《Shrive》


 1 - Arrival

    People stare at me as I trudge down the village¡¯s only street. Their expressions aren¡¯t friendly, but that¡¯s still a good sign. A bad sign would be houses abandoned, or even burning. The people here aren¡¯t happy to see me, but they don¡¯t feel guilty enough to run.


    Part of the reason for the unfriendliness is that I¡¯m a stranger, a mud-spattered outsider coming to disrupt a small community. Part of is definitely due to the collared ghoul shambling along behind me, squat and simian. Most of it is because of the uniform I wear and the authority I carry. They know who I represent, they know what I¡¯m here for, and they know they can¡¯t do anything about it.


    Someone must have run ahead of me when I was first seen, because the village leader is waiting outside his house already, cap in hand and standing well in advance of the small group of villagers here to gawp and glare. I come to a stop in front of him, easing my pack off my shoulder and onto the least muddy patch of the road.


    ¡°Adjudicator.¡± He keeps his eyes down, focused on getting through the conversation as quickly as possible.


    ¡°Mayor. How long since the last assessment, and how many dead?¡± It¡¯s a small place, but a remote one, making it difficult to estimate how much time I¡¯ll need to spend here. With luck, I can be heading South again by tomorrow at the latest, to drier roads and clearer skies.


    ¡°More than two years back ¡ª maybe three. Only six dead though. They¡¯re all laid out as required.¡± One hand stops kneading his hat band to gesture loosely to one side, indicating the low roof of the undercroft and the heavy hatch closed over it.


    ¡°And how recent was the last one? I¡¯ve been on the road for several days now.¡± Behind me, Rutger snuffles loudly, his foreclaws clicking on the cobbles. He knows what villages mean, and they¡¯re only one step behind battlefields in his estimation. The mayor¡¯s shoulders hunch further, and I catch a few muttered words from the onlookers.


    ¡°Only a few days ago ¡ª Jansen¡¯s daughter. She caught a fever, and¡ª¡±


    A man ¡ª Jansen, presumably ¡ª pushes out from the knot of villagers. ¡°You won¡¯t touch her!¡± A few strides bring him closer to me, though he still stops well short of the mayor. His mouth works for a few moments before he finds the words. ¡°I know the law, and I obey it. But if that thing touches my Jeanie, I¡¯ll kill you.¡± A shriek comes from the villagers, a rustle of skirts as someone faints or falters. Softer now, the bravado already failing, he repeats himself. ¡°I¡¯ll kill you.¡±


    He¡¯s a large man, with broad shoulders. Probably a strong one, once, before age and grief weakened him, turning muscle to flab and wrinkles. Still, it¡¯s an empty threat and we all know it ¡ª a word for me would unleash Rutger and have everyone on the street dead in a hundred heartbeats; by the time his hands were around my throat, his entrails would be on the ground.


    By law, the dead belong to the state. No matter how rich, how gifted, how cherished, their flesh and blood and bones and spirit are a national resource of utmost importance. A corpse might be used in rituals, raised into service, or repurposed as fodder, but we all serve in death. It is one of the most immutable laws.Stolen novel; please report.


    For a moment ¡ª a moment ¡ª I consider killing Jansen. I have the right to do it, and no one would dare say a word against it. Had he spoken like that to one of the Dead Lords, his entire village would already be on their way to the charnel pits, Rutger unleashed to drench himself in blood and terror. Even as nothing more than one of their lackeys, I am accorded a certain respect.


    The street is silent, the villagers aghast, only waiting for death to come. Jansen stares at me, his courage gone, his face filled now with worry. Who has he risked, with this defence of his dead daughter? How much does he wish he had stayed with his remaining family, avoided my rebuke? Other adjudicators, ones I have known, would have killed whatever children he had left in front of him, made him beg for forgiveness over their corpses.


