Take the body and give me the rest (12 page)

Minsetta spoke
to the creature. ‘Hello, Arabelle. Take his body and give me the
rest, would you?’

The thing
turned to regard Seth, who was lying helpless and prone on the bed.
It had dirt and mud still clinging to it as it looked at him. It
straightened its seemingly broken neck with a sharp click and
slowly started to walk towards the bed. He thought to scream, but
he knew it would do no good. The wood in these rooms was thick and
solid. If he was going to get killed by this thing, he’d at least
die like a man.

It reached the
bed and opened its mouth. Inside were black gums and animal-like
teeth in tight rows, sharp teeth for a purpose. It started to climb
onto the bed and crawl towards him; he knew those teeth would soon
be in his neck and in a matter of moments he’d bleed to death. He
cast through his mind, madly trying to find something he could use.
He thought again to his own creature and could feel it fighting and
clawing to get in but he’d hadn’t the key to unlock it from its
cold prison.

Minsetta looked
at him. ‘No, no, Seth, I won’t let you ruin the fun, the drug in
the wine makes you forgetful, you’ll not be able to find the words
to call your saviour, and then once you’re out of the way I’ll go
and visit Lady Elizebetha’ she said.

Surely the
General knew something. He thought of it all, fighting and killing,
anything the Dark Guild knew. Some knew other dark summonings, but
nothing that could help him against a wailer. Where had that word
come from? He thought. This thing surely was a wailer and, from her
garb, she was from Dacar. He thought of the fireside at the tavern,
and it came to him in a flash. It was a ghost story that Jopher had
told many times. A wailer on the coast of Dacar. The ghost of a
young woman who had killed herself by diving from the cliffs. She
was waiting for her man who never came home from the sea, such as
happened often in Dacar. It was just a story to Jopher, but now
Seth could see it was real enough—and not a ghost either, but
something physical.

It leaned down
with that lank dark hair over him and cold lips finding his neck.
With a powerful jerk, Seth ripped himself sidewards just as those
teeth sunk in. They tore into the muscles of his shoulder and side
of his neck, causing him to scream out in pain. It sucked and
licked noisily at the rich blood that flowed from him. Turning his
head to look at it, Seth saw the eyes go from the pure white of the
dead to the blue eyes of a person as it drank in his life. The face
started to fill with colour as it licked and fed.

Seth could feel
the life starting to drain out of his body. He became weaker and
weaker as the creature drank from him. He called to his creature
with the last of his strength. He felt his call gain in strength as
he slipped towards the land of the dead himself and did not need
any words at all but just the connection and need. It was joined
with him now and the strength of his intention and plight were all
the invitation it required. The beast ripped through the void and
into the world. He was filled with its burning hunger and deadly
anger.

It grabbed the feeding creature, which was now a full human
reminiscent of tall and pale girl, and, grabbing the back of her
white neck, ripped her from Seth and flinging her body hard into
the wall. It leapt at Minsetta as she screamed in fear. It snatched
her legs out from under her with a clawed forepaw, ripped into her
beautiful face with those sharp teeth and began to devour her. Seth
felt angry powerful words pounding in his mind from the creature:
‘
Mine, never take what is
mine.’

Seth felt his
wounds healing and life and clarity returning to him as everything
Minsetta was flooded into him. He would have told the creature he
didn’t want it, but it was all he could do to stay awake and
conscious. Sounds of slaughter filled his ears as he lay on the
bed, panting, with memory after bloody memory filling his mind.

He lay in his
own blood, the wound on his neck fully healed and he saw the
creature looming over him, using its razor teeth to gently sever
the bonds at his hands and feet.

‘
That was much too close, young one;
she almost had you. I felt you passing over. If I hadn’t been there
to push you back, you would have died tonight
’ it said, licking his own blood off him.

‘Thanks. I
couldn’t find the words to summon you properly’ Seth said, sitting
up and now looking at the ruined carnage that once had been
Minsetta. He felt sick the sight of the near headless thing with
ripped-out chest cavity and ruined form.

