Soultaker

by Duperre, Robert J. ;

  “You think you could settle ’ol grumpypants down by petting his head too, brah?” asked Meesh with a laugh.

  Both brothers glared at him. Meesh shook his head, finished tying off his mare, which he’d named Pam, and then walked twenty paces away to dig a firepit.

  The frigid night was on them soon enough. The moon hanging in the sky was a giant sliver offering little illumination. It was during these dark hours, free from the destructive heat of day, that the world came alive. Nightweed, tiny vine-like plants that hid beneath the packed sand during daylight, forced their roots to the surface, leaves greedily sucking in whatever moisture the sudden drop in temperature brought. The livelier creatures of the desert emerged from their hiding places as well. Sabrewolves, giladons, sand spiders, terragils, and countless other predators lurked out there. A high-pitched shriek sounded somewhere off to the east. It sounded like a great hare breathing its last breath. As Shade tossed another lump of dried ragweed onto the low-burning fire, he wondered why any creature would choose to show itself after the sun went down. He’d sooner brave the heat than some unseen killer.

  Meesh finished placing the five crystal wards around their camp and slid onto his rump opposite Shade. His blue-gray eyes twinkled in the firelight as he lifted a strip of jerky out of his satchel and bit off the end. He grinned as he chewed.

  “What?” Shade asked, annoyed.

  “Oh, nothin’,” replied Meesh.

  “Brother,” said Abe, “did you place the wards evenly this time?”

  “Yup,” he said, still staring at Shade.

  “You certain?”

  “Yes!” the long-haired man snapped. “Don’t believe me? Go check ’em yourself.”

  Abe crossed his arms over his chest. “Simply want to be sure. Pentus help us, we don’t want a diamondhead sneaking up on us again.”

  “Fine,” Meesh said with a huff as he stood and left. “I’ll go check. Again.”

  The five crystals were important tools for surviving out in the Wasteland. When placed thirty feet apart from one another, they emitted a high frequency vibration that thwarted most nightly predators, giving the brothers a nice wide area to safely camp. They even kept the nightweed, which could be dangerous to a sleeping man, in a suspended state. That meant they could extract water from the plants too. The only beasts they didn’t work on were the sabrewolves, but thankfully those monstrous canines disliked the smell of ragweed, which was partly why they used it as fuel for their fires.

  Shade sucked in his lips, glad Meesh wasn’t watching him anymore. The palest brother reveled in prodding him, and during his low moments it was difficult not to lose his temper. He sat forward, took a deep breath, and stared at the dancing flames. When he closed his eyes he saw her face. His heart raced.

  He glanced to the left, where Abe was busy cleaning and oiling his railgun. Shade pulled his rucksack close to him, unlaced it, and removed Rosetta. It was a beautiful if ungainly thing; three feet long, with a silver barrel, polished wood underbelly, and ribbed metal grip. When Reverend Garron had given the weapon to him, he’d called it a thundermaker. Yet the knowledge his creator had imparted to him knew it as a shotgun. By either name, it just felt right in his hands, as if he’d been made to hold it.

  Shade didn’t pray often, but as he sat there he thanked the Pentus for giving him such an advantage. It had taken him two years to fully bond with his Eldersword, and without Rosetta he never would have survived those early days. The only drawback to the weapon was the need for ammunition. The silver slugs used for dispatching demons didn’t exist outside of Sal Yaddo, where they were produced, and he was only allotted twenty to bring with him on their various expeditions. Otherwise he relied on shells filled with tiny leaden balls that he forged himself.

  Shade went to work, popping out the nine shells docked inside and disassembling the weapon’s larger moving parts. Leaving the action untouched, he swabbed the barrel with cotton before moving on to scrub the choke tube. It was a relaxing, almost meditative process. In the corner of his vision he saw Meesh return from checking the wards. The young man plopped himself down, unsheathed his two revolvers (burners in the common lingo) and quickly disassembled them before oiling their barrels. Over the years, cleaning his weapons had become as much of a cathartic experience for Meesh as it was for Shade. It was the only time when the long-haired man shut the hell up.

