“How can you be so sure? If it had taken even a moment longer and you felt my spirit, what would you have done?” She shook her head, her eyes never meeting his. “I didn’t even think a person’s soul could be drawn from them like that.”
“It can’t,” Micah announced, never looking back. “I’ve seen many people wield spirit for any number of reasons and I’ve heard a lot of priests talk of what can be done with it. None of them ever mentioned anything like this. In fact,” he said, stressing his words, “they’ve said it is quite the opposite. Human spirits are protected so long as the living have use for them.”
“I disagree.” Kelc’s words ended the discussion. Not because he said them with any emotion, but because he had just drawn a man’s soul, against his will, devastating his body in the process.
They plodded on in silence for a short while, Kelc deep in thought, trying to discern what his power could do and why, but he arrived at no useful conclusions.
Shaia seemed lost in thoughts of her own, her hands clutching Kelc’s scimitar before her, her eyes unfocused, looking forward.
Micah continued on, hauling Kelc along, bearing his weight in silence as the town of Wemmerton shrank behind him.
All at once, the vampire stopped walking. “They’ve seen us,” he said, sliding Kelc to the ground. “Took them long enough.” He shook his head, his brown eyes peering back at the small town, the irises occasionally reflecting yellow.
Shaia spun to look for the deputies, but she could see nothing. “Where? How do you know?”
Kelc struggled with his guts as they roiled inside, reacting badly to the change in posture. He glanced to Wemmerton for a moment but saw nothing. Instead, he lowered his eyes, looking at the crystalline snow beneath him as he drew deep breaths.
“They’re both right there,” Micah said with a quick nod of his head. “They’re standing up against one of those houses there on the edge of town, looking right at us.” He chuckled. “It seems they are less than eager to come get us.”
“Kelc left little more than a small pile of bone chips after fighting Dell Pyter,” Shaia reasoned. “If they saw that scene, they should be hesitant.”
Her description did no justice to the situation so far as Micah was concerned. One boot remained on the ground where Pyter’s foot had been. Otherwise, small bits of him and all of his lifeblood had exploded from him in a perfect globe, pasting the walls of the nearby buildings evenly. Just as bizarre was the clean spot on the hard-packed street where Kelc’s body had lain, blocking the grotesque explosion, creating a perfect outline of him.
“They’ll come one way or another, Shy. It’s their job.” Kelc remained on all fours. “If you need to flee, Micah, go ahead. You betrayed us and now you’ve saved us. I won’t stop you from going.” Kelc suddenly heaved, bringing up nothing.
“I may do just that,” said the thin man.
“Your breath,” Shaia said, alarmed. She blew out a lungful of her own and it plumed before her eyes, a white ghost. “Your breath does not…It’s not there.”
“It’s not hot,” Micah said. “I’m a vampire. Do you not know what that means?” Shaia said nothing and Kelc simply listened, his stomach calming down. “I’m neither living nor dead. I still possess my spirit but it is not bonded to my flesh. In fact, my flesh is…a façade. A costume that gives me form.”
As if to prove a point, Micah dissipated before Shaia’s eyes, causing her to gasp, snapping the curved blade in her hands up before her defensively. Kelc looked up and, as he imagined Shaia could, he saw an oily cloud hovering over the pristine white landscape, but his spirit sense also told him that Micah still stood there, or floated in a different form. All at once he reformed into a man.
“Neat trick,” Kelc told him. “Can you teach me to do that or is that some ability that only you can do?”
Micah glanced at Wemmerton. “They’ve gone. So far as I know, only vampires can do it. But you? Who knows? Maybe you could. There is one ability I can use to help you, if you’ll trust me.”
“Trust you?” Shaia said. “The last time we trusted you, you led us to Dell Pyter. I was injured. Kelc was nearly killed. Even now we are unable to flee because my brother cannot stand.” She pointed the steel right at Micah’s chest. “How can you ask that of us?”
Kelc agreed, but something about Micah spoke of a need to see him safe, to help Kelc survive this mess.
