Soulwoven

by Jeff Seymour

  Peace wouldn’t come.

  Leramis floated in a sea of memories. He watched himself leave a creaking, empty manor house, saw a black casket garlanded with white roses buried in a moss-filled cemetery by the sea. He caught flashes of the sneering faces of old rivals, heard taunts leveled at him by those who considered themselves his betters, recalled wrestling semi-naked in the cold dawn in the Academy and the pride he’d felt as he donned the white robes for the first time.

  And he remembered a girl with flame-red hair who’d made him feel things he’d never known existed.

  Ryse.

  He’d had a dream about her, not long ago. Had heard her calling his name in the darkness. It hadn’t been the first time he’d dreamed of her.

  You will do great things, Leramis, if you find the courage to seize them.

  His mentor Rhan had said that to him on the night he’d made his pact and become a necromancer.

  Leramis had been in the Order for two years, and he hadn’t done anything great yet.

  He sighed and rose to his feet. The sparse furnishings of his apartment—a chair, a bed, a desk—formed pools of shadow in the milky light leaking through a frosted glass window in his wall.

  He crossed to the window, threw it open, and gazed onto the night-lit roofs of Death’s Head.

  The city looked like the symbol it had been named for. The docks at its southern end jutted into the black sea like rectangular teeth. The empty market of the Centerspach formed a dark eye of quiet chaos at its heart. The Chasm ran like a jagged scar across its face.

  He could see it all from his home near the top of the hill at its northeastern corner. Before him, the city slanted gently down from the monolithic wall that hemmed it in to the north until it reached the inky waters of the Bay of Hope. If he leaned out of his window, he could even see the massive black fastness of the Citadel jutting like a thumb from the mountains beyond the wall.

  Rhan would be there, he guessed, meeting with the rest of the Council of Taers.

  It was near three o’clock in the morning, and something was wrong.

  Leramis had sensed a parcel of souls winging its way to the Citadel, borne on the bones of a half-rotted hawk. And as he’d sensed it, he’d known that it brought bad news.

  He rolled his shoulders and stretched his neck. Sometimes he saw through the veil of the world and grasped the shape of Yenor’s plans. He remembered knowing, calmly and detachedly, that his father was going to die several months before he took sick. He remembered knowing when the Temple came to test his draw in the River of Souls that he would never return to the Lars Dors’ School for Boys except to pick up his belongings.

  It didn’t come as a surprise when, an hour or so after he sensed the message, someone knocked at his door.

  A crow called in the city. A gust of wind slammed the window shut in Leramis’s face.

  He crossed the creaking floorboards of his apartment and opened the door.

  A rotund girl in a black robe stood straight as a plank of siding in the wood-and-stone hallway beyond. Her eyes were sunken and waxy—probably, Leramis assumed, from lack of sleep.

  “Jenna,” he said quietly.

  Her hands moved to the edges of her long sleeves. “Rhan’s waiting below,” she said. Her voice was as cool and damp as the wood beneath his feet. “He has a task for you.”

  Leramis nodded and closed the door. The satchel of clothes and money he’d prepared for his journey lay under his bed. He retrieved it and added what food he had that was fit for traveling.

  Before leaving, he took the black robe from its peg and pulled it over his head.

  Rhan was waiting for him in the street below. The Taer of the Eye was a small, thin man with quiet hands whose shorn head masked baldness that had struck him young. He wore the same plain black robe as everyone else in the order, despite his station. He didn’t gravitate much toward outward displays of power.

  His strength came from within, and it was all the more potent for it.

  Leramis caught Rhan’s sharp brown eyes on him as he left his home and felt as if a spider had danced down his spine.

  Rhan had the same gift as Leramis, but on a grander scale. Rhan saw everything. It was the reason he’d earned his nickname even before taking the post of Taer of the Eye and the reason he’d earned that post a decade younger than any necromancer before him. Even after two years, Leramis felt uncomfortable standing under Rhan’s gaze. It was like going naked before the Eye of Yenor itself.