  The maintenance done, the knights packed their weapons away. Often this was when the music began. The three of them would practice their songs (another effective routine to help keep the sabrewolves away) until they were too tired to go on. But on this night, Shade already felt exhausted. He yanked his wide-brimmed hat down over his eyes and went to lie back on his bedroll.

  “We need to talk,” Abe said.

  “No praying tonight, please,” Meesh grumbled.

  “Not tonight, I promise. But we’ll reach the mountains in the next two days. We need to sort this through.”

  Shade sat back up, legs crossed, elbows on his knees. “Are you doubting the theory that Cooper had something to do with this?” he asked.

  “Not at all. As a matter of fact, I’ve been thinking on it all day, and it might be worse than we thought.”

  “In what way?”

  Abe held up a finger. “First, there’s something you need to know about the Scourgers.”

  Meesh sighed. “They’re Scourgers, dude. Name says it all. Not much to understand.”

  Shade narrowed his eyes as his brother.

  “There’s always more to understand,” Abe said, his tone severe.

  “What’s it matter?” Meesh said. “So they’re spreading their joy around now. Like syphilis. We talk to them, and if they don’t stop, we kill ’em. Easy as pie.”

  Shade opened his mouth to retort, but Abe spoke first.

  “I don’t think you understand just how serious this is,” he said. “I’ve been here a hell of a lot longer than you. I know more about them than you.”

  “Ha! Brah, we saved that family from them a few years ago. You remember the geniuses who decided to cut through the mountains to get from Portsmouth to Po-Po, right? ‘Thought it’d be quicker,’ the dad said. What a moron.”

  Abe glowered. It wasn’t a look he gave often, and Shade shuddered despite himself.

  “Fighting the Scourgers and understanding them are two different things. The situation with the family, and when we chased the demon into the lower foothills, were the only times you’ve even seen them. I’ve actually spoken to their king.”

  Shade’s eyes widened. “You have?”

  “Yes. A long time ago. I was on my own after two of my other brothers died. Before being sent back to the Hallowed Stones, I paid them a visit to help them with a certain problem.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Abe said. “What’s important is the Scourgers are remnants of what came before. They’re an isolated people who’ve passed the afflictions of the Poison Mists down through hundreds of generations. They worship one of the Ancients’ gods, the same one Cooper’s taken up as his own. Which is why I think Shade’s right… Cooper must’ve gotten to them, and that’s not good.”

  Shade sank his teeth into his bottom lip.

  Abe continued: “According to what their king told me, the Scourgers have never left their mountain homes. Ever. I’ve never seen it, but he said they’ve created a world of their own up there. In one thousand and thirty-two years, the only people they’ve ever hurt have been those who’ve trespassed into their lands. If that’s the case, then this is Cooper’s doing. I’m sure of it.”

  Meesh shook his head. “Y’know, you both got a hard-on for Cooper something fierce. I don’t get it. I mean, what’s the dude done, really? Robbed a few villages? Grabbed a few hundred followers? We’ve seen worse. In case you haven’t noticed, we live in pretty rough times. Good for him for being proactive, even if he’s batshit crazy.”

  “He’s a murderer,” snapped Shade.
>
  “That so? I ain’t heard of him killing no one,” Meesh said, and Shade growled. How could his brother defend Cooper after what the bastard had done? He had to fight the urge to cuff his brother upside his head.

  He doesn’t know… he couldn’t know…

  “As for the Scourgers,” Meesh went on, “even though I like the Cooper idea, it’s still possible some blight happened up on the mountain and there’s no food, so now they’re branching out. Or maybe they’re looking to move off those damn mountains.”

  Abe raised an eyebrow. “No, that’s not possible. The Scourgers have kept to themselves for over a thousand years. According to the king, they can’t live anywhere but in the Rocklaw Mountains. The Poison Mists still linger up on the peaks, and they need that mist to simply exist. More than a few days without it, and their bodies wither and die. Which means they’re not coming down here by choice. Something happened up there, something that’s got them scared.” He offered Shade a grave look.

