Shadows of the Soul

Chapter 3

Doric knelt beside the last of the corpses, a sandy haired youth with a face locked in a rictus snarl. Talen, by the look of him, though it was hard to be sure. They weren’t a particularly distinct people, and his black breastplate bore the twining red ram’s horns of the Unbound clear across the center, which was no help. That lot would take any man with the nerve to take up the sword, their past, their homeland be damned. Any man who’d fight their fight was man enough for them.

Doric sighed and leaned back. He could respect that. When it was all said and done, where a man came from, all his deeds, good or bad…well, they didn’t mean shit in the end. Doric knew that better than most.

He reached out with the crystal sword in his hand and tilted the boy’s head with the tip for a better look. Wherever he’d come from, the lad had been handsome, once. Likely made the ladies swoon when he came around. Doric supposed what was left of him was still handsome, as far as corpses went. Ladies might look at the lad a bit askance now, though—particularly around the midsection, where he ended in a row of slimy red streamers and a few chunks of spinal cord where the rest of him should be. Doric’s wrinkled face cracked in a wan smile. He didn’t know much about women, but he knew they weren’t likely to swoon for that.

His shoulders shook lightly with soft, silent laughter. Sure, it was gallows humor. And why not? He had a right to it, if anyone did. He was the Barrow. The harvester of souls. Folks expected that sort of thing out of him. Shame to disappoint.

With a heavy creaking of stiff armor and stiffer joints he came to his feet. He focused once more on the trail of corpses winding all the way up to the ruined cathedral nestled atop the hill. Lot more of them up there, looked like. Maybe half a century of Unbound, something like five hundred dead men. And they’d died hard.

Doric shrugged. Nothing unusual there. The Unbound were hard men, in the main. Few harder. Their leaders in particular--Captains, they called them--tended to wield a singular focus of will that made them bad men to cross. They also tended to find the kind of nasty things wiser men left alone, and then give what they found a good kick just to see what happened. Hard men or no, sometimes they lost the leg that did the kicking all the same. Like they had here.

He followed the trail back up towards the ruins, skirting bodies and severed limbs as he went. It was clear it’d been a retreat, if a disciplined one. That had him shaking his head. The Unbound weren’t much on retreat. He’d once seen a Decade, a hundred Unbound cavalry, ride against a few hundred Vesheen cultists. They’d had to plow headlong through a cloud of screaming death as the cultists called up their demons, but the Unbound had kept right on. Not a man of them broke.

They’d beaten the cultists, too, in the end, though only their Captain and a bare handful of soldiers walked away from it. The cultists were slaughtered to a man. And yet here, a full Century had been beaten bloody and then routed. Whatever they’d unearthed here, the Unbound had fought it coming out of the cathedral, stood their ground and paid for it. Paid for it dear.

Another mystery to tease him. He’d always been too damned curious for his own good. It’s what had gotten him tied up hand and foot with the Song in the first place. He’d just had to know what it’d be like, playing the god.

He snorted out a laugh as he started up the hill to the ruin. Fat lot of stupid that’d been.

Wasn’t the Song that had captured his attention this time, though. Not really. Sure, he’d heard the men add their voices to the chorus clanging away inside him—he always heard that, no getting around it. But men were always dying, and one man dying sounds more or less like another. He had no need to chase down every soul. They’d find him sure enough, cling to him like iron filings to a lodestone, and no avoiding that.

What had called him this time…well, he wasn’t quite sure what to call it. A wrongness. A sour note, in an otherwise perfect harmony. He shook his head. More like a blood curdling scream than a sour note, if he was being honest. He’d never heard the like, and it bothered him.

So he dug through corpses. Seemed he did that a lot these days. The song never held answers for him, but sometimes dead men did.

He found it up near the ruin, where the lion’s share of the bodies were scattered. It was nothing but a faded outline in the blood stained grass and a few tattered strips of white cloth, now, but he’d seen the like enough times to know what he was looking at. Even if he hadn’t had the familiar stench clawing its way up his nostrils.

He scrubbed at his nose. Hadn’t caught that scent in a long, long time, but he knew it. Made his nose itch.

He ran a hand through his scraggly gray hair. So. Seraph. No doubt about it. Their kind never left corpses, nothing you could point to after the fact. Just a bit of ash for the wind to carry off. And dead men.

He’d been wrong after all. Seemed the Unbound had gotten off light. If they’d been up against Seraphim—two at least, if one had been standing to chase off the surviving men—they were damned lucky to get out at all. They’d even killed one, somehow. They might be the only men living, aside from the Locks themselves, who could make that claim.

Doric grinned ruefully and stood from his crouch. And there was himself, of course.

If the Seraphim were free…well. That meant one of the four Locks was dead. One of the four who carried a quarter of all divinity locked away in the depths of their very souls. Dead. Their portion of the Pantheon free to drip into the world like water from a leaky barrel. He shook his head sadly. It meant he had one less friend in the world. A shame. He didn’t have many of those to spare.

He looked down at his hand, where the Keystone perched in his hand, and gave the weapon a shake. Sunlight glittered brightly off the pink crystal blade. He sighed. It also meant that the thing in his fist had done the killing, and no more than a day or two gone, unless he missed his guess.

So. His master dead. At least one friend gone with him. But had the one killed the other, as seemed obvious, or were there more pieces to the puzzle? There must be. His master had created the Locks, safeguarded them above even his own children. He couldn’t believe the man had turned on them. No logic to it.

And even if he had, well, that didn’t explain his own death, now did it?

Doric winced. More questions. Always more questions, and answers few and far between.

One answer he meant to have, though, and soon. Where had that second Seraph gone off to?

He lumbered off toward the nearby forest, following the trail of dead Unbound away from the ruined cathedral, the hilt of the Keystone tight in his white knuckled grip. The corpses were still fresh. The Seraph couldn’t have gotten too far.

If the thing was lucky, it was already dead.