by Jeff Seymour
“Then tomorrow we will begin forging your weapon. It is long past time.”
He looked around him. The mouth of the glacier was black. A few soulwoven lights cast a cold glow over the forge and the river.
It had been afternoon when he stepped into the dream. He was hungry, thirsty, sore in his back and his legs. His euphoria faded.
“Time in the dream can pass strangely, Litnig Eshati,” said Maia.
Litnig noticed a kettle on a fire behind her, smelled sweet and salty venison stew. Maia looked briefly as if she wanted to say something more. She opened her mouth. Closed it.
When she turned to face the fire, deep shadows fell over her. She looked old again. Old and wise and concerned.
Without another word, she walked to the flames and left Litnig alone in the soulwoven twilight.
***
The next day Litnig stood over an anvil, weaving and pounding, weaving and pounding, drawing strength from all the corners of his self and working souls into hot black metal. His blade would have nine layers, folded and pattern-welded into place.
Maia had taught him how to craft it.
She heated long rods of the metal in the forge and placed them on the anvil with tongs. He pounded them flat and thin and covered them with as thick a layer of souls as he was capable of weaving, forming a lattice pattern so dense that the metal was obscured and he had to rely on Maia to guide him as he drew it into shape. The souls were difficult to hold in place. When one layer was finished, he repeated the process, adding more material each time.
He got better as he went. Each layer of metal trapped a layer of souls within the blade. His initial deposits were weak and frayed, but Maia assured him that was an essential part of the process—that weakness was desirable in some layers and that was why a Duennin forged his or her blade before practicing. Once the initial nine layers were in place, Litnig began to fold the metal over and pound it out again, each time working in an additional layer of souls.
The forge was hot, and Litnig soon stripped to the waist. Sweat poured over his body. Meltwater from the glacier streamed down the ice.
Maia’s eyes gleamed as she worked. Every so often, she whispered, “Good, Litnig Eshati, good…” as she turned the blade.
Litnig’s arms wore out. His throat burned. His skin turned red from the heat, but he didn’t stop. The first stage of the blade had to be completed all at once.
Occasionally, when the blade had to be reheated, they would eat and drink or lie in their bed holes, and Maia would tell him stories of the hard-baked land he’d been born in, or of his mother and father, or of the history of his people. With each story, she put a hand on his shoulder, smiled, and said, “You are learning, Litnig Eshati. Finally, you are learning.”
He didn’t stop working until well after the middle of the night, when his arms were so wasted he could barely lift the hammer and his palms were ripped and bleeding. He’d folded the blade twenty-seven times.
“It will be a strong weapon,” Maia assured him, inspecting it in the red light of the forge. She smiled, the shadows heavy on her face. “Very strong.”
She heated it one final time and placed it in a chamber atop the forge to cool.
“It will take two days to anneal,” she told him.
Two days in which they could rest.
He staggered toward his bed hole and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He knew he’d get cold if he didn’t dress before sleeping, but he couldn’t find his shirt. He couldn’t remember ever being so tired. His body, his mind, his soul—
Two fingers trailed something cool and wet over his shoulder. A tired grunt escaped his lungs.
“It is for the burning,” said Maia’s voice.
Litnig turned and found Maia holding a small ceramic bowl with a white cream within it. She had stripped down to her undergarments, and she was smiling with half her mouth.
Litnig’s heart beat faster. Thoughts of Ryse and fear and shame and chastity and lust tried to rush all at once through his mind, and his head swam.
“Relax,” Maia said. She dipped two fingers into the bowl, then drew them out and rubbed his shoulders, his arms, his chest, his back, his neck, his face. The cream smelled like mint and felt deliriously cool. Maia continued to smile as she applied it, strong fingers working his muscles.
“You are strong, Litnig Eshati,” she whispered.
He closed his eyes. Her hands were powerful and sure, her thumbs pressing first between his shoulder blades and then underneath them, then on the sides of his neck and the junction between his shoulder and his chest, then on the small of his back. He didn’t resist when they trailed lightly over his buttocks before working up the backs of his calves and thighs. His balance deserted him, and he swayed rhythmically back and forth.
