by Jeff Seymour
“Sh’a’e, Tsu’min,” she said, and she rubbed his knuckles with her thumb. “If you falter, I will lead.”
***
Tsu’min’s turn to weave didn’t come again. As he walked stiff-legged toward the chamber of Arenthor, shouts of jubilation erupted from it. The previous shift had found the third soul and marked its position in the world and the shape of the body that held it. Many of the na’oth’na leaped up in tornados of color and hugged one another and Maegan and anyone else who’d let them.
Tsu’min found it hard to share in the joy.
His heart was troubled and stormy, and his blood felt thick. It was difficult to think clearly.
So as the others laughed and cheered and prepared a feast that night, Tsu’min stood at the edge of the Temple of Arenthor and stared at the stars. The clouds played around the rim of the crater like children. Behind him, the gentle humming of a lale’thmesh and a rale’thmesh filled the night as someone played the stringed instruments in harmony. He smelled cheese and sausages and onions and hot peppers cooking, heard some of the others whirling in breathless dance.
He stood away from it all, and out in the cold he thought of Mi’ame. Her eyes. Her words. The caring she’d shown him and so many of the people they’d met on their travels.The way she stretched her arms in the morning and always slept on one side at night. The others thought, perhaps, of the world, and the thing they’d just done to help save it.
“I hear you found Mi’ame’s soul,” said a deep voice behind him, after the music had quieted and the dancing stopped. A plate of onions and sausage in gravy was waved in front of Tsu’min by a wide, meaty hand.
When Tsu’min turned, he found Eluama standing between him and the warmth inside the temple. The Sh’ma had a smile on his face.
“Congratulations,” Eluama said.
“Gua’sh’ta’tya,” Tsu’min replied. He took the plate and began to eat with his fingers.
Eluama crossed his arms. Behind him, the other na’oth’na were eating, and the green-haired twins had produced a skin of wine and begun to drink.
“Will you go to her?” Eluama asked.
Tsu’min set down the plate. The food tasted hot and fatty, and the gravy was slick and warm on his fingers. It felt good to eat. He hadn’t eaten all day.
“I shouldn’t,” he said.
“You would not be judged,” replied Eluama.
Tsu’min turned from him and looked again at the night sky—clear and crisp and full of stars above the wide yawn of the crater. The wing of the Heartwren hung over the heavens to the north, a long crescent with a flat line above it. The rest of the bird was hidden by the crater rim, but he knew it would be there, waiting for him.
“She’s in Emeth’il,” he said.
“Not far,” Eluama offered. “Only a few days’ journey.”
“In a few days you’ll be gone.”
“You know where we go, Tsu’min. You could find us.”
Three souls. One in Eldan City, one in western Nutharion, and one in the heart of Aleana.
“Where will you meet when they’re gathered?” Tsu’min asked.
Eluama’s feet scuffed the stone. “In truth, I do not know. The world is not united as it once was. Search for our eddy in the River. You will find it, I am sure.”
Tsu’min nodded. Eluama laid a hand on his shoulder, then walked away.
The stars swung over the bowl of the crater. Tsu’min watched them, then turned back to look at the others once more.
Within the temple, Maegan Heramsun sat by the roaring fire, her book open, her pen resting lightly on the page. She ignored the dancing and revelry. Occasionally, she dipped into her ink well and scratched a character or two on the parchment. Her eyes rarely left him for more than a moment.
My story, Tsu’min thought. She wants to tell the world my story.
He wished he knew how the tale would read.
THIRTY-ONE
Fourteen days before the destruction of Nutharion City
A-
I was right.
Dil held Blackarrow’s letter with steady fingers. There had been time to grieve, and the sorrow in her had hardened into something new. Whoever these people were who had killed Quay and disappeared Ryse, whatever they wanted, she was going to stop them.
Eavesdropped on Willow and Thinshadow. They’ve been busy. Thinshadow in confidence of his mother. Heard through her that his father’s planning to off Koe. Elpion and Pendilon both in on it.