  Rhan nodded as he approached. The Taer was mounted on a shaggy black pony. A second was tied riderless to a post between the sagging, gray entrance of Leramis’s building and the sloping front porch of the one next to it. Jenna was nowhere to be seen.

  “Good morning,” Leramis said quietly.

  Rhan jerked his chin toward the pony. “A ship is leaving for Nutharion on the morning tide. You need to be on it.”

  “Why?”

  Rhan let out a brief sigh. He reached into his robe for something—probably a sprig of mindleaf—then seemed to think better of it and put his hands on the reins again. His shaved head gleamed in what moonlight filtered through a thick skein of clouds above. “The rumors are true,” he said. “The Prince of Eldan travels to Aleana. He blames us for what happened to the heart dragons in his city.”

  Leramis frowned and swung into the pony’s saddle. He hadn’t ridden in years, but some things were difficult to forget.

  “And?” Leramis asked.

  Rhan set off, and Leramis followed. The ponies clopped their way around a roped-off hole in the street. “And the council has chosen you to convince him otherwise.”

  “The council?”

  “At my request.”

  Rhan’s face was unreadable in the moonlight. His pony’s shoes clip-clopped against the cobblestones, occasionally emitting little sparks that flared into the night, burned bright, and died.

  “We want you to intercept the prince in Du Hardt, if possible,” Rhan said. “Or in Du Fenlan if not.” They came down off the hill and approached one of the many bridges, built of stone but paved with wooden planks, that spanned the Chasm. Tall shops, dark and skeletal beneath the weak light, stood shuttered around them.

  Intercept the prince. A shiver went down Leramis’s spine. Eldanian nobles didn’t tend to appreciate being intercepted. Especially not by necromancers, and especially not when they were already on edge. “How many are with him?”

  “Five.” Rhan paused and half turned in the saddle, so that he was facing Leramis. “One of them,” he continued, “is a temple soulweaver about your age, with fiery red hair.”

  Leramis couldn’t help the hiss of breath between his teeth, or the sudden thudding of his heart.

  Peace, he told it, but there was little chance of it listening. Rhan had told him, several weeks back, that their agents in the Temple had heard quiet whisperings that Ryse Lethien had disappeared from Temple Complex the night the heart dragons were broken. She was wanted back, alive, for questioning, by the Twelve.

  The hand of Yenor guided everything in Guedin. Potential paths of causation ran through Leramis’s mind, one with every heartbeat.

  It was possible. It was possible their god was bringing them together again.

  The sea came into view at the end of the street. It was covered in a light skin of fog that shifted and wisped in a gentle mirror of the waves beneath it. Directly ahead, Leramis spotted one of the jagged black stacks the necromancers called the stubble yawning toward the cloud-covered sky like a broken tooth.

  “Eshan and Crixine may move at any time, Leramis. Be ready.”

  Leramis adjusted the lie of his satchel behind him. The ponies passed into the deep shadows between two warehouses, and the sea fell out of view.

  He remembered Eshan and Crixine. Tall. Dark-haired and white-haired, respectively. They’d claimed to be Duennin when they’d come to the Order, and Leramis had believed their story. There’d been something cold and vicious about them—something v
iolent and disdainful in their eyes from the start.

  He hadn’t been all that surprised when they’d left the Order. Nor when others had followed them, or when Rhan had told him that they were probably behind the destruction of the heart dragons.

  The ponies found their way out of the warehouse shadows and slowed to a stop. Leramis looked at Rhan. The older necromancer sat with his hands crossed over the pommel of his saddle.

  “My proposal to send our people to protect the heart dragons was voted down,” Rhan said.

  Leramis grimaced. Safeguard the River, Faide the Wise had written when the Order of Necromancers had splintered from the Temple of Eldan. And respect the Vision of Yenor for the World.

  In recent years, the Council of Taers seemed to have taken that to mean Do nothing, ever.

  Rhan shifted in his saddle and looked out over the water. The faint hint of a smile played around his mouth. “As Olen of the Mind so eloquently put it this evening: ‘Sherduan is the knife Yenor gave the world to slit its own throat. It’s not our place to stop the world from doing it.’” His eyes floated over the water, darting from rock to sea to land and back, seeing everything.

