Feast of Souls

by C. S. Friedman

  But someone should have been in the street. Surely!

  Skittish as a wild rabbit, the boy made his way slowly down the silent street. Nothing was moving. By now he would have expected a dog to come around sniffing after him, or, or . . . something.

  Nothing.

  He passed a lump of horse excrement on the street. It wasn’t all that old, and had a host of flies gathered around it like greedy peasants at a feast. The sight of it struck such sudden fear in his heart that the young boy almost turned and ran without even knowing why. But he forced himself to stand his ground, telling himself that mere flies and feces could not harm him, and trying to put a name to the fear that was slowly becoming a cold fist around his heart.

  “Hello . . . ?”

  He passed by the town’s small tavern. It wasn’t much of one, really, but it served well enough to sell cheap ale to the men who called this place home, and such tidbits of food as the dusty coinage of weathered peasants might buy. In deference to their business the owner dumped his waste in a narrow alley between houses rather than out in the street like most others. The boy caught sight of the refuse pile as he passed by . . . and then stopped, and came closer, and stared at it. Again he was filled with a sense of wrongness so instinctive, so utterly animal in its tenor, that he nearly turned and ran. Again he forced himself to stand his ground and tried to figure out what it could be about a mound of rotting garbage that would make him so afraid.

  And then he realized what it was.

  There were no rats.

  He looked back at the street behind him. None were there either, though the small gray creatures should be slipping out of their hiding places this time of the day, daring a moment or two in the sunset’s growing shadows to grab a bit of refuse before all their brothers came out to fight for their share of human filth. Their presence in the town was a normal backdrop to human activity, something that women cursed vehemently but no one had any hope of stopping.

  There were no rats now.

  Not in the street, not in the shadows, not nosing through the fresh garbage . . . none at all.

  He took a few steps back, and inadvertently stepped in a mound of horse droppings. The flies rolled off its surface like tiny black marbles. Dead. They were all dead.

  “Mother?”

  Panic gripped his small heart. He began to run. Not away from the town, as all his better instincts were screaming for him to do, but down the street, past the main section of the town, to where small houses were scattered along the dirt road, each with its own mound of rat-free, insect-free garbage.

  “Mother!”

  The birds weren’t singing either, he noticed breathlessly as he pulled up before his house. Nor were the insects buzzing. Wrong, wrong, it was all wrong!

  He pounded on the front door until it gave way before him. No voice answered his cries. He upset a stool as he staggered inside, tears of fear running hot down his cheeks. No one noticed the stool careen across the floor, or lifted a leg to get out of its way, or cursed at him for knocking it over.

  Next to the coarsely hewn table in the middle of the small common room sat his mother. She was slumped on the bench with her head resting on the table’s surface beside a dried-up piece of bread. Her expression was almost peaceful, if you could overlook the morning’s bruises; had the boy not just made enough noise upon entering to wake the dead, he might have thought her merely sleeping. His little sister, however, had slid off the bench beside her and was huddled on the floor like a broken doll. A small piece of bread had rolled out of her hand, and come to a stop by the hearth. There were a few small black bits nearby that might once have been insects. They weren’t moving now.

  The air in the small room was stifling. For a moment the boy’s chest tightened up and it was hard to breathe, as if the very stillness of the place had a mind of its own and was sucking the life out of him. By sheer force of will he forced himself to move, to look in all the tiny corners of the house where small, frightened children might hide. There he found another body, that of his youngest brother, barely an infant. The body looked peaceful for once, not screaming its hunger and frustration out to all within hearing as it had done most of the time when it was alive. Whatever had taken the people in this house, it had done so with such stealth that no one saw Death coming.

  Was that what had happened in the rest of the small town? Was every house like this one, peopled with corpses?

  He felt bile rise up in his throat and knew that he was about to vomit, not from sickness but from fear. Out of habit he turned to the door and started toward it, fearing the beating his father would give him if he soiled something in the house. But then he saw a shadow of movement outside, and in his sudden stunned wonderment he forgot about vomiting altogether. Even the sourness in his stomach receded, and the worst of the fear with it.

