Soulwoven

by Jeff Seymour

  The guards continued to advance.

  “Where are Ramith and Miuri?” Tsu’min asked again.

  Lomin smiled.

  Tsu’min’s skin crawled. Ever since Sherduan had laid waste to the Sh’ma on the Gray Reach, Lomin’s smile had been a thing of horror. The Ith’a’s lips curled up and bared his teeth in a way that wasn’t friendly, wasn’t amused, was none of the things a smile was supposed to be.

  “I sent them to protect the heart dragons.”

  A cold weight sank into Tsu’min’s chest.

  The heart dragons were on the bottom of the Soulth’nth.

  When Lomin had taken power, he’d murdered Tsu’min’s father’s supporters and thrown their bodies into the river. Their blood had stained the riverwalks. Their corpses had clogged the waters for weeks. Lomin had called it “protecting the river.”

  Lomin stood and pointed Aythguar at Tsu’min. “I told you long ago,” he said, “that your outcasts would bring destruction to us all.” The Sh’ma Ith’a cocked his head and addressed Tsu’min as he might have a child. “You brought a Duennin to my doorstep. What did you think would happen?”

  He lowered his sword. His guardsmen surged forward. The outlanders shouted and struggled and squirmed as they were grabbed and beaten and bound.

  Tsu’min didn’t fight back. At the heart of the tenfold palace, surrounded by Lomin’s lackeys with no one to aid him but a gaggle of children, he would not have survived a battle. Instead, as his wrists and ankles were chained, he opened himself to the River of Souls, pulled it quickly to his body, and pushed it away. The rebound created a vibration in it that would stretch for miles.

  Some of his friends wouldn’t be far away.

  Not too far to come. Not too far to help.

  Or so he hoped.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Blood dripped into the water in front of Litnig’s swollen face. Each drop looked different—a dark cloud that swirled for a moment against a bright backdrop and dissipated, pulled away to the left.

  Litnig heard crickets. His head pounded. His neck was sore.

  I was unconscious.

  He remembered rope being wrapped around his wrists. Someone had thrown him to the floor. The butt of a spear had spun toward his forehead.

  And then the world had gone black.

  His nose was killing him. His mouth was dry. The water in front of him looked cool and inviting, but when he tried to reach for it, his arms didn’t budge. They’d been twisted behind his back and anchored to a heavy weight. His legs were bound as well. The ropes had been exchanged for chains.

  “Shit,” he mumbled. The blood in the water was his. It was dripping from his nose and trickling into the river Lumos from the crystal boardwalk he was lying on. The light behind it shone from within some waving stands of plant life on the bottom of the river.

  “Es’na,” grunted a voice above him. Something thwacked into his rib cage.

  Litnig couldn’t see the others. His head felt foggy. Tsu’min had been talking to the Sh’ma on the throne. The guards had rushed forward—

  He heard a splash. At the edge of his vision, something white sank into the river.

  His blood went cold.

  Ryse.

  His aching brain lurched into motion. He remembered what had happened in the throne room.

  Litnig tried to wrench his wrists free of their chains, but with his arms pinned behind his back, he barely had the strength to pull the metal links taut.

  Cole, he thought. Maybe Cole can get free, maybe he can—but even if his brother did slip out of his chains, what would he do? The Sh’ma had already shown themselves more than capable of overwhelming him and his friends.

  Maybe I can find the River again. Maybe the weaving will work better than last time.

  Litnig shut his eyes, held his breath, and willed himself to see the stream of glowing orbs.

  Nothing happened.

  He didn’t have a clue how to find the River.

  He fought for calm and tried not to think that any second there might be another splash, that Ryse might already be sucking in water down below, that Cole could be next, that he could be next—

  “Tsu’min! Na’oth’na e!” someone shouted.

  A flash lit the night. A thunderclap broke the world’s sticky stillness into tiny pieces. A burst of wind raced over Litnig’s back, and then he heard shouting and the pounding of feet. There was a heavy crack, and a network of snow-white fractures appeared in the crystal beneath him. The boardwalk tilted in the direction of the river. The tinkling of breaking glass filled the air.