“I could tell, initially, that he was very different,” Micah said, gesturing to Kelc where he still knelt, the vampire’s boots only a few knuckles away. “It scared me. I did what I did. Then, he blew up the tavern, showing me that he was powerful. That scared me even more. I feared that he would dominate me much like the priests of Gul Thannon would, make me a simple minion by binding my power, so I set out to arrange his capture. Now I have seen something that I cannot explain, a strength of spirit that cannot be cast aside.” Micah looked north, out into the undefined whiteness before them. “Who knows what he can do with spirit? I thought him a warlock unfortunate to be born in Symea. Now, I don’t know. But I can’t just let those men kill him, nor can I fully abandon him. He must get to Reman. Reman must see his potential. I suppose part of me wants to see if he can set the priesthood of Thannon back a step, perhaps help my kind. Your kind,” Micah added, looking first to Kelc who still stared at the ground, then to Shaia. “We all need him.”
“You’re such a fool! You couldn’t see that from the beginning? You had to make a mess of things before you realized his value!” She gritted her teeth. “Why, damn it? Now you’ve trapped us just as neatly as you did last time.” She moved to the vampire, her face within three knuckles of his, looking into his predatory eyes. “I vow that if my soul is rent of this body before my time, I will haunt your steps. I will rise as a revenant and see to your misery for eons, be it while you still walk Oerhe or have passed into the afterlife. I will be there and it will be your pain.”
Kelc sensed a flash of spirit and Micah yelped before a growl rose in him. “What did you do?”
“Nothing,” she answered.
“She willed her vow into truth,” Kelc said from below. “She cursed you.”
Again the three fell silent, Shaia and Micah poised to attack one another and Kelc on the ground.
Kelc slowly rocked to a side and settled into a sitting position as he felt a pressure in his mind. He felt for spirits and found that a strand reached from Wemmerton to him, a shimmering rail of energy that stretched over the plain, just over the snow, catching him in the midsection. It seemed possessed of an emotion, or feeling: Alarm.
Kelc jerked his head around to look at the town and though he couldn’t see Tasher and Jista with his eyes, he knew they rode towards them. “They’re coming. They’re coming right to us.”
“Trust me,” was all Micah said. “Trust me this time and allow me to save us all.”
“To do what?” Shaia asked, her voice filled with venom.
“No time. To safeguard you as only a vampire can. I lead them afar and return.”
“If you die, will we be stuck?” Kelc asked, a little too slowly considering the circumstance.
Micah looked at him and nodded. “Yes. But I can evade these two. Trust me.”
Shaia stepped away from the vampire and looked down at her brother, his entire body now caked in spots with dried blood and whatever else still clung to him: ribbons of flesh, lumps of tissue and organs. They met each other’s eyes for only a moment before Kelc spoke.
“Fine.”
Micah squatted to the ground and gestured for Shaia to join him. Hesitantly, she lowered herself, the sword still in hand. The gaunt man pulled his hands from gloves, revealing pale fingers with dark hair and poorly maintained fingernails.
“Prepare yourselves,” the vampire said, his eyes alternating from brown to yellow as he looked back and forth between Kelc and Shaia.
“For what?”
Before he could have answered Shaia, Micah reached out and touched her and her b
rother with the tip of each pointer finger, hurling them into darkness. They heard his answer though it seemed long ago, more of a memory than anything else. It almost seemed as if the word needed to catch up to them, though it no longer mattered when it did. “Death.”
It moved with aching slowness beneath the ground, rolling northeast. Deeper and broader than he could see, like a venerable river that poured through countless lives, seldom exciting more reaction than acknowledgement of its existence, the flow of spirit passed through the ground, through Kelc, seemingly moving with intent.
How deep beneath the surface it flowed, Kelc couldn’t sense. As if he were beneath the dark rippling surface of the ocean, having never dived in, he stood no chance of knowing how far below he sat. He knew only that he was under the surface, immersed in it.
