“I see you’re as energetic as ever, Udsu,” Ash said, taking a seat at a crude wooden table. “How’s your mother doing?”
For the first time since she had spotted him through the window, the acrobatic boy stopped. From this close, she could see that his clothes were little more than ragged strips of cloth wrapped tightly around him. Loose threads hung from the hem like spaghetti. At the wolf’s question, a cloud came over the boy’s small face. The boy’s eyes were sharp, but his cheeks were pale. His body was thin—almost emaciated. U-ri wondered how old he was. Maybe seven or eight?
“Not so good. She’s been getting a fever at night.”
“I see.”
“She’s taking the medicine you gave me, though, Dmitri.”
“Perhaps I should adjust the formula. I’ll give you a new batch soon. You have to wait for your present until then. I haven’t even begun to unpack.”
“I’ll help you!”
“Now, you know that won’t do. If they find you’re here, the village elders won’t be pleased.”
Udsu stuck out his lower lip in a pout. It seemed that even in a region as different from U-ri’s as this, kids were the same.
“I don’t care. The elder doesn’t scare me.”
“Rules are rules, child. If you want to break them, at least have the wit not to flout them openly.”
Udsu frowned, his arms dropping to his sides. The sleeves of his ragged robes swept the floor.
“Fine. I’ll be waiting at home, then.”
“That’s a good boy.”
“You’ll come soon, right? My mom’ll be waiting.”
Ash assured the boy he understood, guiding him back to the door. Ash opened the door and called after him, “Be careful, all right?”
“Me? I’ll be fine!” the boy shouted, dashing out at breakneck speed. U-ri watched him leave, jumping over gravestones and swerving between them like a slalom racer. Two mysteries were solved—one, why Ash had told the boy to be careful, and two, how Udsu had been able to get over the fence.
It was simple really. He had jumped it. On the way out, he did a forward flip over the high iron bars, waving back to Ash as he landed on the far side.
“That kid human?” Aju asked, standing up on his hind legs. He was clearly impressed.
“He’s human,” Ash replied, shutting the door firmly. “Though he has ‘springfoot.’ It’s a kind of, well—” he paused, searching for the right word. “It’s a kind of disease.”
“A disease that makes you stronger? I didn’t know there was such a thing.” To U-ri’s eyes, the boy had looked like a star athlete. How could that be an illness?
“You saw how he runs?”
“Yes. His legs are amazingly strong.”
“Indeed—but he cannot run in a straight line.”
Now that he said it, she realized it was true. There was a proper path from the gate up to the little shack, but the boy hadn’t used it at all, choosing (she’d thought) instead to weave through the gravestones.
“Springfeet have superhuman strength in their legs. But they can’t control it. That’s why he can’t sit still, not even for moment. His legs keep moving of their own accord.”
The boy couldn’t go to school nor work in the fields, Ash explained.
“Are all the people in this village like that?”
“No,” Ash replied, indicating the stairs with a jerk of his head. “Let us continue our previous discussion while I brew that medicine for Udsu’s mother. What I was telling you about is related to this, after a fashion.”
Unbelievably, it looked like he intended to make the medicine on that incredibly cluttered table with the high school chemistry set. Ash opened a small drawer next to the table and began to pull out what looked like the roots of plants, leaves, and a sandlike powder he kept in a small flask. Then he sat and began to work.
“Kirrick raised the dead and made soldiers of them.” He handed an empty flask to Sky, asking him to fill it with water. With a small knife the size of U-ri’s pinky, Ash began cutting the roots.
“In a poor country ravaged by war, the one thing in abundance is the dead. If you could raise them and make them your own, you’d have a very powerful army on your side.”
“Yeah, but can you raise the dead?”
Ash’s hands stopped in mid-cut, and he glanced at U-ri. His expression told her everything she needed to know.
“You can…” she whispered. Suddenly her throat felt dry. “Did he use the Book of Elem?”
