by Jeff Seymour
He ran headlong downhill, following the stream, pulling souls into his legs and arms and letting them glow as they spent their energy. He ran as fast as a bird could fly, with the hills racing past and his feet pounding the rock beneath the water. His arms pumped madly to keep him balanced.
And his muscles burned. Oh, how they burned.
He splashed through holes and over rocks and scraped through bushes and brambles and sent water and pebbles flying behind him. The heat of the weaving grew in his legs and spread through his whole body, until it arced white-hot across the fabric of his mind. His lungs ached. His stomach twisted. His heart felt ready to burst.
He let go of the River and fell shaking onto his hands and knees in the water.
Too hard, he told himself. He couldn’t see clearly. The light was gray and flat, and his eyes wouldn’t focus on the barren land. You ran too hard.
The wind whistled over his head. The icy water sucked the real heat, his heat, from his body and legs, but it didn’t touch the heat of the souls. His ears burned. His stomach threatened to spill itself. He ground his teeth together.
Move.
Slowly, he dragged his body out of the stream and up the hill at the edge of the gully. Brambles scratched his hands, his arms, his face. Dirt and mud sucked at his chest and legs and feet.
When he reached the top of the ridge, he lay there for a moment, trying to catch his breath.
If he was being followed, he needed to know about it.
Focus, he told his eyes. He squinted as hard as he could and faced the way he’d come, west into the wind.
He’d run at least a mile from the ridge. Halfway Home was pouring thick black smoke into the sky. Figures moved on its outskirts. Some on horseback, others on foot. Bodies were being thrown on the flames.
No prisoners, he thought. We didn’t expect them to take no prisoners.
The Eldanians would need time to put out the fires, time to clear the stakes and logs and roadblocks that Leramis and the others had put in their path. But not that much time. They’d be moving south again within an hour or two.
And Leramis’s flight hadn’t gone unnoticed.
Six people walked carefully down the gully, still pretty far away, the stream bunching around their ankles. He wasn’t safe on the ridge. Wouldn’t be safe on any ridge. He tried to stand, but his legs spasmed and dropped him.
You have to wait, he told himself.
A few minutes passed. The Eldanian search party crawled forward, probably afraid of an ambush. Leramis’s heart calmed. His breath returned. He rolled onto his back and let the swirling mists cool his burning face.
So little, whispered a voice in his mind.
The necromancers in the village. The smoking man. The knights and the soulweavers and the footsoldiers. They’d died for so little—the pride of Eldan’s Temple and the madness of a few powerful people.
Leramis was a Necromancer of the Eye and a former Soulweaver of the Temple. He’d killed before, and he’d seen others die. But it had been a long time since he’d seen death like that—death without meaning.
It had been since the mud and the rain in the wastes north of Ilthien’s Wall.
The memory rushed over him: Thorsten Heldani keeling over on his horse, caught in the chest by a spear of light. Mog Overbridge turning to flee and catching a second in the back. Four Sh’ma melting out of the trees. The River bucking, twisting, shearing.
The visions grew thicker. Raden Thornwhistle, the Twelfthman in charge of his unit, burned before his eyes. A Sh’ma with ice-blue hair stared at his guts in his hands. Fat-faced Royce Hilden spat out blood and teeth. Young Thomas a’Rill shoved his sword through a red-haired Sh’ma’s chest and lost his head in a flash of blood.
Leramis rolled over and vomited in the mud, his arms shaking, his face numb.
It’ll pass, he told himself as his guts contracted. It’ll pass.
In the memory, a green-haired Sh’ma raced at him. The Sh’ma slipped and that slip saved Leramis’s life, and then he was ramming his sword through the Sh’ma’s chest, bellowing at the top of his lungs. Ryam Redvine was struggling hand-to-hand with a Sh’ma with indigo hair. Everyone else was dead. Leramis rushed forward. Ryam’s face was melting. He was shrieking—was shrieking—was shrieking—
When Leramis was finished throwing up, he lifted his head and looked up the gully. His pursuers were still picking their way through the rocks, but they were closer now. Leramis lay back in the mud. His stomach was sore, the back of his throat raw. His right hand felt hot and sweaty.