  Shade held Abe’s gaze. “And what could scare a Scourger in his own lands?”

  “The cursed weapons of the Elders,” Abe replied. “Tools of destruction that could raze whole cities to the ground. Reverend Garron is convinced Cooper got his hands on one.”

  “Weapons that require Heartcubes to power them.”

  “Exactly. The enslavement of man, the end of all time. It’s all in Old Crone’s riddle.”

  “Except what to do about it,” Meesh muttered.

  Shade ignored him, lifting the corner of the rucksack where his Eldersword was now stowed. He glimpsed the handle, smooth and metallic, powered by a sliver of Heartcube fastened inside its hilt. Just a sliver, and the sword vibrated with enough force to shear through solid granite. Just a sliver, and its connection with him caused vigor to flow through his veins.

  Just a sliver.

  There was no telling what a weapon powered by a full Heartcube could do.

  “We need to be careful with this,” Abe said. “We need to have faith in the Pentus and be diplomatic. If Cooper left something behind, something that forced their hand…”

  “Then we could be just as susceptible,” Shade finished for him.

  “Exactly.”

  “Well isn’t that a pleasant thought,” Meesh whispered.

  It sure isn’t. Shade shuddered and reclined onto his back without another word. There was nothing he could do about it now. To get his mind off the problem, he would have to satisfy himself by dreaming of slicing open Ronan Cooper from stern to stem.

  Shade couldn’t sleep. Every time he felt on the verge he saw her standing above him, gazing down lovingly, while annoying night sounds echoed in his ears. The horses had awoken, and in the blackness, they nibbled on nightweed. Meesh snored a few feet to his left; Abe moaned and rolled over beneath his blanket to the right.

  A woman’s voice rose over the sound of the bitter wind. “My love,” it said.

  Shade sat up with a start. He unfolded his heavy coat, threw it over his shoulders against the cold, and rose up on one knee.

  “My love, where are you?” said the voice.

  Shade’s lips curled into a smile. She came to me again. She truly came.

  “I’m coming,” he said.

  Shade quietly got to his feet, lifted up his belt and attached Eldersword from his rucksack, and worked it through the loops in his breeches as he strode. The voice called out to him again, from a smudge of deep blackness fifty feet away. He moved with hurried steps, pulled onward by the siren call. The nightweeds rustled beneath his boots, sounding almost like grass. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe the darkness is the time to be alive.

  In a way it was true, since the three times she had come to visit had all been during the blackest hours.

  “Shadrach, I’m waiting…”

  Shade passed one of the crystal wards, its surface twinkling even in the sparse light, and when he was outside the sphere of the wards’ protection, his ears popped. He worked his jaw up and down, trying to get his hearing back to normal.

  When he reached his destination, he found a ring of stones, each slightly taller than him. Shade circled the ring twice to gain his bearings, traced the rough surface of the stones with his fingers. He heard someone breathing from inside the ring. Shade stepped through a gap between two of the stones.

  The inside of the ring was large, perhaps twelve feet in diameter, and a glowing vision of splendor greeted him there. She was as beautiful as the first day Shade had met her, resplendent even though she wore the clothes of a common worker. Her straight black hair draped over her shoulders, falling just below her breasts. The light in the ring emanated from her flesh, as if she were covered with a million tiny diamonds that shone cobalt.

  Shade’s mind flooded with relief, but he couldn’t smile.

  “My love, what’s wrong?” the girl asked.

  He looked at her and frowned, but said nothing.

  “I told you I’d find you again, and here I am.”

  Shade listened to the singsong nature of her voice, and his heart plummeted. “What do you expect from me?” he asked softly.

  “I expect you to be happy.”

  At that, Shade shook his head. “It’s impossible, Vera. You’re dead. There’s no happiness without you.”

  The apparition drifted away from him slightly, hands clasped before her, looking like a hurt child. Shade wanted nothing more than to run to his lover and wrap his arms around her, but he knew that was impossible. When he’d tried it the first night she had come to him, in his chambers back in the Temple of the Crone, his arms had passed right through her body, her form becoming mist where he touched. He didn’t want to experience that again. Not ever.