“Very good,” Ash grunted.
“Wait. Just wait a second—” U-ri began dashing around the cluttered room like the boy had below. She found she couldn’t sit still. “I’ve heard something like this before. In Mr. Minochi’s reading room, from the Sage—the Sage in Green told me. He said that Mr. Minochi collected all those books because he was trying to find a way to raise someone from the dead.”
Ash nodded slowly.
“But the Sage in Green said that was impossible! He said he tried to convince Mr. Minochi of that over and over, and he never listened.”
“Why would he? Minochi had the Book of Elem, after all.”
“You mean Mr. Minochi did it? He succeeded in raising someone?”
“No. He did not.”
“Huh? Why not?” U-ri stomped across the room, shaking her fists in the air. “If Kirrick could do it, why couldn’t he? None of this is making sense!”
Aju squeaked, “U-ri, sit.”
“But, Aju!”
“Just sit down.”
Frowning, U-ri found a spot on the floor. The mouse leaned over from her shoulder and gave her a whack on the nose with his tiny paw. “The allcaste has to keep her cool at all times, U-ri.”
“I’m sorry. I just got excited.”
Ash lit a small alcohol burner on the table and placed a beaker full of water on a stand over it. The stand’s legs were long and wobbly. The whole apparatus looked dangerously unstable.
Sky returned with the water and stood by the table, ready for his next task.
“Let me first tell you of how the Book of Elem was created,” Ash continued once they were quiet. “It began as a history, a chronicle of the great deeds of one hero. You could call it a legend.”
The hero’s name was Altius.
“They called him King Altius the victor.”
He had led the armies of the Haetlands five hundred years ago, triumphantly repelling an invasion by one of the Haetlands’ more powerful neighbors.
“At the time, war raged all over the continent—not just up here. It was the same everywhere you went. One country would invade another, absorb its armies, then launch another invasion. Kings rose victorious only to fall a week later, and maps that attempted to draw political boundaries were rendered useless in the span of a year. It was an age of continental warfare.”
Surrounded by enemies, and small as the Haetlands were, invasion followed upon invasion. As soon as they drove off one would-be conqueror, another would take its place, leaving them barely enough time to catch their breath before they’d be strapping on their armor again.
“You’d run out of soldiers at that rate,” Aju observed. “Small countries have small populations.”
“True enough,” Ash said, nodding. “Which is why King Altius decided he needed something stronger—powerful, forbidden magic. Magic to raise his fallen soldiers and create an immortal army.”
“Magic,” U-ri whispered. Of course it was possible here. The Haetlands were in a story, after all—an imaginary world. Magic could be anywhere, as long as the weaver who had created the Haetlands wrote about it.
Anything was possible.
“Thanks to this magic, the Haetlands fought on successfully throughout the duration of the continental war, maintaining their independence.” Stories of a forbidden magic with the power to raise the dead had been told in legends since the Haetlands first came together as a country, Ash told them. “But even back five hundred years, knowledge of this magic was frag
mented at best, and it had been much embellished with legend, making it useless as it was. It was a military mage in the service of the king who performed experiment after experiment, refining the magic until it worked. The mage’s name was Elem—a woman, incidentally,” Ash added, much to U-ri’s surprise.
“A female mage?”
“That’s right. I recall you were asking about girls who made a difference? Well, she was one.”
That’s not quite how I meant it, U-ri thought glumly. The power to raise the dead seemed frightful. Though it had saved Elem’s country, U-ri wasn’t sure that made it right.
“It’s ironic,” Ash muttered. “Only a woman can truly create life. Perhaps it requires a woman to raise the dead, as well.”
After the victory, both King Altius and the mage Elem were revered by their people.
“But Elem, she did not consider it an honor in the least. She left the palace. While the Haetlands enjoyed prosperity such as it had never known before—after its victory it was far better off than most of the other countries on the war-weary continent—Elem chose to find an abandoned corner of the country and there live in solitude.”
