Soulwoven

by Jeff Seymour

  Wilderleng…

  The word was an old one, from stories his mother had told him about people with golden eyes and unusual powers. They were said to live in hiding and bring bad luck and ill will upon those around them.

  Dil’s hands twisted his shirt. Her sobbing sounded like an old man gasping for breath.

  Cole decided he didn’t care about the stories.

  “Promise,” he said. He pressed his lips against her hair. “Promise on my life.”

  He meant it. She’d chosen him over her old life. He could choose her as well.

  She clutched him harder and took a deep, shuddering breath.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Eventually, she stopped sobbing.

  But her hands never left him, and he knelt in the darkness for a long time and held her. He knelt for so long that he forgot where he was. His head nodded forward. His eyelids drooped. His torso swayed backward.

  His next sensation was one of cold.

  There was damp soil beneath him. The warmth of Dil’s body pressed against his side. The tall, feather-topped grass outside the Forest of Lurathen bobbed and waved around him. The sky was awash with the red-and-orange glow of sunrise.

  He sat up, and a wave of pain rocked his head.

  Dil lay asleep next to him. Alain, the grove, the cave—none of it was anywhere to be found. He wondered if he’d been dreaming.

  Then he looked at his hands.

  They were caked in dirt. Brown and yellow stains mottled his fingers and palms. His throat felt raw. His abdomen was sorer than it’d been in years.

  Dil bumped against his leg and let out a slow, deep breath. Her eyes fluttered open.

  “Dil, what—”

  She squeezed her eyes shut again. Her lips trembled. Her fingers dug into the dirt.

  Cole discovered that he didn’t need to know—didn’t even want to know—what had happened, if the answer was going to hurt her that badly.

  “Never mind,” he said.

  He ran a hand through his hair and turned away from the rising sun. His body felt like it had been ground between two enormous boulders. “We need to find the others. Quay—”

  Cole remembered the fireball. He clamped his mouth shut and stood up.

  The others could be dead already.

  Cole took Dil’s hands and pulled her to her feet. She sniffed once and squeezed his fingers.

  And then they were running with the rising sun toward a hole where once there’d been a cabin.

  FORTY-ONE

  “You love her still. This Temple soulweaver of yours.”

  Leramis stood on mossy stone atop the roof of the Citadel. A warm sea-spray breeze wisped over his cheeks. The ocean roared and murmured on sharp rocks behind him, six hundred feet down. His mentor stood next to him.

  He’d just come, after more than a week of waiting, from an hour-long meeting with the Council of Taers that had felt more like a trial than a debriefing. He’d been upbraided for failing to apprehend Soren Goldguard, berated for failing to report, dressed down and insulted and belittled.

  Through it all, he’d stood like stone with his hands at his sides and answered the questions that were put to him.

  The quiet shadows of the city of Death’s Head stretched over the skullish contours of Menatar’s tip to his south. A cornucopia of constellations graced the sky: the squat, rounded cross of the Heartwren, slipping minute by minute into the water; the long line of the Bastard’s Sword, following it into the next day; the ribbon of tiny, bright stars called the Fool’s River; the deep, starless blackness of the Abyss; and above it, the five stars in a low, squat X called the Temple’s Gag, or Yenor’s Mark, or the Necromancer’s Bones.

  The stars didn’t always follow each other in that order. They shifted with the seasons, with the years, even with the days. They spoke to each person in turn and offered a hint of the future.

  Leramis sucked in the cool, clean air of the night. He would never again take the act of breathing for granted after the burns he’d suffered on the Rokwet. He rubbed his chest. The skin atop his breastbone had healed into a scarred, puffy, wrinkled mass of flesh.

  He wondered how long it would be before he got used to it.

  You love her still—

  There was no sense in denying it. Ryse and the endless possibilities of her presence in his life filled his thoughts. Over the last ten days, as he’d waited in his cold apartment for the Council’s summons, he’d had little else to think about. He’d questioned many things.

  He didn’t say as much to Rhan, but there was no need to. Rhan knew. Rhan saw.

