Cursing, Peele seized what might be his last opportunity. Even as the fireball crackled into existence, Peele surged up from the floor and rushed at the archon’s back, a dagger in each hand held wide out to the sides.
Dorson fell back, beating at his flaming chest and screaming more in fear than pain. Norres turned, hands already circling and weaving his next spell. Peele launched himself off the floor, sweeping his arms forward and together in a savage attack.
Norres snarled wordless rage, one hand outflung in Peele’s direction. Crackling bolts of blue flame lanced out from each fingertip. Lightning struck Peele’s chest, shocking and burning. But the archon was too late. Twin blades stabbed viciously into his ribs from either side, just below the arms. Thief and archon went down in a tumble, rolling across the floor together.
Peele flopped off the archon, rolling onto his back. His chest burned and his lungs felt paralyzed. He coughed and choked and struggled to breathe. Trying to rise, the sneak thief fell back to the floor gasping for breath. With a heroic effort, Peele turned his head to see Timbek Norres. The archon lay motionless beside his murderer, twin daggers buried in his torso and blood beginning to pool on the marble beneath.
Coughing, Peele let his head fall back. He barely felt his skull strike against the marble. Shel was going to be furious, he thought. He heard his own name, spoken softly as if from a thousand miles away. He could feel his own body convulsing, but that too seemed far off and unimportant.
He felt pressure on the side of his head. A hand, pressing. His head turned and he looked up at the grim face of Dorson. The other man’s leather hauberk was blackened and burnt through in several places, and soot stained his hands and face. But he was alive.
“Peele!” he shouted again, only inches away. It might as well have been the moon. Peele blinked, swallowed, tried to speak. The only sound that emerged from his tortured throat was a croaking death rattle.
Dorson lowered his head as Peele died. After a moment, he rose and cast a baleful glare of hatred at the dead Norres. Then he turned to the chests, laden with soulgems. He knew Shel wanted those more than she wanted the archons dead. Peele had given his life, but unless Dorson got these gems to the leaders their mission would be a failure.
There was no way he could carry them all.
***
Shel dropped into a crouch alongside the balustrade, peering down from the mezzanine to the chamber below. Thorne waited somewhere in that shadowy room. His backup was here, though, hidden in one of the rooms on this level. The presence was still too faint, even this close, for Shel to pinpoint it with any certainty. She grimaced, and turned to Kal.
“Back,” she whispered. Still in a crouch, she shuffled awkwardly back the way they had come until she could stand without being seen from the chamber below. She hurried onto an alcove they had passed moments earlier. When the two women reached it, Shel pushed Kal into the cramped nook.
Kal looked confused and opened her mouth to protest. Shel shook her head, and produced an ornately carved, black wooden dagger. It wasn’t really a knife, not a weapon at all in the traditional sense. It was more like a child’s toy, a miniature wooden sword with dull edges. The shape wasn’t really important, anyway, but Shel had shaped the midnight wood into the image of a weapon all the same. Now, she handed the talisman to Kal.
“Each night,” she hurriedly explained, “when I had nearly exhausted myself working the wood, I held back a tiny reserve. Each night, I poured that final reserve into this. This talisman retains my power, Kal. Take it.”
“Shel, I can’t do anything with that. You know I'm no soulweaver.”
“You don’t have to be a weaver,” Shel insisted, pressing the wooden talisman into her friend’s hands. “Listen to me. I stored some of myself in this wood. Not much, but enough. The midnight wood, it knows what to do. You understand?”
Kal shook her head.
“Look,” Shel said, glancing anxiously back down the corridor. There were no enemies in sight; Thorne still awaited her below, but it seemed the archon could be patient when he thought he held all the trumps. “Thorne has laid a trap. It’s almost the same trick he pulled on me before, all right? When I confront him, a second weaver will come up behind me and I'll be caught between them. He’s somewhere on this floor, that other weaver. When I go down to face Thorne, the other will come behind me. You will come behind him.”
