Seven

The screaming was a guttural, inarticulate wail that sent me to my feet. By the time I got there, having to fight a battle with my sleeping bag first, I found everyone else to be standing too. Everyone was looking at the Fool, who was producing the noise while jabbing his finger at the Knight’s sleeping bag, where the only sign of the Knight was the bulge within the bag and the blood on the sand surrounding it.

For a suspended moment, no one spoke. No one moved. Then everyone looked to the Hunter.

She withdrew her long hunting knife and crept to the side of the sleeping bag. Then she delicately pulled back the cover, revealing the pale face of the Knight. His throat had been cut. The Singer screamed and looked away, pulling the Mourner with her to the edge of camp where she began to vomit. I could hear her in the background as I watched the Hunter open the bag. Blood soaked the inside too. Someone had killed him while he slept, while we all slept soundly nearby. The Hunter covered the Knight back up again. Then she kicked some sand over the blood stains, making it look like someone could be peacefully sleeping in the bag.

She stood up reverently and backed away. Then, realizing everyone was looking at her for some clue of what to do and how to feel, she said, “Father Ori was here. Pack your things quickly.” No one moved. “Now!” she snapped.

I busied myself packing up my sleeping bag. When I put on my boot, I felt the unmistakable shape of the Hunter’s knife in it. When I looked into the boot to check that the knife was still invisible, I saw that there were fresh brown stains lining the inside of my footwear. I didn’t dare check too closely, lest someone notice me being suspicious. I was fairly certain however that it was blood. Somehow, Father Ori had used this knife. How was that even possible? Trying not to panic, I told myself that there would be chances to ditch the knife later. I would just have to force myself to wait until the next call of nature. Not now, though. Going to poop now would be suspicious.

One by one, as we finished packing, we joined the circle of pilgrims gathered around the Knight’s sleeping bag.

“Well,” said the Hunter. “Let’s go.”

“Wait,” said Lilly. “Shouldn’t we… do something? Like a ritual or something?”

The Hunter gave her an annoyed “be my guest” look.

Lilly cleared her throat. “Ummm, you didn’t deserve this. And it isn’t right…” She choked up and couldn’t continue. Bending down, she picked up the short staff of wood that the Knight had always carried on his belt like a second sword. She gripped it tight, and a change seemed to come over her. When she spoke again, her voice was strong: “We’ll find whoever did this. I promise. And I’ll kill him myself. In the most painful way possible.”

That was it. Wordlessly, we cast sand onto the sleeping bag until we had made a shallow burial mound. Then we moved on, trudging across the desert toward the hulking mountains. The Hunter said we would reach the desert’s end in the next two days.

A few hours later, Lilly caught my eye and mouthed “slow down.” I allowed my pace to slow until we were walking at the end of the line of seven pilgrims. When we had begun to lag far enough behind to avoid being overheard, Lilly whispered, “Do you really think Father Ori did it?”

I could feel the dagger in my boot pressing against my sock, causing my skin to blister as I walked. “Yeah, why?”

“There are two people with knives among us,” she said, making me all the more self-conscious about the one in my own boot. “Asuana has the big one. And Du Vreil has the small one.”

“But neither of them has a motive,” I said. “And Father Ori does.”

“Does he?” said Lilly. “What’s the motive again? He has some kind of ‘mysterious mission?’ We don’t even know that he’s alive! Honestly, it’s such a complicated theory: Father Ori survived the nomads, circled back, and has been following us ever since. Yet, we’ve never seen him or heard him. And for some reason he randomly decides to kill Sir Mau. Why now? Why just him? Why not all of us? Nothing about Asuana’s theory makes sense.”

“You have a better one?” I asked.

“Yes. Someone here is a serial killer,” she said. “It still think it could be the Singer. But it could be anyone. In fact, there could be more than one.”

My paranoid brain quickly constructed scenarios: the Fool had done it with his own invisible knife; the Hunter had done it with hers; the Singer had somehow gotten the knife from the Mourner and done it; the Mourner herself had done it (perhaps at the Hunter’s command). I caught myself before conjuring up a scenario in which Lilly (a self-proclaimed semi-sociopath) had managed to do it. I met Lilly’s eyes and had a funny feeling she had gone through a similar thought process: evaluating whether perhaps I was the killer.

“This is what the killer wants,” I said. “For us to not trust each other. I don’t know why, but it feels like he’s trying to drive us apart.”

“Maybe so,” said Lilly. “But I’m not going to play the guessing game.”

