Yes, Dariel thought. They sat side by side in a dark, rectangular room now. The wall in front of them was blank. The floor bare, smooth stone. A river of air rushed from one side of the room to the other. Had Dariel to name the purpose of the room, he would have failed. Had they needed to speak words, they would have had to yell. Because they spoke directly to each other’s minds they conversed despite the roar of the air and the flapping of their garments. Na Gamen sat as if he did not notice it all. Dariel did the same, and it was almost true.
I want you to know how I came to be here. Why I waited for you. Look.
A magnificent palace appeared on the wall before them. Dariel saw it from high above, dizzying, as if he were somehow a bird on the wing. It lay like a lace scarf draped in serpentine curves across the high reaches of one of the barrier islands. So it looked from a distance. Closer, it was a flowing, molten structure similar to the Sky Mount, only sumptuous and alive in a way the mount was not. Gardens of trees sculpted by the wind into fantastic, eerie shapes. Fishponds and waterfalls and dining terraces cut into improbable promontories, with views of the sea and the other barrier isles, many with similar estates.
See this? This was my home for several hundred years. I adored it. I built it from nothing, first by my own labor, soon by the labor of others. I made something of a rock that had never known human habitation. I was proud. And I was angry. I hated Tinhadin as fiercely as any among us. I jumped at the opportunity to punish his people. For many years it was I who sorted the spirits that eat death. Do you know what that means?
No.
I chose which children would go into the soul catcher. Not all souls are strong enough for it. Some have a greater force within them than others. I learned to sense it. That became my work. I decided which children would give their lives in labor, and which would give their lives through the gift of the soul energy. I was good at this work, and I did horrible things because of it.
The things he did Dariel saw and felt, though for a time he did not hear the Watcher’s voice in his head. It was not just that the children were scared seven- and eight-year-olds, who had been stolen from their homes and families and taken across a vast ocean to a foreign land. It was not just that he sorted through them and decided which ones would receive a fate worse than death. Wasn’t being fed to the soul catcher worse than death? They lost their bodies. Their identity. They became the life fuel of strangers. They died, yet were reborn more completely as slaves to others than any that labored in the thread fields or as builders or farmers or served as fodder for military slaughter.
Not just the fact that he was responsible for this. He went further. For a time, he chose the children he would reserve for himself. Not all Lothan Aklun took souls into themselves, but he did. In his youth this was because he hungered for years and years of life in which to punish Tinhadin’s people. He did not care that one who accepts a soul inside himself loses the ability to father children. That did not matter, not when he could go on forever. He set his hands on the shoulders of child after child. He smiled in their faces and looked through their eyes and into them. If he truly liked what he saw, he had only to nod, or gesture with his fingers, and the child was his.
There is more.
With the passing of decades he aged. Physically, no, but still, he aged inside. His body stayed young, but as he passed the normal span of a long mortal life he began to forget his own childhood. The lack of it became a yawning chasm chasing him. His work grew harder. He felt different when he set his hands on children’s shoulders and looked into them. More and more often, his gaze lingered on their faces, on the small curves of their muscles and the lines of their collarbones. More and more, he found a beauty in their small, growing life.
One day, performing his duties as selector, he met a boy. Perhaps it would have happened with another boy or a girl. The next day or the week after or in a year’s time. It would have happened at some point, he now believed, but fate had it that it was this boy. Ebrahem, a Halaly boy from one of the tiny villages along the western coast of Talay. The boy gazed up at Na Gamen’s face with timorous, hungry, desperate hope. He had seen this expression a thousand times. All the boy’s hopes were there on his face. All his dreams written in the lines of his lips and the bushy flares of his eyebrows and in the uneven circlets of his nostrils. All the things he had left behind, all that would not be for him-the loved ones lost, the home he would never see again.
Na Gamen knew all these were there, things that he had always thought small, just punishments. Childish things that he recognized because in them he recognized himself. He had always understood them, and, understanding, he had found the strength to be cruel. But this time, written there… was nothing. Features like he had seen before, and yet this time he saw nothing but the boy himself.
L ater that night, after telling both his stories, Dariel could not find sleep. Birke lay flat on his back, snoring. Bashar sat beside him, studying the night. Cashen walked the patrol he had set up from their boulder down to the hollow where the others were and back again.
Nothing but the boy himself, Dariel thought. He remembered the boy’s face as if he had seen it with his own eyes. That face began to change Na Gamen from what he was into what he became. Dariel wondered if Val had seen the same thing on the night he found Dariel shivering and hopeless in a mountain shack in Senival. He had never considered the changes he created in his adopted father’s life. He had shied away from thoughts of himself. Perhaps he had changed Val. Maybe that was what he was telling him when he stayed behind to set the platforms ablaze.
“I’ve never forgiven you for that,” he whispered.
“For what?” Anira’s voice startled him. She had walked up behind Cashen and stood with her face shadowed. Her body, in silhouette, was muscularly feminine, strong as a man’s but contoured like the woman she was.
“You like seeking me out in the night?”
“Yes, I do. I hope you’re more vigilant when you’re on watch.”
“Sorry. My mind is elsewhere.”
“Elsewhere can be a good place to be,” she said. After studying him for a moment, she added, “Or not. Sometimes it’s better to be right here. Are you worried about tomorrow?”
“Should I be?”
“I used to be afraid of Yoen… when I was a child. When I grew up, I learned to love him. He’s gentle, wise. Deliberate. He’ll see through you if you lie to him. So don’t do that.”
“I hadn’t planned on it.”
“Then you’ve nothing to fear. Now, tonight, come swim with me. There’s a pool just down the ravine a little.”
“It’s too cold,” Dariel said.
“We can warm each other. Come.” She stretched a hand toward him.
C hildren are how we return to youth, Na Gamen had said. There is no other way. A span of years does not make one immortal. Children do .
That was why he selected that boy whose face told him nothing. He did not take the boy to the soul catcher. It took him some time to understand what was happening to him, but he knew it was not the boy’s soul he wanted. He did not want to steal his life. Instead, he watched him. The boy lived in his fabulous palace. Na Gamen let him explore it, fed him, had him cared for. He watched as the child lost his timidity and began to play. He marveled at the sound of his laughter, at the way he made stories in his head. He brought another boy to him. And then a girl.
There, in secret, I became the father that I couldn’t be. I raised child after child. For years upon years I thought nothing of it. It was simply my way, a kindness I did to my slaves, treating them as my children. That’s how I thought of it. In truth, it was more than that. I had forgotten my own childhood. Do you understand? I had forgotten part of what it means to be human. Without them, I would have lost my humanity entirely.