Soulwoven

by Jeff Seymour

  The Aleani temple seemed to focalize around the huge, circular room that Ryse had stepped into. Three wide hallways led from it at right angles, and two smaller ones opened diagonally between them in a sunburst shape. Huge pillars filled the space. The undead were massed toward the north and center of the room, and the Aleani had taken a position near the southern hallway.

  You’ve been trained for this, she told herself. Memories of the graveyard in Eldan City floated at the edge of her consciousness, but she pushed them back.

  Ryse moved into the complex but kept to the edge of the battle. Her heart pounded. Her limbs buzzed. In Eldan City, she’d learned the limits of her power. Turning the tide of a conflict like this one was beyond her. But if the mystery soulweaver was Leramis, and if she could find him…

  Maybe he could help.

  An explosion cracked a pillar beside her, but she didn’t flinch. Every fiber of her being danced on edge, ready to act, ready to weave, ready to duck or to move or to do whatever was required to survive.

  She’d been trained.

  She circled north against the wall and held on to as much of the River as she could. The bones of the fallen crunched under her feet. The Aleani shouted and fought behind her. When she had to, she blasted her way through corpses.

  The necromancers were in separate places. One was somewhere below her. The tendrils of souls that linked the undead to him flowed out of the hallway along the northeast edge of the room.

  He wasn’t the one who wove like Leramis, however. The one who wove like Leramis was—

  “Ryse!”

  Quay’s hand closed around her wrist. He held a sword in his other, and he’d been cut from his forehead to the bridge of his nose. He was bleeding.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he snarled.

  He squeezed her wrist hard enough to hurt and hurled her roughly against the wall, where Cole and Dil were pressed with their weapons out. A corpse flew at them, and Quay sank his sword deep into its chest, then pulled the blade out and cut off its head. He kicked it back into the melee and there was a moment of rest.

  “Where is he?” the prince barked.

  Ryse blinked.

  “I…”

  Quay’s grip tightened. His face grew darker. Spittle flew from his lips when he spoke.

  “The necromancer! Where is he?”

  The situation came back to her. Her priorities came back to her.

  What the hell am I doing? she thought.

  Quay released her arm.

  She pursed her lips and read the flow of the River. “There are two of them,” she said. “One downstairs through that hallway, and the other—”

  Cole shouted a curse. He tried to move into the fray, but Quay grabbed his shirt and yanked him back against the wall. Ryse realized that Litnig and Len were missing.

  “Why are they fighting each other?” Quay asked. He held Cole’s shirt in one hand, and he was staring at the undead. The ragged corpses in front of them were ripping into each other as often as they ran for the living.

  “I don’t know,” Ryse said. The second necromancer, the one who wove like Leramis, was somewhere in the main room, but he was masking his presence well. She couldn’t find him. “Which way are the heart dragons?” she asked.

  Another explosion tore through the corpses, and Quay’s eyes narrowed. “We got separated before Len could show us.”

  Ryse swallowed.

  “To hell with the bloody dragons! What about Lit?” Cole’s eyes blazed. His cheek had a large red welt on it.

  Quay ground his teeth. “We can worry about him—” He turned and cut down another corpse that got too interested in them.

  But in order to do that, he had to release Cole. Ryse saw it happening and snatched at the younger Jin brother’s collar, but Cole was too quick. He ducked under her swipe and shot into the melee, kept low, bull-rushed a skeleton and slipped between two shaggy corpses. A third exploded next to him. Dil took off in his wake.

  “No, damn your eyes! Cole!” Quay’s voice was raw and ragged.

  He raced forward and left Ryse alone by the wall.

  She took a deep breath, and she wove.

  It was difficult to see the others. There was little natural light, and the room was clogged with souls. But she was able to pull the little orbs into gnarled, unruly balls of light and blast two corpses away from Cole, one away from Dil.

  Slowly, she began to work her way across the room.

