XI: The Soul Catcher

For a week after I kill Cain, I dream.

I stand upon a great, blackened field, flanked by familiar faces. Laia of Serra is to my left and Helene Aquilla to my right. Keris Veturia stands apart, her gray eyes fixed on something I cannot see. The Mother watches over them all. The scims in my hands gleam with blood.

Beyond us, a great, rabid maelstrom. It is a thousand colors, teeth and viscera and dripping claws. The storm reaches out, wraps a putrid hook around Laia.

Elias! she screams. Help me!

Helene reaches for Laia, but the maelstrom roars and swallows them both. When I look to Keris, she’s gone, replaced by a gray-eyed, blonde child who takes my hand.

“Once,” she whispers, “I was thus.”

Then she, too, is consumed by the maw, while I am dragged down into the earth, into a death that never ends.

I wake covered in sweat but shivering, like when the Commandant would make us run midnight drills in a Serran winter.

It’s still dark, but I stagger up, wash, and step outside into a dull drizzle. The mourning doves haven’t yet begun to croon. Dawn is far.

Passing the spirits is the work of mere hours. When I am done, the storm-dulled light brushes the tops of the trees. The Waiting Place stands oddly silent and my stomach drops at the thought of the day stretching ahead, with nothing but my thoughts to keep me company.

“Right,” I mutter to myself. “Jinn grove it is.”

I consider taking my scims. But I think of the dream and leave them. My attachment to the armlet is troubling enough. Yesterday, I thought I’d lost it. I tore the cabin apart looking for it, only to find it in my cloak.

Laia’s armlet, the voice within shouts. That’s why it matters to you. Because you loved her.

I streak to the jinn grove and leave the voice behind, making for the dead yew. The drizzle keeps me cool as I bring down the chain—left side, right, left side, right. But the action, while exhausting, offers no comfort.

Instead, I am reminded of Blackcliff—of laughing maniacally with Helene one winter when the Commandant ordered our cadet class to train in the middle of a thunderstorm.

Why are we laughing? I’d asked her at the time.

Because laughing makes it hurt less.

“Little one.”

When the Wisp speaks from the edges of the jinn grove, it is a relief. I drop the chain and go to her. There are only a half dozen or so ghosts who refuse to leave the Waiting Place. Most have been here a few weeks, and I know I will pass them on eventually.

But the ghost of my grandmother—whose name in life was Karinna—has been here for more than thirty years. I’ve searched for her many times since joining with Mauth. Each time, she evaded me, seeking solitude in the deepest reaches of the wood.

Now she curls around me like smoke, little more than a shiver in the air. “Have you seen my lovey?”

“I know your lovey,” I say, and her head jerks up. She solidifies completely for the first time since I’ve seen her, so clear that I catch my breath.

She looks just like my mother. Like Keris.

“Your lovey still lives, Karinna,” I say. “But in time, she too will die. She will pass easier if you are waiting for her on the other side.”

Karinna is all movement again, bolting away and back in the blink of an eye. “My lovey does not live,” she says. “My lovey died. But I cannot find her anywhere.”

“Why do you think she died, Karinna?” I sit on a nearby stump and let her come to me. When she is close enough, I reach out with Mauth’s magic to try to understand what she needs. This is the trickiest part of passing a ghost on. Get too close and they bolt. Not close enough, and they rage at you for misunderstanding them.

Karinna doesn’t resist the magic. She hardly notices it. I expect that she’ll ache for forgiveness perhaps, or love. But I feel only agitation from her.

And fear.

“She’s gone.” Karinna says, and my head spins as I try to follow her ceaseless movement through the trees. “My sweet lovey is gone. If she still existed in this world, I would know. But she wouldn’t leave without me. Never. She would wait. Have you seen her?”

“Karinna.” I take a different tack. “Will you tell me how you died? Perhaps if I know, I can help you find your lovey.”