Maia stood. Her arms stretched around him, and she laid him gently into his bed. His skin felt alternately warm and cool from the mixture she’d spread on it. The world smelled of mint. The blankets were soft and welcoming.
Litnig’s eyes drifted open and closed. Maia knelt at the foot of his bed hole, naked as she often was near bedtime, rubbing the minty mixture into her skin. Her muscles bunched as she worked the stuff into her arms, her legs, her face and her hands and her chest. Her hair trailed lightly over her back and stuck to her body where the wetness of the mixture shone. Her fingers looked delicate and dextrous.
She was old. He knew that somewhere in the back of his mind. Too old for him.
But when he watched her like that, she didn’t seem it. She could’ve been seventeen or twenty-seven or fifty-four or four hundred and fifty. She handed the bowl to him, and he didn’t hesitate.
She sat cross-legged with her back to his front, and he dipped two fingers into the cool mixture and applied the cream to her neck. Her body was hard, warm, strong and real and close—he smelled the musky scent of her sweat, even through the mixture’s aroma.
As he worked, she drifted closer. He rubbed her as she’d rubbed him, massaging knots in muscles like steel cords. He followed the contours of her body—the curve between rib cage and hip; the joint between hip and leg; the long, fibrous muscles that reached down her thighs. His fingers became his mind, and he knew only the feel of her, until her head was on his shoulder and her body in his lap drove all thought from him. He knew only her, only that moment, only a need that had existed for years but never shown itself so clearly.
She leaned back into him, touched the side of his face, and sighed.
He reached for her. She taught him every inch of her body.
And when he finally entered her, his world blew apart in a cornucopia of new sensations to love.
TWENTY-FOUR
Thirty-six days before the sack of Death’s Head
The sky roiled, and the invasion of Menatar began.
It was the 22nd of Rainmonth, 7983, a little more than a month after Leramis had left Ryse and Quay to return to the Black Isle. The wind whistled sharp and damp out of the northwest, sweeping from the sea over the Lonely Shore and cresting atop the rocky black spine of the island. Fine mist covered everything in a spidery layer of dampness.
Empty huts of thatch and straw hunched around Leramis. He stood on a slippery and uneven excuse for a road with his legs stained with mud. A maze of sharpened stakes blocked the way to the north.
To the northeast, smoke and fire faded in and out of the mist like the breath of a hundred chimneys.
On Leramis’s left, a squat man in a black robe pulled a few dozen souls to himself and lit a pipe within the recesses of his hood. The vanilla smell of tobacco filled the air for a few sweet seconds, and then the wind ripped it away over the hills to the east.
“That’ll be Marshton, I reckon,” the man said. He was a middle-aged, crusty old blackrobe whom Leramis had met a few days earlier. He’d been an Eldanian soldier, serving on Ilthien’s wall, before the Order found him. He had a name, but Leramis had already forgotten it. Their unit hadn’t been built to stay together long. “And Eastsho
re too, unless I miss my guess.”
Leramis guessed the same.
The struggle for Menatar had started before sunrise at the north end of the isle. Cloud and smoke obscured the Eldanians, but Leramis knew they were there. Soldiers in burnished silver armor. Horses taller than him by a head. Gargantuan soulwoven golems ripped from the rock of the island. He shivered.
Against all that, he stood with a dozen of his brothers and sisters. By the time he’d arrived at Death’s Head with his warning, the necromancers had already heard about the dragon’s release. They had sent a number of blackrobes away from the island to prepare for its arrival.
Everyone else, including Leramis, was going to fight.
It was nearing midday, but the memory of the sun felt far, far away. He squatted in the mud and warmed his hands before a fire they’d built in the center of the road.
