Free Conservation of Shadows by Yoon Ha Lee Page B

palpable.
    The necromancers meant them no good; no one who served the sorcerer could. He retied the harness and set off after the second necromancer. Ifayad’s hand closed around her.
    “Kill her!” Sakera said.
    The necromancer wheezed out something.
    Tamim hesitated for a long moment.
    The necromancer said rapidly, “I can tell you of the death at your heels—”
    He had agreed to support Sakera, not to ask questions. He took a deep breath, then pinched his thumb and forefinger against each other.
    The giant’s fist squeezed tight. The necromancer screamed.
    Tamim didn’t stop until the screaming cut off. Then he dropped the body.
    Sakera had dismembered the rest of the ghouls. “That will hold them for a while,” she said. “We can travel faster than they can.”
    Tamim turned Ifayad to face Sakera’s giant. “That wasn’t so difficult,” he said.
    “Only two necromancers and their ghouls for now,” she said. “We don’t know how long they were following us. We haven’t exactly been subtle. That’s my fault. I thought—” Her voice sounded hollow. “This place has been my home for so long. I thought it would protect me, somehow. But I should have known better. It’s not as if land has any loyalty.”
    Tamim focused on the part of her speech that had made sense. “So we should expect more pursuit. Let’s get our gear and run.”
    “We can only run so far,” Sakera said. “We’ll end up at the gates of the sorcerer’s palace with the undead nipping at our heels. There’s no help for it.”
    “We could head out of the rimlands instead,” Tamim said. He was accustomed to the idea of dying, but surely Sakera felt differently. The thought of her felled by the vultures made him ache in a way he had no name for.
    “No,” Sakera said firmly. “This has to be done.”
    Two villages later, Tamim discovered why Sakera was so desperate to take down the sorcerer.
    This far into the rimlands, they had expected the village to be abandoned. Tamim had suggested that they might be able to find cloth or soap or needles left behind, small necessities. “Unless it bothers you to scavenge,” he added.
    “Not at all,” Sakera said. “If they’ve left, they’ve left.”
    They paused at the crest of a hill to peer down at the village. There were no cook-fires burning, and the crops in the nearby fields had withered. Yet people walked around the village’s perimeter and through its streets.
    The pattern they traced was chakath, one of the letters of the alphabet, except with the beginning and ending points joined.
    “They’re ghouls,” Tamim said, looking at Sakera for an explanation. “But why—?”
    “The vultures didn’t raise them,” Sakera said. “They’re too practical to have ghouls spelling out alphabet lessons. No: something came to this village and killed its people, and the people simply failed to die.”
    “What force moves them, then?”
    “The sorcerer’s control of the Pit is not a natural thing,” she said. “It is affecting the balance of life and death in the rimlands. Necromancy is one thing: it too has its limits. It’s another matter for everything that dies to rise on its own. We must kill the sorcerer before he warps the purpose of the Pit any further.”
    “I can try to go salvage what I can,” Tamim said. “Or would that catch the ghouls’ attention?”
    Sakera watched the ghouls walking, from stoop-shouldered old men to children dragging shapeless dolls. “As long as you don’t interrupt their chakath. We’ll go together.”
    “All right.” For the purposes of walking past the ghouls, her hand tremor shouldn’t make a difference.
    The procession of ghouls had gaps in odd places. It was simply a matter of seeking out the gaps and slipping past. The ghouls’ rotted eyes tracked them, but the ghouls themselves did not deviate from their path.
    Together, Sakera and Tamim raided the village for luxuries they had not seen in their time together: fruit