Unwilling Souls: Unwilling Souls, #1

By Gregory D. Little

The gods are rightfully imprisoned, and Ses intends to keep them that way.

But her rebel father has other plans.

Ses is the daughter of powerful parents who would very much like to kill one another and who therefore pretend she doesn't exist. An apprentice jailer of the gods, Ses spends her days learning to forge the tools needed to maintain the gods' prison.

When her father attacks the prison on her sixteenth birthday, Ses is forced to flee after the secret of her parentage is revealed. Suddenly on the wrong side of the law, Ses realizes the very father who abandoned her may be the only one who can protect her.

But some secrets are darker than parentage. On her way to find her father, Ses will uncover truths about her family and herself that will shatter her understanding of the world and risk the return of the gods themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gregory D. Little
• Release date: Nov 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9781516384129

Gregory D. Little

Gregory D. Little is the author of the Unwilling Souls series, set in a world where technology is powered by the souls of the dead, the gods are locked away in the hollowed-out center of the planet, and what remains of humanity has rebuilt its cities out of the corpses of the great beasts that destroyed them. His short stories can be found in the A GAME OF HORNS, DRAGON WRITERS, UNDERCURRENTS, and ECLECTICALLY SCIENTIFIC anthologies. He writes the kind of stories he likes to read, fantasy and science fiction tales featuring vivid worlds, strong characters, and smart action where nothing is as it seems.

Book preview

1

Birthday Surprise

Slouched in a rigid chair in the open-air pavilion used for morning lessons, Ses Lucani stared idly up at the dome of roiling magma above her head. Of course, there was no true up in the Pit any more than there was a down . Aside from walkable surfaces that were specially maintained, gravity didn't work down here.

High enough that she could almost believe it was a sky of endless flame, Ses found the oozing play of the magma's light hypnotic. Sometimes the beauty of it could even keep her from imagining all that magma breaking through its invisible restraints and pouring down to bury them all in a molten avalanche.

Six months in the Pit and Ses still longed for the sky of the world above, the piercing blue of day and the glittering majesty of the Whirlpool at night. She even missed watching the clouds roll in over the marsh, gray and flat, as though mourning the coming rain. There was never rain in the Pit. There was never weather in the Pit, unless always-hot-and-dry counted.

The souls of the dead have to give themselves willingly to be part of a wrighting, Master Glinn was saying. Why some choose to let themselves be harvested, where others do not is a mystery, but many believe they desire a chance to influence the living world again. Soul energy can't interact with the physical world, not unless it's injected into properly shaped nife iron.

Being in charge of all operations in the Pit didn't mean Master Glinn stopped teaching initiates. Ses suspected he enjoyed teaching best. And since Ses seems so interested in the magma where all the nife iron is found, the big man continued, making Ses start, perhaps she can tell us—

What Ses could tell the rest of the class was never made clear, because just then the klaxon began blaring out an alert. Ses bolted upright in her seat, the beginnings of embarrassment giving way to fear. For an instant she was sure the magma really was raining down. Then she recognized the alarm and felt even worse.

Her sudden motion caused a curl of dirty-blonde hair to tumble in front of her face, obscuring one blue eye. Ses brushed the hair back, wincing as it snagged in one of her eyebrow studs. She focused on working it free, trying to ignore the knot of dread tightening in her stomach.

Master Glinn frowned up at the wall-mounted alarm in stoic confusion. Some of the blacksmith initiates started talking in excited tones.

Ses thought if she opened her mouth, she might throw up.

The alarm was coming from one of the temples. That meant a possible intruder in the Pit. Real intruders were hard to come by when one lived in the great, hollowed-out space in the center of the planet. But that was all the more reason to take the possibility of one seriously.

Not today. Ses mentally groaned. Why today?

Glinn's implacable eyes fixed on her. Singscreamer's temple by the sound of it, he said.

Each temple had its own distinct alarm pattern, though only Master Glinn bothered to memorize all of them.

You're up, birthday girl.

