by Jeff Seymour
“We followed this path, or one very much like it. I remember camping here. My father sat where you sat, and I sat here, my fingers ripped and bleeding as yours are, my legs empty and drained, my body so tired that even slight movements set my heart pounding.
“I was more a child then than you are now, Maegan Heramsun, despite my age, and my father said nothing to me. The whole night, he simply sat with his back to me, watching the stars. He never learned how to deal with me, through the day he died. He tried ignoring me. He tried accepting me. He tried treating me as an outcast, as an equal, as a servant. He elevated and demoted me a dozen times, and there was no one to stop him, because he was the Sh’ma Ith’a and my mother was long dead.”
His eyes drifted down from the stars and settled on her, cold and piercing and very, very old.
“I was a constant reminder to my father of his greatest moment of weakness. To him, no matter what I accomplished in life, I would always be his worst failure.”
Maegan shivered, and Tsu’min lay down on his blanket.
“Remember that,” he said, “when you curse the days you did not spend with your own.”
Tsu’min closed his eyes. His breathing grew slow and regular.
Maegan watched him, and when she was sure he would speak no more, she took up her pen and began to write again.
***
As the sky darkened the following evening, Tsu’min slid down a slope of scree into the crater atop Sh’ma’ame. His hands were sore. His legs and lungs burned. The sky hung gray and depthless above him, and the wind smelled sharp and crisp.
He heard a slip and a crash behind him, but no further sound. There was iron in the soul of Maegan Heramsun, for all her childhood.
And that was good.
Ahead, the sharp angles of the temple beckoned, broken-topped and green-mossed and no longer abandoned. A wisp of blue smoke curled up from a hole in its peaked roof. A gray blanket hung across a gap in one of its walls and formed a crude doorway. Tsu’min saw footprints in the grass surrounding it, and there was a path worn to a lake in the center of the crater.
It was in the temple that the na’oth’na met in times of crisis. There they’d become each other’s family while Lomin slaughtered all the Sh’ma who wouldn’t bow to him. Tsu’min had gathered a few of his people and bound them by a promise to live and protect the world Mi’ame had loved. Ramith and Miuri, who lay dead and rotting in a cave. Taema, a turquoise-haired, quiet Sh’ma from the north who was reliable but not powerful. Eluama, a huge, fuchsia-haired Sh’ma from the Nuar N’retya’sh’ra who over time had become the closest thing the na’oth’na had to a leader.
There had been others, as well—red- and white- and orange-haired half-bloods and blue- and purple- and black-haired full-bloods from across Soultholenash. Some had broken their vows over the millennia—loved, procreated, and died. Others had drifted away or been executed. Twelve remained.
Together it would be them who saved the world, if anyone could. No one else had the knowledge or the strength.
The scree came to an end, and Tsu’min stood before the temple and the weeks or months of painful, draining soulweaving that waited within it.
Maegan came to a stop behind him. Her pack and clothing rustled, and her breaths came in heavy gasps.
“Are you ready?” he asked. She was a good person, one who was stepping far beyond the bounds of her experience to serve a purpose greater than herself; she would write of what she saw, and perhaps through her, the knowledge would be saved. Perhaps through her, even if the na’oth’na were lost, the world would live on.
And perhaps if Tsu’min shared the burden of his promise through her, he would finally be free.
Before she replied, the gray blanket was swept aside. A hulking Sh’ma with short fuchsia hair stepped through it.
“Tyash’lure, Tsu’min,” he boomed. He opened his arms, bent his knees, and inclined his head in the oldest bow of their people. He spoke in Sh’ma. “It is good to see you again.”
“Tyash’lure,” Tsu’min said. “It is good to see you as well.”
The wind rippled over them, and Eluama smiled as he finished his bow.
The hair rose on the back of Tsu’min’s neck.
There was something wrong in the temple. Some eddy in the River that shouldn’t have been there.
“Who is traveling with you?” Eluama asked. He stepped forward and embraced Tsu’min.