Most of his physical senses lay inert, as if they had simply been shut off. His eyes offered no sensation of sight. There existed darkness, but not a darkness because of lack of light, not the darkness of absolute night that can create confusion about whether or not his eyes worked. He knew they didn’t.
He understood that they couldn’t while he possessed no explanation for why. It inspired no terror in him. Where he was, existing as he did, it was simply logical to his being that he should have no sight.
His ears, likewise, offered nothing, not even the constant purl of his own body, of blood moving through his vessels or the beat of his heart. He heard no white noise alerting him to his existence in any way. He no longer possessed hearing.
His flesh felt nothing, and reported nothing of what it felt or even if it still existed. He felt neither the warmth gleaned from his body’s functions nor the cold clamminess of deep set soil beneath a winter sky. He felt no injury, no ache, no nausea. Nothing. It felt rapturous to be free of his body. He felt no fear at the possibility of not having one or worry about the one he couldn’t feel.
Taste and smell struck him in an overwhelming manner. Dirt. Oerhe. He felt the kernel particles of earth pulling at him, saturating him. The dank smell of a deep cavern blended with the rich aroma of freshly turned soil and stone coursed through his existence, filling him, tugging at him as if it should remind him of something.
And it did. It comforted him even as it inundated him, pressing his essence into a leaden motion, a need for deliberate motion. The nearly overwhelming taste of loam seemed to speak of home. Not home, Kelc knew. Not his home. No houses or people. It called him to the beginning. And the end. It called to him, reminded him, of death.
But even that didn’t work in his understanding. It couldn’t be a smell, or a taste. Kelc sensed nothing through such means. Only his soul, his sense of spirit, seemed to be active.
Perhaps, he thought, his nostrils were packed with soil, his throat filled with clay and he simply acknowledged that fact now, absorbing that existence as his own, engendering the sense of smell, the nostalgia. Perhaps rather than the actual scent, his soul acknowledged his body’s current state.
Again, he knew this to be incorrect. He could, somehow, sense the earthy richness and stale age of the ground in a very real manner, through a physical means.
But it drew his attention for only as long as he required before he arrived at the notion that he would not divine the answer.
Then he looked at, or felt, the river. It seemed to wash right through the ground. Deep set granite boulders, gravelly sand, deposits of ore: none of it slowed the passage of spirit. In some ways, it seemed to striate and organize it, pushing the constant flow into smaller channels, though it all seemed to remerge and exchange with the countless other streams with regularity.
In places, Kelc could see where the spirit energy broke apart into smaller and smaller particles, as if the soul started as a clay vessel and needed only to be pulverized back to its integral moiety before…what?
Kelc strained his sense forward, following the flow of the great course, seeking its destination, but as he did, he realized that he sat anchored somehow, his essence able to stretch forward, but not leave. He couldn’t just move about as he desired. He remained tethered to something, though he could not sense what.
As he reached towards the end, thinning his spirit within the course of the ongoing flow, he felt it nibbling at him. As if he sat afloat in a current that carried debris, the spirit in the river collided with him and absorbed, or gouged free, miniscule pieces of his energy.
At once, Kelc drew himself back, never seeing anything helpful downstream, and fearful for the first time of his environment.
He willed his spirit into the tightest sphere he could, trying to minimize the abrasion of the passing flow of spirit, limiting how many particles of his essence he lost to it.
He slowly shaped his form until the side that met the river sat pointed, forcing much of the flow’s momentum around him without directly impacting him, the great tide of spirit now unable to get more than a speck or two of his essence.
Once he felt protected, Kelc allowed himself to simply marvel at the amount of energy surrounding him. If he could get his hands on it, there was no limit to what he could do.
It stunned him to find such energy in Symea. Many would wail in terror to know what ran just beneath the soles of their boots, polluting the earth that served as the foundation for their nation. But Kelc felt only awe.
Whether he spent the sparest moment or ten summers watching the river pass around him, Kelc couldn’t tell. Time meant little enough to him. He just enjoyed the immensity of the river, taking solace in it, losing himself to it.