I burned that infantryman’s face. Just like the Sh’ma did to Ryam. I burned his face.
Still shaking and wiping the vomit from his lips, Leramis rolled and slid into the next gully over, heading south toward the honeycomb of caves called the Atar that riddled the southeastern section of the island. There were passages there he could hide in. Caches of supplies left for necromancers like him. He might find others there. Allies. Friends. His brothers and sisters.
When he was close enough to the bottom of the gully that his weight would drag him no farther, he stood shakily. He made it three more steps, into the stream at the gully’s nadir, before his legs gave out again. His heart thundered. The icy water of the stream trickled over his legs, his torso, his neck.
Get up, he told himself.
His body wouldn’t move.
Get up!
Leramis crawled out of the stream and collapsed at the foot of a steep, slick ridge covered in roots and thornbushes and sharp rocks. The vomit clung to his chin. His heart felt thready and weak. He was soaking wet, and his legs were numb.
Walk, he told himself. Get up and walk.
He raised his head again. The smoke of Halfway Home smelled almost sweet.
Using his hands to help him, Leramis stood and began to climb again.
TWENTY-FIVE
Thirty-six days before the sack of Death’s Head
It took Leramis the rest of the day to reach the Atar. For hours, the blue-tinged hills that hid the honeycomb of caves hung tantalizingly close, but the going was slow. His legs were rubbery. His arms numbed. Every time he strained, his heart raced and he had to stop and catch his breath. The morning’s misting rain intensified into a howling storm that soaked him so thoroughly his robe doubled in weight. His head grew hot and his vision blurry. His knees picked up new scrapes. Climbing into and out of the gullies left his hands raw and a muscle in his right leg seizing at uneven intervals.
He heard no sounds of pursuit.
In the hour just before dark, Leramis eased his exhausted body into a bracken-filled gully and found what he was looking for—a small cleft between two slabs of black rock, overgrown by long brown brambles and thick blue-green bushes with spiked leaves. He pushed through the vegetation, squeezed through the cleft, and stepped into the stillness of the Atar.
The rain ceased to touch him. The air on his face grew still. He couldn’t see in the darkness, but he didn’t care. The quiet, the calm, and the peace were all that mattered.
Leramis stepped forward, leaned against the wet rock of the cave, and coughed. The sound echoed sharply over the hollow howls of the wind in the hills. He rubbed his chest. His eyes drifted shut. He slid down the rock wall until he was seated.
Get up, he told himself. Get up and go deeper. You’re not safe here.
It was no use. His body wouldn’t listen.
Get up, he tried again. Get—
He woke hours later to the feeling of his head being jerked back and the touch of something sharp to his throat.
“You weave, you die,” someone growled. “You move, you die. You do anything other than exactly what I tell you, you die. Do you understand?”
Leramis’s arms felt limp. His legs as well. The cool, calm air of the Atar surrounded him, but he could see nothing other than harsh white light through a dark cloth across his eyes.
Blindfolded, he realized. A cloth was stuffed in his mouth too. And gagged. He tried to mumb
le an affirmative. A female voice spoke.
“He’s no threat. I have him well wrapped.”
She’s irritated, he thought. His mind felt slow. And I’m not bound in rope.
He was bound in souls instead. Strands of them had been wrapped around him, biting into the muscles of his arms and legs to sap his strength. The souls formed stronger bindings than the stiffest chains. As he woke, he felt more of them, as well as the flow of the River around him. There were two soulweavers close by, plus a third person whom the River didn’t bend around. The latter held the blade to his throat.
“I don’t care,” said the man with the knife. “You keep him wrapped, I’ll keep a knife to his throat, and we’ll take him to Lord Steelhill.”
A few cords of souls were removed from Leramis’s body. Feeling and coordination returned to his legs in a rush, as if the limbs had fallen asleep and their circulation had just been reestablished. The blade pressed against his throat.