His words were gentle yet firm. They sounded to Ses like the iron door of a prison slamming shut. He knew how much she hated the temples, but that wouldn't get her off the hook. Master Glinn valued duty ahead of everything else.

Ses tried not to show her fear as she rose from her desk in the lecture pavilion. The squat, gray wall of the barracks loomed behind her, solid as a mountain save for the dots of tiny windows. The klaxon mounted to that wall still blared.

This was bound to happen eventually.

Any apprentice smith could be sent to investigate possible intruders once they reached the age of sixteen. But tradition demanded the youngest of those eligible investigate first.

Maintaining the prison of the gods was the paramount duty in the Pit. The older and more experienced a smith was, the more important they were to that maintenance. Secondary duties, like keeping the temples free of fanatics or thrill-seekers, fell to the apprentices. Ses was sixteen today, so there was nothing to do but avoid making a fool out of herself as she left.

Birthdays are not supposed to be like this.

Ses made her way toward the curving causeway that led to the launch platform. The chatter from the other students had stopped. An eager silence filled the pavilion, and a cruel anticipation hung in the air.

As she walked, Ses caught a whisper from among the students. Look how terrified she is!

Ses didn't need to look. It had been Brea's voice, probably directed at her boyfriend, Cadmus, and purposefully pitched for Ses to hear.

I heard she hears voices at the temples, Brea continued in her not-whisper.

Ses felt her face flame red. Every apprentice, sixteen or not, had been to at least a few of the temples. Glinn occasionally performed lectures at a temple if he felt the setting was relevant to the subject matter, but Ses had never been to one alone. That Brea's little rumor was true made that feeling worse. How did that get out?

I'll bet they whisper dirty little secrets to her, Brea went on, around a throaty giggle.

No talking, Master Glinn said, his scowl evident in his tone. Everyone but Ses, eyes to me.

The other students turned their attention back to Glinn, and Ses's steps came a bit easier. The causeway bent as it descended. Eventually the lecture pavilion was out of sight and that made things easier still. Yet by the time Ses arrived at the launch platform, fear had knotted her stomach so tight she forgot to be overawed by the fiery backdrop of the Pit's distant dome of molten rock.

The platform was circular and, aside from a raised, studded lip that ran along the edge, totally without guardrail. Lacking gravity, if you lost your footing at an edge, you'd just drift lazily off until someone hooked you and reeled you back in.

It happened to everyone sooner or later. For Ses, it had been Cadmus's response to her shy attempt to talk to him on her second day. Bodily thrown from the nearest edge, Ses had shrieked, certain she was going to fall to her death while Brea and Cadmus had brayed like donkeys. Master Glinn had put an end to it, roaring for the pair to fetch a pole-hook.

Three of those hooks stood mounted in brackets, one in each of the three equipment racks spaced along the edge of the platform. At the far end, a wirework map of the Pit's spherical interior stood on a squat pedestal. Both pedestal and map were the same sooty gray as the platform, the barracks, and most everything else in the Pit.

A quick check of the map confirmed Singscreamer's temple was directly up relative to the barracks' position near the center of the Pit. Ses turned her eyes to the temple, miles above her head in the great, spherical emptiness. From this distance, the pervasive red-orange glare obscured most detail. The temple looked like a small black star in a roiling, fiery sky.

In truth, the temple was set into the inner surface of the spherical bubble of molten rock that marked the Pit's edge. Staring up from the great sphere's center, Ses let her eyes linger on the temple, as though they could pick out who or what might be tripping alarms there.

Stop stalling, and get on with it.

Sighing, she approached the racks of assorted wrightings. Each of the varied objects was made of Pit-mined nife iron, forged by full smiths or apprentices like her. The shape of the wrighting determined its purpose, but all wrightings had to be injected with soul energy in order to function. While Ses had become skilled enough to contribute her own forge work to the general stockpile for about a month, she didn't recognize any of her pieces in the racks.

She began by strapping wrighted clingers to her shoulders and forearms. Forged into a round, flat plate, a clinger's roughened side would grip fast to whatever solid surface it touched and could be locked in place so it wouldn't release.

