Page 9 of As Many Souls as Stars
He took the quill. ‘Where?’
‘My hand.’
The man seemed uncertain—they usually did—but, obliging, he dug the tip of the quill into Miriam’s palm, carving his signature:Christopher Harding. Shadows seeped from the open wound and ran down her arm, dripping onto the floor. Miriam watched him, unblinking. She did not feel pain.
He finished his signature. The quill disappeared.
‘It is done,’ she said. ‘The pact is made. I shall take it now.’
‘Take what?’
‘Your soul,’ Miriam said.
‘But God protects me.’
She sighed. ‘What a pity,’ she said, ‘that you seem to have misunderstood. If there is a God, Christopher Harding, He cares little for you. And even if He did—I do not answer to Him, now or ever.’
His eyes widened. ‘I—’
She reached forward and tore his soul from his body. A meteor trail of light bloomed from his chest before it collapsed into a mote in her palm. The man’s gaze became empty, and he swayed on his feet. The deal was complete.
She lifted up the soul to inspect it: an impressive specimen, truly, nearly too bright to look at. Clearly, magic ran in his blood. That was likely the result of another deal, one almost as ancient as that which had made Miriam herself. The shadows recognised the light, and they swarmed around Miriam’s hand with an almost tender familiarity.
A shame the man’s intelligence had not matched his aptitude for spells. Miriam would have usually left him as he was, to live the rest of his life semi-catatonic, unfeeling and uncaring. But she had been impressed by his efforts, and she was feeling unusually benevolent. With her free hand, she reached forward to break his neck. Dead, he slumped forward against the desk, skull rebounding on the wood.
His soul remained in her hands, and she pressed it to her tongue. When she swallowed, she could feel the fire of it course down her throat, sink into her belly, then radiate outwards to her fingertips; she sighed in satisfaction and swatted irritably at the darkness aroundher, which was tugging eagerly at her shoulders in hopes of a share of the meal.
Someone knocked on the door. ‘Father, it is Cybil,’ came a voice.
Stepping back from the desk, Miriam slipped into the shadows, making herself insubstantial. After a moment’s pause, the impatient visitor wandered into the room.
The newcomer was a young lady. She was porcelain-skinned, with long hair the startling orange-red of a polished carnelian. She wore a grey gown with an unstarched ruff that draped languidly over her collarbones. Her nose was small and upturned, her eyes large and heavy-lidded, but the remaining architecture of her face had an almost Gothic severity: her jaw cast a shadow over her neck with lines so dark and clean it almost severed her skull from her spine.
But all that paled in comparison to her soul—herextraordinarysoul—which, even through the prison-bar occlusion of her ribcage, even through the semi-opaque gauze of her skin, glowed so brightly and so intensely, it pressed a bruise onto Miriam’s vision. When she glanced away, Miriam could still see the burn of it: the shifting blue-black stain of a self so furious, so powerful, that it could feed her for decades. The soul was so bright that it was leaking light onto the floor; no wonder the shadows followed the young lady so lovingly. On her very heels, the darkness sipped from her magic, whispering, offering itself to her, desperate to trade for more—but she was deaf to its pleas. No one had taught her how to listen.
Some had such souls innately; some had them forged through adversity. Some, like the one she had just eaten, had been enhanced through generational magic. This girl—Cybil—might have been the product of all these things in tandem: a rare and potent brew. Thrumming with excitement, Miriam reached into Cybil’s mind, seeking something she could offer to her in a deal. But it was difficult to distinguish anything of clarity there. Her thoughts were freezing to the touch, hard and unforgiving as granite. Miriam could find nothing there, no crack to hook her fingers in and pry apart.
‘Father,’ Cybil said, ‘we have a letter from the Crown. They are demanding their dues, with interest. Did you not pay them this last year?’
The corpse, of course, did not respond.
‘Father,’ she repeated, this time with an edge of annoyance. ‘I did the calculations for you, as I always do. I left the ledger on your desk. What—what are you doing?’
She approached the body and laid a hand on its shoulder. When she was met with only silence, she shook it. The head lolled grotesquely against the desk.
‘Oh.’ With sudden urgency, Cybil stooped over to listen for breathing, pressing her fingers against the body’s neck. But it was a futile endeavour. The corpse’s eyes were still open and empty, its swollen tongue protruding from its mouth.
‘Oh,’ she repeated. She had a high voice that dropped low at the end of each word, like petals wilting. ‘Oh, God.’
She released the body and stood up straight. Behind her, one of the candles flickered, and her hair seemed to glow with it. Her father’s corpse lay unmoving before her. In the heavy droop of its skull, disconnected from its spine, the body seemed less human, more a ruin: an ancient statue toppled, reduced to rubble.
Cybil’s breathing sped up in panic. Her eyes fluttered, and Miriam wondered at the marvellous delicacy of that movement, the tender skin of her lids and the paleness of her lashes. And the light, thatincomparablelight, somehow grew brighter with her distress, seeping from her skin as blood from a wound. And—just as the moon glows only at night—that light seemed to have a tidal pull on the darkness around it. The shadows swarmed, wailed, desperate, ecstatic. They gathered at her feet, draped around her shoulders, drinking from that light like leeches. Miriam felt the pull too, found herself taking a half step forward. She wondered if Cybil’s soul was somehow too powerful for her body—if it would detach itself from her of its own volition, shuck off the shackles of mortality, and join Miriam in eternal existence.
And then Cybil closed her eyes. She balled her fists. She pressed her lips thin and measured her breathing, light leaking from her eyes like tears.
‘Enough, Cybil,’ she whispered. ‘Enough.’
And—as a wave pulling back from shore—her soul returned to her body, light fading.
