Joseph Lewis - Wren the Fox Witch

Then a second corpse fell, tipping over backward very slowly and gently until it smashed into a puddle of filthy water in a depression in the floor, and again, Wren saw the dim face of a ghost flying away into the shadows.

Nine hells! I’m knocking the souls right out of their bodies? Is that even possible? I mean, it must be, obviously, but still, shouldn’t Omar have warned me I could tear a soul from a body? Unless, he didn’t know…

Wren dropped her arms to her sides for a moment to rest her shoulders and stumble back from the four remaining dead men and women, who tottered uncertainly on their frozen legs and then began stumbling toward her again.

“Stay away!” She shoved both hands toward just one of the corpses and the resulting blast of aether knocked the fragile ghost of an old woman free of the body, which smashed down to the floor. The shadow form of the woman hovered above her desiccated corpse for a moment, and then vanished.

I can stop them. I can stop all of them!

Wren shoved her hands out toward the remaining corpses, her silver bracelets jangling as they slammed against her wrists, and she hurled the aether through the frozen bodies to yank the souls free and send them drifting into the darkness. The last three bodies slumped to the floor in a haphazard pile of black and white and blue limbs gleaming dimly with aether crystals in the torchlight.

She glanced over her shoulder and saw the two porters still standing a few paces behind her, clutching their chairs and candlesticks. “It’s all right,” she said. “They can’t hurt us now.”

The young men slumped forward with exhausted smiles and set their chairs down.

Wren looked out across the dark cavernous space to the far end of the room where Tycho and the others were still piling furniture up against a single pair of doors. She waved at them, knowing that they couldn’t possibly see her in the gloom, and called out, “It’s all right! I can stop them! We’re going to be all right! Don’t worry!”

“Miss!” one of the porters cried.

Wren saw him pointing over her shoulder and she turned to look over the bodies of the six soulless corpses to see three more dead bodies rush out of the open doorway behind her, with more shadowy forms rustling in the darkness beyond them.

“Everybody get behind me!” Wren shouted as she backed toward the office area.

If I can knock a soul free of a dead body, it can’t be much harder to knock one free of a living body, can it? I need to be careful. Very, very careful, or I might kill everyone in the room.

She kept her eyes on the dead people pouring out of the ancient doors. On and on they came, more and more frozen and rotten faces plunging out of the shadows.

Where on earth are they all coming from? There really must be nine hells after all!

The new wave of corpses moved faster than the last, stumbling and loping as quickly as their frozen legs would allow, their fingers fixed in icy fists and claws, their crystallized eyes locked open, their blackened tongues raised behind yellow teeth, and all of them moaning and grunting as they raced toward the warm bodies in the light.

“Stay behind me!” Wren yelled over her shoulder.

Woden, be my shield!

She swept her arms left and right, dragging thin waves of aether back and forth across the floor to knock the corpses from side to side, and occasionally ripping a ghost free to let its body crumple to the floor. But with each sweep of her arms, the aether drifted a bit farther away into the darkness, leaving it a bit thinner and weaker as it struck the oncoming wave of dead bodies.

The chamber was enormous and the distance between the doors and the torches would have taken a healthy man several long seconds to run across on warm, living legs. The corpses limped and ambled at a fraction of that speed, but still they moved faster than a mere walk, and they spread outward from the doors, slowly filling the vast ballroom with groaning, stumbling figures.

And the first of them were about to reach the torchlight.

Guns began to fire, some of them booming right in Wren’s ear, making her wince as her head filled with watery white noise. Men were shouting behind her and small objects began flying over her head toward the corpses. Chair legs, candles, pens, knives, ink wells, jars, and even a boot or two whizzed by her, nearly hitting her tall ears more than once.

Wren wrapped her fingers together, turning her hands into one massive fist, and she swung both arms together through the air, trying to coax all eight bracelets into resonating through the aether one last time, but the otherworldly mist was simply too thin now and it barely nudged the corpses sideways as they rushed into the light.

The body of a middle-aged man lunged at her, and she threw up both of her arms to shield her head as she closed her eyes and hoped…

Eight silver bracelets veined with sun-steel crashed together as she crossed her arms, and they resounded with a horrible metallic whine. Wren opened her eyes and jerked her face back from her arms and the noise coming from the trinkets on her wrists, and then she saw the corpse standing just in front of her, wobbling in place, stutter-stepping sideways.

The sound!

She crashed her arms together again and again, letting the bracelets ring out with their buzzing, hissing, growling whines. And with every crash, the dead bodies stumbled and turned and tripped and fell. But only for a moment. As the ringing died, the corpses recovered, crawling back up to their feet and turning back toward the clerks and soldiers gathered within the ring of torches.

“Wren!” Tycho appeared at her side, fumbling with the bullets for his revolver. He snapped the gun shut and pointed it at the dead men and women. “Get behind me!”

He fired twice and two corpses slumped to the floor. But in the shadowy corners of the room, Wren’s keen fox eyes saw the dead bodies still pouring in through more and more doors by the dozens, by the hundreds. She clutched Tycho’s shoulder to steady herself as she stared at the countless dead faces stumbling toward her out of the darkness.

Aether. I need more aether! How? HOW???

And a familiar voice whispered to her, “Draw it up from the earth.”

Wren’s eyes snapped to her finger where the slender ring of Denveller gleamed with coppery gold.

“Is that… Hrist?” Wren asked. She frowned at the ring, not certain when she had last heard Hrist’s voice. She had always been the quietest of the Yslander ghosts.

“It is I,” the dead vala answered. “Draw the aether you need up from the earth using the bracelets.”

“How exactly?”

“Sit on the ground,” Hrist said. “Place your palms on the ground, and shiver your soul just as you do when you move the aether around you. But this time, imagine the shivers rippling upward through your body, like ripples on the surface of a lake when the wind blows straight across it.”

“No, not straight across,” a second voice said from the ring.

“Kara?”

“Yes, Wren. Do as Hrist says, but picture the shivers spinning around you like a water spout, rising as it spins, faster and faster. Do it now!”

Wren jerked away from Tycho and ran to the center of the office where Lady Nerissa stood calmly, though very pale, surrounded by her servants. Wren dropped to the cold floor and placed her hands on the damp tiles. Closing her eyes, she tried to forget about the yelling and the shuffling and the gun shots.

Making her own soul shiver was easy enough. Over the last few months, it had almost become a comfortable reflex from her long hours of practice with Omar’s guidance. It then took several moments of effort to make the tiny ripples in her ghost start to turn, to revolve around her, sweeping over her skin from right to left like a wave of gooseflesh, faster and faster, until she was trembling uncontrollably as though she were standing naked on a glacier, her whole body shaking as her flesh tried desperately to stay warm against the freezing elements.