    But cruelty is not required of me, only obedience. It costs me nothing to spare his daughter this, and I have no appetite for blood. I turn my attention back to the mayor. ¡°What about the second most recent?¡±


    He stammers a moment, still half expecting the axe to fall. ¡°A few weeks back, I think? A labourer who fell behind a plough. They just kept on going.¡±


    ¡°Very well. Open the undercroft.¡± I turn my back on the villagers and walk towards the low building, hearing the gasps of released tension spring up behind me, Jansen¡¯s still shaking voice offering comfort to someone, apologies for the danger he caused. The mayor follows along behind me, clutching an iron key. I hear his breath catch in preparation, but he does not manage to speak.


    Once the key is turned, it takes two men ¡ª Jansen and another whose name I do not care to learn ¡ª to lift the heavy hatch and reveal the stairs. Cold air, thick with the strong smell of herbs, rushes out past us. Ice magic: an enchantment worth more than this entire village, set years ago so that the state would not see its most precious resources wasted. There are barrows like this in every hamlet and along every road, storehouses for the Dead Lords¡¯ art.


    I beckon to Rutger before I descend the ladder and the ghoul lopes towards me, using all four limbs in a lopsided run. A week since the last village, and he is eager. Like many of the lesser dead, he is more dangerous when starving, and it is in everyone¡¯s interest to keep him fed.


    Four of us descend the ladder, but only Rutger and I leave the base of the stairs to walk among the dead. Cold air continues to blow from the far end of the long room, past the wooden tables that bear corpses in various stages of decomposition. A death in the last few days means that new bundles of herbs have been hung about the space, a welcome mask to whatever stenches lurk beneath the sharp green smell. The magic keeps things cool, but that simply slows, rather than stops, the rot. Luckily, the Dead Lords have little interest in freshness.


    I guide the ghoul past the first occupied table, a small form covered in a white sheet. The second body is older, brutalised by being dragged for miles behind dead horses, but this means nothing to a ghoul. At my command, he lunges down towards the broken skin and begins to feed. Over the grunts and snarls and wet ripping noises of the dead feeding on the dead, I hear retching and the quick rattle of retreating feet up the ladder. I keep my back turned and walk further into the undercroft; my training has made many horrors commonplace to me, but I still would not choose to watch it.


    Unlike my abominable companion, my work does not require recency. The Dead Lords have the luxury of a long perspective; it is not important that the law is swift, just that it is certain and unflinching. Partly by habit, partly because it keeps me further from the grotesquery of a feeding ghoul, I begin my work with the oldest corpse.

 2 - Graft

    At the age of seven, I was taken from my home. I still remember the place, the faces of my family, but the memories grow more loose and dreamlike every year, a disconnected swirl of images and moments. The requirements of my service have never sent me back to that small hamlet, and clinging to the attachments of childhood is discouraged.


    The one resource that the state prizes more highly than corpses is magic. The dead provide a regular harvest of tireless workers, information, and ritual fuel, but all these are nothing without magic to animate or mine them. For that reason, the Dead Lords pay close attention to awakening and fostering new talent. This village has only seen one adjudicator in three years, but an assessor will have visited at least every six months.


    When talent is found ¡ª perhaps one in every four hundred children ¡ª they are sent to an academy. The education of gifted children is the responsibility and right of the state. There, they learn all that is required to serve the state fully: reading, writing, the basics of magical theory, the full details of the law. And all the while, their magic is shaped and trained into the most effective tool for the Dread Lords¡¯ will.


    A child¡¯s magic is weak and uncontrolled. It cannot be used ¡ª cannot even be sensed by its owner ¡ª until it has developed further, grown along with them. It is nothing but a seed of potential, and seeds can be cultivated to grow however the farmer desires.


    There are several academies throughout the land, and each one is placed at a site of power, somewhere where the wild magic of death bubbles up from the earth. Take a child with potential, and steep them in that energy. Make it so every breath in their lungs carries the leaden weight of the Dead Lord¡¯s power, so that they are so used to the chill of the grave and sapping weakness it brings to their limbs that they do not even notice it. Let the power flow through them, and see them change.


    Unattended, such a well of magic warps the world, calling to creatures of its affinity and birthing new ones. Rutger¡¯s weaker, wilder cousins are often formed by wild wells. Attended though ¡ª with a dozen necromancers bleeding off excess power, guiding the flows ¡ª the effects are much more predictable.