  Motion. There was motion! That meant that something out there was alive, right?

  He stumbled to the door, afraid that whatever it was would be gone by the time he got there. But no, it was out there in the street, a flying thing about the size of a bird, and as he came to the door it approached him and hovered right in front of his face, its bright wings beating quick patterns in the dying sunlight.

  If he had seen it from a distance he might have called it a dragonfly, for it had the long slender body of one, and its translucent wings fanned out in the same graceful pattern. But it was far too large to be a dragonfly, or any kind of insect, and its head was more like that of a lizard than an insect. Or maybe a snake. The body was supple, a deep blue-black that reflected the sunset in glints of purple, and its flesh seemed to quiver as the matching pairs of slender, gossamer wings beat the air, holding it in position right before his face. What beautiful wings they were! All blues and purples, translucent as stained glass, flashing iridescent in the sunlight. Their motion was rhythmic, hypnotic, and despite his fear the boy felt himself drawn into them, unable to look away. From somewhere in the distance he was aware of two black eyes gazing at him, and perhaps if he had looked directly into those eyes he might have felt a new terror take hold, sensing the nascent intelligence in their depths. But he didn’t. His eyes were fixed wholly on the jeweled wings and the play of the dying light upon their moist and glittering membranes.

  He had been afraid of something, hadn’t he? Something in this town. He struggled to remember what it was, but the memory slid out of his grasp like a wet eel. What a beautiful thing this creature in front of him was. He wondered if it had a name. What if it didn’t? What if he was the first person ever to see one? What if he told his mother about it, and she said that no, it had no name . . . could he choose a name for it then? Would people call this strange thing whatever he chose?

  His mother . . .

  From somewhere in the dark recesses of his mind a memory surfaced. Just for a moment, but it was enough to make him step back.

  The creature followed him. Its bright wings glittered as it crossed the threshold into the shadows of the house.

  Mother?

  He moved back again. The back of his leg hit the bench suddenly and he nearly fell. Reaching out a hand blindly to where the table should be, he hit it with a force that sent the items atop it clattering to the ground. The sound jarred him out of his trance and he looked around just in time to see his mother’s corpse collapse onto the floor, like some twisted, broken doll.

  “NOOOOO!”

  The thing was between him and the door. He didn’t care. He covered his head with his arms and just ran in that direction, praying he’d prove stronger than it was. He didn’t dare look at it again. As he passed through the space where it had been hovering he braced himself for some kind of attack—did it have fangs like a real snake?—but it made no effort to stop him. A moment later he was out in the street, running faster than he had ever run in his whole life. Now, it seemed, he could sense motion in the shadows—glittering motion, hovering wherever there were dead things—but he didn’t stop to look. If he did they would get him too,
he knew that now. Like they had gotten his mother. His sister. And everything else in the small town. . . .

  Not until he was nearly a mile away did he stop running and then it was only because the pain in his legs was so bad he couldn’t go on. It was nearly night by then, and it seemed to him as he collapsed on the ground that the shadows were alive with twilight-colored insects that glittered and bobbed as they surrounded him. He sobbed as he gasped for breath, one arm held before his eyes, trying to remember what prayers you said when you wanted a god to come protect you. But the words wouldn’t come. No words would come. It was as if the strange creature had stolen his voice, didn’t want him to pray for help.

  Slowly, inexorably, night descended.

  Chapter 12

  GANSANG WAS smaller than Kamala remembered it. Dirtier also, with a scent of decay that she had never noticed as a child. Or maybe it had just never bothered her back then. Now it was a rank smell that seemed to seep into everything: the clothes she wore, the food she ate, even her very skin. She kept binding soulfire to scrub her person clean of it but it kept coming back. Or maybe such a thing was beyond the power even of Magisters, a primal condition of the place that sorcery could not cancel out. If you made the stink of a city go away, would the place itself disappear?

