Hold your disgust a moment. Hear the rules of our trade first.
We bone-eating ravens are the undertakers of the sand-sea.
The sand-sea buries without coffins. The wind bears the bier, the sand performs the burial — and we recite the rites. Wherever a traveller falls, a soldier dies, a beast perishes of thirst, there our raven-column descends. The flesh feeds us: that is the wage heaven and earth pay their undertakers. But the bones — we pick them clean one by one, lay them straight, carry them to a high windward ledge for three years of scouring till they whiten, then bear them to our Bone-Grove and set them at rest.
And the setting has one law: the skull faces west.
Why west? The clan's old rule gives no reasoning, only a verse: the soul follows the light; the bone marks the soul's road. There was once a great light in the west, and souls remember that direction. Set the skull true toward it, and a wandering soul can sight along its own bones and find the way home.
So no — other ravens eat the dead. We do not. We build roads for souls.
Work bone long enough and the tongue learns to read it. Bone is a ledger: crack a leg-bone and the taste of its marrow tells you how many roads the man walked; a finger-bone tells you whether the hand held a hoe or a brush. And most important of all is the faint after-warmth at the bone's core — not heat, but the trace of longing a soul leaves at its departure. Bone with after-warmth: the soul left in peace. Bone gone cool: the soul is already home.
This craft of the tongue has passed down our line for dozens of generations without a single misreading.
Until these last years.
These last years, more and more of the bones we open are empty.
Not marrowless. The marrow is there; the flavors are there — the roads walked, the hoe held, all still legible. What is gone is the after-warmth. Utterly gone: a cold that does not taste like the soul has left, but like the soul has been taken. Do you grasp the difference? A soul that departs on its own leaves a thread of longing in the bone, the way one who travels far always leaves an old keepsake or two behind. But these bones are stripped clean — as if the luggage had been carried off along with the whole house.
The first few empty bones, we called chance. Then it was three in ten. This year, seven in ten.
We set them all skull-west regardless. But every old raven's heart is drumming: the bone marks the soul's road — and if the soul was taken long ago, for whom are we building the road?
Last month our column gathered in a caravan annihilated on the lee slope of Yellow-Wind Ridge. Nine sets of remains. Eight were empty. The single one with after-warmth was a young apprentice, ten-and-some years old, an undelivered letter to his family still folded against his chest. We set his bones on the highest ledge, and the full column called three rounds for him — not mourning his death. Saluting that he had, at least, left as himself.
Do you hear what that means? On this western road, to die a proper death and depart whole has become a thing worth saluting.
The day the medicine-basket boy passed our Bone-Grove, I dropped to his shoulder and laid two bones side by side before him: one empty, one warm. He weighed the first in his hand, then the second, and his face darkened by degrees.
He asked: when did the empty ones begin?
I scored three lines in the sand with my claw — three years. The same year the altar-smoke began standing straight and the black moon reached its blackest.
He asked: and the taken souls — where do they go?
I opened my beak. No sound came. That is precisely the question our whole clan asks day and night.
So the column has posted me to travel with him. My commission on this road runs two-fold.
The open half: gather the battlefield dead, perform the rites as we go, set every unattended skeleton on the western road in order — skulls west.
The hidden half: find. Find the thing that takes the souls.
We bone-eating ravens are clumsy of speech and make poor arguments. But we hold one truth past all bargaining —
the flesh may fall to us; the dust may fall to the sand-sea;
the soul belongs to no one but itself.