“Stand and walk,” said the man.
Leramis did—right back into the rain and the cold and the death and the misery from which he’d fled.
The camp his captors took him to was less than an hour away from the Atar, past three gullies and sited on the ridge road itself. Getting there was still difficult. In the end, the feeling was returned to Leramis’s arms, then his hands as well, and the man with the blade was forced to remove it from his throat while they climbed.
The blindfold was never taken from Leramis’s eyes, but he heard other people once they reached the flatter ground of the Spine. There must have been hundreds of them, milling about and murmuring and catcalling and shouting. He caught horse sounds too, and hammering. He smelled meat and vegetables cooking on fires of wet wood and peat.
If anyone was surprised to see a captive being brought in, they didn’t make much noise about it.
The blade was returned to Leramis’s throat and his arms were rewrapped. His third escort still hadn’t spoken, but the River bent around him or her like water circling a drain. It was the third who was the most powerful and the one worth fearing, not the woman controlling his wraps or the man with the knife or even the hundred people around him.
It was the third who was his better.
The storm let up as Leramis passed through the camp. The rain disappeared, and the wind died and left behind a cold, quiet breeze. Gray light built by the minute beyond the blindfold.
I slept longer than I realized.
The man with the knife stopped walking, and Leramis halted. His arms hung uselessly at his sides. His heart raced. Whispers drifted toward him from the gray nothing.
Voices rose and fell, and then his third escort spoke.
“I will vouch for his harmlessness. Announce us.”
The voice was male, bold and deep. It hummed with strength.
A Twelfthman, Leramis guessed.
He heard canvas flapping, footsteps, more murmuring. The rough hands of the man with the knife pressed him forward. He stepped into a slug of warm, pine-scented air.
And then Leramis heard a voice he hadn’t expected to hear ever again.
“Half-mad? Half-mad Hentworth?”
He stiffened at the name.
The blindfold was removed from his eyes. Leramis found himself in a wide tent of forest-green cloth. Tall steel braziers hissed and popped in its corners and center. There was a bed at one end, and chests and clothing were scattered between.
In the center of it all stood a gaping young man with barrel arms, wine-cask legs, and blond hair that curled to his shoulders. A gray tabard sat over a green shirt on his chest. He had blue eyes, strong cheekbones—and a round, purple scar where once there’d been a fat wart on his cheek.
Leramis had known him, long ago.
Half-mad, the man had called him. As if that was Leramis’s only name.
“We had a name for you too, you know,” he growled.
The man’s lips thinned. His face turned red. The veins on his arms stood out. He walked forward and leaned in close enough that Leramis could smell the sweetmint on his breath.
“Call me ‘Toad’ and it’s your life, Half-mad,” he whispered.
Leramis didn’t doubt that he meant it.
He had met Charles “Toad” Steelhill at twelve years old, when he’d been enrolled at the Lars Dors School for Boys in Eldan City. Even mocked as he was by the other boys for his wart, Charles had spat at Leramis’s feet when he walked past, turned his back on him at the table, and wreaked a hundred other childhood cruelnesses on the poorest, loneliest, least-important noble at the school.
By the time Leramis had reached Lars Dors, he’d already been Lord Hentworth by title.
The other boys had only laughed at that.
Steelhill straightened and crossed his arms, and Leramis watched him breathe the hatred out of his eyes. Leramis could guess what he was remembering; Lars Dors hadn’t been an easy place to be different—not even for a Steelhill. The wart on his cheek had made Charles an easy target, and all his father’s money and prestige had counted for nothing against it. Even his cousins in House Taeryn had mocked him.
But Charles Steelhill had clearly grown past that. In a moment, the anger had gone from his face and he’d taken a seat before a map-covered table in the center of the tent. A sheaf of papers lay scattered across the maps. A gold wedding ring flashed on his finger as he shuffled through them.