Dil’s heart sped up. This was what she’d been waiting for. Proof of what was happening in Eldan City. House Elpion and House Pendilon were plotting to take the throne. Pendilon had killed Quay to get him out of the way. Elpion, through the Temple, had done something with Ryse to make sure she couldn’t tell anyone about it.
Willow pissed. Thinshadow unhappy. Fought about what to do. Elpion and Pendilon’s plan seems very thorough. Several scenarios thought out, inc. attempt to break off Blackgrab early. Willow went to father. Knew about plot and could do nothing. Willow then convinced Thinshadow to sneak warning to Koe via Djqfodx Rgddoykoo.
Dil sighed and rummaged through her desk until she found a cipher beneath a false panel. Names with no agreed-upon shorthand were scrambled by means of letter substitution. Djqfodx Rgddoykoo translated as Charles Steelhill.
“Have you got something?” Allenbee asked from across the room.
Dil ignored her.
Stupid plan. Doubt they’ll succeed. Thinshadow likely to get caught and knows it. Don’t know what father will do, but won’t be pretty. Thinshadow to go through Desperhorn.
Desperhorn was a new shorthand for Densel. Found by the docks. Dil shivered. The place where everything had gone wrong for Quay and Ryse.
Last letter for while. Been taking too many risks. Need to lie low.
- Blackarrow
“So that’s it then,” Allenbee said over her shoulder. “Do you believe him?”
Dil laid Blackarrow’s letter on the desk and closed her eyes. There was a chance that the spy was misleading them for some reason, but everything he’d written felt true. If Aegelden Elpioni had been aiming for the throne of Eldan from the start, it would make a twisted sort of sense for him to suppress knowledge of the destruction of the heart dragons; he’d want the full attention of Eldan on taking revenge against the necromancers so that he could pressure Molte Eldani into a dangerous situation. And if what Allenbee had said about the Eldanian nobility being willing to do anything for the throne was true, then it explained why they were ignoring the threat of the dragon as well.
“Yes,” Dil said. “I do.” She twisted around to face Allenbee.
The Violet Lady nodded. Her face had grown serious. “I do too,” she said.
Dil felt the flush of action―finally, after all these months―hit her veins. Now was the time to move. To help Ense Pendilon get his warning to Charles Steelhill before it was too late. She’d failed to save Quay, but she might not be too late to save his father. “So what do we do?”
Allenbee crossed to the window and looked out on Nutharion City. The metropolis was already beginning to empty; many of the houses were boarded up and locked, and the streets were regularly filled with wagon trains carting the belongings of those who lived on the Skylevel out of the city.
“There’s nothing we can do,” Allenbee said.
“But this warning—”
“Has very likely either succeeded or failed already.” Allenbee turned around. “It takes Blackarrow’s letters several days to get from Eldan City to me. Ense Pendilon is probably in Densel already, if not beyond. And by the time we could get anyone there, he would certainly have passed through.” She drummed her fingers on her arm, then delivered a withering glare to Dil and stormed over to her desk. “You and Blackarrow took too long to figure this out. I dislike feeling powerless, Dilanthia Lonecliff. I dislike it very much.”
Dil ignored the rebuke and thought about how long it would take her and Cole to get to Densel. Her st
omach twisted. She didn’t even know what Ense Pendilon looked like, let alone where he’d be or how she could help him.
Still, she had to do something.
Allenbee dropped into her chair, put her feet on her desk, and focused her glare on the window. “I see what you’re thinking, and I want you to stop. That man’s best hope right now is that my informers are better than anyone else’s. Anyone we send, anything we do, is more likely to compromise him than help him. I know it’s hard, and I know you want revenge, but now isn’t the time to get it.”
Dil’s hand tightened on the edge of her desk. The Second River pulsed at the boundaries of her consciousness. She wanted very much to channel something like a bear or a lion, pick up the desk, and hurl it through the window.
Instead, she sat back down and thought.
“So we wait,” she said.
Allenbee’s frown edged upward ever so slightly. “Yes.”
