Soulwoven (2 page)

I dreamed.

Litnig sat up and slipped a shirt of rough wool over his head. Already, the dream was fading, but he remembered a gray stone disc as wide as his yard, and faces in the darkness, and teeth, and chains.

And an Aleani.

Litnig shivered.

He breathed.

He thought of Ryse.

Everybody dreams,
she’d told him once.
Some people just don’t remember.

And everybody but Litnig did. They dreamed, and they talked about their dreams, and they argued over what they meant or didn’t mean, and Litnig stayed silent and pretended it didn’t hurt.

Another time, Ryse had told him that she didn’t care if he didn’t dream, and for years she’d run carefree with him and his brother around the white stone mansions and muddy, ramshackle hovels of Eldan City. She’d laughed and cried and played with him. She’d soothed his bruises and told him stories. He’d planned to marry her one day.

And then she’d left and come back changed.

The priests of the Temple of Eldan had taught Ryse to see and use the river of souls that flowed around the world like the air. She had better things to do now than talk to Litnig.

Litnig wanted to see her anyway.
Wanted to tell her about the dream.

And about the Aleani.

He sighed and rubbed his hands on his thighs. The dream hovered at the edge of his memory, all teeth and iron and shadow.

You should go back to sleep,
he told himself.
This was going to be the night you moved on. That you grew up. You can tell Cole about the dream tomorrow.

But truth be told, he was glad that instead he had a reason to go and talk to Ryse again.

Litnig rose and stumbled his way into the dust and dirt and discarded clothes that marked his
brother’s
half of the room. Cole was mumbling and kicking softly at the footboard of his bed as he slept. His nose looked swollen and red, but in the moonlight he seemed calm, happy,
peaceful
.

Something moved outside. Pebbles blowing in the wind or rain peppering the side of the—

Litnig’s ears popped. The door slammed open with a bang, and a gust of air pushed him forward. He felt something tear deep inside his chest, tangled his feet in the clothes on the floor,
lost
his balance.

A shriek like a piece of metal being wrenched apart filled the night.

Litnig hit the floor face first.
Hard.
The dream flashed back through his mind, and then he had a vision of Ryse lying pale and panicked somewhere in the dark.

A deep voice filled the empty spaces between his thoughts.

Everything will be all right,
it said.
Bring your brother.

The vision disappeared. Litnig lay on the floor with his ears ringing and his head pounding and the voice echoing in his mind. He clapped his hand to his chest, but everything felt normal there except for the racing of his heart.

Another dream?
Part of the first dream, returning?

Or something else entirely?

Above him, Cole sat up. His back ran straight as a flour rod, and he stared wide-eyed toward the shadows in the corner of the room. His chest moved in and out in deep, rapid breaths.

Bring your brother.

There was a moment of silence. Litnig swallowed.

Only a fool would risk the wrath of Torin Jin to go out in the city at night just because he’d had a bad dream. Even if that dream was the only one he’d ever had.

But Litnig had never laid any great claims on wisdom.

He rolled to his feet. Cole’s eyes left the shadows and settled on him.

“I’m going to see Ryse,” Litnig mumbled. His lips felt numb. He rubbed his forehead, cleared his throat. “Come with me?”

Cole’s breathing slowed. Usually, Litnig didn’t get easy favors from his brother. On most days he had to twist an arm—sometimes even hard—to get him to do anything.

But Cole just looked at him, swallowed, and swung his legs off the bed.

“Sure,” he mumbled.
“Gimme a second.”

And as his brother dressed hurriedly in the dark, Litnig was much too wrapped up in his own worries to stop and wonder why.

TWO

Cole stepped into a shallow puddle on the moonlit street outside his home, bit off a curse, and wondered what the hell was wrong with him. It was late. It was cold. It was wet. His nose hurt.

He’d had a hell of a day. Hot and sticky, polished off with a punch to the face, and he’d missed the Equinox Festival. All he really wanted to be doing was lying in bed pretending he was someplace else.

And yet,
he thought,
you let a dream chase you out.

Cole didn’t put much stock in dreams. Nor did he put much stock in the stars that hung above his head, the Tenets of Yenor, fortune tellers—none of it. He put stock in himself, in his friends, and every so often, in his brother. That was all.
Period.