  All her years with Ethanus she had dreamed of nothing but Gansang. Coming back to it in triumph, no longer an adolescent whore to be trod underfoot but a sorcerer of the highest order who could weave it a new fate as casually as most men ate their breakfast. But now that she was here—now that she was a Magister in truth—she realized such a task would not be so easy. Like the art of moving clouds, the fate of a city was too complex a thing to be managed casually. Each part of it fit into all the others like a grand puzzle. Move one piece and a thousand other fates would tremble; remove one altogether and something even darker might take its place.

  Obliterating the entire place was always an option, of course. And she felt a sudden thrill that radiated from the core of her soul to her fingertips at the knowledge of what she could do if she wanted to. She could bring the whole place crashing down, all its dirty streets and its thieves and its whoremasters with it, until there was nothing left but a vast mound of stinking debris. Many consorts would have to die for her to do that, of course, but then, men would die beneath the rubble too, drowning in the very filth and degradation they had once delighted in. Such a move was measured in death.

  There would be justice in such an act.

  Night fell early in the narrow streets, tall buildings of aged wood and crumbling plaster blotting out the light of the sun long before it had actually set. In the premature dusk the scavengers of the city stirred to life, rats and humans alike. The beggars who thronged the streets in the sunlit hours had slipped away into alleys and cellars to count their bits of coin, and thieves and whores took their place, taking up stations in the larger streets and outside taverns, waiting like wolves for the weak and the helpless to make themselves known so that they could be separated from the herd and devoured.

  I am not one of you any longer, she thought, nor prey for you, but something else. Something new. Something that stands apart from the world and watches, untouched by human bloodshed or tears.

  She still wore the clothing she had adopted in Ethanus’ domain, more like a boy’s attire than anything a respectable city woman would wear. The high boots and tight-fitting leather jerkin were black in color, not sorcerous black but dark enough to suggest shadows and secrets. With her flame-red hair tucked up into a cap she could pass for a boy at first glance, though anyone who bothered to look closely might have second thoughts about the matter, which suited her just fine. She hated women’s clothing with a passion, and when her mother was alive they had argued often over whether or not she had to wear it. She hated the bondage of skirts about her legs, and hated most of all the way they dragged in the mud and the muck, so that all the city’s foulness flapped about her ankles as she walked. Once as a girl she had taken a table knife and cut off her own muddy hem, turning her dress into a sort of ragged tunic. She’d been beaten for that by her mother, soundly beaten, but it had been worth every blow.

  Now . . . now she was free to do as she pleased. And if any man took issue with it, let him say so to her face, and he would bear the consequences.

  Her mother brought them to Gansang shortly after Kamala’s brother had recovered from the Plague, hoping for opportunities that the small town of their birth could not provide. The city had chewed her up and spit her out, but not after forcing her to sell her two children to whatever buyers would have them. Kamala did not hate her mother for what she had done to them, though neither did she forgive her. Her feeling was more of an emptiness, a void of human emotion. She wondered how she would greet her mother if she found her in some alleyway now, if she would acknowledge her as her mother or just pass by in disgust, as she would a stranger. But it was all just empty fantasy. The woman was long since dead, claimed by some disease of the gutters, and Kamala . . . Kamala had chosen a new road, one that hopefully led to better places. Or at least to cleaner ones.

  Like a stranger now she walked through the city of her youth, like a ghost, touching nothing, seeing all. The natives gave way to her, and though she thought she saw fleetingly in aging eyes here and there the shadows of people she’d known in her youth, no one spoke to her. They did not know her. Poverty and the reek of failure aged men prematurely, so that she no longer matched the generation she had left behind. The girls who had once stood on a street corner with her, shivering against winter’s cold as they sought to bare enough flesh to interest passing travelers, were now as lined and aged in their faces as her mother had been in that time, broken spirits and utter lack of hope etched into their very flesh. Unrecognizable.

