TRAIL OF ASHES

TRAIL OF ASHES, by Caleb Williams

 

‘Fire… fire!’

The carriage rattling over the earthen bridge and the scalding image of fire jarred Keedran from a troubled sleep. He hardly slept at all anymore. The voices of all of the souls he had conjured wouldn’t let him.

He sat up, groaned, and beheld the splendor of Cassandria for the first time in all of his years. Even the moonlight seemed foreign, more gray than yellow as it glinted off of the glass spires lining the path into the city.

“Welcome to Cassandria,” the hefty sentry steering the carriage said. “City of Rivers.”

Canoes sailed along the waterways weaving through the city. Decomposed corpses, some of children, were piled onto one raft by guards covering their mouths and noses. The blight had made its way to Cassandria. Keedran stifled a cough, running a hand under his robe along the flaking skin of his side.

They halted before the city gates. He caught Philemon glaring again. Whether at him or the urn he carried, he didn’t know.

“Does my presence offend you?” Keedran asked.

“Very much so.” Creases deepened in the archmagistrate’s umber-skinned face. He was as dark as Keedran. “But princess Cassia tasked me with retrieving you so I did. Shall we proceed? She doesn’t like to be kept.”

He appreciated Philemon’s honesty if nothing else. They climbed down from the carriage.

He appreciated more the significance of the occasion. In ages past, a practitioner of the forbidden sciences would have been riddled with arrows where he stood. Now the highest court official in the empire escorted one through the towering gates of Cassandria.

His ancestors were smiling.

The sun dipped beneath the horizon and would stay there for a full moon cycle. The half-moon loomed in the eastern sky, engulfing the entire city. He limped behind Philemon and the sentry through crowded, dank backways. Conversations in strange dialects drowned out the babbling waters.

The palace was a city within a city, vaulted passageways adjoined one section to another. Pomander globes dangled from the keystones to keep the blight at bay. He picked at the cracked skin of his side. That won’t save you.

He overheard gossiping. Handmaids whispered about the mysterious circumstance of the Exalt’s death and why it hadn’t been made public.

The maze of corridors opened into a secluded garden where Cassia waited, tall and lissome, wrapped in manticore hide. The beast’s head rested on her shoulder. A gaunt young man with hair like straw stood beside her draped in furs.

“Prince Aaric.” Philemon bowed. “Princess Cassia. Fair moon.”

“I’ve seen fairer.” Cassia skin glowed tawny like her eyes. “Welcome conjurer.”

Keedran bowed. Stifling pain seized his back.

“Enough,” she said. “You’re my guest. Carry yourself as such.”

“I’m no one.”

“If you were no one I wouldn’t have bothered finding you.”

“How did you find me if I may?”

“These aren’t the only eyes I have.”

Philemon added, “Cunning and beauty make for a dangerous woman.”

She fondled the river diamonds around her wrist. “When I need to be.”

When you want to be. Keedran straightened himself up with some discomfort. He sorted his thoughts about these people who had whisked him away for some purpose he did not know.

Cassia dispensed with pleasantries. “His Eminence, Claudius, Exalted of the Peoples, Lord of All That Is, Right Hand of the Maker.” She yawned. “Defender of the Faith… and our dear uncle has passed.

“I heard.” Keedran drew a circle around his heart. “Rest his soul.”

“Not too well I pray. I want you to awaken it.”

A conjurer being tasked with rousing the spirit of the Exalt? His ancestors were surely singing psalms in the Peaceland.

Keedran scratched his thinning beard. “Was there something you wanted to tell him before he departed?”

“I believe there’s something he wishes to tell us.” She said. “Walk with me.”

The four of them and the sentry paced through the terraced garden until they reached a stone structure set apart from the palace proper. Overgrowth obscured the smallish abode.

“What piece of him have you brought for cremation?” He asked.

She peeked over her shoulder. “All of him.”

“You want me to conjure an entire spirit?”

“Is this beyond your power?”

He had no answer. Forty moons ago he had attempted the same, and the urn filled with his son’s ashes had been the result. A part of Kieran’s soul still clung to him, along with the other he had conjured, suffering an unending death buried in his mind. The voices had become more adamant in the last several moons, but it was Kieran’s whose tormented him most.

“Of course it’s beyond his power.” Aaric’s empty gray eyes settled on Keedran. “It’s beyond anyone’s power. And a grave sin. If the priestesses were to discover this, the punishment would be death. The slow kind.”

Keedran trembled, sensing their stares.

Cassia held out her hand. A crow emerged from the darkness and landed in her palm. It cawed in her ear for a long moment then died in her hand. She shot Philemon an undecipherable glance.

“We’ll speak later, conjurer,” she said. “Matters to attend to. Philemon will show you your quarters.”

“Of course.” Philemon bowed lower than necessary.

She disappeared into the palace along with the sentry. Aaric departed by another way. Philemon led him into the thatched house.