Shel clasped Kal’s hands between her own, lifting them up before Kal’s eyes and giving them – and the wooden dagger – a tiny shake.
“All you have to do is point it at him, all right? Just point it at the other weaver and speak one word. Can you do that?”
Swallowing, Kal nodded. “What is the word?” she asked.
Pushing Kal’s hands down, Shel leaned in close. Kal’s honey hair brushed her face as Shel brought her lips close to the other woman’s ear and whispered the trigger: “Justice.”
Kal nodded again, tightly. Shel patted her friend’s shoulder and gave her an encouraging smile. “Remember,” she said. “I'm counting on you to watch my back. As soon as it’s done, get out of here. Get out to the courtyard. Got it?”
“Got it.”
Shel rubbed Kal’s shoulder a final time, then melted away down the corridor. She crept back to her place on the mezzanine and inched slowly forward until she was crouched beside the top of the stairs leading down. She looked all around, eyes closed, “seeing” with her soul rather than her mundane senses. She could still feel him – or her – somewhere close by, but the sensation was maddeningly hard to lock down. It was close, though, and strangely familiar.
Shel swallowed a nervous lump in her throat. She looked back over her shoulder into the darkened corridor where Kal waited, clutching the talisman. Shel whispered a prayer for Dunmir to show mercy, and then rose from her crouch. Shoulders back in determination, she started down the stairs.
“Gutterweave.”
Thorne’s voice echoed around the cathedral-like chamber, bouncing from the walls and ceiling and rebounding on itself until Shel couldn’t pinpoint the archon’s location. She shook her head grimly at the theatrics and continued down the stairs.
Chapter 23 - The Third Weaver
She had nearly reached the bottom when a dark figure glided out of the deeper shadows along one wall. Thorne still wore his richly embroidered robes and his jewels. If anything, his attire was more elaborate and ostentatious than before. He was garbed for an audience before the emperor.
No, Shel reminded herself. Thorne wasn’t planning to prostrate himself before his master and offer up his wealth of souls in tribute. This day, Archon Murdrek Thorne had dressed himself for a coronation – his own, to be held immediately after he murdered his master. Shel’s dark smile from earlier returned. There would be no coronation, she promised herself and the memory of Rez. And if anyone was going to kill the emperor, it was going to be Shel herself.
“Hello, Thorne,” she said, making her voice sound sweet and honeyed as if they were old friends reunited after a long absence.
Stepping off the stairs, she moved to meet him in the center of the chamber. It was a wide, open room without any furniture. She would have thought it was a feasting hall but for the lack of tables. She wondered idly what purpose the room had, but dismissed her curiosity. It didn’t matter. Only one thing mattered. Justice.
Justice for Rez. Justice for all the people of the empire. Justice for Sanook and all the rest of the Shadowmen, her people, a people she had been cut off from. She had never known her heritage until she was the only one left. She demanded justice for that. Thorne would pay first; later, the emperor who had murdered her people.
Thorne saw Shel’s smile, saw her teeth glistening in the faint light spilling into the room from windows of stained glass set high in the walls. He matched it with a dark smile of his own. Evil was a palpable aura that surrounded him. Now, another aura sprang up around the archon. To Shel’s eyes, Thorne began to shimmer and glow in a spectral white, misty il
lumination.
She drew on her own power, to show she wasn’t afraid. Shel was careful not to draw the full extent of her power. Thorne didn’t know about the midnight wood. She didn’t want to tip her hand early.
“Ah,” said Thorne. He sounded as if he had just tasted fine wine, an exhalation of appreciation. He licked his lips hungrily. “You've grown more powerful since we last met, Gutterweave.”
“So I have,” Shel admitted, savoring the moment. Thorne still thought he had the upper hand. Soon, he would learn.
“Tell me,” said Thorne, striking a conversational tone as he circled slowly around her. “Were they trusted companions who fell in battle? Did they give their souls to you out of love and devotion? Or did you wheedle and persuade them? Or…” Thorne’s lips curled up in a devilish grin. “Have you learned the secret of ripping them screaming from their owners?”