  The boardwalk canted further, and Litnig slid toward the water. He tried to dig his feet, his face, his chains—anything—into the crystal, but there was nothing to catch himself on. He couldn’t stop.

  He hit the river shoulders first.

  His head bobbed toward the surface, and he had the giddy thought that he was going to float.

  The thought didn’t last long.

  He heard a splash. A rock with something wrapped around it plunged by him on its way to the bottom of the Lumos. His chains went taut.

  He strained and pulled at the iron links until his muscles felt like they would tear themselves from his bones.

  But all he could do was drift down.

  And down.

  And down.

  The river wasn’t particularly deep. Litnig landed on a sandy flat maybe fifteen feet from its surface. Waving strands of a midnight-green, seaweedlike plant surrounded him. In the middle of them, a crystal slab lay flush with the river bottom. It pulsed with gentle white light.

  Litnig could guess what would lie in its center.

  The heart dragons. The last two heart dragons.

  Eyesss… whispered a voice in his head.

  A white robe curled and fluttered in Litnig’s peripheral vision. Ahead of him, a shadow was sinking toward the sand.

  Litnig’s heart pounded. His head throbbed. His chest began to shout for air.

  Clossse eyesss… the voice whispered, more insistently.

  Litnig had the unnerving feeling it was coming from the plants.

  But he did as it said. There was nothing else to try.

  He fell immediately into the dream.

  It felt good to be back again. The cold gray ambience was bracing and welcoming, like starlight on a frozen winter night. The carved disc and its three pillars looked comfortably familiar. They weren’t even tilting.

  Litnig spotted the Sh’ma light walker sitting cross-legged at the heart of the disc. Its ivory hands gripped its shoulders across its chest. Its head was craned back. Its eyes were closed. A peaceful smile sat upon its face.

  When Litnig approached it, it opened its eyes and gestured open palmed toward the edge of the disc.

  The human and Aleani dark walkers were waiting there, leaning against the pillars that had once chained them. The darkness swirled in thick clouds behind them.

  They were smiling too.

  The human dark walker straightened and strode toward Litnig.

  There was no threat in its body language. A malevolent fug surrounded it, but its hatefulness didn’t seem directed at anything in particular. It came closer. Its aura rolled over the disc like a cloud of putrid smoke.

  Anger seeped into Litnig’s bones.

  He thought about fate. He thought about the world. He thought about how he’d been beaten by his father, mocked by those who were smaller and smarter than him, belittled by the Temple, ignored by the girl he loved. He thought about how he’d been dragged through challenges that would’ve killed a lesser man, and how no one had once praised him for it. He thought about how he’d failed those closest to him, and he thought about how he was going to die, alone in the abyss, with nothing—no god, no brother, no friend, no love—to save him.

  The dark walker drew even with him. Its stone chest heaved. Its skin crackled and flaked. It laid a hand on Litnig’s shoulder, and Litnig decided that never again would he allow the world to dictate
the terms of his life. He would fight it. He would break it.

  He would make the world listen to him.

  The dark walker whipped his legs out, grabbed him by the face, and rammed the back of his head into the disc.

  Litnig woke with vengeance in his heart and the River in his eyes.

  The swirling stream of souls rushed along the bottom of the Lumos. It came from all directions, circling the heart dragons like the froth in a draining barrel of beer. Its souls flowed into the crystal slab in the river’s floor, pooled, and then erupted toward the surface in a geyser of light.

  There was soulweaving happening above. Lots of it.

  When Litnig breathed in with the thing beneath his lungs, the River was reluctant to come to him.

  He ground his teeth. He needed air. He needed to be free.

  He would make the River come.

  Savagely, ferociously, he sucked at it.

  And the harder he sucked, the more souls came to him. He siphoned ten, a hundred, a thousand and more from the torrent that was racing upward. He wrapped them around the chains on his wrists and his ankles. He told them to break the iron, and they did, pulsing with his soul until the links had crumbled to dust in the water.