  Leramis didn’t care for Olen of the Mind, nor for his theology. He never had.

  “Incidentally,” Rhan added, “he didn’t want you serving as ambassador to Prince Quay.”

  Rhan kicked his pony into motion again, and Leramis followed. He’d met Prince Quay once, long ago, at a banquet given at the Lars Dors’ School. He’d made a vow then, to protect the monarchy, and to protect Eldan.

  Interesting how things could change in the course of half a young man’s lifetime.

  “You’re to convince the Prince of Eldan that we’re not behind the attacks on the heart dragons and keep him from enlisting the help of the Aleani in his father’s war against us. You need do no more.”

  The ponies wormed past ships tied to stone pylons along the sea walk by the docks. Near the south end of the walk, a small craft with a lateen-style mainsail and a triangular jib bobbed on the waters. Its deck was lit by oil lamps. Black-robed sailors beetled over it in the smoky orange light.

  “But I’m sending you to Prince Quay for a reason, Leramis.”

  Protect the heart dragons, he meant. But it was hard for Leramis to hear anything other than Ryse is with him.

  Rhan dismounted when they’d gotten close enough to the little ship to see the silhouette of its captain on the aft deck. Leramis stepped down from his saddle and was surprised to note that his thighs felt sore even after such a short ride. His mind felt cottony and unbalanced.

  Ryse is with him. I’m going to see her again.

  Leramis’s fingers tingled. He fixed his eyes on the stubble in the bay.

  “Yenor steers the world with the breath of Hir soul,” Rhan said. He handed a slip of paper to a sailor who came toward them, and he gave a sealed packet to Leramis. “Everything happens for a reason.”

  Peace. Thud-thud. Peace. Thud-thud.

  Rhan shook his hand.

  “Good luck,” the older necromancer said. “And go with the Grace of Yenor.”

  Rhan the Eye tied Leramis’s pony to the saddle of his own, mounted up, and rode into the yawning darkness of the streets of Death’s Head.

  Leramis gazed out to sea. He listened to the water whisper against the pylons, the sea walk, the stubble. He felt the breeze ebb and flow. He watched the mist move over the water and the clouds slide across the sky.

  The movements of the body of the world told him nothing.

  He opened the packet of papers he’d been handed. It was a rundown of the information that had been gathered on Quay of Eldan and the people Rhan’s agents thought were with him.

  Cole Jin… He recognized that name. Ryse had mentioned him as a friend more than once. His heart sped further. He scanned the pages in front of him, searching feverishly, mindlessly.

  On the third page, he found what he was after.

  Ryse Lethien.

  Rhan was sending him forth, at last, to do great things.

  Intercept the prince.

  But it wasn’t great things Leramis was truly excited for.

  SEVENTEEN

  A hand squeezed Cole’s shoulder, and he woke with a start. The hard, smooth wood of a chair was beneath him. Open rafters soared over his head. He sat in a warm room filled with familiar voices, benches, tables, a fireplace. His body felt as if it had been dragged through a flour mill, and a pack lay next to him on the floor like his own personal ball and chain.

  “Upstairs, Cole. We’re almost there.”

  His brother’s voice. They’d been walking for a day and a half straight. It was morning and they were in Janestown, a small, unwalled city of humble buildings and red slate roofs that was nevertheless the biggest Nutharian municipality near the border of Aleana. Cole had seen it at sunrise on the edge of the northern plains of Nutharion, where the grasses met the hills and the hills met the blue, haze-shrouded mountains.

  He didn’t remember what had passed between.

  The hand on his shoulder moved to his arm and helped him up. His vision was a little blurry, but he could see that some of the others had it worse. Ryse, in particular. She was leaning heavily on Litnig in front of him and staggering up a flight of stairs.

  Cole followed, leaning on someone else. Someone shorter than him.

  At the top of the staircase, he found a hallway full of doors. Quay was fiddling with a lock on one. Litnig was moving into another. Cole stood dumbly, not sure where to go.

