Peculiar Soul

No shell misses. When we say such a thing we mean that it has not struck men or materiel - but every shot strikes something. Walk through Daressa, where the thunder and fire has raged for years without respite, and you will see that war kills more than men.

- Saleh Taskin, On Reclamation, 687

The roar of the surf swelled in a slow counterpoint to the distant rumble of guns. Michael found himself struggling to control the small dinghy as he drew near to the shore; the waves broke and surged with enough vigor to slap bracing-cold water against his legs.

His oars struggled to find purchase in the uneven sea, and one ill-timed stroke turned the dinghy to the side. Another wave came before Michael had any hope of correcting it. He felt the boat tip inexorably sideways as the water rose up from beneath, and from his spector’s vantage he watched himself fall from the boat into the sea.

Gritting his teeth, he forced his view back to his natural perspective and began to swim toward the shore. Waves broke over him again and again, sending him tumbling under the midnight sea. Shells and rocks along the bottom raked his skin. He felt the tug of cloth tearing.

Michael found purchase on the bottom at last, stumbling forward to collapse onto the rocky beach. He lay there for a time, panting and staring up at the stars overhead with his back pressed up gratefully against the land.

His mind drifted into a restless half-sleep, punctuated by fits of paranoid wakefulness as half-imagined noises set his heart hammering and quickened his breath. In between the stolen drabs of sleep the stars advanced overhead and the night waned until Michael opened his eyes to find the horizon once more aglow with a pale light.

He sat up. The guns had stopped, although he could not say for how long they had been silent. Michael rose to his feet and felt the rasps of hunger and thirst scraping at his insides, his muscles leaning heavily on the strengthening warmth of Stefan’s soul. Food, fresh water - he looked down and ruefully added new clothing to the list of things he would need, for his red clothing from the island had been torn nearly to rags by the tumble along the shoreline.

Worse still, one of his shoes had gone missing during his swim. He slipped the remaining shoe off and stood barefoot on the shore, feeling every inch the castaway. Still, he found an incongruous smile on his lips - he had made it to the continent at last.

The shoreline did not seem so different from Ardalt’s at a glance, with a gentle slope of rocks and sand abutting scrubland. Hills rose in the distance, and beyond those lay the first real departure from an Ardan landscape - mountains, dim and hazy in the morning light. Snow still clung to their peaks despite the season, and the white patches glowed with the first rays of the day’s sun.

Michael began to walk forward, wincing as the rocks prodded his unprotected feet. He pushed inland for some time until a low ridge drew his attention; his course diverted to take him up its spine for the first good view of his surroundings.

It was unimpressive. Most of what he saw was yet more scrubland, although from his vantage he began to notice an oddly-irregular quality to the terrain, pocked with divots and undulating furrows that snaked beneath the ground cover. It wasn’t until he saw a fresh shell-burst amid the chaos that he realized what he was looking at; the uneven terrain was the result of battles long-past, since overgrown and smoothed by time.

Sending his vision up higher still, he spied a welcome sight: greenery choked a small hollow not far from his position, promising a stream hidden within its depths. He set off down the ridge and soon found the small trickle of water. It was cool and clear; Michael cupped his hands in it and drank deeply.

Upon the third handful he heard the hard click of a rifle’s bolt and froze. He turned his sight to the side and saw a muzzle protruding unsteadily from a clump of brush to his right. The water drained from his hands as he slowly held them apart and upward, showing his open palms to the gun’s wielder.

“Who?” came a slurred gasp from the bushes. “Who’re you?”

“My name is Michael,” he replied, trying to keep very still.

There was a pause. “Ardan?” the voice asked. The muzzle wavered, then dropped to the ground. Michael exhaled and lowered his arms, albeit slowly. He let his sight drift toward the covering bushes and found a man stretched out against the hillside, leaning on a pack with his rifle cradled weakly in one arm.