“What’s the other choice?” I asked.

“We ask him,” said Lilly, indicating the Knight’s staff. “This belonged to him. Tonight, after everyone goes to sleep, we’ll ask him.”

As she sped up to catch up with the rest of the group, I took a long look at her. She was still wearing a tattered shoulderless dress, the last of its kind. Her skin had grown tanned and her hair tangled. One thing was for sure, though, I loved her. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why, but it was true. Maybe it was her shoulders. Maybe it was how determined she could get, or how sharp her tongue could be. Maybe…

> Dear Human, I assume you are well acquainted with the way that the young people of your species fall rapidly in love. Thus, I hope you do not mind me redacting several tedious pages in which Nial attempts (and fails) to capture his love in words. I shall summarize those pages: First, he wrote not one but two love poems about her shoulders. Then he spent several more pages analyzing his own poetry.

>

> Today, even he agrees (in retrospect) that these poems should never have been written. So please forgive the edits.

The day passed with almost complete silence. We kept casting furtive glances over our shoulders (except the Mourner who never bothered). Twice that day, the Hunter wordlessly distributed the last of the lizard meat. She didn’t say it was the last of it. Her grim face did.

When night fell, causing the flickering in the bellies of the clouds to be the only light source, I made my sleeping bag and buried the knife hastily beside it during the moments of darkness between the flashes. I was unable to sleep as I waited for Lilly’s signal.

This came by way of her kneeling by my sleeping bag and hissing, “Come on. I need someone to make sure I don’t die while I’m using the bathroom.”

“Yeah,” I said, “no problem.” Then I followed her into the night desperately hoping she wasn’t the murderer, given that I had just left the knife behind and that I was madly in love with her.

She led me around a dune, then over another, and another. “Don’t want to wake anyone,” she whispered.

The night was cold and a light drizzle fell. More like a mist actually. It accentuated the light that sprang from Lilly’s hands as she wove her spell. It engulfed the wooden stick she carried. I held my breath and watched (not without jealousy) as the light grew. When it died, we waited. I began counting my breaths. One, two, three…

“Hello,” said Sir Mau’s voice.

I spun around to see the Knight sitting on a dune behind me. He looked great: his hair clean and washed, his beard well-kempt.

“We don’t have much time,” hissed Lilly, sagging against my arm. She could barely stand. “Sir Mau, I’m sorry about what happened to you. But did you see anything? Were you awake when it happened?”

Sir Mau smiled. It was weird, I realized, to see the Knight smile. He’d rarely done that when he was alive. I felt bad thinking it, but the smile looked a bit fake. Like it was pasted on.

“As a matter of fact,” said the Knight. “I did.”

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“Who was it?” whispered Lilly. “Tell us, quickly! We don’t have much time.”

He kept grinning. Dead people are weird, I thought.

“Nial did,” he said, still grinning.

Lilly stopped leaning on my arm. “You must be mistaken,” said Lilly, slowly. “Did you see Nial do it? I command you to tell me the truth.”

He grinned wider. Yeah, it was definitely weird. No one smiled like that, with his mouth, but not his eyes. It was almost like he was trying to tell us something without telling us. His eyes looked terrified. I shivered.

“I woke up,” said the Knight. “And there was Nial, kneeling over me. Before I could say anything, he stabbed me in the throat!” His grin never faded.

I realized the Knight’s ghost was fading. Sometimes he was there when the lightning flashed overhead; sometimes he wasn’t.

“Wait,” said Lilly, “don’t go. Are you sure it was Nial? I really don’t think…”

When he was gone and only sand remained. I said, “You don’t believe him, right?”

“Of course not. We need to get back before someone sees we’re gone.”

I caught her hand as she turned, a little too hastily, to leave. “Wait!” I hissed. “There was clearly something weird about that, right? I mean, I’m no necromancer, but dead spirits don’t smile like that, right? Maybe he was, I don’t know, trying to tell us something.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Let’s tell Asuana. She’ll know what to do.”

I didn’t let go of her as she tried a second time to return to camp. “You don’t believe me do you?”

“Let go!” she said, loudly. “I swear I’ll scream.”

“What if I told you,” I said, “that I have reason to believe that Father Ori may have necromantic abilities himself. If that were true, maybe he was able to make Sir Mau’s ghost say whatever he wanted?”

“If Father Ori’s commands can override mine,” said Lilly, “then he is a much more powerful necromancer than me. And if that’s true, we need to get back to camp right now and tell someone what we know!”