  And still men paid for them, Kamala thought darkly, because in the end whoring is not about pleasure but about degradation, the pleasure not so much a thing of the flesh as a triumph of power—the certain knowledge that your coin can buy a human being, can render her at your mercy for a few brief minutes. Oh, the fancy lords of the Hill might favor delicately painted ladies, and treasure those courtesans who dallied with them in the shadows of the court while servants played music and burned sweet incense, but here in the poverty-ridden district called the Quarter a man’s pleasure had as much to do with the heartlessness and the anonymity of the act as any “higher” calling. Why else would anyone buy a child?

  The anger came over her then in a rush, and with it the memory of despair. It is over now, she told herself. No man can ever do that to you again. For a brief moment she toyed with the idea of using her power to protect those who were still following that road, but the moment passed quickly. There were too many of them in the world for the efforts of one Magister to make a difference, and in a twisted way, it seemed wrong to drain the life of one morati just to save another.

  Magister morality is a tangled thing, Ethanus had said. For the first time she understood what he had meant.

  As night’s humid miasma settled upon the streets she felt the first pangs of hunger. For a moment she fumbled for her purse, out of habit. She still had the few precious coins she had carried with her as a child, back when she had fled the city to seek a better fate. Now . . . now they were little more than adornment, a weight in the purse that hung at her belt to make her look normal. A Magister needed no money.

  She passed by a few of the Quarter’s taverns, waiting until she found one where the smell of beer and cooking spices was stronger than the reek of human sweat. It took a while. The places were small, usually on the first floor of narrow buildings, but she found one on a corner that had enough air coming in to at least mix up the smells, if not banish the fouler ones entirely.

  (The forest had smelled sweet. So sweet. Especially after a rain, when you could hear the insects rustling under newly washed leaves in search of hidden drops to drink.)

  There was a beggar at the door but she pushed past him without a second glance. She�
��d seen enough beggars in this city counting their coin after a good day’s take to know what fake wounds and feigned deformities were worth. She had pity for a child tied up in rags to engender sympathy, because usually his cuts and welts were real—parents didn’t mind cutting up the young ones, or even gouging out an eye occasionally, if it made their misery more profitable—but grown men made their own choices, and few of the beggars went hungry.

  (And for a moment she remembered her brother, the scabs of the Green Plague broken open again and again by her mother until they scarred, because scars were worth money, and the rage welled up inside her, and the memories began to stir from that dark place where they lay hidden, like some deadly serpent coming forth from the shadows . . .)

  “Here for dinner, lad? You’ve almost missed the serving.”

  Startled, she looked up. Yes, the words had been addressed to her. In the shadows of the place the speaker could not see details of her person, and so had simply accepted the tale that her clothing told.

  “Yes, er . . . thank you.” She coughed, wondering if they took her for a young enough “lad” that her voice would pass muster, or if she should disguise it. The sudden thrill of the subterfuge made her toes curl. “I’ll take what you’ve got.” She jingled her purse, to make sure the man understood she could afford the meal. As if money mattered.

  The place was dark and dusty and filled mostly with men ending a day’s labor—or avoiding one. Their hands were stained with grit and their nails were black and Ethanus would have never received them in that state. A slight smile quirked her lips at that thought, remembering her own unwashed condition as a child. Most residents of Gansang believed that washing too often would do them harm. Given that the Quarter had been built out over what was once a salt marsh, and was known for the sluggish channels of brackish water that coursed through it, that might well be an accurate assessment.

  She took a table in the far corner where the shadows gathered and sat with her back to the wall. A few minutes later a wooden plate and tankard were brought to her. The latter had something brown in it with froth on the top. The plate held a greasy meat pie, with far more onions and garlic than meat. She pulled out a coin from her bag and held it for a moment, winding the power around it until she was satisfied it felt right, then offered it. She watched, breath held, as he took it up and studied it in the dim light, then nodded and offered her change. She also watched as he put it into his own deep pocket, where other coins jingled. Good. By the time the enchantment wore off and its true denomination was apparent, it would be mixed in with all the others.