Soulwoven

by Jeff Seymour

  Litnig’s mouth went dry.

  Useless.

  When he’d tried to follow Ryse into the Academy as a child, a gray-robed soulweaver had evaluated him. It had taken just a few seconds.

  His affinity to the River is too weak, the man had said. He would be useless.

  Litnig shut his eyes and tried to let the word slide off his battered shoulders. He could still help, somehow. He could—

  Ryse’s hand closed over his good arm. “I can get to it once I’ve had a chance to rest, Lit. Just give me some time.” She smiled at him.

  He was even more grateful for the smile than for the promise behind it.

  Ryse took a shirt from the pack behind her and began to fashion a sling around his arm. It was makeshift, but just having the cloth around the injury made Litnig feel a little better.

  “What next?” Ryse asked Quay.

  The prince dusted off his trousers and stood. “We move. Now.”

  An uncomfortable silence settled over the broken stones. Litnig flinched as Ryse tightened his sling. He watched Cole and Dil stop taking inventory of one of the party’s remaining packs and stare at Quay.

  Ryse frowned.

  “My prince, Len will take a little while to recover enough—”

  “The soulweaver behind us was robed in black.”

  The prince paused. Litnig’s heart sank.

  Quay stood over Len and stared down the passage ahead. “We need to find a way out,” he said. “We can’t wait for Len.”

  Nobody argued, but Litnig caught his brother scowling and saw tightness in Ryse’s jaw.

  “Then who’s going to carry him?” Litnig asked. He flexed his fist experimentally in its sling.

  “No one.” The prince’s voice was as cold as the stones below him. “We leave him behind.”

  The torches flickered. Len breathed laboriously on the rocks below.

  “You can’t be serious,” Litnig said.

  But Quay was. Litnig could see it in the angle of his eyebrows and the way his skin was stretched over his skull.

  “He’s still alive! We can’t just—”

  Quay looked down his nose at him, and Litnig felt small and stupid and unimportant and worthless, just like he had in Nutharion City.

  “He will be a great burden on the rest of us if we try to bring him along,” the prince said. “And we will probably lose him even if we do.” Quay glanced at Ryse, as if for confirmation.

  She turned away.

  “At the height of your strength, Litnig,” Quay continued, “maybe you could have carried him out. But right now none of us is strong enough to even try.”

  Litnig’s mouth worked silently. Useless. His head was beginning to ache.

  “I—”

  “We can drag him.”

  All eyes turned to Dil. She was leaning on Cole, who had his arm around her shoulders and was watching Quay like a dog eyes a man coming toward her puppies with a sack.

  Dil’s face was pale, and she winced when she spoke, but her voice was strong.

  “When we take down big prey in Lurathen, we tie three branches in a triangle and strap the kill onto it.” She drew a diagram in the air with her finger as she spoke. “You thread a loop through the top of the triangle and slip it around your waist, and then you drag it. We call it a deadcarry.”

  She looked down at Len and bit her lip. “We could use Quay’s scabbards and my bow to make a frame, and a blanket and some strips from Len’s clothing to finish it. But it’d be a rough ride—and someone would still have to drag it.”

  Quay frowned.

  “I can drag the weight,” Litnig rasped.

  He struggled to his feet. His arm ached. His legs felt like jelly. His head thumped and thundered.

  Useless.

  A moment passed. Quay looked at him emotionlessly.

  But eventually, the prince nodded.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Litnig shifted from foot to foot as Dil worked around him. She collected their belts and used scraps of clothing to fashion a loop for his waist, then a makeshift harness that would help distribute the weight of the deadcarry over his shoulders and chest. She worked in a desperate, feverish crouch, her hands flying over leather and cloth, tying and untying and retying in the dim light. Cole watched balefully. Quay didn’t move. Ryse reclined on one of the packs and closed her eyes. Her face still gleamed with sweat.

  Litnig wondered if Dil wasn’t throwing herself into the task so hard to avoid thinking about what had happened above, or what lay ahead.

  If she was, he didn’t blame her.