I shook my head; I couldn’t believe it. “Lilly, I swear to you, I did not kill Sir Mau.” But she wrenched her wrist away and began to jog. In a last desperate attempt, I called out, “I think he killed your father, Lilly!” She stopped at the top of a dune and turned. She looked beautiful and a little terrifying, silhouetted as she was against the flickering doomsday clouds.

Just as I was about to go to her and explain, I felt the coldness of a knife at my throat. Then, Father Ori’s voice in my ear said, “Don’t.”

She waited for a moment, but when I said nothing, she must have concluded that I was just making stuff up to keep her there, “Nial, I really thought you were just occasionally annoying. I didn’t think you were downright evil.”

Father Ori whispered, “Say ‘I love you, Lilly’. Now. Or I will cut your throat.”

“I love you, Lilly,” I called out desperately.

Lilly rolled her eyes and disappeared over the dune, leaving me alone in the night with the murderer.

“That’s better,” said Father Ori. “I figured that would get rid of her. Sit down, Nial.”

He pushed me to the sand. I looked around for the Morl but couldn’t even see the telltale shimmers. “Are you going to kill me?” I said.

“A good question,” said Father Ori. “I want to tell you a fun fact about shadow mercenaries. Is that okay with you, Nial?”

“I guess,” I said.

“There’s a reason that when we morls want humans dead, we prefer that they kill each other. There’s a reason, for example, that I didn’t want to kill those nomads myself. Any guesses about why, Nial?”

“Umm, because killing is wrong?” I said. Should I scream? I wondered. Or would he just kill whoever came to rescue me?

“Killing is wrong,” said the Morl. “Sometimes. But I guess the missing piece of information here is that morls don’t really kill people. Instead, when a morl kills a human, the human’s soul get Gathered.”

“Gathered?” I said, doing my best to sound like I’d never heard of such a thing.

Suddenly something thudded onto the sand at my feet. A small box. “Pick it up,” said the Morl. “Open it.”

On closer inspection, it was a familiar object. The Ariel Angel had, in addition to books, carried other printed entertainment items, such as decks of cards. This particular deck was inside a battered wooden box, and the cards themselves were well worn. I flipped through them, realizing that the Morl had penned names on each one. The card at the top, the Knave of Cups, bore the name “Sir Mau Dannister of Lopesa.” The one beneath, the Sorcerer of Moons, bore the names “Torin Thanata / Brodrim Overlai.” The one beneath that…

“That’s enough,” said Father Ori. I felt the deck snatched from my hands. It disappeared into the air. “My point is. And I hope you don’t take offense to this, but I would very much prefer for you not to be in my deck. It’s not that I don’t like you. It’s just that I don’t like you that much. Not enough to keep you in my mind for any length of time. We morls are picky on the subject of those whom we Gather.”

“So you’re not going to kill me?”

“I would prefer not to kill you,” said Father Ori. “There’s a difference. I would prefer if you simply left. And I’m going to make it easy for you. Very soon, the rest of the pilgrims are going to conclude that you killed Sir Mau. We both know you didn’t. Some of them might know it too. But you’re going to make sure they doubt the matter enough to leave you behind. You don’t have to confess to doing it. Just, you know, be somewhat suspicious.”

“Asuana will kill me,” I said. “She wouldn’t think twice about it.”

“I’m shrugging, but you can’t see it,” said Father Ori. “Look, that’s not really my problem. Humans kill each other all the time. You yourself participated in Asuana’s plan to kill twenty-five nomads. You’re a smart boy, though. I bet you can raise a sufficient amount of doubt that they won’t kill you yet won’t want you around either. I’ll leave the details up to you. The main thing is: your time on this pilgrimage must come to an end. And soon. There’s a monastery at the foothills of the mountains. You will all reach it shortly. When the rest of the pilgrims leave, you are to stay behind. If you do this favor for me, I’ll refrain from killing you and I’ll make sure Lilly doesn’t suffer.”

“Are you going to hurt them?” I found myself asking.

“Being Gathered is a privilege,” said the Morl. “It is the chance to live beyond the confines of your lifetime. Consider this deeply if you are thinking of ‘saving’ them. If you prevent them from being Gathered, they will simply live out their lives as humans and die. But inside my mind, Gathered souls live as long as I do.”

“What’s it like?” I said. “Can I talk to Lilly’s father?”

