Soulwoven

by Jeff Seymour

  A single perfect snowflake landed on Dil’s sleeve.

  And then the mountains shook.

  A screech ripped through the icy stillness. The ground heaved from left to right and back. The river sloshed against one side of the valley and returned, then did it again, then devolved into a bubbling tangle of waves and whirlpools. The canoe slid from side to side. Dil pitched forward and rolled into Litnig’s legs.

  The screech faded. The shaking stopped.

  Dil heard a snap, then a crack, then another and another, until the sounds had merged into a thunderous, rolling orchestra. She scrambled upright. At first, she thought the canoe had struck a rock and was breaking apart.

  But it wasn’t the boat that was breaking.

  It was the mountains.

  No, she thought. No, no, Yenor, please, no.

  Huge chunks of the cliffs and glaciers to the north crumbled into the river and threw fountains of water the size of houses into the air. To the south, Dil saw more of the same. The air snapped and popped like corn above a fire. The river grew black and frothy. The canoe jumped back and forth like a toy.

  Dil clung to the side of the boat and tried to lean with the flow. Next to her, Cole kept one hand on the canoe and the other on his brother’s chest.

  He looked terrified.

  The canoe skidded off a rock and careened to the left. Tsu’min screamed something into the wind, and then the boat hit another rock, then another. A boulder dropped into the water beside Dil, and the wave it created poured over the bow and into her lap. Another large rock barely missed them.

  Dil caught a glimpse of a place ahead where the valley widened and the danger seemed less.

  Please, she thought. She slipped a hand over Cole’s thigh and squeezed. Please.

  She heard a tremendous roar to her left.

  The side of a mountain let go and dropped and slid and avalanched into the river in front of the canoe. When the debris hit the water, it launched a cloud of brown-and-white spray several stories into the air. The muddy fountain crashed over Dil with a wet slap. She tried to inhale and got a nose full of water.

  The canoe drove through the falling spray onto the new landmass, rolled, and threw her from its grasp.

  She landed with a grunt on jagged brown stones and darted to her feet. The world continued to fall down. Icy water poured from the sky and pooled around her boots.

  The canoe’s bow was jammed between two black boulders above her.

  “Right it! Right it!” someone screamed.

  Someone else screamed something in return. The water rose over Dil’s feet, then her ankles. Ryse and Quay and Leramis and Tsu’min scrambled toward the bow of the canoe. Litnig lay crumpled in the swelling river. Cole squatted over him and held his head out of the water.

  Dil stood and did nothing. She could hear a dull, constant roar within the crackling of the landslides. She blew a drop of water from her nose and faced upriver.

  She found the source of the roar.

  Less than a mile away, a wall of water was cascading down the valley, crashing over anything and everything in its path. It was sixty feet high, at least. Huge. Unavoidable. As if a whole lake had been dumped into the Lumos’s narrow channel.

  She and the others would never get the canoe righted before the water hit, and even if they did, a flood that big would just swamp the boat again.

  The others looked north, and Dil watched them come to the same conclusions that she had. The canoe was abandoned. Ryse’s lips moved silently. Leramis’s eyes filled with bright white light.

  “No!” Cole shouted.

  His hands grasped Dil’s waist and threw her up the slip the boat had run aground on. She took a few steps and looked back down.

  Cole was standing over Litnig’s body, struggling to drag his brother upward by the arms. The hem of his cloak was floating in the rising water around his calves. She could see the veins bulging in his neck.

  “Go!” he shouted at her. “Dammit, go!”

  She looked at the oncoming wall of water, then at the slip. The jumble of rocks, big as it was, wasn’t big enough. The floodwater would wash over it like it would wash over everything else in the valley. To be safe, she and the others would need to get twenty or thirty feet above it somehow.

  Dil’s brain slid back into motion. There was a ledge on the cliffs to her left, sixty feet or so up from the top of the slip. It was wide enough to hold her and others, if it didn’t collapse.

