She could still feel her soul, burning hot and powerful deep within herself. But she was unable to take hold of the power, unable to extend it in any way beyond her own skin. She was trapped, trussed and ready for the sacrifice.
The emperor himself stood a few feet away. The wizened little vulture of a man wore robes of black and violet and ash, the colors of the People Who Swallow the Souls of the Dead. His chest was bare, exposing his own runic birthmarks. The patina of gold flakes which had previously decorated and disguised his markings had been washed away, leaving only the pale faded blue of the marks themselves.
It was hard for Shel to see the young man from her dream-vision in this twisted creature before her. Impossible for her to imagine the wailing infant stolen from its mother so many, many centuries ago.
Around the circled edge of the Summer Sanctum were arrayed three dozen Tophylax Emperia. They stood impassively, backs to the wall. Their eyeless helms gave no indication whether they watched with anticipation or merely dozed on their feet. Each hulking soldier was motionless in his spiky, black-lacquered armor. They may as well have been statues. They would move only if the emperor willed them do so.
Twin braziers stood at either end of the altar. Shel could feel the weak heat from their coals on the soles of her feet and the top of her scalp. A putrid scent wafted from the sizzling coals. It was a spicy mix of burning leaves and what might have been human flesh.
The emperor came forward to stand over Shel at the altar. In one skeletal hand he held an ornate dagger of pure silver. The hilt was encrusted with gems that sparkled dimly. The fingers of his other hand were splayed wide, and he raised this claw out above Shel’s body and began to chant in the ancient tongue of the Shadowmen.
A white mist began to form in the air in front of the emperor. It billowed in front of his chest like a globe of smoke. Light flickered and pulsed like the lightning within a miniature storm. Strands of the mist unraveled, snaking out toward Shel as they twined about one another to form a complex, tightly knotted weave she had never seen before.
Shel struggled against her bonds. Tensed muscles strained against solid air; within herself, she fought and raged against the crippling of her soul’s power. It was all useless. The emperor’s weave penetrated her forehead and she felt its cold touch in the damp convolutions of her brain.
The Tophylax Emperia remained impassive and unmoved at their posts when Shel began to scream.
***
Rezdurth Thorne, rightfully Archon Rezdurth Thorne, strode imperiously through the scorched ruin of the High Market with a grim, wry smile.
He had sent the rest on ahead to the palace. Forty-four ragged men who had fought against one another two days before, sent against the might of five hundred Tophylax Emperia. It was laughable, and Rez did laugh.
He’d left that old goat Collam in charge, with Jacin Verret as his lieutenant. Which was almost the same as if he’d gone himself. Rez laughed again at that thought.
With his coaching, Verret had been able to tap into his innate powers for the first time. The Southern Islander had been aghast at first, but the first taste of the power was always intoxicating. He had been smiling long before he finally succeeded in the task Rez had set him.
Rez was free. He could weave again. The bonds that whelp gutterweave Shel had placed on his soul were torn asunder, and the rightful Archon Thorne was reborn. He had immediately set about glutting himself on the meager store of stolen soul gems his rebels carried. Spoils from the other archons, his former peers and colleagues. He had been so hungry for souls that he had gotten carried away and swallowed up Jacin Verret’s soul along with those stored in the jewels.
Verret’s soul had been surprisingly robust. Rez was glad he’d taken it. Of course, there was the added benefit that he now controlled Verret utterly. The former Suncloak guard was a Soulless now. It took only a tiny fraction of Rezdurth Thorne’s power to animate that puppet.
He still didn’t have the power to challenge the emperor. Not directly, not yet. That was why he’d come to High Market. He was looking for Idris Selban, but the wily soul trader was nowhere to be found. Selban’s home was a smoking ruin. Maybe the sly old fellow was dead. Also missing were the rest of High Market’s soul merchants. Killed, hiding, or fled; it made no difference.