  “Come on, this way,” whispered a voice from the shoulder he was leaning on. He was helped into a small room with a bed on either side and a little glass-paned window in the outside wall.

  He flopped onto the nearest mattress. His helper grunted. His pack fell to the floor, and he rolled over and blinked up at the blurry shape that had been supporting him.

  Dil. Of course it had been Dil. Her face was tired and dusty, but she smiled at him anyway and pulled a strand of hair from her eyes.

  The bed felt soft and welcoming, but he wasn’t sure he had the strength to undress, or even to get under the blankets. And Dil was still there. He needed to say something to Dil.

  His mouth opened, but he couldn’t remember the words. She patted his shoulder.

  “You’re welcome,” she said. Her hand lingered, squeezed. Some time passed, and then his head jerked up and he found himself looking into her face again. “Rest up, Cole,” she sighed, and the hand left his shoulder.

  “Wait,” he mumbled, though he wasn’t sure if it was loud enough for her to hear. “I need to thank you.”

  “We’ve still got a long way to go,” she said. He couldn’t focus on her. “He’ll be all right?”

  Cole mumbled something confused in response.

  “Yeah,” said his brother. “I’ll take care of him. Thanks.”

  There was a brief, caring squeeze of his knee, and then Dil was gone.

  Something tugged at his boots. He looked down and found his brother yanking them off his feet. The room swam. He could do it on his own. He could. Really. All he needed was a little—

  His head hit the pillow, and his eyelids fluttered closed, and Cole Jin went out like a snuffed candle.

  ***

  Litnig helped his little brother lie down, and Cole was snoring before he’d even crossed the room again. The bigger Jin brother shook his head. Dil had practically carried Cole the last few miles into town. The girl was strong for her size. Very strong.

  The room Quay had rented for him and his brother was cool in the morning light, and he could see most of Janestown from its window. The settlement sat at the base of a long line of hills, near a fast-moving river that flowed toward Nutharion City. Litnig had seen the mountains towering endless and snow-capped and austere on the horizon that morning.

  There were no walls to defend the town, no soldiers or guards to be seen. Its cream-colored, mud-brick homes ran straight into the waving sea of gardens and golden grasses th
at surrounded it. Pink, purple, and red flowers dotted long green vines that crawled from roof to street, from house to house. Fruit trees sat loaded and unravaged on the corners, and a public bath occupied the center of the town.

  It was the kind of place he would’ve loved to stay in for a while—sleepy, relaxed, happy. Their innkeeper was a fat, pleasant woman who’d peeled potatoes while she took their names and laughed when she’d seen how tired they were.

  A burst of cool air swept through the window, and Litnig shivered. It had been getting colder as they’d approached the mountains. The days were still warm, the air quite dry, but the nights…

  He sighed and sat down on his bed to unlace his boots. Two nights and a full day. That was how long Quay had marched them for. Thirty-seven hours at least, by Litnig’s reckoning. His shoulders were fiery knots. His legs quivered like noodles. He tugged one boot off, then the other, poured dust and dirt and rocks from the road onto the creaking wooden boards below his feet. He had to stop and marshal his strength even for such small actions.

  But he wasn’t nearly as exhausted as he’d expected to be. He’d never walked like that in his life. He should’ve felt like Cole, should’ve felt like Ryse. Instead, he’d carried their extra weight.

  Why? he wondered.

  A basin with a looking glass behind it sat in one corner of the room, and he took the time to wash his face and drink a little from a pitcher of water that had been left by it. The face that looked back from the glass surprised him. It was still black-haired, still gray-eyed, but it had grown darker with sun and a little gaunt. Stubble grew along his jawline, his upper lip, his chin. His hair sprouted greasy and unkempt from his skull like the grasping roots of a potato plant, and mean red streaks stretched along his shoulders where the straps of his pack had rested. He looked more like the human statue from his dream than he did himself.

  He grunted and walked in bare feet back to his bed. The sun shone brightly outside, and he drew the curtains against it. He could still hear the rustle of people passing by in the streets of Janestown, but he didn’t think that would keep him from sleeping. Truth be told, he didn’t think anything could keep him from sleeping.