“Her name is Maegan Heramsun,” Tsu’min replied. “She will chronicle our efforts.”
The eddy put him in mind of rotting garbage. It brought back thoughts of Sherduan, of the city of the Duennin and the cavern below it.
“Eluama…” he said, but his friend was already speaking to Maegan in Aleani.
The stink in the River stepped out from behind the blanket and into the light of day.
It was a skinny, pale human with blond hair and blue eyes. He wore a gray, patched robe that had once been black.
The man was a necromancer, and he’d stood at Eshan Eshati’s side beneath Sherdu’il.
Tsu’min gripped the River, wove a noose of souls around the man’s neck, and pulled it tight. The human dropped to his knees, his hand going to his throat as if he could pull the souls there free with his fingers alone. His face was gaunter than it had been, almost hollow looking.
They were being slaughtered as we ran, Tsu’min remembered. How did this one survive?
“Tsu’min.” Eluama’s voice, behind him. “Let him go.”
“Do you know who this is, Eluama?”
“Yes.”
Tsu’min turned to face his friend. Eluama stood with his arms over his chest and a deep frown on his face. There was no madness in his eyes, no anger, no betrayal.
“His name is Soren Goldguard,” he said. “The Duennin betrayed him, and he came to us to betray them in turn.”
Tsu’min did not release the necromancer.
“Let him go,” Eluama said. The River rushed to his command. He was stronger than Tsu’min. “Please.”
Behind Eluama, Maegan’s eyes filled with sadness. She was looking not at the human but at Tsu’min. At what he’d become.
He released his weaving.
Behind him, the human coughed as blood began flowing to his brain again.
“Explain,” Tsu’min said to Eluama.
His friend’s eyes glistened, businesslike and calm. The wind brought the smell of water from the lake, greenness from the grass. Tsu’min heard movement behind him and turned. Others were exiting the temple—Taema and her green-haired kin-friend Oata. Ayaya, the flame-haired half-blood. Loure’ame and Loure’mith, the sapphire-haired twins. All old friends. All watching him with the same sad question in their eyes.
Tsu’min let go of the River and looked at his feet.
“The enemy of our enemy is our friend, Tsu’min,” said Eluama. “And we have few friends these days.”
Mi’ame’s bead found its way between Tsu’min’s fingers, and he squeezed it.
Eluama touched his shoulder. “It’s all right,” he said.
When Tsu’min looked up, Soren Goldguard was rubbing his throat. His eyes looked as cold as the ice in the forgotten mountains.
“I do not trust the human,” Tsu’min said quietly.
“Nor do I,” Eluama replied. “But we may need him nonetheless, and I do not think it wise to throw away such a life carelessly.”
The others were approaching, sad smiles on their faces and greetings on their lips. Maegan would write of this, Tsu’min was sure. Of the way the others looked at him. Of his shame.
“There is much we need to speak of,” Eluama said.
When the others reached them, Tsu’min was lost in a wave of small kindnesses. The gestures, the smiles, the words slipped into the wound of his guilt and sprinkled salt.
Once, Tsu’min had thought the world a bright and beautiful place, and himself a bright and beautiful part of it.
But that had been a long, long time ago.
TWENTY-ONE
Fifty days before the destruction of Nutharion City
The sun rose through a haze of blue and brown smoke. The manmade canyons of Nutharion City cascaded in concentric rings below it, lower and lower until they petered out at the city’s perimeter and the haphazard wooden slums that surrounded it.
Cole had looked at that view, every morning and every evening, for weeks.
Beyond the stone city, the fields of central Nutharion carpeted the land in gold and green late-summer crops—wheat, corn, tomatoes. Two bluebirds capered in the early light, chirping as they rode the air. Cole leaned on a stone railing and watched them play, trying to ignore the goose bumps on his skin and the churning in his stomach.
He felt caged, and he was pretty sure there were people in the city responsible for that.
