Feast of Souls

by C. S. Friedman

  Sulah remembered what Colivar had taught him about the balance of nature, and wondered about the effect this tragedy would have on local animal populations. Would more meat eaters be born in the time following such bounty, only to be brought into a world that offered no more such feasts? Would they be forced out of the forest by their increased numbers, to brave the towns of men in search of sustenance? Would men die five years down the line in some distant town, not knowing what had prompted the assault?

  All these things were related, Colivar had taught him. Nothing changed in the world without fostering changes itself. The difference between the art of the Magisters and the magic worked by witches, he said, was that the former took such things into account, both in the planning and the execution.

  As well we must, Sulah had once mused. A witch might create a sizeable disturbance before she died, but only that. A Magister could, in theory, change the world itself. Though the gods alone knew how many people would have to die to provide the power for such a thing, or what a Magister’s soul would look like after he had done it.

  Moderation and restraint are what will keep you human, Colivar had taught him. Never forget that.

  Sulah had asked him many times why being “human” was so important, since it seemed to him that many Magisters were not. It was among the many questions his teacher had never answered.

  Slowly the two of them walked through the small town, reading its story in the bones that were scattered along the street. Once Colivar stopped and opened the door of a small house, to see what there was in places the beasts could not go. A putrid smell greeted their nostrils, and he bade the breeze sweep it away before they entered.

  The bones of those inside were stripped equally clean, but eerily so, as they were still more or less in the posture in which they had died. The discarded husks of maggots lay in thousands upon the floor and crunched underfoot as Colivar inspected the place. A handful of insects buzzed about his head, but most had clearly found their way out by the same means they had come in. And of course there were rat droppings. Always rat droppings.

  Sulah was silent while his teacher inspected the place, his expression grim. He had been to the town before, for the same sort of inspection, and knew what would be found.

  Finally Colivar nodded for them to leave. The fresh air outside was welcome, with a brisk wind from the north that scoured the town clean of its rotten smells. Colivar took a deep breath of it and said, “What is there in the surrounding area?”

  “Woods, mostly. A river down that way.” He pointed.

  “No clearings? There should be one somewhere, not far beyond the borders of men.”

  “I do not know. I did not think to search for one.”

  Colivar nodded. With an almost casual gesture he called up a bit of soulfire and bade it gather before him. A foggy map that seemed to reflect the landscape surrounding the small town appeared. There appeared to be a few places nearby that were bereft of trees, the majority of them cultivated lands, circumscribed by low stone walls built when they were cleared. There was a wilder place farther off, a narrow strip where the earth was not deep enough for trees to take root, but evidently not well suited to farming.

  “There,” Colivar whispered. “That will be it.”

  “What?” Sulah asked him. “What are you looking for?”

  “What I hope not to find,” Colivar said quietly, “but fear that I will.”

  He would answer no more questions after that, but called the horses to them and mounted his own in silence, his expression as dark as a stormcloud about to break. And Sulah, who had been his student, knew him well enough not to press for answers.

  Wild the land was, in the place surrounding the narrow clearing, and wild things chittered and chirruped in the shadows as Colivar and Sulah made their way through the thick brush at its border into the open.

  For a moment then Colivar just stood still, studying the landscape. His aspect reminded Sulah of a wild beast just come into the open, eyeing the surrounding woods for predators . . . or perhaps prey. But whatever Colivar sought it was not so simple a thing as wolves or deer, that was clear. Sulah had never seen him in such a dark mood as now, and as he watched his elder take the measure of the land, he could almost taste on his lips the aura of foreboding that surrounded him.

  The strip of land was a narrow one, but long, that twisted between jutting granite slabs near the rise of a mountain. Some quirk of earthly creation had made its soil shallow enough that trees could not anchor themselves comfortably, and the place was too rocky and irregular to draw human interest, so it had been left for grasses and scraggly low bushes to colonize despite its proximity to the town.

  “This is the place,” Colivar said quietly. His expression was grim as he looked about the area, searching for something as yet unseen. “If it is anywhere to be found, it will be here . . .”

  Having learned from the preceding hours that Colivar was not in a mood for answering questions, Sulah followed patiently behind him as he slowly walked the length of the clearing, his sharp black eyes taking in everything. Then suddenly he hissed, and stopped. The sound was sudden enough that Sulah found his hand going for his knife . . . as if what had killed all the people in that town might be stopped by simple steel.

  What had drawn Colivar’s attention was a mound of rocks near one edge of the clearing. All around it the land was barren, stripped even of its sparse grasses. As Sulah looked more closely he could see that the area was scored by what might be claw marks, as if some huge thing had been digging there. In such a context, the mound of rocks at its center seemed distinctly unnatural.

  Colivar cursed vividly, and the dialect he used was so foreign—or so ancient—that Sulah could only understand half of it.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  Colivar did not answer him. He no longer seemed to be aware of Sulah’s existence, or indeed of anything else surrounding him.

