Ashkor Soulbinder counted his dead each dawn, and each dawn the count was short. He stood at the black edge of the Demonicwoods with souls circling his shoulders like slow gray moths, each one a warrior he had pulled from a battlefield and chained to his service. His fire arms threw light on the trees. His flame eye, the gift of a warlord who once hurled a dying sun at his face, saw heat where his green eye saw only bark. He was building an army from the fallen, soul by soul, and something in these woods was eating them before he could close the chain. The leash at his hip twitched. On its end drifted the bound soul of the Ashkor who had died, the older self he kept as a watchman over the others. The dead Ashkor pointed deeper into the trees. One soul in the ring around him, the one that clawed at its binding every night, hissed and tried to drift the other way. Ashkor walked where his dead self pointed. He found the clearing at the second hour. A shape stood there in the shape of a burning house, taller than three men, its walls made of roaring fire and jet-black hollow. Chains poured out of its sides. Lesser spirits spiraled along the chains toward the dark mouth at its center, and the mouth swallowed them, and a single long scream came out of it that did not belong to any one of them. At the tree line lay what was left of the ones already taken: torn silhouettes with hollow chests, legs gone to smoke, white eyes still open. Evidence. Receipts for a theft. Ashkor did not bargain with thieves. He cut the leash and let the dead Ashkor loose into the burning house. His older soul went in screaming his own name. The fire-house bucked. Chains snapped backward into its walls. Ashkor stepped into the shadow mouth with both fire arms forward and seized the hungry thing inside by what passed for its throat. A binding broke somewhere on his ring; his left hand flared white and two fingers fell off as ash. He did not look. He spoke the binding words into the dark until the scream inside the house became one voice, and the voice was his. The fire went out. The chains fell. The torn shades at the tree line did not return. They were gone for good, and his army was smaller by every spirit the house had swallowed. But the thing that had eaten them now circled his shoulders with the rest, heavy and obedient, and his lost fingers were already pushing back through the ash. He turned toward the deeper woods. The one soul that still clawed at its binding clawed harder now. It had seen what he was willing to do.

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.

Ashkor moved his procession deeper into the Demonicwoods before the fire-house spirit could grow hungry again. Eleven warriors circled him in a tight ring. His older self walked at his hip on its leash. The trees here grew close and black, and the ground muffled his steps. He felt the eleven press in toward his shoulders without being told. They had learned the pit lesson. Now something else was teaching them a new fear. The small bone charm at his throat began to keen. He had stripped it years ago from a screaming spirit and bound the cry inside it. It only sang when a hunter closed in unseen. Its wail cut through the trees, low and thin, then climbed. Ashkor stopped and listened past it. He heard nothing. That was the warning. The woods around a depleted procession should never go silent. He backtracked a dozen paces and found the sign. A tree as thick as a wagon had been split open at chest height, the bark peeled back in four long strips. Sap ran black down the trunk. Pawprints pressed deep into the dirt below it, each one wider than his hand. He had seen the like once before, on a one-eyed grizzly that hunted his old camps. Something bigger than that walked these trees now. The charm at his throat kept screaming. The eleven souls flickered and tried to drift outward. He pulled them back with a word. He could not run. A scattered ring would be eaten one by one. He drove his fire arms into the dirt and spoke the binding words he used on stone and root. The ground answered. Four ancient trunks tore up around him in a square, their roots still trailing soil. Iron rose with them, plate and chain bolted through the wood, locking the trunks together into a cage with the procession inside. He sealed the last seam and turned outward, fire arms raised. The bone charm went quiet for one breath, then shrieked again, closer. It came through the trees at a run. A grizzly's body, a wolf's head, a snake's tail lashing behind it. Runes burned red along its ribs. It hit the cage and the cage held. The beast bit the iron and broke two teeth. It clawed the trunks and tore bark but not through. Ashkor stood inside the ring of his eleven and watched it work itself bloody against the bars. When it tired, he spoke the binding words forward this time, slow and clean. The runes on its hide answered his. The creature sank to its belly. He opened one seam of the cage, walked out, and laid his burning hand on its skull. It became his. Twelve now circled him again, and one of the twelve had claws. The fire-house spirit stirred on his shoulder and pulled at the ring. It had smelled the new soul. It was already hungry.

