggled in a grip like steel. The only members of our party who stayed free were the old woman, who lay untouched on her stretcher, and Aleka, who stayed down, her always pale face drained of every drop of color. Soon lay too far away for me to see what had happened to him, a cluster of warriors surrounding the spot where he’d fallen.

  “Strangers from beyond the Shattered Lands,” the man who held me spoke in a deep, oddly accented voice that I not only heard but felt vibrating against my back. I strained to look at him, but he held me fast. “By what right do you travel in our realm?”

  No one spoke. One of the warriors lifted Aleka roughly to her feet, her head lolling on her thin neck.

  “Release them, Archangel,” a new voice issued from above. The words rolled over the scene of battle, rich and melodious but at the same time as sharp as the crack of the unknown weapon that had maimed Aleka.

  The arms dropped me, the other warriors freeing their prisoners as well. I turned to face the most massive human being I’d ever seen: well over seven feet tall, brown-skinned and with a chest and shoulders bulging with muscle. He was dressed as skimpily as the others, in moccasins and loincloth, except he wore an ankle-length cloak made of the same brown material. His clean-shaven face was immobile, impassive, more like the face of a cliff than the face of a man. His black eyes traveled upward to the place where the new voice had come from.

  I followed his gaze and saw a man standing on the summit we’d just descended, his skin pale against the black. He was nowhere near as huge as the one he called Archangel. In fact he was small, not much taller than me, and he seemed particularly puny compared to his lieutenant’s hulking frame. Like all the men, he wore no beard, and his brown hair hung to shoulder length. But the cloak that spilled over his shoulders and hid his arms and chest was red, a glaring red that made his figure explode from the empty land like a splash of blood.

  He descended his perch, traveling on a narrow trail either carved or worn into the stone. His steps were lithe and quick, almost cocky. When he reached the level ground, he strode toward Aleka, who stood unsteadily, her broken wrist cradled in her left hand. The weapon that had done the damage, a pair of palm-size black balls connected by a foot-long cord, lay coiled at her feet. I waited for the red-cloaked man to retrieve it, but he walked past his weapon, past his victim, to the discarded gun no one had yet touched. I’d thought Wali might go for the pistol when the warriors freed him, but like everyone else in our colony, he seemed too shaken to move. Everyone except Nessa, that is, who had decided to take the opportunity to braid her hair. I turned from her, shaking my head, and followed the progress of the warriors’ leader.

  He bent by Aleka’s gun. “Archangel,” he said, and the giant left me. When he reached his captain’s side, the smaller man said, “What do you make of this?”

  The giant stooped, picked up the gun gingerly. He held the barrel between thumb and forefinger, dangling it as if he’d never seen anything like it before. In his huge hand, it looked as harmless as a child’s toy.

  “Their power lessens, to send such a trinket against us,” he said at last, his deep voice rising on the final words as if he was asking a question or seeking approval.

  “So it is foretold.” The man nodded. “Leave it, Archangel. We will bury it with the rest, when the time comes.”

  Obediently the giant lowered the gun to the ground. The red-cloaked man kicked it dismissively with the toe of his moccasin, then stood and paced back to Aleka. His lieutenant shadowed his steps.

  The red-cloaked man stopped before Aleka, who’d slipped down in the warrior’s grasp, huddling over her injury. Close up, I saw that the leader’s face, though lean and strong, was cut by scars that trailed across his forehead, down his cheeks, over his jaw to his neck and throat. If Aleka had been standing straight, she’d have been looking down at that face. Now she looked up, and her eyes widened in an expression of unmistakable terror.

  “Athan,” she said, her voice trembling.

  The man said nothing in response. Instead, he shrugged, wiggling his shoulders in a snakelike way that threw the blood-red cloak clear of his arms.

  And I saw that the wounds didn’t end with his face.

