The Last Soul Necromancer: An Unknown Class Beyond Death

The last thing Ravel Ashlock carried in his first life was a dying boy, and the man who killed him for it was his best friend.

Four hundred and twelve steps went down into Vael Tarsis.

Ravel Ashlock had counted them on the descent, the way he counted everything, because sooner or later somebody would have to be carried back up, and it was never the knights who did the carrying.

It was him. It had always been him.

He stood at the foot of the four hundred and twelfth step with a boy strapped to his back and waited for a priest to finish praying.

The vault was round and black and older than the kingdom above it. Lamplight slid off the walls as if the stone disliked being looked at. In the centre, on a dais of three shallow steps, sat the thing the Church had hired them to find: a casket of grey metal, long as a man, bound in chains of sunbrass gone dull as old coins. The last ward on it had broken an hour ago. It had taken six lay brothers with it when it went.

They lay where they had fallen, in a rough ring around the dais. Brother Anselm moved from one to the next with his book open, murmuring the Rite of Passing over each in the same mild voice he used for blessings at breakfast.

"He'll be a while," Hob Tarn said from the door. The big man leaned on his shield as though it were a fence rail. "Six rites. Quarter hour apiece, if he doesn't skip the responses. You could've had the lad halfway up by now."

"I was told to wait."

"You're always told to wait." Hob scratched his beard. "Ever notice that? Nine years I've walked behind you, and it's always wait, Bearer, carry, Bearer. Rank B. Highest any of your lot ever got. Still wait."

"Somebody has to stand still," Ravel said. "Otherwise how would the rest of you know you were moving?"

Hob's laugh was one short bark, too loud for the room. Anselm did not look up.

On Ravel's back, the boy stirred. His name was Dell. He was sixteen, a sapper's apprentice lent to the expedition by the Canonry, and the ward that killed the six had only brushed him. Only. His left side was burned from hip to armpit, and he had been bleeding through the dressing for most of an hour. Ravel could feel it, warm and then cool, soaking through the carry-frame into his own shirt.

He shifted his weight and let the skill take it. [Steady] settled into his knees and spine like a hand on the shoulder. There were warriors who could split a boulder and mages who could boil a river, and the Writ, in its wisdom, had given Ravel Ashlock the ability to stand under a load without shaking. He had stopped being bitter about it around his twenty-fifth year. Mostly. Before the hour was out he would learn that the Writ had lied to him about what he was, and he would die of it.

"Ravel."

Emeric Lyle crossed the vault with his helm under his arm, and the lamplight, which disliked the stone, seemed to like him well enough. It usually did. Thirty-two and already greying at the temples, in mail he had polished that morning with his own hands, because he had never once asked his Bearer to do it. Nine years ago he had walked into the Chartery hall at Greywater, looked down the list of unattached carry-classes, and picked the one everybody called the Pallbearer behind his back.

Because you bring them home, he had said, when Ravel asked why. I'd want that. If it were me.

"How is he?" Emeric asked, low.

"He needs a healer who isn't busy."

Emeric glanced at Anselm, then at the casket, and something troubled moved behind his face and was put away. "Take him up. I'll square it with the Brother."

"He said the casket goes first."

"The casket has waited three thousand years. It can wait an hour for a boy." Emeric's hand came down on his shoulder, careful of the straps. "Go on. You've the look you get. The counting one."

"Four hundred and twelve," Ravel said.

"Of course it is." A tired smile. "Sela used to say she could hear you doing sums in your sleep."

The name sat between them the way it always did, a fourth lantern nobody lit any more. Two years. Ravel had carried her out of the Tanglewold himself, three leagues, and had not set her down once.

"Go," Emeric said gently.

Ravel went.

Or began to. The straps had slipped while he stood, and Dell had slid low on the frame, and there is a right way to resettle a wounded man that does not involve dropping him. Ravel took two steps to the dais, braced a knee on its lowest stair, and put his bare left hand flat on the lid of the casket to steady himself while he hauled the buckle tight with his right.

The metal was cold.

Colder than stone that deep had any right to be. Cold like the inside of a held breath.

And a part of him that had lain quiet for years turned over, the way a sleeper does when a door opens.

For fourteen years there had been a line in his Writ that he did not look at. Every Bearer had the same three skills. Ravel had a fourth, and the fourth had no name. Where the name should be were seven black bars, like words struck out of a letter by a careful clerk. The assessor at his Reading had called it a fault in the plate. The Chartery had called it a fault in the plate. Ravel had called it nothing at all, because a man at the bottom of the board does not go asking why the Writ has made a mistake in his particular case.

It had stirred once before. Five years ago at Tollenhaven, after the Black Rift, somewhere in the third week of carrying. A warmth behind the breastbone, a sense of being noticed, gone before he could set down the body he was holding.

It was not gone now.

The seven bars went hot as a brand. The lamps did not dim, but the sound went out of the room: Hob's breathing, the scrape of Emeric's boot, the soft drone of the rite, all of it sinking away as though the vault were filling with water.