    For those students with a talent for the magic of death, those who will one day become Dead Lords themselves, it makes them stronger. The magic calls to their own power, drawing it forth. For those with other useful affinities ¡ª ice, shadow, other minor talents that can serve the state ¡ª it makes them more compatible with the power of death, angles their growth towards skills that necromancy sometimes has use of. A weak control of water becomes a fine control of blood, a power that strengthens stone begins to work on bones and teeth.


    I fell into the third group. The state does not need magic that calls fire, or makes roses bloom. The Dread Lords know that some powers are less valuable than others. For us, those with unneeded gifts, the steeping in the power of death prepares us for repurposing.


    In the South, there are victory gardens tended by prisoners of war, each one a monument to a city taken, an attack rebuffed. There, enemy nature mages have employed their art to create wonders for the Dead Lords: flowers that bloom and wither as you watch them, an endless cycle. Leaves which whisper the names of dead and undead heroes to the wind. Our native trees bearing exotic fruits from the nations that have dared to defy the Dead Lords.Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author''s preferred platform and support their work!


    A branch can be taken from one tree and grafted to another, melded to the new trunk so that it still can feed, still produce the fruit of its original parent. This is also true of gifts. Take a child, and steep them in the magic of death. Let it flow through them, so much more and more powerful than their own faltering spark. Slowly, make them more compatible, more susceptible, to the power of death. Give them a new gift, one that lets them serve.


    I have never sensed my magic ¡ª my original magic. By the time I grew enough, was trained enough, to feel that strange weight inside of me, it had been altered. A piece of power from one of the Dead Lords, a transplant grown around my magic, safe from rejection in a body that had been prepared for years to see the power of death as normal.


    The power is there when I reach for it, a cold heaviness inside my chest, viscous and slow moving when I call it into my hands. I have tried to feel my own magic through it, out of an idle curiosity to know what gift I was originally granted, how it compares, but the enclosure is complete. Once, another gifted, found later than me, told me that her first power had felt fizzy, like tiny bubbles rushing beneath her skin. She called it a wonder, a joy, in a way that I have not experienced. I feel only the grafted power, and the pain when it draws from me.


    The grafting process is not without its flaws. The gift of death does not sustain itself in me, and must pull from my original gift to be used. When that small reservoir runs dry, the borrowed magic takes from my lifeforce instead.  Each time I reach for the magic, I feel the same tightness in my chest, the roots of death contracting as they suck up energy. Not every adjudicator I have spoken to feels it so strongly, but only a lucky few of us can draw the power without discomfort of any kind.


    The more significant flaw is the limitation in strength. The grafted magic does not grow on its own, but can only be added to by a Dead Lord. I have far, far less power than a necromancer, and it is far less versatile. The Dead Lords have total power over flesh and bone and spirit; the grafted receive only a meagre control of one of the three.


    When the graft is done ¡ª after the initial pain of having your spirit surgically altered has passed, after the weeks of weakness and sickness as your body, even so acclimatised, struggles to incorporate the foreign growth, you are assessed again. Identify the power you have been loaned, and see you future set for the rest of your days.


    A lump of mutton, half-cut through. The jumbled bones of a mouse. A child¡¯s glove, bloodstained. These were the tools used in my first true lesson in magic. They taught me to turn my senses inwards, to reach for that seed that is not a seed, and call the magic into my hand. They told me to touch the items and command them, one at a time.


    Those who can heal the rent in the dead flesh become fleshwrights, working behind the front to keep the bound lesser dead in good condition. Those who can make the bones wobble, shudder, dance become animators, ensuring that every village has its allotment of tireless horses and labourers who do not need pay.


    When I held the glove and called my power, I collapsed. A storm of images and moments, foreign memories, ripped through me. I felt warmth and hunger, the love of a mother not my own, saw a room I had never been to. Ran in terror, screamed at the claws clutching my ankle, felt the sharp pain in my neck before the end.


    When I had recovered enough to stand, they told me I was to be an adjudicator.