Soulwoven

by Jeff Seymour

“Where’s Litnig?” she asked, and she watched Leramis take it all wrong and wanted to slap him for even thinking that way. Her feet found her shoes. Her fingers grabbed her robe from a peg near the door.

  “Downstairs,” Leramis grunted. His grip on the doorframe tightened. “She’s stronger than both of us, Ryse. Yenor’s eye, hurry up!”

  Ryse pulled the robe on and thumped down the stairs behind Leramis, peppering him with questions.

  “When did you get here?”

  “Just now.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Menatar.”

  “How did you find us?”

  “You didn’t bother to hide your eddy.”

  Her skin crawled. She hadn’t. She was in Eldan City. Her home.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, but Leramis was already downstairs.

  When Ryse reached the Jins’ living room, she found the others standing in a semicircle around the hearth.

  Litnig straightened from checking something on his pack. The sight of him made Ryse’s stomach jump into her throat. She swallowed acid.

  “Where’s Quay?” she asked. Dil slipped into the room behind her. Everyone else, including Litnig’s mother, was already there.

  “Gone,” Cole said. He got out of the chair he’d been sitting in. “He left me in charge.”

  Ryse took a deep breath.

  “Gone wh—”

  As she spoke, she felt a sickening suction in the River of Souls.

  She wove on instinct. Her arm reached for Leramis. Her threads entwined with his.

  The wall facing her shattered in smoke and fire.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Litnig took deep breaths.

  Darkness surrounded him. His ears rang as loudly as if a bell had been struck inside his skull. Dust clogged his nose and stuck to his face, his lips, his teeth.

  His house had collapsed. He’d seen it lose a wall.

  But it hadn’t fallen on him.

  He reached above his head and felt splintered wood and plaster wavering a few inches over him. Next to him, someone thin and warm was clutching his arm with shaking hands.

  My mother, he realized.

  Four pools of white light blazed in the dusty air.

  Ryse and Leramis. The two of them stood next to one another, arms locked, soulweaving.

  Together.

  A wave of jealousy washed over Litnig.

  The ringing in his ears subsided.

  “Is everybody all right?” Cole shouted. He was twisting a finger in his ear, like he was trying to work out a piece of debris or dust or maybe just the ringing. Dil and Len flanked him. Dust coated their faces.

  Litnig heard murmured assents. His mother whimpered. Ryse and Leramis said nothing, but their grips on one another’s arms tightened.

  Litnig’s stomach twisted.

  “Ryse, can you get us out of here?” Cole asked.

  She and Leramis responded simultaneously.

  “No, but he can.”

  “No, but I can.”

  The synchronicity of their voices was eerie. Something angry stirred in Litnig’s chest. A harshness that had been growing in his soul since Du Fenlan woke up along with it.

  “Then why don’t you do it?” he spat.

  Ryse and Leramis glared at him together, and the debris above him moved. The pile shifted up, slid sideways, and crashed to the ground.

  Stars appeared above Litnig’s head. The wind kissed his face.

  He straightened.

  He stood at the center of a pile of rubble three or four feet high. None of the walls that had once framed his house were still standing. The dust had begun to dissipate, but it still filled the air.

  The streets were dark. No lights shone in the windows of the neighbors’ homes. No shouts of alarm disturbed the silence.

  The hair on the back of Litnig’s neck stood up.

  Ryse and Leramis gave a shuddering gasp. Their breathing lost its synchronization, but it stayed heavy.

  Litnig didn’t like the sound of it.

  “Can we get some light?” he asked.

  Ryse pursed her lips, and an incandescent sphere kindled in the air above the wreckage.

  Litnig sucked in a deep breath.

  Scores of skeletons filled the street in both directions. The empty sockets of their skulls gleamed in Ryse’s light. A few of them tilted their heads sideways, as if the skeletons were uncertain how Litnig and his friends had moved the wreckage of a house off of themselves.

  “Thrice-damned, nine-tailed, six-pronged, step-dancing hells,” Cole said. “The Catacombs.”