Half of his face was a bloody ruin. His cheek and one eye were unrecognizable, his neck and jaw abraded and burnt. Michael’s mind went blank, his heart pounding with sudden force. A hand, hanging limp off the bed as blood dripped slowly from the fingers-

He turned his sight away and tried to breathe. A low groan sounded from the bush. Michael steeled himself and turned to look at the man once more. Blood spattered his overcoat - a soldier’s uniform, Michael recognized, although more faded and torn than any poster he’d seen back on the mainland. The soldier took slow, labored breaths, and Michael watched his chest rise and fall for a few moments.

Michael stood. “Is it all right if I come closer?” he asked. “You look…”

The soldier gave a wheezing laugh, bloody saliva bubbling on his lips. “Hurt? No shit,” he mumbled. “Damn Savvies shelled us. Everything near - near Leik.” He coughed, and fresh blood spattered his lips. “Got my patrol. Was dark, I got turned around. Can’t see right.”

The soldier grimaced, and Michael felt a sudden, sharp spike of fear as his breathing quickened. The emotion pulsed like seeping oil, and with matching horror Michael realized that it was the soldier’s fear he felt.

He closed his eyes and thought of the tree, the gnarled wood wrapping around the darkness within. The fear began to fade as he drew and redrew the barrier in his mind, layering detail on the tree until it seemed almost as real as the scraggly bushes crowding around him.

“You - still there?” the soldier murmured. Michael could no longer feel the man’s fear through Spark’s insidious soul, but it was plain in his voice. He moved toward the bush and knelt down - then, after a moment, took the soldier’s hand in his own.

The man squeezed his fingers with painful force, shivering. “Thought you left,” he mumbled. “Been seeing things all night.”

Michael let his eyes trace down the rest of the soldier’s body. His face had the worst of it, but there were small bloodstains down the length of his torso and the outside of one leg - the side closest to the shell, Michael presumed. The exertion of lifting the rifle made itself clear in the fresh, red blood smeared among the dry. There was dirt and debris in his visible wounds, mud and slime from the creekbed amid the blood.

An anatomens was the soldier’s only hope, Michael realized - a trained anatomens. For all that Michael had that same power in theory, he knew he would only harm the man further if he tried. The image of Spark’s leering, bruised face flitted through his mind, and he shuddered.

“Can you stand?” he asked, kneeling beside the soldier. “Maybe I can help you get back.”

The soldier gave a weak laugh that faded into coughing, then shook his head. “Nah,” he chuckled. “Can’t feel my feet.” He let Michael’s hand slip from his fingers, reaching clumsily under his collar to withdraw a small metal plate on a chain. He pulled it free and held it out towards Michael with a trembling hand.

“Tell ‘em I didn’t run away,” he said. “My ma needs the money.”

Michael looked at the dangling tag for a moment, then reached out his hand to take it. Crudely-stamped letters in the metal identified it as belonging to a Gefr. Elias Keller, from a town Michael had never heard of. He clasped his fingers around the still-warm metal and knelt down.

“I’ll tell them,” Michael said. He had no idea whom he would tell, nor how, but it seemed a reasonable thing to figure out later. “You have anyone else besides your mother?”

Elias shook his head. “No,” he said. “Just me and her for - for years now.”

He sounded as if he meant to say more, but only managed a weak, guttural noise. His fingers grasped blindly on the ground; Michael took his hand once more and squeezed.

Michael felt the keen irony. Here he was, with Stanza’s soul - a healer’s soul, unable to do anything for a dying man. He could only watch Elias convulse in pain and fear.

There was, of course, the other soul. Michael did not dare let his thoughts dwell on it, since for him there could be only the tree. Stepping over that line would not heal Elias either - but perhaps his death would not be so painful, so full of fear. The notion drifted along like a piece of grass in the stream, tempting Michael with each gasp and strangled sob the soldier made.

Michael kept his thoughts to the tree, and wondered again if he was evil.

After some time Elias quieted. His breathing had become labored and shallow, his hand falling limp in Michael’s grasp. Again, there was an ache that gathered behind Michael’s ribs, building in strength as Elias waned. It was strangely subdued, though, the aching pull muted and weak compared to the insistent pain he had felt in the past. Eventually, it stopped.

