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“For a time, they had no way of stopping them. For a time, the half people owned the night. People quickly learned to lock themselves inside once the sun went down and hope those without souls didn’t come for them in large numbers.
“Fearful whispers called these demonic hunters of souls the unholy half dead.”
“Unholy half dead. That sounds like a pretty good description of them to me,” Samantha said.
Richard agreed. “Naja says that Sulachan’s makers were eventually able to come up with a solution. They modified the magic they had used to create them and directed this need to kill against their enemies—the people here in the New World.”
“Against us?” Samantha asked in alarm.
Richard nodded. “I’m afraid so. She says that the half people, although no stronger than a normal person and nowhere near as strong as the awakened dead, are more dangerous because they are quicker, but more importantly because they still have the ability to think like a predator and hunt those with souls.
“Although stripped of their higher reasoning functions, they learned to amass and attack in overpowering numbers. After the makers gained control and were able to modify the magic used create them, their savage nature and their ability to think was finally turned against Sulachan’s enemies.”
Richard was weary from the effort of translating such complex symbols, but he couldn’t afford to miss anything or to stop. He rubbed his eyes and went on reading.
When he was silent for a time, Samantha shook his sleeve. “What does it say? What are you reading? Speak it out loud.”
Richard let out a deep sigh as he straightened. He gestured vaguely, dismissively, at the wall.
“There’s no new information in this part. It’s just some material describing how the half people kill their victims.”
“I need to know,” Samantha said when he fell silent. “They will come after our people, after me. Don’t try to protect me by keeping me in the dark. It’s no help to be ignorant of the truth. I need to know.”
Richard glanced briefly to the determination in her eyes. He supposed that she was right. He gestured at the description.
“They tear people open, believing the soul they crave is inside. The half people often eat the victim’s insides first because they think the soul resides in them. They drink the blood, fearing that the soul might escape by leaking away. When they aren’t satisfied because they still haven’t been able to get what they crave, they strip all the meat from the bones, devouring every bit of it in an attempt to find and consume the soul they think is hiding somewhere in the still-warm flesh.
“Groups of them will compete for scraps, each hoping to get the soul for themselves. They eat everything—muscle, blood, organs, even the face. They suck the brain out of the skull, or crush it with a rock to get at it. They leave only some of the bowels and the bones, but often crack open larger bones and devour the marrow, still trying to find the elusive soul.”
Samantha looked dumbfounded. “How do they possibly think they can get a soul by eating people?”
“It’s a madness that drives them. It doesn’t make sense to us, but it does to them. They think that souls reside within a person or hide in bodily tissues. They’re looking for that moment when the spirit departs the dying body. They think that at that moment they can devour it, pulling it into themselves for their own. So, they eat everything, hoping to get it while it is hiding in the body, before it can escape the warm flesh.”
Samantha’s eyes grew more liquid. “They are unholy demons.”
“Soulless demons,” Richard agreed. He gestured to the symbols as he went on. “Failure to gain the soul they seek only makes them more frantic, more enraged. The more they kill, the more they fail to be sated, the more obsessed they become to possess a soul.
“Naja says that the half people can sense the presence of a soul, the way a predator can smell blood.”
Samantha grabbed his sleeve again and leaned in. “You mean they can use that ability to track and hunt people?”
Richard nodded. “Naja says that the half people are death itself, with teeth, coming for the living.”
He had to pause to take a breath. The account was graphic and making him sick. He had only given her the highlights so that she would understand what they faced. He judged it enough.
Samantha, looking on the verge of tears, shook her head in horror. “Death with teeth, coming for the living,” she said to herself. “That’s what happened to my father, then. And maybe my mother. If they hadn’t already eaten her alive when they caught her, they would have by now.”
“We don’t know that.” Richard put a hand around the girl’s small shoulders and hugged her against his side. “I’m sorry, Samantha, to have to read this to you.”
She wiped her tears on her sleeve. “A kind lie would hardly serve me well. I’m the only gifted person left here. I need to know the truth of what my people face. I may be too young to really defend them, but I’m all they have.”
Richard understood how she felt. He was terrified for Zedd, Nicci, Cara, and the rest of them. He redoubled his focus on translating the account. Any time he might have left was quickly running out. But he needed to understand what they faced and then go find them.
Richard knew that with his gift corrupted and not working because of the touch of death in him, that meant that his bond to the people of D’Hara would not work. And if that bond didn’t work, then Cara’s Agiel, like Zedd’s and Nicci’s gift, would not work. Like the rest of them, she was virtually defenseless.
“This is disturbing,” Richard told Samantha. “Naja says that when the emperor’s makers created the half people, their spirits, once pulled from the victim, were not allowed to go to the spirit world. Because of how the spells to reanimate the dead worked, the spirits of those dead are pulled from their place in the underworld. Those spirits, both of the dead and of the half people, are thus kept trapped between realms.
“Unable to get to either the person they were pulled from or go through the veil into the underworld, these lost spirits sometimes drift back in this direction and end up haunting this plane of existence.” Richard looked over at Samantha. “Naja says that not all of them who drift back into the world of life are friendly.”
She made a sour face. “Great.”
Richard could only imagine the vengeful anger of such lost spirits.
The account became more complex with some terms involving magic, both Subtractive and Additive, that Richard didn’t understand. While there were elements describing conjuring that he had never seen before, he was able to grasp the general meaning of what Naja was explaining. And what she was explaining was frightening.
He scanned the next line of complex symbols twice before he was sure of what it said. He wished he weren’t, but he was sure.
CHAPTER
29
“So,” Samantha prompted, “is that all of it?”
He thought she sounded like she was trying to be hopeful even though she knew better.
He wiped a hand across his eyes and read the last of Naja Moon’s account, hoping to at last come to some word of the solutions to the problems of the half people and the reawakened dead. He was disheartened by what he found.
“She says that the best minds and most talented wizards of the New World were unable to come up with a way to eliminate the threat. She said that they fought the half people and the walking dead, often to victory, but even in victory they steadily lost valuable people. The Old World’s losses were meaningless to them because there are vastly more people there. Besides that, they could reanimate as many dead as they needed—often the very enemy we had been able to kill—while the losses on our side were costly and continually drained strength and resources from the New World.
“She says they all knew that if something wasn’t soon done to end the threat, or to at least somehow contain it, the New World, and life itself, was going to lose the war to Sulachan’s forces.
“Unable
to come up with an effective counter or a way to destroy such a threat, she says they were desperate for a solution that could save them from annihilation as well as preserve the world of life. Eventually they came up with an answer that was not as much as they had hoped, but it was the best that they could do.
“She says that what the people here ended up doing was to use gravity spells that inexorably drew both the dead and the half people to this place beyond the mountains that we see out the portal. Once they had all been drawn in, the wizards in the New World were then able to seal these demons without souls behind a barrier of keeper spells.”
“Gravity spells, keeper spells—I’ve never heard of any such magic.”
“Me neither,” Richard said. “Naja doesn’t go into detail about the nature of those spells, but they seem pretty self-explanatory. She does say that in this way they were finally able to protect everyone from these demons without souls loose among the living.
“She then goes to great lengths to apologize on behalf of her people that they were forced to pass this terrible danger on to some unknown future generation, but there was nothing else they could do because otherwise Sulachan would have won the war and then there would be no future generations.
