Tom’ head snapped toward the sound.

A Vith warrior gushed blood from a slashed neck, his expression confused.

Gunn’s voice bellowed. “Kinzena!”

A moment later, Tom felt someone tackle him across his ribs, and he was driven to the ground by old man Gunn.

A whistling sounded above his head.

Thunk.

Gunn twitched.

“Get to the children!” He shouted over Tom’s head.

“They’re gone! A distant voice shouted back.

What the hell is going on? Tom twisted his head to look past Gunn’s arm shielding his face and neck.

He wished he hadn’t.

The plaintive wail of a baby grew louder for a curious second.

it impacted on the rocky earth two steps away from his face. The pupils dilated.

Tom drew in a shuddering breath as child after child rained down from above, hitting the ground at terminal velocity.

Some survived.

Most didn’t.

No. NO NO NO!

Ice gripped Tom’s heart and he scrambled his way out from under Gunn, his shirt ripping away in the old man’s grip. He spotted another baby falling from above and stretched his arms up to try and catch it.

If I can just slow down it’s descent enough, I can save it.

I CAN SAVE IT.

Every fiber of Tom’s being was focused on that baby. That proxy for Ellie. On that one point in time where he could save its life. For an instant, it felt like time had no meaning, and the child was locked above him by sheer will.

Tom heard the sound of metal on bone again.

This time it came from inside him.

Tom’s eyes flickered down and he made out a man, a huge one, taller even than Tom, and wider by half, wearing a faceless mask and light amor plates over his arms and torso, wielding a wickedly curved dagger, which was currently scraping out of Tom’s neck.

Children rained down behind him, impacting against the ground with meaty smack of impact. Crying was good. Crying meant they were alive.

Tom smelled blood.

The apparition vanished.

Tom tried to raise his arms to stop the bleeding, but his arms weren’t working.

Tom’s head lolled to the side, casting his swimming gaze across Gun and a good section of the village.

Gunn was standing up when the man appeared behind him and tried to punch a dagger through the old man’s kidneys.

Gunn was thrown to the ground.

A young warrior heaved a spear back and threw it at the towering man, and for a moment, he seemed to be in two places at once, standing in the path of the spear and slaughtering the warrior at the same time.

“Don’t attack!” Gun shouted, climbing to his feet. “Stay hard! HARD!”

The attacker’s head cocked for a moment before he strode through the field of the dead and injured, toward where the blond healer was cowering against the side of a hut, her hair braided into golden ropes that hung loose around her shaking shoulders.

Tom’s vision went dark as the towering man reached down and seized her by the neck.

***Sasha Honnuken***

Sasha recoiled away as the terrifying man loomed close, her entire body shivering as his fingers grasped her throat.

A second later, the feel of the air changed against her skin, along with the light, which dimmed from the bright red sun, to the warm yellow of a lamp.

She was in an office, with books lining the walls. A far cry from the stone huts she’d been dwelling in the past three weeks.

A moment later, the towering figure stepped back and she saw a desk of dark hardwood, and behind it…

The Omnipresent!

Sasha scrambled to her knees and groveled reflexively before her uncle’s patron.

“Greeting to my lord!” she said into the floor before glancing back up. What she saw made her skin go cold.

Vendrith Kinzena looked her over with a scowl.

“What are you wearing, girl?” he asked, his voice sour.

“They took my –“

The patriarch of the Kinzena clan held up a hand, forestalling her explanation.

“What’s really important is the sanctity of your womb. Can’t have you mating with any savage you please. Did you breed with any of them?”

Sasha’s jaw dropped at the tactless question.

“Of course not, Omnipresent! And even if they had forced themselves on me, a Honnuken woman can-“

“I find myself having difficulty taking your word for it when you’re wearing those clothes,” Vendrith said, stroking his long, white beard as his gaze followed the beads in her hair. “Raze, take her to the holding cells. We’ll keep her for a short while until we know she’s clean. Then we can give her back to her uncle in good conscience.”

“But –“

The massive fingers seized her shoulder, and in the blink of an eye, the air chilled, the light dimmed, and she found herself kneeling in a stone cell lined with runes of power. A cell for Alia.