  So Leramis didn’t speak. He watched the stars in silence, and he waited.

  “Have you known what it is to lose true love, Leramis?” Rhan asked.

  A coldness rose in Leramis’s heart and whispered to him that he was learning.

  “I have,” Rhan continued. “And it’s no small thing.”

  Leramis rubbed the tortured skin on his chest again through the cloth of his robe. He remembered falling on the Rokwet. He remembered pain. He remembered knowing that he was going to die.

  Under the shadow of that knowledge, he’d discovered something he might not have found anywhere else.

  No.

  He’d expected to regret the things he’d left undone, like redeeming his family’s name and doing great things for the world. But as the threads of his life had slipped through his fingers, he’d mourned not the loss of those grand things but the breaking of the simple promises he’d made to a young woman whose eyes twinkled in his dreams.

  Ryse had been the first person he’d ever truly thought he could help. And she’d been the first person who’d looked through his name and believed in his strength and his will.

  “What’s your purpose in life, Leramis?” asked Rhan.

  He’d told himself the answer so many times he didn’t even think about it anymore.

  “To safeguard the River of Souls,” he said. “To secure the lynchpins of the world.”

  But the words sounded wrong even as he spoke them. Guarding the River was Rhan’s purpose, and the purpose of the Council of Taers and the Order.

  Leramis wondered if it was still his as well.

  A quiet wind swept a gull’s black feather toward the houses of his brothers and sisters in Death’s Head.

  “Purposes change,” Rhan said. “Yenor’s will changes.”

  The feather floated into the night, down and away, farther and farther, until it melted into the shadows and out of Leramis’s life.

  “Be sure that you’re able to change too,” Rhan said.

  There was an unusual harshness to the way he spoke. A prickly spider of fear clambered over Leramis’s skull and lodged at the base of his neck.

  He isn’t talking about my feelings for Ryse, he realized. He means something else, something bigger.

  “What would you do if I said the Council wants you to kill Prince Quay and his friends?” Rhan asked.

  Fingers of ice spread from the spider’s nest down Leramis’s back. His hands tightened on the ramparts.

  Rhan said nothing further.

  They can’t—I couldn’t—I can’t— Leramis thought, and then he shrank in horror from the reality of those words and everything they meant for his life.

  “What if they wanted to send someone else, but I convinced them that you were the only one who could get close enough to do it? Could you?”

  Leramis’s mouth dried up. His legs felt rubbery. The wind raced up the Citadel walls and over his head.

  “I don’t know what your purpose is anymore,” Rhan said. “Perhaps Yenor hasn’t decided.” He smiled at the city lights to the south. “Bear that in mind when you return to the Prince of Eldan. Your orders haven’t changed.”

  Leramis’s fingers trembled on the gritty stone of the wall.

  A trick. A trick of words, like many Rhan had played on him over the years they’d known one another.

  His breath shook and his heart r
aced nonetheless.

  He put his back to the wind and looked over the ocean. The sea’s black waves, sparkling as they crested in the moonlight, plodded endlessly toward Menatar’s rocky coast. Seventy miles or so to the northeast, the waves would be breaking on the shores of Eldan. Farther still, Ryse would be moving closer to Eldan City, and the Temple, and the White Forest.

  Without him.

  Leramis looked back at his mentor. With the moon behind him, Rhan loomed larger than life, godlike. Leramis watched the light play over the older necromancer’s skull, and he marveled at the man who’d risen to power just when he was needed, at the way the two of them had found one another in the alleys of Nucidlan, and at the fact that from the moment they’d met, Rhan had believed in him, and he had believed in Rhan.

  There are no coincidences…

  He felt connected to the whole world, touched by an energy that surged through every atom of his existence. Awe washed the fear from his body. He felt calm, steady, and at peace.

  “Yenor makes us free creatures, Leramis, hampered only by ourselves. Remember that when you see your prince and your soulweaver again.”