By dusk the twelve souls would not hold their ring. They drifted wide between the black trunks, and Ashkor had to pull each one back with a word. The new beast walked at the front, docile under its fresh runes. The other eleven hated him for what they had watched in the pit. He felt it in the way they leaned away from his fire arms. The bone charm at his throat stayed quiet. The danger now walked inside his own circle. He stopped them in a clearing and drove his burning hands into the dirt. Twelve curved ribs tore up out of the ground at his call, lashed together with sinew into a tall archway over his head. Each rib stood for one soul. He spoke their bindings into the bone one by one, and the arch creaked as it took the weight. The ribs bent inward. One on the left split down its length and kept holding. That was the defiant one, the soul that clawed at its leash every day. He marked the crack with his eye and turned to face the twelve. He drew the chain from his belt, blackened iron with a pale skull for a grip, and yanked his own dead self forward by it. The older Ashkor stumbled into the ring on the end of the leash. "Show me," Ashkor said. The bound soul lifted one finger and pointed at the defiant one, then at two others who had been whispering with it. Ashkor walked to the defiant soul. It did not kneel. It swung at his face. He caught the blow on his flame eye and felt nothing. Then he closed his burning hand around its throat and dragged it to the center of the clearing. The fire-house spirit on his shoulder shivered awake. He fed the soul to it while the other eleven watched. The grass under his feet went black. Ash fell in a perfect circle around the place where the soul had stood, and the ferns at the edge bent inward, scorched. He turned to the two the dead self had named. They dropped to their knees before he reached them. He let them live. He looked at the remaining nine and saw the change in their faces. Not love. Not loyalty. The narrow, useful fear he had been working toward. The rib above the dead soul's place cracked clean through and fell. Eleven ribs held. Eleven souls circled him again, tight to his shoulders without being called. The fire-house spirit settled, full. Ashkor wound the chain back onto his belt and walked his procession out of the clearing, leaving the burnt ring behind him in the dirt.

Ashkor walked his eleven out of the burnt clearing and did not stop until the trees thinned at a low rise. He had fear now. He did not have numbers. Eleven souls and one bound beast did not make an army, and the fire-house spirit on his shoulder was already stirring for its next meal. He needed warriors. There were none nearby to fight. He would have to call them in. He set the beast to dig and put the eleven to work hauling stone from a fallen ridge. By the second night they had raised a square tower on the rise, crude but thick, its inner pillars driven through with iron rings and heavy chain. He cut the binding runes into the stone with a burning finger. The walls took the marks and held them. Inside, the chain rang against the pillars whenever a soul brushed too close. This was where he would break what he caught. Outside the door he drove twelve carved stones into the ground in a tight ring, each one stacked with skulls and wrapped at the base with chain. He bound his eleven to those stones. They would stand there and wait for him while he hunted. The lure was harder. He walked an hour out from the tower and cleared a flat patch of dirt under the black trees. He set thirteen tall stones in a circle and laid bone between them in a spiral that closed on itself. He cut runes into each stone with his flame eye fixed on the work. The circle was a trap for wandering spirits. Any soul that drifted through the Demonicwoods within a night's walk would feel the pull and step inside. The bone spiral would hold it until he came. He bled two fingers of fire into the center stone to wake it. The ring of bone lit pale and went quiet. He waited at the tower through the next dusk. The bone charm at his throat ticked twice. Something had entered the circle. He took the beast and ran. Inside the ring of stones, four thin spirits paced the spiral, snarling and unable to step out. They were not warriors. They were woodsmen, lost a long time. He bound them where they stood with the dark incantation and dragged them back to the tower on the chain. He drove them into the iron rings and broke them against the pillars through the night. By morning he had fifteen souls. The fire-house spirit fed on the weakest of the four before the binding finished and left him fourteen. He stood in the tower door and looked at his ring of waiting stones outside. The procession was bigger. It was still not an army. The lure had worked once. He would have to set it again, and again, and the spirit on his shoulder would eat every gain he made.

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.

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.

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.