The cheers originated at the front of the column and rippled back through the crowd like a shock wave. Karla couldn’t see what had prompted them, her view obscured by the dust kicked up by the myriad of marching souls, but she guessed it had something to do with the Horus. Her suspicions were confirmed by an ecstatic Seeker who ran back shouting the news.
“The Horus! It’s turning!”
A thin man who had fallen back through the ranks peered through the dust, but there was nothing to see but more dust. More bone, than muscle, he must have looked just as grotesque in life, but like Karla, he had no obvious disability.
No one ate in the Deeps, but no one lost weight. No one ever aged either, but they weathered. Bodies were mere vehicles for souls until they broke down and became a prison.
“Big deal,” muttered the thin man. “It has turned to us before, only to veer away at the last minute. It’s only purpose is to torment.”
“Keep your prognostications to yourself, Seeker,” came a booming, authoritative voice.
The speaker was a milky-faced soul swaddled in pale muslin. He carried a staff shaped like a shepherd’s crook, but with fine ceramic teeth studding its curve.
Karla hadn’t even seen the Hashmal come up alongside them with his escort of Protectors—trusted Seekers deputized to enforce order in the column and defend it from infidels.
The contingent was shuttling from the rear to the head of the column. Their strides were long and quick as they hurried forward, now that their responsibilities had shifted from encouraging stragglers to managing entry into the Horus.
Karla scurried out of their way. The Protectors were not shy about cracking their staffs on a skull or two, and one of the first things she learned in the Deeps was that these hybrid bodies were brittle. This existence might be a few steps removed from the physical, but it was not a solely spiritual realm.
She had come across so many broken and discouraged souls in the rear of the column that even though she was able-bodied, she made it her mission to assist her own motley clique of the walking wounded. Someone had to protect them from the Protectors.
There was a man named Tomas, with shattered bones in his ankle who had trouble planting his foot without it flopping over on its side. Mary was a hunchback with a severed spine. She wasn’t paralyzed as one might expect, but she could only remain erect by leaning on a pair of ceramic crutches fashioned from ceramic shafts salvaged from an abandoned infidel settlement. Ishmael was an African without hands or lower jaw, but who managed to convey his feelings with the most expressive eyes Karla had ever seen.
Those three were the core of her little clique, but there were those who occasionally joined them as they shuttled through the column. A frequent visitor was Renault, a man whose limbs were intact but whose skin hung in shreds from his frame like ribbons. Renault was a strong walker, but his grotesque appearance discomfited the luckier souls at the fore and he was often ridiculed and ostracized. Position in the column was a measure of status, but the pretty souls only deigned to be with other pretty souls, until they too inevitably accrued damage and had to fall back.
The Hashmal lagged behind, keeping pace with Karla and her group, and he could not stop staring. It wasn’t hard to see that she had the only intact body in this collection of battered souls.
“Your body looks perfectly fine,” said the Hashmal, squinting at her. “What are you doing with these cripples? You need to come to the fore where you belong.”
“They need help,” said Karla. “So I thought, why not help them.”
The Hashmal shook his head. “That’s not how the vetting and sorting is supposed to work. There is a reason they are back here. They have been punished by the powers-that-be. Only the virtuous get to advance.”