  But they’d never reach it before the water got to them, even if they ran full speed and climbed as fast as they could. They’d never reach it—

  Without me, she thought, and she opened her eyes to the Second River.

  The stream of yellow orbs moved calmly through the shadows of the valley, as if nothing was happening around it. Dil’s heartbeat slowed. She scanned the souls around her.

  Salmon, mountain parrot, kestrel, silverfish, bottle-fly, smalldove.

  Leapfrog.

  She pulled the leapfrog inside and felt it fill her.

  The rest of the world came into sharp focus. The others were running and shouting around her, trying to haul Litnig or sprinting for the top of the slip.

  Standing became uncomfortable. Dil yanked her boots from her feet and dropped to all fours. She spread her legs and arms out wide.

  “Onto my back!” she shouted. Her heart sped up again. The wide-eyed twitchiness of the frog pushed at the edges of her consciousness.

  Relax, she told herself. You know what’s coming. Master it. Ride it. Be one with it.

  “Get on my back!” she yelled, and the fear built inside her and her little heart beat faster and faster.

  She scuttled forward until she was next to someone, and then she knocked against his thighs and he fell on top of her. His arms wrapped around her torso. She bunched her legs and leaped as she’d been born to leap, boulder to boulder, high to the top of the slip in two bounds, then toward the ledge above. The extra weight was little bother.

  She landed hard on the side of the mountain, just below the ledge. The tiny ridges on the skin of her fingers and toes hooked easily onto the rock.

  “Off,” she croaked.

  Whoever was on her back slid tentatively onto the wall.

  And then Dil was off again, falling and pinwheeling back to the slip.

  She landed lightly on all fours, found someone else, and repeated the process. Then she did it again.

  Not quick enough, she told herself. Not quick enough. The people on her back took ages to scramble onto the wall, and the water was still approaching.

  Too close, too close.

  Dil bounded back down. She saw one tall, skinny person left to carry. She scrambled to him, and he climbed onto her back, and then she turned and leaped for the wall.

  Her fingers found the cold, sharp edges of the rock. The ridges on her skin caught and held. The person on her back crawled off.

  Dil let herself relax. She let the leapfrog go.

  She jammed her hands and feet into tiny crevices and hung from the wet rock like the others.

  And she laughed. The wind whipped her hair out. Her arms and legs felt strong and sure.

  She’d done it. She’d saved them. She felt like crowing, like shouting. That was what a Wilderleng was. That was what a Wilderleng could do. She flushed and beamed up at the others.

  The others who were looking, pale and sick, back down at the slip.

  Dil heard a shout above the roaring of the water and looked down. Two dark shapes were still visible on top of the rocks. One lay crumpled around the feet of the other. The second was standing and shouting her name.

  Cole.

  Litnig.

  “No,” she whispered.

  And then the water thundered over them.

  SIXTY-ONE

  The water was cold.

  Not just cold cold. Fucking cold. Colder than the water underneath the mountains of Aleana had been. Cold enough to take Cole’s breath away. The flood was filled with rock
s and dirt and boulders bigger than he was, and it rolled and pitched him in a dozen directions. It was all he could do to hold on to the dead weight of his brother.

  He tried to kick for the surface, but he couldn’t find it. Rock after rock smashed into him. Every so often, he was thrown free of the deluge for just long enough to suck in a breath, and then he plunged back into it again. His arms got tired. It became hard to think. He lost track of time. All he could do was hold on, roll, breathe, roll, hold—

  Stay calm, he told himself, but his mind was breaking apart. He pitched forward and turned a somersault. He broke free of the water and barely remembered to take a breath. Stay calm—ca—calmm—

  The weight in his arms was too heavy. His hands were numb. He wanted to hold on. The weight was important. It mattered.

  But he was so tired. He needed to let go.

  Something grabbed him beneath the armpit.

  He lost his grip on the weight.

  The hand holding his armpit pulled him upward and outward until he was free of the water. He took a deep breath, then another.

  But he was freezing. His mind buzzed and swam. And he felt empty without the weight in his arms.

  He was dragged onto something hard and wet.