For a month, he and Dil had been guests in Nutharion, shepherded from meeting to meeting, dignitary to dignitary. They’d met the king—a red-faced man with none of the gravitas of the soulweavers who surrounded him—and the twelve heads of school who formed the council that ruled the land. They’d met most of the council’s immediate subordinates and a lot of children and soulweavers of various ranks and duties. They’d been forced to learn dances and rituals and to play interminable rounds of a game the Nutharians called Truths and Lies, in which the goal was to tell a lie so convincingly that all the other players accepted it as truth.
Nothing particularly disturbing had happened—just a lot of jawing over what Nutharion would do about the dragon. But he’d seen the looks, heard the whispers. He and Dil had faced Sherduan and lived. Most Aleani hadn’t seemed worried about that, but in Nutharion it cast a pall over everything they did. There was a sense of waiting in the interactions they had with people, as if the Nutharians were trying to decide what to do with them.
And in the meantime, they were caught in a cage gilded by cool white stone and manners.
The bluebirds flew over the roof, still chattering, and Cole walked into his empty bedroom. A white suit with buttons up the front, cut high in the Nutharian style, waited for him on a wardrobe. He tossed the pants on a chair near his bed and began to put the top half of the outfit on. The sun had cleared the horizon, which meant—
“Ambassador Jin?”
A light-skinned, mostly bald, round-faced man in an impeccable gray uniform cracked open the door to Cole’s room. “Will you be requiring hot water this mor—”
“No,” Cole snapped. The buttons on the shirt were cloth covered and difficult to do up, but he hurried with them anyway. The door opened further, and Willem a’Raeth, the good-natured, middle-aged man who’d been assigned as his steward, entered the room. The Nutharian had a paunchy stomach and a patch missing from the left of his otherwise ample eyebrows. Taken by a kitchen fire, he’d told Cole one morning.
Willem held himself as straight as a board whether he was sitting or standing, and he’d been simultaneously a godsend and a pain in Cole’s ass since the day Cole had met him. Willem had been in the domestic service of the Cityhall since boyhood, and while that was useful when Cole had questions, Cole had a sneaking suspicion that the man meant to acculturate him by any means necessary.
The trousers to his suit had caught on the back of the delicate wire chair he’d thrown them at. He snatched them just as Willem’s hand was reaching for them, and then he sat on the foot of his bed and pulled them on.
Willem cleared his throat. There was a tension to the way he held himself, a worry hiding in the creases around his eyes that Cole wasn’t used to seeing there.
“What is it?” Cole asked.
“Breakfast with the Aleani delegation from seven thirty to nine, followed by interviews first with Lord Lentry of the Green School and then with Lady Allenbee of the Violet School. Lunch to follow, and after lunch the Magister Pyell has requested to speak with you and Ambassador Lonecliff in private.”
Cole stopped lacing up his trousers.
The birds were still chirping songs outside. Somewhere below, two men called to one another. Cole fingered the white strips of thick cloth that did the trousers up, then crossed and re-crossed them before sliding them through two holes and pulling them into a broad knot.
The real power in Nutharion was the Magister. Cole had heard rumors about her—everything from that she was just a girl in a robe to that she was more powerful than the rest of the Council of Schools combined.
The air in the room was warming already. Nutharion City lay in the center of a ten-mile basin, and in the late summer it got truly sweltering when there wasn’t a breeze. Cole felt the beginnings of sweat on his stomach and back and knew he would be damp all day.
It will go fine, he told himself, but the words felt empty.
“And after that?”
Willem sniffed. “After that, your honor has no further appointments and is free to do as he pleases.”
Cole sighed. He’d been asking for a day off from the meetings practically since he’d gotten there. He’d learned over the last few months that life could move awfully fast, and he wanted to see the city with Dil before their time there was over. Every day around sunset, the air cooled off and the sky turned a dozen flower-bright shades of red and violet. He wanted to hold her hand and watch that, just once.
But the meeting with Pyell blocked out the free evening like the rind on a watermelon.
Willem was staring at him. Cole reached for his boots.