  The tunnel in front of them was black as the pit of an aspmelon. They had only two torches and Ryse’s soulweaving to light their way. Litnig had no idea how long it would take them to find the surface, or if it was even possible.

  Quay’s words still echoed in his head. No one. We leave him behind.

  He shivered.

  When Dil finished the deadcarry, he put it on and stifled a grunt. The weight of Len’s body lay heavy on his shoulders and back. His head ached. His arm throbbed with pain that resonated all the way up through his teeth. He took a tentative first step, and his legs wobbled underneath him.

  For a moment, he felt close to the edge of panic.

  Quay brushed past him, torch in hand, and began to pick his way over the broken rocks.

  “Steady,” the prince said as he passed.

  Litnig’s panic slipped below the surface.

  The tunnel floor was strewn with debris, and the deadcarry skipped and bounced unevenly behind Litnig as he and the others left the cliff and the fall behind. His muscles warmed to the walking. The rhythm of moving and carrying a heavy load calmed his heart. He let his mind wander.

  When he did, it returned to Eldan.

  Remember your forests, Len had said. Remember your skies. Litnig did. He walked through the waving oceans of grass to the east of his city. He stood beneath the stark blue sky above it on a cold autumn day. The smell of fresh hay filled his nostrils. The white petals and dark leaves of herbs winked at his mind as they grew along the bottom of the city wall in spring.

  The tunnel led downward, and the air grew stuffy and stale, but Litnig lost himself in the endless freedom of the plains, the wind in his face, the songs of birds overhead, the playful gambols of clouds tossing and tumbling in the high world above him.

  He lost track of time. It was easy to do in the world beneath the mountains, where there was no sun and no moon to tell the turning of the hours. He walked until he or one of the others grew tired or hungry, and then he rested, or he ate and he drank, and then he got up and walked again.

  Occasionally, the tunnel forked and Quay chose a path for them. The prince took them upward when it was possible and avoided any sounds or movement. Twisting and turning on the deadcarry behind Litnig, Len made little improvement, but he didn’t worsen either, and every once in a while Dil could get him to swallow a little water by rubbing his throat and pouring it into his mouth as he gulped in reaction.

  Ryse, however, didn’t seem to be getting her strength back. She demurred when Quay asked her to work with either Litnig or Len. Her skin stayed pale. A sheen of sweat clung to her even when she slept. Every once in a while, she reached into the pocket that had held the treesoul and looked pained when her hand came out empty.

  Let me help you, Litnig thought. But his arm sent splinters of pain up his neck, and he realized that he had no help to offer.

  On what Litnig figured was their second day under the mountains, their last torch went out, and then they had only the pale white light of Ryse’s soulweaving to see by. On the third day, as Quay was listening at a fork in the tunnel, Litnig heard something.

  “Wait,” he said when the prince moved away from the noise.

  It didn’t sound like a giant worm. It was more of a rushing, like wind in the mountains or water close by. The sound came from the left fork of the tunnel, which branched downward into a layer of dark, yellow-brown rock. Litnig pressed h
is good hand and then his ear to the wall. It was cold, unyielding, and wet.

  “There’s water here,” he said.

  Quay was at his side in a heartbeat, running his fingers over the rock as if he was looking for a catch or trapdoor. Water was a good thing. They’d been rationing it carefully since they’d started walking, but their supply was still running low. Litnig’s throat had been dry for hours.

  Litnig freed himself from the deadcarry with his good arm and walked along the tunnel next to Quay.

  “Do you hear it?” he asked.

  “Yes,” grunted the prince.

  The rushing noise was close to the wall, like it was coming from just behind it. Quay stopped. His eyes glistened in the rocky shadows.

  “We follow the water,” he said, and they did.

  The water on the walls ran onto the base of the tunnel and led them downward for a mile or more. The rushing noise grew louder and louder. The tunnel eventually turned to the right, and in the elbow of the bend, Litnig spotted a cart-sized gap in the rock.

  It opened onto a black void.

  In that void, cascading into the darkness, white in the light of Ryse’s soulweaving, was a long, bounding sweep of falling water.

