Soulwoven

by Jeff Seymour

  “What are they talking about in there, anyway?”

  There was no reply.

  “Dil?”

  When he turned around, she was changed.

  Her face was thrust forward into the wind. Her nose twitched. Her weight floated on the balls of her feet. She was flexing and unflexing the first two joints of her fingers on each hand, almost like she was bending them into claws.

  “The wind,” she whispered. “Something’s wrong.”

  For a second, while his stomach plunged into his feet, Cole thought he caught a glimpse of the tiger in her as well.

  “Grandfather!” she barked.

  Alain was at the door in an instant, his face thrust into the wind in the same curious way.

  “Grandfather—”

  “I know. Wait here.”

  His eyes flashed a brighter gold than normal. He strode past Cole and took two steps into the grass and the gloaming.

  And then he was gone.

  He disappeared completely, leaving neither tracks nor bent grass behind. It was like he’d never been there at all.

  “Dil, what—” Cole began, but by then she’d ducked inside the cabin long enough to grab her quiver and bow and come back out. Her eyes flashed in the dimness. Her nostrils flared.

  She grabbed his hand and squeezed it.

  “Shh,” she whispered. “Come with me, and be absolutely quiet.” Her eyes met his. They shone wide and foreign—half-afraid and half-excited. He saw the flutter of her heart in her neck. “Not a sound, Cole. Promise me.”

  He nodded and grabbed a long knife from the stack of dishes he’d cleaned. She pulled him into the prairie. He didn’t have time for so much as a glance toward the others.

  The tall, big-grained grass soon swallowed them. Dil led their way through it. Her hand was iron tight around Cole’s.

  He crept in silence behind her.

  He’d always been a quiet mover when he wanted to be. It’d served him well in Eldan City, whether he was sneaking through the slums at night or hiding from his father when the big man was in one of his rages. He was proud of his stealth, but he knew his limitations.

  In that field, he didn’t seem to have any.

  It was like he and Dil weren’t even there. The wind and grass parted for them. The soil cushioned their footfalls. Their clothing clung to their bodies so tightly that no sound could escape it. When Cole looked behind them, he saw no tracks to show where they’d been.

  Dil snuck half-crouched along a wide, curving route through the grass and up a slow incline.

  All Cole could do was follow.

  After a few moments, they stood atop a small hill, looking down on the ocean of grass between the forest’s edge and the cabin.

  “Here,” Dil breathed, and it was as if the wind had breathed it. She nocked an arrow to her bow and dropped to one knee. The breeze pulled gently at her hair. A few stars winked cold and merciless in the blackening sky above.

  The moon rose big and yellow on the horizon, and when it caught Dil’s eyes, Cole’s heart jumped. Her pupils had shrunk. They were two points of darkness, surrounded by a swirling bath of yellow light.

  He caught a flash of movement in the grass below. Two shapes became visible on the prairie. One of them stood tall and black in the grass. The other crouched low, like an enormous cat or a person on all fours. Cole heard a growl.

  The low shape shot toward the tall one.

  A jet of flame roiled out from the bigger figure. The smaller one darted out of its way, skidded to a halt, and leaped again.

  The tall shadow danced nimbly to the side. A wall of fire scorched the night in front of it. Before the flames faded, Cole caught a glimpse of a black robe behind them.

  Necromancer, he thought.

  Next to him, Dil’s eyes flicked rapidly to and fro. Her hands gripped her bow. Her torso looked as rigid as a rock.

  Their friends were within earshot. Cole’s gut told him to shout for help, but he looked at Dil and bit his tongue.

  Promise me, she’d said—

  The hairs on his arms stood up. Thick fingers of lightning snapped out in all directions from the tall shadow. A loud crack and rumble filled the air.

  A wild yowl, half human and half beast, followed.

  Cole saw a muscle tighten in Dil’s face. A gust of wind carried the scent of burning grass and a sickly stench from the direction of the lightning.

  Dil didn’t move. The black-robed figure stalked through a ring of scorched grass toward a crumpled form on the ground.