  A few streets away there was an entrance to the underground corpse houses that had held Eldan City’s dead for thousands of years. The bones within would be a never-ending army for a necromancer.

  “Leramis, can you do anything about them?” Ryse asked.

  The necromancer shook his head.

  Bone scraped on cobblestone. Litnig began to climb out of the wreckage of his house.

  And then things started happening very, very quickly.

  The skeletons to the south surged forward. Leramis’s eyes flared. The corpses crashed into a shockwave big enough that Litnig could hear the pop and feel the concussion, even several yards away.

  Litnig ducked under shards of broken bone. An explosion raked the stillness above him. Two skeletons dropped from the air and landed in front of him.

  His body acted automatically. He grabbed one corpse by the arm and slung it into a bank of its compatriots. He kicked the other in the same direction, then slid down the far side of the wreckage behind it.

  Yenor’s eye, since when can they jump like that?

  Another shockwave sounded behind him. A corpse got within range of his hands, and he grabbed it and hurled it to the ground. It tried to get up.

  He stepped on its hips and ripped its femur free, and then he had a club.

  The bone was thick and strong. It crunched easily through skulls, cracked ribs, and shattered shoulders.

  Litnig reached the street. He thought he heard his friends climbing out of the house after him.

  But no matter how quickly he swung the club, he wasn’t fast enough to buy himself more than a split second to think.

  A skeleton grabbed his shoulder, and he shook free and smashed its head from its neck. Another jabbed for his stomach, and he spun out of the way and kicked its knee so hard that the bones snapped apart and it fell flailing onto the cobblestone street.

  A frustrated weight built in his chest. He started pounding the skeletons around him harder than he had to.

  It felt good. Like running full speed after being stuck indoors for a week.

  This is what you were made for, whispered something inside of him.

  And then, above the rush of his heart, Litnig heard a thin wail.

  “Not my sons! Not while I live and breathe, you will not take my sons!”

  The blood haze dimmed from his eyes. He’d gotten separated from the others. Ryse and Leramis stood likewise alone, each surrounded by small rings of space and tightly packed skeletons. A gargantuan corpse was pressing its foot into Cole’s throat near the edge of the street. Dil hung from the corpse’s back, her arms locked around its neck and head, her teeth bared, her eyes flaring with a golden light that Litnig didn’t understand.

  The corpse didn’t even seem to notice her.

  Len fought just in front of them, whirling a dance of destruction with his axes. It looked like if he stopped, the skeletons would surge right over them.

  Litnig’s mother was unprotected.

  She stood in front of the ruins of her home, shrieking and beating at the skeleton squeezing the life from her youngest son.

  Run, Litnig thought. You’re not safe here.

  But she didn’t.

  A pale hand reached out of the shadows behind her and grabbed her by the hair. Another wrapped over her mouth. Her eyes grew wide and terrified.

  Behind the hands, the washed-out face of a young woman
emerged into the light. A shock of hair so blond it was almost white wisped over her forehead. Her lips were purple and thin.

  Her eyes glowed red.

  Not white like Ryse’s or gold like Dil’s, but red, like blood.

  Light flashed in the darkness. A sword that shone as though it was filled with luminescent white fluid moved toward the throat of Litnig’s mother.

  The red eyes made contact with his.

  Litnig grit his teeth. The others wouldn’t notice what was happening behind them. And even if by some miracle they did, they wouldn’t be able to act. There was only him, and he was too slow, and too far off to help.

  The pressure in his chest gave way.

  He screamed a terrible obscenity. Fingers of heat spread across his torso, as though a vial of warm liquid had broken open inside his heart. Time slowed. The air filled with tiny white orbs.

  A bundle of white tendrils connected the skeletons to the woman with the red eyes. Thousands of the little glowing orbs, twisted together into strands, made up each tendril. Down the street in one direction, more orbs swirled toward Ryse. In the other direction, they slid headlong toward Leramis.

