Solitudes and Silence

  Chapter 3

  Drab and Rags

  Waimbrill walked to town, intent on buying fresh fish and perhaps even meat if he found cheap cuts or some of the tastier organs. He hoped to find everything to make a recipe for lamb kidney stew he had gathered from his cleaved.

  Picturing the succulent stew as he set out that morning, Waimbrill became ravenous and planned a huge meal in his mind, with a heaping bowl of Crekkish mashed beets and a bramble pie. He had made this plan before, but always his pains sapped his appetite before he could whet it. Today, he resolved to feast no matter what. The second tool against the pains of thy cleaved is food. A mind can not pursue higher needs while base hungers remain unfilled, so fill them first with sound nutrition.

  So focused was he on the increasingly elaborate but still theoretical meal that he almost didn’t notice a fisherman, whom Waimbrill knew as Egglebrod, with a dour face, sunburnt and scarred, running towards him on the path. He was out of breath, chest heaving, and he stammered wildly before giving up and taking a minute to regain his composure.

  Waimbrill shuffled his feet, wondering what had the fisherman so upset: a monster, perhaps, or an army invading the land. He was glad he was essentially safe from marauders, soldiers and slavers, since few men would dare attack a Soulclaine. But monsters were a different story. They attacked indiscriminately, slaughtering whatever was within reach, and while the church has several martial orders, some of whom were quite potent in combat, Waimbrill did not belong to any of them. His was a simple monastic clan who trained in meditation and horticulture, not combat and war.

  “’Twas that great… beast of… Chamballa’s… bosom,” said the fisherman, lungs lurching for breath, spasming violently, “A long monster… like a snake with… rows of red-tipped fins on her back, but the beast’s head… Mortiss Waimbrill, ‘twas just an end to her body, an open maw lined with fangs.”

  “I was told this happens from time to time,” Waimbrill said. Chamballa was a local goddess, associated with storms, destruction and the deepest reaches of Lake Crikmere, whence came a monster said to be her child.

  “Aye,” Egglebrod said, “Every few years, Chamballa sends her wrath upon the land from the lake.”

  Waimbrill walked alongside Egglebrod, whose haggard eyes welled with tears as he listed those he hadn’t accounted for after the attack. He twice stopped to beg Waimbrill to find their bodies. But he could only promise to try. If a monster devoured the corpses, there was nothing he could do.

  The wreckage of the fishing boats had washed up on the shores of Lake Crikmere: bits of flotsam, chunks of wood, line and nets, and here and there a hat or an old boot soaked in blood. Waimbrill could soulcleave any piece of brain or spinal cord, but there was not a single bit of either to be found.

  The monster had destroyed every boat on the lake, and swallowed its passengers whole, and then, Egglebrod said, it dived back into the water.

  “Ye know the rainids down there, right?” Egglebrod asked, and Waimbrill nodded.

  “Only because their Soulclaine position is vacant,” he said, “They have to bring their dead to me. I have no way to summon them. If they found the bodies of the other men, or if they themselves had bodies to be cleaved, they would have come ashore to find me by now.”

  “That means...” Egglebrod said, his voice stiff and timid, “The beast must have swallowed them all.”

  Waimbrill tried to think of a more sensitive way to explain it, but he was at a loss for words, and merely nodded, a lump rising in his throat.

  “To be ever a tortured ghost...” Egglebrod said, quoting a famous line from a local ballad.

  Waimbrill said, “Not everyone who is uncleaved becomes a ghost.”

  But his reassurances sounded hollow even to his own ears. Waimbrill knew that the fishermen who had not been soulcleaved - and now, lacking a body, never would be - remained forever at risk for becoming a ghost or ghoul, or even one of the worse kinds of restless dead.

  “Why doth Modroben allow her to do this?” Egglebrod asked, “Why doth Chamballa not allow her victims to be cleaved?”

  “I can not answer that,” Waimbrill said, “I can only enforce my lord’s rules against mortals, not the gods. It is for him to stop her, and I’m sure he will send a champion in his time.”