Soulwoven

by Jeff Seymour

  The process worked as it always did with the powerful. Souls trickled from the River toward the wrap. Ryse breathed out to ease their passage, and then they flowed in a smooth, wide stream. Leramis’s flesh stopped smoking and cooled to a normal temperature. His skin re-formed.

  Ryse ground her teeth. Her lungs burned. It was hard to maintain a wrap when so much power was flowing through it, but she could handle it.

  She’d been trained.

  Leramis stopped twitching. His torso jerked upward. His eyes cleared briefly.

  And then he fell back to the deck.

  A moment later, it was finished. Leramis’s body was whole again. His eyes closed. He breathed normally, like he was sleeping.

  Ryse let the wrap dissolve into the River. Her legs shook. She tried to take deep breaths and fight the crash she knew was coming.

  Next to her, someone else was breathing heavily too.

  Litnig. She vaguely remembered him shouting her name as she’d left to help Leramis. But she couldn’t fathom why in Yenor’s name he was watching her work when he should have been watching the Lost—

  She turned to face him, and her heart stuck in her throat.

  There was a creature standing near the rail. Its eyes were yellow and almond shaped. Its skin was a pale, scaly white, and its ears were flattened and small. Long white hair flowed over its chest in waves. It wore only leather rags and feathers.

  It was plunging a spear directly toward Litnig’s back.

  Ryse didn’t scream. There wasn’t time to. She simply sucked at the River as hard as she ever had in her life and tried to form a crude shockwave.

  Souls massed in front of the Lost One’s chest. Litnig’s eyes widened. He started to stand and to turn and to swing his club.

  Neither of them was fast enough. The Lost One’s spear entered Litnig’s back just to the left of his spine and came fully out the other side. He cried out. His club clattered to the deck, and his hands grabbed frenziedly at the spear jutting from his torso.

  The Lost One uttered a horrible, birdlike cry.

  But the souls were almost ready. Push, she told them.

  The Lost One saw her. Its spear left Litnig’s torso and pivoted around. The butt of it slammed into her forehead before she could finish energizing the weaving.

  Spots filled her vision. The back of her head smashed against the deck. She lost her weaving in a flood of pain and disorientation.

  There was a desperate, wordless shout beside her.

  It was the sort of noise a man might make as he tapped the last reserves of his strength. The sort of howl an injured necromancer might release as he managed to soulweave when by all rights he should have been dead.

  The River of Souls rippled. Ryse smelled lightning and heard the crackle of an electric discharge. The Lost One screamed. She felt it hit the deck with a heavy thump.

  Ryse rolled over and found herself lying face to face with Litnig. His eyes were glassy. His mouth was open. Blood was pooling beneath his cheeks.

  She left Leramis gasping on the deck and scrambled to Litnig’s side. She could save him. Thanks to Leramis, she could save him.

  As long as she had a little time.

  A loud thump echoed from the bulwark, and Ryse whirled to see a weaponless Lost One grappling with an Aleani next to the ship’s rail. She lurched to her feet. The Aleani lost his balance. The Lost One heaved him overboard and turned in her direction.

  Ryse began to weave. The Lost One bridged the distance between them and kicked for her rib cage.

  But she’d been trained.

  She caught hold of the Lost One’s leg as it thumped into her side. It tried to jerk it back, but she clasped her hands around it and held on tight. Her feet bit on the deck. She spun and used the leg to hurl the creature against the rail.

  It grabbed the wood and struggled to free itself. She breathed out with her soul and gathered the River around its throat.

  It screamed. She roared.

  She ripped its thrice-damned head off.

  Two more Lost Ones gained the ship in front of her, and Ryse shouted something that was half battle cry, half frustration. She lunged forward and struck one hard enough in the chest that it toppled over the side.

  The other’s eyes glowed pearly white.

  A shockwave slammed into her gut.

  The concussion threw her backward, and she crashed to the deck next to a paler-than-ever Litnig. Her legs went rubbery. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t weave.

