Soulgatherer, Chapter 1 of 6

We are introduced to the characters

Soulgatherer

Chapter 1, A Hare-Brained Conversation

The rabbits were talking. That was the first sign that something was amiss. A field ringed in hills and forest, busy with the sounds of leporine chatter. To be sure, most of the talk was along the lines of, “Hey, I can talk. What the hell is going on,” suggesting that they were aware of the peculiarity of the situation.
Some of the rabbits were crouching together in groups of twos or threes, others poking their heads out of warrens. There didn’t seem to be any conversations going; most of the animals were talking over each other, filling the air with a noisy babble.
Lizel Goweren picked one brown rabbit up by the scruff of the neck.
“Oi. Stop it. Want to get down,” the rabbit said as she lifted it into the air. Its almond shaped eyes were wide and blue, its huge ears quivering.
“Who did this to you,” said Lizel.
The rabbit twisted so that the eye on one side of its head was looking at her. “It’s you,” it said. A nearby group of rabbits broke off their yammer to look at her. “It’s you. It’s you,” they said, their voices falling into unison as they repeated. More and more groups turned in her direction. Some started hopping towards her. The ears of the rabbit she was holding lay back and it started bucking in her gloved hands and growling. “You. Bitch woman. Bite. Tear,” it said.
“Oh, shit,” Lizel said. Holding the rabbit down on the ground with one hand, she took some rope out of her pouch and quickly tried to tie its legs together while watching the nearest rabbits hop closer. She had just tied the knot when a black rabbit dusted with white came close to her, jumped at her and bit her on the upper part of her cheek.
Lizel stood up as other rabbits approached. “Oww, fuck,” she said. The rabbit wouldn’t let it go, and she had to support its weight with her hands lest it rip her face off. She panicked for a few precious moments, trying to pull it off, but it was impossible without losing skin. The rabbit was trying dementedly to talk as it gnawed at her, its words muffled by her flesh in its mouth. She went still and accepted the pain as she gathered a small center of calm then drew a knife from her belt and stabbed the rabbit in the side of the head twice. It held on for another horrific heartbeat and then went limp.
There were now ten or so rabbits scratching frantically at her trousers, chanting “You,” and “Bitch.” Lizel stepped on the back of one rabbit, and teetered on the edge of losing her balance. If she fell now, she probably wouldn’t get back up without grievous injury. She probably wouldn’t get back up. She kept her balance. She put one hand inside her blouse and held the crystal seashell pendant hanging on a chain around her neck. She rubbed the pendant against her chest three times, took it out, breathed on it and said a spell. Then she reached down and touched one of the rabbits. A lightning charge ran through it and spread to the whole intermingled group. With a pop and a snap, they were soon all still, some smoking.
Lizel picked up a rock and used it to draw a circle in the dirt and grass around the rabbit she had tied up. Then she took the rabbit she had stabbed and cut its throat open. More rabbits were almost upon her, twice as many as before. She drank from the blood running from the black rabbit’s neck. It was salty and bitter. She rubbed her pendant again, planted her feet firmly and faced the oncoming fluffle.
Her psyche crashed into the herd mind, causing the rabbits to stop mid hop, some of them flopping over in a way that would look cute out of context. The blood she had swallowed formed a bridge from her mind to theirs. “Who did this to you,” she said. But she knew.
“Man. Short man. Pale man,” they said. She saw him burning in their brains. Derrick Okasto. The man she was hunting.
“Which way did he go?” East. Into the woods. She took a deep breath and then heaved at them with her mind. Derrick’s mental splinter shifted but resisted. She heaved again, straining. The splinter broke free. Some of the rabbits fell to the ground again, jerking spasmodically, their primitive minds shattered. Others shook themselves and wandered away, the madness slowly fading.
Lizel performed one more spell to heal the wound on her face, but she was near exhaustion and could not remove it completely. She fell to the ground and passed out on the grass, the last thing she heard being the cursing and wailing of the brown rabbit, safe in its circle.