  Rhan squeezed Leramis’s shoulder. The angle between the Taer and the moon shifted. His godlike appearance bled away into the night.

  The energy that had possessed Leramis trickled from his veins.

  It left the calm behind.

  “Live your life, Leramis Hentworth,” said Rhan the Eye. “You’ll do Yenor’s will, whether you see it happening or not.”

  Rhan pressed Leramis’s hands between his own.

  And then he walked away.

  Leramis didn’t watch him. He didn’t need to. His whole life lay before him, open and free. For a long time, he stood on the ramparts of the Citadel, breathing and rubbing his chest. He thought about Ryse. He thought about Quay. He thought about death, and more than anything else, he thought about life.

  He didn’t take his eyes from the sky until the Heartwren had set and the sun had dimmed the Fool’s River past seeing. The sea and sky went from black to gray. The morning breeze rasped over him. The cocks crowed.

  Leramis left the Citadel, reentered Death’s Head, and walked briskly through the growing bustle of the city’s streets.

  A ship would be waiting for him in the harbor.

  Somewhere to the northeast, his reunion with Ryse would be waiting for him too.

  FORTY-TWO

  Wilderleng.

  Cole watched Dil’s back rise and fall in front of him as she walked, and against his will, he remembered the stories his mother had told him.

  A drop of rain splashed from his hood onto his nose. It had been pouring for four days straight, ever since the hills of Steel Hall had appeared on the horizon to the north. But neither the rain nor his mother’s tales of murder in the dark had dampened his sense of good fortune.

  Overall, he and his friends had been very, very lucky. Everyone had been outside when Alain’s cabin had been destroyed except for Ryse, and the fireball had skimmed right over her.

  After Cole and Dil had awoken in the grass, the two of them had found the others camped around the burnt-out remains of the cabin, arguing over whether to leave or stay and look for them. When Quay had asked Cole where he and Dil had been, Cole had spun an elaborate lie about chasing the necromancer through the night. When the prince had asked where Alain had gone, Dil had told him that her grandfather had headed for Lurathen.

  Cole hadn’t contradicted her.

  He stumped muddily through the drenched green fields of the Windplain, holding one end of the stretcher that Dil and Len had fashioned to carry Ryse. The weather had been mercifully quiet for most of their journey, but as the light had risen that morning, so had the winds. The air was shrieking from west to east with force, whipping the rain into the eyes of anyone foolish enough to look back the way they’d come.

  Cole wasn’t looking back.

  They’d almost reached Eldan City. He caught glimpses of the three hills every few minutes through the curtains of rain, and he was beginning to make out the shape of the wall around them too.

  He supposed Dil could probably see the whole thing.

  If she was what he thought she was, anyway.

  Wilderleng.

  Cole soon spotted the dark roofs of Thieves’ Rise clustered behind Temple Hill like forgotten children begging for a handout. He knew a place in the Rise where a gang of outlaws had dug a tunnel under the wall. A person could sneak into the city there, for a price.

  Two months in the past, he’d shared meals, jokes, and time with those outlaws.

  But all that seemed impossibly far away.

  Dil drifted back to walk next to him as they approached the city. Her fingers dug lightly into his forearm.

  He planted a kiss on her head in return, though doing so made him shiver a little. Wilderlengs were the bogeymen of Eldan, and it was hard to get over that. He supposed Dil’s life in Lurathen would’ve been miserable with that secret—always careful, always hiding, knowing that only behind closed doors could she be herself.

  Cole squinted through the rain at her. She looked sad, drawn, and worried. There was no sign of the golden swirls he’d seen in her eyes at her grandfather’s cabin.

  Maybe she isn’t Wilderleng, he thought. Maybe she’s just worried about her grandfather.

  But the idea sounded hollow even inside his head.

  An hour later, Cole squatted on the side of a small rise where once there’d been a bramblebush, digging his way through muddy soil beneath a carpet of tallgrass. Just east of him, the Northwater flowed into the city through a huge iron grate. The river was close to flood level, and Cole wondered how bad things would be further south—how high the water had gotten in the slums, and how many were homeless or dead already.

