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  The Ghoul men and women had been plaguing the Sand Seas and the Burning Plains for as long as Vekal knew. As long as the city of Tir had stood, or so the stories say. They could not be reasoned with, and they could not be approached or entreated. They took their toll in the blood of the occasional traveler on the long desert paths, or sometimes, rarely, a whole brood of them would attack one of the trading caravans, dragging them down into the dark caverns under the dunes, never to be seen again.

  It seemed as though Vekal and Ikrit had disturbed a brood, or that they were unlucky enough to be in the path of one, as they charged toward him down the tunnel, champing their pincer-jaws and croaking and clacking at each other in their haste.

  In the ab-light of Vekal’s new-found mystic sight, he saw something else about them. They appeared no more alive than the walls around them.

  It is true then, they have no souls. He saw a blinding flash of blue-white light coming from the middle of their knot. “They have someone. A human?” Vekal shouted, raising the axe in both hands.

  The Ghoul men and women did indeed have something with them, and it was this theft that the Sin Eater and the demon had interrupted. The knot of them appeared to be dragging with them a small human boy, no taller than Vekal’s chest.

  The Sin Eater felt a surge of anger at the creatures, hating their grotesque nature, their monstrous savagery. He did not want to think about just where that hatred and disgust had come from, as he felt the demon inside of him revel in the savage joy.

  The first ghoul-man or woman (the one in the dress, wielding a jawbone of some dead creature) went down to the first strike of the axe, its plated head exploding into a sea of spectral-tinted red. The second one, right behind the first, latched onto his out-swung arm with its two clawed hands, digging painfully into Vekal’s flesh.

  But the Sin eater couldn’t feel any pain. He couldn’t feel the way that the wound in the middle of his back tugged and tore as he held the battle axe in one arm, and drove the other, with its latched-on Ghoul against the wall, smashing it until something clicked in its back and it fell limp.

  “Behind!” Ikrit warned him, and Vekal ducked just in time as a heavy club made of stone scraped across the rock wall where his head had so recently been. The smell of rock dust and ozone filled the air briefly, where parts of it had shattered.

  Vekal roared an inhuman sound, as the club-wielding Ghoul lashed out with a foot and connected with his side—but it wasn’t through pain, even though, distantly, his brain registered the welt of blood that seeped in the wake of the thing’s clawed feet. It was at the affront of the creature to deign to attack him. In the grip of his demon-fueled rage, Vekal felt powerful, he felt on top of the world. He felt like a god.

  “Yes! Yes! Kill! Kill them all, my Vekal!” Ikrit was crowing with joy, feeding strength into his flagging arms and limbs as Vekal butted the axe into the club-wielder’s chest, sending it tripping over the one behind and both splashing into the fast-moving water.

  Vekal turned to the others, to almost be blinded by the bluish light.

  The stolen boy was hunched against the side of the wall and screaming—but not just at the Ghouls—at Vekal himself. For the briefest of seconds, the Sin Eater felt the tide of fury that churned inside his breast wash towards the boy below him. How dare it be scared of him! He was no monster! But the look of anguish cut through the demonic tantrum that possessed him. Barely managing to control his anger, he spoke through clenched jaws.

  “Get behind me, boy.”

  Vekal looked up at the knot of Ghouls approaching him.

  They had briefly let go of their charge when Vekal had attacked them, but the rest of the brood were regrouping ahead of him. The boy, whimpering, crawled to Vekal’s feet, and the Sin Eater stepped over him and roared a challenge at the oncoming brood.

  “Come! Come!” he snarled, not counting quite how many there were ahead of him. More than the four he had already dispatched.

  With a chittering squeal like scraping plates, one of the brood ahead of him burst like an egg, as a blade emerged from its head.

  Shocked, Vekal had no time to question his good fortune, as the brood convulsed like a grabbing, leering, clacking wave towards him. With a grunt, his first swing took off the head of the first, neatly, as behind him the boy screamed.

  “Talon!”