  “Brr,” he mumbled.

  A voice said something comforting. Warm arms wrapped around him.

  Cole shook his head. He could feel water freezing into tiny crystals on the hair on his arms, his head, his face. His lips wouldn’t move properly.

  “Brrth,” he managed the second time.

  The voice said something consoling. A pair of hands began to rub his arms vigorously.

  Cole opened his eyes and found himself sitting on a large slab of dark rock. The world looked bleary and bright. A torrent of gray-and-black water roared on either side of him.

  “Brrothherr!” he snapped, and he tore free of the arms around him and crawled on shivering, wasted hands and knees toward the river. He remembered what the weight in his arms had been. Who the weight in his arms had been.

  The voice of murmurs became a voice of words.

  “No, Cole. Stay. Promise me you’ll stay. I’ll find him. I swear to you, I will find him.”

  Cole’s arms wouldn’t bear his weight. He collapsed and curled into the fetal position.

  He was so cold.

  A girl slid into the water in front of him on her belly. Cole caught a glimpse of her head breaking free of the flood, and then he couldn’t hold his neck up any longer. He lay down on his rock, and he shivered, and he shivered, and he shivered.

  He woke when a dark mass was tossed onto the rock beside him. The body was cold and wet and heavy.

  “Lit,” Cole croaked.

  There were snowflakes in the air. Cole’s hands were stiff and frozen, but he poked at the rubbery mass that was his brother anyway, and then he threw himself over him.

  Litnig didn’t move.

  “Off,” said the comforting voice, and Cole felt himself pushed gently from his brother’s chest.

  He flopped onto his back and looked up. Above him, swimming in the snow and the gray, was the face of a girl with dark hair and shining golden eyes. Yenor’s angel. She was like Yenor’s angel. She would take care of everything.

  Cole closed his eyes, and he let the world spin out of his control and into hers.

  A succession of strange dreams flowed through Cole’s mind. An enormous black dragon bit the head off a laughing Aleani; a spear of smoke slipped between Cole’s teeth and down his throat; a sad golden eye in a white-scaled face filled his vision and blinked.

  And then he awoke.

  He felt warm. He was lying in someone’s lap, and a pair of arms was rocking him gently back and forth.

  Dil was talking.

  “—so sorry, Cole. I didn’t mean to—it was the frog, the damn frog. It’s so hard to keep your mind separate from theirs, to think and not just be.” He felt himself squeezed tight. “I’m so sorry—”

  “Lit,” he mumbled, and he opened his eyes.

  The sky was black and clear and dotted with stars. Cold air nipped at his skin. His breath misted in front of his lips, but the rock beneath him was comfortably warm. To his right, someone’s eyes glowed white.

  Cole tried to sit up fully and wound up falling back against Dil’s chest. His head swam. His body felt sick and feverish. His tongue flopped around in his mouth when he tried to speak, like it was cast in lead.

  “How’s Lit?” he managed after a moment.

  “Alive,” said another voice.

  Cole stopped trying to sit up. He held his hand out. Warm dark fingers grasped it.

  “Quay,” he breathed. “Quay, what happened?”

  “The valley collapsed. There was a flood.”

  Cole nodded.

  “Dil pulled you out, went back for Litnig, and ferried the rest of us to this rock.”

  The arms around Cole hugged tighter. “He wasn’t breathing, Cole, but I got him breathing again. I took too long to find him, but I swear, I wouldn’t let you lose him, I wouldn’t—” Dil’s voice broke.

  Cole found her hand with his and wrapped her fingers up.

  “Love you,” he mumbled into her thigh.

  “What?”

  “I love you, Dil.”

  For a moment, no one said anything.

  Dil squeezed Cole’s hand and his chest. Her torso jerked underneath him. He felt tears on the back of his head. And then she kissed him on the forehead, then the lips, again and again and again, until his whole face felt warm and wet.

  Time passed. Dil stopped crying, but she didn’t let go of Cole’s hand.

  “What’s next?” Cole asked.

