Soul Weaver: A Fantasy Novel

by Trip Ellington

  Thorne scowled at her response, dark eyes flashing. Before he could speak, however, another voice was raised.

  “It’s good to hear you say that, Shel.” It was Rez, awake now if looking beaten and delirious. He’d worked the leather-wrapped gag out of his mouth and worked his jaw open and closed with a sour expression, as if trying to rid himself of a foul taste on his tongue.

  He was in terrible shape. Besides being beaten, sliced, and burned there was something else. Staring at him, Shel gasped when she realized what it was. She remembered the first time she had sensed his power, in the training room with Sanook. That power was now much diminished.

  “Rez…” Shel licked dry lips, suddenly terrified. “What have they done?”

  Behind her, she heard the hunchback weaver chuckling. She couldn’t turn her head, but from the sound she knew he had come further into the room. He was right behind her. She thought back to that same training session. Sanook had held her in bonds of air much like the ones she was in now…

  “Shall I give her a demonstration, Rezdurth?” asked Thorne, stroking his chin thoughtfully as he glanced back and forth between his two captives. Suddenly, he flung out one hand with fingers splayed. Shel saw the glow, the distortion in the air. Thorne contracted his fingers slowly, curling them in until they made a fist.

  At the same time, Rez bucked and writhed against his bonds. A low groan rose in pitch, becoming an agonized scream. Shel’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped as she saw what happened next. A fuzzy, indistinct glowing appeared in the center of Rez’s chest. It bulged outward, drawn inexorably toward Thorne’s grasping fist. The incandescent energy clung to Rez, but in the end was torn free. It shot across the room in a flash, collecting itself round Thorne’s fist before dissolving into the archon’s arm.

  Thorne’s eyes flashed with light and then became dark again. Rez sagged on the torture rack, breathing heavily. Sweat beaded his forehead and his eyes were squeezed shut in pain. Thorne had stolen one of his souls.

  “That’s impossible…” breathed Shel. No one could forcibly take a soul without its owner’s consent. Yet, that was exactly what Thorne had done. Shel stared in open-mouthed horror at the archon. Behind her, the hunchback barked an evil laugh.

  Brushing his hands off, Thorne turned to Shel and smiled darkly. Rez moaned in pain.

  “As you can see, Gutterweave,” the archon said, “it is quite possible. Rez here had quite a lot of souls when he came to us. I have relieved him of that burden.”

  Shel looked over at Rez, still sagging on the rack. He was weak and in terrible pain. She sensed the diminished power within him and gasped. She wasn’t sure, but she thought he had been stripped of every soul but his own. Even that was a weakly flickering ball of wounded energy within his body. She had to do something, or Rez was going to die.

  “Not even the emperor knows this secret,” Thorne continued, turning away and moving back behind his desk. Seating himself, he steepled his fingers in front of his chin and regarded Shel over them with dark, hooded eyes. “For a thousand years he has depended on the Conclave to replenish his power. No longer.”

  “You want to overthrow him yourself,” said Rez, wheezing and struggling to get the words out through his pain. “You call us rebels…”

  “Why shouldn’t I be emperor?” asked Thorne. “I am stronger. I require no Conclave of Archons to prop up my strength. I require no one! I can take what I need, take what I want! The Golden Empire will be all the stronger under my leadership!”

  “Murdrek…” wheezed Rez. “You're…insane…”

  “She’s doing something!” The hunchback’s warning was shrill, tinged with alarm. “She’s trying something clever, my lord!”

  Thorne’s head jerked around, eyes narrowed. “Crush her,” he snapped at his minion. “She is weak. I sense no extra souls in her. Crush her!”

  The bands of air wrapped tightly around Shel began to constrict, cutting off her air. Shel pushed back, the same way she had against Sanook in her training session. But this was no training session.

  Frantically, she pushed back against the hunchback’s weaves. She struggled to force away the constraining bands of air. Shel raised her arm – a titanic struggle in itself – and readied a powerful weave. Thorne’s eyes widened in surprise.

  “What have we here?” he mused.