Rezdurth Thorne’s smile had begun to slip into an expression of annoyance by the time he quit the High Market, turning back north through the city to head back to the lower market. He needed souls. If there was anyone left alive, anyone at all who had souls to trade, he would find them. And then he would kill them and take what he wanted.
***
Collam studied the turncoat Suncloak Jacin Verret through eyes narrowed with suspicion. It wasn’t so much that he thought Verret would betray them. He’d heard the Islander speak of the battle for Solstice, and he recognized the bitterness of a soldier who’d lost his faith in what he fought for. No, Jacin Verret had definitely turned his back on the Golden Empire. Jacin Verret wouldn’t betray them.
The problem was, Jacin Verret wasn’t the man who crouched beside Collam at the river’s edge. They and the forty-two other men Rez had sent on ahead were hidden in the tall rushes and water-grasses along the muddy bank, but if any of them were to stand upright they’d be within easy sight of the palace. They meant to go in through the tiny rivergate. But Collam had called a halt to their uncomfortable, squatting march through the reeds fifteen minutes ago, and he wasn’t nearly ready to signal them forward again. Not until he figured out what had happened to Jacin in the night.
Yesterday, the younger man had been full of fire and regret. This morning, it was as if he were a sack that had been emptied. Breaking fast, he had slouched over his morning meal and spoken not a word to anyone. His eyes, when Collam caught sight of them, were vacant and distant. Verret was hollow. But then he’d seemed to come alive. Only, he wasn’t the same now.
Collam had his suspicions it was some dark spell. He’d seen Rez looking pretty vacant the day before they met up with Verret and his men. Just leaning up against the tree with a dopey look on his face and not a thought in his head. He’d sprung alive of a sudden, just like Verret. And…he’d been different too. Collam didn’t want to face it, but whatever had come over Jacin had come over Rez first.
And Jacin had spent most of the night training with Rez. At least, that’s what Rez had told everyone.
It was more than passing strange, Collam thought, and it had his back up. It had to be some nastiness from the emperor, some kind of spell. Collam had heard more than once that weavers could snare a man’s mind, but he never believed that. It was silly superstition. He’d known weavers, and they couldn’t just reach out and possess a man.
Then again, Collam had to admit the eternal emperor was no ordinary weaver. He wondered just what such a sorcerer was truly capable of, and hesitated to speculate.
“Collam!” It was a hissed whisper from further along the river bank. Collam couldn’t see the young man through the rushes, but even at a hoarse whisper he recognized the voice. He glanced once more at Verret, feeling uneasy, and then made his painstaking way over the muddy ground to Alban’s side. The much younger man was right at the edge of the water, and as Collam approached Alban parted the rushes and pointed through the gap at something on the river.
Collam ground his teeth down on the curse that sprang to his tongue. The heavily armored, double-masted rivership riding the current toward the river gate dock was no merchant or trader’s vessel. Collam could see rows of men standing to rigid attention on the high deck.
He shook his head. The ship was a bit too far off for him to make out the banner flapping loosely in the wind from atop the main mast. Not that it mattered. Whoever owned that ship, there was little chance they’d come to help Collam and his men.
He was about to signal a stealthy retreat, back to some place they could reevaluate their strategy, when Jacin Verret suddenly stood up and screamed, “Attack!”
***
His family had been living in Sunharbor since before it was called Sunharbor. A Pedderson had built the stout keep that overlooked the empire’s principal sea port, and a Pedderson had dwelt there ever since. As the youngest of three sons, it had been Kial Pedderson’s fate to spend his life soldiering.
He had begun his career in the colors of Archon Craston, whose holdings included Sunharbor and the surrounding lands. However, due to the proximity of Craston’s fief to the imperial hub, Pedderson had most often fought for the emperor.
Kial Pedderson remembered the uprising in the Southern Islands as if it were yesterday rather than two and a half decades past. He relived it sometimes, in his darker dreams. He remembered the perilous landing and the battle at the beachhead, remembered marching into South Landing with his hot blood pounding. He remembered well how the emperor’s foes were treated.