  With steady steps he moved to the rock pile and began to remove stones from it, one after the other, casting them aside with little concern for where they might fall. Sulah had to dodge one as he scrambled to his side to watch. Now that he was closer to the mound he could see clearly that it was no natural thing; the stones had been placed so as to interlock closely, providing a sound shelter for whatever lay beneath. A burial mound, perhaps? It didn’t seem to him that the size was quite right, unless it was that of a child. . . .

  And then Colivar seemed to find whatever he was searching for, and he cursed again, this time in a language Sulah did understand. The nature of that curse made his blood run cold.

  “Look,” his teacher commanded.

  He leaned forward to look down into the hole that Colivar had made. In its shadows he could see a layer of dried grass that his teacher had broken through, and could just make out beneath that some off-white fragments of something. It took him a moment to identify them.

  “Eggshells?”

  Colivar nodded, and then resumed his digging. This time Sulah helped him. Now that he had some sense of what they were digging toward he was able to do so without ruining the find, and soon they had laid bare a collection of what appeared to be broken eggs, all gathered neatly in a bowl-shaped depression that had been scraped into the shallow earth.

  They would have been large eggs, about the size of a fist, and like nothing Sulah had ever seen before. The outside was a dull white but the inside glistened with color, and as he turned a fragment up to catch the sunlight it flashed a deep blue where something had caught on the shell and stuck there. He pried it loose with his fingernail and held it close to his eye to examine. Reptile skin, it looked like, though of the most unusual color.

  “Is this where it came from?” he asked. “The thing the boy saw?”

  Colivar nodded grimly.

  Sulah put the shell fragment down. The nest—if that’s what it was—was a large one. There must have been dozens of eggs in it once, though most were now shattered.

  “Are there then
. . . this many? Of those things?”

  Colivar shook his head. “They fight each other when they first hatch, so that only the strongest survive. They don’t leave the nest until much later. Sometimes a dozen will survive that stage. Sometimes only one.” He studied the part of the nest that still lay buried, as if trying to calculate how many were born, and how few of those might have survived. “Even one is not good,” he said at last.

  Sulah dared to ask it, finally. “This is what killed the town?”

  Colivar hesitated. “This is the cause of the Black Sleep,” he said finally. “So many of these making their transformation at the same time . . . once they cease to feed on one another they need another source of food. But this one nest should not have killed a whole town . . .”

  “Are these what the ancients called Souleaters, then?”

  Colivar nodded. “Men used to hunt the nests, trying to kill them before they came forth. But it was hard. The presence of that many, even in their hatching form, acts as a kind of sorcerous barrier; one can stand right on top of a nest and not realize it is there.” He looked at the fragment of shell he held in one hand. Then crushed it. “Only witches could find them, back then. And the effort cost them many years of life. Few would risk it, in the early days.”

  “And after that?” Sulah asked the question softy, as if afraid that sound would scatter his teacher’s thoughts. In all the years that he had been with Colivar the man had never spoken so openly of what took place in the Dark Ages, when mankind had waged a losing war against the beasts that fed upon human souls, and lost everything that was precious to them as a result.

  “Then the hunting flight of the ikati darkened the skies, and all that was within man that was intelligent, or creative, or civilized, died.” His voice had dropped to a mere whisper, hardly louder than the breeze stirring the trees nearby. “They had come to prefer men for food, you see, and from that time onward, it was said there could be no peace between the two races—one or the other must die.

  “So the witches finally came together and hunted them down—or drove them out—until there were none left . . . on either side.” He turned his hand over and dropped the crushed bits of eggshell to the ground. “Their blood was the purchase price for the Second Age of Kings.”

  “The witches all died?”

  “If not in battle, soon after.”

  “You never told me that.”

  Colivar looked at the younger man. “You are not a witch. And there were no ikati when we spoke. Why remember things that have no purpose?”

  “So where did the first Magisters come from?”

  “Later. They came later.” He brushed his hand against his breeches, dislodging the crushed bits of eggshell. “Now, it seems, we must learn these things anew.”

  He stood up beside the mound, slowly, as if the weight of all those stones was upon his shoulders. Then he turned north and gazed at the cold skies as if answers might be found in them. Sulah did the same, but found no enlightenment in the pattern of clouds—whatever his teacher was gazing at had clearly more to do with memory than with the current situation—and he finally brought his gaze back down to earth—

  And gasped.

  Colivar looked down at him sharply. “What is it?”

  He couldn’t speak, for a moment. So he pointed. To the mound of rocks perhaps ten yards away, almost hidden from view by the tall grasses between them.

  With a muttered curse Colivar strode to the place. It was smaller than the first nest but similar in structure, and this time he didn’t pick it apart with care. A quick gesture served to bind enough soulfire to blow it apart, sending the small rocks hurtling toward the forest, baring the pile of broken shells beneath.

  “It can’t be,” he whispered, staring at the fragments. “They would never do this . . .”

  Now that he knew what to look for, Sulah could make out another bare spot some yards beyond them. It, too, seemed to host one of the great nests, stones just visible in the shafts of cloud-filtered sunlight.

  “Another, my teacher.” He said it quietly, but the words had great effect; a shudder seemed to run through Colivar’s body as he turned to regard the newest find, and a new emotion stirred in the black depths of his eyes that Sulah had never seen there before.