“That’s a power no one should have, Thorne.” Shel matched his movements, walking in a slow circle and keeping him directly in front of her. They moved around each other like dancers. “It’s an abomination.”
Thorne laughed harshly. “You sound like a Shadowman, Gutterweave.”
“I am a Shadowman,” Shel told him, relishing the moment of revelation and the momentary look of stunned surprise that flitted across the archon’s face.
“Are you now…” Thorne nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I see. A halfbreed, anyway. Yes, that explains much about you which had puzzled me. But don’t think your filthy winter blood will save you, Gutterweave. It won’t.”
***
With her back pressed to the curving wall in the alcove, Kal listened to the murmur of voices from below. Brows knitted in concentration, she leaned forward to peek around the edge of her hiding spot and watched for this “other” weaver Shel expected.
She gripped the talisman Shel had given her with both hands and waited for her cue.
***
Shel’s skin tingled, the tiny hairs along her arms rising. She narrowed her eyes at Thorne, whose faint glow intensified. The archon smiled back at her, still pacing in his slow circle but not moving his hands at all. Shel couldn’t see any patterns forming in the white haze that surrounded the other sorcerer.
Here it comes, she thought, and felt a tiny shiver run through her body. She put it down to nervous anticipation. Her tingling skin had alerted her to a spell being woven. She could see Thorne but no spectral lace of ghostly threads forming; the third weaver had entered the contest. She returned Thorne’s smile with an insolent grin of her own.
“You won’t get the drop on me the same way twice,” she taunted him, matching his circular pacing step for step. Shel raised her arms slowly to the sides, fingers splayed. In the same motion, she lowered her shoulders forward in a ready stance. Just a few more paces would bring her around facing the mezzanine above. Thorne’s lackey upstairs had lousy timing.
The archon’s smile never faltered. With his next step, he extended his foot a little further before bringing it down and so adopted a low, loping posture. One hand came up, palm inward and fingers extended together. His other hand made a fist beside his hip, thumb facing Shel. Indistinct, shimmering hazes of energy gathered themselves around each hand.
“You're overconfident, Gutterweave.” The archon’s icy tone sent another shiver running up and down her spine.
Shel took another step, then another. She could see the dimly lit mezzanine over Thorne’s shoulders. The third weaver was up there somewhere…and so was Kal. She couldn’t risk an attack on the upper level until Kal got clear, but the archon’s inexorable circling what force her to put her back to the mezzanine in another moment.
Come on, Kal. Shel concentrated on the thought as if by force of will she could send it flying on the still air to her friend’s mind. Maybe she could, Shel realized, but now wasn’t the time to experiment with unknown new weave-patterns.
Thorne took another step; Shel matched it. The archon laughed a rasping chuckle. Shel’s eyes narrowed to slits. Hidden deep inside herself, Shel reached out delicate tendrils of her soul to the wooden ornaments adorning her belt and wrists, and dangling in her air. In the Midnight Grove, Shel had tasted unlimited power. These simple amulets and talismans she carried now offered but a tiny fraction of that magnificence, and for the first time Shel considered that even that would prove insufficient.
Thorne took another step, and as Shel matched it she saw the archon’s smile slip and his eyes dart up and down as if he sensed the increase in her power but couldn’t discern its source. In time with his next step, Thorne slowly turned his uplifted hand until his palm faced Shel. Another step, Thorne raised his hand an inch or two higher until his fingers were in front of his nose. Another step, Shel lost sight of the mezzanine as she matched the movement.
Shivering again, Shel realized the room had been growing steadily colder for several minutes. Then it happened.
***
Kal was just about to peek around the corner of her alcove for what felt like the thousandth time when she heard two noises simultaneously. The first chilled her blood and nearly drowned out the second in its volume. It was a scream. It was Shel.
The second sound was the creak of a neglected hinge as a doorway on the other side of the open mezzanine was slowly pushed open.