Dil’s mind took the puzzle and flipped it in a different direction. “Whatever they do in Menatar won’t be the end of it. Even if they get rid of Quay’s father, only one of them can take the throne. They’ll probably start stabbing each other in the back the minute it’s vacant.”
The frown grew into the beginnings of a smile. “Yes.”
Dil nabbed several sheets of paper and a quill. She’d been sending directions to Allenbee’s agents in Eldan City for over a month, and she was used to the process. “So while we can, we get ahead of them. Arayi Elpioni’s been named heir, so we know what House Elpion is getting out of the coup. We need to know what the other houses are getting in return for their help or their silence. Which ones are involved. Who thinks they have a shot at the throne and how they plan to get it.”
The smile broadened. “And then?”
Dil wrote furiously, scribbling instructions. “And then we find someone to help—someone who’ll do what Quay would have done, if he was still alive. Someone who’ll marshal Eldan to fight the dragon. Ense Pendilon, maybe. And we help them take the throne.”
Allenbee let out a pleased-sounding puff of air. “Precisely, Dilanthia.”
Dil glanced over at her. The Violet Lady’s eyes were focused on the city outside the window again. They looked hard as iron.
“Precisely.”
THIRTY-TWO
Twelve hours before the sack of Death’s Head
Still alive.
Leramis woke to drums and flapping canvas on 9 Leafmonth 7983. Water dripped onto his cheek and ran down his neck. Green light and dark shadows washed over him.
They seemed to have gotten tired of him, after a while.
After Steelhill’s ultimatum, the Eldanians had put Leramis in an empty tent and let him think, then returned to ask him questions about Death’s Head. He’d fed them false answers. You could choose how you wanted to be remembered, as Steelhill had said. You could try anything you might to live, only to fail in the end, or you could accept that no one lived forever and go to the grave with your sense of who you were intact.
But Steelhill’s one-day deadline had come and gone, and Leramis hadn’t been turned over to the Temple or killed. There’d been no more pokers in the coals, either. Someone from the Temple waited outside the tent, always, and someone else from the Eldanian army sat on a stool inside it. They never spoke to him, and after a while they’d stopped even looking at him.
But they fed him and gave him water.
Someone was keeping him alive, and he wondered why.
The drums were followed by loud curses.
“Half-mad!”
Muffled squabbling from outside the tent.
“Hentworth! Dammit, I want him to see!”
A canvas flap whipped open, and bright light framed a tall shadow in the door. Leramis squinted. Behind the silhouette the clouds looked high and thin with the light of morning.
The shadow stepped inside the tent. Leramis’s eyes adjusted.
Charles Steelhill stood before him, half-clad in gleaming plate armor. Two gray-faced soldiers at his back hurried to finish placing and tightening his protection. His eyes blazed. His face was flushed. His teeth gnashed.
“They’re marching, Half-mad,” he growled, and he strode forward, forcing one of his assistants along with him. Leramis saw the slap coming but could only flinch away from it. Steelhill’s open hand struck his ear and set it ringing. “They’re marching to their deaths, and you could have saved them!”
Leramis was hauled up by his collar and shoved into the arms of one of Steelhill’s attendants. His bindings were removed. It took a moment for feeling to return to his wrists, and he stood barefoot in the mud, rubbing his arms and his hands.
“Even if I’d known anything, Charles—”
“Spare me,” spat Steelhill. “You remember how to ride?”
Leramis nodded. He remembered, though his legs felt wobbly and he wondered whether he’d be able to.
“Then ride with me.”
Leramis did. Water was brought to him, and porridge, and boots. With the first two in his stomach and the third on his feet, he felt stronger. He followed Steelhill from the stinking, muddy tent into a cold dawn of bright mist and shouts and the thunder of hooves.
Steelhill didn’t so much as look at him. He seemed preoccupied. And whenever he wasn’t glaring at Leramis, the anger bled out of him.
As if he was only acting.
People came up to him, on horses or on foot, asking questions and carrying orders off. Twelve households, Steelhill had said he commanded. Probably ten to twenty soldiers in each. Conscriptees, or, since Steel Hall was a wealthy place, people paid to take their places.
All of them marching to their deaths.