“You know, Hentworth, this is what you could have had,” he said. His eyes remained on the papers before him. Dispatches, Leramis supposed, though he couldn’t be sure. “I command a dozen households now—and as many soulweavers, for this campaign. Temper aside, you were smart. I remember that much. Probably smarter than me. You would have done well.”
Leramis frowned. He could have done very well, but with no land, no money, no connections, he would’ve been lucky to command five men, and after the scandal of his father’s last days he never would’ve found a marriage. Charles’s eyes came up. A wispy blond beard clung to his face like dandelion fuzz.
“The Temple is claiming all captives in this campaign, Half-mad.” The papers shuffled in his hands again. “There’s nothing I can do for you. Or that House Serethon can, not that they’re likely to try.”
Leramis’s throat tightened. His cousins in House Serethon had been even crueler to him than the other boys at Lars Dors. His family had been a blight on their name, and their nastiness had been their way of distancing themselves from it.
“How’s your father?” Leramis asked quietly. He had the pleasure of watching a muscle in Charles’s jaw twitch in response. Alphonse Lord Steelhill had been old and falling apart when Leramis had left Lars Dors. He was almost certainly dead.
The man with the knife struck him on the back of the head hard enough to blur his vision.
“The necromancer killed one man this morning, m’lud,” the man mumbled. His voice was thick and choked. “Maimed two others.”
Charles’s eyebrows rose. “Who?”
“Killed Fishbridge, crushed Bymarsh’s legs beneath his horse and burned Lackley’s face.” The knife twitched against his throat. “They say Lackley’ll go blind.”
Steelhill’s mouth slid into a deep, tight frown, and Leramis was suddenly sorry for the man behind him. Sorry for Fishbridge and Bymarsh and Lackley and the others whom he’d killed or tried to kill. Sorry for the others who’d died and would die before it was over, who served a nobility that, for the most part, didn’t care about them.
Steelhill shook his head.
Fire and steel, Leramis saw in his eyes. Hot coals and ice water. It was a look that had made people leave Charles Steelhill alone, once he’d grown big enough to back it up during wrestling lessons.
“There’s blood on your hands, Half-mad,” he said. “My men’s blood, and the blood of the nobles they were fighting alongside. And that makes it my blood.” His hand stroked the blond wisps on his chin. He looked briefly at the soulweavers behind Leramis. His chin wagged down and up.
The wrap around Leramis tightened. His legs wobbled and dumped him to the ground. His eyes lost their ability to focus. His chest felt like a heavy weight had been set upon it.
Steelhill’s questions came fast and merciless.
“How many more in the caves?”
“I don’t know.”
“How many left in your unit?”
“I don’t know.”
“How many man the walls of Death’s Head?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re ripping out your own entrails, Half-mad,” Steelhill said.
The rain picked up against the tent. Someone behind Leramis moved. A poker sizzled its way into coals.
Please, Yenor, he prayed, let me die quickly.
If Steelhill was asking about the walls, it meant they hadn’t been stormed yet. The city hadn’t fallen, but neither had the Eldanians marched into the Order’s trap.
Someone talked, he realized. That explained how he’d been found, how Eldan’s army had known about the caves. Why it had avoided the trap.
Steelhill’s voice was cold.
“I’ll ask you again. How many?”
The truth was that Leramis didn’t know. But if someone had told the Eldanians about the caves, they’d likely told them about the walls, and in that case misinformation was the best he could offer his comrades. He lowered his eyes.
“Two thousand.”
“You’re lying.” The response came immediately from behind him, out of the mouth of the maybe-Twelfthman. “There aren’t that many in the entire Order.”
The Twelfthman was wrong. There were about twenty-four hundred in the Order, but many of them had postings on the mainland, and many more had been sent away before the assault, so that the Order would survive even if Death’s Head fell. Others had been outside the walls as skirmishers, like Leramis. In truth, he estimated there were about twelve hundred left to defend Death’s Head.
Leramis forced himself to smile. His tongue felt dry and thick, but his eyes started to focus more clearly again. “If you’re so sure, Twelfthman,” he said, “storm the walls and find out.”