  He heard someone shout, distantly, but was unable to focus on who or what was saying it. Another Ghoul was on him, forcing his arms down with the combined strength of both of its own as it drove its mouth parts, clacking and piercing, towards his face. The ab-light was fading from his eyes as Ikrit’s powers waned, and the pain that Vekal’s body had been ignoring for so long started to creep in at him from the edges.

  Suddenly, the weight was released from him as Vekal hit the floor, blue spectral light giving way to a brighter, more natural light in the tunnel. The Ghoul was thrown off of him, and there was the sound of ringing metal on stone, and screams.

  Someone called out, as the shapes above him grew indistinct. “Talon? Talon!”

  No, my name is Vekal, he thought.

  “Wake up! You’re not that badly hurt! Wake up, you meaty fool!” the voice of Ikrit was repeating.

  9

  For the second time in the last month, Vekal opened his eyes to someone asking almost the exact same question. “Are you sure it’s not dead?”

  “We must really evaluate our life choices here, Vekal, if this is happening with such regularity…” The voice of Ikrit filled his mind, and he groaned. For a brief, peaceful moment, he had wondered if it had all been a dream, and he was not in fact the carrier of an evil spirit.

  “No such luck. You didn’t even have the decency to pass me on while you hovered between life and death. I was stuck there waiting for your sorry self to wake up again,” Ikrit mumbled in an annoyed, hurt fashion—as if everything that the Sin Eater host did was to spite it alone.

  “It’s groaning, so it must be alive, despite how it looks,” said another voice, a young one. Vekal cracked open his eyes half expecting to see the spectral blue ab-light covering his vision, but instead seeing only the shaded desert-light of a tent over his head. The air smelled of incense, and something slightly sweet and foul, like rotten fruit.

  “That was you. Your body had started to go bad, despite my best efforts.” A demonic, aggrieved sigh. “Why are you humans so frail? I really have no idea how you survive a day up here…”

  “Shut up,” Vekal murmured.

  “Did it speak? Did it say something?” asked one of the voices, and Vekal saw a head approaching him. A round, pudgy head with uncovered golden curls. A boy of about twelve or fourteen, looking at him shrewdly.

  “It saved my life,” said the other, and Vekal saw that it was the boy from the tunnel.

  “Talon,” the demon supplied.

  The boy was smaller than his pudgier fellow by a good way, but didn’t appear too much younger in years. He had the same dark hair and the same dark skin with a pinched, anxious expression as before, but he looked exhausted from his recent ordeal.

  “It?” Vekal croaked, causing the golden-haired pudgier boy to scuttle backwards into the tent.

  “You—you want water, sir?” The golden-haired boy pointed to the ewer beside the cot where Vekal was laying. The man saw that he was on a simple cot of strapped-together poles and blankets, in a tent like the ones that the desert travelers used; brightly colored fabrics for the walls, thick hides for the floor. A small clay chimenea sat round-bellied and unlit in the center of the room. It was hot enough as it was, and Vekal wasn’t hungry. Censers of clean smelling smoke hung from the tent ridges, and beside his cot was a small table, where blankets, bowls, and swatches of bandages were laid out.

  Vekal nodded. “Water, please.” He tried to lift his arm, but a wave of agony washed down from his shoulder.

  “Don’t move,” the dark-skinned boy named Talon said. “Suriyen told me that you weren’t to move. Here.” He poured the wat
er into a small clay cup, and lifted it to the Sin Eater’s lips, letting him sip a little, and then a little more, until he signaled that he had had his fill.

  “Suriyen?” Vekal managed to ask.

  “Yes. She is the guard who saved you, or us.” Talon frowned. “She bound your back, and said that you were to rest.”

  “And that you weren’t to talk to it, Talon!” the golden-haired boy admonished, shooting the smaller a warning look.

  “It’s not an it, it’s a he. And he saved my life… sort of,” Talon spat back, but the bigger boy didn’t appear convinced, looking skeptically at the figure of the seemingly emaciated and near-death Sin Eater on the cot. The larger boy screwed his eyes together in a cruel look and snorted once through his nose, before hurrying out of the tent.

  “Such a waste,” Ikrit confided to Vekal sadly about the golden-haired boy. “A first rate set of jealousy, anger, and arrogance, all wrapped up in a mind as slow as a rock!” Vekal chose not to comment.