  Shoot it, Cole thought.

  Dil held her pose and licked her lips and didn’t move.

  She’s afraid she’ll miss. Afraid she’ll get us killed.

  Motion and shouting erupted from the direction of the cabin.

  The necromancer turned to face the voices and abandoned the silent form on the ground. A ball of blue-white fire formed between its hands. The flames were small at first, but they grew bigger and bigger, until the fireball was the size of a house and the necromancer had to step back to avoid getting caught up in it.

  Cole glimpsed a female, pale-skinned face within the black robe in the blue-white light.

  And Dil finally moved.

  “No!” she screamed.

  She loosed her shot.

  It was too late.

  The necromancer finished her weaving. Dil’s arrow missed. The fireball lost its blue tint and turned the liquid orange of normal flame, and then it dropped to the ground and shot forward as if whipped from the end of a sling. It snapped and hissed and popped and rolled over the earth, blazing a wide swath through the grass and casting long, shifting shadows on the plain.

  Cole watched helplessly. The fireball was a hundred feet from the cabin, then fifty, then twenty-five. He couldn’t see his brother or his friends. He couldn’t do anything to help them.

  Dil shrieked.

  The fire rolled through her home like the cabin had been built out of toothpicks.

  A geyser of fiery splinters shot into the air with a resounding crack. The flames dropped over the edge of the cliff and out of sight.

  Cole’s jaw clenched. In the darkness left by all the light, he could see little more than the flashing purple afterimages of the fireball. He couldn’t tell who’d made it out of the cabin before it had been smashed. Litnig, Quay, and Len, he hoped, but Ryse—

  He didn’t want to think about Ryse.

  He clutched his knife and turned back toward the necromancer. The black-robed silhouette was running east in a zigzag pattern, parallel to the forest’s edge.

  Dil fired arrow after arrow at it as it fled. She shot until the necromancer disappeared into the dusk, and then she threw her bow to the side and charged downhill toward the ring of blackened grass.

  Cole tried to follow, but Dil was too fast. She scrambled and slid down the slope with a quickness he couldn’t have matched even if he’d been able to see his footing. He lost his knife and nearly turned an ankle twice before he got to her.

  She was kneeling in the ring of scorched grass and cradling a twisted black shape against her chest.

  “—the cave—” Cole heard.

  His stomach turned over. The voice was Alain’s. Cole recognized the cloying scent he’d failed to place before.

  Burnt flesh.

  Cole drew closer.

  Dil’s grandfather was almost unrecognizable in her arms. His hair was singed and shriveled. His skin was covered in an arcing network of red and black burns. He wheezed and shook.

  Dil murmured something unintelligible, and Cole heard Alain growl, “No! Must…with them. Just…cave!”

  The last word came out in a roar that would’ve suited an old, dying bear.

  Cole reached Dil’s side. He stretched out his hand to touch her shoulder.

  Alain whispered, “Then take…Cole…”

  Cole froze.

  Dil laid her grandfather down. Her eyes glowed fiercely. The tiny dots of her pupils had all but melted into the swirl
ing flow of gold in her irises. Tears swam down her face and dripped from her chin.

  Cole spread his hands and shook his head. “Dil, I don’t—”

  She pulled his hands down and thrust them under Alain’s armpits. The flesh was sticky and hot. Liquid oozed between his fingers. He fought not to gag.

  “What—”

  “Don’t speak, Cole,” Dil whispered. “No one else can see this.”

  If the others were still coming, they’d be there any second.

  Cole closed his mouth and struggled to lift Alain’s torso. He heard voices and the sounds of people running through the grass. His name was called. So was Dil’s.

  Dil grabbed her grandfather’s legs and stood. Her eyes flashed.

  A few steps took them into the sea of grass, and Cole knew that no one would find them unless they wished to be found.

  FORTY

  Cole passed under the rustling canopy of the Forest of Lurathen. His feet felt slow and awkward under the weight in his arms. The pale light of the moon disappeared. Dil’s back grew ghostly gray in the shadows.