  The groups of undead grew thicker and more vicious as she and the others approached the northeast hallway. Cole’s dagger was in his hand. Behind him, Quay seemed to be doing all right, and Dil was hugging close between them both.

  But the three of them were tempting fate.

  The Aleani soulweavers didn’t know or care who they were, and they were heading into the heart of the bombardment. Ryse couldn’t bend or block so many weavings—not when she didn’t know where they would come from, what shape they’d take. She couldn’t protect them from the Aleani.

  A ball of souls coalesced in front of her, and it took all of her strength to weave even a small barrier around it before it exploded. The shockwave threw her off-balance. She lost track of Cole and Dil, shut her eyes to ward off the light and the smoke.

  Something grabbed her arm, and she shook it free. Her knee went for wherever the grab had come from and was blocked. She opened her eyes and saw an angry, sooty, bleeding Quay. He pulled her against the nearest wall. They’d made it to the east side of the room, just yards from the hall, but Cole and Dil were nowhere to be seen. The prince was heavily favoring his left leg.

  “Get behind me!” he snapped. “Where are the others?”

  Something grabbed her by the hair and dragged her to the ground.

  A bony hand grasped her ear, and it was twisting—ripping. She screamed and tried to roll over to blast it away, but there was a weight on her shoulder, and it was too heavy. Her stomach wrenched. She was going to lose an ear at the least, and if she couldn’t—

  There was a flash of heat, and then the weight was gone. She scrambled to her feet and looked toward the Aleani, wondering if they’d recognized her as an ally.

  In front of her stood a man in a black robe. He was surrounded by a halo of thousands of souls. Tendrils led from his body to many of the undead in the room.

  Ryse shouted for Quay even as she prepared a weaving she knew would be too little, too late.

  An Aleani weaving crashed against a shield the necromancer had woven around himself. The flash lit the man within the hood. He had brown eyes. His face was sharp and angular, but soft when he smiled. So soft…

  Her throat closed. She couldn’t breathe.

  She could only whisper his name.

  “Leramis…”

  TWENTY-SIX

  It hurt when Litnig breathed.

  He stood at the foot of a narrow spiral staircase. His right arm was pinned to a stone wall by a leering skeleton. A skinny, black-robed man stood before him with his face hidden in the shadows of a hood. Behind the man was a wall of blue crystal.

  And buried in the wall was a golden statuette in the shape of two dragons eating one another’s tails.

  The Heart Dragons of Aleana.

  Litnig Jin felt very, very afraid.

  He heard an explosion above. The stones of the chamber shook. The skeleton’s grip on him was so tight his hand was going to sleep, but his left arm was free. He’d torn the sling off long ago.

  The necromancer stepped forward and cocked his head. He wore black gloves and black boots. Wisps of blond hair floated around the edges of his hood.

  “Hmph,” the man grunted. His voice was low, curious and disdainful. He turned back to face the heart dragons.

  Litnig’s stomach moved into his throat.

  “Stop!” he yelled.

  The necromancer turned back to him and crossed the distance between them in a swift, unnaturally long stride. He wrapped a hand around Litnig’s windpipe.

  His fing
ers were as cold as ice and as strong as iron.

  Litnig couldn’t breathe. He tried to gasp, tried to swallow, but nothing came. His head grew tight and hot. He could feel blood pooling in the veins on his temples.

  “Shut. Up,” the man growled. The hand released him. Litnig coughed and spluttered. The heat in his head washed away.

  The necromancer pulled down his hood.

  The man was maybe thirty-five at the oldest, and his hair was long and straight. He had a disgusted look on his face, as though Litnig was an annoyance he put up with only because he had no other choice.

  He could’ve killed me by now, Litnig realized. Why hasn’t he?

  The necromancer breathed heavily. He stared at Litnig with bold blue eyes only partially obscured by the swirling whiteness of soulweaving, like he was looking for something in Litnig’s face he couldn’t find.

  He pointed upward, and his voice darkened.

