Free Take the body and give me the rest by Julius Schenk

you
read and write yet?’ she asked.
    ‘He can, so I
can,’ Seth replied.
    ‘And when did
you realise you could?’ she asked.
    He thought back
to that first discovery in the Mermaid’s Kiss. ‘I looked at some
written words and found I could decipher them.’
    ‘You needed the
skill and it came. Now, if I’d asked the Officer to spar with you,
the memories and skills of Stephan’s sparring and practise would
have flooded you, but they would have joined with you and that’s
all you would take from him. All the real memories and skills he
had from life and death battles, of killing, of that horrible
talent of his would have been lost. The only way I could make it a
part of you forever was to put your very life at risk,’ she
said.
    She moved over
to him and sat near him at the small desk. ‘Now, do you have any
memories of his summoning or the many, many times before you when
he took someone into him?’
    Seth cast back
into his mind; he pictured the room where he was chained to the
floor; he thought of the General. He thought of the creature and
the look of the summoning stones but nothing clear came to him,
just a hazy of shapes, darkness and the cold ambitions of a
collector. ‘I can’t picture anything clearly,’ he said.
    ‘He took
people, Seth. His skill with a sword was only one of his talents.
He built on the takings from many, many other men and boys. He
killed them and took them into him whole. Now they are in you and
you need to unlock each one in turn so that what they knew and
learned isn’t wasted,’ she said.
    ‘How can I do
that,’ he asked.
    ‘You need to
try everything you can, try your hand at anything and see if you
feel the tug of the familiar, but also you need to be ready to
dream. Your dreams are no longer your own and soon you’ll find you
share them with his and soon your own victims,’ she said.
    ‘I don’t intend
to kill anyone I don’t have to,’ he said.
    She smiled
slowly at him, shaking her head. ‘We never do, Seth, but guard
against the hunger. The beast will hunger for the flesh soon and
you’ll feel it inside you like a starving man and you’ll have to
fight the other hunger, the hunger of knowledge, of the gatherer.
You’ll meet someone who can do, who knows, who is everything you
want and it’s so easy to take them into you and possess it. Guard
against it, Seth; I don’t want you to become a monster like
Stephan. I’ll help you.’
    ‘What happens
if I give into it?’ he asked.
    ‘You’ll become
like them, the Dark Guild. All they do is gather more and more; as
their knowledge grows so does their ambition. They have been around
for hundreds of years, taking more and more, living ageless lives
from the takings of others. We won’t be like them, Seth. We are
meant for better things.’
    She stood up
from the desk and placed her hand on his arm. ‘I’m off to bed now,
and you should be as well. When you’re half asleep, I want you to
imagine yourself in a room full of doors, hundreds and hundreds of
doors of different sizes. Try to open some and see where you
go.’
     
    Dirst walked
into the main dining room of the manor house. There his cousin
Seraphina was seated at the table consuming a quick lunchtime
repast. As he entered the room she flicked her hand at a woman
server standing at her shoulder, gesturing for her to leave. When
they were alone in the silence of the well-appointed room he spoke
to her.
    ‘We have word that he took berth on the ship The Opulent , two months at least to
Pelloss and stopping a few days as usual at the island of Dacar,’
he said quickly.
    She put down
her fork and looked at the ceiling, thinking about the situation.
‘That’s too much of a coincidence for me to like it,’ she said.
    ‘Why’s that?’
he asked. Stephan never talked plans with his son, but treated
Seraphina as his equal in intelligence and The Guild.
    ‘We have
someone on that ship that we’re already watching. Elizebetha of
Black Rock is on