A straw pallet and ample shelving were partitioned to one half of the room. The other half housed a mud brick kiln. Philemon waved in two servants carrying the Exalt’s body wrapped in scarlet quilts. They set the corpse down and hurried out.

The body had been immaculately embalmed—fragrant with cinnamon and resin, beeswax smeared about the colorless face, thyme sprigs placed in the rigid hands to ward off apparitions. He admired the workmanship.

“Will you need anything else?” Philemon asked.

Keedran ambled over to shelves stocked with alchemical compounds, crematory tools, reed pens, and blank parchments. He ran his hand along the rim of a clay jar. Chalky residue clung to his finger. “Fresh bitumen. And sandalwood. I assume you want me to perform this rite properly.”

“No,” Philemon said sharply. “But you shall have what you request all the same.”

Keedran continued taking inventory and grimacing.

Philemon inquired. “You look unwell.”

He pulled down a jar of turpentine. “No worse than all those bodies piled onto that raft.”

“I supposed you had noticed.”

“Hard to miss a blight-ridden body. Covered in boils. Withered to a husk.” He shook the images of the children from his mind.

“Four thousand by last count.” Philemon kissed the pomander pendant dangling from his neck. “Perhaps I should have a court alchemist examine you for symptoms?”

“Wouldn’t tell you much. The symptoms are unique to each victim.”

“Victim?” Philemon scoffed. “Victims of their own sick souls. It’s a spiritual plague sent by Voluuntawh.”

The archmagistrate gripped his necklace tight and prayed a penitential litany under his breath. Philemon’s prayer seemed to aggravate Keedran’s illness. He fended off a coughing fit.

“Divine judgement?” Keedran slumped onto the straw bed. “You believe that? Every single one of them.”

“The Maker does not err.” Philemon’s wolfish eyes gleamed.

“Why the children?”

“The sins of the father.” Philemon nodded and left.

Keedran stared at Kieran’s urn. He buried his head in his hands. The Maker did not err. God had led him here, unwillingly, amid a palace of schemers and murderers.

As he tried to make sense of his predicament, the voices murmured. Scattered memories of the souls he had conjured assailed him. Random images flitted in and out of his consciousness.

So long he had buried them, as all conjurers were trained to do to. But in his blight-ridden condition, he struggled to keep them to a whisper. He hacked up blood and wiped it on his bedsheet. He lifted his robe. The skin along his side peeled off in strips like rotten parchment. He could almost see it advancing along his ribs.

At last, the Maker had come for him.

He genuflected. “Voluuntawh uu lauude.”

He waited for the Maker to impress some inkling in his heart or mind.

‘Fire… fire!’

Kieran spoke to him, but Keedran shut him out. He wanted no reminder of his sins.

He lay down and tried to steal a few moments of sleep.

 

*

 

‘Don’t… let go…’

Another memory surfaced, one of his own, trailing back to the beginning of his heartache. He stood over Kieran’s deathbed as the boy begged his mother and father to stay by his side even as his skin turned mossy with rot. A phantom illness had taken ahold of Kieran. None of the medicine man’s remedies eased the boy’s agony. Keedran was grateful when the last breath seeped from his son’s lips.

In his weakness, he swore to never let Kieran go. He truly had believed that he held power over life and death. The clarity of hindsight humbled him.

Countless voices crept into his thoughts. He struggled to discern one from another.

Again, he fell to his knees. “Voluuntawh uu lauude.”

His plea returned the same reply.

‘Fire… fire!’

He shouted Kieran away, accepting that he would have no peace. He prepped the kiln for the Exalt’s body.

Using tools that weren’t his own proved tedious. The kiln was better suited for firing pottery than cremation. Heat escaped through cracks in the brick.

A servant arrived with the items he had requested. Keedran made an epoxy of the bitumen to fill in the fissures of the kiln.

As he split large chunks of wood into chips, someone knocked on the door and didn’t wait for permission to enter. The familiar sentry carried in an amphora of wine. Cassia entered behind him.

The man set the wine down, offered a kind word, and left. Keedran appreciated the man’s simple kindness, no pretense.

Cassia was less straightforward. He hadn’t decided what to make of her.

She strode across the room, bowl of wine in hand. Her tunic skimmed the floor. She sat near the fire.

“Careful of the flames, princess.” He said. “Could flare up.”

“I’m always careful.” She inhaled. “The smell isn’t so bad.”

“That’s a misconception. The fire burns so hot all you smell is heat.”

“How hot?”

“Very. Elsewise you end up with char.”

“What happens to the soul if you char the bones?”

“I won’t.” He said. That’s an apprentice’s mistake.

He hacked at the leg bone with a brass hoe. Embers crackled and died at his bare feet. He wiped the sweat from his brow.

“Your work takes a lot out of you,” she said.

He lived with the truth of her words—gnarled fingers, stooped back, burn scars. The cumulative effect of his work had served to make a man of one hundred sixty years as frail as a man of twice as many.