  “Don’t mind Boris. That’s just the way he is. Always has been,” Talon said, before adding, “I-I guess that I should say thank you.”

  “What for?” Vekal asked. “It should be me thanking you, I think.”

  “For saving my life. If you hadn’t been there, with your axe, then Suriyen says I would be Ghoul-meat by now.”

  Vekal grimaced. What a thing to tell a child! “Well, I’m sure that this Suriyen would have saved you herself,” he hazarded. “Is she your mother?”

  “Suriyen?” Talon laughed. “Good heavens, no!” He looked aside into nothing. “No mother for me. I’m an orphan.”

  “So am I,” Vekal said, touched by the boy’s honesty.

  “Ugh. Spare me, please.” The demon retched. “What next, best friends’ bracelets?”

  What in fact was to come next was the tent flap to be swept aside, and in walked a tall, imposing woman with frizzy reddish-brown hair and dark features. She wore simple light robes underneath a tighter leather jacket and arm straps, and was also scowling. Behind her through the flap in the tent, Vekal saw the face of Boris peering, as the woman held it open and glared at Talon until he rose from his place and left.

  “Now what did I tell you about talking to strangers in the desert?” The woman scowled some more, but still ruffled his hair as he left the tent. Vekal could tell that she liked the lad, enough to go down under the desert and risk her life battling a brood of Ghouls, at least.

  “Now. You.” She turned her glare towards Vekal, casting an eye over him before perfunctorily coming to sit beside him, and washing her hands. “Can you move your arms? Feel hot?”

  Vekal nodded. “Yes, and yes. I take it that you are Suriyen?”

  A deeper scowl. “Talon told you my name, did he? He never should have done.”

  “Why?” Vekal couldn’t resist asking.

  “Never mind that. Now.” She reached her hands over and not very gently helped to turn him over onto his side.

  Vekal winced with the pain that spread across his back.

  “Yeah, well I’m not surprised that it hurts. It looks like you got run through with a spear,” Suriyen said. “The Ghouls didn’t do this. This wound has been treated and partly healed, and then reopened again.”

  “No…” Vekal said through gritted teeth. “The Ghouls never did that.”

  “Hm.” Suriyen agreed, but didn’t say anything.

  A tutting sound from the woman behind him. “Well, I could tell that you were going to have a story.” A sudden lancing-hot pain went through the middle of his back, as Suriyen applied whatever healing salve and treatment there. It felt to Vekal like he was being shot by the arrow all over again. In fact, worse.

  “Hmm, I like this one. Reminds me of the torture that I used to oversee in the Chamber of Solace,” said Ikrit, who was rather unfavorably not suppressing his pain, Vekal thought.

  “So...” Jab. Another jolt of pain. “What were you doing walking around in the dark, Sin Eater?”

  Sin Eater… She knows what I am! Vekal thought with horror.

  As if to confirm his worst fears, the next words out of the woman’s lips were loaded. “No one is found underneath the desert without a good reason to be there, and no Sin Eater is usually found outside of the city of Tir without a very good reason. What load are you carrying on your back, Sin Eater?” Jab. Another jolt of pain, again.

  “Tir… Tir has fallen,” Vekal found himself saying.

  “Fallen! The city of the Gods has fallen. What on earth do you mean?” Suriyen stopped working, which was a blessing in Vekal’s mind.

  “The Menaali tribes. They’ve united under some War Chief,” he muttered.

  “Dal Grehb,” Suriyen confirmed, and her tone was heavy and dark enough to announce that she knew of him.

  “Yes. Him. They came to the city to…” Should I tell her? Vekal wondered for a moment. Inside, Ikrit the demon was surprisingly quiet for once.

  “To rape, pillage and plunder—just what they always do,” Suriyen said with scorn and hatred. Jab again, and another jolt of pain that made Vekal wince. The absolute hatred that Suriyen held in her voice made it obvious that she really did know him. “Dal Grehb is one of the worst men in history,” she said, heavily. “And now he has Tir, he has access to the Eastlands. He has crossed the Sand Seas.”