  Behind her, Shel heard the hunchback gasp. She had broken her bonds. She had to act fast, before her jailer could overpower her again…before the archon pitted his own considerable strength against her. Raising her fist high over her head, she met Thorne’s eyes defiantly. Then she brought the fist down hard and fast, splaying open her fingers as if throwing a handful of dust down on the floor.

  She concentrated all of her power. Shel imagined the white hot ball of soulstuff burning in her hand. When she hurled it at the floor, all of her power slammed into the bare stone like an invisible battering ram. Stone cracked where her power struck and the titanic recoil sent a shockwave through the room.

  Shel, standing dead center of the blast, was hurled off her feet. Her shoulders crashed into the heavy door with a shockingly painful impact. The door gave way and Shel tumbled into the hallway. She saw Thorne similarly thrown back, his chair upsetting and splintering to pieces as the archon was tossed against the far wall like a rag doll.

  The hunchback who’d held her prisoner burst into flames, shrieking and waving his arms. He beat his hands over his body, but it was no use. Within seconds, the misshapen little man was consumed. By the time Shel’s back slapped down against the floor in the corridor, nothing was left but ashes.

  “How?” demanded Thorne, picking himself up from the floor. He dusted himself off with one hand; the other arm hung limp and crooked at his side. His face seethed with rage. “How did you conceal this power from me?”

  From the overturned torture rack, Rez laughed bitterly. “She’s more powerful than you can imagine, Murdrek! Run Shel!”

  Shel didn’t know what he meant. She didn’t think she was very powerful at all. She had just gotten lucky. Now she had to escape. She looked desperately toward the upended torture rack, but there was no way she could get to it and free Rez before the archon struck back.

  “I'm sorry,” she breathed. Then she turned and ran.

  Chapter 13 - Escape!

  Murdrek Thorne screamed for his guards. Dust – blasted from the cracks between stone blocks in the walls, ceiling and floor by the raw power of Shel’s weaving – drifted with slow grace on the air. Rez fought the pain to lift his head. Blood trickled from the corner of his smile.

  Murdrek turned on him, snarling with rage. “What is this girl?” he demanded.

  Charging across the room, Murdrek Thorne reached out with his own weaving. The upturned rack was seized in invisible hands and torn up from the floor. Rez gritted his teeth as the leather straps jerked him along with the table top, which Thorne slammed against the wall as he drew near. The archon’s teeth were bared in a rictus of fury as he advanced on the helpless prisoner.

  Rez just laughed. It was all he could manage.

  He had said Shel was more powerful than Murdrek could imagine. He hoped it proved more than a bluff, because everything depended on the girl now.

  Thorne seized Rez by the shoulders. The archon leaned in close, bringing their faces to within an inch of one another. His eyes blazed with hate and madness.

  “Who is she?” he hissed through clenched teeth.

  “She’s hope,” said Rez, making it up as he went along. After all, that was what he always had done. It was only fitting that he should die the same way he lived. Bluffing and lying through his teeth. Oh, Dunmir, he thought. Let it be more than a bluff.

  “She will die screaming,” Murdrek snarled. Abruptly, he released his hold on Rez and spun away. He hurried back to the splintered hulk of his desk and tore open one of the drawers. When he turned around again, he held a dull, colorless gemstone in one hand. An evil smile twisted Murdrek Thorne’s lips.

/>   Staring at the jewel in the archon’s hand, Rez felt the blood drain from his face as he realized what Thorne meant to do next.

  “No,” he said hoarsely. Ignoring him, Murdrek moved closer. Rez fought weakly against the leather straps holding him in place, but he couldn’t escape. His voice rose in pitch as he became increasingly frantic. “You can’t. It isn’t possible. It’s not possible, Murdrek! I won’t let you!”

  The archon now stood inches away from Rez, holding the dull jewel aloft between them. His smile was sinister and confident.

  “I can,” he said. “It is possible, Rezdurth. It’s possible, and you have no say in the matter.”

  ***

  Shel ran blindly down corridor after corridor, looking for a way out. She was lost in a maze of stone hallways each decorated with the same banners. Even the tapestries, depicting a variety of summery outdoor scenes, all looked alike to the young woman. An edge of panic was rising in her thoughts as she turned yet another corner and failed to find a door leading outside.