The creature spoke to his thoughts. ‘
We hardly need them anymore, the connection between us grows
stronger all the time. Now young one you must search her memory and
find the coldness you need to keep moving on. She didn’t love you;
you were just a convenient ruse to get close to someone
else.
’

‘I know.’

Seth looked at
the other form of the dead girl. With her neck snapped and body
slumped against the wall, she looked completely like another victim
of the creature and not his assailant.

‘What is
she?’

‘
She’s one of your dead. My land is
filled with them like rats. Try not to get killed again; I don’t
like people to take what is mine.
’ With
that, the creature walked back through the rift, dragging the dead
girl by the ankle as it went, leaving Seth alone in the room with
the silence and the mutilated body of his first proper
love.

In many ways,
Seth had changed since he’d taken in these new people and lives. He
didn’t believe as Minsetta had said that he was a gatherer of
souls. Surely, he had something deeply personal from them, but he
wasn’t carrying them inside of himself. They didn’t live on in him.
Sometimes their urges and ideas would rear in his mind, but that
was all. One part of Stephan the General that was at odds with
Seth’s own nature was that of secrecy. The General had spent
decades of his life not only as a leading member of the Dark Guild
but also a murderer.

When he’d begun
his affair with Minsetta, Seth would have tried to hold her hand on
deck, while the General told him no. So now that she had strangely
disappeared from the ship just a day out of port from Dacar, it was
well that no one except for Elizebetha knew that he’d been involved
with her.

Seth was having
trouble sleeping, thinking about carrying her fine body to the
lower deck and throwing it into the dark sea. Crouching on the
floor in her room afterwards, scrubbing her precious blood off the
wood. Stephan had done that before as well.

He had loved
her and he had killed her. She would have killed him, but that
didn’t change his guilt. Everyone wanted to kill him these days;
you couldn’t hold that against a person. He kept wondering what The
Guild could have offered her that was so tempting. She may have
said it was to liberate Arisetta’s soul from inside of him, but he
could see that look of greed when she mentioned a reward. Something
that they had offered had pushed her over the edge.

Chapter 14

With the moon high in the sky over the deck of
The Opulent
and only two
weeks left in the voyage, Seth still found himself haunting the
sparing decks at midnight. Of course she wasn’t coming, but he
still felt the need to be there. As he sat he heard soft footsteps
approach, he raised his head from the bench. Elizebetha came to sit
next to him.

She seemed so
very old in the cold, with a shawl wrapped around her.

‘What are you
doing here every night, Seth?’ she asked.

‘Trying to
avoid sleep is the main thing.’ It was true he had been sleeping
terribly and had red-shot eyes half of the time.

‘Bad dreams?’
she asked.

‘Bad memories.
She wasn’t wrong when she said that doing that to me was nothing
compared to what she had done before,’ he said.

‘How many
people had she taken?’ Elizebetha said, Seth sensing some envy in
her voice.

‘Hundreds and
hundreds. She was some kind of priestess in Pelloss. She had done
summonings and given the gifts to others, not just herself. She
could take someone and share out the memories, skills and life
amongst many,’ he said.

‘I’ve heard of
such things, but not imagined that anyone could bring themselves to
do it,’ she said. ‘Now let’s talk of something else, if we
can?’

‘Of course. I’d
be glad to get something else on my mind,’ he said.

‘Have you heard
of Black Rock Keep?’ she said.

‘Of course.
It’s a Duchy right at the end of Pelloss, sort of a barrier between
the Great Southern Desert and all the rest of us.’

‘That’s my
home,’ she said.

‘You’re the
Duchess?’ he said, shocked at his many informal chats with her and
incorrectly calling her Ladyship not Duchess

She laughed.
‘It’s fine, Seth. Truly I am, but my brother Renton has been
holding my seat for me for the last ten or so years while I’ve been
out gathering.’

Seth didn’t
know if he liked her usage of that word. ‘Gathering what?’ he
asked.