  “But he has what he wants…” Vekal tried to say, not letting on just what it was that the War Chief had wanted, which was his daughter healed.

  “A man like him never has what they want. It is ridiculous to think that they ever will be happy, unless everyone else is at their feet. No. This is very grave news indeed, and must be taken to the Council of Fuldoon.”

  “The Council of Fuldoon?” Vekal wondered. The name rang a bell, but he couldn’t quite remember what it was. Wasn’t it the next city over, or thereabouts?

  “By the Gods, do any of you dust drinkers ever lift your head out of the books and the sands once in a while?” Suriyen growled. “Fuldoon is the closest port to Tir. It sits just over the scrublands, past the desert and the river. It’s the gateway to the rest of the world!”

  “Oh,” Vekal said, feeling stupid. He thought that, actually, he had spent the last few decades just practicing, exercising, and reading ancient scrolls, and not traveling at all.

  “And it is there that the rumors of Dal Grehb have spread, making people panic. It is from there that the reinforcements and the troops to fight back will come,” Suriyen said, confidently.

  “But why do you care so much?” Vekal asked. “Why not flee with the rest of the refugees from Tir?”

  A tut from behind him. Jab. Sharp pain. “Dal Grehb slaughtered my family as I watched, before selling me to slavers. That was some fifteen years ago, at a place called the Iron Pass. Heard of it?”

  Vekal had, both the battle and the place. The Iron Pass sat to the far north, the other side of the desert, and was a narrow gap in the rocky cliffs that allowed access to the richer, more fertile northern lands. People had fought for it and in it for centuries, or so the old sagas had said, but Dal Grehb was the most recent.

  Unlike previous warlords, he had managed to maintain control over the vital trading route for the last fifteen years, building up his resources and his coffers until he was obviously strong enough to march south across the desert itself. If he controlled the Iron Pass and the desert, then he had a choke hold on half of the known world.

  “The battle of the Iron Pass was the last alliance against the Menaali,” Suriyen said. “I was only a teenager. I didn’t know any better than to follow my parents and help out with the baggage trains. I was there, at base camp, watching as Dal Grehb burnt the cliff-top towers and sent his war-wolves charging through the gap itself, decimating our forces. We ran, of course, all of us children and old people, trying to flee north. But how can anyone outrun a wolf? I killed one with a spear before the Menaali captured me and sold me to the slavers on the inner sea.” The woman ended her sad story with an oddly expressionless tone, as if
it had all happened to someone else.

  “Then, if you were a galley-slave, how on earth did you get out here?” Vekal asked.

  “It was fifteen years ago, and even slaves grow up. I grew stronger,” Suriyen said. “Strong enough to fight alongside the slavers when the pirates attacked. That was when I took my chances, strangling the captain who had brought me, and using his head to buy my passage with the pirates to Fuldoon Port.” She finished her story brightly. “I thought that I had put a desert, sea, and fifteen years between me and Dal Grehb. And what does he do? He crosses the desert!”

  “You can still flee,” Vekal pointed out.

  “No.” Her answer was swift, and final. “Not this time. Not now. I cannot.” A moment of silence, and then more jabbing at his back. “So, Sin Eater, that is my story. Now yours. You managed to avoid telling me why you were under the desert, and how you managed to rescue Talon back there.”

  Vekal opened and closed his mouth, wishing that the silver-tongued Ikrit would emerge and say something charming and soothing. Weren’t devils supposed to be good at lies?

  “I fled Tir,” he said at last. “And I was lucky, that is all.”

  “Hmm. You know the reputation that you Sin Eaters have beyond the desert, don’t you?” Suriyen said in a skeptical tone of voice.

  “If it is anything like the reputation that Sin Eaters have inside the holy city, then it can’t be that good.”

  “Huh. Really?” Suriyen sounded surprised. “I would have thought in their home town… Well. The world views your kind as little better than criminals and lepers.”

  No surprise there, then. Vekal knew that the Sin Eaters, despite being the students and the emissaries of the gods, were largely reviled by all. Their taking on of the sins of those they absolved made them contaminated, objects of shame and ridicule for the ‘purified’.