She sipped slowly. “How much longer?”

“A while princess.” He sat down on a stool keeping an eye on the growing fire. “Takes time to get the heat up and let the bones render. Have to be careful not to lose any ashes. Every grain holds a bit of the soul.”

“How will you know when it’s done?”

“Same way a cook knows supper’s ready.” He forced a ragged smile. “You practice something for more than a century you learn these things.”

She brushed her curls aside. “I’ve never witnessed this ritual before. What will happen?”

“I’ll play a song in the key of the soul. It’s different for everyone.” He displayed his calloused hands. “Then the ashes form a pattern as intricate as the palm.”

“And you can interpret the ashes, correct?” she said.

“I can, but I won’t,” He said nervously. “Forgive me princess, it’s a conjurer’s vow. The soul must speak for itself.”

The wrong answer might cost him his life, and she didn’t appear pleased. She took her time finishing her wine.

“Why do you do this?” A thin smile crept on her face. “All the burns, the pain you must carry around. Letting another soul enter your body. Why?”

He had questioned that for the last forty moons, second-guessing his entire life’s work. To give people closure, that was his usual justification. He offered his clients the gift of forgetting.

Keedran never forgot, though. A bit of every soul he conjured became a part of him. Their memories left a trail of emotion altogether indescribable teeming beneath the surface of the pained expression he wore.

Perspiration wetted his splotchy scalp. Another memory tunneled to the front of his mind.

‘Kieran… we love you Kieran!’

He remembered that one well, the first divination he had ever performed. A couple had tasked him with conjuring the spirit of their infant boy who had died of brittle fever that terribly cold year. The youngling had been four moons old and not yet named. Its parents cried as they called its name over and over ‘Kieran… we love you Kieran’. The child’s soul undulated within Keedran’s body at hearing its name for the first time. It was the most beautiful name he had ever heard.

When another soul dwelt within his body, he saw the world through a stranger’s eyes and shaped a bond more intimate than as a mother to her unborn. Being a conjurer was very much like being God.

Cassia stared at him, fingers laced and resting on her lap. She wanted an answer, the right one.

“It pays well,” he said.

“Was that worth it?” She craned her neck toward the urn on the shelf. “Your son’s in there isn’t he? Kieran?”

“Yes.” He said. Most of him.

“The boy died from blight. You tried to conjure him, but you failed. Your wife, she drowned herself not long after.”

He clenched his teeth.

Her expression softened. “I chose you for this task, because you were the only choice I had. The only conjurer I could find who had ever attempted such a thing. You must have been desperate.”

He couldn’t tell if she was toying with him. He gripped his knees, trying to compose himself.

“I need you.” She uncrossed her legs and leaned closer. “And you need me. A convenient arrangement.”

Convenient. He betrayed a smile.

“You seem like a reasonable man. That worries me.” She straightened herself. “I’ve lived my life around men. The reasonable ones tend to be the most reckless in matters of the heart. Can I trust you with this task?”

He expelled an audible breath. A soft knock fell upon the door.

“Pardon me.” She went to answer it.

A handmaiden whispered in her ear. Keedran considered his predicament, though he had little to consider. She had him around her finger. The young girl departed. Cassia poured herself another bowl of wine.

“It’s seems no one is safe.” She sighed. “One of the Exalt’s personal guardsmen has turned up, without a head. Crushed like a melon. Quite a mess.”

“Why are you telling me this?” He said.

“Someone is cleansing the court of certain undesirables. But I’m very protective of people who are valuable to me.”

“Princess.” He took his time in response. “I assure you this is no matter of the heart for me. It’s my vocation, my calling if you believe in such. I will do what I’ve been tasked to do.”

He hadn’t lied exactly—this was a matter of the soul. She regarded Keedran for a long while.

“Don’t stray far from this place,” She said. “Leaving guards here would only draw suspicion. You’ll be on your own. Don’t fret. These aren’t the only ears I have either. If you scream, I’ll hear you.”

He posed a concern of his own. “If the sisterhood were to discover me—”

“You needn’t worry.” She smiled. “I just received word that the high priestess has departed on holy orders and the other sisters are tending to the blight-ridden dead. They will be preoccupied for some time.”

He let his shoulders slouch. Relief eased his mind temporarily.

“You should be suspicious of certain people, conjurer.”

“Like whom?”

“Of those who are suspicious of you.” She took a gulp of wine. “I need you alive long enough to do your job.”

 

*

 

‘Fire!’

Kieran’s spoke louder than ever as Keedran tended the fire. Cassia had departed some time ago, leaving him in the company of the whispering in his head.

Then there came a shout from deep within the palace. Another body found?

This occurrence was disturbingly commonplace. The machinations of nobility confounded Keedran. He ignored the commotion and focused on his task.

In the moons since his last attempt, he had devoted himself to reexamining every step in the process he had performed in conjuring his son. He had been hasty with the cremation, not allowing the ashes time to rest or for the oil to seep into the grains. The bond of father and son had compromised his judgment. The patience he counselled to his clients had escaped him in his own heartache.

