Chapter 432: Soul City
Chapter 432: Soul City
"You will find out when we reach the Soul City."
Bruce waited for more. None came. The skeleton simply stood there, hands folded in its sleeves, the star-orbs still fixed on him with the same patient attention.
Bruce smiled, faintly; the small dry smile of a man who had been told not yet by too many beings in too many realms to be irritated by it.
"Alright," he said.
He picked up his spoon and went back to his meal.
Kael, who had been listening, snorted into his bowl.
"Welcome to the Soul Realm," he said. "Everyone here loves to tell you you’ll find out later."
After what might have been an hour, time in this carriage was as slippery as time anywhere else in this realm, and Bruce had given up trying to measure it, the carriage slowed and stopped.
Bruce looked up from his nearly empty bowl.
Kael did the same. "Are we there?"
"No," Theron said quietly. He was looking out the small slatted window beside his seat. "There are people."
Bruce slid over to his own window and looked out.
Outside, in the grey expanse, two souls were standing. Both of them on their feet, barely. Both of them visibly cracked across their soul-bodies, their faint glow guttering, looking as exhausted as Bruce had felt in the worst minute of the fight. They were a man and a woman, side by side, both holding themselves up. The man was leaning slightly on the woman’s shoulder. They had clearly been through something hard.
The carriage had stopped beside them.
The skeleton driver on the front seat made some small gesture, and after a moment the woman and the man came forward unsteadily. The carriage door opened. The two of them climbed in, slow, careful, the man wincing every time he set his weight wrong, and took the empty seats along the back wall of the compartment.
The skeleton serving them came forward with a fresh tray and set it down in front of the new pair. The same glowing dishes. The same soft warm light. The same instructions, the same quiet voice. Eat. Recover. The Soul City is some distance.
The two new arrivals ate. They did not speak at first. They were the kind of tired that had no words in it.
Kael, of course, had words.
"Hello there," he called over to them, friendly as anything. "Welcome to the carriage. The food is good. The skeletons don’t talk much. I’m Kael. The quiet one is Bruce. The young one is Theron. Where did you two come from?"
The woman lifted her head from her bowl. She was older, perhaps in her forties, by the look of her soul-body’s face, and she had a long thin scar across one cheek that Bruce suspected had been there in life. She studied Kael for a moment, then seemed to decide he was harmless, and gave a tired smile.
"Iret," she said. "And this is Halen."
The man beside her grunted a greeting through a mouthful of food.
"We were further out in the mist," Iret said. "Maybe a day from where you boarded, I think. Time’s hard out there. We’d been holding off a small group of hollows for a while. I don’t know how long. They kept coming."
"They were ignoring us at first," Halen added. He had a deeper, slower voice. "Then they weren’t."
Kael’s eyes flicked sideways to Theron at that, very briefly. Theron noticed. He said nothing.
"You both awakened?" Kael asked.
"Yes," Iret said. "A few days ago, I think. Mine is..." She held out one palm, and for a moment, the air above her hand shimmered, and a thin film like water rippled into existence and then faded. "Something with reflection. I haven’t figured out the name yet. Halen has..."
"Stones," Halen said. He shrugged. "I can pull them out of the mist. They hit hard."
"You held off a group of hollows with stones and reflections?"
"Until our energy ran out," Halen said. "Then we were just standing there waiting. We thought we were done."
"Yeah," Kael said, with feeling. "We had the same morning."
The five of them ate together in a slowly warming companionability. Iret and Halen were older, steadier, with the kind of tiredness that came from being two adults who had decided to look after each other no matter what. They ate slowly, they shared their plates, they pushed certain pieces toward each other without speaking. Theron, the youngest, watched them quietly and ate beside them. Kael talked. Bruce listened and watched.
He understood, while he listened, what was happening.
The harvesters were saving the awakened.
That was the pattern. The hollows had been purified the moment the carriage’s wave touched them, killed cleanly and instantly with no chance to defend themselves. The five souls now sitting in the carriage had all awakened soul talents, Bruce, Kael, Theron, Iret, Halen, and the harvesters had collected them carefully, one stop at a time, served them food, healed their cracks. The souls in between, the conscious souls who had not yet awakened, the older woman and her cluster who had drifted toward dissolution, the others Bruce had passed in his long walk, those had not been collected. The harvesters had passed them by. Those souls would be left in the Mistlands, would either awaken on their own and be picked up on a later sweep, or would fail and turn hollow and be purified by some future carriage’s wave.
It was a system. A simple, efficient, cold system. The harvesters saved the souls strong enough to be useful. The harvesters killed the souls broken enough to be dangerous. The harvesters left the in-betweens to sort themselves out.
Bruce understood it. He did not love it. He thought of the older woman from his first hour in this realm, the one who had told him about the figures in grey, and he wondered which side of the sorting she had ended up on. He had a guess.
He filed it.
The carriage rang its bell and moved on.
That was the rhythm for a long time.
Every so often the carriage would stop. The door would open. One or two or sometimes three new souls would climb in, exhausted, cracked, half-empty, and the skeleton servants would bring out fresh trays, and the food would do its quiet work. By the time the carriage had stopped perhaps a dozen times, there were fifteen of them inside.
Fifteen newly awakened souls, all of them strangers to each other and to this realm.
The compartment, somehow, kept being big enough. Bruce had stopped questioning that several stops ago. The Soul Realm worked the way it worked. He had stopped expecting his old assumptions to apply.
The souls who came in told their stories, if they wanted to. Some did. Some did not. There was a woman who could make her hands cut like blades, a thin nervous man who could throw weights heavier than he was, a soft-voiced older man who could speak and have nearby souls listen against their will. A pair of friends who had awakened together, both with fire, different colors, one orange, one a pale blue. A young woman with no obvious talent who had survived for a month in the Mistlands and would not say how.
Kael, naturally, talked to all of them. Bruce listened. Theron, who had at first been the youngest in the compartment, slowly relaxed as more souls his age and older joined them. He was not, anymore, the only one who had been afraid.
Outside, the bell kept ringing. Every so often, a faint wave of soul energy would pulse out from one of the harvesters on the carriage, and Bruce, sitting near the window, could see the distant glow of hollows being purified in the mist. The harvesters were sweeping the Mistlands as they traveled. Picking the awakened up. Cleaning the hollows out. The carriage was both rescue and broom at the same time.
It went on for a long time.
Then, at some point Bruce could not have measured, the ding stopped.
He noticed it first as an absence, the steady soft rhythm he had stopped consciously hearing suddenly missing. He sat up. Several of the others did the same. The skeleton servant by the wall raised its head.
"We have arrived," it said. "The Soul City."
The carriage slowed, then stopped.
The door opened.
Bruce was near the door, so he went first. He stepped down onto solid ground, solid, real ground, not the soft give of the grey Mistlands expanse, and lifted his head, and stopped.
In front of him, spread out under a pale luminous sky, was a city.
It looked, at first glance, like something out of an old earth painting. A medieval city. That was the impression, the immediate visual type: tall pale walls of carved soul-stone, gates set into them, towers behind the walls rising up in graceful tiers, streets that he could glimpse through the open gate winding off in different directions. Banners hung from the towers. Lanterns hung from the gates, actual lanterns, glowing softly with held soul-energy, the same warm color as the food had been. Above the city, the sky was a pale dome of soft light, sourceless and even, lighter than the grey of the Mistlands by a great deal.
But the city was alive in a way no earth city ever had been.