by Jeff Seymour
A hard, callused hand.
Her skin felt numb and rubbery, her hair tousled and tangled and matted. She shook like a wet cat, her feet bare on flagstones in the port of Densel, and she clutched the tattered remains of her nightclothes around her. Lights shone dully on a hill to her right. The sky was gray and growing lighter every minute. Low, thick fog misted around her ankles. The tall shadows of warships hung around her in the grayness, like the bodies of whales waiting to be hacked apart for a bit of meat and bone.
She wished it would rain.
She couldn’t feel the pain. Not yet. Her body wasn’t working right. It was hard to walk, and something sticky was trickling down the inside of her leg. The pain was waiting. For what, she didn’t know.
The hand left her shoulder.
She didn’t look at its owner. She didn’t want to see that face.
“Eh, here.”
A blanket of thick blue wool was placed in her arms. She snatched at it greedily and wrapped it around herself, but it wasn’t the comfort of wool she wanted. She wanted the River. Wanted to gulp it in and breathe it out in torrents, wanted to tear the man’s head off like she’d done to the Lost One in the North Sea, wanted to rip holes the size of boulders in the Folly of Man and send every man aboard to the bottom of the harbor.
But her breaths were shallow and sharp, and she couldn’t make the River come.
Her head felt hot and feverish. What they’d done—what they’d done to her—
Not to you, said a voice in her head. That happened to someone else. Don’t think of it. Just let it pass. It never happened. Not to you.
Someone she’d thought was Quay had come into the room while she was sleeping. Something had struck her head.
The next thing she’d known, she’d been in a strange place. Orange light surrounded her. A cloth was wrapped so tightly across her mouth that it was hard to breathe. There were sounds she didn’t recognize—didn’t understand—and dark shapes moving in the shadows. A heavy weight sat between her shoulder blades.
Her hands had been bound, and her legs. She’d heard the sound of something ripping. There’d been a curious coldness and then a warmth, and then she’d realized what was happening and screamed into the cloth and there had been horror, long horror and pain, pain, pain—
Don’t think of it. It never happened. Not to you.
“The Temple,” she whispered.
“Eh?”
“Where is it?” Her lungs heaved. Her fingers picked desperately at the edges of the blanket. She had a job to do. A message to deliver. Everything else had been taken—her power, her pride, the promise she’d made to herself that it would never happen to her, not to Ryse Lethien, not like other girls in the slums—
—not to you—
—but she had a warning that needed to be heard. Words that had to be said to the only people who could possibly put the world to rights. The world could kick her, violate her, destroy her, but still she would do this thing, a firefly flashing messages long after careless fingers tried to crush it.
Because that was Ryse Lethien, and she was hard to crush.
She heard a hand scratching at stubble.
“Eh, listen, no one will care, see. No one will listen to you, not even the Temple. You’d be better off just—”
She turned and looked at the man. She knew his face. Every line. Every pockmark. Every furrow and wrinkle and scar and unshaved hair. She knew all their faces. She would never forget them.
“Eh, up that way.” A thumb jerked up the hill, and a man whose face she would never forget walked into the fog.
It was that—the man leaving—that the pain had been waiting for.
It came on like a wildfire. Bruises flashing like sparks in the darkness. Sorenesses rubbing against one another, multiplying and cascading into leaping tongues of agony. Every step brought flame lancing up her legs and into her abdomen, but she stumbled on. The memory built no matter how she fought it.
