Soulwoven
Page 4
The disc rumbled like a thundercloud.
The clouds beyond the pillar churned and tumbled, and then a white statue of a man stood at the edge of the disc, staring at him.
The statue wore trousers and a loose-cut shirt, tall boots, a heavy greatcoat. It had Litnig’s height, his breadth, his ears and eyebrows and mouth. Its eyes shone bright and hazy in silver light that seemed to leak as much as shine from it. It could’ve been carved from a block of marble, or soap, or alabaster, a hundred different shades of bluish-white.
And it could move.
The statue closed its eyes, opened them, smiled thickly and clenched and unclenched its hands.
Think, Litnig told himself. What was left of his dinner slid around in his gut. The statue walked toward one of the pillars, its boots scraping on the disc as it moved. Litnig’s heart pounded.
It doesn’t look like me, he thought. Not exactly. The face was different. Its nose was broader, its cheeks higher, its forehead smaller. It had moles and wrinkles where he didn’t.
It crooked its finger and beckoned him forward. He obeyed. The statue wasn’t out to hurt him. Somehow, in the muddled, hazy logic of the dream, he knew that—like he knew in the real world that when the air was cold and damp, a storm was coming.
When he reached the statue, it pointed him toward the pillar, and he spotted the thing that had scared him out of the dream earlier that night.
A perfect black copy of the white statue stood chained to the pillar with its arms across its chest, facing the edge of the disc and the darkness beyond. Its eyes hung in shadow, half-turned from Litnig and the white statue as if it was afraid of the light. Its eyebrows were drawn down, its mouth locked in a grimace. Its fingers gripped its shoulders tightly. At its feet lay more of the broken links Litnig had seen before, but heavy chains the color of iron still bound it to the pillar.
Litnig turned back to the white statue and found it walking away from him.
Wait! he called. The word came from above, like Yenor Hirself had spoken it from the void. The white statue turned back to face him.
The statue looked at Litnig, and Litnig looked at it, and then it stepped from the disc into the darkness beyond.
Litnig stared numbly after it and wrapped his arms around his torso.
Think, he told himself. Reason. But his mind was muddy, and his head hurt. He turned back to the statue on the pillar.
It had moved.
Its eyes were still shut, but its face had turned toward Litnig, and the corners of its mouth had tugged up in a wicked smile. Its fingers were spread, and one of its arms was partially extended, like it had been ready to reach out and touch him.
He swallowed. That was what had scared him before. It had moved. He could feel the fear roiling in his blood again, telling him to run, to wake up and get as far away as he could, but he fought it.
It’s just a dream, he told himself, though some part of him whispered that it was more than that. He took a step toward the statue. Then another.
Nothing happened. The dark thing stood motionless in its chains. Litnig’s feet crunched over the broken links at the pillar’s base. A slight breeze pulled the hair from left to right atop his head.
Touch it, whispered something in his mind, and he trailed his fingers across its arm. The stone felt smooth, warm, almost like skin. The fear in him melted away and was replaced by something else.
Anger, he realized.
At what he couldn’t say, but it raced through his veins like wildfire, and he yanked his hand back before he lost himself in it completely.
A shiver ran over the top of his skull. His chest tingled. He turned to look for the white statue in the darkness and willed his heart to slow down, breathing as slowly and as calmly as he could. The disc rumbled again. The darkness tumbled and shifted.
He felt a presence at his back.
When Litnig turned around, the eyes of the statue on the pillar were open, wide and almond shaped. They glowed the angry, shifting red of the darkest coals in a fire.
And the statue was moving.
It raised its chin from its chest, fixed its eyes on Litnig’s and bared black, sharpened teeth. A thousand frightened thoughts tried all at once to run through Litnig’s mind, and the thing lunged forward, strained against its chains and opened its mouth in a soundless snarl. Litnig jerked back and caught his heel on part of the disc. He tried to pivot, but he couldn’t move fast enough, lost his balance, fell ugly and awkward and fast. His head struck the disc. The statue was yanking at its chains above him, trying to break them, trying to get to him—
There was a painful flash of light and the rumble of thunder again. A hand squeezed his shoulder, and he shut his eyes. The dream started to fade. He heard the deep voice with its command.
Everything will be all right, it said. Bring your brother.
He had the sensation of turning a somersault, and then he woke in his bed.
His right hand clutched his left shoulder. The window was open. The alley outside it looked gray and ghostly.
Breathe, he told himself. Just breathe. He remembered Ryse, walking down the street with that gray-robed man grabbing her arm. He’d watched priests and guards walk off with Ryse like that many times when they were kids. They’d always brought her back to the slums. Put her where they thought she belonged.
Everything will be all right.
He remembered the eyes of the statue, its long, sharpened teeth, saw it lunge for him over and over in his mind.
It was a long, long time before Litnig fell asleep again.
FIVE
Ryse stared at the rainspout.
It hung from a wall of plaster in front of her, twenty feet high at least, sticking out from a wooden gutter below a red tile roof. A light breeze, smelling of dampness and rain in the west, ruffled her robes. The moon hung high and bright.
Her legs burned. Her heart beat fast and hard.