“Ambassador Jin?”
Cole looked up. Willem’s face had turned the color of ash.
“Be careful today.”
The man turned and left, like he was afraid he’d say more than he should if he stayed.
Cole shivered and laced up his boots.
***
Not long after the boots were on, a clock in the hall chimed seven fifteen, and Cole stepped through his bedroom door into a blindingly white parlor bedecked with stone tables, wire chairs, airy curtains, and an armoire the size of his bed. Seven fifteen was his favorite time of the day—the time when Dil would emerge from her room and the world would seem a little brighter, a little more normal, and they would have a chance to laugh anew at the way they looked.
Willem was fussing with Cole’s hair when the other bedroom door opened and Dil stepped through it, wearing a high-shouldered, blue-white dress with glass beads across the bust and a gauzy train that trailed a few feet behind her. Her hair was done up high with some winged, unholy combination of pins and tresses.
When Cole saw her, the whirlpool in his guts calmed down, and he couldn’t help a smile.
He walked toward her, grinning, and held out his arm.
“Oh, you do look enchanting today,” he said.
She snorted and mussed his hair. She’d adjusted to life at court much better than he’d expected. Her parlor maids, he thought, might be the first girls her age she could talk to without fearing. “Not quite as ladylike as you, your honor.”
Cole heard a tsk from Willem and walked forward. The man trailed behind him, re-shellacking Cole’s hair with icy goop that would keep it stuck against the side of his head all day. Dil pressed her fingers lightly against Cole’s arm. He squeezed them in return, and together they passed into a world they didn’t belong in.
The rest of the morning went quickly.
Two hours later, Cole found himself staring out a high window at several children wearing bright robes. They were in a courtyard, playing a game involving some combination of hopping and running and standing that he couldn’t figure out.
He was supposed to be paying attention to a tall, frightened-looking man in a mint robe ornamented with gold embroidery. Lord Lentry Endelhafen’s school controlled a significant portion of the Mirror Forest in the southwest of Nutharion. The school wasn’t particularly powerful, but it was backing Quay’s plan for dealing with the dragon, so Cole and Dil had to be nice to its twitching leader.
Dil was better at it than Cole was.
“What—you see, well—what I’m ju
st unsure of, you see—” Lentry had a habit of picking his teeth while he talked, even when there was nothing there. Cole turned back and saw him doing it unreservedly with one hand while gesticulating spasmodically with the other. “You see, is what Eldan will actually do—or what the Duennin, you see, the Duennin will do. This Eshan has just, you see, disappeared, and if we abandon the cities, how will we be able to—you see—to form a fighting force if the Duennin—if the Duennin return?”
Lord Lentry had apparently been elected head of his school for his soulweaving strength. But when Cole looked at him, he didn’t see someone possessed of any power.
“Quay’s working on that,” Cole grumbled.
But there’d been no word from Quay. The only news out of Eldan was a persistent rumor that its fleet would be sailing for Menatar any day.
Cole looked at his boots and fingered the silver ring Quay had given him before they reached Sherdu’il. He wore it on a steel chain around his neck, and some days it felt heavier than others. In that moment, more than anything else in the world, he wished for a letter from Quay or for the prince to ride up and shoulder the burden of negotiation himself.
“As for the Duennin, Quay says lookouts posted on Ilthien’s Wall would give us plenty of warning. And at any rate, it’s the Sh’ma and Eldan who are closest to them.”
“Hm.”
Cole looked up. That was a sound Lentry had never made before during their interviews. The green-robed man was standing near his writing desk. One of his hands had landed on the snowfield of papers that covered it. The other picked his teeth. He was looking at Cole as if Cole was a dog that he hadn’t quite decided was friendly yet.
“Anything else bothering you, Lord Lentry?” Cole asked.
The man took almost a full second to reply. “What? No, of course not. No. Not at all.” He slid the paper his hand had landed on under several others.
He and Cole spoke at the same time.
“Then I think I should—”
“Perhaps you should—”