Dorian dropped the shields. This was no attack. At least not on his body. “What is this?”
Ashaiah glanced at Jenine, then, obviously deciding he must speak the truth, said, “Should the wild men invade, this is your salvation, Your Holiness. It is your corpusarium. When General Naga speaks of the clans raising an army, this is what he means. Two years ago, a barbarian chieftain found an ancient mass grave and discovered a secret we had long thought was ours alone.”
“Raising the dead?”
“Sort of, Your Holiness.”
“Sort of?”
“The souls of men are inviolate,” Ashaiah Vul said.
“I always liked purple.”
Ashaiah blinked, not daring to chuckle. Jenine was too busy staring around in wonder. He didn’t think she even heard him. “We don’t have the power to bind men’s souls to their bodies. Your predecessors tried to make themselves immortal doing that, but it never worked well. This is different. We call it raising because we use the bones of the dead and unite them with a kind of spirit we call the Strangers. The result is the krul. They were originally called the Fallen because whenever they fall in battle, they can be raised again if a Vürdmeister is present.”
“Take me one step at a time,” Dorian ordered, his queasiness increasing.
“It starts in the pits. It always has. The Godkings have always said that the ore beneath Khaliras was powerful, and that that’s why the slaves and criminals and captured enemies are forced to work there. It’s a lie. We don’t need their service; we don’t need the ore. We need the prisoners’ bones and their agony. Their bones give us a frame. Their agony draws the Strangers.”
“What are these Strangers?” Dorian asked.
“We don’t know. Some of them have been here for millennia, but despite the length of their experiences, we are a puzzle to them. They don’t have physical bodies—though my master said that once they walked the earth, took lovers, and had children who were the heroes of old, the nephilim. The southrons claim the name was because the Strangers were once children of their One God who were thrown out of heaven.” He smiled weakly, clearly regretting saying anything about a southron religion.
“What happened?”
“We don’t know. But the Strangers long to wear flesh again. So we take the bones of our dead and sanctify them for the Strangers’ use. Incidentally, this is why Godkings have themselves cremated; they wish to avoid our use of their bones.”
“And then?”
“Real bones are necessary but not sufficient to give the fallen a sense of embodiment, and it is for embodiment that they trade their service. We give them flesh. It doesn’t have to look human. Some Godkings believed that any shape is possible, putting human bones into a horse’s or a dog’s shape. It makes binding the fallen more difficult as they wish to be men, not horses, but it makes a fine horse.”
“And the musculature, the skin and so forth, does it need to be crafted as painstakingly as the skeletons?” Dorian asked. He’d trained as a Healer, and he couldn’t imagine the intricate magic necessary to create a whole living body.
“Given the correct skeleton and enough clay and water, the Strangers help the magic form muscles and ligaments and skin. They’re never as sturdy as man. Godking Roygaris was able to craft krul that lived for a decade or more, but he was a brilliant anatomist. He was able to make krul horses, and wolves, and tigers, and mammoths and other creatures we no longer have names for.”
“They function like living beings?”
“They are living beings, Your Holiness. They breathe, they eat, they . . .”—he looked at Jenine again—“defecate. They just don’t feel as men do. Pain that would incapacitate a man will do nothing to them. They won’t complain about hunger. They will mention it if it’s gone long enough that they are about to stop functioning.”
“They speak?”
“Poorly. But they can see better in the dark than a man, though not as far. Eyes are difficult to make correctly. They make poor archers. They have emotions, but the palette is different from men’s. Fear is incredibly rare. They know that as long as the line of Godkings survives, if their body is destroyed, they will most likely be put into another sooner or later.”
“Are they obedient?”
“Perfectly, in most circumstances, but they have an incredible hatred toward the living. They won’t help build anything, not even engines of war. They only destroy. Experiments have been tried where a krul was put in a room with a prisoner and told that if he killed the prisoner, he would be killed in turn. Every time, the krul killed the prisoner. It was tried with women, with old men, with children: it didn’t matter, except they killed children more quickly. You couldn’t ask them to take a city and not kill those who surrendered. They also hunger for human flesh. Eating it seems to make them stronger. We don’t know why.”
“My father gathered these bones, but never used them.” That was odd. Dorian turned it over in his mind. Perhaps Garoth Ursuul was too decent.
“Your pardon, Your Holiness. Your esteemed father did use them, once. When Clan Hil rebelled. Afterward, he noted that the Hil fought to the last man when they knew they would be eaten and profaned. Your father said he wished to have men left alive to rule; the krul wished only for ashes. He held them off for a great emergency. The emergency never came, so there’s quite a stockpile.”
“How many do we have?”
“About eighty-five thousand. When we organize them, we have to preserve their hierarchy. Their number system is different than ours.”
“What do you mean?”
“Even our words for numbers are predicated on multiples of ten: ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million. Their number system is based on thirteen—my master said that was where our superstitions about thirteen come from. They’re rigidly bound to those numbers. A meister can lead twelve krul himself, but if he wishes to lead thirteen or more, he must master a thirteenth, which is different—a white krul called a daemon. The white krul are faster, over six feet tall, and take more magic to raise. Platoons are thirteen squads—a hundred sixty-nine krul. So after you raise thirteen squads, if you wish to add a single krul, you must raise a bone lord. Bone lords speak well, they’re smarter, tough, and they can use magic.”
“Vir?”
“No. It’s either the Talent or very similar. Thirteen bone lords make a legion. If you don’t lead it yourself, a legion needs a fiend. Thirteen fiends make an army, twenty-eight thousand five hundred sixty-one krul. Your Holiness has enough for three armies, if you can master two arcanghuls to lead the other two armies. All told, that gives you a force of more than eighty-five thousand.”
“What would happen if I had thirteen arcanghuls? What is that? Close to four hundred thousand krul?”
“I don’t know, Your Holiness.” The man looked fearful, however, and Dorian thought he was lying.
“Has it ever been tried? I won’t have you lie to me.”
The man blinked furiously. “The only rumors I’ve heard about that are blasphemous, Your Holiness.”
“As Godking, I pardon your blasphemy.”