***
Professor McDurgle walked along the stone corridors of the Ravendish Academy of Magic, as he’d done many times prior. Students and other lecturers moved up and down the narrow halls with him or against, in varying degrees of lateness, past open windows looking out into the city. There was much squeezing and jostling, and even the occasional apology. The hall could just about fit two people side by side without touching, if neither of them regularly overindulged in the meal hall’s sticky pudding. But the differing speeds and senses of urgency in some members of the traffic flow required a level of overtaking that the narrow confines made difficult.
Some of them were no doubt racing him to the very class he was soon to start teaching. He did not recognize most of them. The academy had far too many students, and he had far too little desire to remember them in any case. He had been teaching at the academy for fifty years and had long ago stopped paying attention to the carousel of names attached to the in-varying-degrees-of-sleep faces sat in front of him in his first year classes.
But there was one student he was aware of, and McDurgle knew he wouldn’t see him rushing about in the hallways. Dalton Goodwill would already be seated in the lecture hall, ready to learn everything the professor could teach. The boy had a facility for absorbing and mastering arcane knowledge that was... formidable. He had come to the school an orphan, parents unknown. At the orphanage that raised him, he had shown remarkable natural talents (he had turned his caretakers into a herd of goats), and Ravendish had agreed to withhold his tuition until such a time as he could earn for himself. The orphanage had agreed to hand the lad over in return for not having to deal with him anymore, and for certain human-animal transformations to be reversed.
McDurgle turned right and went down another hallway, narrower but empty, sloping precipitously downwards. He came to the teacher’s entrance of Bindell lecture hall, the floor now boarded in wood. He clomped across a brief passage and went out into the hall. Benches designed to seat two hundred were stacked before him in rows of ten, one to each side of a central path that led up to carved wooden doors. Most of the benches were occupied, a few stragglers sitting down as he came in, but his eyes went direct to Goodwill. He never sat in the same place every class, but McDurgle could always find the boy instantly, was drawn by some kind of magnetism towards the boy with the bowl cut. Some day, that child would be running this academy. Or would destroy it. Could he truly be the one prophesied? He had the mark...
Professor McDurgle made his voice gruff to hide his awe. “Hankenthorpe’s five principles of magic circle design,” he said, making little effort to reach the eleven year olds at the back of the room, some of whom leaned forward to hear him better. Goodwill seemed particularly eager today, bright eyed and grinning.
“I say circle, but in fact the whole point of the principles is that different shapes can be used to different effects. ‘Hakenthorpe’s five principles of magic ellipses and polygons’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, haha.” A few students smiled reflexively because they saw the teacher laughing at something, but for most the opening quip dropped like a stone into a mud pie. Goodwill, however, smiled even more broadly and seemed to be chuckling a little from his open mouth.
“Yes, well...” McDurgle said. “Who can tell me the relationship between angle:circumference ratio and netherplane frequency?” None of the boys and girls present moved. Of course. The question was too advanced for their age, but he had been hoping... he glanced again at Dalton Goodwill. The same fixed grin and wide eyes, but no sign that he was about to answer the question.
“Yes, well,” McDurgle said. He explained how to make effective magic circles as patiently as he could, even drawing one or two to create a flash of light or a puff of smoke to keep everyone awake.
“Now when we input netherplane frequency into our calculations,” he said, “we also have to realize that different areas have different frequencies. The frequency here in the capital is zero, because, anyone?”
“Because the capital was used as the benchmark?” someone said near the back.
“Very good,” said McDurgle. There isn’t anything particularly unique about our frequency, but since we are the greatest city state in the world, our frequency is the one to which all other frequencies are compared. If it is harder in an area to gain access to thaumic energy, that area has a positive netherplane frequency, and if it is easier, negative. The mountains just outside the city state tend to be a natural barrier that helps to maintain the stability of our frequency in this area. Just beyond the mountains are areas where the frequency is quite low and the magic is wild and dangerous. Just as well all you young ladies and gentlemen are safe here with us.”
Movement drew McDrugle’s eye. Dalton Goodwill was rocking backwards and forwards on his bench, the students to either side of him looking at him askance and edging away as far as they could go in the press.