He would allow the fire all of the time it needed to render Claudius’ bones. Thick smoke filled the room, aggravating his cough.

He poured himself a bowl of deep purple libation, and wandered into the courtyard overlooking the city.

The moon waned and stars dappled the sky. Smoke from guilt offerings perfumed the night. People shuffled through firelit passageways to the melodies of stringed instruments.

Addalyn had always wanted to see Cassandria. She had wanted a second child too, but that was never to be. The Maker had blessed them with Kieran after many fertility offerings, only to have disease claim the boy so many years later. With her dying wish, Addalyn begged him to give up the conjury that had cost Kieran’s soul.

He was breaking that promise.

He recited a favorite verse of poetry. “So far from home the sky is wrong—”

“The stars not in their proper place.” Philemon appeared from amid the shadows and trees.

“Nor am I.” Keedran kept his eyes on the unchanging stars.

“You certainly aren’t in your proper place, conjurer.” He made the word an obscenity.

“You’re not the first one to visit me.”

“Prince Aaric came by, then?”

“No, should I be expecting him?”

“No, my apologies. What did the princess want to speak about?”

Keedran eyed the man. “She says I should be suspicious of certain people.”

“Wise beyond her years.” Philemon’s expression quickly soured. “Do you ever wonder if what you do is unnatural?”

“You consort with alchemists don’t you?”

“Alchemists heal.”

“Alchemists mend bodies, conjurers mend souls.”

“So you say.” Philemon rubbed the bridge of his nose. “But I fear this path Cassia is set on will only bring pain.”

“There can be no healing without it.”

“What healing has conjury brought you?”

Keedran sucked his teeth.

“This is a complex ritual, summoning an entire soul.” Philemon drew nearer. “Condemned even among conjurers. Is this not so?”

Keedran took a slow draught of wine puckering at the sweetness. “How does a man of law come to know so much of conjury?”

“I’ve read scrolls on the subject.”

“I’ve written scrolls on the subject. When the time comes, the Exalt’s soul will speak.”

“And?” Philemon deepened his done. “Am I to honor the testimony of a dead man? Men lie.”

“Our mouths lie. Our souls cannot.”

Keedran leaned against the balcony. He took a few rasping breaths.

Philemon advanced a step. “You must understand, conjurer. It isn’t personal. My concern is for Cassandria. She is gravely ill.”

Keedran sighed ripples into his wine. He respected Philemon. Beneath a different moon, they could have been friends. “All the more reason you should want to know the circumstances of the Exalt’s death.”

“I do. He was concupiscent, infirm, and unfit to lead.” Philemon pointed to the bow moon, Voluundere, the eye of God blinking shut. “And the Maker was watching.”

Voluundere’s gray gleam bewitched Keedran. The truth of Philemon’s words weighed down on him. Kieran forced himself to be heard.

‘Water!’

The word lingered in Keedran’s mind. He drank another mouthful of wine and poured out the rest. “Too sweet. I should finish my work.”

“You should reconsider.” Philemon jangled a sack heavy with coins. “Why involve yourself in the schemes of magistrates and nobles? What’s keeping you here?”

The coin sack swayed like a pendulum before Keedran’s eyes. His trembling hands told him to take the money and flee. Though, if Cassia had as many eyes as he feared, he wouldn’t get far.

Kieran called again.

‘Water… Fire!’

Those words evoked a familiar but hazy memory. Fire. Water. They could have meant a million different things. He couldn’t comprehend Kieran’s meaning, but he desperately needed to know. Perhaps they contained within them some way to free himself of the voices. Cassia’s words entered his mind, to be weary of those who were weary of him.

“The princess is a determined woman,” Keedran said. “But surely there are worse things to be than that. According to the prophets, the lowest depths of Chinora are reserved for treacherous souls, is it not? Hypocrites. Betrayers. Conspirators. Plotters. They sink in that abyss under the weight of their own corruption.”

Something like hatred flickered in Philemon’s eyes. “Her grace, is more than determined. She is reckless.”

“As was I once. None our without sin.”

“And yet not all sin is equal.”

Smoke funneled from the roof of Keedran’s abode. He regarded Philemon. If only they had met beneath another moon.

“I didn’t choose to come to this place, yet here I stand,” Keedran said. “The Maker’s ways are inaccessible to me, but He doesn’t err, I am certain. I have my reasons. She has hers. I’m certain that you and the prince of yours. I must find the princess. Let her know it is done.”

Philemon tucked the bribe away inside of his long cloak. ”And where to after that?”

“The library.” Perhaps some scroll within the library’s walls could decipher the words Kieran had imparted.

Keedran walked toward the palace. Philemon blocked his way. Their shadows touched. Philemon lifted his arm in the darkness.