  “Water,” Litnig gasped. It roared past the tunnel in great gouts. It struck the rocks so hard on its way down that the spray formed puddles on the floor. Litnig lurched forward, and then Cole and Dil were running with him, ahead of him, racing for the water in wild, joyful abandon.

  Litnig bumped and dragged the deadcarry all the way to the tunnel’s edge. He stood with his friends as they cupped their hands in the waterfall’s flow. He grew wet and cold with them in the icy spray, unstrapped the deadcarry, laid it on the tunnel floor and leaned out into the falls itself.

  The water tasted sweeter than the richest peach. It pounded against his face, and he laughed and filled his mouth again and again.

  When he pulled his head, cold and soaking, back into the tunnel, he saw Quay standing with his arms crossed and a deep frown on his face.

  The prince said nothing for several minutes. He simply stood and drank the water and watched as the others laughed and refilled their skins.

  But Litnig could see the same deadly calculation in his body language he’d seen at the bottom of the cliff. He was going to push them again. He was going to ask them to do something that no sane person would ever do.

  Sure enough, when everyone had drunk their fill and they were strewn out resting among the puddles near the tunnel’s edge, Quay stepped forward and said, “Ryse?”

  The laughter stopped. The smiles disappeared.

  Ryse turned her worn-out face to him and sighed. “Yes?”

  “Can you light it?” asked Quay. He swept his hand toward the hollow beyond the waterfall.

  Ryse struggled to her feet. Her ball of light swung drunkenly into the space before the falls, then grew and brightened until the full extent of the cataract could be seen.

  The water dropped a hundred feet or so into a defile wide enough for two to walk abreast in. At the bottom of the falls, it formed a quiet pool. From there, it flowed to the right in the open air.

  The stone behind the cascade looked jagged and slick, but it was full of handholds. Slippery, but climbable.

  Except for my arm, Litnig thought, and fear began to worm its way through his gut.

  Quay crouched at the edge of the tunnel and conferred in crisp whispers with Ryse and Dil. He pointed to the rock face, to the defile, to the pool.

  Litnig watched the spray bead on their bodies and tried to stay calm.

  He’s going to leave you behind, whispered Litnig’s mind. He’s going to make the rest of them climb down there with him and leave you to die in the darkness while they follow the water out.

  The prince looked up at Litnig with a cold gleam in his eye. Ryse said something to him that Litnig couldn’t hear.

  Quay nodded, then shouldered the pack it was his turn to carry and set off down the tunnel.

  Litnig shuddered. Ryse looked pale, Dil uncomfortable.

  “What did you say to him?” he whispered to Ryse as he eased back into his harness. The weight of the deadcarry was worse with the water it had taken on, and he grimaced as he started walking again.

  Ryse’s lips were pressed tightly together. Her hair had been plastered to her forehead by the spray of the falls.

  “I made him a promise,” she said. Her voice had a sharp, don’t-press-me-on-this edge to it.

  So Litnig didn’t.

  “What’s his plan?” he asked instead. The tunnel took a steeper angle down, and his legs burned under the strain of checking both Len’s weight and his own. His stomach felt hollow and knotty—he’d had nothing to eat but hardtack, cheese, and salted meat for three days, and those had come in sparing amounts. The cave water had tasted delicious, but he could feel it sloshing around in his empty gut.

  Ryse didn’t answer the question.

  The tunnel flattened out, and the roar of the waterfall grew more distant. Quay looked pointedly at Ryse, but she shook her head.

  “Not yet,” she said, and the prince continued on.

  Litnig began to sweat. Quay’s arms swung back and forth ahead of him. Cole grunted under the weight of the party’s second pack. Ryse and Dil traded glances in the dim, soulwoven light.

  And then Litnig was reminded that there was more to be afraid of in the tunnels than Quay Eldani.

  The stones hummed and vibrated. The gravel beneath his feet shivered and skipped.

  Slide, thrum. Slide, thrum.

  Oh no, Yenor, please, no, he thought. Dil whimpered beside him. Cole’s face froze. Ryse and Quay stared at one another in pale, naked fear.

