The Last Soul Necromancer: An Unknown Class Beyond Death

Chapter 2: Foreclosure

Emeric came on weeping.

That was the part Ravel's mind kept snagging on, uselessly, while his body did the sensible thing and backed away. Emeric Lyle was crying like a child, mouth open, tears running down into his collar, and his sword arm was doing something else entirely. The blade stood in a knight's high guard, perfectly placed, and along its edge the oath-light had kindled: hard gold-white, bright enough to throw every shadow in the vault against the far wall.

"Hob, move." It came out in pieces. "I can't... it won't stop, I can't make it stop. Move!"

"Then I'll stop it for you," Hob said, and set his feet.

The first blow would have split an ox. Hob caught it on the shield's boss, the way he had caught everything for nine years. He gave a step. He was not trying to win; Ravel saw that at once. A shield-man knows to the ounce what he can hold, and Hob Tarn was holding a knight a full rank above him the only way such a thing can be done, which is briefly.

The stair. Now, while he's buying it.

Ravel turned and ran at Anselm.

The priest had drawn no weapon. He did not own one. He lifted one soft hand, palm out, like a man refusing a second helping, and the air across the bottom stair went solid. A pane of light, square-edged, pale gold, no thicker than a window. Ravel hit it shoulder-first at a dead run with a boy on his back. He rebounded, kept his feet because [Steady] kept them for him, and laid his palm against the ward. It burned clean, as if the light were trying to scrub him off.

"Please do not," Anselm said. "You will only hurt yourself, and I would spare you what I can."

"Spare the boy, then. He saw nothing. Let me carry him to the top and I'll walk back down to you."

Anselm's eyes moved to Dell's slack face and came back.

"He heard you," Anselm said gently. "I am sorry. I am so very sorry."

Behind them, the sound of sword on shield stopped.

Ravel turned in time to see it. Hob had given every step he had to give; his heel was against the dais. Emeric's blade went up, came down on the shield's rim, and as the shield dipped under it the point slid over the top, quick as a needle, into the gap between gorget and collarbone.

Hob said, "Oh," in a tone of mild surprise.

He sat down on the dais steps the way he sat down at any fire, heavily, with a grunt, and laid his shield across his knees. He looked for Ravel and found him.

"Go on," he said again, and died.

Ravel saw the thread come out of him.

He had not thought to brace for it. Out of that barrel chest, out of nine years of bad jokes and worse singing and a habit of saving the last of the dried apples for whoever had the watch, a single silver line unspooled and rose and drew tight. He watched it reach the ceiling. He watched it begin to run.

Nobody had even said the words.

"Hob." Emeric was staring down at what he had done. "Hob, get up. I didn't, that wasn't..." His sword arm came back to guard on its own. His feet turned him toward Ravel. "Oh, gods. Rav. Rav, run."

"Where?" Ravel said.

A Bearer's guard wins nothing. All it has ever been for is the handful of breaths between they're on us and someone who can actually fight has arrived. Ravel had stretched those breaths across fourteen years of other men's battles, and he stretched them now.

The first cut he turned off the flat. The second he slipped, and felt its wind on his cheek and smelled the burnt-linen reek of oath-light. The third drove him back against the ward, which seared his shoulder through the leather, and he came off it sideways with Dell's weight swinging and his knees taking it.

And he saw the hitch.

It was at the top of every stroke. A stutter, a quarter-breath long, where the arm went on and the man inside it tried with everything he had to haul it back. Emeric was fighting too. He was simply losing. But for that quarter-breath, each time, his guard stood open from collar to chin, and Ravel's point was already low and forward, and the distance was nothing.

He had the opening three times.

Nine years. Emeric at Sela's graveside with a hand on the back of Ravel's neck, saying nothing, for an hour. Emeric saying, I'd want that, if it were me.

Three times, and he could not make his arm go.

The fourth time there was no opening. There was a flare of gold, and a blow like a mule's kick just below his breastbone, and a strange deep cold, and Emeric's face very close to his, wet and broken, whispering no, no, no.

The sword came out. That was worse.

Ravel's knees went. [Steady] held them a moment longer than nature would have, out of sheer habit, and then he was on the floor on his side, with the boy's weight across him and his own blood coming out between his fingers a good deal faster than Dell's ever had.

Steel rang on stone. Emeric had dropped his sword. He stood over it with his empty hands held out from his body as if they were on fire. Then he folded, all at once, and crawled to the dais and took Hob's head in his lap and began to rock.

"It is done," Anselm said softly. "You kept your oath, my son. No one will ask more of you tonight."

The pane of light across the stair thinned and went out.

The priest came and crouched by Ravel, careful of his robe. He reached out, and Ravel understood, with a horror that had nothing to do with dying, what the hand was for: two fingers to the brow, the opening gesture of the rite.

"Don't."

It was barely a voice. Anselm stopped.

"Don't you say one word over me."

The priest drew his hand back and nodded once, as a man nods to a fair request.

That was when the floor moved.

