Ashkor Soulbinder's Arc

Chapter 7 of 8

Ashkor went back to the burial mound at dawn and pulled the heavy soul out of the dirt with his burning hands. It came up slow, dragging roots, and the iron scale on his belt bent toward it before he even hung the weights. He chained it to a carved stone outside his tower and his count moved from fourteen to fifteen. One soul in a morning. He needed thirteen more by the next moon, and he did not know where any of them lay. The woods were wide and the warriors were under it somewhere, and he could not dig at random. He spent the next day raising a tall wooden tower beside the stone one. He cut dead trees and lashed skeletal branches along the railings for grip, and he set burial urns on each level as anchors for the souls he meant to find. He climbed to the top platform and set his flame eye on the forest. The green eye saw trees. The flame eye saw heat, and under the heat, cold. Warrior bones sat cold in the ground for a long time after the flesh was gone. He turned slow on the platform and marked every cold patch he could see. He counted six before the light failed. Outside the stone tower he set a flat piece of ground for his tally. He laid the bound warrior's chained stone there and meant to add one stone for every soul he pulled from the dirt. He called the patch his field of the fallen, and it held one stone, and he wanted twenty-eight. At dawn he climbed the watchtower again and walked to the nearest cold patch his flame eye had marked. He found nothing on the surface but moss and a low ridge of broken stone. He kicked the moss aside and stopped. A column of stacked warrior skulls rose from a cracked base, wrapped in dark vines, half sunk in the earth. The bottom skulls still wore the dents of the blows that had killed them. This was a marker. Warriors had been buried here in number. He dug with his burning hands until he hit bone, then more bone, then a pit of them laid in rows. He dragged souls up one by one and weighed them on the scale. Four pans dropped to the floor. Three pans held high and he fed those to the fire-house spirit on his shoulder. He chained the four heavy souls to stones beside the first and his tally field held five. He climbed the watchtower again at dusk and marked the next five cold patches. The problem of where to dig was finished. The problem of time was not. Five moons of digging in one moon of nights, and the spirit on his shoulder was already hungry again.