And Ravel saw the threads.

There was one for each of the dead. Six silver lines, fine as spider-silk and bright as a blade's edge, rising from six still chests. They went straight up. They did not sway. They passed through the black ceiling as though it were not there, and they were taut, every one of them, taut as a line with a fish on it.

He stared. Two hundred and eleven bodies he had carried home in his life, and washed, and laid straight with their hands folded, and not one of them had ever shown him this.

Anselm turned a page and spoke the next verse over the brother at his feet, and that brother's thread jerked. Ran faster. Something was coming up it, out of the dead man, hand over hand toward the roof.

"Brother," Ravel said.

His own voice sounded far off. The priest did not hear, or did not stop.

"Brother Anselm. There's something coming out of them."

The rite faltered.

"Threads." He could not look away. On his back Dell breathed in small wet hitches, and through the boy's ribs, faint as frost on a window, a seventh line had begun to show. Not loose yet. Not rising. Only there, the way a rope waits coiled on a dock. "Silver. Out of the chest, going up through the stone. All six. And when you say the words it..." He swallowed. "It goes faster. It's being pulled. Brother, something is pulling them."

Sound came back a piece at a time. A drip somewhere. The creak of Hob's shield strap. Brother Anselm closing his book.

He did it without hurry, one finger marking the place a moment before he let it go, as if he fully meant to come back to it. Then he looked at Ravel, and the look was the worst thing in the room.

There was no surprise in it, and no anger either. He had the face of a man at a sickbed who has just heard the physician say the word he was afraid of.

"Oh, Ravel," Anselm said. "I had so hoped it would not be you."

"Brother?" Emeric looked from one of them to the other. "What does he mean, threads? Rav, what are you..."

"Take your hand from the reliquary, my son," Anselm said. Still mild. Still the breakfast voice. "Slowly. There. Now tell me exactly what you see, and leave nothing out. It matters a great deal that you leave nothing out."

Ravel took his hand away. The cold stayed in his palm, and the threads stayed exactly where they were.

Anselm had not asked what are you talking about. He had asked what do you see.

Anselm had moved. Not far. Three unhurried steps, which put a priest of forty with soft hands squarely on the bottom stair, between Ravel and four hundred and twelve steps of climbing.

And Emeric's right hand, which a moment ago had rested on Ravel's shoulder, had gone to the hilt of his sword. He did not seem to know it had. He was looking down at his own fingers with a kind of puzzled dread, like a man watching a dog he had raised from a pup begin, for no reason, to growl.

"He has seen the Gathering, Ser Emeric," Anselm said. "You understand what that requires. You swore to it before you ever swore to me."

"No." It came out of Emeric cracked. "No, he's... it's a fever of the deep, it's the ward, he touched the... Brother, it's Ravel."

"I know who it is."

"He's carried us nine years!"

"I know that also. I shall grieve it longer than you will." The priest's eyes had not left Ravel's face. There was real sorrow in them. That was the thing Ravel would remember afterwards, when there was an afterwards to remember in. The man was sorry. "It is not a punishment, my son. You have done nothing wrong. You have simply seen a thing that cannot be seen and then left to walk about. I would give a great deal for it to have been otherwise."

The boy on his back made a small sound.

It cut through the dread and the silver in his eyes together. Sixteen years old and bleeding into Ravel's shirt, with a thread in his chest that had not yet let go.

Not yet, Ravel thought. Not this one.

He reached down and finished tightening the buckle.

Then he straightened, and his right hand drew the plain sword at his hip, and his left stayed where it had been for fourteen years: closed on the strap of the load. Blade low and forward. Weight on the back foot. The guard of a man who has only ever fought one-handed, because the other hand was always holding somebody up. Castor Vey, the Dawn Saint himself, had once watched him use it in a practice yard and asked, laughing, what school taught a man to fence as if he were dragging a sack.

No school. Just this.

"I'm taking the boy up," Ravel said. "He's bleeding. That's all I'm doing. Whatever I saw, I'll swear on anything you like that I'll never speak of it. Move off the stair, Brother."

"I believe you would swear it," Anselm said. "I believe you would even mean it."

He did not move off the stair.

"Rav." Emeric's voice shook. His sword was a hand's width out of the scabbard now, and he was staring at that bright strip of steel as if it belonged to someone else. "Rav, put him down. Please. Just put the lad down and we'll talk, we'll sort it, there's some way to..."

"There's a way up," Ravel said. "It's behind him."

"Please."

Anselm sighed. It was a small sound, and tired, and it had the weight of a door closing.

"Emeric," he said, very quietly.

Only the name.

Emeric's whole body jerked as if a hook had set in it. The sword came the rest of the way out.

And Hob Tarn, who had not said a word since the rite stopped, who was slow of speech and slower to anger and had never in nine years been first through any door, picked his shield up off the floor, walked across the vault with his heavy unhurried tread, and planted himself in front of Ravel.

Facing the wrong way.

Facing Emeric.

"Go on, Rav," Hob said over his shoulder. "I've got this bit."