The Pillars Of The World

you saying they have no souls?
    Aye, they have them. Crippled, withered things as hard as stone. You’ll only break your own heart if you try to help them. But you’re still young, and you don’t believe it will be that way. I once felt as you do now. And I broke my heart on stone. You’ll do the same. I can see it in your eyes. It’s glad I am that you’ll show me the road to the Summerland before that day arrives.
    That will be a long time from now.
     
    No. Death has become an attentive lover. I won’t see the seasons change again, and when I take my last breath, you will become the Gatherer in my place. You’re the strongest of the Fae who are Death’s Servants, so the name, and the power, will be yours. You will become Death’s Mistress.
    The others who have this gift can take a spirit once the body has breathed its last breath. But you will be able to gather the spirit from living flesh. You will have the power to kill.
    The shadows under the trees thickened. Morag shivered.
    There were places in the human world that were so thick with ghosts the land always felt cold. And there were stories the Fae bards sang about human battlefields.
    There was one in particular that, having heard it as a child, still haunted her.
    According to the bards, two great forces of men had come together on a battlefield. It was never told why they had come to fight. It didn’t matter. They had come to that place, and as the fighting began, the one who had been the Gatherer in that long-ago time had felt Death’s summons. Taking the form of a raven, she flew over the battlefield, gathering the souls of those who would not survive their wounds and were crying out in agony. But the war chiefs on both sides knew what she was, and they both decided that if she couldn’t gather the souls of their men, Death would not be able to touch them and they would know victory over their enemy. When she flew over them, the war chiefs shouted to their best archers, who loosed their arrows into the sky. A handful of arrows pierced her. As she fell, dying, the souls she had gathered in her wings fell with her to become ghosts on the battlefield. Her own spirit, in raven form, flew away to the Summerland. The war chiefs, now certain that they had cheated Death, threw themselves and their men into the battle. The slaughter was ferocious, and the land turned red from the spilled blood.
    The song said that no man walked away from that battlefield, and that no Fae who had the gift to be Death’s Servant had ever returned to that place to gather any souls. And it said that the ghosts of those men were still fighting that battle, over and over and over, and if a person stepped onto that land, he would hear the clash of swords and the battle cries and the screams of horses and the desperate pleas of the dying. Over and over. And never would it end.
    Why am I thinking of that story now ? Morag wondered. Reining in the dark horse, she studied the meadow beyond the last trees. There were no shadowed places there to indicate Death’s presence outside of the Great Mother’s circle of beginnings and endings. But . . .
    There was anger coming toward her. And there was power herding that anger the way dogs herded sheep, driving it toward some completion. That power felt almost Fae, but it wasn’t Fae. And it didn’t belong to the Small Folk. It wasn’t clean magic, whatever it was.
    But it was familiar. This is what still lingered in those villages she recently had passed through.
    Death called her.
    She urged the dark horse forward at the same moment a woman burst from the trees on the other side of the meadow. The woman ran as best she could, heading straight across the meadow for the trees that were the border for the Old Place, but there was something wrong with her legs that kept her from taking a full stride.
    A moment later, a pack of men burst from the same trees, their faces filled with such ugly emotions they looked like they were wearing twisted, obscene masks. Most of them carried clubs. Some just held a rock that filled his hand. Behind them rode a young man dressed in a fine black coat. His face shone with an unbearable ecstasy.

    As soon as she saw him, Morag knew he was the source of that other power. He reminded her of a septic wound, full of pus. Rotten.
    Before she was out of the trees and galloping across the meadow, the men had caught the woman and pulled her to the ground.
    Fae horses had silent hooves, so there was no sound to