  “Light?” asked Quay.

  Ryse’s face screwed up like her arm was being wrenched off. The ball of light beside her brightened and shot down the tunnel in the direction they’d come from.

  Litnig saw the worm.

  It was smaller than the last one, and farther away, but it was still big enough and close enough to set his bowels on ice. It filled about three-quarters of the tunnel, and it was moving slowly and deliberately, pausing and waving its head from side to side as if it was sniffing for something.

  Us, Litnig thought. It lowered its head and came on further. It smells us, and it’s more than big enough to eat us. The light snuffed out, and he lost the worm in the darkness.

  His legs threatened to slip out from under him. The light reappeared next to a very pale Ryse Lethien.

  Litnig’s broken arm ached ferociously. Len was half-dead at his back. Even as his mind screamed, Run! he knew it was useless.

  He slid to the tunnel floor and buried his head in his one good hand.

  They were going to die, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  Slide, thrum.

  A second vibration, faster and higher-pitched than the first, began in the rocks. Litnig looked up. Ryse was standing in the center of the tunnel. Her chin was tucked to her chest. Her eyes were squeezed shut. Her hands were clenched in fierce, quivering fists.

  The high vibration grew louder and faster, drowned out the oncoming worm and concentrated in the rock wall next to Ryse. Litnig heard a crack, then another. Ryse’s face twitched and reddened.

  The tunnel wall to Ryse’s right blew inward.

  The floor shook. A plume of dust shot into the tunnel. Ryse’s light winked out, and then Litnig was staring, once again, into darkness.

  Slide, thrum.

  Ryse’s white light flickered to life again and floated just before her ragged face. She was pale as a winter sunrise. Her mouth hung open. Her breaths looked deep and desperate.

  Quay ran toward the hole she’d blown. Ryse swayed and followed, and her light brightened. At the base of an indentation in the rock, a torrent of water rushed inches below a narrow opening. It was as if Ryse had punched a dent in the tunnel wall and then ripped a hole in the top of a drainage pipe at the bottom of it. A hole just large enough for a person
to lean into to fill a water skin, or wash his hands, or fall—

  “Quay, no,” said a voice behind Litnig.

  He turned and saw Cole staring at the racing water with wide, terrified eyes.

  “You’re crazy,” Cole said.

  Slide, thrum. Slide, thrum. Faster than before. Litnig shivered and watched the water splash against the opening Ryse had torn. The floor began to shake. There was desperation in Quay’s eyes, and ferocity, and madness.

  “We have no choice.”

  “We’ll drown!”

  “We don’t know that.”

  The prince stuck his hand into the water’s flow. Litnig watched it move in the current and saw his palm come back up red.

  “We should be close to the surface by now,” Quay said. “Close to the snow and the glaciers.” He shook droplets of water from his hand and stared down Cole in a way that made Litnig cringe.

  “We go. Now.”

  Vibrations shook the whole tunnel. Rhythmic blasts of wind began to sweep over Litnig’s back.

  Slide, thrum. Slide, thrum.

  The river had to come out of the ground somewhere. And if they were close—if they were just close enough—

  “Fuck that,” Cole squeaked.

  Dil was already moving toward the hole. She sat on its edge and reached a hand toward Cole.

  “Come on,” she said. Slide, thrum. “We can go together.”

  She licked her lips and hesitated with her hand outstretched. Her legs were half in the water.

  Cole’s face was white as a sheet.

  Litnig remembered his brother screaming and being dangled by the ankles over the Eldwater as a kid. Litnig had beaten the daylights out of the boys who’d done it, but that hadn’t kept his brother from turning colors at the thought of swimming ever since.

  “I—” Dil stammered, “I ca—”

  The tunnel shook. Dil’s eyes went wide. Her legs splashed all the way into the water.

  And then she was gone.

  The wind on Litnig’s back grew warmer. He whipped around and saw the worm not a hundred yards away, mouth open, head reared back, black teeth shining in the light. Cold, acrid fear bubbled up in the back of his throat. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t move, he couldn’t—