  His fingers found metal, and he dug his heels into the ground and heaved. A small trapdoor, covered lightly in earth and grass, swung toward the sky. Cole stuck his head through it and found a rickety wooden ladder that dropped about ten feet into a puddle of brown water. He set his toes on the first rung and beckoned to the others.

  “Come on,” he said. “It’ll be wet enough without the rain getting in.”

  He was right. The floor was covered in about two feet of cold, muddy water, and the walls and roof were dripping. Crooked timbers scavenged from the rubbish piles in the slums stood haphazardly along the walls and roof as braces. It was a miracle that the place hadn’t caved in.

  Cole fumbled around trying to light an oil-soaked torch, and Litnig pulled the trapdoor shut behind them.

  The torch caught after a moment and painted the tunnel in smoky yellow light. As Cole carried the flickering brand over the water, he could almost hear his brother grumble, If this comes down on top of us, Cole, I swear I’ll haunt your ghost.

  Almost. Because Litnig didn’t say a word.

  He’d scarcely spoken since Ryse had gotten sick. And there was something in his eyes that Cole had never seen there before—something hurt or angry or frustrated, or maybe all three. There’d been times, out on the Windplain, when Cole had become uncomfortably aware of just how big Litnig was.

  The water deepened as the tunnel angled down to get under the foundations of the city wall. At its lowest point, Litnig and Quay had to hold Ryse’s stretcher at shoulder level, and Len was practically swimming—hopping from toe to toe with his pack held above his head. By the time the tunnel angled upward again, they were all soaked and shivering.

  Cole hoped Brown John and the River Rats would have a fire going on the other side, and that the others would be willing to stop and enjoy it.

  A ladder led up to another trapdoor at the far end of the tunnel. Cole handed his torch to Dil and climbed up as quick as he could. The wood was wet, and slick with moss.

  Cole knocked three times on the door and waited. After a few moments, he knocked again.

  “What’s wrong?” Quay asked.

  Cole stared at the unmoving door. He listened to the dripp
ing of water and heard nothing else. No voices. No fire. No footsteps. No laughing or music.

  “I don’t know,” he whispered.

  He knocked a third time, and there was still no response. “They should’ve answered by now,” he said. “They always have someone watching the door.”

  He braced his legs on the ladder and pressed his hands against the door itself.

  It rose at his touch. His fingers grazed a piece of twisted metal.

  The lock, he realized, or what’s left of it.

  He froze.

  But there was nowhere to go but up.

  He eased the door open and lowered it until it rested on the floor. He remembered the room beyond as a warm, well-lit, comfortably furnished basement in Brown John’s home. The place had usually been filled with men and girls and boys and women gambling and talking and laughing around a cask or two of beer and a game of skull rummy or Yenor’s bones.

  Instead of that room, he found cold, empty darkness.

  He turned back to the others, gestured for silence, and held out his hand. Dil offered him his torch, but he shook his head and crooked a finger toward her instead.

  She hesitated, chewed her lip, then handed the torch to Len and started up the ladder.

  Cole moved off of it and sat on the cold stone of the floor. His feet dangled next to Dil.

  When she reached the top of the ladder, her eyes glowed liquid gold.

  “Can you see?” he whispered.

  She nodded, took a shaky breath, and described the room. Signs of struggle. Two tables and chairs near the staircase smashed to pieces. Torches scattered on the floor, still smelling of smoke. The stale stink of dried beer from the remnants of a cask in the corner.

  “Bodies?” he made himself ask, but she shook her head no.

  “No signs of anyone alive, either,” she said. Her face was sweating, despite the cold.

  Cole squeezed her shoulder and touched his nose to hers in the dark.

  It was the best thanks he could muster.

  “Quay, send a torch up.”

  The others followed the torch one by one. Litnig handed Ryse on her stretcher up to Quay and Len. Cole helped them off the ladder and into the room, then shut the trapdoor behind them. The door slid into place with an empty thunk.