She held up her hands, which were still transparent in the Heart of the World’s brilliant sunlight. “We’re magic, too. Maybe not as much as spirits, but it’s still a part of us. Obviously, humanity physically survived the drought, but just because our race kept multiplying doesn’t mean the loss of magic didn’t hurt us terribly. When I died, my magic was what lived on inside my death. I would have been stuck in there until it collapsed if Ghost hadn’t come to save me.”
Marci put her hand on the Empty Wind’s shoulder. “You’re always going on about how ‘he is death,’ but what you’re forgetting isthat’snot a bad thing. All humans die, and it’s spirits like Ghost—the Mortal Spirits ofdeath—who care for our souls afterward. If you take that away, if you put those spirits to sleep, what happens to us? Where do we go?” She turned back to Shiro. “What happened to the people who died during the drought?”
“What do you think?” he said stoically. “They died.”
“But what happenedafter?” Marci pressed. “If there’s no magic, then what happens to the magical part of us? To the soul? Does it just die?”
“All things die.”
“Answer the question,” she growled, stepping closer. “What happened to their souls?”
Shiro dropped his eyes. “Nothing,” he said at last. “They didn’t go anywhere, because they weren’t there to begin with.”
“Stop,” Myron said, putting a hand to his forehead. “Just stop. This is insanity. Are you really telling me that humans born during the drought didn’t havesouls?”
“They had something,” the shikigami said quickly. “Humans need a certain amount of magic to live, and my master was very careful to leave a small buffer. He couldn’t leave much since it takes very little for the smallest spirits to rise, but the entire outer ring of spellwork you see there on the seal is dedicated to making sure the seal never sucks in that final percent of magic necessary to let humans keep their magical half while they are alive.”
“What about after?” Marci asked.
Shiro winced. “There, I’m afraid things had to change. It takes only a tiny bit of magic to let humanity live, but death is far more demanding. Keeping souls together on this side requires more magic than we could allow, so we were forced to let them disperse.”
“Disperse?” she repeated, her voice shaking. “As in poof? No more? You’re just gone?”
“It was very peaceful,” Shiro said quickly. “Much more so than the torments some Mortal Spirits would—”
“That’s beside the point!” Marci cried. “You took away the afterlife from hundreds of generations! Your masterstolethat from them!”
“Yes!” he yelled back at her. “To save the living! I keep telling you, this isn’t a solution we came to lightly. My master had to make a hard choice, and he chose to do whatever he could to keep humanity going.”
“I understand that,” Marci said. “My problem isn’t that Abe no Seimei had to make a tough call in a bad situation. It’s that you’re asking me to do itagain, and I won’t. Not if there’s even the slightest chance of a better way.”
Shiro dropped his eyes after that. When Marci turned back to Myron, though, the older mage was just standing there staring at the seal.
“I didn’t know,” he said at last. “I had no idea there was an afterlife until…”
His voice wavered at the end, and Marci sighed. She’d grown up reading his books, but she’d despised the real-life Sir Myron Rollins almost from the moment she’d met him. He was a bombastic, pompous, cocky jerk who made terrible choices, but despite all that, he really did seem to care deeply about saving lives. That wasn’t actually surprising for someone who’d spent his entire life working for the United Nations, but it was a new discovery for Marci, and for the first time since her rosy image of Sir Myron Rollins had been crushed by the real thing, she felt a flash of her old admiration.
“We’re not going to let that happen again,” she said, reaching out to touch his arm. “The Mortal Spirits, the gods of death, they were created by us so our souls would have someone to help them. The Empty Wind is full of people who’ve found peace, and those are just the forgotten. There are other faces of death, other ends. They might not all be pleasant, but any afterlife has to be better than just dissipating into nothing.”
“Does it?” Myron asked, dropping his hands with a sigh. “That’s what I always thought would happen to me. I thought I would die and that would be it. I’m not sure how to feel knowing there’s more to it.”
“It’s kind of a shock,” she agreed. “But however we feel about it, we don’t have the right to take eternity from the people who do care.”
“Perhaps,” he said tiredly. “But I’m not just mourning a thousand years of lost souls. I’m also grieving for the death of our last acceptable solution. I thought if I stopped the magic, everything would go back to how it was before. Now you’re telling me there’s an afterlife, and if we stop the magic, we’re taking that away, too. If wedon’thalt the magic, though, we still face Armageddon. The Mortal Spirit problem doesn’t go away just because a few of them have side jobs shepherding our souls. We’re going to be facing even bigger versions of the terrors the ancient Merlins couldn’t handle. Are we supposed to just accept that as the price for not killing our own afterlife?”
“I don’t know,” Marci said honestly. “Every choice has consequences. The trick is to pick the one with the fallout you can live with. Or die with, as the case may be.”
“There’ll be a lot of that if you let the Mortal Spirits rise.”
Marci gave him a scathing look. “You know, for someone who’s dedicated his life to defending humanity, you sure have a low opinion of us.”
“It’s not an opinion,” Myron said angrily. “It’s fact. My work for the UN took me to countless disaster sites, everything from spirit tantrums to dragon attacks to magical terrorism. It was all horrible, but do you know which disasters were invariably the worst? The most cruel?” He leaned in closer. “The human ones. Genocide, child soldiers, school bombings, human trafficking—I’ve seen it all. Magic was the weapon of choice in the situations I was called to work on, but it didn’t really make a difference. Cruelty is cruelty, and humans excel at it. That’s why I wanted the Mortal Spirits so badly. I thought they were our better angels, and if I could just get my hands on one, I could solve so many problems. Right so many wrongs.”
He heaved a long sigh. “Imagine my disappointment when I realized they were an accurate reflection. That’s when I decided to end it, even if it meant teaming up with Algonquin. I’d finally realized you were right, Novalli. Mortal Spiritsareus, and that’s what terrifies me.”
“But it shouldn’t,” she said. “Yes, people can be terrible, but so many more are decent. That matters for Mortal Spirits especially, because they’re not the work of a single person. Those huge chasms are dug by our collective feelings, and if at least some of the diggers are good people, then every spirit has a positive side, even the terrifying ones. Look at the Empty Wind. He’s always been terrifying, but he’s still one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. That might sound like a contradiction, but so is everything else about being human, which is all they are. Human, just like us. So when the bad ones come, and theywill, we’ll handle them just like we handle bad people. We’ll oppose them with good ones.”
Myron stared at her like she was crazy. “What are you talking about?”
