Ashkor Soulbinder's Arc

Chapter 2 of 8

By the next dawn, the new servant was hungry. Ashkor felt it pull at the ring of souls around his shoulders like a hook in cloth. The fire-house spirit had a mouth in him now, and that mouth wanted feeding. If he gave it nothing, it would eat what he had left. He counted the warriors circling him. Twelve. Not enough to lose one, but not enough to lose them all either. He stopped in a clearing and built a pit. He dragged stones into a ring with his fire arms and cracked the ground open at the center until the dirt glowed red. Flames climbed the rim and held there. The fire-house spirit shoved against its binding when it saw the pit. It knew what the pit was for. Ashkor knew too. He had built a feeding ground, and now he had to fill it. From his belt he lifted a cup made from the skull of an old rival, its crown burning with low green flame. He had carried it for years and never used it for this. He walked the ring of circling souls and chose the one that clawed at its binding every night, the one that had tried to drift the wrong way in the trees. It hissed when he reached for it. He spoke the binding words backward, just far enough to lift the soul free of the chain, and caught it in the cup. The flames in the skull turned blue, then green, then both. The captured soul fought inside the cup. It pressed against the bone walls until the cup glowed clear as glass and he could see it: ash and ember turning in a sphere, blue fire and green fire braided together, a small storm of a man who had once been a warrior. Ashkor held it over the pit. His older self, on its leash at his hip, watched without sound. The other souls in the ring went still. They understood the lesson he was teaching. He tipped the cup. The sphere fell into the pit and broke. The fire-house spirit lunged down its chain and swallowed the offering whole. The pull on the ring eased at once. The hook came out of the cloth. The fire-house servant settled heavy on his shoulder, fed, obedient, quiet for the first time since he had bound it. Ashkor closed the cup and hung it back on his belt. Eleven souls circled him now. The eleven did not drift. They did not claw. They held their places in the ring the way trained soldiers hold a line. He had paid one to break the rest, and the rest had learned. He turned toward the deeper woods. The fire-house spirit would be hungry again. He would need more warriors before it was, and he knew now exactly how to keep the ones he took.