  But he wasn’t through.

  Strength, he told the souls, give me strength. He pumped the little orbs in and out of his body. He coiled them around his arms, his legs, his chest. He pushed them inside of himself and layered them over every muscle he could think of. His whole being felt energized.

  He swam easily through the current of the Lumos to Ryse. She was chained to a big black rock. Her eyes were closed. Her face was pale. Her robe and her hair floated in a ghostly halo around her.

  Litnig wrapped his arms around Ryse’s warm body, set his feet against the black rock, and pushed. The chains binding her to the rock straightened, then warped, then broke.

  It took him only two kicks to break the surface.

  The night air swept over his face, and he took a long, deep breath. Ryse was heavy, but not so heavy that he couldn’t lift her out of the water if he kicked hard enough. He swam her over to the sloping crystal boardwalk.

  She wasn’t breathing.

  Litnig struck down as hard as he could with his legs, and he hurled Ryse up onto the crystal.

  Make her breathe, he told the souls around him, and he pushed them out and they flooded into Ryse’s chest and pulsed once, twice, and then she was coughing up water and gasping in air.

  Litnig turned and dove back to the bottom of the river.

  A black robe fluttered in the current, over near the stand of tall green plants.

  Leramis.

  He tookherfromyou stoleherfromyou showedyouup she doesn’t want you it’s hisfault hisfault hisfault it’s all his fault—

  Litnig linked his arms around Leramis’s waist. The necromancer’s shorn head bobbed lifelessly in the water, bleeding from a gash that began on his forehead and stretched along half his skull.

  If he wasn’t dead already, he was close.

  Litnig tightened his grip and bunched his legs to push for the surface.

  The water shivered. The River shifted toward the crystal slab.

  And then Litnig and Leramis were no longer alone.

  Two people in black clothes floated gently toward the river bottom. Their faces, lit from below by the glow of the heart dragons, looked timeless, frozen at an age not much beyond Litnig’s. One of them was male. Long onyx hair streamed from his head in the current of the river. His eyes were sallow and dark. Litnig didn’t think he’d ever seen him before.

  The other person in black was the red-eyed woman.

  Litnig let go of Leramis. He didn’t have a weapon, but he had his hands and his teeth, and he had the River.

  Enoughenough it will be enough to getthem crushthem hurtthem killthem—

  Litnig kicked off the bottom. With the souls in his blood, he felt like he was swimming through air. The woman laid a hand on the arm of the man who was with her and nodded.

  Litnig got little further.

  The man’s shadowy eyes filled with the same wine-red glow the woman’s had shone with in Eldan City. The man himself swam toward Litnig. The water swirled behind him in a delicate confusion of whorls and bubbles and eddies.

  Litnig jerked to the right to avoid the man’s first blow.

  The next strike was harder to dodge. The third grazed Litnig’s temple. The man was blindingly fast, even underwater. Thousands of souls whirled in a cloud around his body. His shin smashed into Litnig’s ribs. His knee punched into Litnig’s stomach. His fist set Litnig’s nose gushing blood again.

  Litnig tried to hit him back, but he was too slow.

  The man grabbed Litnig’s arms and threw him to the bottom of the river hard enough to jar his teeth. Litnig tried to get up, but the man landed on top of him and crushed him into the sand.

  The woman floated to the river bottom. The glow of the heart dragons set her silhouette glimmering with white light. Her hair trailed behind her like a thick, living mass of pearl.

  Litnig’s blood pounded through his temples. His ribs ached. His chest felt hollow.

  Behind the woman, a coil of souls spun from the River and coated Leramis’s chains. The souls pulsed. The chains broke apart. The necromancer floated upward and downstream.

  The woman with the red eyes swam closer and pressed two fingers against her lips, then against Litnig’s. Litnig tried to bite her, but the man just wrenched his face harder into the sand.

  The woman pointed upriver and smiled.

  Water began to force its way into Litnig’s nostrils.