Next, Ses pulled a well-worn agonizer from a row full of them. The slate gray shaft and wicked prongs at one end caught the Pit's red light, making the agonizer seem to glow with a baleful menace. It would dispense debilitating pain upon anyone unfortunate enough to come into contact with those prongs.

Hopefully I won't need it.

A pair of goggles with smoked crystal lenses came next. They weren't wrightings, just a way to help see through the Pit's glare. The repulsors were the last bit of equipment Ses needed, but those were already mounted to the soles of her boots. They looked like thick, triangular coins, slightly warped, and with curved edges.

Ses approached the platform's raised edge. Sets of repulsors were fixed all along it in pairs, each about a shoulder's width from its mate. Bending over to find a matching set, she blinked in irritation as her mop of hair fell over her eyes again. She pushed it back—gingerly this time—then pulled a string from one of her many pockets and tied the mess behind her ears.

Once she found a repulsor set with hash markings matching those in her boots, Ses squatted above them, balanced on the balls of her feet. And there she paused. Dread weighed her down, rooting her in place.

There's never been a real intruder in the six months I've been down here, or for years before that. The temple alarms were notoriously finicky. If Master Glinn thought this was for real, he would send more than just one apprentice. Just get this over with.

Sighing again, Ses gripped her agonizer in both hands, but ended up tucking it under one arm. After the second time, she nearly lost her balance. Though her arms and shoulders were well-muscled from six months of learning to work a forge, her legs had no such advantages, and they protested the squat.

Ses turned her eyes back upward, pressed her heels down to bring the boot repulsors into contact with their mates on the platform. She almost lost her agonizer and nearly bit through her tongue as the repulsors came to life, their overlapping repulsion fields driving them apart and launching Ses forcefully into the empty space of the Pit.

A few seconds up, the hot, dry wind pushing back at Ses, grew strong enough to steal her breath. The first time this had happened, she'd gasped like a fish. This time she patiently held it.

Soon she'd hurtled far enough away from the barracks that the spherical energy fields of the repulsors on her boots no longer overlapped with their mates' on the platform. Once freed of one another's influence, Ses's upward acceleration stopped and the wind lessened as she gradually slowed. Soon enough she could breathe again.

The vast, spherical chamber of the Pit crawled by as Ses shot toward the temple. Looking left and right, she could see other temples dotting the glowing wall of magma at regular intervals, like constellations arranged in precise, unchanging geometry.

Looking back down, Ses could see the great silhouette of the Globe and the much smaller silhouette of the barracks complex that orbited it. They fell away beneath her as she flew. The Globe was the true core of the planet, a sphere of pure nife iron a mile in diameter. Its surface had been fashioned by human hands into a perfect miniature replica of the surface world above. It was the reason they were all down here.

The gods were imprisoned within it.

When Ses looked up again, Singscreamer's temple had grown alarmingly close. Her sense of orientation flipped, and it now seemed as if she was nose-diving from a great height. A familiar panic welled up in her.

I'm not falling. I am not falling.

It was no use. Her gut still told her she was falling every time. That was all right. With none of her fellow initiates around to see her do it, she could stick the landing gracefully for once.

The temple's landing platform seemed to rush up at her as she hurtled headfirst toward impact. Ses was about to orient herself for a safe landing when she noticed a dark shape on the platform, picked out in the Pit's fiery light. She squinted, but even with the help of her goggles, the glare this close to the magma wall made it hard to see. Whatever the strange object was, it sat directly in the center of the temple's landing platform. Uncharacteristically, this was also exactly where Ses had managed to aim when she'd launched herself from the barracks.

In a flash of fear, not just that she was going to hit the object, but also that it might be the intruder, Ses began whirling her arms. Clawing at the air while hurtling through the Pit wouldn't alter her course much, but a small change was all she needed. After a few seconds of frantic motion, she judged she'd done enough to miss the mystery object then realized she'd forgotten to orient herself for landing.