  “One of the Black Isle’s strongest is right up there,” he muttered. There was a haunted look in his eyes. Beyond the brightness of the soulweaving, Litnig could see that they were rimmed with red. “Just above us. Leramis Hentworth. Rhan’s golden boy. The Order’s chosen one. He can’t so much as get down that staircase.”

  The necromancer’s eyes narrowed, and Litnig said nothing. He didn’t understand half of what had been said, but he could hear the unspoken addendum: What do you think you’re going to do?

  Litnig wondered himself.

  His free arm ached. He couldn’t explain why he wasn’t already dead.

  The white eyes narrowed further. “My name is Soren Goldguard,” the necromancer said. “Don’t forget it.”

  The black-robed man turned his back on Litnig again. The skeleton’s grip weakened for just a second, and in that second, Litnig acted.

  He smashed the elbow of his broken arm into the skeleton’s wrist.

  The old bones snapped beneath the blow. His own popped loose again with a jarring, white flash of pain. The sting buzzed up his arm and into his skull, his teeth, his eyes, but his right arm came free.

  He lunged for the necromancer. If he could just get his good arm around the man’s throat, hook him under the chin, pull him to the ground where his weight would give him the advantage—

  Litnig’s legs flew over his head, and he catapulted over the necromancer’s shoulder.

  He turned a full somersault, spun halfway around, and slammed into the crystal wall. The blow drove the wind from his lungs. His left shoulder took the brunt of it, and he felt it bend in a way that wasn’t normal. His left arm popped again. The pain in it grew so fierce he couldn’t feel much else.

  But he didn’t bounce off the wall. Invisible bonds pinned him there by his armpits, his thighs, his wrists.

  The necromancer’s eyes blazed white.

  “To hell with Eshan’s plans,” he said.

  Litnig felt the crystal wall behind him go warm and liquid, and the force against his limbs pressed him into it. At first, the feeling was almost comforting—like that of a warm bath wrapping over his shoulders.

  Then he realized what was happening, and he screamed.

  It wasn’t a shout of defiance. It wasn’t a deep and manly roar of resistance, the way he’d imagined himself going out if it came down to it. It was a mindless shriek of terror.

  The blue crystal eased over his shoulders, the back of his head, his neck.

  The necromancer smiled.

  Litnig took a deep, panicked breath, and then the warm softness of the crystal oozed over his mouth as well.

  His eyes shut themselves, but he forced them open again. The world looked hazy and blue through the crystal, as if he was viewing it through shallow water.

  Calm, he told himself. Stay calm.

  His chest felt heavy and warm. His heart pounded. His lungs were beginning to shout for air.

  The heart dragons pulsed not far to the right of him. They were immaculately carved, and detailed in lacquer. Hazy light like that of the statues in his dream leaked from them.

  His bonds released. The necromancer wanted him to squirm. He could feel it.

  Instead, he reached for the heart dragons.

  If he could just touch them, just get his fingers on them, he thought, everything would be all right somehow.

  His hand grew closer, but the bonds returned and rooted his body in place again.

  If I just stretch, he thought. Just a little more, a little farther—

  The dragons glittered in their own light, but their eyes were black. One of them was facing him. He could feel its gaze on him. Like it was watching. Like it cared.

  A burst of heat and light engulfed his hand, and then the crystal around it was gone. His fingers wiggled freely in a small tunnel where there was air—air to breathe if he could get to it.

  He squirmed.

  He flailed, flopped, tried to break his bonds and push or pull the crystal away and get his lips to the air. The crystal surrounding him grew rock solid again. He could feel the necromancer watching him, knew he was giving the man exactly the show he wanted to see, but he didn’t care.

  He panicked, tried against all logic to move the crystal, strained with his whole body and thrashed desperately with his free, burned hand. There was nothing even to drown in, no way to breathe. Solid crystal was pressed up against his lips, his nose, his eyes.