  “I am not gone,” Vera said.

  “But you aren’t here,” he whispered. He had met Vera Hari three years prior during a visit to Lemsberg, a large township located on the edge of the mountains separating the Wasteland from whatever icy desolation lay to the north. Reverend Garron had sent Shade there to barter with Lemsberg’s quartermaster for lumber to be sent to a needy settlement farther south.

  When first he’d laid eyes on Vera, the quartermaster’s ward from Lambswool, who acted as his personal assistant, he was smitten. With dark skin and straight black hair, she stood out among the sea of pale faces. That first evening she’d invited him to sup with her beneath one of the mountain evergreens, eating freshly cooked beef topped with stewed tomatoes—an unheard of feast in the Wasteland—while they talked trade. She convinced Shade to give the quartermaster double the bounty Reverend Garron had allotted him in exchange for two tons of cut logs, while his tender, naïve ramblings made her smile as she invited him into her body. They made love for the first time that night under the light of the full moon, tenderly, passionately. How Shade had trembled afterward.

  In all, he spent four months in Lemsberg under the guise of overseeing the production of lumber, and he spent nearly every moment at Vera’s side. He had even considered abandoning his knightly duties and fleeing with his love to some remote location where they’d never be found. It was only when the quartermaster came to him with a desperate message from Sal Yaddo that Shade tore himself away. His brothers were in peril, the message said, overwhelmed by a legion of otherworldly demons in the far west of the continent. Shade had promised Vera he’d return and galloped off.

  He had never expected the message to be a fake, but when he arrived in the village of Tansaray he found that all was well. Though he’d been glad his brothers were safe, the quartermaster had lied to him, had driven him away from Lemsberg under false pretenses, and his anger with the man bloomed.

  That quartermaster would go on to become the brigand prophet Ronan Cooper.

  Shade dug his fingernails into his palms and stared at Vera’s ghost. I should’ve gone back for you, he thought. She offered a sad smile in return as if reading his mind. She lifted her hand to brush it against his face, trailing wisps of light. Her fingers passed through his flesh, his cheek grew cold.
<
br />   “Don’t,” he said.

  Shade slumped against one of the stones, wrapped his arms around himself. “My love?” Vera said, but he refused to look up. Just seeing her reminded him of all the letters he had secretly sent to her since they’d last seen each other, letters that had stopped being replied to a year later. Simply gazing into her ethereal eyes caused him to relive the first time she had come to him like this four months ago, saying that she’d died and it was Ronan Cooper’s fault.

  “I can’t do this,” Shade whispered.

  “But you promised.”

  “I was wrong.”

  Vera leaned against the stone beside him, hands clasped, head hanging low. The bluish glow trailing off her ghostly flesh was so very much unlike the lively, dark-skinned beauty he once knew, and her formerly brown eyes shimmered an unearthly gray. Yet she was still beautiful.

  “I’ll never be whole,” he said softly. “I’m lost without you.”

  “You will be,” she answered. “You have to be.”

  “I’m sorry I never came back.”

  “I know. And that’s a regret you’ll carry with you for the rest of your days.”

  “That I will,” he said with a nod.

  Vera stared at him fondly. “Stay with me, my love. And don’t be sad. The man I fell in love with was a man of duty, of honor. That’s why I told you ‘no’ when you said you wanted to run away together. Had we done so, you would have become something different than what you’d been. If that had happened, I don’t know if the love I felt would have survived.” Her visage took a deep breath as she touched her breast. “I wanted to love you forever in here, Shadrach. I wanted our purity to last. And it did.”

  How could there be purity when I almost broke my vows? he thought, but didn’t say.

  “I’m bound to him,” Vera continued, sounding almost pained. Her voice echoed in his brain as if born between his ears. “I am always there, watching you, loving you. It is painful, yes, but I take solace in the belief that you will avenge me. Destroy the one who took me… destroy my…” She hesitated, winced. “My master. It is only then that my soul will be freed.”