Soulwoven

by Jeff Seymour

  Quay turned from the Estmarsh and walked downhill toward the fire, rocks, and canvas lean-to that formed his camp. There’d only been time to grab two packs during the flight from Eldan City, and the lack of supplies hadn’t stopped causing problems since. Sleep, crammed into a wet ball of people under dripping canvas, had been difficult at best. Spare clothing was sparse. They’d lost one of Cole’s daggers and most of Dil’s arrows.

  For all that, it was the morale problems he felt most incapable of solving.

  The rain intensified as Quay slid down the muddy slope. His companions were gathered like ghosts around a breakfast fire more smoke than flame. The Jin brothers seemed utterly despairing. Litnig’s eyes were dull and distant. Cole’s remained bright but desperate.

  Quay frowned.

  He pitied the brothers. He’d lost his mother too. He remembered the wrenching loneliness, the guilt of things undone and words unsaid, the longing for just a day, an hour, a moment more of her presence—enough time to say that yes, he really loved her, and yes, he would always remember her, and no, he’d never meant the harshest things he’d said.

  He’d been unable to find words of comfort for Cole and Litnig nevertheless.

  That fact bothered him.

  Always be kind… said his mother’s voice in his memories.

  Focus, said his own.

  The red-eyed woman who’d killed Lena Jin had been one of the Duennin breaking the heart dragons, and the manner of her strike worried Quay. Lena’s death had deprived him of both Cole and Litnig at once. He was being forced to baby them along at a snail’s pace. The Duennin woman had chosen not to kill him and his companions, but to hobble them.

  She broke their hearts.

  And Quay couldn’t figure out why.

  He ran a hand through his rain-soaked hair.

  Rest, he thought. We need rest. We need food. We need sleep. He’d looked at his map so often it was seared into his brain.

  But there was nowhere they could go for supplies and nobody they could trust to take them in and feed them and warm them up.

  During his night alone in Eldan City, he’d crept through the rain to the bedroom of his cousin Misha. He’d woken her and learned that the full array of his father’s enemies was looking for him—Houses Elpioni and Pendilon, the Temple, even House Redpath and House Greydawn. Arayi Elpioni was agitating to be named prince in his place if he couldn’t be found.

  Misha thought the people looking for Quay wanted to make sure he never was found. She’d also seen no signs and heard no talk of necromancers being involved in Eldanian politics.

  Another mistake.

  After his conversation with Misha, Quay had returned to the others and found the Jin house in ruins, Lena dead, Litnig and Cole incoherent, and the city watch on its way.

  He rubbed his freezing hands against his trousers and dropped into a crouch near the breakfast fire. The serendipity of his timing was one of a growing number of phenomena that he didn’t understand, and his ignorance made him nervous.

  The necromancers they’d fought had been fully capable of destroying the heart dragons in Eldan and Aleana simultaneously, but they’d chosen not to. They’d been fully capable of killing members of the party in Du Fenlan, then again in Lurathen, and again in Eldan City. And they’d chosen not to.

  There was some piece of the puzzle he was missing.

  Dil pulled a rabbit from a skewer, and Quay settled in next to Leramis for his share of their meager breakfast. The necromancer hadn’t shorn his head in days. Little drops of water clung to the thin crop of black hair that poked up around his skull.

  Leramis had promised Quay that the White Forest could be reached through the Estmarsh.

  The marsh was dangerous, but the other routes to the White Forest were worse. Trying to sneak past Bywater Castle or the Middlefort would expose the party to detection by the Seven and the Temple. Trying to go all the way around the Estmarsh would pin them between it and the Mudplain, where there would be little food, little water, and paths no better than those in the marsh.

  Just keep moving, Quay thought, but the words felt sour. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being herded.

  He took a bite of the rabbit. It was overcooked on the outside and undercooked on the inside, lean and gamey and an unpleasant combination of crunchy and slimy at the same time. The prince swallowed as quickly as he could and watched Litnig and Cole eat listlessly in the rain.