“Why?” U-ri asked though she expected the answer was forthcoming.
“Because she understood. She knew why the magic to raise the dead had been forbidden. When she first completed the spell, she went to the king and told him it would only invite more conflict. The magic would create an invincible army, but not one that would benefit the people. She asked if the king still approved—and King Altius did. ‘What troubles you, Elem?’ he asked of his mage. ‘Is it not to defend our land that we drive back the invaders at our gates? How does this not benefit our people?’ With Elem’s magic, it was possible to completely revive someone who had died. This wasn’t hedge magic, like animating zombies. It was a full person returned to the living, soul intact.”
“But didn’t that make people happy?” U-ri asked. “I would think they’d be overjoyed to have their sons and husbands return from the dead—and to know they’d never lose them again?”
“The continental wars ended,” Ash continued in a low voice, ignoring her question. The liquid in the beaker he had placed over the burner had begun to boil. U-ri watched as the liquid turned a deep red. “In the end, the Haetlands boasted an army of immortal soldiers twelve thousand strong. They would never die, they would never fall. They were perfect warriors. And in a world at peace, there was nothing for them to do.” Ash adjusted the flame. “Some put their sturdy bodies to good use, working the mines and the fields. Most of them had begun there before becoming soldiers—they simply returned to their roots, so to speak. But many were career soldiers, or had grown used to military life and to being treated like heroes. They did not want to dirty their hands in the soil again. They could not go back to their regular lives.”
Ash gave U-ri a long look. “Think about it,” he said at length. “You’re immortal. You cannot die. What do you do? What do you become?”
You wouldn’t fear danger. You wouldn’t fear anyone.
“I’d think there wouldn’t be much that could stop them from doing whatever they wanted.”
Ash bowed his head, his face grave. “Not a decade had passed since the end of the continental wars when the Haetlands devolved into a nest of bandits and murderers. They had won the war, and it ruined them—just as the mage Elem had warned.”
Still, for the space of seven years, the victor King Altius struggled to maintain peace. He knew there would be more fighting on the continent before long. The Haetlands needed their immortal army.
“Yet there was a limit, and it came quickly. While they draw breath, people change. Those women who rejoiced at seeing their sons and lovers returned to life watched them turn into something inhuman before their eyes, creatures of magic, made to do an insufferable amount of work, and they could not stand it.
“In desperation, King Altius sent scouts out across the Haetlands in search of Elem’s whereabouts. But she came to the palace of her own accord. ‘What must I do to undo the spell?’ the king asked, and she answered, ‘You must end my life.’ For you see, the arcane magic Elem had used was tied to its creator’s life. Were she to die, the men she had raised would in that very moment turn to ash.”
So it was that Elem had been sentenced to death by hanging in the palace courtyard. The immortal soldiers turned to ash, as she said they would. The ash rose into the air, becoming a dark cloud that, it was said, blotted out the sun over the Haetlands for ten full days.
“Soon after, every book wherein had been written Elem’s magic and the history of her immortal army, and the many victories of King Altius, were torn to shreds and burned.”
“What!” Aju shouted, leaping up to his hindlegs. “So the Book of Elem was lost?”
“The original was, yes,” Ash explained. “But there was another mage who had secretly copied parts of Elem’s work, preserving them in a scroll.”
The scroll had then been lost to the depths of the history.
“…until it reappeared suddenly, fifty-seven years ago, in the hands of an impoverished noble of royal lineage named Kirrick.”
Kirrick had taken up arms to save his countrymen from the suffering he saw around him. He was no fool. His aims were noble, his eyes clear, and his heart burned with righteous indignation.
“That is why he did not seek to duplicate Elem’s magic in whole. He went to a teacher of his who was knowledgeable in the ways of sorcery.”
It turned out that in Kirrick’s lineage, on his mother’s side, there had been many royal mages. Magic ran in his blood.