Kal threw herself out of the alcove, clutching Shel’s talisman in her left hand and pulling a knife with her right. She caught side of the shadowy figure on the other side of the loft immediately. Instinctively, she threw the knife. It sliced the space between them in half, but the third weaver ducked and rolled forward at the last instant. The knife clattered uselessly into a wall. Kal ran forward, reaching for another blade. Her foe slapped the floor and sprang up from his roll.
The dagger flew from Kal’s hand. She raised the carved wooden talisman. Her lips parted to speak the incantation. The word rose in her throat but died on her lips. Eyes burst wide with shock. Lips trembled. The talisman fell from her grasp. Kal sank to her knees with a muted cry of despair.
Rez bared his teeth in a malicious grin and swept her hard against the wall.
***
Shel thought she could see how it was done. Thorne had startled her with the sudden attack. Shel’s face burned with shame at her cry of alarm. He’d managed to surprise her after all.
The third weaver had been drawing warmth out of the air all the time she and the archon circled and postured at one another. She had felt the weaving but had foolishly dismissed it. The third weaver couldn’t press a truly threatening attack unless he could see her. She knew where he was, couldn’t see him, couldn’t be seen; she’d thought that made her safe.
What he could do, she now realized, was diffuse his spiritual essence into the air. Meditating high in her tree at Midnight Grove, Shel had done this many times. She knew that when you examined the air very closely – far closer than possible with the eye – it was made up of infinitesimally small particles that shook and bounced together.
From there, it was a simple task to draw some of these invisible building blocks together in a rigid formation. This was how Sanook had once bound her in bands of seemingly solid air, and how he had then pummeled her with invisible fists.
She had escaped his grasp that time by creating a fireball, her first flame weave. At the time, it had been indignant fury mixed with blind instinct that allowed her to make empty air catch fire. In later training, she had learned that those very same unseeable particles that shook and rattled could be smashed together at higher speeds.
She hadn’t made the connection before, but it was clear to her now. Speeding up the movement so the pieces smashed together faster made heat; it made perfect sense that slowing them down would sap the heat. That was what the third weaver had done, and he hadn’t needed to see his target when the air slipped under and around doors and through cracks in the stone itself.
But then Thorne himself had sprang into action, lunging away from her and planting his feet. His upper hand swept down and his fist sur
ged forward and up in a barreling punch. As his arm snapped out full, the archon opened his fist.
The moisture in the air turned to solid ice at his touch, a frozen spear that flashed across the chamber. Shel threw herself down and to the side.
Thorne’s down-sweeping, open hand balled into a fist at his hip. He bent his extended arm at the elbow and brought that hand in front of his face. This time there was no pause. The upraised hand swept down, the fist at the tip snapped forward. Shel leaped and dove to avoid the spears of ice he threw. Thorne pumped his arms, churning out a frenzied flurry of frozen spikes.
Shel spun in place as one of the ice spears grazed her shoulder. Another impacted on the wall behind her, and a third was already flashing toward her. The air was getting colder and colder. The third weaver had slowed its movement enough for Thorne to freeze it instantly, but the rapid barrage of freeze weaves sucked every remaining vestige of heat from the air.
Shel darted forward then threw herself backward. The next three spears sailed through the air in front of her as she cartwheeled, drawing the full store of power amplification available through her talismans to guide her body through the flip. Her upraised hands slapped the marble floor. She spun through, landing on her feet in a low crouch.
Whipping her arms around to thrust both in Thorne’s direction, she sent out a dozen weaves at once. The lacy nets of energy trapped pockets of air and tightened around them, compressing the air until its cold torpor became an excited frenzy in the claustrophobic trap. Even as this happened, she sent the twelve trapped pockets of air flying at Thorne.
The archon reversed his motion, tracking her backwards across the room. He flung an ice spear straight for her. Before he could send another, Shel’s twelve tightly woven orbs smashed together inches in front of his face. The combined friction and sudden release caused an impressive explosion in Thorne’s eyes.
Soul Weaver: A Fantasy Novel Page 17