The archmagistrate pointed east to a narrow stairway. “That will get you to the library without having to go through the city. Nothing but sickness there.”

Keedran nodded and started for Cassia’s quarters.

“If only scrolls contained all of the wisdom there was to know.” Philemon said to Keedran’s back. “You should be mindful of certain people conjurer.”

He halted, but didn’t turn around. “Like whom?”

“Of those less mindful of sacred things than you and I.” Philemon departed toward the city.

 

*

 

Keedran had hoped to be brief with Cassia, inform her that the cremation was finished and at the new moon the ritual could commence. When he asked if she had set aside any particular vessel to house her uncle’s ashes, she handed him a timeworn pot with soil still in it. He remembered Philemon’s warning.

As he turned to leave, he found himself doubled-over in agony holding his side. He insisted it was a passing illness, nothing she should concern herself with.

“Your health is my concern,” Cassia told him. “You don’t get to die until you’ve finished your work.”

She ordered in a court alchemist to examine him. Thankfully, the half-blind woman wasn’t especially thorough in her examination, massaging his glands for swelling and looked down his throat for redness. She found both and diagnosed him with a simple infection and excess black bile.

With arthritic grace, she concocted a tonic of ember root and mercury. “Drink it all”

He drained it in two gulps. The burning overcame the bitterness. Horrid stuff.

Cassia reminded him as he departed. “Don’t wander off.”

“Of course.” He bowed and departed for the library.

 

*

 

The courtyard stairway led him down several narrow corridors that deposited him in front of the library as Philemon had said. He passed a couple of blight-ridden vagabonds who weren’t long for this world. He sympathized.

The alchemist’s tonic moved his bowels and soothed his cough, but no worldly elixir could cure his affliction. The blight had slithered across his chest and claimed his right arm down to the elbow. The Maker would have him soon. Not before he freed his son, he prayed.

A pale, messy haired boy stood watch inside the library.

Keedran placed a few misshapen silver pieces in his hand. “Show me.”

Scribe’s apprentice was a noble profession, but not a profitable one. The boy proved cheap to bribe. Alchemical candles encrusted in ambergris illumined the spiraling path into the recesses of the library.

He guided Keedran around brass kettles filled with a fermented, congealed slurry. The boy was afraid to even get near the stuff. He pointed Keedran to the aisles of forbidden texts and returned to the atrium.

Several scrolls had been sloppily rerolled, as though recently examined. Whoever had read them last had been in a hurry.

Aided by reading stones, he uncovered a few insights for someone foolish enough to attempt to conjure an entire spirit. He took solace in knowing that he could still be the student.

Ignorant to the passing of time, he left no sheet unexamined. After emptying the shelves of their wisdom, grief settled in once more. He knew all there was to know about conjury. It wasn’t enough to tell how to free his son’s soul.

Another voice joined those tormenting him.

‘If only scrolls contained all of the wisdom there was to know.’ Philemon’s words cut like barbs under the skin.

He cried out the last drops of his pride. Worn down by heartache he succumbed to the silence. He couldn’t fight the voices anymore, so complete was his brokenness. With nothing left in the way, Kieran whispered clearly.

‘Water for the body…’

He knew those words. Kieran spoke again.

‘Water for the body…

Fire for the soul! Keedran had spoken that proverb to his son on many occasions. That centuries old saying kindled the dying fire in his heart—a prayer answered after forty moons. He understood.

It would be an arduous task, sinking into the furnace of his soul while another soul possessed his body, but he could run from his penance no longer. He must let Kieran be heard, and beg his own child’s forgiveness.

“You can’t go down there.” The young scribe’s startled voice jarred Keedran from his epiphany. “I said stop.”

The sickening crunch of iron against bone echoed through the library walls. Lumbering metal footsteps grew louder. A hefty shadow animated against the far wall. Keedran hid behind a row of shelving.

The man stumbled into shelves. His horrible groans filled the room.

Keedran blindly reached up and searched the shelf over head for a weapon. He found a worn down scribe’s knife. The helmed sentry’s eyes glowed white in the darkness. He knew that face, the same genteel giant who had led him into the city. Only he wasn’t.

An inhuman growl escaped the man’s mouth. A wild swing of his maul turned a shelf into splinters. He groaned in agony.

An apparition had entered the man. Or rather, one had been sent upon him. The man struggled for possession of himself. Spit dribbled from his mouth as he panted.

Keedran crept to a stone pillar near the staircase. The blight gripped his lungs. He spattered a wet cough.

The creature seethed. Another swing of its maul shredded the scrolls Keedran had been reading. It stumbled toward him. Its breath reached Keedran’s neck.

Keedran considered plunging the knife creature’s thigh, then thought better of it. He tossed the knife across the antechamber. The creature pursued the noise. Keedran found it in him to sprint up the stairway. The sentry chased the patter of his feet.

Keedran made it to the stairwell and threw his bodyweight into one of the brass kettles. Semifluid sloshed across the floor corroding all it touched. The sentry growled, but dared not move. Keedran fled.