  Fear.

  “They are hostile creatures,” he whispered, “even to their own kind. If they had been otherwise, if they had been capable of gathering together in great numbers, and of acting in a unified manner, mankind would have stood no chance at all. For the females to share a nesting site . . . it is . . . was . . . unthinkable.”

  “They have changed, then.”

  Colivar didn’t respond. He turned to the north and gazed into the skies as if somehow answers could be found there.

  “This is what killed the town, isn’t it?” Sulah pressed. “So many of them at once, all drawing their strength from the nearest source of life.”

  Colivar nodded. “Yes. So many at once . . . more than a human settlement could handle.”

  Without further word Colivar began to walk back to where they had left the horses. Sulah attempted a few more questions, but they went unanswered; the elder Magister was clearly too lost in dark thoughts of his own to play the teacher’s role any longer.

  There was only one more thing he offered, as he mounted his horse, and as he shot one last look toward the nesting ground and the tone of it made Sulah’s blood run cold.

  “May the gods save us all . . .” Colivar whispered.

  Reckoning

  Chapter 29

  IT WAS a moonless night, and a fog hung low over the High Queen’s courtyard. The ancestor trees were shadowed and ghostly, lit only by the flickering light of a half-hooded lantern set upon a marble bench, and her spears glistened wetly in the damp night air. It reminded Gwynofar of how the real Spears appeared back home, when morning’s moisture condensed on the chilled stone; the sight of them made her ache with homesickness.

  She was spending more and more time here of late. There was no other place in the castle she could go to escape Kostas but her own chambers, and she refused to let him make her a prisoner in her own rooms. Once she could have sought refuge in her husband’s presence, taking comfort from his obvious devotion to her but now that had changed, too. It was hard to be in Danton’s presence without remembering what he had done to her. Hard to remember that act and forgive.

  With a sigh she offered up drops of her blood to the spears, placing one on each glistening surface, praying to the gods of the Wrath as she did so that they would lend some kind of peace to her soul. They were gods of war and generally did not oversee such gentle tasks, but she had nowhere else to turn. Her family was too far away for comfort, her memories of home were fading in the face of her long absence from the northlands, and the one member of Danton’s household who had brought her real joy had taken his own life.

  Suddenly there was a rustling behind her. With a terrible sinking feeling in her heart she turned to see who it was, half expecting Kostas to be standing there, or perhaps her husband. But it was neither of them, though in the flickering shadows her visitor might have been mistaken for the High King.

  “Mother.” It was Rurick, her firstborn. “I don‘t disturb your prayers, do I?”

  “You are never a disturbance.” She reached out a hand to welcome him; he took it and kissed it with rough grace. “But I thought you did not care for this place.”

  Rurick shrugged. In the darkness he was the spitting image of his father, from his heavy brow and narrow black eyes to his hawklike nose. He was not as stout as Danton—yet—but had the same solidity of frame that lent the High King an aura of uncompromising substance. In truth, it was sometimes hard to believe that a creature so utterly unlike her had come out of her womb, but that was the way of it with Danton’s sons. All of them except Andovan.

  The sudden reminder of her loss threatened to bring tears to her eyes, and she lifted up a hand to brush a lock of hair from her face, wiping t
he corners of her eyes before moisture could gather there. Even in front of her sons she hated to look weak.

  “Not my favorite place,” Rurick allowed, “but there are others who like it less. And so it has its uses. Are we alone here?”

  “No servants come here, by my order. And your father does not, by his own choice.”

  “And Kostas hasn’t the balls to. From what I hear.”

  She bit back on her first response. “No,” she said quietly. “He does not come here.”

  He nodded. “Good enough.”

  He was an impressive figure, dressed in a rich knee-length gown, with the Aurelius double-headed hawk repeated in gold upon a velvet background. The fabric was too heavy for the season, but that never mattered to Rurick. Strutting about in fine clothes and being feared and admired by all within eyeshot was very important to him. In that he differed greatly from his father, who only cared about the “feared” part.

  He looked over the area surrounding the Spears, peering into the shadows as if making sure that no one was hidden there. Was he really so worried about eavesdroppers, or was his message so unpleasant that he was stalling its delivery? Neither explanation was reassuring to her. She waited silently for him to broach his business, dreading the worst.

  Finally he sighed heavily, and rested one foot upon the end of a pale marble bench. “Frankly, I am afraid that if I tell you what is going on in my mind, you will judge me mad.”

  She smiled faintly, with a mother’s eternal indulgence. “Never, my son.”

  “Or that I merely desire the throne before my time. That I seek signs of trouble in House Aurelius, to make that come about.”

  She kept the maternal smile carefully in place. “No, Rurick. I know you better than that.” In truth it was very possible that he lusted after the throne, and had possibly even harbored dreams of claiming it ahead of his time—what ambitious young prince would not?—but he was not a creature of great subtlety, and was unlikely to weave some complicated plot to undermine his father, if only out of certainty that Danton would catch him at it.