  He sympathized with them.

  But all he could think of to help was to try his best to keep them alive.

  By that afternoon, Quay was watching the others move cautiously through the fog of the Estmarsh with Dil in the lead. The rain had slackened into a thin, omnipresent mist. The Broadwater had frayed into dozens of smaller channels. Dil was doing a good job finding paths, but she seemed uncomfortable picking her way through the Estmarsh’s shifting bogs and hidden mudsinks.

  Distracted, Quay thought.

  He didn’t blame her. She’d lost a home already, and now it looked to him like she was losing Cole as well. Quay’s friend was a soggy stump of his old self, humping through the muck in misery.

  Always be kind… he thought.

  Still, no words came to him.

  He and the others moved through the marsh in near-silence, getting muddier and muddier while their stocks of food dwindled. The lack of sunlight and few differences between one lump of wet, spiky grass and another made navigation difficult. Quay lost his sense of direction numerous times, only to find it again when the clouds thinned enough to present the white circle of the sun’s light.

  He imagined Dil was doing only slightly better.

  “One cannot regain a lost advantage without accepting risk,” he told himself. The marsh is a good risk.

  The axiom was a quote from House Eldani’s Manual of War. The supposition that followed it was Quay’s own, and it became a mantra for him. The marsh stretched for miles in all directions. It had no known inhabitants. No one Quay was aware of had successfully mapped it. Eastern rumormongers whispered of vicious beasts in its waters and dark happenings that occurred within it at night.

  For their first three days, the party encountered neither dark happenings nor vicious beasts, and Quay held tightly to his mantra and his decision to keep moving, whether he was being herded or not.

  On the afternoon of the fourth day in the fog, Dil held up a hand to stop them.

  They stood on a piece of spongy yellow bog that stretched across a chunk of open water and vanished into the mist. Quay grimaced and worked his way around the others until he was next to Dil. She was squatting low and close to the muck, thrusting her face into the air in front of her.

  Her eyes gleamed wide and bright.

  “What is it?” Quay asked.

  “I don’t know.” Dil reached for her bow. Her nose twitched. “It’s too quiet.”

  Quay let his hands drift to his swords. She was right. Even in the stillness of the marsh, there were always sounds—the bogs shifting, water dripping from the boughs of skeletal black trees, fish and eels sliding through the water, the hum of insects.

  But at that moment, the silence was entirely unbroken.

  “Be ready,” Quay whispered. He slipped his swords from their sheaths as quietly as possible. His message passed from person to person behind him.

  For a moment, the marsh stayed quiet.

  Leramis began to say something.

  The water to Quay’s left exploded.

  Something brown catapulted at him with a high-pitched shriek. He twisted away, then struck from low to high with one hand and high to low with the other. His swords bit through flesh and bone. The shriek stopped.

  Something slammed into his stomach anyway. He lost his footing and fell. His swords dropped from his hands.

  As the bog shifted underneath him, Quay found himself face-to-face with the tapered, auburn-scaled head of a creature the size of a large dog.

  Two brown eyes glared at him from the cent
er of its lizardlike snout. A dark tongue lolled between several rows of gleaming, knife-shaped teeth in its mouth. The creature’s head linked into a thick mud-brown neck and body. A row of red spots ran down its side. A fin stretched the length of its spine. It had two clawed forelegs and a single back leg that ended in what looked like a cross between a flipper and a foot.

  Cole cursed loudly.

  Dark blood pumped rapidly from two gashes in the creature’s neck. Its legs twitched.

  Quay watched it and breathed. It didn’t stop spasming until Cole planted his dagger in the base of its skull.

  The bog bounced softly with the energy of the creature’s death throes. The water around it rippled. The fog seethed and swirled. The marsh grew quiet and calm.

  The rumormongers were right, Quay thought.

  Behind that thought came another, more insidious: Is that why you were led here? Did the necromancers want you in this marsh all along, to die at the hands of these beasts, or to lose someone, or to lose your way, or to lose the confidence of your followers?

