Omar Bakhoum sat down in the bottom of the rocky pit in the shadow of Ivar’s Drill and dangled his legs over the lip of the tunnel. The hole stared up at him, the darkness gazing into him in silence.
Near silence.
The tiny buzzing of the mosquitoes kept him scowling and jerking his head away, trying to keep the pests from whining in his ears. He gripped his sword and called the names of his inner council, his ghostly advisors, a few chosen souls from among the countless thousands that resided in his sun-steel blade.
One by one their faces and forms loomed darkly before him, standing on the floor of the pit around him dressed as they had been in life, aged as they had been at the moment of death, and wearing varying expressions of interest, annoyance, and boredom.
An elderly Indian physician with short white hair framing his lined brown face and stooping over his crooked little cane appeared on the left. A beautiful Hellan oracle with curling brown hair and soft olive skin sat on the right in her carefully folded white robes. A little Aegyptian girl dressed in a threadbare gray dress lay on the ground, staring up at the darkening sky and playing with a lock of her black hair.
And the young samurai from Nippon, Ito Daisuke, stood on the far side of the pit, pacing slowly along its edge. His green and black robes were immaculate, and his black hair was knotted at the back of his head, but a few long strands had escaped the knot and hung from his temples in such perfect balance that Omar suspected the youth had plucked them loose intentionally.
All of the others were there as well, as always. The vast multitude of the dead, thousands of souls collected from every nation and every era, hovered in the distance like pale stars, ringing Omar on every side and pressing in with hungry and pleading stares. There were even a few Yslanders among them, plague victims set free of their curse as the shreds of the fox-soul dissolved within the seireiken, as all animal souls did. And they too gazed hungrily at Omar, eager to speak and be spoken to. But he held them all at a distance, as always. He could search them and question them at will, on command, as he had on many occasions searched through this vast library of humanity for answers time and again.
But not today.
He sighed. “For five years, we’ve been trying to unravel this little riddle, haven’t we, dear friends?”
The physician and oracle nodded solemnly.
“We need to try something new, something different. We know the reavers cannot be treated with herbs or leeches, or even with sun-steel.” Omar stood up and took a few steps toward the rusting hulk of the drill. “We can’t pull the fox-souls out of the people. So if we cannot take the contagion out without killing the patient, what can we do?”
“Kill them quickly,” said Daisuke. “Hunt them down, and kill them all. It is the only solution and the only mercy they can hope to receive.”
Omar shook his head. “I don’t believe that.”
“You know,” said the physician, “simply because none of the medicines have worked so far does not mean that no medicine will work in the future. You had only the crudest of instruments and materials in that cave behind the falls. Surely with the help of the valas, with their tools and their knowledge of the plants here, a balm can be created that will soothe both the minds and the bodies of the victims.”
“I doubt that, old friend,” Omar said.
“Perhaps we can bind them,” said the oracle. “Trap them. Control them. Even cast them into a deep sleep, to hibernate until you can find a true cure, if ever. At least then they might find some peace in oblivion, or even in dreaming. Perhaps their lives in this world cannot be salvaged, but in the dreaming world they might live a hundred better lives before their bodies expire.”
Omar smiled sadly. “We’ve been over this before. Even if we could sedate the reavers, even if we could grant them that peace, as soon as the warriors in Rekavik learned that their enemy was vulnerable they would hunt them down and slaughter them in their dens. That’s not the answer I want. I want a real cure. I want to give these people back their lives. All of them.”
“If you can’t get the fox-soul out,” said the Aegyptian girl, “then you should put something else in.”
Omar turned slowly to look at the little ghost lying on her back, wiggling her bare feet through the thin snow without troubling a single white flake. “Put what in, exactly?”
“I don’t know, something nicer. Like a fish-soul or something. Foxes are hunters, right? Kill or be killed. Fighting over the spoils of the hunt. Always competing for things. Food, mates. That’s what’s driving the reavers crazy, isn’t it? All those wild instincts creeping through their brains. Especially mating, I guess. So put something else in there. Maybe a deer-soul. Or even a tree-soul.”
“There are no trees in Ysland,” the oracle reminded her. “But the idea has merit.”
“Put something else in.” Omar nodded thoughtfully. “Something to balance the vixen. Something calm, controlled, stable.” He ran his thumb slowly down his stubbled jaw.
“Trouble.” The samurai stood on the western edge of the pit looking out over the slopes of Mount Esja and the bay below. “Two figures.”
Omar trotted across the frozen earth and snow and stood beside the ghost. Over a league away at the base of the mountain he could see shapes moving in the deep shadows, almost hidden from the fading daylight.
“One is a man with long hair,” said Daisuke. “The other is a reaver. A large one.”
“What?” Omar squinted. “Are you sure? I can barely see them.”
“Strong eyes. The advantages of youth,” the samurai said.
“Your eyes have been dead for over eight years,” Omar said with a grin. “But I believe you. Are they fighting?”
“No. They are standing very close together, but the man has not drawn a weapon. I think they are speaking to each other.”
Omar tightened his grip on his sword.
With Ivar dead, what reaver could possibly be talking to a man?
“Can you see anything else?”
A sharp howl split the silence, and Omar stepped back from the edge. He grimaced and looked at the samurai.
“Strange.” Daisuke paused. “The man is heading back along the edge of the bay toward the city now. The reaver is running in the opposite direction.”
“A meeting?” Omar turned away and walked back toward the hole and his other dead companions. “Could Skadi actually be working with the reavers?”
“If there are other reavers that can speak, then they must also have larger portions of the vixen’s soul,” said the physician. “Enough to have clear fox-instincts and clear human-thoughts, and not the muddled madness of the simple reavers.”
Omar shook his head. “I suppose so, but who?”
“Hey!” The Aegyptian girl sat up, leaving no mark in the snow to prove she had been there. “I want to talk about my idea some more. What are you going to put in the reavers to make them nice again?”
Omar felt his boot knock against something loose on the ground, and he knelt to pick up the hard brown lump dusted with ice crystals. Several tiny mosquitoes were crawling on the lump and buzzing their wings.
“I have an idea of what to use,” Omar said. “And I have an idea of how to deliver it. But we should work quickly. If Skadi is somehow in league with the reavers, then God only knows what she could be planning. But whatever it is, it will not be pleasant for our lovely young friend with the silvery hair.”
“You like her? The huntress?” The little girl scowled. “Her tattoos are ugly.”
“I think they’re quite nice, actually.” Omar picked up a second brown lump covered in mosquitoes. “Now help me look for more of these. We’re going to need a lot of them.”