Most of her momentum had bled away, but without her feet facing the right direction, all Ses could do was twist in space to present her back, then go limp at the last possible second. Her right shoulder impacted the platform with a lance of pain.

Ses came to rest in a heap as one of her clingers took hold of the platform surface. Without the clinger's grip, she might have bounced high enough to escape the temple's local gravity field and drifted off.

Wincing, she pivoted about the clinger to the platform and found an angry, yellow face staring back at her. It took Ses a glimpse of LARIMAINE DUNSINAY in giant block lettering to realize she'd almost collided with one of her father's wanted placards. Made of yellow paper glued to the center of a freestanding, wooden frame, the placards were updated monthly. The sight of her father's unrecognizable face drawn in the center of the paper made her piercings itch.

You'd think I'd be used to it by now.

In truth, she mostly was, but as her birthday fell on the first of Tellin, the placards were a special cruelty once a year. The new duties brought by this particular birthday were just salt in the wound.

Ses groaned in pain as she released her clinger. She struggled to stand, her robes tangling around her feet. Glancing reflexively back the way she'd come, she felt her face flush, worried someone had seen her gracelessness. But it was a silly fear. The distance was too great, the light too poor.

She turned back to the placard, scowling. The Centrality officials weren't supposed to place the placards right in the center of a temple's landing platform.

No wonder I almost hit it.

The likeness drawn into the placards changed so much every month, it was often like looking at a different person. A part of her felt guilty for secretly rooting for her father's terrorist organization. But though the Centrality's presence in the Pit was minimal, she'd seen what the government was capable of back on the surface. In her secret heart, she was thrilled that they didn't know what her father looked like any more than Ses herself did.

But staring at the image of a burly, bearded face with a permanent sneer rendered in charcoal quickly soured her. She dragged the placard out of the platform's center and off toward one side so the next poor soul would not repeat her mistake.

The Globe hung miles above her head, now seemingly up where it had previously been down. The same would be true of every temple dotting the Pit's inner surface. Stand at any of them, and the Globe would look like it was still above you.

The Pit could really destroy a person's sense of direction.

Where the temples looked like black stars in a fiery sky, the Globe, when viewed from the temples, was like a lightless sun that never set, always in silhouette to the magma behind it. It was hard not to marvel at. But she was here for Singscreamer's temple, not to stare at the gods' prison. Ses turned and headed toward the temple entrance.

The trapezoidal opening yawned before her, rimmed in the same familiar slate gray and wider than it was tall. The term temple was unofficial and sarcastic, worship of the gods forbidden as it was. This structure, and the others like it, had two real purposes. Neither related to worship.

Hugging the spherical interior of the Pit, the temples were in fact huge wrightings. Each had been constructed from a single piece of nife iron, an incredible feat. The temples secured dangerous artifacts recovered from the gods at the end of the Immurement War. Collectively, the temples also formed the wrighted lattice that kept all the molten rock and metal from collapsing into the Pit.

All around the landing platform, that burning liquid rock seethed and bulged, fighting to push past the invisible net of soul energy holding it at bay. The same energy held back the heat and fumes. Without it, Ses would have already passed out and suffocated.

The last of the pain in her shoulder faded in proportion to the volume of the whispers. The breathy words were nonsense delivered in a hushed voice only Ses could hear. Most of the time she couldn't understand the whispers, but she could hear the emotion behind them, always strong and mostly negative.

She'd tried to make Master Glinn believe her while being careful not to mention it in front of the other initiates. Too many horror stories was the distinct message she'd gotten from his kindly, patient reply. She'd almost written Grandfather about it, but was certain he wouldn't understand.

The whispers always set Ses on edge, as though someone was speaking to her from just over her shoulder. Sometimes she even imagined she could feel breath puff lightly against the raised hairs of her neck. The sensation was extra strong today, and she clutched a little harder to her agonizer. Its worn, smooth grip felt alive in her hands, and she kept the wicked prongs at the end of the nife iron shaft facing carefully away. It would not discriminate in delivering its pain.