Not to you, not to you, it didn’t happen to you—
Men were grabbing, leering, laughing or silent or shaking, and she felt every touch, every scrape, every bruise and grope and fingernail—each invasion, small or large, of the space that was supposed to be hers. When she tried to jerk away, they pulled her back, and there was nowhere to go, nowhere to run to anyway, no escape, no one to help. She tried to weave, to fight back, but there was cloth in her mouth and she couldn’t breathe to grip the River and the men were too heavy and too many. She was powerless like she’d been as a child, powerless like everyone in the slums, and the world was cold and dark and mud-drenched and rotten and slimy to the very deepest heart of it. The pain went away, hidden behind the shock and the terror and the hands of jibbering devils with faces too well seen in orange light, but the numbness that followed was almost worse; she pleaded for mercy and then for unconsciousness but it didn’t come, and the pain took her mind with it until she wasn’t herself. It wasn’t happening to her but to some other girl, some poor other girl she was watching get tossed around like a doll, and she was crying for that poor lost girl and praying for it to end and for her to survive, until the world began to quiet and the devils stopped their dance.
Then the devils left, and she was alone in the dark, and she was Ryse Lethien, and it had happened to her, and she wanted to pull at the River until the whole damn ship burned and sank with all hands.
But it was too much to ask of herself, and still she could barely breathe.
She surfaced from the memory. A shock of hair, red-gold against the gray, had fallen over her eyes. She had to wipe it away to see where she’d gone. She stood near the top of a steep cobblestone street. Shadowy buildings rose around her, crooked fingers reaching upward in a broken world. A hill fell away behind. Rainclouds filled the sky, and the silhouettes of hills dotted the horizon. There were tears on her face. Thick tears in streams. She was sniffling.
She shared the street with a few other people. One walked past without meeting her eyes. Another stared openly. The cobblestones felt rough on her feet. Her legs shook.
The dragon’s coming, Ryse.
She smelled wood smoke. The fire in her guts burned every time she took a step.
The dragon’s coming. You have to warn them. You owe it to them to warn them.
The faces of her friends floated in her mind. Len. Quay who was probably dead already. Cole and Dil and Litnig and Leramis, wherever they were, who’d still be fighting, who didn’t know, who couldn’t know—
—not to you, not to you—
She walked up wide stone steps. The air was wet and damp, and there was a cold wind coming up the hill behind her, coming from the sea where—
—not to you.
Candles lit the inside of the temple. Incense burned in small braziers. People moved slowly between white stone walls in robes. The place felt calm and quiet, peaceful and holy. Ryse stopped and watched the priests and priestesses moving through the early morning shadows.
She couldn’t think where to go, whom to speak to first. Her knees buckled, and someone noticed her. Voices echoed under the dome. The predawn light poured through the hole in the ceiling meant to let in the grace of Yenor.
Within it, the first drops of rain glistened silver and cold.
A gray-haired woman in a black-and-white robe stood in front of her, holding her shoulders and saying something that didn’t matter. A response Ryse had rehearsed in her head a hundred times came tumbling out, and that was good because she could scarcely stand the fire in her body any longer.
“My name is Ryse Lethien,” she whispered. “I was a soulweaver of the Temple. I have to tell the Twelve—”
She looked up into confused, worried eyes. “The dragon is coming.”
INTERLUDE TWO
Eighty-eight days before the destruction of Emeth’il
The ghost shivers.
He has come a long way at the side of the necromancer named Soren. They have walked alongside the river that brought him into the mo
untains to die. They have walked through a forest in which anyone they meet would happily kill them. They are following things that Soren can sense in the River of Souls and that the ghost cannot catch even the slightest hint of.
He has never been so passive.
Or has he?
There has been a lot of time to think, during all the walking and sitting and standing and sleeping. More time to think than there was when he was journeying the other direction, surrounded by human children for whom he cared more than he should have.
“So,” Soren begins. He is seated across a campfire from the ghost, picking the remains of a wood pigeon out of his teeth. “Why’d you do it?”
The ghost raises one of his eyebrows, and Soren sweeps his hand northward, encompassing the shadows of the forest and everything that lies behind them.
“Sacrifice yourself, I mean. For them.”
The dark cone of a volcano rises out of the forest like a broken thumb behind him, so tall that the ghost expects it will take more than a full day of climbing to reach its top. Its silhouette is riddled with horns and crevices and mysteries.
“For him, I think you mean,” the ghost replies.
Soren smiles his oily smile. “For him, then.”
