Ashkor Soulbinder's Arc

Chapter 8 of 8

At dawn Ashkor stood on his wooden tower and counted the cold patches again. Six marks under the trees. Five souls in his field. One moon left. He could not dig six pits alone before the light died, and a hollow count meant a hollow army. He climbed down and cut six long shards from the leg bones of a fallen warrior in his pit. He sharpened each tip against his stone tower until they bit the air. He stained the heads in the dirt of the burial mound so the marks would hold. He walked the woods with the bone stakes under one arm. At each cold patch his flame eye flared, and he drove a stake into the ground above the buried bones. The stained head sank, the sharp tip held the earth, and the soul below knew it had been claimed. He set all six before noon. The stakes did not dig the graves. They only said the graves were his. He came back to the stone tower and built a second shelter beside the watchtower out of cut stone and lashed beams. He smeared the walls with the blood of his pit work so his bound souls would know the smell and stay close. He kept his iron scale, his digging hands, and a row of fresh stakes inside. He slept there in short turns between the cold patches, and the fire-house spirit on his shoulder hissed for food each time he closed his eye. He dug through the night. The first cold patch gave him two souls, both heavy on the scale. The second gave him one, and the scale held high on a second, and he fed the weak one to the spirit. The third patch was thin and the bones came up cracked and gave him nothing. By the fourth patch his fire arms shook, and a binding on an old soul snapped, and two fingers fell from his right hand into the dirt. He kept digging. The fourth gave him two. The fifth gave him one. The moon climbed past the trees before he reached the sixth, and the sixth stake stood alone in untouched ground. He walked back to his field of the fallen at moonrise and counted the chained stones. Eleven. He had needed twenty-eight. Past the row of stones, in a clearing he had cleared for it, sat a broken stone chair he had dragged from old ruin, threaded with dead vines. He had meant the seat for the day his army stood full around it. He sat in the chair now with seventeen empty spaces in front of him and the spirit on his shoulder still hungry. His fingers grew back while he sat. The quota was lost. The hollow army was real. He would have to find a faster way to fill the chair, or feed it the souls he already had.