“What? No… why is this happening?” Sasha asked, her stomach sinking as she made out the cold stone around her, pockmarked with impacts from hundreds of prisoners before her, scratches on the wall denoting time, names, and splotches of dried blood.

She shivered involuntarily, the cold slowly creeping its way into her body and soul.

A deep, rumbling voice spoke. It would have been beautiful if there hadn’t been so much malice lurking behind it.

“The Omnipresent places a great deal of weight on the purity of blood.”

She yipped as a bare tremor of wind announced the man’s presence.

“You’ve got a long life ahead of you, Honnuken.” He said, holding out a book. “If you told the truth, you’ll spend no more than three weeks in this cell.”

The man – Raze he’d been called – stepped past her once she took the book and ran the tips of his fingers over the pattern of scratches on the wall.

“Some spend quite a bit longer. Use that book and this time to think about your place in the world.”

Sasha glanced down at the cover of the book. it was hardbound in a tattered but stiff leather backing, illuminated gold words standing out on the worn cover.

Geneology of the Great Houses Vol 16

“Is this a-“

Raze was gone.

“joke?”

***Vendrith Kinzena***

Can’t risk that happening again, Vendrith thought morosely as he felt the ripple in his soul preceding Raze’s arrival.

Raze appeared standing three feet away from Vendrith’s desk, standing loosely at attention.

“Got the girl squared away then?”

“Yes.”

“It took you forty-five seconds to return with the girl. That strikes me as rather slow. Care to explain?” Vendrith motioned to the sturdy clock affixed to his desk.

Raze could accomplish many, many things in an unaccounted for fifteen seconds, and Vendrith wouldn’t make the mistake of letting the boy slip his leash again.

“I dispatched a few targets of opportunity while I was there,” Raze answered, his rumbling voice ostensibly bored. But Vendrith could never be sure. Not anymore.

“Anything out of the ordinary to report?”

“I spotted a building that was unusual for Vith, as it was constructed of wood, and about the size of a tavern, belching smoke. When I took a look inside, it appeared to be a rudimentary ironworks.”

Vendrith gave a quiet scoff. The rock-throwing savages were trying to best them in an arms race. Cute.

“The ironworks seemed to be populated by animated corpses.” Raze said, his voice just as bored as before.

“WHAT!?” Vendrith shouted, lunging to his feet. The chair clattered behind him, unseen.

***later***

“That’s weird,” Tom mumbled as his eyes opened.

“What’s weird?” Nema asked, entering his field of vision, which happened to be the roof of his hut.

“I didn’t expect to be alive right now.”

“It was very close. Wounds like that kill in minutes.”

Tom tentatively directed his attention down to his hand, commanding it to move.

Please don’t be a paraplegic.

Tom’s hand raised, tapping its fingers together in front of his face, and he felt a wave of relief crash over him. Well, if it can restore skin that’s been entirely burned away, why not a severed spine?

“Thank god,” Tom groaned.

“You may wish to save gratitude until you understand the true scope of the damage,” Nema said with a severe face. “We lost three warriors and sixteen children. Many more were wounded.”

19 X 8 =173 soul pulses.

A soulmonger can only profit from war.

Tom shook the reflexive math out of his head as he sat up.

“How long has it been?”

“About two hours.” Nema said.

Tom cocked his head. He could make out the wails of heartbroken women, the wounds in their hearts still raw and bloody.

Shit.

War was fast, and it was brutal, especially when you were on the other side of the equation.

Tom’s hand absentmindedly touched his neck, searching for any evidence that it’d been perforated just a bit earlier.

A moment later, he remembered the sight of a baby dying on impact with the ground.

Tom’s stomach recoiled violently, and he leaned off the side of the bed, choking up bile before spitting it onto the stone floor, his mouth stinging.

“Ugh,” Tom groaned, his whole body shivering as the child’s deaths settled into his thoughts like an unwelcome visitor. Tom couldn’t even comprehend what kind of monster could kill babies, raining them down from the sky in such a…callously impersonal way.

Vol was nasty and cruel. This guy just didn’t care.

Tom shuddered one final time before he got a hold on himself.

“So what do we do now?” he asked.

