Soolie Beetch and the Hungry Souls (2) by Skelly Harrington

Author:Skelly Harrington [Harrington, Skelly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: bridge city coven press
Published: 2023-09-30T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

Tera. My love. When you were here, you helped me to be a better man. Ever since you left, I’ve been lost. I want to be a good man and a good father, but I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m afraid I’m doing it all wrong.

Silas tried to make himself useful. He had approached Havah several times, asking to be put to work, but the older woman had no use for him and no interest in helping him occupy his time. Mostly, she ignored him unless his feet strayed towards the stairway door, at which point she was suddenly conspicuously nearby.

He tried approaching the refugees directly to offer his skills as a cobbler, and quickly learned that there was no wanting for clothing, weapons, or material goods. The mortality in Ravus had left a surplus for the scavengers. What was in short supply was food and, most of all, water.

Most food was preserved or dried, with rare exceptions of occasional slum beetles and rats that the refugees caught in traps and brought back to the morgue to be roasted over coals in the furnace room. The water came from rain barrels. It was illegal to collect water in Ravus, but the flat hospital roof was one of the highest outside of the Sun District and ideal for flouting the law. Nevertheless, the spring rains were letting up, and the barrels were low. Cups were small, musty, and rancid, and everyone was thirsty. Silas marveled that in Hob Glen, only a few days east of the city, well water flowed plentiful, clean, and cold.

Since he was not allowed to leave the morgue, he was unable to assist with gathering food or water. Idleness did not sit well with him, and his panic condensed like droplets on the walls, so he turned to the only other people who were imprisoned in the underground room, and started teaching the children.

There were nine of them in ages varying from four to fourteen, all as restless as he was. There were no books, so Silas took charcoal from the incinerator and wrote on the tiles. He taught them letters and numbers and, when they grew unruly, he rewarded them with tales of Ravus history and the lore of the northern settlers. He recounted the books he used to read with Soolie when she was young and filled in the parts he did not remember with his own, reasonable conjectures. At last, he resorted to distorted retellings of Evaline’s Southern Lands myths full of dark magic and dangerous creatures, and the children liked those stories best of all. He wished they were fond of the more gentle stories. He thought tales of sorcery and bloodshed were a poor escape from real-life terrors, but he humored the children in exchange for them letting him try to teach them numerical splinters and the fundamentals of literary law. It all made him miss his daughter terribly.

At night, he would lie on the hard floor, a straw

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