“I say,” McDurgle said. “Are you all -”
Dalton Goodwill vomited black bile down three rows of chairs that hit McDurgle square on the chest as if thrown from a bucket right in front of him.
“Great Zanu’s nutsack,” said McDurgle, covering his face against the deluge. The students chorused a massive “Eeeeew” as if from one giant throat. The students sitting directly in front of Goodwill were worse off than Durgle, completely drenched in pitch black from their heads to their chests. Some of them started climbing over their neighbors to escape, creating a chain reaction of revulsion.
“Holy shit, what the fuck!” said McDurgle, as Goodwill’s mouth stretched wider and wider, splitting his face open. The deluge of bile had reduced to a trickle, but something else was coming out. Goodwill’s face was folding out, the cheeks and neck pushing up inside of him while the insides came out. But what came out wasn’t tongue and teeth. It was something barbed, black and chitinous.
“Get away from him, everyone,” McDurgle said, his voice ringing from the back of the hall. He rubbed briskly at the glob of slime on his robes and shook as much of the sticky substance off his hands as he could. The circle around Goodwill was widening rapidly as students rushed for the door. The dark object coming from his mouth extended in jointed segments ending in a tip that groped around blindly before settling on a bench. It was a leg, oh gods it was a leg. Goodwill’s body became small and shriveled as the thing within him emerged. McDurgle pulled his wand from his belt and cast a binding spell at the boy. Half of a mandabled thorax had appeared, suggesting the inversion would culminate in a giant spider. Its progress halted as the spell took hold. The spider jerked and heaved against the grip of it. What remained of the boy’s body held firm, but the spider was slowly pulling free. Goodwill’s mouth was now open one hundred and eighty degrees, his eyes pointing back towards the student entrance, where screaming students were now jammed in together, pushing and shoving to get out.
The teacher strained to hold onto the creature through the husk of the boy’s body. He should have waited for the creature to emerge first and then bind that. Stupid old fool. He tried to hold on until all the students had left, but there were too many of them, his grip too tenuous. He let go, and the spider sprang into the air, completely turning all the rest of the boy’s body inward, and landed on the benches. It regarded McDurgle with a clutch of small red eyes, and he readied himself for an attack. But then it turned and bounded up towards the students. He cast ice, trying to freeze the monster, not wanting to permanently harm any of the crowd around it. It leapt away, the ice covering three chairs and attaching one girl by the back of her robe as she fled. Her robe ripped half off, but she just staggered and kept running.
There were still about ten students pushing at the doorway. Some of them saw the spider leap at them with a hideous squeal, and they managed to jump aside. Some were facing away from the spider and never saw it until it had landed on their backs, shoving them hard into the people in front of them. McDurgle cast a spell of constitution. It was a dangerous spell to cast, because while it seemed to give you energy, it also hid from you how much energy you were using to cast the spells in the first place, so that you could keep casting it and feel like a god right up until you dropped dead. He used the rush of adrenaline to run up the stairs. The spider had four of its legs on the floor, the other four wrapped around one boy and one girl, its fangs stabbing wildly into both of them, venom dripping from the wounds. As he came closer, McDurgle could see that the narrow hallway was a crush of panic. Some students were being pushed against walls, others trampled under foot, those in the middle hardly able to move at all. The two students being bitten were going stiff and spasming, their mouths foaming. If the spider got past them, dozens would die. He had to act now.
He cast reversal, hoping to turn the spider back into the boy. No effect. Damn, damn. Beneath his magical energy, his years of experience told him he was running dangerously low. “Ah, fuck it,” he said, and hurled a fireball at the thing, hitting it square in the abdomen. It dropped the two children and turned freakishly quickly to regard him once more. He hurled another, hitting it in the face. It screamed a horrible scream. All the students were finally out of the lecture hall, except for the unfortunate lad and lass lying on the floor. McDurgle screamed back, hurling ball after ball of flame. Two more hit before the spider could dodge aside. He cast razor whip, slicing off one of the spider’s back legs and one of its spinnerets. The spider lunged at him. He raised his fists in the air and brought them down hard, slamming the spider into the ground with a massive thrust of blunt force.