I won't need it, anyway.

The intruder detection wrightings malfunctioned frequently. Most likely, the alarm had been set off by whichever Centrality official had placed the wanted placard. None of this would be necessary if they could simply restrict access to the temples, but some trick of their function as wrightings required the inner chambers of each to remain open.

It's going to be nothing. I just have to prove it.

Ses entered the temple and began her sweep of its eight radial spokes at a brisk walk, head constantly swiveling as she sought for any sign of intrusion. The star-shaped temple's floor hugged the magma wall of the pit and therefore curved almost imperceptibly upward to her eyes.

Wrighted sconces, like slender urns, stood at intervals near the bases of the slanted inner walls. They emitted pale, pure light, but the passage was still gloomy. The slight flicker of older sconces gave the shadows a queasy, unbalanced look as they flickered against metal walls pitted like old, damp stone.

In contrast to the heat outside, the air within the temple felt cool and almost humid, as though to resist the Pit's natural order. The whispers grew more insistent with each step inward, but Ses was as thorough in her sweep as her fear allowed. Each hallway ran straight to the temple's heart with no side passages or adjoining rooms. There weren't many places an intruder could hide.

She reached the temple's center without incident. A hooded, leather apron and tall, wide-brimmed hat stood behind a ring-shaped wall of wrighted nifeglass. Perched upon a thick, ornate stand of nife iron, they looked as if they were on display for sale at a leatherworker's shop.

Though the artifacts had once belonged to Singscreamer himself, they looked curiously human-sized for a god. Ses moved on quickly, having no wish to linger near the heart of such a creepy place. The whispers were loudest near the display, almost intelligible. Today the voice behind them sounded eager.

Eight times she passed the display, twice for each opposing pair of spokes of the star-shaped temple. Eight times she skirted the edge of the central chamber to avoid the artifacts, wondering why they were displayed at all. The knot in her stomach swelled with every passing and each surge of the whispers.

At last, Ses was satisfied the temple was empty of trespassers. So relieved her knees shook, she walked briskly back along the entrance corridor.

I did it. She allowed herself a warm flash of pride as she crossed the threshold back out onto the landing platform. All that worry, and there was nothing here after all. Her thoughts trailed off as a light flared brilliant and cold above her.

Above her, the Globe was bathed in light. Ses frowned. Normally the detail of its surface was invisible from this far away. Now, however, Ses could see its miniature ocean, a replica of the single great ocean that dominated most of the surface world, limned in harsh, blue radiance.

A line of rotating rings glowing with the sapphire light had appeared in the air near the Globe. Each of the rings was made up of many separate shapes, massive wrightings outlining a bulky mass that was not yet visible. A hellship was returning with its latest haul of soul energy harvested from either Heaven or Hell. This was not normally a noteworthy event, but Ses had never seen one arrive so close to the Globe.

Because it's forbidden.

The realization sent a bolt of shock through her body. It faded to a chill as she understood what was about to happen. She was staring at the face of the Globe opposite the barracks, the active forges, and the lone continent of Calavaria, so there probably wouldn't be any people nearby. But this side of the Globe was where the spare forges were kept, arranged in neat, cubical grids in the air above the Globe's unbroken expanse of ocean.

The hellship was appearing in the spare forges' midst.

From this far away, it was impossible to tell exactly where the reaction began. Somewhere along those fading rings of blue light, one of the hellship's wrightings materialized inside one of the spare forges. The hellship's wrighting and the forge's wrightings merged into a single, malformed one.

The resultant flare of light dwarfed that of the hellship's arrival. It was the brightest light Ses had ever seen, scouring away the fiery glare of the Pit. Impossibly white, impossibly brilliant.

Even with her goggles, Ses was forced to shield her eyes, twisting her head away just as a rushing swell of air roared over her. This far away, it did little more than make her jump, but near the Globe it would have been a powerful shockwave.

Master Glinn, she thought, even mustering some worry for the other initiates. The light above her dimmed enough to hazard a glance. As her eyes adjusted, she saw a dark smudge appear in the direction of the explosion. Haloed by the fading glow, it grew larger by the instant.