When the Tophylax Emperia quelled the fighting in Solstice, Kial Pedderson remembered. He thought back to all the Islanders they had slain, whether they be rebel or no. South Landing was an enemy city, and afterwards an occupied one. Whether any given local had been loyal or not was irrelevant. Solstice should have been different.
It hadn’t been. And Kial Pedderson, who had served the eternal emperor with his sword for more than thirty years, decided he’d had enough.
Most of his own men lay dead in the streets or remained unaccounted for. He knew most of the missing had fled the fighting, fled the city. He wondered if they’d struck out separately, or whether there was some group of former City Watchmen hunkered down in the woods somewhere. Pedderson decided it didn’t matter. The ones who were left to him, the few Suncloak survivors still in the city, were not much and besides that Pedderson couldn’t be sure of their loyalty.
So he had sent a parrot to Sunharbor.
The answer had reached him at dawn this morning, and he set out immediately. He hadn’t even taken the time to saddle his horse. He galloped out of the city, pushing the horse hard. He’d ridden downriver and met the ship a few miles south of the palace.
Kial dove into the river and swam out to the ship, hoisting himself up the ladder that was tossed down with the slowly returning familiarity of one who had been away from the sea for many years. His eldest brother Kiergan greeted him on deck, and confided his belief that it was long past time someone stood up to the cruel wizard in the palace.
With a hundred and fifty men, loyal Sunharbormen all, they proceeded up the river.
***
The emperor’s awareness was spread out through each man of the Tophylax Emperia. He knew of the assault at the river gate as soon as it began.
The emperor recognized the colors of the ancient House Pedderson, minor nobility in his Golden Empire and long subjects of the Craston archons. Those colors hadn’t been raised in battle since the glorious Summer War. The emperor knew the significance of this immediately, and directed his Tophylax to slaughter them all.
A second force, a motley assortment of City Watch men and rebellious peasants, rallied out of the high grasses and weeds along the river’s edge. The man leading their charge still wore a few remnants of his Suncloak armor. Waving his bared sword overhead, he bellowed with rage and hurled himself into the fighting without regard for whom he struck out at.
The battle was joined. The emperor directed his Tophylax Emperia with a corner of his attention, subliminally irritated at the distraction. He had a far more important contest to win, and the half-Shadow child on his altar resisted him mightily.
Sneering at the whelp, the emperor leaned over her with flashing eyes and redoubled his efforts to break through her defenses.
Chapter 31 - Battle of the Wills
He was in her mind.
The emperor’s soul felt oily and rancid to Shel. She couldn’t resist him with weaves of her own, and was forced to writhe madly but ineffectually as his magic insinuated itself into her flesh. Ethereal talons sank into her, the foul touch reaching every part of her. It made her sick.
There were no words for the struggle between them, and had there been Shel wouldn’t have the time to conjure them. Her body was bound and her soul fettered, but no one had ever been able to conquer her will. She pitted herself against the emperor with every ounce of strength.
In reality, in the domed central sanctuary of his palace, the eternal emperor of the Golden Empire stood hunched over the stone altar with eyes bugging out, vein throbbing at his temple with fearsome concentration, sweat on his brow, fingers curled tightly and quivering where he held his hands up between himself and the girl on the slab. She bucked and writhed against her restraints, her howling wordless, endless.
On some other level, esoteric and strange and knowable only to those with the blood of the Shadows in them, Shel and the Emperor faced one another and fought. His weaves pinched and tickled the folds of her brain, applied calculated pressure to nerve endings which racked her physical body with agony, and melted themselves into her thoughts themselves to spread out. He sought something in her mind, in her memory, which at first she couldn’t categorize.
For her part, Shel resisted. She closed down her thoughts as best she could. Part of her went back to the Midnight Grove, when she sat on the air at the top of the pines. In her far-off contemplation she had often found herself stilling, thinking nothing. She sought that emptiness of thought now in order to deny the emperor what knowledge, she still knew not what, he sought.