Kelc. His name washed through him as if it permeated the ground around him and arrived to him, seeping into him from every side. Kelc.
Distracted, the river seemed to impact him with greater success, sucking particles of his soul along with its irreversible flow.
Kelc. Again, his name arrived from seemingly everywhere, though this time he felt as if it possessed intent, or force. Stranger still, he understood it. It meant to carry him away. Kelc knew that by answering the call, by simply projecting his name back to whatever force that initiated the call, he would be transported. Where, he did not know. Kelc.
As Kelc worried about the force that summoned him, he again waned in his defense against the river, and it, again, tugged at him, drawing a steady stream of his spirit into its vast body.
Kelc struggled to retain his life force, willing it back into his center, commanding his spirit to recede from the slow moving flow. But he failed. He could stymie the current of his energy, cutting it off and keeping it from flooding out of him, but that which had already left, he could not recapture.
Kelc. It crushed into him this time, a thunderclap rolling through ethereal form, its force beyond measure, its desire unveiled. It meant to drag him away. It needed to. Kelc Varrlson.
As he considered the new addition to his name, the river tugged at him, drawing spirit out of him as if it were simply fumes that needed to be coaxed out and blown away. Several tendrils now extended away from him for the briefest moment before he throttled each one. Kelc.
There could be no victory, he now realized. Either, he gave in to the force or he lost himself to the river. He pondered the outcome of each, the answer seeming obvious after consideration. All of the spirit running beneath the ground, following the course of the river, had been broken into incoherent bits. Were he to give in to that, he’d cease to exist.
Kelc. This time, as soon as he felt the call crash through him, he gave in to it.
At once he found himself gasping for air, snow blasting him in the face as he did. His body froze. Every knuckle of him suffered the effects of winter.
“He’s here!” called out a woman. “You got him.” Hands clutched him, though his eyes blurred with tears, the grey white of the day too much. “Kelc! Breathe.”
“Warm him up,” commanded a man. “He stayed too long. Your kind should never be down so long. Warm him.”
Kelc fought to pull air into his struggling lungs even as he felt the woman press hersel
f atop him, her warmth ebbing to him, offering comfort to his frigid body.
“Shy,” he gasped, suddenly remembering. “Cold.”
“Don’t worry, Kelc. I’m going to heat you up. Micah, throw our blankets on us. All of them.” She clutched her brother tightly against her flesh despite his inability to breathe. “Come on,” she urged. “Breathe in deeply.”
The suggestion seemed to slow his efforts, simply hearing her calm allowed him to draw air a little more deeply into lungs, lungs felt dried and shriveled. As they expanded, they burned and itched, forcing Kelc into a coughing fit.
“Again,” Shaia ordered him, even as he coughed. “Take in more.” Kelc did so and his coughs deepened, but even as he suffered he sucked in strongly when he could, the fit returning function to his lungs, albeit violently.
“They missed us, but they’ll be back.”
“I hear you,” hissed Shaia, the edge in her voice sharp enough to cut steel. “Throw the damned blankets on us. Now.”
A groan came as response, followed a few moments later by a heavy wool blanket and then a second. And a third.
“Okay Kelc, you need to keep taking in deep breaths and get some heat back into you.” Seeing some of her long brown hair draping onto her brother’s face, Shaia whipped her head to the side, flipping it over her head. “Breathe,” she said again, soothingly.
The deep hacking abated somewhat, the constant fit giving way to a more sporadic cough. “Deputies?” Kelc spat, still struggling to find enough air to speak.
His body began to tremble, his arms and legs quaking where they lay. His teeth began to chatter as if to keep up with the rest of him.
“Away north,” Shaia said. “Can you wrap your arms around me? Lift them? And lay them against my back?”
Kelc nodded weakly before easing his arms up and around his sister, his skin vibrating with painful prickles as he did.
“Is he talking?” asked Micah, hidden from Kelc’s vision, his voice wrought of anxiety and urgency.
Dread of Spirit: Rise of the Mage - Book One Page 29
