families and taken across a vast ocean to a foreign land. It was not just that he sorted through them and decided which ones would receive a fate worse than death. Wasn’t being fed to the soul catcher worse than death? They lost their bodies. Their identity. They became the life fuel of strangers. They died, yet were reborn more completely as slaves to others than any that labored in the thread fields or as builders or farmers or served as fodder for military slaughter.
Not just the fact that he was responsible for this. He went further. For a time, he chose the children he would reserve for himself. Not all Lothan Aklun took souls into themselves, but he did. In his youth this was because he hungered for years and years of life in which to punish Tinhadin’s people. He did not care that one who accepts a soul inside himself loses the ability to father children. That did not matter, not when he could go on forever. He set his hands on the shoulders of child after child. He smiled in their faces and looked through their eyes and into them. If he truly liked what he saw, he had only to nod, or gesture with his fingers, and the child was his.
There is more.
With the passing of decades he aged. Physically, no, but still, he aged inside. His body stayed young, but as he passed the normal span of a long mortal life he began to forget his own childhood. The lack of it became a yawning chasm chasing him. His work grew harder. He felt different when he set his hands on children’s shoulders and looked into them. More and more often, his gaze lingered on their faces, on the small curves of their muscles and the lines of their collarbones. More and more, he found a beauty in their small, growing life.
One day, performing his duties as selector, he met a boy. Perhaps it would have happened with another boy or a girl. The next day or the week after or in a year’s time. It would have happened at some point, he now believed, but fate had it that it was this boy. Ebrahem, a Halaly boy from one of the tiny villages along the western coast of Talay. The boy gazed up at Na Gamen’s face with timorous, hungry, desperate hope. He had seen this expression a thousand times. All the boy’s hopes were there on his face. All his dreams written in the lines of his lips and the bushy flares of his eyebrows and in the uneven circlets of his nostrils. All the things he had left behind, all that would not be for him-the loved ones lost, the home he would never see again.
Na Gamen knew all these were there, things that he had always thought small, just punishments. Childish things that he recognized because in them he recognized himself. He had always understood them, and, understanding, he had found the strength to be cruel. But this time, written there… was nothing. Features like he had seen before, and yet this time he saw nothing but the boy himself.
L ater that night, after telling both his stories, Dariel could not find sleep. Birke lay flat on his back, snoring. Bashar sat beside him, studying the night. Cashen walked the patrol he had set up from their boulder down to the hollow where the others were and back again.
Nothing but the boy himself, Dariel thought. He remembered the boy’s face as if he had seen it with his own eyes. That face began to change Na Gamen from what he was into what he became. Dariel wondered if Val had seen the same thing on the night he found Dariel shivering and hopeless in a mountain shack in Senival. He had never considered the changes he created in his adopted father’s life. He had shied away from thoughts of himself. Perhaps he had changed Val. Maybe that was what he was telling him when he stayed behind to set the platforms ablaze.
“I’ve never forgiven you for that,” he whispered.
“For what?” Anira’s voice startled him. She had walked up behind Cashen and stood with her face shadowed. Her body, in silhouette, was muscularly feminine, strong as a man’s but contoured like the woman she was.
“You like seeking me out in the night?”
“Yes, I do. I hope you’re more vigilant when you’re on watch.”
“Sorry. My mind is elsewhere.”
“Elsewhere can be a good place to be,” she said. After studying him for a moment, she added, “Or not. Sometimes it’s better to be right here. Are you worried about tomorrow?”
“Should I be?”
“I used to be afraid of Yoen… when I was a child. When I grew up, I learned to love him. He’s gentle, wise. Deliberate. He’ll see through you if you lie to him. So don’t do that.”
“I hadn’t planned on it.”
“Then you’ve nothing to fear. Now, tonight, come swim with me. There’s a pool just down the ravine a little.”
“It’s too cold,” Dariel said.
“We can warm each other. Come.” She stretched a hand toward him.
C hildren are how we return to youth, Na Gamen had said. There is no other way. A span of years does not make one immortal. Children do .
That was why he selected that boy whose face told him nothing. He did not take the boy to the soul catcher. It took him some time to understand what was happening to him, but he knew it was not the boy’s soul he wanted. He did not want to steal his life. Instead, he watched him. The boy lived in his fabulous palace. Na Gamen let him explore it, fed him, had him cared for. He watched as the child lost his timidity and began to play. He marveled at the sound of his laughter, at the way he made stories in his head. He brought another boy to him. And then a girl.
There, in secret, I became the father that I couldn’t be. I raised child after child. For years upon years I thought nothing of it. It was simply my way, a kindness I did to my slaves, treating them as my children. That’s how I thought of it. In truth, it was more than that. I had forgotten my own childhood. Do you understand? I had forgotten part of what it means to be human. Without them, I would have lost my humanity entirely.
Na Gamen told of how much he loved to have them near. The vibrancy within them. The innocence. The capacity to heal and thrive no matter what the world threw at them. He gave those children the happiest lives he could. He gave to them-for increasingly it felt like he owed them and the other quota children a great debt-but they also gave to him. He watched them grow into men and women over and over again, and then grow old and die. In all of it he learned and relearned the natural order of life.
They made me human again, Na Gamen said. After all the wrongs I did to them, they made me human again.
Why did you walk away from that? Dariel asked. How did you end up here?
The Watcher’s ears flexed and rippled in the air currents. It took him some time to find the words to go on with. Eventually, his voice resumed inside Dariel’s head.
I had a network of swimming pools on the upper level of my palace. I didn’t swim in them myself. Hadn’t for hundreds of years. But the children did. One day I was lounging near the pools, at a short distance. There was a barrier. He divided the air in front of his face with the edge of his hand, squinting one eye closed. I could see the edge of the pool, but not the area just next to it. Two boys… I remember their names, but I’ll hold them inside me, if you don’t mind. Two boys would both run to the edge as if to jump in, but pull back at the last minute. I would just see them appear, sprinting suddenly at the edge, in motion and then skidding, arms wheeling around to stop them. One would tease the other. Plead to jump the next time. Again and again they did this. I wanted to call out to them to stop it. They might slip and crack their heads. The words were in my throat, but I couldn’t speak. They were so joyful-and I so afraid-that I couldn’t speak.
For a moment Na Gamen’s face was warm with the memory. Then the expression faded. And that was it.
What do you mean? What was it?
Watching them, I realized for the first time that I would die so that either of them could live. That’s what I thought: I would trade my life for either of theirs in an instant. And if that were so, what sense did it make for me to steal the lives of other children? What a crime. It all came to me at once. Not understanding our crimes. I had always done that. But the knowing. That was new. The horrible knowing. It was love, Dariel. I loved those children. I had loved all of them, from Ebrahem onward. I loved them as if they were part of me. Knowing that, I could no longer sort souls. I feared what became of the stolen souls once they died. Would they know peace? Would they understand who they were, or would they be trapped in between? I knew the answers, and I hated them.
Images poured into Dariel’s mind again. He watched Na Gamen speaking before an audience of the Lothan Aklun. They watched him with faces of sublime indifference as he implored them to stop the trade. He asked them to search in their hearts. They knew how wrong it was. They knew that the punishment of Tinhadin was hurting innocents and also making them into greater villains than the one they hated. He railed at them, but he could not change their course. He could not stop them. Their hatred was too deep. If they had looked into so many children’s