Through the atrium and passed the pulpy remains of the boy, he scampered into the starlit passageways of the palace complex. He limped down unfamiliar corridors. The sentry’s groans chased him. He took whichever turn lead him further from the growling.

A far-off scream echoed from the library. The patter of iron-clad feet surrounded him. The groaning vanished. Keedran turned right and right again. His robe caught on something. He tore himself free.

Shadows appeared and disappeared in either direction. A sharp pain gripped Keedran’s chest. He collapsed, struggling for air. A cadre of guards in full scale armor assembled on either side of the passageway.

Cassia forced her way through them. “Why are you here?”

Keedran had no answer. Philemon arrived, more soldiers with him.

“They got away my lady.” The guard captain said. “What should we—”

She silenced him with a wave of her hand. “What happened?”

No use lying. He had never been much of a liar anyhow. “Something tried to kill me. An apparition. It came for me when I was in the antechamber.”

“Impossible,” Philemon said. “No one’s allowed down there except officials of the imperial court.”

Cassia scowled at Keedran, but still came to his aid. “He’s in service of the court. I think we can make an exception.”

“I think otherwise.”

Keedran lay on the ground, trying to catch his breath. His lungs burned. He swallowed a cough, sweat dripping down his wrinkled face.

“The laws must be enforced, my lady, lest all descend into chaos.” Philemon walked by Keedran. “The man must be punished.”

“I agree,” she said. “We shall hold him in confinement. In the palace with guards nearby. So he can’t escape.”

Keedran watched as they bartered for his life. The guard captain stared at him curiously. Suddenly, the man’s eyes widened.

“Blight,” he shouted and aimed his spear at Keedran, not knowing what else to do.

The men huddled around Philemon and Cassia, lances shaking between their hands. The discolored flesh of his arm sagged grotesquely exposing bone. Philemon clutched for his pendant. Cassia’s eyes flared with disgust and contempt. Keedran had surely fallen out her good graces, not that it mattered now.

“Seize him.” Philemon ordered the soldiers.

“Leave him,” she said.

The guards looked at their captain for confirmation of whose side they should be on.

“This man is in no condition to perform any ritual.” Philemon said. “He won’t survive through the new moon. All that can be done is to have a priestess bless him and put an arrow through his heart.”

“Of course.” Cassia gathered up the fabric of her tunic close to her body. “Just as soon as he finishes conjuring the Exalt.”

“You would let your uncle’s soul dwell within this man’s corrupted body?”

“My uncle is already dead. No more harm can come to him.”

Philemon’s face reddened as his eyes shifted between Cassia and Keedran. “My lady, it is my responsibility to maintain rule of law.”

“Surely your duties include going to every length to uncover the murderer of the Exalt.”

“My duty is to Cassandria. Not corpses. What would prince Aaric or your cousins have to say of this?”

“They will each have their say when the conjurer performs the rite.”

Keedran managed to steady his breath and find his footing. The guards retreated a step, spears extended.

“No they won’t.” Philemon glared at Cassia. “The power to admit testimony belongs to the archmagistrate alone. You forget yourself princess.”

A subtle grin spread across her dimpled cheeks. “And you forget whose silver bought you that power.”

Wrinkles bunched up on Philemon’s brow, two centuries of life etched into the lines of his face. Keedran couldn’t help but pity the man angling for his life. The soldiers waited instruction. Keedran awaited his fate.

“Seize him.” Philemon waved a dismissive hand. “Bring him to the palace and place guards around him. He’ll stand trial after the new moon.”

The guard captain stamped his heel and pointed. Two timid guards slowly walked toward him. They ordered him forward, careful brushing up against his exposed skin.

“Thank you.” She bowed. “My uncle honors your wisdom.”

Philemon departed unceremoniously. The soldiers marched Keedran at spear-point. Cassia halted them, studying his arm. An uneasy silence settled in.

“Remember conjurer.” She abandoned all pretense. “Your life is in my hands.”

The guards marched him off. He felt no safer. The Maker would claim him soon enough. He set his heart on Kieran’s words and the task before him—the last conjury he would ever perform.

 

*

 

Keedran knelt in a grassy clearing far outside the city walls in the company of magistrates and relatives Cassia had chosen. The moon had waned into nothingness, so the Maker wasn’t watching.

He painted two concentric circles on the ground. Those witnessing stood outside of the larger circle, while he knelt within the smaller one.

Across the way, Philemon stood among his fellow magistrates, seven in all.

Cassia stood beside prince Aaric and their kin, two princes and three princesses. Each dressed in the ceremonial linens of their ancestral lands. Twelve guards encircled them with arrows nocked.

Something in Aaric’s gaze unsettled him, those gray eyes narrowed in concentration. Not far from him, the genteel sentry, the man who had both brought Keedran wine and tried to murder him, stood in the shadows with a distorted twitch to his face.

