Soul Catcher

“Yes.”

  “Why did you go walking, Katsuk?”

  “Raven called me.”

  David heard the remoteness in Katsuk’s voice, realized the man stood half in the spirit world, in the place of his dreams and his visions.

  “Are we going to stay here today?” David asked.

  “We are going to stay.”

  “Good. You should rest after your sickness.”

  And David thought: Maybe if I just talk to him calmly he’ll come out of it and be all right.

  Katsuk sensed then that the boy had also developed another self which must be reasoned with, influenced, and understood. The immobility in the surface of this youth was not to be mistaken for peace. Hoquat’s spirit was no longer hiding. And Katsuk asked himself: Why shouldn’t this happen to Hoquat as it happened to me?

  Why else had Hoquat nursed his captor through the Cedar sickness? Logic said the boy should flee while Katsuk was weak, yet he stayed.

  David felt the pressure of Katsuk’s silence, asked; “Do you need anything? Shall I get up now?”

  Katsuk hesitated, then: “There is no need for you to get up. We have a little time left us yet.”

  Katsuk thought then of the bow and its single arrow hidden in a tree behind him. The past and the present were tied together, but the great circle had yet to be completed. He felt the pouch at his waist, the packet with the down from sea ducks in it to scatter on the slain victim as it had been done through all time. He knew his mind grazed above its old levels. He sensed Soul Catcher speaking to him and through him. The passionate simplicity of Bee had caught him up in full awareness of death and world-silence. The spirit power of his realization reached all through him. He felt death not as negation but as the assignment of his life. It was why he stood in this place. It was why he had made the bow, touching the wood only with a stone knife. It was why he had fitted the old arrow-head from the ocean beach into its new wooden pocket, preparing it for the death to come.

  Spirits had energized him. They were spirits without shape or smell or sound—yet they moved this world. They moved it! They moved the men in the river meadow. They moved the aircraft and machines engaged in this primitive contest. They moved the Innocent who must die. They moved Katsuk, who had become more spirit than man.

  Katsuk thought: I must do this thing to the perfection which the old gods have ordered. It must have the unmistakable spirit pattern that all men may understand it: good and evil bound one to the other by unbreakable form, the circle completed. I must keep faith with my past. Good-evil! One thing. That is what I do.

  With inward vision, he sensed elk horn lances in the dark all around him. Their shafts were trimmed with tufted bear fur. They were held by people from the past. Those people came from the time when men had lived with the land and not against it. He dropped his gaze to his hand. The shape of it was there, but details were lost in shadow. Memory provided the image: Bee’s slug-white accusation in his skin.

  Katsuk thought: Any man may emulate the bee. A man may sting the entire universe if he does it properly. He must only find the right nerve to receive his barb. It must be an evil thing I do, with the good visible only when they turn it over. The shape of hate must be revealed in it, and betrayal and anguish and the insanities we all share. Only later should they see the love.

  David sensed undercurrents in the silence. He found himself afraid for Katsuk and of him. The man had become once more that wild creature who had bound his captive’s arms and half dragged him to the cave a night’s march from Six Rivers Camp.

  What’s he thinking now? David wondered. And he said: “Katsuk, shouldn’t you come back to bed?”

  Katsuk heard two questions in the boy’s words, one on the surface and one beneath. The second question asked: “What can I do to help you?”

  “Do not worry about me, Hoquat,” Katsuk said. “It is well with me.”

  David heard a softness in Katsuk’s voice. Sleep lay at the edge of the boy’s awareness like a gray cloud. Katsuk was concerned for his captive now. The boy readjusted the blankets around him, shifted closer to the coals in the fire pit. The night was cold.

  Katsuk heard the movement as a demonstration of life. He thought in sudden fearful awareness of the thing he had to do in this world of flesh and time. Would people misinterpret his actions?