“Kirrick was able to fill the gaps in the imperfect copy of Elem’s spell.”
Thinking that the problems had arisen when men had been restored to their former humanity—and only requiring soldiers, in any case—he sought not to return men to the world of the living, but to create fighting machines to do his bidding. He would simply raise their bodies, but leave their hearts to rot. His soldiers would not think or desire anything for themselves. They would exist to follow orders and hunt their prey like well-trained hounds to attack Kirrick’s enemies.
“When his rebellion was over, all he would need do would be round them up and dispatch them.”
“That’s horrible,” U-ri whispered.
“And foolish,” Ash declared, placing his boiling blood-red liquid in a decanter. “He didn’t stop to think why, five hundred years before him, Elem had raised men whole, souls intact. She had a reason to do so, you see.”
Dead men forced to walk again without a soul were mere cases of flesh, with gaping holes where their hearts belonged. “And into those holes, darkness crept. The spirits of the earth, the destructive forces that fly unseen through the air, and the evil thoughts of the living began to accumulate within Kirrick’s undead. He led them in a rebellion for his people, and the cheers of those he freed from oppression were many. Yet even as his victories mounted, his army was slowly corrupted.”
Kirrick’s rebellion ended quickly, and he was made king. Peace was restored to the Haetlands, and governance for the people was about to begin. “But the darkness quickly filled the shells of the men he had raised, and it changed them from inside, making them something other than men. Having no other recourse, Kirrick forced his undead soldiers into a great dungeon beneath the royal palace, there to remain until he was ready to dispose of them for good. But then creatures fell and horrid began to appear from that dungeon. The guards were their first victims. You see,” Ash added, his expression cold, “these creatures ate human flesh. They were cannibals, of a sort, because they had begun their afterlives as men.”
“Ewwww,” Aju groaned before U-ri had even finished processing what she was hearing.
“With great urgency, Kirrick assembled the royal mages and led them against the very creatures he had created, beneath the halls of his own home. His version of Elem’s magic should have enabled him to turn his raised army back into corpses. But the darkness inside them had taken t
he shape of souls, giving them a new life, and his magic did nothing.”
The fiends broke from their dungeon prison, ransacked the palace, and spilled out into the capital and the countryside beyond.
Ash closed his eyes, either recollecting the scene of mayhem, or trying to keep an imagined scene from escaping his head. “Among the survivors of the royal house that Kirrick had destroyed were those who sought to use this opportunity to defeat him. Instead of attempting to quell the new threat, they worked more magic on the fiends to bend them to their own will.”
But that had only made matters worse.
“The conflicting magic cast upon the creatures made them huge and violent, transforming them in unpredictable ways. Of all the resulting monstrosities, the worst were those that developed the ability to reproduce.”
“You mean the creatures had children?”
“Not like that. There were some that, if you cut off their arm, another whole creature would grow from the severed limb. Cut off their head, and another creature would grow from that.”
U-ri, Aju, and Sky were all speechless. It made U-ri sick to her stomach just imagining it. A chill ran down her spine, and not on account of the cold wind blowing in through the cracks in the walls.
“Were they able to drive them back?” Aju asked, hoping beyond all hope for a happy ending to the story.
Ash nodded. “Yes, but it took much effort. They had to kill them one at a time.”
“How did they do it?”
“Most of them they burned. It was no pleasant task, I assure you.”
In the ensuing fight against the creatures, Kirrick lost his life. He had been on the throne for only sixty days.
“Some historians call him the King of Two Months.”
Something about the way Ash talked of these events tugged at U-ri’s mind.
“So there you have it,” Ash said, his voice hoarse from the telling. “All of these events are written in the Book of Elem, which showed up in the years afterward. There are some who call the book the Chronicles of Kirrick, but only those who stayed with him throughout the chaos. Few use that name now.”
“And that book was sitting in Minochi’s reading room,” Aju whispered, gnashing his teeth.