  A hand yanked her to her knees by the hair. A scaly palm filled her vision. The beginnings of a fireball formed in front of it.

  A shadow hit the Lost One from the side.

  Its blow landed with a resounding crack. The Lost One let go of Ryse. A boot struck the creature in the head. Its throat erupted in a gout of dark red blood.

  Then it was gone, hurled over the side of the ship.

  Cole stood in its place.

  There was blood spattered on his chest. His daggers were in his hands. The veins stood out on his neck and forehead, and he was bellowing bloody murder.

  Next to Ryse on the deck, Litnig was still bleeding.

  She grabbed hold of his shirt and rolled him onto his back. His arms hung limp. His feet flopped unnervingly.

  Ryse looked down at the hole in Litnig’s torso, and her stomach turned.

  The spear had hit vital areas—liver, spleen, maybe other organs. A voice in her head whispered that the wound was too deep. Litnig’s affinity to the River wouldn’t heal it. She didn’t have the strength to heal him on her own. Leramis was tapped out, probably no longer even conscious.

  Cole was looking at her. The flames from a Lost One fireball were spreading behind him.

  For his sake, she lied.

  “I can handle it,” she said. “Just keep them off me.”

  And in her head, she whispered, Please. Yenor, please—give me the strength.

  Cole nodded, and Ryse began to weave.

  She started with the wrap, to get Litnig’s weak connection to the River doing what it could before she tried to heal him through brute force. The web formed around him. Its strands began to pulse. A white glow built over the hole in his torso.

  When she linked the wrap to Litnig’s soul, she felt as if she’d fallen into deep water from a great height.

  The world turned black and stormy. A weight pressed upon her chest. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Two crimson eyes burned deep in clouds of darkness before her. The voice of the dragon thundered in her mind.

  And then the vision was gone.

  The sun filtered through high clouds over her head once more. Aleani struggled with Lost Ones on the main deck. Cole stood above her with his daggers in his hands.

  And souls were rushing toward Litnig.

  The whole course of the River shifted. The souls came from the mainland. They came from the sea. They came from the sky. Tens of thousands of tiny spheres surged past her so quickly they blurred into streaks of light.

  Her chest coursed with fiery pain. The wrap bucked and warped, and it took all her strength just to maintain it. The River filled Litnig’s wound completely. A pool of souls spilled out of his body and washed over the blood on the deck.

  More souls came.

  Litnig’s eyes glowed scarlet, and panic leeched into Ryse’s throat. She knew, knew, in some part of her that was deeper than logic, that something was terribly wrong.

  She tore the wrap apart. The torrent of souls stopped. The pain in her chest abated. The souls that had raced to Litnig floated near him for one frozen moment, and then the River resumed its battle-broken flow.

  Ryse knelt over Litnig and ran a bloody hand through her hair. Her whole body felt cold. Her mind raced through question after question and found no answers.

  Litnig’s wound had disappeared.

  There was only a small hole in his shirt and an ocean of still-wet blood on the deck to show it had ever been there. She didn’t see so much as a scar on his skin.


  Breathe, Ryse told herself.

  Litnig sat up. His eyes were clear and gray.

  Breathe, said her mind again, but she jerked away from him nonetheless. Nobody—no human came back from the dead like that. Not even the strongest in the Temple had that kind of power.

  And just a few days before, he’d been so weak.

  Litnig looked at her, and she flinched.

  The clarity in his eyes melted into confusion and pain. A howl and a thud echoed from the deck below them. The heat from the flames behind Ryse reached her back. She saw other fires on the deck, though there didn’t seem to be any more Lost One soulweavers creating them. Perhaps there had just been the one.

  Litnig rose to his feet and picked up his club. A gust of wind grabbed his hair and ruffled it. For a moment, he looked like he had as a twelve-year-old. Just Litnig. Somewhere between boy and man.

  He opened his mouth to speak, and Ryse shook her head. If he spoke, it would forever link what had just happened with the boy she’d grown up with.

  “No,” she croaked. “We’ll have time to talk later. If you can fight, go.”

