Soulwoven

by Jeff Seymour

  Another lay by its foot.

  Litnig picked it up. The bead was warm and smooth, like marble that had sat all day in the summer sun. Broad, straight-lined characters had been carved upon it.

  He felt as if it belonged to him.

  The bead grew warmer between Litnig’s fingers, and a pleasant, soft feeling flooded his body. He closed his eyes, still kneeling. His sensations became hazy and dim, and then a series of images filled his mind in placid succession. Memories. Aleani memories.

  The walker’s memories.

  He lived them as they paraded through his mind, but he also stood apart from them and watched, as though a third party to his own life.

  A stern-faced Aleani mother yelled his name in anger and swung a broom at his face. He felt the crack of its connection, stumbled, hid hot tears behind his arms and scurried beneath a table. The image faded, and then he was clutching at her skirts while his hollow-eyed father herded a pair of oxen onto a small, ragged trail. Years passed. He grew tall and strong. His hair hung long and unbound, blew in the wind atop bright cliffs in the setting sun. Others processed below him with bells and dresses and dance and song. His first love, a russet-haired flamebonnet of an Aleani woman, walked in the center of them, right out of his life.

  Ryse? he thought, but the thought was outside of him, alien, not a part of the memory. He bit the skin from his thumb and sucked the blood and spat it out, and he swore an oath on it never to be timid in love again.

  He left home, sent sheep trotting over green hills with a whistle and a yell and a stout staff, walked through the streets of cities he did not know and cursed humans twice his size who scarcely noticed him. In the midst of that throng of strangers, he saw a face he recognized, bright and warm and welcoming, and he remembered a forbidden desire. He lay in the feather bed of a foreign inn with a woman whose touch had been withheld from him. Her hands were soft on the skin of his back, her curls light on his face, her words velvet in his ear.

  In the dead of winter not six months later, he awoke choking, surrounded by harsh orange light, hot air, and gray, acrid smoke. The timbers of his home hissed and spit with flame, and he blundered through crackling heat into the cold outdoors. A sharp, thick pain tore through his gut. His legs went out from under him. He looked down and saw an arrow, spotted blood in the snow. He gasped, and something came down above him with a crash, and that was all he knew.

  Litnig opened his eyes. The bead had grown ice cold in his hand. He could feel the arrow in his gut. His heart thumped, and the clouds of darkness beyond the disc swirled and spun themselves into tall black figures.

  The Aleani walker opened its eyes. There was a deep, unsettled sadness in them, mixed with an undercurrent of long frustration and jealousy. Litnig recalled his feelings about Ryse and the soulweaver in the tree and felt the blood rise to his cheeks.

  Compared to all that, the walker’s gaze seemed to say, what do you have to complain about?

  It uncrossed its legs, leaned forward, and pressed Litnig’s forehead to the disc.

  He woke to deep darkness in the room he’d gone to sleep in. His bed was still soft. His veins pulsed with a strange mixture of calmness and anxiety, sureness and fear. His brother snored across the room.

  What—he wondered, but there was no point in asking the full question, even of himself. He didn’t know what the dream meant, nor the memories. He still couldn’t guess at what the walkers were, why they took such interest in him, or why he felt so close to them and why they never spoke.

  A light flared in the hallway. A moment later, Quay stood wreathed in a yellow glow in the entrance of Litnig’s room.

  “Wake up,” Quay said. The shadows on his face were deep and unnerving. “It’s time to go.”

  Litnig looked out the window. The moon hadn’t risen yet. It was almost pitch black outside. “Isn’t—”

  “We’re not taking the road,” Quay said.

  Cole sat up. Litnig watched his brother and Quay stare at each other in the dim light.

  Len appeared in the hallway behind the prince. A moment later, so did Dil and Ryse.

  “A necromancer was spotted in the city two days ago,” the Aleani said. “We must take the tunnels.”

  A cold weight settled in Litnig’s chest. He watched Dil’s eyes glimmer with fear.

  “Is that safe?” he heard his brother ask.

  “It’s fast,” Quay said. His voice was hard and dark as coal. “And safe enough.”