The island of Menatar was shaped like an elongated turtle’s back, with a high ridge down the center and satellite ridges and gullies running down to the sea. The Eldanians would have to take and traverse the road that ran down the central ridge to reach the low-lying city of Death’s Head in the south. Striking from the gullies, the necromancers would harry them along the way, then melt back into the flatlands along the shores, the marshes, the island’s many caves. At a few chokepoints, they’d skirmish with the Eldanians on the road.
Halfway Home, where Leramis squatted in the mud warming his hands, was one such point.
Leramis stood and wiped his nose. Early that morning, before the fog moved in, he’d caught sight of a white sail off the north end of the island. He’d hoped it might be just one ship, coming to offer terms.
But that sail had been followed by another, then another and another, and then the fog had closed back in and swallowed them all again.
The Eldanians had marshaled their forces offshore for three days before striking.
They hadn’t sought to negotiate once.
The mist filled Leramis’s eyes, his ears, his lungs. Menatar had never been a hospitable place. It was a hard land of cold black rock and briny seafood. The only edible things that grew on the island were roots and a variety of marsh grain called Hob’s Weed that made bitter, mealy flour. The misery of the place was one reason Fayyid the Black had chosen it for his order’s stronghold so long ago.
Behind Leramis, a horse snorted and snicked. Her rider, a pink-haired Sh’ma, whispered something soothing in her ear.
The plan wasn’t to defeat the Eldanians on the road. There were too many of them and too few defenders. Rhan the Eye, Bors the Arm, and Olen the Mind meant to draw them onto the precipitous slopes above Death’s Head and ruin them there, where their horses would be unable to charge, where their infantry would be crammed onto the narrow, winding road leading to the city gates or caught sliding headlong down the rocks. Where the necromancers could use the corpses buried under their city.
A woman to Leramis’s right, seated against one of the huts, began to crack her knuckles. Another ducked into first one hut, then a second, probably checking the traps the unit had set in them that morning.
None of them would see the battle of Death’s Head.
Leramis sighed. A long sword hung from his hip. A pike lay at his feet. The weapons had been bought by the Order from Nutharian traders over the last several months. There was little money left in Death’s Head any longer. Just food and people and weapons.
Wind rippled over the thatch roofs.
The smoking man inhaled deeply, then overturned his pipe and ground out the embers with his foot.
“They’re coming,” he grunted.
Leramis faced north. A moment later, he heard hoofbeats and plates of armor scraping together. The ground began to tremble.
“How many?” he asked.
The smoking man sucked in a breath. “Ten. Twenty. Tough to say.”
“The mud will slow them,” said a woman to his right, pulling the hood from her head and peering into the rain.
“Not enough,” replied the smoking man.
Leramis said nothing. His calmness evaporated. His limbs trembled. He’d faced death before—on the Rokwet, beneath the mountains of Aleana, in Sherdu’il.
But this felt different.
A line of black shadows plowed through the mist, less than a hundred yards from the village.
On top of their horses, the riders sat higher than the huts. They bobbed up and down three abreast as they rode, taking up the whole of the narrow, muddy road down the Spine.
The ones in front lowered black lances. Behind Leramis, the pink-haired Sh’ma turned her horse without a word and sped south.
Leramis began to weave.
He linked arms with the pipe smoker next to him. Together, they exhaled into the River. A chain of souls formed across the road between the riders and the village.
As the riders approached the chain, the River bucked and snapped. The weaving broke apart.
Leramis cursed and dropped the smoking man’s arm.
“Soulweavers!” he called, reaching for the thin sword at his waist. The riders were seconds away, and he spotted a dozen figures in gray and white robes running behind them. “Divisions Twelve and Six!”
The Temple’s vanguard.
Leramis drew the sword. Once, he’d been on the fast track to a place in Division Twelve himself, one of the rising stars of the Temple, at the top of his classes.
He hadn’t forgotten his lessons.
Sucking deeply at the River, he wove a dense spear of souls that resisted the Twelfthmen’s attempts to tear it apart. He gave it life right as one of the Eldanian knights rode into it. A red-orange dart of light appeared eight feet high and melted through the knight’s armor and heart. The man toppled from his horse without a word. His fellows rode on as if he’d never lived, one behind moving up to take his place in the line.
