1. ARRIVAL
In the steppes, the wind seemed to carry voices. They roamed the land lost, cadences of laughter or the laments of unforgotten misfortunes. They bore fleeting reminders of life to reflect how very empty the Ginmae province lay.
On the plateau, the topsoil peeled from the dry earth. On the windswept bluffs, entire villages sat crumbling under emboldened creeper vines. The winter had hardened the plants’ limbs and petrified their stranglehold around the ruins. Smooth bones of domesticated animals still decorated the rotten village pens. The beasts had waited for safety to lure back their keepers.
Nearly two decades later, the same stale dangers still stalked the land.
Because the silence rested heavy, each interruption tore it open like a wound. In an oasis of knobbly trees, Alize stood still as winter, listening to the unapologetic footsteps of the Karakuls’ approach. She had detected them much earlier in the day and kept ahead long enough to choose her battlefield. She meant to face them on her own terms.
The broad granite boulder she crouched behind was the same stone that lent the Silver City its name. Her cart rested to the side, its only true value to the Karakuls being the donkey that carried it. Without him, Alize would never reach the city with the precious cargo held fast in her belt loop.
A seasonal mist rolled between the boulders and muffled the encroaching footsteps. Alize listened with her eyes closed. Her fingers flickered over the two items at her waist, a blade meant for security, and a salt mineral for absolution. The dagger in the hilt was borrowed, but she could wield it as effectively as her own. Indeed, it had already killed nine Karakul Soul Eaters during this journey.
The footsteps paused before the boulders, Karakuls on one side, and Hrumi with bated breath on the other.
Alize moved first. Every Soul Eater acted predictably – always reaching for her soul, losing precious time before recognizing Alize’s Hrumi protection. This Soul Eater was no exception. His still held his hands up as Alize closed the distance between them, stabbing her dagger forward and wrenching it from his heart in a single fluid movement.
His collapse left his two Soulless followers staring dumbly as they reached out to Alize, their stiff fingers catching on the fabric of her clothing. The man pressed her back with surprising strength, but Alize ripped her dagger through his torso. She slashed the Soulless woman in the throat. Even though they were no more than bodies, their souls long since irrevocably consumed, Alize still averted her gaze as the blood seeped from the woman’s neck. The agonized expression in her face looked all too familiar.
Alize drew a deep breath. She wiped the blood from her hands and the horror from her mind as she pressed her dagger to the sand to clean it. When she rose, the donkey whined, stamping its foot, his pearly eyes reflecting rising shadows.
The reflection caused Alize to whirl around, but not fast enough. A second Karakul Soul Eater swung his iron rod at her skull and though Alize ducked, the blow still burst her vision into shimmering stars. The heat of the pain blossomed with the blood.
The instant Alize staggered, her opponent crashed over her, throwing her to the ground where his subsequent blows landed on her face and thrust at her gut. Alize heaved and tried to twist away, but the Soul Eater held her down. The pressure robbed her lungs of the air.
And in her moment of weakness, the Soul Eater’s hands flew to her waist, his eyes hungry, livid, feeling Davram’s soul emanating its delirious power.
Alize tasted blood as his hand closed around the salt mineral, and she screamed with the sheer force of the violation. Preserving Davram’s soul was her only means to deny her cursed heritage.
The Soul Eater stuck her in the face, strewing blood into the air as he pulled away, his prize secured.
Though Alize jabbed at him, when she launched to her feet, she felt herself immediately overcome with dizziness from her head wound.
The Soul Eater smiled as he pocketed Davram’s soul.
In Alize’s desperation, all her resolution spiraled forth.
And the box in the donkey cart flew open, its content tearing through the distance to shatter its mark. The Soul Eater collapsed to the ground, Alize’s true dagger jutting from his forehead. The last air fleeing his body sounded like a moan.
Alize paused in the restored stillness, wary of additional lurking adversaries. Before the autumn, before the Temple Battle, the trees would have warned her. But the Deku had stolen her magic, robbing the forest of their voices for Alize. Now she had only her own observations and instincts to protect her.
Between them, she never felt wholly safe.
Alize approached the man’s body, balancing her revulsion and relief. The Soul Eater’s fingers were warm against hers as she pried the salt mineral containing Davram’s soul from his grip. It glowed white, a gift from the Oghuz when Alize had left Parousia. Davram would not fall into the Emptiness; he remained at its doorway, his body breathing, but his soul trapped. Alize replaced the salt mineral in her belt with shaking fingers.
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To extract her dagger, Alize covered her hands with the coarse blanket she used to cushion Davram’s body in the donkey cart. The cloth was sufficiently thick to block an immediate connection with her dagger, which housed her cursed soul.
A gust thrashed the forest, bringing the smell of dust from the steppes beyond it. When the wind stilled, Alize saw the world’s trembling was her own, her body rebelling not only against her wound, but her fear. She returned her dagger to Kell’s wooden box, where she guarded it close enough for her to call, but never close enough to connect her to it. That act would compel her to both summon the echo magic that she could not wield and consume Davram’s soul, just as her family intended. She had not resolved to call her dagger from its protected box. Its response represented yet another aspect of her power that remained outside her control.