  “We wait for the floodwater to ebb. Then we walk out,” Quay said. The prince was sitting up, staring numbly toward the mouth of the valley. His eyes looked red and puffy. “We’ll head northwest, to the coast. Leramis can send a message to the Aleani if we can find a dead bird or kill one. We’ll ask them to pick us up and hope they respond.”

  Leramis, seated on the other side of the rock, looked up when his name was mentioned. But he didn’t speak.

  “What about—”

  “The dragon?” Quay shrugged. He sounded empty somehow, broken. “Tsu’min thinks the dragon will find the densest populations it can and snuff them out. Leramis thinks the Duennin will control it well enough to free their people and bring war to Guedin. I think they’ll do something no one expects.”

  Cole licked his lips. They were talking about the dragon. It didn’t seem possible.

  Except that you’ve seen it, said his mind.

  And for once, he listened.

  “What do we do once we reach Aleana?” he asked.

  Quay stared downriver.

  “We have a long time to figure that out.”

  EPILOGUE

  Soren Goldguard’s eyes snapped open. He sucked in a heavy, gasping breath and coughed it out. The air rasped cold and dry against his throat. His body was curled tightly around itself on wet stone. His hands were pressed over his stomach.

  He saw nothing.

  It was just the darkness of the cave. The darkness of the somehow empty cave.

  I should be dead.

  Eshan had run his bloody orange sword straight through Soren’s guts. The necromancer had died with the dragon in his eyes.

  And yet he was alive.

  The gash in Soren’s stomach was smaller than he remembered but still trickling blood. He could feel his legs again, and his feet—even his toes.

  The cave was black and silent.

  Soren rolled onto his side and kept a hand against his stomach. The pressure didn’t make his wound any better, but it made him feel better and it reminded him not to move too abruptly, and that was good enough. He opened his eyes to the River of Souls.

  The stream of white orbs drifted through the cave in lazy swirls.

  The dragon was gone.

  Soren closed his eyes.

  When he woke, he felt slightly str
onger. He staggered to his feet, wove a small ball of souls into a light above his head, and walked out of the cave.

  The world beyond was frigid. Icy pellets of snow streaked through the gray, formless sky. The wind blew sharply out of the north. The smell of rock dust filled the air. The mountains and glaciers looked smaller and leaner, as if they’d shaken the dead weight from their bones.

  Soren crept down the wide stairs that formed Sherdu’il’s rotting spine. He passed broken, collapsed buildings. He walked through blood, through vomit, through thrashing marks in the dust that were only somewhat obscured by the new-fallen snow.

  Ramith and Miuri were dead. So was D’Orin. He’d seen their corpses in the cave.

  He was the sole survivor in a shattered city.

  Either Eshan or Crixine had brought him back from the brink of death but left him damaged enough to look dead. As if one of them was trying to fool the other. Or the dragon.

  Or me.

  Soren stopped and leaned against one of the crooked buildings. His stomach hurt if he breathed too deeply.

  They’re fucking with me, he thought sourly. Like they fucked with that boy.

  The Duennin. Litnig. The one they’d been manipulating for months. The one they had something in mind for.

  The beginnings of a plan formed in Soren’s head. Litnig had been there when Crixine and Eshan had turned on the rest of them. He’d come from Soulth’il, along with Leramis and the Prince of Eldan. Odds were they’d be returning there. Odds were Crixine and Eshan would follow.

  The cliffs that held the rope bridge had been left relatively undamaged by whatever had remade the faces of the rest of the mountains. The bridge itself had been turned into splinters and dangling strands, but it was a simple matter of a moment’s snarled soulweaving to pull it up from the depths and bind it together with souls.

  Soren walked across the pieces of the broken bridge. The wound in his stomach seeped blood over his hand. The river Lumos roiled black and sludgelike below him.

  Whichever of the Duennin had left him alive had made the biggest mistake of its life. He would see Eshan and Crixine both dead, and he would make sure that in their last moments they looked at him and realized exactly where their plan had gone wrong.