He knew what he would see when he finally turned his sight back to Elias. The soldier’s remaining eye stared blankly upward, his mouth pulled into a grimace. Michael watched his face for a few moments, then turned away to watch the creek flow past in its happy ignorance.

It would be right to leave, to let Elias rest undisturbed. It did not sit right with Michael to cavalierly loot the dead. That said - he was sitting barefoot, barely clothed and starving with little more than rags to his name. Elias, meanwhile…

Michael sighed and rose to his knees, reaching into the bushes. The man’s pack lay on the far side of his body, and Michael dragged it across the corpse to begin sorting out its contents. A spare shirt and socks were first, followed by assorted tools and kits that he laid out for later perusal. One item, however, transfixed him when he read the writing on the can.

Elias had carried an emergency ration. The gnawing hunger in his belly reasserted itself at the mere sight of the label, and Michael’s hands shook as he carefully unwound the thin strip of metal binding the canister together. Its contents were puzzling - a sort of compacted meat bouillon solid in one half and a rancid, dense chocolate in the other.

It was ambrosia. Michael found a spoon among the other effects and began to devour the powdery contents of the ration, supplementing with hearty gulps from the stream. He fancied that he could feel the food seeping into his body as it hit his stomach, slurped up by Stefan’s ravenous soul to spread to each limb. It was not a huge amount of food, nor at all tasty, but it was enough that Michael felt a renewed strength when he finally set the emptied canister aside.

Further searching revealed little more of note - gloves, more socks, pots and pans, a small shaving kit, toiletries, rope, undergarments, kerchiefs, and a few assorted stakes and pins that Michael figured must be for a tent. He donned the spare shirt, discarding his tattered red one. After some hesitation and a murmured apology, he also slipped off Elias’s boots and leg wraps. They were a loose but passable fit, and much better than going barefoot. The wraps neatly covered the torn legs of his trousers, leaving him fully - if haphazardly - dressed.

From the rest Michael took only the canteen and a few coins that had been tucked into Elias’s pockets. It was a modest sum, but it would feed him for a few nights. He frowned and stood, looking up at the sun before letting his sight rise to scan along the coast.

From what Elias had said, he had landed somewhere east of Leik, the staging point for Ardan operations on the continent. Ordinarily this would be a good thing - it would be simple to catch a boat up the strait from such an active town. Those guns had sounded most of the night, however, and the port was likely in disarray. Aside from that, the mere presence of what were apparently Safid ships made the notion of sea travel seem much less appealing.

Boats were not Michael’s only option, however. Mendian had continental holdings on the south side of the strait, north along the coast from Michael’s position. It would take longer, and it would be unpleasant - but he should be able to simply walk into Mendian. That the route led him away from the Daressan front of the war was a happy bonus.

He knelt to fill the canteen, gave Elias’s hand a final squeeze, and set off parallel to the coast.

He found a road after an hour or so of walking, as the land flattened and spread beneath another set of towering mountains. Shell-bursts were more frequent here - it looked as if barrages were regular, and prone to target the road. Splotches of irregular, loosely-packed dirt mingled with the older road surface where attacks had struck true and been hastily repaired.

There were other, more sobering reminders. The wreckage of wagons and carts lay here and there upon the road. Bloated horses and oxen buzzed with clouds of flies or lay with gleaming white bone exposed to the sun. The air stank of death and stagnant water when the wind blew, and grew thick with insects when it stilled.

By mid-day the stench and noxious buzzing swarms had become intolerable; even where the road was not littered with animal carcasses there were great pools of fetid water that had gathered in craters. When he came to a crossroads, Michael gladly took the narrower path that led away from the coast and toward the hills. He could see a light haze of smoke from beyond a rise, and the deep wheel-ruts in the path promised at least a middling village lay somewhere along the turnoff.

As it happened, the village was not far at all from the main road. Michael felt in high spirits at the prospect of a place to rest and eat, far from the stink he had waded through for most of the morning. The Safid had clearly limited their barrage to the coastal road; this one was unmarked and well-kept.