  TWENTY

  Dil paused at the head of a set of stone stairs and shivered. The stars beckoned cold and far away above her. A jagged, cylindrical hole about a hundred yards in diameter yawned in black rock below. There were lights within—orange and yellow espers that danced and flickered in her eyes. Strange sounds drifted gently to her ears: fast-paced, whirling music. The babbling of crowds. Every so often, a metallic screech that started out loud and faded into the black. The stairs wound round the circumference of the hole and spiraled down, down into darkness.

  The steps were narrow, and Dil slipped with shaking hands onto them behind the others: Len, who knew the way. Quay, who had decided to take it. Litnig and Ryse, who followed.

  And Cole. Cole who walked in front of her in a green shirt, his tangled hair whipping over the back of his neck in warm updrafts. Cole whom she yearned to reach out and touch.

  She wasn’t sure why. She’d never fallen for a boy so quickly or so hard before. But there was something about him—the way his eyes caught the sunset, or the way he could be laughing and telling jokes one moment and serious as a scholar the next. Or maybe it was the way he cared for his brother and his friends.

  And the way she thought he might care about her.

  The stars disappeared. The air grew hot and damp and sticky.

  Dilanthia Lonecliff walked into the dark.

  The heart of Du Hardt, the city under the mountain, opened itself to her with hungry arms. The stairs led to streets that honeycombed up and down through the rock past taverns and warehouses and workshops and markets and homes. Aleani in rich, feathered costumes thronged around her and stared with curiosity in their eyes. There was a feeling of mirth in the air, of release, of festival. She didn’t ask why.

  Down and down Len Heramsun wound, and Dil could only follow. The crowds dwindled, then the music, then the light. Before she knew it, she stood in silence beyond the bottom of the great hole, the sky long lost to her, the warmth and society of Du Hardt a distant memory.

  In the shadows beyond the city’s subterranean heart, she found herself staring through a wide ring of red wood into an even deeper darkness, and she fought against all the bogeymen of her short life. Cool air blew in from the tunnels. A pitch-covered torch, the first of what was meant to be many, sputtered in her hand. The others stood around her, but they were too far away to touch. Too far away to give help.

  If I drop the torch, she worried, if it goes out…

  Len, a thick, dreadlocked silhouette in the orange light, shouldered his pack and stepped into the tunnels. Quay followed, then Litnig, then Ryse, then Cole.

  And Dil forced herself to go on.

  The tunnels themselves were huge, round and smooth-sided, at least fourteen feet tall and sixteen wide. The wind she’d felt at the tunnel entrance ceased as she moved further into the dark. Her ears brought her the sounds of dripping water, the footsteps of her companions, the rustling of their clothing and the clanking of their backpacks.

  There’s nothing alive down here, she thought. There’s nothing meant to be alive down here. Not the smallest insect. Not the tiniest plant. Not her.

  “How long will we be down here, Len?” Her voice echoed high and harsh against the rock walls of the tunnel. Out of place. Unwelcome.

  “Twenty-four hours, if we’re quick. No longer.”

  She breathed out slowly. Her eyes drifted to Cole’s torchlit back. She wanted to hold his hand, wanted him to put his arm around her shoulders. But he was staring ashen-faced at his own feet, and
even if he hadn’t been, she wasn’t sure he’d want to comfort her.

  She’d laughed at him.

  The world pressed in on her. Her mind began to whisper terrible things, then to gibber, then to babble. The others walked in silence, ghostly shadows in the torchlight, and suddenly she felt terribly, horribly alone. Alone under a mountain in a foreign land following an Aleani she didn’t understand to face necromancers she was afraid of and if she screwed up or slowed the others down or someone got hurt and they failed, then the whole world would end and she’d never have a chance to say goodbye to her grandfather or anyone else and—

  She felt two fingers on her arm.

  “Deep breaths.” Len Heramsun stood before her, torchlight orange and wavering over his dark skin, his dreadlocks, his arms. His touch was light, gentle, kind.

  “You’ll be fine,” he said. His eyes had grown softer than she’d thought they could. His fingers left her arm carefully. His eyes moved away from hers, as if he was speaking just for the sake of speaking and not for her benefit.

