A kick to the face and his head slammed on waste grown ground, and Mack was coughing up dirt and blood and now he thinks fuck, not again. He was out in the wastes cupping around for something good, something nice to keep the hours away again, when the squatters came and bootjacked him. He had just unspooned a bit of shiny too, a memory, a firmament in a globe to while away the loss and lonely hours. This memory seemed to be a sweet one, one that could grow and flower in his soul mines and keep his spirit in a fresh and summer state.
-Ey, look at this pint. Hey pint, you hear me? Shut up and show us your stuff.
-Yeah pint, come on, what you swiping? Give it to us or we’ll take out our ghosts and you’ll be a begging for a mercy killing.
Mack didn’t want to fight back, he hated fighting back, using his own ghosts cut a lot out of him, it did. But he guessed he didn’t have a choice, not now, not when the center sun had gone black with night and the heat pipes shut down for the cooling hours. He didn’t have more than a dim amber flicker to see them by, and they could easily kick and punch and bite him down.
And if they released their own ghosts? He’d have no choice. A bucket of meat like this is nothing when a ghost is out to grab you.
They yank him up dustcoughing with globules spittling out, their hands on his neck and shaking him around. Ragdool he was now, all shandy boned and fingersplayed. He didn’t have the shunt in him to lack it out much longer. He had to let go, let ghost, only way he could survive this.
-Aw, hey lookie here, the pint’s found himself a love story.
-How cute! A widdle wuv stowie.
Laughter, corrosive, burning, hurting and blammering. One of the assailants flickered in the harvest low light, like his ghost was begging for a fight. The other turned dim and solid and dim again. Their ghosts were getting ready, almost ready now to get out and burn the air away with haunting howls.
-Come on, let’s cut him up with our haunts.
-Yeah, and trash his purty widdle memwy.
-Sounds about right, come on.
So Mack decided that was it, that was enough. He squished his spine down, his eyes slimming shut. His heart thudded and blundered about like a wounded animal about to lay down to a deathrest. His lips murmured something, the words a calling chant, bringing on the haunts that hung around him like spurned lovers. They fled out, unchained now from his body, his own spirit wrapping and warping them, forcing them into his still command. He used the mental images to control them, just like his Za taught him, oh way back in the yester ago. In a way and skill that only the Za had known, and had died into obscurity at the passing of the last of the kind.
Since he was truly trained that made Mack a ghost master, a haunt hilio, one of the last who could tame the spirits and have them sticky icky slick to his soul like butter on a bread. These other punks, they had no chance, no light of a fight that could even come close to it. Four against one? For a Za he still outnumbered them, yes, he did. Though he would pay for it in the morning, with skin all too tight and lips like dust and a tongue like a spine in his mouth.
The spirits lit and filtered the air, their swarming bodies like glinting metal fog as they took on shapes and forms and memories from another time, another when, back in the days when the Spiral first set out into the sky with dreams of being a last hope in the star sea. There was Ossa the snake shaped and Fenn of the many breasts, and don’t forget Stone with his scythe and his body like mountains moving. There was more, much more, and the meager spirits those jacks could scum out of their personal aether didn’t even hold a flickering candlebulb to these things.
Not with a proper Za controlling them.
Mack shut his ears and his eyes not wanting the screams and the visions of death to clutter up his memories again. Later tonight he would pray to the eyeless heart and pinch the seer some chains to get his thoughts of this whole thing wiped pure. That was how Mack dealt with these things, he let them go, he purged them out of his soul mines. Can’t let these moments shadow up his spirit and being. Had to keep himself clean, had to cleanse his own spirit to control these Others.
That was the way of the Za. Purity and focus and humbleness in the shape of all things.
