Free Web NovelChapter 430: Purify
The carriage drew up beside them and stopped. Without any visible signal between the skeletons and the horses, the horses simply stopped. The small fading footholds vanished one by one behind it until the whole apparatus was sitting still in the air a couple of paces above the grey ground.
Bruce, Kael, and the young man looked up at it.
The lead skeleton, the one on the driver’s seat, turned its head slowly to take them in. Its star-orb eyes moved across each of their faces in turn, unhurried, and stopped, briefly, on Bruce’s. Bruce held the gaze. It was difficult. Looking at the lights inside those eye sockets was like looking into a small cold sky.
Then the skeleton spoke.
Its voice was chilling.
It did not come out of a mouth. The skeleton had no lips, no tongue, no throat, but it came out of somewhere, a low resonant sound that arrived in the air around the three of them as if it had always been there, as if speech in this realm did not need a body to make it. The voice was deep, calm, and cold. It was the kind of voice that should have made the mist itself colder when it passed through it.
"Purifying this many souls," the skeleton said, "must have been tiring."
The star-orbs flicked from face to face once more.
"Enter the carriage. We will take you to the Soul City."
Bruce stood very still.
He noticed, with the part of his mind that was still working, the word the skeleton had used. Purifying. That was the word. Not killing. Not destroying. The hollows they had broken apart had been purified. The word meant the same thing the mist did. To break a soul down into its energy and release it back into the realm, to send it on its way through the cycle, that was purification here. To kill, in the Soul Realm, was simply to do faster what the mist did slowly.
He filed the word away with everything else.
He looked at Kael. Kael, even half-collapsed in the grey, was a man who could read a room. He met Bruce’s eyes and gave a small tired nod. Get in. The young man with the wrenched arm was already trying to push himself to his feet, his face full of the kind of hope that did not care whether the offer was a trick or not. Anywhere was better than here.
Bruce moved first.
He walked, slowly, his legs not entirely his own, to the side of the carriage. A small step had folded out from somewhere. He had not seen it fold out, but it was there now, waiting. He climbed up onto it. He glanced once more at the skeleton driver. The skeleton was not looking at him. It was looking ahead, into the distance, with its star-orb eyes fixed on something Bruce could not see.
He opened the carriage door and got inside.
Kael followed, hauling himself up with effort. The young man came last, half-helped by Kael’s hand on his good arm.
The carriage door closed behind them. The compartment inside was dark and unexpectedly warm. Warm, in this realm of grey cold mist, was a sensation Bruce had not realized he had missed. The seats were padded with something soft. The three of them sank into them as if the seats had been waiting for them their whole lives.
Outside, the lead skeleton made some small motion. The horses lifted into a slow trot. Pale footholds bloomed in the air under their hooves. The carriage moved off, away from the patch of ground where the three of them had nearly died, away from the field of slowly fading mist where the horde had been.
Bruce leaned his head back against the soft seat and closed his eyes.
Their ordeal in the Mistlands was over.
Wherever the Soul City was, whatever it would turn out to be, it would not be this. And right now, for Bruce, for all three of them, not this was enough.
The carriage drove on, and the bell at its front rang once more, soft and clean, into the grey.
Inside, the three of them sat in the kind of silence that came after almost dying. None of them spoke.
None of them had the strength to. Bruce had his head back against the padded seat with his eyes closed.
Kael was sprawled across the bench opposite him, one arm thrown over his face. The young man with the wrenched arm was curled half-sideways in his corner, cradling his bad elbow with his good hand, breathing shallow.
The compartment was warm. That was the strange luxury of it, warmth, in a realm that had been nothing but cold grey mist since Bruce arrived. The carriage walls seemed to hold the warmth in. The padded seats gave under their weight as if they had been shaped for tired bodies. Bruce did not know what the seats were made of and did not care.
After a few minutes, the door at the front of the compartment opened.
A skeleton came through.
It was smaller than the driver, or perhaps not smaller, but more delicately built, robes hanging differently on its frame, the star-orbs in its eye sockets a slightly softer color than the driver’s had been. It carried a tray. The tray was large, balanced on bone fingers, and it was loaded with food.
Bruce opened his eyes and looked at the tray.
What he saw made him sit up a little straighter despite himself.
The food was glowing.
There were several dishes on the tray, each in its own small bowl or on its own small plate, and each dish gave off a soft, warm light from inside the food itself. Hot, fragrant, alive-looking light. Bruce could see steam rising from the dishes too, pale steam, faintly luminous, the way the mist outside was luminous but cleaner. It curled up into the air of the compartment and brought a smell with it.
The smell was good.
Bruce had not expected to be hungry. He had a soul-body, not a body. He did not need to eat in the way his physical-realm body needed to eat. But the moment the smell hit him, something deep inside his soul-body answered it, a hollow ache he had not noticed until this moment, a thinness somewhere in his core that wanted what was on the tray. He realized, with some surprise, that his soul was hungry.
He glanced at Kael and the young man. Both of them had also sat up. Both of them were staring at the tray with the same dazed, blinking attention.
The skeleton set the tray down on a small folding shelf that emerged from the carriage wall. Bruce had not seen it emerge, but it was there, and stepped back. Its voice came out of the same nowhere the driver’s had, deep and cold and quiet.
"Eat," it said. "These dishes will help your souls recover. They will close your cracks. They will return your strength."
It paused. The star-orbs of its eyes moved across the three of them.
"You will need it. The Soul City is some distance."
It said nothing else. It simply stood by the carriage wall, hands folded inside the sleeves of its robe, waiting.
Bruce looked at the food again, more carefully this time.
The dishes were... beast parts. He understood that as soon as he looked properly. Each plate held what was clearly the cut and cooked piece of some creature, a slice of glowing muscle here, a cluster of glowing organs there, a small stew of what looked like glowing tendon and skin. The cuts were clean and skilled, the cooking elegant. They were garnished, too, with small pale leaves and slivers of what might have been root vegetables, all of them also faintly luminous, all of them arranged on the plates with care.
It was, Bruce realized, very fine cooking. Whoever had prepared this had cared about it.
It was also, he understood after a moment longer, the cooked flesh of soul beasts. Whatever creatures lived in this realm alongside the souls of people, Bruce had not yet seen any, but he had heard Kael mention them in passing, and the existence of "beast soul dishes" implied them clearly enough, had been killed, butchered, cooked, and served. The light in the food was the light of soul energy still held in those slices and stews. It had not yet dispersed back into the mist of the realm. The food was holding it in.
That was strange.
Bruce tucked the strangeness away for later. He could think about it after he had eaten.
He reached for the nearest bowl. ƒrēewebnovel.com
The first taste was a shock.
He had not expected to taste anything. He had a soul-body. He did not have a physical tongue, did not have physical taste buds, did not have any of the equipment by which taste was supposed to work.
But the moment the food touched his mouth, taste arrived, full, real, exactly as if his living body in the labyrinth far away were the one eating. Salt. Fat.