  Litnig swallowed, gave her one last, pained look, and moved toward the melee below.

  An icy shard of guilt lodged itself in Ryse’s heart.

  “Yenor’s third fucking eye, Lit.”

  Litnig must have responded to his brother, but Ryse couldn’t hear him. She was already moving toward the fires. It would take a soulweaver to extinguish them.

  Fires she knew how to deal with.

  Fires she knew how to fix.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Len stood atop a steep wooden staircase. Seven sailors and the girl Dilanthia Lonecliff huddled behind him around the Rokwet’s massive wheel. The sun shone in his eyes. His feet were planted beneath his shoulders.

  The muscles in Len’s arms bunched, and he freed one of his axes from the shoulder of a Syorchuak Van.

  He kicked it down the stairs, jumped down after it, and followed with the other ax.

  The Van’s skull crunched beneath the blow, and Len lifted his eyes. A stew of struggling figures frothed across the Rokwet’s deck. Large bronzed arms tangled with thin scaly ones. Steel flashed. Aleani roared. Syorchuak Van hissed. A river of blood soaked his feet.

  The children were in trouble.

  The necromancer had gone down. Litnig had gone down. Ryse and Cole had probably gone down as well.

  A Van lunged for Len with a spear, and he leaped aside.

  He’d seen Quay moving toward the others a moment before, but he couldn’t—

  Duck. Twist. Hack. Screech.

  —he couldn’t find them. Dil was relatively safe on the gallery behind him. The others, however…

  Easy, he told himself. Wait. Fight. Keep your eyes open.

  A Van taller than the rest was fighting in the center of the deck. It wore a ragged loincloth around its waist. Two bands of leather were cinched over its arms. Its hair was long and silver.

  The beast was well built. It could have been human, if not for its scaly skin and smashed-looking face. It wielded two gleaming cutlasses with pearl guards. Cutlasses only issued to Aleani fleet captains. Cutlasses like Aldric’s.

  Len knew then that he would have to fight it.

  Two sailors descended to the deck behind him. He heard loud, heavy fear in the way they breathed, and he turned around long enough to see that they were young—a black-haired, bright-eyed boy from just outside Du Nath and an older one from the valley of Du Mir.

  They were inexperienced. They were nervous. They would have to do.

  “Heduan,” he said. “Cheluk nda.”

  Len had been born to rule. When he commanded, he was obeyed.

  He moved forward. The sailors behind him did not.

  Len wasted no time. He rushed at the Van giant as it was pulling a sword from the throat of one of his countrymen. The deck thumped and flexed beneath his feet. His hands held tight to the grips of his axes.

  The beast turned to face him. Its hair swung before its face.

  It smiled.

  Len snarled.

  They joined in battle.

  Len had to dodge a thrust from one of the Van’s cutlasses to get in close enough to strike. He lashed out for the creature’s knee and was parried, but the momentum pushed him into a spin. He came back around and swung his right ax for the Van’s head. The attack forced the creature to duck, and Len followed through with a slash of his other ax toward its midsection.

  The Van leaned back. The ax missed by inches.

  Len kept spinning. He swung for the creature’s outstretched, unprotected legs.

  The Van took a step back and exploded forward with a kick that caught him straight in the arm. Its shin hit him hard enough to make an impact on his bones.

  The blow stopped his momentum. His breath whooshed out of him.

  The Van came forward.

  Len barely had the balance to dodge its next thrust, and the one after that, and the one after that. The cutlasses flickered in the sunlight and were lost in shadow, gone and back again inches from his body. There was a madness to the way the beast fought—an insane ecstasy in combat, as though the dance of death was all it lived for, all it needed.

  The ship’s rail loomed behind Len. He was running out of space, and he wanted to maneuver so that he had open deck at his back again, but he had no time. The swords came too fast. His heel bumped the bulwark. He parried a blow from the left with an ax, then parried one from the right. He breathed, grunted, breathed.

  A sailor bought him time with his life.