The ghost shrugs. “It seemed a shame for both of us to die when one of us could live.” He has already told the story of his death to Soren. He finds he enjoys talking to the man more than he ought to.
“His life was more valuable than yours?”
The ghost frowns. “That is not what I said.”
“But it’s what you decided, isn’t it? You could have climbed up his body. Taken his place. Risked his life to save your own. But you didn’t. Why not?”
“Are you my wife now, to ask me these questions?”
The necromancer laughs. “I spent three months being chased by you and your little band of wish-they-were-heroes. I am now very much enjoying pointing out your shortcomings. Is that what your wife did?”
It was one thing he relied upon her for, but he does not need to tell Soren that.
“Come to think of it,” the necromancer continues, “what about your wife? What about your son and daughter? Did they come into it at all? Did you think about your family when you decided to die?”
The ghost’s hands, old and scarred, tighten on the ruined leather of his trousers. “I thought of one of them,” he says, quietly.
“D’Orin.”
“Yes.”
“And not the three who were living?”
“No.”
“Why?”
The question hangs between them over the campfire, turning in the light and the heat like the joint of a lamb. The ghost has no answer for it.
“You ask me,” Soren says, flicking the shard of bone he has been using for a toothpick into the woods, “if you were going to sacrifice yourself for anyone, it should have been for them.”
TWENTY
Fifty-eight days before the destruction of Emeth’il
Tsu’min stood on a small ship that bobbed on dark seas. Clouds rolled in long, bulbous lines above him. The wind whipped his face, and the ship bucked and pitched in heavy swells. In front of him, a small bay opened beneath green canyons that ran like claw marks up the mammoth side of a cone-shaped volcano.
Oleguash’ma’ame, it was called. The mountain of God. The place Yenor had told Tsu’min’s father Aimere many things about the world. Many things that had been remembered. Many others that had been lost.
“There,” Tsu’min said to a gray-haired, frowning Aleani next to him. A tiny stone landing lay at the foot of one of the chasms.
Tsu’min’s eyes floated up to the mountain’s cloud-shrouded peak. In the summit crater there was a small, broken temple, long overgrown by grass and ivy and creeping vines. Beneath it lay a chamber of glittering white feldspar. And in the floor of that chamber was a round disc of perfectly smooth crystal.
Sh’ma’ame had erupted twice in Tsu’min’s long lifetime. But the temple had never been touched, and the crystal had never been sullied. Beneath it was something even Tsu’min couldn’t fathom—some connection to the god Yenor Hirself. Some conduit that allowed those on Guedin to commune with Sherduan’s other half, the white dragon Arenthor.
The wind whistled over Tsu’min’s skin, but he no longer felt it. The mountain clouded his eyes, and he recalled the white dragon—how it shimmered with its own bright light. There was an aura around it, a sense that everything would be all right, that you were loved, that the world you lived in was the most beautiful thing that had ever been created, even with all its many flaws, and that you were blessed beyond belief to have lived in it.
That feeling, he wondered. When did I lose that feeling?
Below the mountain, Maegan stood at the bow of the ship.
She had made this journey happen. Pressed her hired crew farther than they’d expected to go, farther than they’d contracted to. She was a strong child in many ways.
She reminded him of Mi’ame.
Your name is Eraic, she’d said.
And as if the words had been a command, he’d begun to remember. Old thoughts, locked away after Mi’ame’s death, after his father’s murder and the downfall of his people, had trickled back to him.
He was Eraic a’Soulth—bastard, half-breed son of Aimere Ith’a. Unintended consequence of the first Sh’ma’s first contact with the human race. The first nar’oth, doomed never to age and pass as his human mother had, never to procreate and die as his na’oth among the Sh’ma had. Doomed to watch his father lose his way and destroy his people. Doomed to be too late and too weak to save the one being who’d ever understood or loved him.