The spider’s body cracked open like a dropped coconut, splashing him with green fluids to accompany the black. He collapsed onto a bench, wheezing and retching from the foul odors, gasping for breath, the screams of the fleeing students fading into the distance.
***
Rachael Hertzevitz sat in her small apartment, looking in front of her at a patch of morning sun on the table of her small combined kitchen/dining room. She was sleepy. She had to go to work. She dunked her cup into her tub of drinking water and took a long sip. She went over and looked out the window. From five stories up, she had a decent view of her slice of the city. Roofs tiled in red mingled with roofs tiled in white and roofs of wooden planks, spreading out in concentric circles, until they were bisected by other circles, like ripples of a handful of rocks thrown into a pond. People, horses and carts moved in and out between the buildings, stalls, statues, loiterers, prostitutes, cutpurses and con artists, shoulder to shoulder, animating the cobbled arteries of the city. In the distance, rearing above the other buildings, was the grim, austere tower of the Ravendish Academy of the Occult Arts, pointing at the overcast sky like a crooked finger in black stone.
Rachel stuck her head out of the window, treating her nose to the everpresent stench of mingled human and animal excreta. How easy it would be to just ease herself out a little further, a brief rush of air, and then... She would almost certainly hit someone. Day and night, people scurried beneath her window. It was the city that never let people sleep. If she hit one of them and survived... Talk about awkward!
The Academy tower reminded her of work again. She didn’t work there, but she worked with one of its graduates. Rachel was a clerk for an insurance company that hired a wizard who worked in the claims department. Her hand went to the glass bead in the pocket of her sleeping robe.
I can’t, she thought. I have to go to work.
I have to, she thought, so that I can make it to work. Just a little bit.
She pulled the bead out of her pocket. It was about the size of her fingernail, shaped like a teardrop, pearly white on the outside with a pink inner light, pulsing. The wizard, Allayard, had given it to her a few days ago, slipping it into her hand when they were on a break together. Its glow was diminishing, but there was still enough left for a few uses.
She rubbed the bead vigorously between her fingers for a few seconds and then placed it against her forehead. The bead, or whatever was inside it, created a viewing portal into another dimension. A dimension with no known life, certainly uninhabitable by humans. The wizards who had discovered this place had died. The following wizards who had investigated without actually going in had gone insane. Instead of sealing up this phenomenon as inherently dangerous, of course people had kept prodding at it, testing, daring, and eventually safe limits had been established. If you stare into the abyss for just a certain length of time, at just such an intensity, you won’t die. You won’t go insane - at least, not at the time. But you will feel something. You will be... transported.
The pink light filled her mind. Her eyes still worked, but she would have to concentrate to use them. She had two points of view now, her cramped living space, and the pink glow. And the pink was the more interesting choice. That was the preferable thing, for sure.
It wasn’t that the Pink, as users capitalized it, was particularly remarkable to look at. It was just various shades and clumps of the color that moved and shifted around like wind tossed seas. But as Rachael watched those waves, something in her mind started to... melt. Her sense of caring, of worry. Those early pioneers of this magic had lost their inhibitions to the extent that they just stepped through their holes in reality and never came back alive. But if you knew what you were doing, rode the crest of the wave up to the point just so... you could spend the next hour walking on air.
Rachael fumbled the bead back into her pocket and floated, rocking back and forth on her wooden dining chair, head lolling. She rose up as if lifted on a gentle breeze and prepared for work, relying on her hands so that her eyes could stay focused on her internal visions. Then she was locking the door behind her. Then she was moving downstairs. Then she was outside. She had to flip her focus from inside to outside, something any functional zone gazer soon learned to do. The pink was still there, warm and comforting, but with the colors turned down. It was sad, that turning down, like a little death, but better that than the long journey to work with nothing at all.
Her feet seemed to touch the ground for the first time in minutes, and she let them carry her into the flow of humanity and off to earn her daily bread.