  Litnig took a deep breath, not with his lungs but with something lower in his chest, and the orbs rushed toward him. They moved away from Ryse, away from Leramis, away from the woman with the red eyes. They were his to command, if he had something to ask of them.

  He did.

  The white sword was still moving toward his mother’s neck.

  He wanted to stop everything, to call a halt to time itself and get a chance to think. The orbs couldn’t do that, they whispered to him, but they could flatten something—the skeletons, the buildings around him, the woman with the red eyes—the entire city, if he wanted.

  Just the woman. Flatten the woman, he told them, and he breathed out with the thing beneath his lungs, and they tried.

  Thousands of them flowed toward the woman with the red eyes. They wrapped her in a cocoon of light, and then they pulsed and contracted.

  It was breathtaking. Enabling. It made him feel invincible.

  I’ll crush her, he thought. I’ll crush her and it’ll all be over. We’ll rebuild the house. We’ll all be fine. The world will be safe again.

  The souls covered his mother too.

  His heart plunged. No! he shouted with his mind, but the souls wouldn’t listen to him any longer.

  The tendrils extending from the red-eyed woman retracted into the cocoon. Fissures of darkness raced over its sides like the veins of a blackened tumor. The skeletons began to fall bone by bone toward the ground.

  The cocoon exploded.

  Orbs flew in every direction so violently that Litnig tried to duck behind his arms to avoid them. They passed through him without effect, but when he looked up, the red-eyed woman was free.

  Her sword reached his mother’s skin. Bile rose into his mouth.

  The woman with the red eyes looked right at him, and her sword trailed a weeping line of scarlet from one side of his mother’s throat to the other.

  Time sped up. The orbs faded from Litnig’s vision. The red-eyed woman’s outline blurred and raced toward him in a shadowy streak of black and white and red. Cold lips touched his cheek.

  And then she was gone.

  Litnig watched his mother’s hands go to her neck, as if she could stop the flow of blood there, and then his head fell forward and he was puking his guts out in the street and trying to run. His legs fell out from under him. He crashed to the ground. His head bounced on stones wet with rain and vomit.

  His mother fell too.

  He heard panicked shouting. Lights flared to life in the homes of his neighbors. He lifted his head and crawled toward his mother through an ocean of bones.

  Cole reached her first. He was waving frantically at someone and screaming at the top of his lungs. Footsteps pounded down the street.

  They were too slow.

  Litnig’s stomach finished emptying itself. Unconsciousness dragged at his eyelids. The flow of blood from his mother’s throat grew slow and lazy. Her skin turned as pale as the sun.

  Her eyes dimmed and met his, and he knew that at the end, at the very end, she still loved him.

  Her face went stiff and lifeless. His eyelids closed.

  And then he fell into the dream.

  FORTY-SIX

  The disc lurched, as if it was no longer solidly attached to whatever held it aloft in the darkness. The black clouds swirled in terrible stacks. Litnig’s heart pounded wildly. Thoughts tore through his head like locusts through a ripened field.

  I soulwove. My mother is dead. It wasn’t enough. My mother is dead. I need to wake up. I couldn’t save her. MY MOTHER IS DEAD!

  The hurricane of that last thought stirred up the darkness around the disc.

  Something moved too quick to see, like the red-eyed woman had, and then in front of Litnig stood a leering black-gargoyle carving of himself.

  His heart clenched. The human dark walker.

  The Aleani dark walker was free too—it sat on the edge of the disc with its legs dangling into the abyss, and it grinned at Litnig over its shoulder. The black statue of the Sh’ma remained chained to its pillar by small glowing links. The duller, simpler chains that had once bound all three walkers lay broken across the surface of the lurching disc.

  The dark walker in front of Litnig spat a glob of thick black ooze onto the disc, planted icy fingers on Litnig’s chest, and pushed.

  Litnig’s knees buckled. He fell backward.

  As his head hit the disc, a hand grasped his shoulder. In the dream, something light and shining rushed past him.

  He had the sensation of turning a somersault and passing through the disc, and he woke up and took a heavy lungful of air.