  “It does strange things to a person’s mind to be so far underground,” he said. “Remember your forests. Remember your skies.” His eyes glittered in the dim light and focused back on hers. Watching. Looking for something she couldn’t place. He glanced at Ryse and Litnig, and Dil realized that she wasn’t the only one afraid. Ryse was sweating. Litnig was pale.

  Len turned and took the lead again. He set a measured pace, and the walking calmed her. She could focus on the rhythm of the Aleani’s steps and on matching it. She could let her mind grow loose and pretend that she was far away.

  Cole’s voice echoed in her ear.

  “You nervous?”

  She nearly jumped out of her skin.

  “Me too,” he said. “Did you see the size of that gate we walked through?”

  They walked, and he kept talking. The rhythm of his voice calmed her. So did the tone. It was warm, soft, strong.

  “I never realized this was going to be so big, you know,” he said. His eyes scanned the darkness in front of them. “I just wanted to help Quay and maybe see a little bit of the world. My dad, he’s never been anywhere farther west than Densel, or farther east than Foltir. I didn’t want his life.” They went a few more steps. No one spoke.

  “I don’t know that I want this one either,” he said.

  His hand knocked into hers. She heard him swallow in the darkness, felt his arm tense. Her wrist rested on his. Her armpits began to sweat. It was the right time to grab his hand. It was silly not to. It was right there, for Yenor’s sake—

  His fingers grabbed hers, and she squeezed them and let out a heavy breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

  For a second, she forgot all about dragons and necromancers and mountains and Aleani, and it was just her and him, holding each other’s hands in smoky light and walking.

  “You’re shaking,” he said with a smile, but she wasn’t. She felt fine.

  “No,” she said, “you are.”

  “No, I—” Cole’s eyes snapped forward. The shaking wasn’t coming from him, and it wasn’t coming from her.

  It was coming from the tunnel.

  Ahead of them, Len stopped moving. The Aleani’s face, impossible as it seemed, paled.

  “Len?” asked Quay. A new wind started up, blowing toward them from the deepness of the tunnels. Quay’s cloak snapped in Dil’s face.

  Len straightened. His eyes took on depth Dil had never seen in them before, and a steadiness and sureness she hadn’t expected.

  “I need you all to do something for me,” he said.

  No one moved. Dil didn’t even breathe. She just clutched Cole’s hand harder and felt it squeeze back.

  “Stay calm.”

  The Aleani’s eyes stayed on them. She felt paralyzed, frozen to the floor of the tunnel with fear growing large in her belly.

  “A worm is coming toward us.”

  Cole’s hand squeezed harder. He mumbled a curse. A worm? she thought. But the whole tunnel’s shaking.

  “You’re kidding,” someone said, but Dil’s eyes were on Len. The darkness had grown thicker in the crags of the Aleani’s face. He was almost unrecognizable. She felt sick to her stomach.

  “We will not be able to kill it,” he said.

  He set his pack down on the tunnel floor, wedged his torch next to it, pulled his axes from their loops and rubbed his thumbs over the leather of their grips. “I do not even know that they can be killed,” he said. She watched the torchlight glint on the weapons. “The cheltyaler created these tunnels. We only colonized them—drove the beasts out.”

  Dil began to feel the trembling in the tunnel through her whole body, saw pebbles start to hum and skip around her feet, noticed a throbbing in the rock around her.

  Her mind whimpered, No, no, not now.

  “Strike at its mouth or its tongue,” Len continued. “They are not used to anything resisting them. It will turn back.”

  He spoke with enough conviction that the others seemed to believe him. Quay drew his short swords. Litnig pulled his long club from his belt. Cole let go of her hand and reached for his daggers.

  But she could smell Len’s fear, and she could see it in the wrinkles around his eyes.

  Dil wiped her sweating hands on her thighs. She could feel the thing coming, feel the bulk of it resonating in the rock. She set her pack down. Even as she bent and strung her bow, she wondered if it would do any good against something so large.

  And her thoughts ran wild, terrified, and feverish into a place she’d long forbidden them from treading.