I haven’t climbed this in eight years, she thought, but she put her hands on the slick old wood and started up anyway. Her body remembered where every handhold or foothold was—when to reach around the back of the spout and stick her thumb into a divot on the side of the house, where to jam her toe in order to get her knee up onto the roof, which tile to hook her fingers under to pull the rest of her body up. It was easier than it had been eight years before. Much easier.
I’m taller now, she realized. And stronger.
She stood cautiously on the slick clay tiles, took a deep breath of chilly air and surveyed the lights of the city—Temple Dome bright and harsh in the north, the palace stern and white to the east, a few hazy glows in streets or houses between. Heavy fog covered the breadth of the Eldwater and most of the slums, was already creeping in amongst the houses of the Merchants’ Crescent.
On top of the roof, she rose above it all.
Breathe, she told herself, then move.
Ryse had little with her. Just her bag and the robe on her back and a brown cloak over the top. She had snuck through the columns of Temple Complex like a ghost in the moonlight and run pell-mell down the streets of Temple Hill, ducking through alleyways and jumping fences. When the dilapidated old homes of Thieves’ Rise had loomed before her, she’d curved west and doubled back toward the river and the tall houses of the Crescent.
She hadn’t even realized where her feet were taking her until she’d slowed down and discovered she was only two streets over from the Jin household.
Of course, she’d thought. Where else would she go?
She crept gently across the red roof and jumped catlike from its slate tiles onto the spiky, damp thatch of the Jins’ home. The scent of a thousand rainstorms and a hundred memories wafted over her. She remembered nights spent bundled under blankets with Litnig and Cole, naming the stars and telling stories and boasting over a hundred little nothings.
She crawled across the thatch and peeked down. The brothers’ old window was open, just a few feet below her.
She hoped it still led to their room.
The room beyond the window definitely still belonged to Litnig and Cole. The wardrobe had crossed the floor, and the beds had moved from the inside walls to the outer walls, but—
A dark shape shot toward her from the corner. As she spun to face it, her heel caught on her robe. Her butt dropped toward the street. Her wrist slammed into the window frame. Her feet lost traction.
A hand caught her wrist.
She looked up into the gray eyes of Litnig Jin. He was shirtless, his hair mussed at crazy angles. His grip was strong as stone.
“Ryse?” he whispered as he pulled her in. “What are you doing here?”
Her stomach roiled while her feet found the floor. Twenty feet was a long way to fall onto hard stone.
She glanced at Cole’s bed. The younger Jin brother lay facing the wall, snoring quietly.
“I—” The words stuck in her throat. “I left the Temple.”
Litnig looked puzzled.
“For good.”
At first, Litnig said nothing. He just stood there in the semidarkness holding her wrist and staring at her.
Then he took a deep breath.
“All right,” he said, and he let go of her arm. A shirt hung from the corner of his empty bed, and he pulled it on, his eyes peeking darkly for a moment from the collar. “How can I help?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know why I came here.” She hugged herself, took a shaky breath and sat on the windowsill. “I can’t think straight right now.”
Litnig stared at her from the shadows. His face was swaddled in darkness, unreadable.
“You need sleep,” he said.
She shook her head. “I can’t, Lit. What if the Temple comes after me?”
Litnig looked briefly out the window, then nodded. “Sentinel Hill, then. The cave.” He crossed the room and grabbed his cloak from a peg near the door. It was the same one he’d worn when he’d come to the Temple just hours before.
“You must be exhausted,” Ryse said.
“Can’t sleep anyway,” he muttered, and then he was opening the door to his room while she turned back and gestured out the open window. He smiled. “We’re not kids anymore, Ryse. We can use the front door.”
Moments later, Ryse was walking next to him through the streets and alleys of Merchants’ Crescent into a thickening cloud of fog. As she walked, she forced the River of Souls into a semblance of its normal flow around her, to help keep other soulweavers from finding the eddy she caused in it.
Like I was never here at all.
The sides of buildings rose around her like half-seen ships floating in the fog. Litnig was little more than a shadow at her side. It took until the deepest time of night, just before dawn began to crack the horizon, for them to break free of the streets and start up the old, worn footpath that led to the top of Sentinel Hill.
“Why’d you leave?” Litnig asked as they broke out of the fog. The path led along the north ridge of the hill, curling high above the tail end of Merchants’ Crescent and the smoky, hidden shacks of the slums. He held out a hand to help her scramble up a slick patch of rock.
She took it and stepped from boulder to boulder, clambered up the slippery stone to join him amongst tall, dewy grasses. Below her, the fog had swallowed the entire Eld River valley. Only the three hills poked up above the clouds.
Ryse let her eyes rest on the Temple. “Do you remember the statuette of the broken dragon we saw tonight?”
Litnig nodded.
“Do you remember the legend of Sherduan?”
He frowned. “Yes, but—”
“That little statue was one of the heart dragons that keep Sherduan sealed.”
Ryse stepped around Litnig and sat on a boulder. She felt calmer away from the Temple, standing even with it, the city lost in cloud below. Her body hummed with the exertion of the climb. Her sweat steamed in the predawn air.