The village itself came into view as he crested the slope. It was a small sort of town, although markedly different from the ones he remembered from Ardalt. Where Varneck or Maiburg had been loose sprawls of buildings interspersed with fields and animal pens, the houses here clustered together in a tight clump ringed by a low but stout wall. The wall itself had clearly been patched and reconstructed many times, the stone varying from aged but neatly-cut blocks to little more than a loose jumble of cemented infill.

Two men stood by the town’s gate, conversing in the shade until one of them spotted Michael approaching. They were armed but not uniformed; both held rifles ready at their sides while watching him walk up the path. For his part, Michael made sure that his hands were clearly visible - the tension in their greeting was palpable.

“That’s far enough,” one of the men called, bringing Michael to a halt several paces from their position. His eyes tracked methodically over Michael’s disheveled appearance, lingering on his boots before snapping back to his face. “State your business.”

Their speech marked them as locals - Daressan, by simple logic, though Michael had never learned to differentiate most of the smaller continental dialects by ear. The accent was reminiscent enough of Esroun that he had no trouble understanding it.

“Looking for some food and drink,” Michael replied. “Maybe a place to clean up.”

The two men exchanged a glance. Michael did not miss the slight nod that the leftmost gave, nor that the other man was looking for it. He felt a slow chill. Was one of the doormen a verifex, or one of the lesser varieties that could likewise sniff out deception?

“Road’s closed,” said the man who had spoken before. “Has been for a week. How’d you get past the block? You come from Leik?”

Michael shook his head, his thoughts blurring as he tried to pare down a truthful but innocuous variant of his story. “Came by boat - not the Safid ships,” he said, holding his hands up as both men tensed. “Saw them shelling Leik last night, tried to steer wide. Ended up wrecking on the shore. I passed out there until morning, then walked until I came here.”

Another glance, another nod from the man on the left - less firm, this time. Definitely an ensouled. Michael hoped it was not his anxiety that the man was using to test his claims, as he felt it more keenly the longer this impromptu interrogation continued.

The speaker shrugged and turned back to Michael. “One last question: do you mean harm to anyone in this town, or to the free people and sovereignty of Daressa?” The verifex nudged him in the ribs, and the man let out a sigh. “…or to their Ardan protectors?”

“No,” Michael said, with what he hoped was clear conviction.

Firm nod. The men parted, and the probably-verifex gestured for him to walk inside. “We don’t have an inn,” he said. “But Roland serves food and drink for coin, if his mood suits. On the right as you enter, with the green door.”

Michael thanked the men and walked in, letting out a shaky breath as he passed under the arched gateway and into the village proper. He was quite sure those men would have shot him if he had lied, and denied him entry for ambiguity. This was a village at war, and had been for long enough that it appeared more of a fortress outpost charged with farming than some sleepy backwater. He was a long way from Ardalt.

The reality of his situation made itself felt once again as he got his first look at the town. It had an age to it that most construction in Ardalt lacked, a sense that the paint and copious plaster lay over work from stonemasons long-dead. Buildings crowded together and rose high with their sides pressed together, culminating in mossy sloped-tile roofs that overhung the street.

He did not have to look long for Roland’s door, as the vibrant green paint made it jump out amid the cramped buildings. Michael grasped the wooden handle and pulled the door open.

There was a small room within, furnished in fine dark woods. A modest bar ran along the far wall, and a few tables clustered under the front windows. The bartender, presumably Roland himself, looked up as Michael entered.

“A new face,” he rumbled, not sounding particularly pleased at the notion. He looked like a man who subsisted entirely on meat, some of which might even have been cooked. “We don’t normally get many travelers. None, recently. Trouble is more likely.” He squinted over the bar at Michael. “So which are you?”

“Just hungry,” Michael said, trying to muster a smile. “Very hungry. I’ve just walked up from the coast. The man at the gate said you might have food.”