No one told those stories about Eraic a’Soulth. The Aleani spoke of how the wanderer had spent centuries traveling with Mi’ame Greatheart. The Nutharians remembered him as an adventurer—a roguish, tall man with an easy smile and a companion who lit the night with her joyfulness. The Sh’ma remembered him as a dutiful son and a stalwart counselor. The Eldanians, it seemed, didn’t remember him at all.
The green slopes of Sh’ma’ame towered over his head. Waterfalls poured from ancient cataracts over the old stone pier. It was two days’ climb to the top, if he remembered correctly. The Aleani wouldn’t follow, though they’d been invited. They would remain at the mountain’s foot with their ship and wait with their nerves until either their food ran low or their client returned. Only Maegan Heramsun would climb the peak with him. Only Maegan Heramsun would watch as he and the other na’oth’na searched for the three souls around which they could create the body of Arenthor.
She had dressed in the leather traveling clothes of the Aleani. On top of them, she wore a cloak of wool and a traveler’s knapsack.
Mi’ame had dressed like that sometimes.
Maegan looked at Tsu’min as the ship bumped against the pier and two Aleani sailors leaped ashore. The wind whipped her hair.
She looked suitably nervous.
When the Aleani had tied down their ship fully, Tsu’min stepped onto the pier.
Before he’d taken three steps, he heard the heavy thumping of Maegan’s feet, following his lead.
***
It is the 11th of Rainmonth 7983, and I camp with Tsu’min upon the slopes of a great volcano, nestled under an overhang by a path overgrown with weeds and thorny bushes. We climbed for nearly eight hours today, as best I could count. The sun stayed hidden behind a thick wall of cloud, though it never rained. Captain Chelsun and his crew wait below, anchored to an ancient pier on a shifting, angry sea. I cannot emphasize their bravery enough. They have sailed beyond their maps and charts, finding their way by an ancient being’s memory and the stars. Their journey could fill another volume, but it is not the story I have promised to tell.
Maegan shifted her tome to let the firelight fall onto it a little more clearly. In front of her, a small blaze spit and hissed, and she sat on a moss-covered slab of rock under an overhang. At the edge of the light lay the thin, spare path u
pon which she’d dragged her weary body all day. Past it, she saw nothing.
She shuddered. She’d never been a great climber. Heights made her dizzy, though she’d never admitted it to anyone but her mother, and even then only as a child. It was best if the world thought she’d grown out of it. It was best if it thought she was stronger than she thought herself.
Tsu’min has told me we will reach the summit tomorrow. There is a temple there, he says, and a cavern, and others who are like him will be waiting. Perhaps they will share stories of the being he once was, and how Eraic a’Soulth became Tsu’min Nar’oth. Some of them, I am sure, will have known him for centuries.
“How goes your book?”
Maegan turned her head. Tsu’min sat with his back to a rock wall on the other side of the fire, his wrap draped over his shoulders and lap like a blanket. He was rolling the jade bead between his fingers, watching her. His eyes sparkled in the firelight.
“Well,” she replied. She laid the book down on a cloth and cleaned the nib of her pen in a small dish of water. “I am writing the story of today.”
“You are writing a story of today.”
She didn’t respond. Beneath their overhang the wind was quiet, but she could hear it howling over the mountain.
“How are your hands?” Tsu’min asked.
She looked down and curled her fingertips lightly against her palms. She’d torn the skin from them clinging to a rock face with a hundred-foot drop below her that afternoon, as the sun dipped low in the sky and the wind picked up. Thin strips of cloth covered them now, her new skin until they healed, but they stung whenever she pressed them against something.
“Fine,” she lied.
Tsu’min smirked.
“You’re proud,” he said. “Most people would have asked me to heal them by now.”
She remained silent.
“Would you like to hear a story?” he asked. He was leaning back on one arm, his eyes more on the black sky beyond the overhang than on her.
“Yes,” she said.
“The first time I climbed this peak,” he began, “I was three hundred and twelve years old. My father was still the Sh’ma Ith’a, and he brought me here, as Yenor had brought him when the world was new.