  His entire body was crisscrossed with shiny, long-healed scars. They were thick and broad, as if he’d been deeply gouged by a blade. There were so many of them, running in so many directions across his chest and shoulders and arms and thighs, it looked like he’d been torn apart and stitched back together. The man smiled, the scars on his face stretching his lips back to show all his teeth.

  “Aya tivah bis, shashi tivah bracha,” he said in a strange tongue. “The day of the despoilers is no more. The sun has risen on the children of the blessed.”

  3

  The man with scars talked to his warriors in an unknown language, and they bound our hands in front of us while they stripped away our packs and searched through our possessions.

  The cords they tied around our wrists seemed to be made of the same brown material as their clothes and Archangel’s cloak. It felt both scratchy and sinuous, and as strong as rope. Any thoughts I had of trying to break free ended when they leveled spears at us, wooden shafts topped with evil-looking shards of black stone. But that didn’t stop Wali, who struggled violently as they searched him. “Give that back to me!” he screamed, and I saw that they’d slipped a cord off his neck, something gold glinting at its end. I recognized it instantly, and I knew why he was so desperate to get it back: it was the ring Korah had given him, partner to the one that had been destroyed when fire consumed her body. I hoped they wouldn’t find the red-handled pocketknife I’d inherited from Laman, the one that had belonged to his lost son, but their search was too thorough for that. They also found the book Aleka had given me just a week ago on my fifteenth birthday, a homemade book with a single charcoal portrait from when I was a baby. Wali’s curses rang out against the volcanic stone as they gathered everything we owned and showed it to the scarred man.

  Most of it he merely nodded at before Archangel added it to the pile that had started with Aleka’s gun. The old woman’s collection jar he dashed to the ground, where it shattered into a hundred fragments. But he held Wali’s ring up to the sunlight for a long moment, watching it gleam as it slowly rotated on its cord. My knife too caught his attention, as he opened and closed the blades several times before handing it back to Archangel. When he came to the baby book, he seemed to freeze on the portrait, his eyes tightening in concentration. But then he cast it aside, letting it fall to the ground with the rest. As if that was some kind of signal, Archangel dumped everything else onto the pile and gestured to the warriors to lead us away, toward the canyon.

  That was when I got my first good look at Soon. One of the warriors stood over him, pulling a spear from his back. It was obvious from the location of the wound and the stillness of his body that he was dead.

  I turned shakily from the sight, my eyes seeking Aleka. Her injury didn’t appear to be life-threatening, but it was ugly: an unnatural bulge protruded from her forearm, blood drenching the surrounding skin. Her face had turned gray, and beads of sweat stood on her upper lip as she gritted her teeth against the pain. When Tyris saw her, she tried to muscle through the warriors to Aleka’s side.

  “It’s a compound fracture,” she said to their leader. “You have to let me set it.”

  “We have medicines of our own,” he replied in a flat voice. “If she cannot walk we will assist her.”

  One of the warriors lifted the frail body of th
e old woman from the stretcher. Nessa started to object, but the old woman slept on in the warrior’s arms, her gnarled hands twisting mechanically now that she had no jar to cuddle. When they led Aleka to the stretcher she stared at it, her eyes unfocused. I edged closer to her and reached out with bound hands to touch her shoulder.

  “You should lie down,” I said. “Come on. Aleka. Lie down.”

  She barely nodded, but she didn’t resist when the warriors lowered her onto the stretcher.

  We were marched toward the canyon, which was visible beyond the edge of the black rock plateau. The warriors offered their backs to the little kids, but all seven shied away—all except Zataias, who roughly shrugged off the hands they held out to him. Nessa refused to let them touch her, and walked with her head high. I tried to follow her example, but the thought of Soon’s lifeless body sprawled on the field of battle behind us rattled me, and I had a hard time keeping up the act. The scarred man walked at the head of the column, surefooted and jaunty in his stride, his red cloak flapping behind him. At some point, probably while they were tending to Aleka, he had retrieved his weapon. It hung at his right side, the weighted balls bouncing with each step. Another object hung at his left hip: a short staff, no more than a foot in length, bone white and polished to a high shine. Given what he’d been able to do with the ball weapon, I hoped we’d never find out what that was for.