It was not a dungeon-quake; those came up through the feet. This came down, a long shudder dropping through four hundred steps of rock, as if something enormous had been set on the roof of the world. On the dais, the sunbrass chains began to chime against the casket, link on link.

Anselm's head snapped up. For the first time in nine years, Ravel saw him afraid.

"No," the priest whispered. "No, that is not... it is not time."

He ran to the casket. A man with a hole under his breastbone is not a thing one looks back at.

So nobody saw the Bearer get up.

It took three tries. He used the sword as a staff and the ward-scorched wall as a friend, and when he was standing he found the strap with his left hand, and closed his fingers on it, and put his foot on the first step.

One.

He did not look at Hob. If he looked, he would stay.

Nine. Ten. Eleven.

Count the steps. Not the blood. Blood is not a number a man can do anything about.

Sixty. Sixty-one.

The shudders came again and again, and each time he leaned into the wall and waited and went on. His legs were somebody else's. But [Burden] did not care whose legs they were, and the load was the load, and he had been climbing out of holes under dead weight since he was seventeen years old.

One hundred and eighty-eight. One hundred and eighty-nine.

On the hundred and ninetieth step, Dell let go.

There was no sound. The small wet breathing against his ear simply was not there on the next step, and the weight on the frame changed in the way every porter knows and none can describe. And past his shoulder, at the edge of his eye, a silver line slid free and went up into the stone.

Ravel let go of the strap. He had not done that in fourteen years. He reached up and closed his fist on the thread.

It went through his fingers like light through water.

He stood there with his hand in the air. Then he took hold of the strap again, because the boy still had to be carried, and went on. Two hundred and eleven, he thought, of nothing to do with stairs. Two hundred and eleven I brought home. I am not going to make it twelve.

Somewhere after three hundred he lost the count. That had never happened to him before.

Air told him he was out: cold, and moving, and smelling of leaf-mould. He was on his knees in the Gate Court of Vael Tarsis, among pillars that had been old before there was a Brannoch, and it was dusk. An autumn dusk, clear and violet, with the first stars pricking through.

Below the hill lay Tarsbridge. Forty thousand people in the crook of a river, and they were lighting their lamps. He could see it happening street by street, a slow gold tide. A bell somewhere, calling the mill shift home.

He laid Dell down by the nearest pillar, and straightened the boy's legs, and folded his hands. It took a long time. When he was done he sat back against the stone with his sword across his knees.

An owl was watching him.

It sat on a broken capital an arm's length away, small and grey, with eyes the colour of old pewter. It looked at him with no fear and no particular interest, as a clerk looks at the next man in the queue. Then it turned its head, quite calmly, and looked up.

The sky opened.

Not like a rift. He had seen rifts: ragged, bruise-coloured, wet at the edges, with things in them that wanted out. This was a line. Straight as a ruled margin from one horizon to the other, and it parted without a sound, the way a ledger falls open at a marked page. Behind it lay a pale, even light that cast no shadows at all.

Nothing came through.

The light just lay over the valley, patient as snow.

Then, down in Tarsbridge, a silver thread went up from a chimney.

Then another. Then a street of them. Then all the streets at once: every roof, every alley, the mill and the bridge and the barges on the river, forty thousand bright lines lifting straight into the evening like rain falling upward. The bell stopped between one stroke and the next. A cart rolled a little way down the river road with nobody driving it, and bumped a wall, and stood. The lamps burned on in the windows.

Nobody screamed. Nobody had the time to.

One, thought Ravel Ashlock, because it was all he had. Two. Three.

He got to three hundred and six before he understood he was still counting the same street.

He found he was not angry; there was no room for it. Emeric rocking on the dais steps came into his mind, and it was like pressing a bruise through a thick coat. We opened something that should have stayed shut, he thought, and then, Somebody ought to carry them, and there's nobody left. His mother was eleven years dead of a cough he could not afford to cure, and his sister had been taken at thirteen, and he was glad, in a small tired way, that neither had lived to be a line in that sky.

Then came a tug, low in his chest.

He looked down. A thread stood out of the wound, silver, fine as silk. His own. It rose past his face, and he felt it take up the slack and draw tight, and words he had never seen wrote themselves across the dusk in the Writ's plain black hand.

[Entry: Ashlock, Ravel. Bearer.]

[Closing.]

The pull was not cruel. It was like being lifted by the collar by someone very strong and entirely indifferent.

And in the place where his fourth skill lived, seven black bars caught fire.

The thread stopped.

[Closing.]

[Closing.]

[■■■■■■■ : discharged.]

[Entry cannot be closed.]

The owl looked at him then. Properly, this time. It seemed, as far as a bird can, surprised.

The sky, the dead city, the cold stone at his back: all of it went out like a pinched wick.

Dark.

And then a voice, sharp and close and impossibly, unbearably ordinary.

"Ravel Ashlock! If you are not out of that bed by the time I count ten, you will be late for your own Reading, and I am not walking you there by the ear at your age. One!"

His mother had been dead for eleven years.

"Two!"