Brent Weeks - Beyond the Shadows

“What happened?”

“We don’t know. But the Strangers long to wear flesh again. So we take the bones of our dead and sanctify them for the Strangers’ use. Incidentally, this is why Godkings have themselves cremated; they wish to avoid our use of their bones.”

“And then?”

“Real bones are necessary but not sufficient to give the fallen a sense of embodiment, and it is for embodiment that they trade their service. We give them flesh. It doesn’t have to look human. Some Godkings believed that any shape is possible, putting human bones into a horse’s or a dog’s shape. It makes binding the fallen more difficult as they wish to be men, not horses, but it makes a fine horse.”

“And the musculature, the skin and so forth, does it need to be crafted as painstakingly as the skeletons?” Dorian asked. He’d trained as a Healer, and he couldn’t imagine the intricate magic necessary to create a whole living body.

“Given the correct skeleton and enough clay and water, the Strangers help the magic form muscles and ligaments and skin. They’re never as sturdy as man. Godking Roygaris was able to craft krul that lived for a decade or more, but he was a brilliant anatomist. He was able to make krul horses, and wolves, and tigers, and mammoths and other creatures we no longer have names for.”

“They function like living beings?”

“They are living beings, Your Holiness. They breathe, they eat, they …”—he looked at Jenine again—“defecate. They just don’t feel as men do. Pain that would incapacitate a man will do nothing to them. They won’t complain about hunger. They will mention it if it’s gone long enough that they are about to stop functioning.”

“They speak?”

“Poorly. But they can see better in the dark than a man, though not as far. Eyes are difficult to make correctly. They make poor archers. They have emotions, but the palette is different from men’s. Fear is incredibly rare. They know that as long as the line of Godkings survives, if their body is destroyed, they will most likely be put into another sooner or later.”

“Are they obedient?”

“Perfectly, in most circumstances, but they have an incredible hatred toward the living. They won’t help build anything, not even engines of war. They only destroy. Experiments have been tried where a krul was put in a room with a prisoner and told that if he killed the prisoner, he would be killed in turn. Every time, the krul killed the prisoner. It was tried with women, with old men, with children: it didn’t matter, except they killed children more quickly. You couldn’t ask them to take a city and not kill those who surrendered. They also hunger for human flesh. Eating it seems to make them stronger. We don’t know why.”

“My father gathered these bones, but never used them.” That was odd. Dorian turned it over in his mind. Perhaps Garoth Ursuul was too decent.

“Your pardon, Your Holiness. Your esteemed father did use them, once. When Clan Hil rebelled. Afterward, he noted that the Hil fought to the last man when they knew they would be eaten and profaned. Your father said he wished to have men left alive to rule; the krul wished only for ashes. He held them off for a great emergency. The emergency never came, so there’s quite a stockpile.”

“How many do we have?”

“About eighty-five thousand. When we organize them, we have to preserve their hierarchy. Their number system is different than ours.”

“What do you mean?”

“Even our words for numbers are predicated on multiples of ten: ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million. Their number system is based on thirteen—my master said that was where our superstitions about thirteen come from. They’re rigidly bound to those numbers. A meister can lead twelve krul himself, but if he wishes to lead thirteen or more, he must master a thirteenth, which is different—a white krul called a daemon. The white krul are faster, over six feet tall, and take more magic to raise. Platoons are thirteen squads—a hundred sixty-nine krul. So after you raise thirteen squads, if you wish to add a single krul, you must raise a bone lord. Bone lords speak well, they’re smarter, tough, and they can use magic.”

“Vir?”

“No. It’s either the Talent or very similar. Thirteen bone lords make a legion. If you don’t lead it yourself, a legion needs a fiend. Thirteen fiends make an army, twenty-eight thousand five hundred sixty-one krul. Your Holiness has enough for three armies, if you can master two arcanghuls to lead the other two armies. All told, that gives you a force of more than eighty-five thousand.”

“What would happen if I had thirteen arcanghuls? What is that? Close to four hundred thousand krul?”

“I don’t know, Your Holiness.” The man looked fearful, however, and Dorian thought he was lying.

“Has it ever been tried? I won’t have you lie to me.”

The man blinked furiously. “The only rumors I’ve heard about that are blasphemous, Your Holiness.”

“As Godking, I pardon your blasphemy.”

The man blinked again, but after a few moments seemed to master his fear. “My predecessor, Keeper Yrrgin, said that the first of your line, Godking Roygaris, tried. He needed hundreds of thousands of skeletons for the attempt, so he invaded what is now the Freeze. Keeper Yrrgin said it was once a great civilization, filled with mighty cities. Roygaris took it with little difficulty, for they thought him their ally. And then he put them in camps and killed them all—an entire civilization. Keeper Yrrgin said that above the thirteen arcanghuls, Godking Roygaris found a rank he called night lords. With one night lord, Roygaris conquered the rest of the Freeze, and his armies only grew. He couldn’t be content. He thought he was closing in on the mysteries of the universe. He thought if he could master thirteen night lords, he would master God. I can’t imagine that there were ever so many people in all the world, but my master told me that he succeeded in capturing and putting to death almost five million people, and that there, above the night lords, he found …” the man face was pasty and sweating, his voice low and hoarse. “There he found Khali. She destroyed him and became our goddess. She gave us the vir to bind us to her and to make us destroyers. This is why agony is worship to her, because like all the Strangers, she hates life.”

“What happened, Ashaiah?”

The man’s voice was a whisper, “Jorsin Alkestes.”

Dorian’s heart went cold. He’d heard this history, but only from the southern perspective. The Mad Emperor and the Mad Mage. The conqueror and his dog. Now, Ashaiah was saying that Jorsin and Ezra had stopped a goddess and her army of five million krul.

“Elsewhere our armies would suffer losses in the day and be remade in the night. That alone made us almost invincible. But Alkestes somehow warded all of the great city of Trayethell and leagues around it so that the krul couldn’t be raised there.”

“Black Barrow?” Dorian asked. The city was in southeast Khalidor, but it had never been inhabited. It was cursed. No one lived within leagues of the place. Indeed, all of eastern Khalidor was sparsely populated. “Who else knows about these bones and about the krul?”

“I have a number of deaf-mutes who assist me. We take all the castle’s and the city’s dead. I never allow anyone in the larger chambers. Paerik and Moburu were the only aethelings who knew. General Naga learned it from Paerik. No one else.”

No one else.

“So Paerik wasn’t a fool,” Jenine said, speaking for the first time since they’d entered the vast room. “With twenty thousand men, he was facing sixty thousand. Paerik didn’t come here for the throne—or at least not only for the throne—he came for the krul. What does it mean, my lord?”