Ashkor Soulbinder's Arc

Chapter 6 of 8

Ashkor set the lure again the next dusk and waited at the tower with the beast at his heel. The bone charm ticked before full dark. He ran out to the circle and found three thin shapes pacing the spiral. One was a child. One was a hunched old man with no hands. The third clawed at the stones and wept. None of them had ever held a blade. He stood at the edge of the ring and watched the fire-house spirit shift on his shoulder, already hungry. He needed a way to know before he wasted a night breaking trash against iron. He went back to the tower and pulled an old iron scale from his pack. Moss had grown over its weights in the years he had kept it buried. He hung it from a chain inside the door. The pans swung. He dragged the weeping spirit in by the throat and dropped it into the left pan. The pan barely sank. The weights on the right glowed pale green and held steady at the top. A fighter's soul would have dragged the pan to the floor. He fed the spirit to the fire-house thing on his shoulder and watched it swallow. He did the same with the old man and the child. Three caught, three gone, and his count still stood at fourteen. He left the tower before sunrise and walked the woods with the scale on his belt. The trap was pulling in the soft dead because the soft dead were what drifted. Warriors did not drift. They fell where they fought and stayed there. He walked until he found what he was looking for at the base of a black ridge. A low mound of dark earth sat under the trees, its surface choked with thick roots that had clawed up from below. The roots had grown in the shape of a man with his arms thrown wide. He set his green eye on it and felt the pull. Something heavy was still down there. Further on, half buried in leaves, he found an empty coffin of rotted slats with mushrooms pushing through the cracks. The lid lay snapped beside it. Whatever had been put in there had climbed out a long time ago and gone somewhere else to lie down. He marked both places in his head. He walked back to the tower and tore the bone spiral apart with his burning hands. The drifting trap was finished. He would not waste another night on woodsmen and weeping children. He would dig where warriors had fallen and pull them out of the ground himself. The scale would tell him which ones were worth the chain. His count was still fourteen. By the next moon he meant to double it with souls that could hold a weapon.