Keedran averted his eyes. Identifying his assailant now would be fruitless. He hadn’t anticipated surviving this ordeal anyway. Atonement was all that mattered. Fire for the soul.

Incense wafted across the field. He poured Claudius’ ashes into a large, porcelain disc surrounded by torch pillars.

He uncorked a bottle of sweet vitriol and imbibed until a fog settled over his mind and numbed his muscles. He spewed a mouthful of vitriol over the ashes.

He dabbed his finger in the ashen pile and swallowed the grains that clung to it. The fetid taste on his tongue bespoke of a man who had died in distress.

He cradled a horn flute in his arms and played a few notes. The ashes didn’t move. He played lower and a bit faster searching for the key of Claudius’ soul. He syncopated the rhythm. The ashes trembled.

Keedran played the aria of awakening. The music sounded distant and hollow, as if from another world.

The heap arranged itself into a mosaic of swirling lines that told a life’s story. He interpreted the subtleties of the pattern—places where lines bent, overlapped, or vanished entirely. He read Claudius’ hopes and fears, but spoke none of them.

His stomach churned. A small portion of Claudius’ soul stirred out from the grains he had swallowed. It longed for the rest of its self.

The last memories always surfaced first. For a moment he saw through Claudius’ tired eyes—someone hovering over his bed with hair like straw.

Claudius rose from the ashen mosaic, his presence invisible but unmistakable.

The song lured the dispossessed spirit which yearned to be whole again. Claudius rushed toward the music. Keedran inhaled to the bottom of his lungs, as Claudius’ spirit flowed in. The music died. His body fell limp and his consciousness receded. Claudius filled every space of his being, trying to settle into an unfamiliar body that didn’t quite fit.

Pictures blossomed in Keedran’s mind—failed assassinations, political schemes, forbidden lovers. All adopted memories.

Other memories came—a child resting upon his father’s knee as he taught him to pray. Kieran’s memories.

He let the light dim in his eyes. In an instant, he was floating. Then falling. An eldritch sensation consumed him, a feeling of existence beyond the flesh. No sense of touch, time, left or right. He maintained a vague perception of the temporal world. The faint but clear ripple of Kieran’s voice reached out for him.

‘Father!’

He tumbled further within himself. Memories of all of the souls he had conjured pressed down on him, at once beautiful an agonizing. Kieran cried out.

‘Father!’

He answered. Kieran! It had been so many moons since he’d spoken that name, it felt like a word in foreign tongue.

‘Father!’

His soul wept at the sound of his son’s voice, preserved in its youthful innocence. As he contemplated this indescribable damnation his pride had consigned Kieran to, his spirit ached. The ethereal flames swelled around. Any deeper and the fire would expose every part of him.

He drew nearer.

With a conjurer’s trained focus, he made out the sounds from the outside world. Cassia and Philemon both questioned someone. The other magistrates made mention of poison. A ghostly intonation, which surely belonged to Claudius, shouted its testimony. So deep within himself they were a blur of words.

All that mattered was his son. Kieran!

Kieran answered.

‘Forgive…’

Emptied of pride and even shame, he laid bare the deepest regrets of his soul. Forgive me. Forgive me for the suffering I’ve caused you. The inferno swelled. Scorching. Purifying.

His strength waned. Indistinguishable noises from the outside world touched him—accusations, denials, and what he thought was the invocation of blood magic. His body was in harm’s way.

But all that mattered was his son. Kieran please, say you forgive me.

Kieran’s presence receded as if to summon the strength to utter the words he had waited forty moon to say.

‘Forgive yourself!’

Those simple words baffled him. Understanding flowed into him, a truth no scroll contained. The words of a child had mastered him.

Kieran pleaded.

‘Father, let me go.’

He obeyed. Kieran’s presence faded. A wave of memories floated by recounting all of the lives he had lived. He set them free, and their memories fled his mind.

Clinging to a single thread of consciousness, he struggled to pull himself out. Claudius’ will pressed down on him, unwilling to surrender the body.

He waded through a patchwork of mournful memories. An older brother who had died in Claudius’ childhood. A bastard son whom he had killed. A general whom he loved in a way that would never have been allowed to stand had anyone known.

Claudius’ last memory appeared before him with terrifying clarity, the last thing the Exalt ever beheld. His life of betrayal and infanticide brought full circle when his beloved nephew kneeled over his bed and forced a vial of undiluted dream seed into his mouth. With his dying breath he stared into those eyes, empty and gray.

He forced his way through the tumult of Claudius’ soul, suffocating beneath the weight of a lifetime of sin.

His own soul mourned for the man. It was impossible to detest anyone, no matter their transgressions, once he had bathed in their memories. No one should be privy to such things. None but the Maker.

The sounds of the temporal world grew louder, the voices more distinct. Cross-examination had devolved into curdling screams and the clanging of iron. Arrows whistled through wind. A horrid growl resonated across the field. Whoever had been restraining the apparition-infested sentry had lost control. The thing ravaged about groaning all the while.