But instead of resting, instead of curling into the dirt under the weight of the weaknesses that tugged at her eyes and her limbs, Alize bound her bleeding head with bruised knuckles and blistered fingers. In the cart, Davram’s body breathed with shallow breaths, his wide eyes restless on the darkening sky. Alize pressed his eyelids shut, but, just as every time before, he blinked them open. They retained the same look of agony on his features, reflecting, Alize feared, the last connection his body had made with his soul.
Alize sighed, pulling the donkey to face east once more.
Bleached bones littered the thin forest, even so far from the road. They marked the failures of those who had escaped the Soul Eating only to die by the Karakuls’ weapons. Though the earth tried to reclaim them, their jagged edges still attested to the death blows that felled them, crushed cheekbones, shattered ribs. Some had died alone, others in large group. Each time Alize passed the strewn skeletons, she averted her eyes, wishing the corpses had been afforded more dignity than to erode with the wind in such pitiless daylight.
Dusk found Alize near water. The cold stream bit at her hands, despite day’s warmth. Hints of the spring grew every day. The timid flowers and the green buds seemed an affront to the death of the land. But there was comfort in knowing that the spring would come, even to the Ginmae plateau.
When her water skin was filled, Alize settled next to Davram in the cart to drip it contents into his mouth. He only swallowed occasionally, and Alize loathed to risk him choking, or listen to him shiver if the water soaked into his clothing. Feeding him food had proven much harder. Already after three days on the road, his skin seemed more stretched over in his face. He was starving. Alize pressed her hand to his. She wished she could share her own strength, though in truth it was scarcely enough to sustain her. When the skin was empty, Alize climbed down from the cart.
And her heartbeat nearly stopped.
Across the stream stood a woman, hands clasped, watching Alize.
The woman stood still as stone while the wind tossed her robe and her tangled gray hair. They slanted to the same angle as the dipping willow branches, leaving Alize’s severe figure alone standing upright on the earth. The woman’s eyes bore the same Emptiness as the Soulless, but her face had none of the disfigurements the Karakul Soul Eaters usually wrought on their victims. Her skin shone pale and limp, and under Alize’s grim gaze, she reached out, nearly across the stream. Her loose hair writhed through her fingers as she curled them towards the sky, beckoning.
“Araouh sends you this guide,” she stated. Even her voice seemed corroded, as if it had languished lost under cobwebs throughout the years. “While the prince lives, the Karakuls will keep seeking you. You cannot rest tonight.”
Alize huffed through her nose, but her own voice faltered. “He lives,” she managed. “How does Arouah know my task?”
“A good guess,” the woman answered, her eyes unmoving. “The Deku-Karakul alliance has toppled three more provinces since their defeat in Parousia, but they could have conquered all of them with the completed power of the Ginmae souls.”
“Then six provinces remain standing?” Alize stammered.
“Five. Our time is short, and our task critical. Come.”
Seeing little choice, Alize followed the Soulless into the darkness. Her donkey heaved the cart behind them with the same steady rhythm. Never in her life had Alize been so grateful for a dimwitted beast of burden. His permanent unease in the gnawing silence felt alive, a small defiance joining Alize against the land’s smothering desolation.
The night encircled them in rushes, assembling its shadows into a unified darkness. Alize’s head throbbed but she kept pace, pausing only for respite when the moon arched downwards in the sky.
“You are wounded,” the woman stated, “will you permit your guide to tend you?”
“I’m fine,” Alize growled.
But still the woman approached. Alize gasped as her fingers probed Alize’s wound. She had nearly expected them to pass through her, so tenuous was the body’s grip of life. But they were solid, almost disturbingly so. Under her touch, Alize’s pain began to subside like a wave receding from the shore, the last water draining through carved tendrils in the sand.
“Healing magic,” Alize breathed. “Arouah can cast healing magic?”
The Mages, the most elite conjurer’s of the steppes, adamantly avoided healing magic. Alize had always wondered why, but she had not had a chance to ask Onder before he died. Probably something to do with honor, something to do with limiting power. Something Arouah knew nothing about.
“You have not yet begun to see my capabilities,” the woman answered, as if to confirm Alize’s thoughts. In doing so, she stated bluntly a truth Alize had sought to avoid: she already addressed the Conjurer himself.
She swallowed. Now that he revealed his presence, Alize asked the only question that mattered. “Can you restore my friend?”
“It is possible if he survives the journey tonight. You’ve no time to linger. Follow my guide but know she has little worth if you are attacked.”
The woman led Alize by the cliffs that overlooked the sea, where the papery grasses were rusty with salt burn. Far below them the waves gnashed, furling and unfurling their white crests under the force of the tides. Clouds uncoiled from the horizon, caressing the sky and muting the starlight.
Alize watched it all and shivered.
Only the timorous dawn revealed the ancient city’s profile, nestled in the Great Eastern Bay. The spires of its library and palace punctured the sky as the sun rose. Alize squinted, seeking the phenomenon she had heard Hesna describe so many times. The daylight scattered the darkness to dance on the city’s stones. And Alize inhaled the beauty as the new light on the gray granite dazzled silver as the moon.