  The spirits had summoned him to perform an artistic act. It would be a refinement of blood revenge, a supreme example to be appreciated by this entire world. His own people would understand this much of it. His own people had blood revenge locked into their history. They would be stirred in their innermost being. They would recognize why it had been done in the ancient way—a mark upon raw earth, an incantation, a bow untouched by steel, a death arrow with a stone head, the down of sea ducks sprinkled upon the victim. They would see the circle and this would lead them to the other meanings within this act.

  What of the hoquat, though? Their primitive times lay farther back, although they were more violent. They had hidden their own violence from their surface awareness and might not recognize Katsuk’s ritual. Realization would seep upward from the spirit side, though. The very nature of the Innocent’s death could not be denied.

  “I have in truth become Soul Catcher,” Katsuk said, realizing he had spoken aloud only after the words were uttered.

  “What’d you say?” The boy’s voice was heavy with sleep.

  “I am the creature of spirits.”

  “Are you sick again, Katsuk?” The boy was coming back from sleep, his tone worried.

  “I no longer have the Cedar sickness, Hoquat.”

  His flesh gripped by anguish, Katsuk thought: Only one thing remains. The Innocent must ask me for the arrow. He must show that he is ready. He must give me his spirit wish.

  Silently, Katsuk prayed: “O, Life Giver, now that you have seen the way a part of your all-powerful being goes, put all of you that way. Bring the circle to completion.”

  Somewhere down the river behind Katsuk, a man shouted. It was a hoarse sound, words unintelligible but full of menace.

  David started from sleep. “What was that?”

  Katsuk did not turn toward the sound. He thought: It must be decided now. He said: “The searchers have found us.”

  “People coming?”

  “Your people are coming, Hoquat.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am sure. That was where I went walking in my forest, Hoquat. I went down to the meadow. There was a camp in the meadow. The people from that camp will be here by daylight.”

  David heard the words with mounting panic. “What’re we going to do?”

  “We?”

  “You’ve gotta run, Katsuk!” Even as he spoke, David felt the mixture of reason and unreason in his words. But the demand for flight was larger than any other consideration.

  “Why must we run?” Katsuk asked. He sensed the spirit guiding the boy’s reason through

  a maze of panic.

  “You can’t let them catch you!”

  Katsuk spoke with the calming presence of his vision: “Where would I run? I am still weak from the Cedar sickness. I could not go far.”

  David dropped the blankets from his shoulders, jumped up. The man’s serenity outraged him. “I’ll help you!”

  “Why would you help me?”

  “Because ... because they ...”

  “Because they will kill me?”

  How could the man be so calm? David asked himself. And he blurted: “Katsuk! You’ve gotta run!”

  “I cannot.”

  “You’ve just gotta!” The boy clutched up the blankets, thrust them across the glowing fire pit at Katsuk. “Here! Take the blankets and go hide on the hill. There must be someplace to hide up there. I’ll tell ‘em you left yesterday.”

  “Why would you do such a thing?”

  Katsuk’s patience filled David with panic. He said: “Because I don’t want you caught ... and put in jail.”

  “Hoquat, Hoquat,” Katsuk reasoned,
“until these past few weeks I’ve lived all my life in cages.”

  The boy was frantic now. “They’ll put you in jail!”

  “No. They will kill me.”

  David immediately saw the logic of this. Katsuk had murdered a man. David said: “I won’t tell them about that guy-”

  “What ... guy?”

  “You know! The hiker, the guy you ... You know!” How could Katsuk be this stupid?

  “But they will kill me because I kidnapped you.”

  “I’ll tell ‘em I came of my own free will.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes!”

  Katsuk thought: Now, the spirits guide us both. The Innocent had not yet asked for the consecrated arrow. He was not yet ready. But the circle was closing. Katsuk said: “But what about my message?”

  “What message?” There he went, talking crazy again!

  “The spirit message I must send to the whole world,” Katsuk explained.

  “I don’t care about your message! Send it! Just don’t let them catch you!”

  Katsuk nodded. Thus it went. He said: “Then it is your wish—your spirit wish, that I send my message?”