“We carry on,” Nema said with a shrug. “What other choice do we have? Fleeing would accomplish nothing.”

“I guess.” Tom muttered, gazing into the distance.

What am I pussyfooting around for? The Kinzena could come back whenever he wanted to. The hair on the back of Tom’s neck rose as he realized the reason for the name ‘omnipresent’. It felt like there was a sword dangling above his neck, hanging by a thread.

He had to get to work if he wanted to prevent a repeat of today.

He got up and tried not to look at the weeping mothers cradling the still forms of their children as he left his hut. He didn’t want to lose control of his stomach again.

Tom went to his workstation separated from the ironworks and reviewed his mould. He was about to make a better soul engine, using scrapped parts from the previous crypts, hopefully allowing him to boost the efficiency beyond eight soul pulses per soul.

This time the tube was going to be so tightly wound that it would defy belief. He’d seen the evidence in the crypts. Souls don’t exactly occupy a physical space, so the smaller the tube, the better, it meant more coils could be packed into a smaller space.

Tom’s eyes rolled back in his head and he flickered rapidly in and out of sleep, duplicating the insulative powder he’d scraped out of the crypts until he had a rather respectable pile of it. It only cost him twenty soul pulses.

Never again. Tom thought as he created the coil, using a sticky flux to pack the insulative material around a wire stolen from Jacob’s car. When the hot gold hit the material, the sticky flux would sweat out of the mix as the powder bonded back into a solid.

Tom was going to make a real soul engine.

Tom’s vision narrowed to nothing but the wire, until a harsh shriek tore his attention away from it.

Thump.

Tom jolted off his seat and stuck his head out the flap of the hut.

Kinzena.

There was a wall of flesh and steel surrounding the village. A thousand stone-faced men in every direction he looked.

It hasn’t even been three hours! Fuck!

Tom’s notion of building a better engine to be ‘prepared’ for next time felt childish and ineffectual. The entire military force of Kinzena could be wherever they wanted to be WHENEVER they wanted to be. He needed an answer to that NOW.

Motion caught Tom’s eyes, and he could make out at least fifty soldiers in the process of tearing down his ironworks.

How…HOW do I survive this? Tom thought, his heart pounding in his chest.

You wanna win a marathon, you gotta put some bandaids on your nipples. Sacrifice and cruelty in equal measure.

Tom’s eyes slid to the summoning circle with Luz’s address on it. Tom ran back to his circle made of ash-filled fat, and knelt beside the circle.

Thump. Tom’s heart gave a start as he squeezed a soul pulse out of his chest, feeding it into the circle. He dialed up Luz. The Outsider’s hologram flickered into existence a moment later, showing the provocatively dressed woman same as she’d ever been.

Tom didn’t have eyes for her at all.

“Mr. Graves, how can I assist you?”

“Luz, what is my debt at?”

“Four hundred and sixty soul pulses, Mr. Graves. Your familiar is almost paid for!”

Tom took a deep breath. “I’d like to roll that debt into another loan.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t write you another loan until your current one has been completely cleared. Outsider law is very specific about –“

Tom held up the ghostwalk crypt.

“Would this clear my current loan?” Tom demanded as the sounds of combat increased outside the hut.

Luz hesitated a moment. “Well, yes, but to make a new loan while you’re in…the circumstances you’re in, you would have to have some kind of collateral, what Ilspeth eighty-nine did was –“

Tom fished the shield crypt out of his pocket. “How’s this for collateral?”

She hesitated.

Tom pulled out the healing crypt and held that out, too.

Luz stared at the gold discs, and Tom could see the numbers crunching in her head.

“Very well. Bleed on them if you would, please.”

Tom didn’t have time to find a knife, so he punched the closest rock with everything he had. Crack! Tom bit back a groan of pain and rubbed the bleeding knuckle on the three crypts. They vanished from his hands.

“Alright, things look good. What can the Outsiders do for you, Mr. Graves?”

Closer to his hut, the screaming grew, along with the sound of combat. Tom heard raised voices, many of them decidedly not speaking Vith.

“I need something that says ‘get the fuck off my lawn.’”

The tent-flap was thrown open, revealing a stone-faced soldier.