  The man on top of him ripped him from the sand, punched him in the gut, and slung him toward the surface of the Lumos. The River of Souls faded. The man and the woman swam toward the heart dragons.

  Litnig broke the surface. His arms and legs thrashed wildly. He sucked down shallow gasps of air.

  You’re all right, he told himself. You’re all right.

  His body felt like it had been run through a meat grinder.

  The current dragged him downriver. He clawed his way back to the sloping crystal boardwalk and grabbed a jagged piece of it.

  On the other side of the Lumos, a large crystal building was on fire. Its face had been broken inward, like it had been struck with an impossibly large sledgehammer. Sh’ma were running toward it in droves.

  Litnig gathered his strength and pulled himself halfway out of the water. He recognized Tsu’min standing about thirty yards upriver. The flame-haired Sh’ma was facing four of the red-coated guards from the palace. His hands swam with turquoise fire.

  Three other Sh’ma stood closer to Litnig. They wore shoulder wraps of green, white, and gray, and they had oversize brown cloaks thrown over their heads. They faced six guards in red coats.

  No one moved. The red coats and the brown cloaks stood and stared at each other, as if each side was afraid to make the first strike.

  Litnig’s friends and his brother lay scattered around their feet, bound but safe.

  Except for Ryse.

  Ryse was just in front of Litnig, still chained and coughing up water, inching painfully slowly toward Leramis. The necromancer’s black robe had caught on a broken piece of the boardwalk. His body bobbed mindlessly in the Lumos’s current. His head floated just above the water. Blood streamed from the wound on his scalp.

  Litnig took short breaths and clung to his little chunk of crystal.

  Ryse’s robe was so wet it had turned almost gray. Her hair was plastered to her face. She wrenched herself toward Leramis with the same desperate energy Litnig had seen on the Rokwet, leaving a damp trail behind her.

  When she drew close to the necromancer, she pressed her forehead to his. Her eyes went white. She whispered something—a prayer, maybe.

  Leramis remained unmoving.

  Ryse screamed something that was not a prayer.

  Litnig felt a pang of guilt.

  I could’ve saved him—

>   Ryse’s chains disintegrated. She grabbed Leramis by the robe and hauled him from the Lumos. She pressed her hands against his chest.

  And then she bent down and placed her lips on his.

  She repeated the motions a second time, and a third, and a fourth. The necromancer vomited up a stream of water and began to breathe.

  “Ryse,” Litnig whispered hoarsely. “Ryse, the heart dragons—”

  But either she didn’t hear him or she didn’t process his words. She crouched over Leramis, watching the Sh’ma in their standoff and the fire across the Lumos like a cornered animal.

  Litnig took as deep a breath as his lungs would let him.

  “Tsu’min,” he croaked. “The heart dragons—”

  Tsu’min moved.

  Bolts of light appeared in the air before him and sailed through the chests of two of the red-coated guards he was facing. The other two guards neutralized the weavings, but Tsu’min’s hands blew past their weapons and into their bodies before they could move.

  They dropped motionless at his feet. Litnig saw the brown-cloaked Sh’ma dispatch their foes as easily. Three throats were cut in a heartbeat. One guard was kicked through a crystal wall.

  Why… The thought was hazy in his mind. He could feel his consciousness slipping. Why not…earlier…

  The three cloaked Sh’ma and Tsu’min dove into the river as one.

  Ryse jerked upright. Her eyes darted to the Lumos.

  “No,” Litnig heard her say.

  A fountain of water shot from the heart of the river.

  A gust of hot, heavy mist followed it. The wind roared thick and triumphant in Litnig’s ears. Some final catch gave in his chest.

  The last thing he saw as he succumbed to the darkness was Tsu’min Nar’oth, swimming toward him.

  A bloody cut split the Sh’ma’s chin.

  And his eyes had narrowed to slits.

  FIFTY-THREE

  The night smelled of lilac and cinnamon. Stars speckled the blackened sky. Warm breezes stirred the air. The moon hung heavy in the south.