Scavenger of Souls Read Free Page A

so one of the kids always ended up lurching along beside me, immune to my attempts at chatter or jokes, holding a hand that dragged him more than it held him up. Zataias skipped his turn more than most. I suspected he was in on Aleka’s secret too. That would be just like him, young enough to play the grown-ups’ game even though he was old enough to guess its true purpose was to deceive.
    We descended the slight rise where we’d set up our temporary camp and entered a flat, broad valley of stone. I’d have said the terrain looked no different from the land I remembered the past seven months, but that wouldn’t have been fair to the past seven months. In fact, this area looked a lot worse. I’d grown accustomed to dust, a choking brown dust that coated every surface and rose in swirling storms when the wind blew. Out here the dust had been swept away along with everything else, exposing reddish rock that rippled like an endless series of motionless waves. If there’d ever been a human civilization in the vicinity, roads and houses and farms, it had all been leveled as completely as if a giant hand had wiped the place clean. I kept alert for possible food sources—flowering trees, river stones that could be flipped for squirming multi-legged creatures—but there truly was nothing, justan endless table of rock like an enormous tombstone.
    The river struggled along by our side, cutting a slim channel through the unvarying stone. It had shrunk to a muddy trickle, and I found it hard to believe it could ever pick up steam the way Aleka had promised. Still, we hugged its eastern shore, determined not to lose this frail lifeline. We’d never been able to stay so close to water for so long—the Skaldi had always found us by the rivers, so we’d shied from the water’s edge, making furtive trips to fill our canteens then veering off into the desert again. Being near water made me feel as if I was doing something wrong, something risky and disobedient. It wasn’t only that I was afraid something might have survived the destruction of the Skaldi nest. It was that I didn’t trust the river to last. The more we relied on it, the more we’d be lost if it ever ran dry.
    It didn’t, though. By late evening it had shriveled to the point where you could barely dunk your hands to the wrist, but it kept going.
    We swallowed another spoonful of slop from our nearly empty cans and slept by the river’s side, and when I woke, I realized what none of us had been able to tell during the dusk: the color of the stone around us had changed from rusty red to pitch black, smooth and glossy and bright in the gleam of the new day. It might have been the remains of a road if not for the fact that it was simply immense, extending as far as I could see to the east and northwest. And there was something else: stone shapes were visible all around us, notjust the usual ripples or rises in the ground but distinct forms dotting the land like black sculptures. Some of them were roughly the size of the stunted trees that grew in the desert, others no taller than a human being. They were blunt, misshapen, glazed blobs of rock without distinguishing features. But all of them gave me the eerie feeling that they’d once been alive, as if a thick, glassy layer of stone had flowed over and trapped whatever lay inside.
    Nessa tried another of her songs, but she fell silent when the stone bounced back her voice in a hollow, mocking echo. “Maybe this is the mountains?” she suggested.
    â€œDoes this look like mountains?” Wali said.
    â€œI was just asking.”
    â€œTry using your brain instead,” he muttered.
    Nessa turned on him, eyes hot, but Aleka stepped between them.
    â€œThis isn’t the mountains,” she said. “But it’s a good sign.”
    I looked around at the endless desert of black stone. How it could be a good sign of anything I couldn’t