  The boy charged in from the side screaming a wordless battle cry and slashing with a short sword. The Van leaped back and dodged his first strike, then his second.

  Len watched the beast pivot. He hurled his left ax at its chest.

  The Van stepped forward. Len’s ax flew by it. It thrust.

  Its left cutlass went straight into the sailor’s chest.

  The Aleani’s eyes went wide. Len rushed forward. The Van’s sword was stuck in the sailor’s chest, and the boy had his hands on its hilt. He was shouting something, fighting even as he died.

  Len would tell the boy’s family that, if he had the chance.

  The Van had to let go of the sword to meet Len’s attack. They clashed, spun, clashed. The beast’s movements were easier to track with only one blade to follow.

  But Len was down to one weapon as well.

  Their duel grew tighter. Len struggled to grab one of the half a dozen weapons scattered across the Rokwet’s deck. The Van did the same. It angled for a short sword, and Len blocked its way. Len went for his ax, and the Van nearly took his arm off.

  The fighting quieted. There were fewer other combatants to dodge around, and the screams and shouts of battle became less frequent.

  Len couldn’t be sure who had won.

  His breath came in gasps and grunts. His arms and legs burned. It was all he could do to keep the Van from gaining a second weapon.

  Bone-deep pain engulfed his right arm.

  Len tried to move it and failed. He was forced to fight defensively. The Van picked up its other cutlass.

  A six-inch black dart was embedded in Len’s arm.

  The Van stuck him in the shoulder and then opened a long gash on his thigh. It kicked Len in the gut, and as he fell back, its knee slammed into his head hard enough to wrench his neck. His ears rang. The world went fuzzy and distant. He felt blood on his chin, in his hair, in his mouth.

  He tried to stand, but he couldn’t get his legs under him. He braced for the blow that would end his life.

  It didn’t come.

  Len’s feet couldn’t gain purchase on the deck. His right arm wouldn’t bear his weight. He squirmed and rolled until he could drag himself up against the ship’s bulwark, and then he pulled the dart from his arm and tried to catch his breath. The world blacked in and out around him. His head ached. He had difficulty thinking in straight lines.

  The three human
boys were fighting the Van giant.

  One of them parried cutlass blows once, twice, three times with daggers. He almost succeeded in landing a strike to the beast’s left knee, but he caught the right in his head for his troubles.

  He went to the deck, and the Van turned around to block an overhand club blow from one of the others.

  Litnig, Len thought. Cole—

  His arm and stomach ached. His jaw swelled shut. His thigh and shoulder were crossed by fiery lines.

  The beast kicked Litnig away and turned back to Cole.

  Quay stepped between them and thrust for its torso.

  Len struggled to watch. The prince showed no signs of seasickness. He fought cautiously and quickly, two swords to two. Cole regained his feet and attacked from the other side. The Van fought them both at once, one cutlass for each.

  Len felt light-headed. He wanted to watch the boys continue their fight, but he couldn’t find the strength. His leg and arm were black with blood.

  A dart.

  The histories would read that Len Heramsun had been killed in the North Sea in the hundred and eleventh year of his life by a dart.

  Len’s chin fell to his chest, and he slumped against another body. His eyes closed. His tongue felt dry and swollen. Images of his wife and children floated before him.

  Lena, he thought. Lena, forgive me— But her frowning face faded away and was replaced by his youngest son’s. The boy’s dark dreadlocks, so like his grandfather’s, reached his waist. The split peak of Du Hardt winked proudly from his cheekbone. In his hands, he held a long poleaxe.

  Raest. Raest, I—

  Raest disappeared. The daughter Len barely knew filled his mind. She had quiet, thoughtful brown eyes and her mother’s nose. A green dress covered her body. Her lips pressed together in concern.

  Maegan, please—

  But then she too was gone, and there was only one more, shrouded in shadows. A boy whose face Len could no longer see, and whose voice he no longer heard except in his nightmares.

  His oldest. His pride.

  D’O—D’Orin—

  And then there was nothing.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Litnig pulled a sword from the chest of a monster.