  He shambled onward.

  Soon he was breathing hard. His arms got sore. His hands ached. Sticks and rocks and streams passed by underfoot, but the brush didn’t seem to touch him. Or Dil. Or Alain. He felt as if he wasn’t moving at all—as if a world of shadows and sound was turning slowly around him instead.

  Alain’s breath grew more labored. The old man’s flesh had cooled beneath Cole’s hands, but the oozing of his wounds had kept up. The reddish-yellow fluid that was leaking from them was hardening on Cole’s skin.

  Dil shuffled along ahead of him in silence. Sometimes, when they rested, he could hear her breathing as hard as he was.

  It wasn’t all that hard not to think about what was happening. Nothing seemed real. Cole half expected to wake up on the floor in Alain’s cabin at any moment.

  That moment never came.

  He lurched into a small clearing, and suddenly the world was more than just shadows and sound. A round patch of grass glowed green in the moonlight before him. Three hummocks within it encircled a pool of glassy black water. The space was ringed by a wall of brambles and tightly spaced birch trees. The air smelled of leaves and sharp mint.

  Dil slowed down.

  Don’t think, Cole told himself. His back ached. His shoulders and forearms were solid, fiery knots. Help Alain, then go back to the others. Those were the real concerns. He could figure out what was happening and why after it was all over.

  Dil stepped into the water with her grandfather’s legs still tucked tightly under her arms. The pool’s mirrorlike surface broke into a cascade of ripples that shimmered from one end of it to the other. Little flickers of captured moonlight raced around the edges of the water and collided, annihilating or augmenting each other in chaotic, sparkling clashes.

  Cole followed Dil into the pool.

  The water was lukewarm and silky, and it clung to his body as if it was made of something much more viscous than the output of a spring. Dil walked in up to her shoulders. Cole went in to his chest. Alain floated motionlessly between them.

  Cole couldn’t see the cave the old man had spoken of. There was nothing around the pool but grass.

  The water played around his legs, and he stood and watched Dil. Her chin was tucked against her chest. Her lips quivered. She bobbed back through the water toward him, and when she reached him, she stood close enough that he could feel the heat of her body.

  “Dil…” he began.

  But he didn’t know what to say.

  She clutched his shirt.

  “In a second,” she said, “you’re going to feel like you’re not yourself anymore—like your body’s different. It won’t be. You’re still you. Remember that.”

  She took his hand.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered. “Please.”

  And his whole world changed.

  His legs and feet pressed against one another. His arms pinned themselves to his sides. His eyes fixed open. His body stiffened.

  He couldn’t breathe.

  He panicked and tried to wriggle from side to side, but something had a strong hold on his midsection. He needed water. Needed to be wet, to be cold, and to breathe. A hand put pressure on his shoulders and forced him down until his head hit liquid.

  His lungs filled with water, and then he could breathe again.

  The hand let him go. He flicked his legs and dove for the bottom of the pool, and then he let himself drift. His heart thundered fast and fearful against his ribs.

  A human-size, long-haired, familiar shape floated toward him from the surface. Some part of its midsection gripped a larger, heavier shape and dragged it along. The first shape belonged in his world. The second didn’t. It was too big and too blocky, and it looked out of place in the water.

  But the first shape he knew. It swam past him, towing its burden.

  He followed.

  He trailed it along the bottom of the pool. Thick mud slipped by under his belly. Bubbles and tiny bits of edible somethings floated in the water around him. Pressure squeezed his head, but he didn’t mind it.

  A passageway opened in a wall of black rock at the edge of the pool. The shape he knew entered it, and he followed past jagged ledges into a little tunnel. The shaft angled upward. Bits of algae hung from its roof. He soon reached the mirrored, rippling plane of the water’s surface.

  His friend-shape swam to the edge of the water and changed. Its tail-like back end split into two flailing halves. Its middle divided into a central trunk with two thinner stalks attached to it. The lower bits settled on the rock and propelled the rest of it up through the surface. The middle bits dragged along the blocky burden they’d been carrying. Only his friend-shape’s feet were left to him, and those feet jerked desperately, as if something violent was happening in the breathless world above.