  “Yes! Only hurry. I can hear them coming.”

  Katsuk sensed the calmness of his vision sweep upward through his body from the soles of his feet. He spoke formally, as one did to the properly prepared sacrificial victim. “Very well, Hoquat. I admire your courage, your beauty, and your innocence. You are admirable. Let no man doubt that. Let all men and all spirits ...”

  “Hurry, Katsuk,” David whispered. “Hurry.”

  “Let all men and all spirits,” Katsuk repeated, “learn of your qualities, Hoquat. Please sit down and wait here. I will go now.”

  With a sigh of relief, the boy sank to a sitting position on one of the bed logs beside the shelter’s entrance. “Hurry,” he whispered. “They’re close. I can hear them.”

  Katsuk cocked his head to listen. Yes, there were voices shouting directions in the dark, a movement seen only by its noises. Still in the formal tone, he said: “Hoquat, your friend Katsuk bids you goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, Katsuk,” the boy whispered.

  Quickly now, because he could feel the predawn stillness in the air and see the flashlights of searchers coming through the trees across the river, Katsuk faded back in the shadows to the young spruce where he had secreted the bow and arrow. Murmuring his prayers, he set the bowstring, that hard line of walrus gut. The bow trembled in his hands, then steadied as he felt the power of it. Truly, it was a god-bow. He nocked the arrow against the bowstring. Now, his vision focused down to the infinity of this instant.

  A bird whistled in the trees overhead.

  Katsuk nodded his awareness. The animals of this forest knew the moment had come. He felt the spirit power surge all through his muscles. He turned toward the shelter, sensed the morning world begin to glow all around him, all platinum and gray movement. The boy could be seen behind the fire pit, sitting wrapped in a blanket, head bowed, a primordial figure lost to the world of flesh.

  Although he heard no sound of it, Katsuk knew the boy was crying. Hoquat was shedding spirit tears for this world.

  Steadily, Katsuk drew the bow taut, sighted as his grandfather had taught him. His thumb felt the fletching of the arrow. His fingers held the unpolished cedar of the arrow. All of his senses were concentrated upon this moment—river, wind, forest, boy, Katsuk ... all one. In the magic instant, feeling the bow become part of his own flesh, Katsuk released the arrow. He heard the whang of the walrus gut. The sound flew straight across the clearing with the arrow. Straight it went and into the boy’s chest.

  Hoquat jerked once against the log post at the shelter’s entrance. The post held him upright. He did not move again.

  For David, there was only the sharp and crashing instant of awareness. He did it! There was no pain greater than the betrayal. Hunting for a name that was not Hoquat, the boy sank into blackness.

  Katsuk felt anguish invade his breast. He said: “Soul Catcher, it is done.”

  Carefully measuring out each step, Katsuk advanced upon the shelter. He stared at the arrow in Hoquat’s breast. Now. the circle was complete. It had been a clean and shattering stroke, straight through the heart and probably into the spine. Death had come quickly to the Innocent.

  Katsuk felt the ancient watchers of the spirit world departing them. He stood alone, immobile, fascinated by his own creation—this death.

  In the growing daylight, the folds of the boy’s clothing took on a semblance of the mossy post behind the boy. Part of the body appeared ready to dissipate into the smoke winding upward from the fire pit. It created an illusion of transparency about Hoquat. The boy was gone. The Innocent had left this place in company with the ancient watchers. That was as it should be.

  Katsuk heard the searchers then. They were climbing onto the logs which crossed the river. They would be here within minutes. What did it matter now?

  Tears coursed down Katsuk’s cheeks. He dropped the bow, stumbled forward across the fire pit, fell to his knees, and gathered up the small body.

  When Sheriff Pallatt and the search party entered the clearing at the shelter, Katsuk sat with Hoquat’s body in his arms, cradling the dead boy like a child, swaying and chanting the death song one sang for a friend. The white down of the sea ducks floated in the damp air all around them.