  Cold liquid ran down his face. Something warm and sticky dripped from his chin. Somewhere, someone was crying and screaming, and in front of him, harsh white light shone on the rain-beaten face of Quay Eldani.

  The prince had one hand cocked back open-palmed, as if to strike him. The other was wrapped tight in the fabric of Litnig’s shirt, holding him above the cobblestones.

  Litnig’s cheek stung.

  “Can you stand?” the prince asked, but he hauled Litnig to his feet before he could answer.

  Behind Quay, a too-white hand lay motionless on the pavement. The world started to spin again.

  Litnig found himself turned roughly around.

  “Don’t look. Just walk. First the left foot, then the right.”

  Litnig felt drunk. His teeth buzzed.

  “Wha, whe—?”

  “Don’t talk. Don’t think. Just walk. Faster now.”

  The prince’s hand was still on Litnig’s shoulder, pressing him forward. Houses moved past them. Yellow bones crunched and rolled under Litnig’s feet.

  My mother—

  He heard a sob in front of him and saw two shapes dragging a third with its face in its hands. A shorter shadow strode forward ahead of them. Litnig heard footsteps behind him, where the light was coming from. Quay’s hand pushed harder.

  “Faster. Can you run? You need to run. Now.”

  Shouting erupted in the street behind them. The shrill calls of whistles pierced the night. Quay’s touch grew lighter on Litnig’s shoulder, and then they were running—racing full speed into darker streets ahead of them, upcity, across the Eldwater Bridge and the muddy flood roaring against its bottom, through Temple Hill and into Thieves’ Rise.

  They ran and they ran and they ran, and then they pounded breathless through a broken home and tore down a stairway that led to a trapdoor and the wet world beyond. Litnig gave up thinking about anything but his feet and his legs and his boots and the mud and the rain. Quay was a constant presence at his back, urging him to move faster, faster, faster, through grass and wind and a gray sky that grew lighter as they pressed on, and on, and on.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice whimpered, My mother is dead...

  Again.
r />   And again.

  And again.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Litnig’s heart hurt. Everything around him was wet—a soggy, miserable shadow world through which he walked while he prayed for numbness. His thoughts had calmed, but the pain got worse with every step he took. There were too many mysteries to solve, and he didn’t have the strength to face them.

  Quay led Litnig and the others up a steep slope at the edge of an ocean of grass. Litnig’s knees got muddy and bruised with the climbing. He didn’t care. He didn’t even feel like crying anymore. He just felt empty.

  I couldn’t save her.

  The others started digging out the sopping sheet of canvas that was serving as their excuse for a tent. Dil stumbled into the dusk to try to catch something for dinner. Litnig stepped into a puddle, and a rush of cold water replaced the boot-warm liquid around his feet.

  That woman kissed me.

  The cold and wet didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered anymore. He lay down and closed his eyes. The others let him. They had their own things to worry about.

  It’s my fault.

  He didn’t let himself sleep. He was terrified of the dream.

  So the guilt washed around in his head, like the souls that had circled him for one brief, shining moment in which he’d thought he could save everyone who mattered.

  ***

  Quay chewed on a wad of sweet waygrass and failed to solve a puzzle.

  The muddy body of the Broadwater River fanned out ahead of him and lost itself in a marsh under flat morning light. Rain fell onto his shoulders and squeezed down the back of his neck. His breath formed cold, ragged clouds.

  He had no idea what he should do next.

  He’d dragged the others into the most persistent rains he’d ever seen, tramped them east for ten days through the grasslands bordering the Breadplain, and turned them northeast along the densely forested edges of the Eastgate Hills. He’d found the Broadwater as it left Foltir. He’d tracked the river to its end in the vast, wet wastes of the Estmarsh.

  They were getting closer to the White Forest every day, but as Quay steered his party cross-country, its members were melting in the rain. The party had gone hungry for several nights and had spent several days drinking rainwater. They were moving slower and slower as the bite of the hunger and the damp got worse.