Usually ghosts are still thinking about their deaths—even discussing them. But for as long as I’ve been in the Waiting Place, I’ve never heard Karinna say a word about her passing.

She turns her face away. “I thought we were safe,” she says. “I’d never have gone, I’d never have taken her if I didn’t think we were safe.”

“The world of the living is capricious,” I say. “But the other side is not. You’ll be safe there.”

“No. There is no safe place anymore.” She whirls on me. The air crackles with cold, the rain hardening to sleet. “Not even beyond the river. It’s madness. I will not go.”

Beyond the river. She means the other side. “The other side is not like our world—”

“How do you know?” Her fear sharpens and settles around her, a poisonous miasma. “You have not been there. You do not sense what crouches in the beyond.”

“Other ghosts pass through and find peace.”

“They do not!” she shrieks. “You send them to the chasm and they do not know what awaits them! A maelstrom, a great hunger—”

The dream. “Karinna.” Urgency grips me, but I do not let it show. “Tell me of this maelstrom.”

But my grandmother’s spirit stiffens and spins east, toward the river. Seconds later, I sense what she does—outsiders to the far north.

“Karinna—wait—” But she is gone. Skies only know when I will find her again.

My ire at the outsiders is fueled by her departure. If they hadn’t breached the Waiting Place, I could have gotten some answers out of her.

I windwalk north, considering whether to kill them or simply frighten them. When I reach the River Dusk, I do not slow. To the spirits, the Dusk is a pathway to the other side. To me, it is just a river. But today, as I cross, the midmorning mist rises and brings with it a swirl of memory. The ghosts’ memories, I realize. Joy and contentment, peace and—

Agony. Not physical, but something deeper. A wound of the soul.

I have never stumbled when windwalking the Dusk. Stepping across it is like hopping across a rivulet instead of a river wide enough to hold a dozen Mercator barges.

But the pain shocks me and I plunge into the freezing water. Something grabs me—hands, pulling, pressing so hard that I can feel the skin break on my arms, my legs—

Jinn! I fight my way to the surface, sputtering, and swim for the far bank. The past few months of training have made me strong and I break free, kicking violently.

A low trick, ambushing me in the water—but one I should have been prepared for.

At shore, I look back, steeling myself for another battle with the jinn. But the river is quiet, moving swift and sure. There is no sign of anything that might wish me harm. I inspect my arms, my legs.

No marks. Though I was sure I felt blood leaking out of me.

I’m tempted to return to the river, but the intruders await. I streak northeast, frost collecting on my wet clothes, my hair, my eyelashes as I travel. The wind whips against me, fey and angry until, for the second time in a week, I walk the border of the Waiting Place, prepared to drive out whoever is foolish enough to enter it.

The fools, it turns out, are manifold.

Nearly a hundred, in fact. There are soldiers in longboats, most of whom sling arrows at a group of people clustered at the water’s edge, on a short spit of beach. Those few are locked in close combat with a dozen more Martial soldiers.

The beach backs to the cliffs, with a few treacherous paths leading up to my domain.

“To the woods, Tas, run!”

The man who speaks is tall and sandy-haired, his brown skin matching that of the young woman next to him. Her armor is piecemeal, her cloak in tatters. She’s hooded so I cannot see her face. But I know her. I know the way she moves, and the color of her skin and the set of her shoulders.

“Laia! Watch it!” a Scholar man with dark skin and long, black hair calls out. He holds off three legionnaires with a scim, a short dagger, and—I squint—a cloud of hundreds of wights who befuddle his foes. They defend him with a vicious protectiveness that wights aren’t known for. Laia, meanwhile, spins, nocks, and shoots a soldier creeping up on her.

“Get Tas out of here now,” she shouts. The sandy-haired man grabs the child by the arm and drags him up the trail, directly toward where I’m standing.

The forest groans. Perhaps Mauth is occupied, as the Augur said. But he still feels the assault on his territory. And he doesn’t like it.