  Dil took a shuddering breath.

  Quay’s thoughts evaporated.

  “Three-eyed, nine-tailed, shivering mudfuckers,” Cole whispered.

  A pack of eleven dark fins was moving swiftly through the water to their left.

  “More behind,” grunted Len.

  Quay glanced over his shoulder and saw seven fins heading toward them from the other side as well.

  “I see some under the water too.” Dil was trying to train her bow on them as they approached.

  Quay took a breath and shut his eyes. There were questions in their statements: What do we do? What’s the plan? How do we face this?

  What are your orders, my prince?

  In the depths of Quay’s past, he stood next to a practice field in the palace, watching his brother organize seven boys to face twelve.

  And he spoke.

  “Leramis, on the left flank. Ryse, Dil, on the right. Stay close to each other. Len, Cole, and I will deal with any that reach us.”

  He could feel Litnig’s eyes on him as the others loosed or took their stances. The what about me? in the older Jin brother’s gaze hung like a weight on Quay’s shoulders.

  But the prince had no answers for him. Litnig had no weapons. His hands, big and strong as they were, were no match for claws and teeth.

  The marsh beasts scattered and dove as Leramis, Ryse, and Dil began their onslaught. The animals were surprisingly agile in the water, and more organized than Quay had expected them to be. Only three died to arrows and fire before the others abandoned the surface. Two tried breaching from the water on opposite sides of Len, but a single ax blow from the Aleani took care of each.

  The beasts stopped attacking after that, but Quay could see them circling in the water, just deep enough that Dil’s arrows couldn’t touch them.

  He made eye contact with Ryse.

  “Can you get them down there?”

  “Not without disturbing the water so much that we might break through the bog.”

  Quay could already see the spongy stuff starting to split apart—it had never been solid footing in the first place, and it wasn’t likely to hold together long with them fighting on top of it.

  If they broke through, they were as good as dead.

  “Leramis?” he asked.

  The necromancer shook his head.

  Quay clenched his teeth and watched the beasts circling. They were communicating with each other in a language of clicks and squeaks, and he had the feeling that they were planning something, almost like people.

  The voice in his head whispered again that there were forces at work beyond his grasp, and that he was nothing more than a pawn, blindly leading those who trusted him to their deaths.

  A hard, round shape brushed against the bog underneath his feet. It returned a second time and bumped him harder.

  “No—” he breathed, and something slammed into his footing with enough force to stagger him. He saw Cole almost lose his balance as well.

  Wide, disbelieving fear shone in his friend’s eyes.

  I’m not, Quay had said to Cole. He’d given his word that they’d be fine.

  Now Cole’s mother was dead.

  Quay looked for something, anything, to save them, but there was nothing. No solid land for at least five hundred feet behind them, nothing visible but the bog and the water in front. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and nothing to grab on to.

  He turned to Leramis and Ryse.

  “Take them out.”

  Ryse frowned. “I don’t think we’ll be quick enough to get all—” A beast slammed into Litnig’s feet, and the elder Jin brother let loose a terrifying roar. He stomped viciously at the bog.

  Cole whirled on Ryse and shouted, “Just fucking do it!”

  She took a deep breath and closed her eyes.

  So did Leramis.

  The water began to froth and roil. The marsh beasts shrieked and slammed against the bog again. The scent of skunk filled the air.

  The bog quaked, buckled, and began to break apart.

  Quay scrambled with the others to keep on top of it. Clouds of black blood billowed in the water around him.

  And then he heard words that put a chill in his heart.

  “Our’ma! E’la e mash’shta!”

  He whipped around to face the voice. It had come from the mist across the water, maybe a hundred feet away from them. He didn’t recognize the language it spoke. It wasn’t Old Mennaian. It wasn’t Aleani.

  “Sh’ma,” whispered Leramis.

  “Mash’shta!” the voice barked again. It sounded high and strained.