A gray-robed Twelfthman fell in behind Leramis.
The presence of the soulweaver unnerved him. Steelhill had said he commanded a few in this campaign. But one of such power to follow a captive necromancer into battle? And someone to guard him, day and night, for weeks? Surely the young lord of Steel Hall would have run into questions from the Temple about what he was doing. Surely he wouldn’t have risked its ire for a chance at intelligence that wasn’t forthcoming or the privilege of keeping an old schoolmate alive.
Something odd was afoot, and Leramis didn’t like it. Not at all.
The tents and the mist and the horses told him nothing.
He was led to a brown gelding. It stood obediently as he struggled with the stirrups, pulled himself up, and settled on its back. The wind whistled cold and sharp against the mist on his cheeks. Green and gray tents flapped around him. Steelhill mounted a black war stallion twice the size of the gelding, and the Twelfthman straddled a horse of his own.
Leramis’s legs felt stretched and awkward against his horse’s ribs. When he tried to sit up in the saddle, his thighs quivered. When he let himself sag, his back began to ache.
Still, it was better than being bound in the tent.
Leramis took a deep breath. “Charles—”
Steelhill kicked his spurs into his mount’s ribs and shot forward.
Leramis could only follow.
Most of the Eldanian camp was empty—hundreds of vacant tents packed in long lines against the wet, rocky road that led down the Spine toward Death’s Head. In the part of the camp decorated with the black banners of House Pendilon, however, preparations were still being made. As they passed through, Steelhill nodded to a tall rider wearing black armor. The rider, in turn, stared hard at Leramis. He had soft brown eyes and a crooked nose, and he was of an age with Steelhill and Leramis.
Ense Pendilon, Leramis remembered. What the hell is he doing here? Aesith Lord Pendilon was as careful with his heirs as other people were with their account books.
They rode on. The porridge and the water settled in Leramis’s belly. His legs warmed up. After a few minutes, his head felt clearer than it had in days.
Columns of soldiers appeared in the mist, their helmets and bucklers flashing in the light. Steelhill rode by them in preoccupied silence. The soldiers marched wi
th their heads down, a banner bearing Steelhill’s colors flapping listlessly at their head. Only a few turned to look at the riders as they passed.
They even walk as if they’re going to their deaths, Leramis thought.
The road wound between two black hills and opened up, and for the first time in more than a month, Leramis saw the great wall of Death’s Head.
The fortification stretched across the base of a steep incline that led from the Spine into the city. Its dark stones reached eighty feet into the air, lined with snarling faces and fantastic creatures. Fluted columns ran from the wall’s bottom to its top, their stones old and slick with mist and moss. A closed gate forty feet wide, built more for display than defense, occupied the left side of the wall. Shut, it looked like the two halves of an enormous skull.
The wall was too thick to blast through—even for a score of soulweavers working at once and unopposed. Leramis saw only a few siege weapons—small catapults that looked cobbled together, as if they’d been adapted from the shipborne variety. He wondered how the Eldanians meant to take the city.
The Citadel stretched its bony towers into the sky to Leramis’s left, a skeletal hand of black fingers at the edge of the wall. It would have been abandoned for weeks. The necromancers had decided early on that there would be no holding out the siege in that bastion. There was no one coming to help them, and there were civilians in the city to protect. People whom they couldn’t hide in the Atar or who had refused to evacuate.
Leramis’s mouth felt dry. As Steelhill checked his horse and swore violently at a column of swordsmen, Leramis reached for a water skin tied to his horse’s saddle. The River contracted around him almost immediately. Tendrils of souls latched on to his arm. The strength drained from his hand. His fingers dribbled limply over the skin.
He turned and found the Twelfthman’s eyes pearly white behind him.
Moments later the way cleared. They crested a small rise, and Leramis saw the strength of Eldan marshaled in one place for the first time in his life. The footmen massed at the top of Death’s Hill—a surging crowd of thousands, their spears and armor and furled banners bright against the dark stone. Behind them, hidden from watchers in the city, there were companies of longbowmen, additional units and the heavy horse.