A life and death skirmish proceeded, and Keedran was blind and limbless wandering the battlefield. His soul swayed as Claudius flailed wildly in a body he did not know how to maneuver.

Choked screams came from all around him. The sentry let out a gurgling roar. He was certain now that he heard Cassia chanting.

So near the surface, he could feel again. Claudius managed to pry a blade from the hands of butchered guard. Claudius stumbled forward.

He sensed a body near his with murderous intent. Claudius parried the blow. A warm trickle flowed down his side. Swords locked. A twinge of pain shot through his wrist. His knees buckled.

Claudius raised the blade high and let out a vengeful shout from the depths of his soul that made Keedran’s shudder. He cut through sinew and bone. Keedran’s legs gave out.

Cassia chanted once more. A sudden roar of wind and flame brought the clamor to a swift end.

Claudius’ presence dwindled. Keedran seized the moment, and reclaimed possession of himself.

The tang of scorched flesh greeted him. He fought back the instinct to vomit. He reacquainted himself with his fingers and legs. Sight came last, blurry at first. A few slow blinks restored clarity.

The dead outnumbered the living. A young princess cried for her slain sisters as she cradled her wounded brother in her arms. Cassia stood over an incapacitated Philemon, badly burned but still alive.

Among the massacred guards, the sentry too lay dead with a knife plunged into his neck. Better by your own hands than to succumb to an apparition.

Gouged from hip to thigh, Aaric breathed his last. His gray eyes cast down on him one last time.

Claudius’ soul pressed against his body, begging for release. He crawled to his horn flute. He played a refrain and exhaled. Claudius departed.

He played a serenade, and the ashen mosaic fell again into a heap.

Only Keedran’s soul dwelled within him now. Freed of the burden he had carried for so long, tears stream of their own volition. A strange emptiness filled the space where Kieran had dwelt. A part of him was missing.

He hadn’t the strength to move or even speak, but there was no need for words. He knew Kieran couldn’t hear him anyway.

 

*

 

Half a moon passed in Keedran’s convalescence. The sun was rising over Cassandria again. He examined his arm and chest. All signs of blight had vanished. His scarred arm would be an everlasting reminder of his ordeal, but his soul was well. The Maker’s judgment had passed over him. He breathed without discomfort.

The palace officials had been too distracted with the fallout from the ritual to harass him. He departed quietly with Kieran’s urn under his arm. It weighed more than he remembered. Perhaps he was lighter.

Rumors floated among the people in the city. Stray eyes winced at his scarred arm. People muttered about Claudius’ proclivities, Aaric’s treachery, and the master conjury who had revealed the depths of the corruption within the palace of Cassandria.

He kept his head down and limped by the gossip. This must be how ordinary men are whispered into myth.

He made it to the city walls before two guards accosted him with spears brandished. Cassia stood beside them. She looked unperturbed considering all that had occurred.

“You’ve caused quite a panic,” she said. “But the rumors would have gotten out eventually.”

He bowed stiffly. “What will become of Philemon?”

“He has stood before the tribunal.”

“And?”

“The manticores will eat well.”

He sighed. “Philemon had nothing to do with the Exalt’s death.”

“No.” She revealed a sack heavy with silver pieces. “But bribery can rise to the sin of high treason.”

His face didn’t change. Half a moon ago he would have feared her, but he had survived the maker’s judgement. Dying now would be only a small torture.

“Tell me,” she said. “What else did you see my uncle’s memories.”

“I can’t say.” Truly, he couldn’t. Those memories vanished the moment Claudius’s soul left his body.

She pursed her lips and dismissed the guards, staring silently at him until they were out of sight. She tossed him them sack of money. “When a man does his job he is to be compensated.”

He nervously pocketed the money. She inspected his arm—the dark brown color had returned though it still had the texture of cracked eggshell.

“Your life is no longer my concern.” She symbolically washed her hands of him. “Though I’d suggest you don’t stay here. Unless you have any ideas about cleaning up the city. So much corruption.”

He looked at Cassandria’s gleaming golden domes and the blight-ridden bodies being hurled over its gates. Fire for the soul. “Burn it.”

She smiled coyly. “Not a terrible idea. Dead princes, dead magistrates. It seems there’s no one left to ascend the throne but me. Farewell, conjurer, may we never meet again.”

 

*

 

He crossed over the same bridge he had entered the city by. The half-moon was low and westering as Cassandria disappeared beneath the horizon.

He knelt by the water, tracing his finger along the crevices of Kieran’s urn. “I pray the Maker will make you whole again on the other side.”

He emptied the cremains, and left the urn by the riverside. Kieran’s ashes drifted through all eight rivers of Cassandria on his way to the Peaceland. A part of Keedran went with him.

 

________________________________________

Caleb Williams is a part-time architect of fictional worlds. His fiction has appeared in InterGalactic Medicine Show.