A noise from the corner sent a little shock of adrenaline through Michael’s gut, though he kept his smile frozen on his face. His focus on food had kept his attention squarely on Roland, but now he turned his sight to the side. Three people sat at one of the corner tables, two men and a woman. They were not overtly staring at Michael, but by their posture they were certainly paying attention.

“I do, if you have coin,” Roland said. “Nothing fancy. Bread, cheese and ale for a livre.”

Michael hurriedly realigned his sight with his eyes. “Ah,” he said. “I’m afraid I only have Ardan coin.”

“A crown, then,” Roland said, making an exasperated gesture. Michael fished out the largest of the coins he had stolen from Elias and set it on the counter; Roland made it disappear with preternatural speed. A noise from the corner made Michael turn his sight again.

The three at the table wore covert smiles. Michael realized that he may have just been swindled - he did not have proper exchange rates in his head, and had no idea how many Daressan livres went into an Ardan crown or vice versa - nor, indeed, if one livre was a reasonable sum to ask for a spare meal of bread and cheese.

Money had not been a real concern of his prior to today. Jeorg had possessed seemingly inexhaustible funds, somehow, and what he had learned during his schooling related more to broader matters of finance rather than actually using the stuff. His father had impressed upon him, however, that if a man cheats you it is usually best to let him think he has done so successfully.

Karl would have gone on to plot revenge, of course. Michael’s desires were simpler, he would forgive Roland nearly any transgression as long as the man eventually fed him.

To Michael’s delight, Roland bent down beneath the counter and emerged with a rough platter, on which he placed half a loaf of bread and a sizable block of a fresh, white cheese. He pushed it in front of Michael and turned to fill a mug from some barrels on the back wall; by the time he had filled it half of the bread was gone.

The stony expression on the barman’s face softened fractionally, although his mouth pulled into a frown. “Chew your food, damn you,” he grumbled, bending down once more to retrieve a length of sausage. He sliced it with a knife from his belt and tossed the meat onto the platter beside the cheese. “Keep it in your stomach, not on my floor.”

Michael gave him a grateful smile, trying his best to linger on each bite now that his immediate, ravenous need was sated. He moved on to the cheese and sausage, finding both to be deliciously salty and filling. He was more sure now than ever that Stefan’s soul had gifts beyond endurance - the volume of food he had eaten was prodigious, and he did not feel anywhere near full. Michael reflected that if ever made it back to Ardalt, he would have to look up that old tutor of his and apologize for his inattention.

Mid-mouthful, he paused when one of the men at the table stiffened. His head was tilted to look out the window, eyes sharpened on something in the distance. “Constable,” he muttered.

Every eye in the room turned to Michael. The woman among their group got up, carefully stepping around an empty chair to eye him. Her eyes slid downward to his boots, then up to his face with realization. “Shit,” she muttered, exchanging a look with Roland.

She turned to look back at the table, and Michael’s sight blurred for a moment. When it cleared the others had gone, leaving him alone with Roland.

“What-” he began, but Roland laid a meaty hand on his shoulder and squeezed hard, staring into his eyes for a moment before giving a disgusted snort and pushing Michael away.

“Should have seen it,” he spat. “Idiot. What were you thinking, coming here? Just because we don’t have a garrison-”

The door burst open, revealing two Ardan soldiers - one with the filigreed cap of an officer, the other a walking slab of muscle in an infantryman’s gear. Behind them stood the verifex from the gate. A grin spread across his face as his eyes settled on Michael.

“There,” the verifex said. “You see?”

The Ardan officer sighed and reached into his pocket, taking out a neat stack of coins. “Yes, yes, well done,” he sighed, handing the money to the verifex and stepping through the door. Michael could hear the wooden floorboards groan as the other soldier followed, glaring down at him.

“And you,” the officer said, moving to stand in front of Michael. As with the others, his eyes flicked to his boots, then his face. “Deserter. You’re better at hiding it than some, but a spector’s eyes will always tell.” The officer smiled, and the other soldier stepped forward to clamp Michael’s arm in an unyielding grip.

“They probably won’t kill you, since we’re short on your ilk,” the officer said. “But I fear they will be rather unkind to your kneecaps.”