  There was more that she could do. More that only she could do. But the price—the others—a memory of fire and fear stirred in her heart, and her mind raced desperately for a solution.

  There was a second river of souls that flowed around Guedin. Few people knew about it. Fewer still could use it.

  Dil was one of them.

  She could feel the Second River pulsing around her, waiting for her to call it. Waiting to help—

  No! her mind screamed, ‘Do not let them learn—’ but the feeling was relentless.

  The wind grew shrill in her ears. Her feet felt like wooden blocks. Her chest filled with a need to do something, anything. The glints from Quay’s swords and Len’s axes moved deeper into the tunnel. Their cloaks streamed behind them in the wind. The torches at their feet sputtered wildly.

  Dil’s eyes started to water. Her heart climbed into her throat.

  The torches went out.

  Dil hitched in a breath to scream and grasped the Second River in panic. A flood of golden spheres of light burst to life before her. Cole’s hand landed on her back and pulled her toward him. She swallowed her scream. She dropped her grip on the River. She heard Cole shouting her name over the growing wind, and her mind whispered, What have I done, Yenor’s eye, what have I done—

  A ball of white light appeared in the center of the tunnel. Another winked into existence beyond it, then another and another, farther and farther down, lighting the rocky tube far better than the torches ever had. Ryse’s left hand was stretching out toward the lights. Her eyes glowed pearly white.

  Dil shrank against Cole.

  She was right next to me. Did she see, did she feel—

  A stench like that of a dead man’s mouth filled the air. Cole cursed. Dil took her eyes from Ryse.

  At the edge of the light, about a quarter mile down, a tapered white mound of flesh was surging forward.

  The worm filled most of the tunnel. It had no eyes, and its skin was mottled with patches ranging from cream to buff to porcelain. Its movements matched the earth’s vibration: Slide, thrum, slide, thrum. Bits of rock crumbled from the ceiling and the walls.

  Dil watched the worm come on and realized that if it was that big, it was likely to be simple, and hungry.

  A line of blackness opened up along the bottom of its head. Ryse’s lights disappeared into it one by one, and Dil saw sharp black teeth, dark-red f
lesh, the lighter pink of a tongue.

  Len’s words came back to her. She pulled away from Cole, set her feet, let her body move automatically while the worm came on at speed, like it didn’t know or care that they were there ahead of it.

  It’s just like a boar it’s just like a boar it’s just like a boar it’s just like a boar—

  It was nothing like shooting a charging boar, but she would admit that to herself later.

  She drew an arrow, aimed, held, released.

  The first shot went too high, but she knew it the moment it left her bow and had another arrow nocked and fired before it even struck the ceiling. The second shot felt good, the bow springing and recoiling in her hand, the string humming with energy. She drew and shot a third time anyway, and she was reaching for a fourth arrow when a bolt of light speared over her shoulder and split the air like a thunder strike.

  She whirled back and saw Ryse’s eyes glowing white and otherworldly. The soulweaver’s bolt struck the worm at the same time Dil’s third arrow did. The light shot straight into the roof of its mouth and illuminated it in a yellow burst.

  The worm stopped its surging, rhythmic advance, slid for a short time, and ground to a halt thirty or forty yards away. The wind stopped. Dil stood silent, afraid to straighten, to draw an arrow, to move. She could hear the rustle of the others’ clothes, their heavy breathing, the crackle of their feet on the loose bits of rock covering the tunnel floor. The worm’s mouth opened and closed as if it was confused, as if it was tasting something.

  Then it screamed.

  Its mouth opened wide, and an ear-piercing shriek filled the tunnel. Dil dropped her bow, shoved her hands over her ears.

  The pain—

  The worm shot into motion, its mouth still open wide. Len turned, and the boys turned with him, and she didn’t need to hear the Aleani’s shouts to know to run. Another flash of light shot over her, then a third. Ryse stood her ground in the center of the tunnel, and Dil hesitated as she ran past her, stopped and looked back and saw the worm’s tongue hanging in bloody pieces, its head thrashing from side to side as it advanced. Len shouted something she couldn’t understand, then grabbed Ryse by the robes and hurled her back.