The riders wore black armor decorated with red skulls and armbands made from bright red feathers. Leramis recognized it as the regalia of the Knights of the Fire—a company of youngest sons and penniless nobles with nothing to lose but their lives. They prided themselves on savagery and courage.
Before he’d discovered his gift for soulweaving, Leramis had thought of becoming one.
Eleven knights rode toward the village. Three fell before they reached the stakes. Several others pulled back and waited for the Temple soulweavers to catch up. Another’s horse lost its footing and sent its rider pitching to the ground. The necromancer closest to the fallen man raised her hand, and Leramis watched the knight’s armor glow white-hot, heard him scream as he cooked in his own protection.
The last charging knight rode straight over his shrieking fellow and drove his lance through the chest of the necromancer. She hit the ground so hard her body bounced. The lance shattered and was abandoned.
Leramis’s fellows scattered before the horse. The rider’s sword flashed; a forearm fell severed onto the road. Leramis rolled under a strike that would’ve taken off his head. The rider’s hoofbeats continued to the end of the village, then stopped. He would be coming back for a second charge.
The Temple soulweavers were breaching the stakes to the north, ripping them up or blasting them apart, and the River was a thing of hideous chaos. It surged in every direction, torn at by soulweavers on both sides, slippery and difficult to grasp. The riders surged around the Twelfthmen. A score of Eldanian infantrymen came on fast down the road. The skirmish had already been lost. It was time to trip the traps and then surrender, to throw themselves on the mercy of—
Leramis watched one of his fellows drop his sword and raise his arms. A black rider parted his head from his shoulders in one blow.
Hoofbeats filled the air behind Leramis. He spun and found the rider who’d made it through the village coming at him. Leramis dropped his sword and grabbed the pike at his feet, heaved the heavy weapon up, planted its butt in the ground and leveled it at the massive Foltiri horse’s chest. The animal hit the twelve-foot pole like a thunderbolt, hard enoug
h that the shaft splintered and jumped out of Leramis’s hands. The pike’s point, which had slipped past the horse’s chestplate, jutted all the way through the animal’s neck before it slid to a stop. The horse fell to the ground a few feet from him, twitching and gasping, blood pouring from its nose, its mouth, its chest.
“Hellspawn!” snarled a voice behind him, and Leramis whirled and found the smoking man grappling with an Eldanian footsoldier near the entrance to one of the huts. As he stepped forward to help him, Leramis caught a trace of movement at the corner of his eye.
He spun to face it just as an Eldanian infantryman swung at him with a long sword.
Leramis wove faster than he’d known himself capable of, wrapped his hands in a thick layer of souls and caught the blade. He twisted sharply, and it snapped. Leramis slipped past the broken blade, grabbed the wielder by the face and altered his weaving. The souls around his hand grew hot. The man’s grunt melted into a shriek, and Leramis dropped him.
The smoking man was backing into a hut a few feet away, wielding a sword in each hand. Elsewhere in the village, three necromancers faced six Twelfthmen, seven other whiterobes, two riders. The Knight of the Fire Leramis had taken down puffed and grunted behind him. More soldiers with swords and shields approached from the mists.
Leramis turned and ran.
The escape routes had been chosen days in advance. Two on the east side of the village and a third on the west. Leramis darted between empty huts as he heard a woman shriek and die. There was fuel in the huts—dry tinder and straw soaked in oil. He raced past and sucked hard at the River.
Burn, he told the souls, and they obeyed.
Boom, said the hut.
The heat hit Leramis’s back sudden and sharp, hard enough to push him forward a few feet. Shouts erupted from the Eldanians. A horse screamed. Flaming chunks of thatch and mud rained down around him, and he ducked his head and leaped from the village’s edge into a gully bottomed with a shallow, ice-cold stream. A second thoom echoed from the village. One of the others, Leramis thought, igniting the huts across the road.