“Sadly,” said Father Ori, “I can’t allow that. I can’t risk him attempting to send some kind of secret message to Lilly through you. Sir Mau’s stupid grin moments ago was, I suspect, an attempt to let you both know that things weren’t what they seem. Now that he’s back safely in my mind, I’ll have to discuss this detail with him.” The Morl sighed. “I’m shaking my head in sadness, though you can’t see.”

“Just one more question,” I said. “Out of curiosity, what would be so bad about Gathering me? Not that I want you to do it. It’s just… why don’t you want to?”

“Let me see if I can explain it in a way the human mind can understand,” said Father Ori. “Do you ever have nagging thoughts in your head that just won’t go away? A voice that just won’t shut up. Maybe it’s saying something stupid, but you can’t make it be quiet. Or maybe it has moral misgivings about something stupid, but you don’t have time for that. What I’m trying to say is: I don’t want your annoying voice in my head for the rest of my life. I mean, sure, I could punish you and make you shut up, eventually. But that in itself is an annoyance. After the first invasion, I saw hundreds of youngling morls descend into madness from the humans they inadvertently Gathered during the fighting. Too many annoying voices in their heads. It adds up. A moment ago, when I was watching Lilly, Torin wouldn’t shut up. Annoying. Now I shall have to punish him, which will further compound the annoyance.”

We sat in silence long enough that I began to wonder if the Morl was still there. “Okay,” I finally said. “I’ll bow out of the pilgrimage when we get to the monastery.”

“I am smiling benevolently at you,” said Father Ori. “In exchange for your cooperation, I will make sure you become a high-ranking slave in the Morl Nation. Perhaps after some training, a morl will take a liking to you and Gather you into his or her flock forever. Remember, just because I find you annoying doesn’t mean that everyone does, or that everyone always will. There’s hope for you yet!”

“Umm. Thanks?” I said. The doomsday clouds rumbled and flickered.

***

Back at camp, everyone was awake and waiting for me. Lilly and the Hunter were talking in hushed tones but stopped when I crested the dune.

“Nial,” said the Hunter, “I’m going to have to ask you to submit to your wrists being tied.” She held a length of rope that from the look of things had been recently removed from the Singer and the Mourner. Supplies were short.

“I suppose Lilly told you,” I said, grimly extending my wrists.

Just as grimly, the Hunter bound me. “I’m not saying I believe it. I still think Father Ori killed Sir Mau. But we need to take these kinds of things into account.”

“I’d bet my beard he did it,” said the Wizard, looking at me with disdain. “I knew that nothing good would come of having him with us.”

“I don’t suppose,” I said, “I can get any of you to believe that what Lilly and I saw was Sir Mau’s soul being puppetted by Father Ori?”

The Wizard scoffed, but the Hunter said, “What do you mean?”

“I believe that when morls kill us and Gather us into their minds,” I said, “they… I don’t fully understand it yet. They have some kind of power over us forever. I think Father Ori made Sir Mau say that I killed him.”

“May I suggest,” said Professor Octavius, “that we search his things for a murder weapon. I suspect we’ll find all sorts of necromantic paraphernalia hidden away.”

At first I didn’t understand, but then it dawned on me. “Lilly told you I was the necromancer,” I said.

Lilly looked at me calmly, “You are the necromancer, Nial.”

I realized she had made a mistake but she didn’t know it yet. She didn’t know that the Hunter knew about her father. By pretending I was the necromancer, the Hunter would, no doubt, be suspicious.

“If I’m the necromancer and the killer,” I said, “why would I summon the soul of someone who would incriminate me?”

“Because,” said Lilly, “you thought you could compel him to lie for you, but your magic turned out not to be strong enough.” She gave me a weird look, like she was trying to tell me I have a plan, just go along with it.

I rolled my eyes. “Fine, search my things.”

The Wizard came back from my nest disappointedly empty-handed, making me glad that I had buried the knife rather than leaving it in my boot. “Pants,” said the Wizard. “Take them off. Turn the pockets out.” The Wizard checked my garments with the utmost care. When he found nothing but notebooks, he began to read them and sneered every time he discovered a misspelling. This lasted a few minutes, until the Hunter put a stop to it.

“Binding his wrists,” said the Wizard, “won’t be enough. Although restricting hand motions can be helpful, most human magic users can access their powers with whispers and even with thoughts. If you’re interested, I teach a course at the Academy called…” He trailed off as if by magic when the Hunter waved her own hand.

“He’s not one of the Five,” the Hunter pointed out. “So I suspect binding his wrists will be sufficient. I doubt we’ll see much magic out of Nial.”