7.

 

“Are you sure he will die?”

“It was the faintest pulse, Bau. A death rattle, nothing more. But I can return to cut his throat if that would please you.”

“You know it would not.”

“It would please me. It was all I could do to stop myself, but I did.” The scarred Keeper sat himself down. “But you must control yourself. It has been long believed that he would never abide by the laws, and Aelyn will not punish us for his death.”

“If he is dead. You said the disease had burned itself out. If he isn’t dead, that means he is now the vaccine to your prized creation.”

“There is enough in him that he will not survive.”

“Reila will be at him now.”

“You believe she can do anything?”

“Do not underestimate her.”

“Do not underestimate me,” Fo replied. “Now, sit. You’re making me miss the battle.”

Zaifyr heard Bau grunt, but the white-robed man did sit next to the other and face the Spine. From the second floor of the tower it was lit by fire, the smoke blowing away from their gaze. The Keepers had retreated to the tower after leaving the hospital, unconcerned by the sparseness of it, the emptiness. The Healer had asked Fo three times if Zaifyr was truly dead, until the Keeper began to suggest snappishly that the only way to be sure was to take a knife to Zaifyr’s throat. All three knew it was a hollow idea: regardless of where he died, or what he believed, his brothers and sisters would demand to see his body. Despite his bravado, if Fo was found to be responsible, the response from Jae’le at the least would be terrifying.

But I am not dead.

He might as well be.

He had suppressed the haunt of the mercenary he found himself in, turned the voice of the young man into a tiny whisper, and had put aside the pain he had felt when he died. He could move, also, much further than any other haunt he had seen. He suspected that if he wanted, he could walk the haunt into Leera, and feel nothing of the pull that the dead felt to their bodies. Still, there would be no reason to do that, for he could touch nothing, and a creeping cold had begun to settle into him that he did not belong to the mercenary.

“Look at their numbers,” Fo said, leaning forward. “How much of their nation has emerged from the darkness for this war?”

After a moment of study, Bau said, “More than we estimated.”

“It does appear that way.” He pointed out a part of the Spine where, as if it were a thick, flat snake made from stone, it crawled out into the dark of trees and bush. “They will push that edge soon, I believe. Work the edges to weaken the middle.”

“Will they come into contact with your plague?”

“Soon enough. Those that Saet infected during her travels will show soon enough.”

Zaifyr had followed the Keeper in the hope of learning more of what had happened to him, but he had heard nothing. Fo did not discuss the details of his poison, how it affected the body, and he left Zaifyr with no idea of how he could cure his body—a body that, like Fo, he believed would not survive the poison inside it.

Approaching the window, he gazed down at the box-like shape of the hospital and focused on the tether of his own body. He had felt it since he left the building, as if it were an echo through a tunnel. He had felt an ache inside him at the call, but it was sickly and he was reluctant to focus on it without knowing how to cure the last of what was in him.

But it was all that would lead him back to his body.

Like a cord, he thought. A deathly trail by which I can return. What choice do I have?

He felt it, as if it were in his hands. Around him the haunt—the mercenary who sent his pay to his mother, to his sister, to his family who lived in a small town—dropped from him as he began to follow it. His senses changed and he felt a chill about him.

His very being was suddenly assaulted. Hundreds of haunts lifted into the air about him, each of them launched from the ground in a pale-gray haze, bursting from the battle that was taking place. The haunts came straight to him, drawn to the cord of his life. They saw in it a way to return to life, to end their suffering. They did not fear him, nor consider that—rightly or wrongly—the body he was returning to was his own. They were driven only by their fear, their horror at being dead and their need to return.

Unable to do anything else, Zaifyr released his grip.

The haunts crashed into his being, hit him with a shock so profound and deep that he lost himself.

Zaifyr did not know for how long he drifted, but when he felt his own being again it was not alone. The echo of the earth closing in on him was strong, and for a moment he felt that he was buried—though he knew that this could not possibly be true, for the people of Mireea did not bury their dead, but burned them. Shortly, it became clear to him that, in his loss of awareness, his subconscious had gone in search of another haunt, one whose body also lay in the mountains, who had been lost, and found himself buried alive. He had a vision of rising in one of the narrow caves that the Cities of Ger threaded through, a lost gold digger, his ancient bones the force by which Zaifyr would have to return to the hospital that held his body.

But as his consciousness took more shape and he regained more and more of himself, he realized that he was wrong. He was not solid, not in terms of bone or flesh. Instead, a freezing crush began to emerge across his chest, as if his ribs had been shattered, and he began to become aware of another presence, that of a woman, no older than the mercenary whose haunt he had inhabited before. This woman was not from the Mireean Guard, nor the mercenaries, but rather from the Leeran Army. Memories of a march up the mountain reached him, a woman in search of conquest, a soldier directed by her god.

She searches for that being now. The realization saddened him. She searches for a god that will deliver her to paradise and care for her immortal soul and she thinks she has found her.

But she was wrong.

There was only him.