  After a half hour of silent marching, the black rock ended and we entered a narrow gorge of reddish-brown sandstone, the puny river trickling beside us. The walls of the canyon blocked some of the sunlight, so the air felt cooler than usual, cool enough that you could breathe deeply without feeling your lungs fry. At the same time, it was unnerving to be hemmed in like this, with the knobby-smooth rock rising to a height of twenty, then forty, then seventy feet on either side of us. After a few minutes, though, the gorge broadened to a width of maybe a hundred feet, and the leader called a halt. The warriors set Aleka down near the canyon wall, and Archangel didn’t interfere when I went to her. Tyris joined me. I looked at my mother’s pale, drawn face, her eyes closed tight in an effort to clamp down on the pain. Her right forearm was a mess of flesh and blood. I knelt by her side and took her undamaged hand in mine. I wished I could use my sleeve to pat the sweat from her forehead, but that was more than I could manage with my hands bound.

  Her eyes fluttered open. “Querry,” she said weakly. “This”—and she drew a sharp breath between her teeth—“hurts.”

  Tyris stooped beside me and placed a couple fingers on Aleka’s intact wrist. “The pulse is strong,” she said. “We’ll get you fixed up, Aleka. Do your breathing. It’ll help.”

  Aleka nodded and closed her eyes again. I watched her chest expand with a deep breath, her lips purse to let it out. I tried to breathe with her.

  “I’m going to talk to him,” I told her. “He can’t just leave you like this.”

  “Querry,” she said, her eyes flying open. “Is Soon . . . ?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Pain knotted her face. “Then the others will need you to—”

  “I know,” I said. “Don’t worry. I will.”

  “Querry.” Her voice dropped to a nearly inaudible breath. “Don’t trust Athan. Don’t believe him. He wants . . .”

  Too many ears might be hearing this. I tried to lean closer. “You know him?”

  I thought I saw a flicker of a nod. “I wanted to tell you,” she said. “I’m sorry. . . .”

  “It’s okay,” I said, though I wasn’t sure what she meant. Had she known we would encounter these people? Or was it our missed conversation she was apologizing for? “Who is he?” I whispered as close to her ear as I could.

  “He’s . . .”

  But before she could say another word, the huge shadow of Archangel fell over us, and her eyes widened with warning. Her mouth formed a word I couldn’t read, and anger bubbled up in me as I looked at my mother’s suffering face.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll take care of them. I won’t let anything happen to the colony.” I patted her hand, awkwardly raised it for a kiss. Then, for her ears only, I whispered the word I’d never used before: “Mom.”

  Her eyes, normally so hard, softened and closed. I laid her hand on her chest and stood, stumbling at first without hands to balance me, and turned to look for the man who’d done this to her.

  I didn’t have far to look. As soon as I gained my feet, I found the scarred man standing beside Archangel, his own shadow swallowed by his giant lieutenant’s.

  “Her injury is grave,” he said softly. Though he spoke in a stilted, formal way, I didn’t hear any trace of the accent I’d detected in Archangel’s words. What I did notice was the musical quality of his voice, how its rich tones conveyed a depth of compassion I wouldn’t have believed even without my mother’s warning. His eyes, too, seemed to melt with concern. Confronting those eyes up close, I saw that though the irises were almost black at the core, their edges held a prism of colors, brown and green and gold and gray, flickering like reflections off water. “Would you like us to heal her now?”

  “I think you’ve done enough damage already,” I said.

  “The techno woman wielded a gun,” the man said calmly, even soothingly. “I am required to defend my people.”

  “And our other man?” I said. “The one you killed? What did he do to deserve that?”

  “In battle, there are unavoidable losses,” he said, his voice dropping with false remorse. “The techno warrior we perceived to pose a threat, and there was no time to determine whether he deserved to live or die.”