  Cole panicked again. He cared for this thing—this shape, whatever it was. He wanted to help it, and he didn’t want it to leave him alone. He swam up against its splintered tail bits and rubbed his face on them. He nibbled at them desperately. It was all he could think to do.

  Then he couldn’t breathe again.

  His feet felt like feet. There was water in his nose, his mouth, his chest.

  He stood up, and his torso broke through the surface. Muscles he didn’t even know he had went rock solid in his abdomen, then pulsed again and again, and he spewed water out of his mouth at the same time he was trying to gasp in air through his nose. His arms and legs buzzed and shook. His fingers scrabbled on wet rock, searching for something, anything, to help him.

  A hand grabbed them. Its digits wrapped tightly around his and pulled him out of the water. An arm circled his chest and hugged him against a warm, soft body until the coughing stopped and the water was gone and he could breathe again.

  Mucus streamed from his nose. His lungs took in air in quick gasps.

  “Shh,” said a voice. A hand stroked his hair. He laid his head against a shoulder and let himself relax.

  And then he opened his eyes.

  He was on his knees, leaning against Dil at one end of a round, dirt-floored cave. Thousands of blue iridescent dots clung to the walls. Strings of pale green moss dangled from the ceiling and trailed across the top of his head.

  Alain lay on the ground nearby. The old man’s eyes were closed. His legs lay in a pool of black water. His chest moved in and out slowly.

  The water, Cole thought. We came through the water—but how—and what—?

  “Yenor—” he vomited water again in midsentence. He was dripping wet, head to toe. He wiped a hand across his mouth. “Yenor’s eye, Dil.”

  Her hand stroked his hair in a way that felt almost automatic. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled.

  Cole held his fist up to his mouth and coughed. “Was I a—a fish?”

  She shook her head.

  “No, I promise. I just—I just made you feel different. I didn’t want to do this alone, an
d I…”

  “Do what?” he asked.

  He never got an answer.

  “Dilanthia,” Alain rasped. “Are…we there?”

  The old man’s eyes had swollen shut.

  Cole’s stomach tensed, but there was nothing left inside it to throw up.

  Dil scrambled to her grandfather’s side. Wet dirt flew from her hands and knees in clumps. She grabbed Alain under the armpits and dragged him out of the water.

  “Yes,” she said. “We’re here. I’m sorry.”

  Alain let out a long sigh. Dil stretched him out on the ground.

  As Cole watched, a dim orange glow wrapped itself around him.

  The light began on the tortured skin of his chest and spread itself around the rest of his body. Memories tickled Cole’s brain—Ryse in Eldan City healing the boy with the broken leg, then on the Rokwet healing Litnig—but this was different. The glow was thinner and weaker. There was no miraculous scabbing over. No instantaneous recovery.

  Instead, a whole garden’s worth of roots and vines broke through the earth and stretched over Alain’s body like a blanket.

  The old man gasped as if he’d been plunged into a stream in the wintertime. The roots engulfed his head, and then all Cole could see of him was his singed hair and the blanket of vegetation moving up and down, up and down with his breath.

  Cole rubbed his eyes. “Dil, what—”

  He heard a whimper, and she slammed into his chest.

  Her head pressed against his shoulder. Her hands pulled at the wet cloth of his shirt. Her body heaved with wracking sobs.

  “Promise,” she stammered. “Promise you don’t hate me, Cole. Promise you won’t make me go away. Promise, promise…” Her shoulders shook. Her hair dragged over his face.

  Cole moved his mouth so that he could breathe freely, and then he splayed his fingers over her back and pushed her against his chest, and he let her cry and tried to understand what the hell was happening.

  She’d led him through the prairie and the forest in silence. Her grandfather had fought like a tiger. She’d turned him into a fish. Or something like a fish. She’d turned into one herself, or she wouldn’t have been able to swim so far.

  And her eyes had glowed gold in the moonlight.