  The world grew heavy and slow.

  Power descended upon the room. There was no space into which the hairs on his body could rise, but his skin drew tight anyway and tried to shift them. Tension crackled in the crystal. Energy marshaled unseen, like a thunderstorm building in the minutes before it hit.

  Litnig’s skin crawled. His spine tingled. He felt like he was standing beneath a hundred-foot crack in the dome of the world, and all the energy of the endless universe was about to pour forth from it and drown him.

  The heart dragons began to pulse. He saw sadness in the beady eyes fixed upon him, heard the sound of metal grinding along metal through the rock. The dragons cracked. He reached for them desperately, one last time.

  His fingers grazed the nearest dragon’s surface. It was warm and smooth, like a coin left out in the sun toward the end of the day. He tried to grab it, but with a horrible, wrenching screech, it tore in half. The shards of it shot from their place in the wall toward the room beyond.

  One of them cut Litnig’s hand. The sensation was dull and foreign—like the wound had been suffered by someone else. He saw his blood begin to pool in the hole left behind by the dragons.

  For a moment, there was complete silence.

  Then an ear-piercing shriek hit the world. Litnig’s insides bulged and twisted. Fire began in his chest and spread through his veins. Every fiber of his being screamed with agony, and he couldn’t even hitch in the breath to voice it.

  He tried to writhe, tried to move, tried to express the pain that was ripping him apart. A chorus of hammers pounded in his head.

  Death! his mind screamed. Give me death!

  The noise stopped. The pain did too. Litnig grew light-headed. His lungs burned, and his chest felt as if it was crumpling in on itself like a folding piece of parchment. Dancing spots filled his eyes.

  His mind reeled, and on some level, he realized he was dying.

  Explosions echoed above. A man screamed in pain. Out of the corner of his eye, Litnig saw a young woman in white tumble down the staircase. She stood. He caught a flash of disheveled, red-gold hair on her shoulders.

  A wall of flame obscured her.

  Then there was only darkness.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Litnig awoke in the dream. His body vibrated. His skin felt numb. The three pillars loomed above him. There was no sound.

  He sat up. His hands looked pale and unreal—shadow-things that were less than solid, less than whole. He felt no pain, no broken bones, not the faintest whisper of air over his arms. It was like the dream had died.

  The disc shifted.

  It wasn’t violent. The edge
behind him tipped softly down, the edge in front softly up. It seemed natural. His body wanted to slide, but it was caught on the disc’s ridged surface.

  His heart fluttered, faint and desperate.

  I’m dying, he realized. His chest had shriveled up like a dried plum. I’m dying, and the dream’s dying with me.

  He lurched to his feet.

  The disc continued to tip.

  The darkness, he thought. It was suddenly terrifying, a pit of a thousand hungry mouths after his soul. If I fall, it’ll kill me catch me destroy me—

  The words blurred into one long stream of fear. Litnig tried to run, but his legs were hard to move. The angle of the disc increased. He started to slide, and there was nothing to grab on to. The nearest pillar was too far. The little ridges on the disc weren’t tall enough to catch. And try as he might, he couldn’t get his feet to bite.

  He slid past the pillar closest to the bottom of the disc. There was a flash of light. A hand wrapped itself around his wrist.

  Litnig looked up into the sad eyes of the skinny, wasted walker. It had one hand around the chains that bound its doppelganger to the pillar. The other held his wrist. The walker’s body shone brilliant white against the darkness, against the gray, against everything.

  It was stronger than it looked. The white muscles of its arms had a grip like iron. Litnig felt its strength flow into him, and he grabbed the walker’s wrist with his other arm.

  The disc went fully vertical.

  The walker hung from the chains. Litnig dangled over the darkness.

  Litnig’s heart slowed. His hands seemed less and less real to him. The gray glow of the disc was all but dead, and only the walker was solid. Only the walker wasn’t dying. Its grip tightened. Litnig’s vision blurred.