He spoke in her thoughts, as silent as nothing and insistent as her own dominant consciousness. It burned in her head, that foreign voice, that intrusive presence, that demanding alien howl. It shook and rattled her brain and sank claws into her spine and shouted its question at her again and again.
What is your name?
Shel. She tried to clamp down but the thought rose unbidden, instinctively. She couldn’t help but think it. Shel. My name is Shel. And there came howling laughter filled with evil delight, and the laughter burned her mind as harshly as the furious demands had done.
Then laughter fell silent and a wave of hate washed through Shel. She hunched in on herself to weather the surging storm of vile emotion. Buried in the hate was a sense of astonished betrayal, and then the question came again. What is your name?
And even as she thought her own name, Shel understood the truth. Her name wasn’t Shel. If the parents she knew were not her real parents, then what did it matter what sound that man and woman had called her by? It wasn’t her name.
What is your name?
Yes, thought Shel. That is the question.
***
Hulking Tophylax Emperia poured out from the rivergate, spreading to make room for their fellows but offering no opening to the raiders.
There was a narrow platform suspended from the wall over the water, barely large enough for ten men outside the gate. One end of the platform connected to the riverbank at the corner of the palace wall. From the other end of the platform extended the dock, a long finger stretched out across the current. There was certainly not enough room for the battle that was shaping up, and the Sunharbor men took to the water and waded toward shore.
Jacin Verret splashed into the shallows and began to attack the Sunharbor men. Tophylax Emperia charged out into the reeds, quickly spreading over the beach while others waded out into the water. Where they trod, there could be no successful resistance. Blades cut the air and sang their slicing-whistling-whooshing-thwacking song, and soon the blood began to flow.
It was utter chaos around the river gate. If there had ever been any hope for the rebels, Collam thought, it had surely vanished now. He drew his knives and did his best to stay alive. He didn’t think that would be very long. As long as I can, he promised.
Alban shouted Jacin Verret’s name again, slogging through the wat
er toward trying to catch up to the other man. An utterly confused Sunharbor man came at him from the side, and Alban plunged his sword into the seaman’s leg without stopping. He shouted after Verret a third time, but Jacin either didn’t hear or wouldn’t heed.
Kial Pedderson raced down the length of the dock, his saber held high. He didn’t waste breath on boast or challenge, but ran with his mouth held firmly closed. He blew huffing breaths blew out between his lips with increasing frequency, and his pulse thundered in his ear. The first Tophylax coming down the dock squared up to him, and Pedderson brought his saber down and around and felt it glance off the lacquered armor and catch against the spikes. He whipped it back and searched the mostly unfamiliar armor for chinks as he prepared a follow-up stroke.
Kiergan was right behind his younger brother, exultant and filled with nervous excitement. If Kial had ever envied his position as the eldest and the heir, the youngest brother had never shown it. But, oh, how Kiergan had envied his brother’s adventurous life over the years. Now, at last, the brothers would share a final adventure. He almost didn’t care whether they won or lost. It seemed a worthy cause, to unseat the undying monster from his throne, but mostly Kiergan relished this chance to fight at his brother’s side.
Seeing the Tophylax raise its broad-bladed sword, and his brother fumbling to find a viable attack, Kiergan Pedderson raised his own saber high and set his feet against the deck in a seaman’s fighting stance. Though he’d never seen real action, like all the boys in Sunharbor, noble and peasant alike, he had learned to fight on the rolling deck of a ship. That’s what killed him, the unnecessarily solid and sturdy stance he struck in preparation. The Tophylax needed no further preparation than the intent to kill, and with a swipe of its massive blade it cut Kiergan Pedderson in half.
Blood splashed Kial’s face and his vision swam. A haze of rage fell across his eyes, but as the Tophylax hauled back its sword he drove his own blade forward and into the crease beneath the Eyeless’arm. He felt his saber bite flesh and knew he’d avenged his brother. That was the best he could have for the moment; later, if he lived, he would mourn. If he indulged in it now, he would see his Kiergan again all too soon.
Soul Weaver: A Fantasy Novel Page 23