‘Gathering
knowledge, of course. Gathering wisdom,’ she said.

‘Okay, so
what’s the plan? You need an escort home?’

‘I do, Seth. I
need an escort home and have arranged passage for us on a trading
caravan from Pelloss most of the way. But before we get started,
there is something I need in Pelloss.’

‘What’s
that?’

‘The Dark Guild
has been around for a long time, Seth, four hundred years at least.
During that time, they have been collecting as much knowledge as
they can. They have a vast library in Pelloss, mostly filled with
the diaries of the senior members,’ she said.

‘So you want me
to go steal one?’ he said.

‘There is one I
need to read, but I’ve never known the library’s location. I think
they told Minsetta; I think that was her reward for killing us
both, to have access to all the knowledge of The Guild.’

Seth felt that
ring true inside. He could feel that lust for knowledge in her, in
him. He could hear the messenger in Pelloss give her directions to
the building, tell her what to say to the guards and the amount of
time she was allowed inside.

‘They’re
expecting someone when this ship docks; they gave her a word for
the guards at the gates, even,’ he said.

‘Can you find
the place with her memories?’ she asked in an excited voice.

He knew he
could.

A timid knock
at the door preceded a timid-looking page boy walking into the
lounge room where Seraphina sat reading a large old book in a
leather chair. Reaching out with her fine, pale hand, she took the
letter from him without saying a word of thanks. She quickly tore
open the rough paper and read the words scrawled inside. It said,
‘She had already been using him to get close to the Duchess and
would take him as well’.’

She smiled to
herself as she sat. It was all done now. The Pellosina woman was a
legend amongst the Dark Guild; not one of them but someone they
knew about. In decades past, they had helped her when she needed to
flee her home country, when her sect of worshippers had grown too
extreme, and for that she owed The Guild a blood debt. She was
dangerous and cold in the extreme, but soon she’d have all of
Stephan’s knowledge back in the family.

They had offered her three days access to the library, but it
was much more than a library; it was the collection of diaries from
every member of the Dark Guild from the formation to now. It housed
all of their knowledge earned with blood until now. While she was
there, she was going to be drugged and thrown into a cell
underneath the building until Seraphina and Dirst could get to her
and retrieve her. Minsetta didn’t know that, of course, but that
had been the plan of Stephan’s since he had learned Elizebetha was
heading home on
The Opulent
.
An outsider would never been given free access to all of that
knowledge, she should have known that.

Seth dreams
continued to be plagued by Minsetta and the life she had lived.
Before now, Stephan the General was the major character in his
mind, but now her memories, impressions and ideas ran through him,
overwhelming them and making the General’s seem faded and pale. She
had lived one hundred years. Seth had seen how she held strongly
onto her youth by the means of taking the young as victims. It was
an easy practise, and he realised that he himself would already be
living to a much greater age because of the four lives he’d now
taken into him. He took for granted the extra strength and vitality
he felt, but if it had suddenly left him and he returned to normal,
he would feel like a man who hadn’t eaten or slept in days. Now, he
glowed with health and life.

During nights on
The
Opulent
, Seth dreamed dark dreams of the
Pellosi city with Minsetta at the centre. He saw her travelling to
different parts of the world, to the cold northern reaches of his
home and to the southern desert to dwell with the people there and
to learn from them. Pelloss, though, was her home, and there she
had built her following. It was more than forty years since she had
fled for her life from the current king, Seth knew she had been
coming back to regain what she’d had. She was a patient woman, and
she had merely waited for that king to die before she could return
to the city that she loved.

When
The Opulent
began to cross its way into the sun-streamed bay to the main
city called simply Pelloss City, he felt in a strange way like he
was coming home. It was indeed an impressive place, and he almost
laughed thinking of his first reaction on seeing Bloodcrest keep as
a newly enlisted recruit in the North. He’d marvelled at a hall
with a hearth at each end and tables to seat two hundred. Now the
towering white walls of this city stood in front of him with the
bay glittering in the sunshine. It was starting to feel hot as
well.