  * * * * *

  About the Author

  Frank Herbert, the visionary author of Dune, wrote more than twenty other novels, including Hellstrom’s Hive, The White Plague, The Green Brain, and The Dosadi Experiment. During his life, he received great acclaim for his sweeping vision and the deep philosophical underpinnings in his writings. His life is detailed in the Hugo-nominated biography Dreamer of Dune, by Brian Herbert.

  Other Frank Herbert novels available from WordFire Press include Destination: Void, The Heaven Makers, Direct Descent, The Jesus Incident (with Bill Ransom), and his last-published novel, Man of Two Worlds, coauthored with his son Brian Herbert.

  * * * * *

  Look for These & Other Digital Works from WordFire Press

  by Frank Herbert

  The Ascension Factor (with Bill Ransom)

  Pandora’s humans have been recovering land from its raging seas at an accelerated pace since The Lazarus Effect. The great kelp of the seas, sentient but electronically manipulated by humans, buffers Pandora’s wild currents to restore land and facilitate the booming sea trade. New settlements rise overnight, but children starve in their shadows. An orbiting assembly station is near completion of Project Voidship, which is the hope of many for finding a better world.

  Pandora is under the fist of an ambitious clone from hibernation called The Director, who rules with a sadistic security force led by the assassin Spider Nevi. Small resistance groups, like the one led by Twisp Queets and Ben Ozette, have had little effect on his absolute power. The Director controls the transportation of foodstuffs; uprisings are punished with starvation.

  The resistance fighters’ main hope is Crista Galli, a woman believed by some to be the child of God. Crista pools her talents with Dwarf MacIntosh, Beatriz Tatoosh, and Rico LaPush to transcend the barriers between the different species and overthrow The Director and the sinister cabal with which he rules.

  Book 3 in Herbert & Ransom’s Pandora Sequence.

  Direct Descent

  Earth has become a library planet for thousands of years, a bastion of both useful and useless knowledge—esoterica of all types, history, science, politics—gathered by teams of “pack rats” who scour the galaxy for any scrap of information. Knowledge is power, knowledge is wealth, and knowledge can be a weapon. As powerful dictators come and go over the course of history, the cadre of dedicated librarians is sworn to obey the lawful government . . . and use their wits to protect the treasure trove of knowledge they have collected over the millennia.

  Destination: Void

  The starship Earthling, filled with thousands
of hybernating colonists en route to a new world at Tau Ceti, is stranded beyond the solar system when the ship’s three Organic Mental Cores—disembodied human brains that control the vessel’s functions—go insane. An emergency skeleton crew sees only one chance for survival: to create an artificial consciousness in the Earthling’s primary computer, which could guide them to their destination . . . or could destroy the human race.

  Frank Herbert’s classic novel that begins the epic Pandora Sequence (written with Bill Ransom), which also includes The Jesus Incident, The Lazarus Effect, and The Ascension Factor.

  Prequel to Herbert & Ransom’s Pandora Sequence.

  The Heaven Makers

  Immortal aliens have observed Earth for centuries, making full sensory movies of wars, natural disasters, and horrific human activities . . . all to relieve their boredom. When they finally became jaded by ordinary, run-of-the-mill tragedies, they found ways to create their own disasters, just to amuse themselves. However, interfering with human activities was forbidden, and by the time Investigator Kelexel arrived to investigate, things were really getting out of hand. . . .

  The Jesus Incident (with Bill Ransom)

  A sentient Ship with godlike powers (and aspirations) delivers the last survivors of humanity to a horrific, poisonous planet, Pandora—rife with deadly Nerve-Runners, Hooded Dashers, airborne jellyfish, and intelligent kelp. Chaplain/Psychiatrist Raja Lon Flattery is brought back out of hybernation to witness Ship’s machinations as well as the schemes of human scientists manipulating the genetic structure of humanity. Sequel to Frank Herbert’s Destination: Void.

  Book 1 in Herbert & Ransom’s Pandora Sequence.