She and Cole and Litnig had argued over the different versions of the story when they were kids. About whether the Duennin, monstrous beings cobbled together with the power of the dragon, were real. About whether their creator had really had wings. About whether Yenor had made soulweavers to break the seals, protect the seals, or both, and whether the whole thing was as made-up as Father Solstice and the Harvest Man.
Litnig was looking at the Temple too. “You still think the story’s real?”
She nodded. “When I asked the Twelve about the broken heart dragon, they wanted to know how I knew about it and who you were.” She breathed warm mist toward the fog. “I lied to them.”
Long silence. Litnig uncrossed his arms, flexed his hands. The wind brushed the tips of the grass against Ryse’s neck. Drops of water ran slowly down her back.
“So you left because of us,” Litnig said at last.
“I left because of them.” She could still feel the danger in the air and the goose bumps on her skin, still hear the little girl in her head screaming at her to run. “I think they’re going to try to keep it a secret.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” A breeze whistled over her shoulders from the great, walled-in stretch of farmland that lay on the far side of Sentinel Hill. Clouds hung in silver moonlit bands across the horizon.
“So what next?” Litnig asked. He was still staring at the Temple, arms crossed.
Ryse’s eyes lingered at the bottom of the hill, on the fog-drenched slums she’d grown up in. “I don’t know,” she said. She couldn’t suppress a shiver. “I don’t have anywhere to go.”
“You could stay with me.”
“I can’t.” She looked up at him, as he stood there with the moon over his head and the wind in his face offering her something she could never take. He’d done the same thing more than once, when they’d been kids.
“They would find me.” She sighed. “And they might find you too. You and Cole will have to be careful, Lit. Maybe go with your father out to the country or something.”
Litnig frowned, and Ryse stood up. She could already feel the soreness of the climb mounting in her legs.
“Come on,” she said as she started up the path again. “The cave isn’t far ahead.”
She needed to rest, and she needed to think.
Because if the Temple wasn’t going to take the destruction of the heart dragons seriously, she had no idea who would.
SIX
Just after dawn, Quay Eldani squatted beneath the vaulted ceiling of his solar and stuffed an old leather backpack with clothing that didn’t belong to him.
Miniature paintings by great Eldanian masters hung from the walls, alive in swirls of color and thick-textured paint. Doors to his apartments stood ajar to his right and his left. The glass-paned entrance to his balcony was open, and through it, he saw dark reds, oranges, and purples splashed across the bottom of a thickening band of cloud to the west.
The clothing at his fingertips was drab, thick, woolen. It felt coarse against his skin compared to the silk and cotton to which he was accustomed.
Next to Quay, a red-haired, freckle-faced five-year-old stood and watched him pack.
“You can help, if you want,” Quay said, and little Colin Galeni, wearing the green doublet of his house, knelt on the tiled floor and started stuffing white shirts and brown trousers into the pack. Two short swords in worn, frayed sheaths lay next to the clothes. So did a wooden case full of maps and a purse stuffed with coins.
“Did the washerwomen ask you why you needed the clothes?” Quay asked.
Colin nodded.
“And what did you tell them?”
The boy didn’t look up from his task. His eyes gleamed green in the low light. “That I wanted to play slum man.”
“And what will you say if they ask for them back?”
“I lost them.”
Quay smiled and tousled his cousin’s hair. “Good man,” he sa
id, and Colin beamed.
Quay sat back and let his cousin stuff the clothes into the pack. His stomach was unsettled. Had been since he’d woken up that morning.
He was the Prince of Eldan, and he had seen the dragon in his dreams.
He rubbed his chest and grimaced. Not just seen it, felt it—a darkness that had sat on his heart and smothered him until he’d woken gasping for air.
“Quay?”
The prince looked down and found Colin sitting cross-legged on the floor, the clothes forgotten.
“Why are you leaving?”
Quay rubbed his cousin’s head again. “Who told you I was leaving?”
“I’m not stupid.”
The prince smiled and stood. “Come here,” he said. He walked to a stone table in the center of the solar, upon which rested a charcoal drawing of two dragons eating one another’s tails. Quay lifted Colin up by the armpits and set him on a chair.
“You see those?” the prince asked.
Colin nodded.
“They’re called the heart dragons, and last night they were broken.”
“Who broke them?” Colin had fixed his eyes on the dragons. He did that, sometimes, when he saw something new.
“Necromancers.” Or so Aegelden Elpioni tells us.
“Why?”
Quay frowned. It was a good question. “They’re crazy, or they think they can control the dragon and use it for something.”
Colin turned half-around in his chair. “My father says the dragon isn’t real.”
Quay rolled up the drawing and slipped it into the map case near the pack.
“He said he heard it from Yenor’s Highest himself,” Colin continued. The boy climbed down from his chair and walked toward the two swords by the pack.
“Don’t touch those,” Quay said, but Colin didn’t listen. He had one halfway out of its sheath before Quay reached him and slid it gently back in.
“When you’re older,” the prince said quietly.
Colin nodded and walked toward a tall shelf of books and maps. A small, green volume, probably Cantani’s Wilderlengs and the Second River of Souls, had fallen out of place. The boy straightened it up against its neighbors.