  The bog continued to break apart beneath Quay’s feet. Brown water ran over his toes.

  “We bring a warning from Eldan!” Quay shouted. “Please, help us, and we can—”

  “Mash’shta! Olua our’ma e elua’shta!” The Sh’ma’s voice sounded closer.

  “The beasts are dead,” said Ryse.

  But the bog was breaking up.

  Their only chance for safety lay wherever the Sh’ma was standing. Even without the beasts to flay them, they could lose their provisions, their way, or their lives floundering in the water.

  “Quay…” whispered Cole.

  The prince glanced back. One of Litnig’s feet had plunged through the cover of the bog. Water was pooling around the other.

  “Esh’na’shta! ’Oa ’tan kua aysh’shou!”

  Quay’s heart pounded. He laid his swords on the bog in front of him and spread his hands. Snippets of old reports ran through his head.

  Three lost on the border today… Ten soldiers and two soulweavers unaccounted for, signs of a struggle… Raid on Bywater Castle repulsed. No casualties, but a portion of the wall destroyed…

  “Listen,” he said. He tried to keep his voice calm and reassuring. “We mean no harm. We want to help you.” He took a step toward the voice.

  “Mash’shta!” it cried again.

  The bog sank further.

  Quay kept his eyes on the mist and walked on.

  “Mash’shta!”

  Step.

  “Mash’shta!”

  Step.

  “MASH’SHTA!”

  The mist in front of Quay melted into a curtain of light and heat. The prince saw what looked like a tall, thin, blue-haired young man standing on a grass-covered bank. The youth’s ears tapered to a point almost halfway along its skull.

  Other than that and its hair color, it could’ve been any sixteen-year-old Eldanian boy.

  Behind it stretched a land of dark green conifers.

  The light and heat reached Quay. He shut his eyes and raised a forearm to shield himself. The hair singed from his arm and face. Terrific pain scoured his skin, and he knew he was burning, knew he’d failed his land, his people, his ancestors, his friends, himself—

  The heat stopped.

  There was a snap in the air. Ryse shouted. A bow twanged.

  When Quay lowered
his scalded forearm and opened his eyes, he saw the Sh’ma on its back on the muddy bank. The mists began to close back in. His arm stung enough to take his breath away.

  One choice. Nowhere else to go.

  Herded.

  “Forward,” he gasped, cradling his arm. “To the bank!”

  He plunged into the cold, silky water, trusting the others would follow, and he prayed that his burnt arm would get him the thirty yards to shore.

  It wasn’t a graceful swim. He spent most of it on his side, paddling with his good arm and kicking and hoping that no more of the marsh beasts would show up.

  His foot hit the bottom.

  Quay took two more strokes and settled his boots into the muck. He had to grab the bank with his good arm and pull and wriggle and dig in with his knees to drag himself out of the water. A look behind him revealed the others swimming slowly through the rapidly regenerating mist, hampered by their clothes, the packs, and their weapons.

  A look ahead showed him the Sh’ma.

  It lay on its back less than a yard from him, with one of Dil’s black arrows protruding from its chest. Wool trousers of dark gray hid its legs. It wore a bloodstained, V-cut white tunic under a brown vest. A pale-green insignia of a tree with a crown and a star had been embroidered on all of its clothing.

  Its chest moved in and out shallowly.

  Quay struggled to his feet and walked over the wet ground to the Sh’ma’s side.

  Its face was gray. Its eyes were open and unfocused. There were tears on its cheeks.

  “Oleguash’ma,” it sobbed. “’Oan ohne suash’shta.”

  Water splashed to Quay’s left. He heard grunts and whispers and footsteps and the sound of cloth sliding along mud.

  A moment later, he spotted a dripping black robe out of the corner of his eye and asked, “Can you understand it?”

  Leramis’s silence spoke volumes.

  “Ohne,” whispered the Sh’ma. “Ohne oleguash’ma, ohne.”

  “Put him out of his misery already,” grunted Len.

  No choices. Herded.