Ses frowned, trying to decipher what sort of phenomenon she was seeing. The study of wrightings merging and interfering with one another was an abstract, arcane subject, and no one really understood how such interactions would manifest—

Ses hurled herself to one side, her instinct recognizing what her conscious mind hadn't. She curled up, covering her head just as a scorched, smoking chunk of hellship smashed down directly where she'd been standing and gaping like an idiot.

The temple rang like a gong from the force of the impact. Ses's teeth rattled in her head, and her body bounced free of the temple platform's local gravity field. Small bits of debris pelted her from above and behind, leaving a pattern of stinging burns even through the thick leather of her robes.

Clawing her way back down into the gravity, Ses planted her boots and stood. Glowing with strange hybrid colors, silver-blue and red-black in turns, the hellship chunk spat smoke from the deep dent it had gouged into the platform. Large cracks fanned outward like a spider web from the point of impact.

Ses bolted to the platform's edge, frantically searching for matching repulsors to vault away. But a deep, groaning rumble staggered her. All around the temple, the magma rose and bucked against the field restraining it.

The crash weakened the field holding back the pressure.

One swell of magma lifted higher than the temple roof. Ses knelt there, waiting for the molten rock to come pouring in as the world quaked around her. But the end did not come, and the turmoil within the magma gradually subsided.

When she dared take her eyes away from the debris, Ses looked up. The part of the Globe she could see was a ruin, much of the replica world's ocean blasted away in gouts of steam. Raw nife iron glowing with heat was visible underneath as more water rushed in from the edges to fill in the gap. Oh sweet Immurement. If the explosion had breached the prison…

But for the second time in as many moments, the end did not come. The gods did not come roaring out to exact two-hundred-year-old vengeance. The prison remained whole.

After a time, Ses breathed, her muscles and bones unlocking themselves. Above her, lamps swarmed toward the damaged section of the Globe from the direction of the barracks around the far side. Those would be smiths rushing to inspect the damage. She also saw tiny black shapes launching themselves from other temples along the curvature of the inner wall to the left and right of her. Who those people were, Ses didn't know, but the sight spurred her to action.

What if this wasn't an accident? What if we're under attack? Whatever was happening, she had to get back and help. Clutching her agonizer, Ses found matching repulsors and launched herself toward the disaster unfolding above her.

2

Expulsion

Only one of the figures vaulting from the temples and converging on the wounded Globe was near, rising from another temple and closing with Ses from the left. She spared a moment considering whether to try and attack the intruder, but before she could overcome her own anxiety, she recognized Brea.

What is she doing out here?

Suspicion gripped Ses, but then she considered all the other people launching themselves toward the Globe. Were all of them initiates as well?

Brea's river of long, dark hair streamed back from a face even paler than usual. She noticed Ses and threw a haggard look her way. For once there was no cruelty in Brea's dark eyes. She looked as scared and lost as Ses felt.

Something black and fast flitted into Ses's peripheral vision. She spoke without thought. Brea, behind you!

Brea turned reflexively to look, twisting her whole body and fiercely brandishing her agonizer. The motion saved her life. A piece of ricocheted hellship debris shot past her back, opening up a tear in her robes and leaving a gleaming red line in the skin beneath. Brea hissed and clenched her teeth, but there wasn't a great deal of bleeding. It looked to Ses like a flesh wound.

When she met Ses's eye, Brea's face was a mixture of pain, wide-eyed fear, and gratitude. She looked about to speak, but her words faltered. Wincing with the motion as she visibly fought through the pain of her wound, she raised her agonizer in a salute instead. Ses felt her first flash of admiration for Brea, and a little gratitude of her own. Whatever this was, they were going to face it together.

They were within touching distance as they reached the barracks. The closest platform didn't happen to be facing in the right direction for a graceful landing, so they were forced to grab one of the many handholds that lined its bottom edge. Brea's aim had been better, but she caught Ses's