  There were, however, a trio of armsmen waiting for her in that next stretch of hallway.

  “There she is!” shouted the one out front, and all three drew their short swords and charged toward Shel without another word.

  Skidding to a stop, Shel looked back the way she had come. Twenty feet down that corridor, another guard raced toward her. She frowned, turning back to the three who were almost on top of her.

  Her escape from Archon Thorne and his hunchbacked minion had sapped much of her strength. With a strenuous effort, Shel summoned the power within her. Her eyes emitted a faint glow as she raised both hands, palms out toward the oncoming soldiers.

  They never saw the blast of solid air that slammed into them, knocking them back in confused disarray. Swords fell from their hands as they clattered off the walls and sank to the floor. Panting, Shel leaped over them and continued on her way. She had to find the way out.

  When she turned the next corner, she saw the double-width doors of the main hall. Careening through the doorway, she nearly lost her balance. She drew up short in the center of the cozy gathering room and tried to remember which way the hunchback had brought her in. There! That door led to the kitchens. Shel raced through it.

  Shoving startled cooks and undercooks out of her way, Shel darted through the kitchens trying to remember the confusing path they had taken earlier. That hunchback must have chosen an indirect route intentionally, because Shel was sure she was close to the exit but the room she was in – filled with free-standing hearths over which a dozen steaming cauldrons hung suspended – was one she hadn’t seen before.

  Pounding footsteps behind her. Shouting cooks. “She went that way!” Shel growled a curse, picked one of the four doors leading out of the soup room, and ran.

  Plunging through the scullery, with guards in hot pursuit, Shel remembered her trick in the dungeon. She wasn’t sure she had enough strength to pull it off again, but it might be her only way out. Without stopping her headlong rush, she strained to extend her invisible awareness in stretching feelers that probed the walls in search of open air and the quickest path leading to it.

  She gasped with exertion, her pelting footsteps faltering. She was so weak. Shel had been tired out in the practice sessions with Sanook, but she had never felt so exhausted as she did now. Weaving had sapped her energy. Her chest heaving and pulse racing, Shel burst through another doorway and into a butcher’s workshop.

  Faintly, distantly, she felt the hint of a cooling breeze drifting over her cheeks and the warmth of partially-shaded sunlight.

  Shel froze in midstride, concentrating on the sensation. A startled butcher’s apprentice drew back from her, raising his blood-stained cleaver defensively. Shel ignored him. That way! She ran.

  A minute later she burst through the rear entrance of the manor house into the narrow back yard. The guards were still behind her. She whirled around, looking behind. She spared a thought for Rez, wishing she’d been able to save him.

  As if summoned by her thoughts, she heard him then. Rez was screaming. It was one unbroken howl of torment and agony that broke off abruptly, replaced by silence. Shel hung her head. There had been nothing more for Thorne to take; Rez would never have relinquished his own, original soul. Surely Thorne’s new ability didn’t stretch so far as to enable him to take it anyway. And if Rez was going to submit to his tortures, if there was anything at all he could tell his tormentor, he would have done so by now.

  Rez was dead, and she had no time to mourn him.

  The first of the guards appeared in the doorway. Red-faced and shouting angrily, he brandished his sword high overhead as he charged after her.

  Shel wiped a tear from the corner of one eye and turned away from the manor house. With her last reserve of strength, she thrust both hands palms down toward the ground. Twin shafts of power burst from her palms and stabbed down at the ground. When her forceful weaves met the unyielding earth, the recoil sent Shel rocketing into the sky just as the amazed guard emerged from the house swinging his sword through empty space.

  ***

  Murdrek Thorne paced back and forth in the main hall of the Sorrel house, livid with rage.

  The servants of the house cowered in nearby rooms, fearful of any summons and striving to work silently lest they come to the attention of the man who had murdered their rightful employers and absorbed the estate into his own.