  “He had a name,” I said, furious that he could dismiss Soon’s death so casually. “He wasn’t a techno.”

  “You are all technos,” he said in the same quiet, reasonable voice. “Men with machines, men of machines. You are the children of the despoilers, those who poisoned the air and land and water. Your leaders would have you believe their weapons of metal can save you. But nothing can save you now but the way of righteousness.”

  My heart sank at the realization that we’d been captured by a madman. I’d heard stories of people who’d lost it in the years after the wars, people who’d gone on killing sprees in their own colonies or run off by themselves to die in the desert. People driven mad by grief or guilt or despair. Laman’s own son had surrendered himself to the Skaldi after a lifetime of trying to live up to his father’s impossible demands. But I’d never heard of a madman who’d recruited an army of lunatics to fight his demons for him. And I’d never imagined anyone, mad or sane, who could provoke such fear from the woman I’d never known to show fear before.

  “Well, I’m the leader now,” I said, anger making my voice strong. “Pledged, like you, to protect my people.”

  His face quirked with surprise or amusement. “And how shall I address the leader of your people?”

  I saw Wali make a slicing motion with his hand, but I ignored him. “My name’s Querry Genn,” I said. “And you’re going to have to deal with me from now on.”

  The man’s expression never changed, though I thought I saw his eyes flicker with interest. “Is it customary among your people to delegate such power to one so young?”

  “It’s necessary,” I said. “To keep the chain of command intact.”

  He nodded as if that made sense to him. “We, too, train our young in the ways of wisdom. From their earliest days, they heed our word and learn to follow the true path. But what wisdom can there be in following a path that leads only to death?”

  “Are you going to let us fix her wrist or not?” I said.

  He smiled then, a pleasant, unforced smile, as if I’d complimented the color of his cloak or agreed with him about the chance of rain. He took one last look at Aleka’s wrist, then turned and whistled sharply. A man I hadn’t seen before separated himself from the cliff face and came to stand by his captain’s side. Unlike the others, he held no spear, and a neat beard lined his chin.

  The scarred man spok
e to this new arrival in a low voice, too quiet for me to tell if he was using our language or not. The bearded man listened silently, nodding and alert. Seeing him and his leader face to face, I became aware of something the common uniform had disguised: the two were much older than the rest. Some of the warriors, I realized, might have been Wali’s age or even mine, though their stolid faces and muscular bodies made them look older. But none of them, including Archangel, was much past their early twenties, while their leader and the bearded man were easily twice the warriors’ age, the skin around their eyes crinkled and dry, threads of gray woven into their hair. Everyone, including the bearded man, watched the man with scars intently. When he talked they all straightened, their concentration focused on him, their faces open as if his words filled them with a combination of fear and joy.

  When the one-sided conversation ended, the bearded man knelt by Aleka’s stretcher, reaching for a brown pouch that hung at his belt. Tyris and I tried to get between him and his patient, but both of us were pulled back, me by the irresistible might of Archangel’s iron hands, Tyris by a tug on the cord binding her wrists. The scarred man spoke again, raising his voice loud enough for all to hear. But his shifting eyes rested only on the teens and little kids, who stood in a huddle with Nessa at their head.

  “Hear me,” he said, “children of the despoilers. You must know that you are ours now, and so long as you remain in the Sheltered Lands our word is law. We will heal this woman’s injury, and if you allow us, we will heal that far greater injury none of you has yet imagined you bear. But if you resist us, we will cast you out, and abandon you to the power that dwells in the Shattered Lands: the Scavenger of Souls.”

  The name meant nothing to me, but a shiver went through me as he said it. Maybe it was the name, or maybe it was the effect of his rich, rolling voice, as mutable as the spinning prism of his eyes.

  “Who are you?” Nessa said breathlessly.

  His shoulders rippled in a way that made me think of squirming underground creatures, and the red cloak flared over his back, exposing again the lurid scars across his chest and arms. He raised his hands in a gesture of victory, as if he was reaching up to pull down the sky.