  Thorne’s own armsmen stepped lightly. Those who patrolled the grounds outside were sharply alert, but beneath their painstaking attention to duty each man shared the same relief that they were not called upon to attend their master.

  Those on duty within the house, and particularly those who stood at rigid attention along the walls of the main hall, sweated beneath their helmets and prayed their archon’s eye wouldn’t single them out.

  Thorne was clearly feeling murderous.

  The captain of the guards stood nervously alongside the “royal” table, the only of several heavy wooden tables that remained in the room. It had stood apart from the rest in the old days, a smaller table with room for the principal members of the Sorrel house. Its fellows had long since been removed, but this one remained. On it now rested a serving platter carrying a jug of wine and two wooden goblets; an unrolled map of the southern half of the Golden Empire; a sparkling amethyst jewel with swirling clouds in the depths of its facets; and a wooden bowl containing a dirty-looking pile of ashes: all that remained of the hunchbacked jailer.

  Thorne paced back and forth in front of the table and his captain stood beside the table and struggled to keep his fear from showing. The girl had escaped.

  “I want her found,” Thorne said, for perhaps the tenth time. His voice was low and dangerous, a rough growl in place of the usual silken, cultured tones. “I want her found and brought to me at once.”

  “Of course, my lord,” the guard captain answered at once. His response had been the same with each repetition.

  Thorne stopped his pacing, whirling around and jabbing an angry finger at the captain. “Send all of your men, Captain. Accompany them yourself. I want that gutter-rat found, is that perfectly clear?”

  “Yes, my lord…” began the guard captain.

  “It had better be,” the archon cut him off. “Send scouts back to the ambush. Backtrack to that pitiful gang’s hideout. I'm certain it won’t be far off. Find it, you may find the rest of them. I want everyone else slashing and burning their way through that forest until the Gutterweave is found.”

  “But, my lord,” the captain said, swallowing a terrified lump in his throat but pressing on despite fear of his master. “What about defending the house? My lord…”

  “Should the rebels try taking this estate, let them have it. Put the house to flames before you depart. I have no further need of it.”

  “But, my lord…what of yourself?”

  “I will continue on to the capital,” Thorne said, his dark eyes narrowed dangerously at the captain’s questioning. �
��Alone.”

  “But sir!”

  “I have no need of bumbling armsmen and guards!” snapped Thorne, and his eyes flashed with dreadful inner light. The guard captain felt his master’s anger like a physical blow and recoiled from it. Thorne sneered at him, and swept out of the room.

  ***

  Shel picked herself up from where she had fallen. Damp, dead leaves clung to her clothes and dirt streaked her face. She looked around in a daze.

  She hadn’t been able to maintain her wild flight. That first incredible jump had drained the last reserves of her power. Utterly spent, she had plummeted from the sky. It felt like she had knocked into every single tree branch in the forest on her way down. She was bloodied and bruised, shaken from the fall. She didn’t realize how fortunate she was in hitting so many limbs; they had slowed her fall.

  Turning around, Shel saw that she had nevertheless torn a shallow furrow along the forest floor. Leaves and debris were swept away, and she had dragged at the dirt as she tumbled. Shel shook her head and brushed as much of the dirt and the dead leaves away as she could.

  Then she looked all around, trying to figure out which way to go. Still lost, she thought. At least there weren’t any guards this time.

  Her thoughts were sluggish. It was more than exhaustion. Shel didn’t know it, but she was in a light shock. She stumbled away from her crash site, numbly pushing branches and vines aside as she walked.

  Rez was dead.

  She couldn’t have saved him, she knew that. She knew there wasn’thing she could have done. If she had tried to rescue him, Thorne would have recovered from her initial attack and probably destroyed her. She had sensed his power and it was immense. Maybe if Rez had been able to help, together they could have stood off the archon. But Rez was on the edge of death already, with all his accumulated souls stripped from him. He couldn’t have helped, and without him Shel didn’t stand a chance.

  She knew she had made the right decision, and she didn’t feel guilty about Rez’s death. Rather, she felt responsible for it. She couldn’t help but think Aemond would have known what to do. If not in the manor house, then back on the road when Thorne first emerged from his carriage.