But still.

He wrinkled his swollen nose and frowned. The night was chilly, soak-your-bones damp in a way that made it feel more like winter than spring. The street outside his house shone bleached white in the moonlight, and he could smell the sewer stink of the slums wafting up the River Eld to his right. In the north, a white quarter moon hung above the twinkling lights of Temple Hill.

Closer were his dark-haired lummox of an older brother, a growing dampness in the toes of his boots, and the thick, fearful memory of a nightmare.

Cole stepped farther into the street while his brother locked the door. He remembered a dozen times he’d run away from home on nights like this, only to return within a few days. He remembered bloody noses.
Bloody ears.
Black eyes.
Bruised ribs.

The memories always came after his father hit him.

The cobblestone thoroughfare outside his house was deserted, but the orange light of candles flickered from the second-story windows of a few white-plastered houses. He thought he heard children crying. The memories of his life faded away. The image of a black-scaled dragon’s head filled his mind, and he remembered a scream, a horrible, ear-shattering scream, and the feeling that the world was ripping apart and he was ripping with it.

He pulled his collar up.

Just a dream,
he told himself, but he didn’t believe it.

The moon broke through the clouds. The wind shifted, replaced the fetid stench of the slums with the scent of clean, wet earth and stone, and Eldan City shone bright and glistening in front of him. The three hills that framed it rose prominently from the sprawl of houses in the river valleys below them, shadowed sentinels glittering with yellow lights.
Friendly, open, full of life.

Cole took a deep breath and followed his brother toward the river. It would be good to have a walk, get his mind off his nightmare. It might even be good to see Ryse, if she could get off her newfound high horse long enough to talk with them.

The craggy shadows of the city stretched before him, silhouettes clustered along the rivers and reaching up the hills. He smiled. He’d spent much of his life in those shadows. They’d been the father he’d always wanted. They’d let him grow.

A mile or two ahead, across the rush of the River Eld, the white pillars and golden dome of the Temple of Eldan glittered atop the blackened shapes of Temple Hill. “Welcoming sinners and the pious alike,” its white-and-black-robed priests told anyone who would listen.

Cole had never put much stock in them either.

At the bottom of Temple Hill, the iron gates and moss-covered stones of the Old Temple stood in cold, stark contrast to the garish dome above them. The Old Temple had been built smaller than the New, with a peaked roof and the stories of the Book of Yenor carved in relief upon its gables. It was thousands of years older than the complex above it and got more attention from one-penny storytellers than priests. He remembered going there with Litnig and his mother when he was a kid, to hear the tales of Eldan’s great triumphs in the name of Yenor. The place, in his mind, was one of sunny afternoons and pleasant naps.

It was there that Ryse Lethien stood watch at night.

The city was unusually quiet—no rats, no owls, no cats chasing one another in the cool shadows. The festival poles were still, their ribbons hanging limply at their sides. The bonfires had burned down to cold piles of black ash. Neither Cole nor his brother broke the silence. They passed the gold-painted wooden figurines of the Fishbridge and crossed over the broad silver stroke of the Eld into Temple Hill without meeting a soul.

Cole’s toes got wetter and colder, and he wrapped a scarf around his ears. Temple Hill was always quiet at night, but at least it was safe. Nobody much wanted to risk mugging a soulweaver by accident. He’d seen that happen once. The woman’s scream, as soulwoven fire engulfed the hand holding her knife, had been as high as a child’s.

It wasn’t until the darkened gates of the Old Temple grew almost close enough to spit on that Cole spotted even the slightest hint of life.

It was a much slighter hint than he was comfortable with.

Two people lay on the temple steps, their bodies at odd angles, bent in ways that would be uncomfortable at best and painful at worst. They wore the white sash of the temple across their chests. There was a liquid, sticky darkness underneath them, almost black in the moon’s white glow.

The guards,
he thought.
Posted outside, just in case.
His stomach jumped into his throat.

Litnig quickened his pace. Cole slowed down, tried to push away his memories of sunshine and story and fire and dragons and screams and let his ears listen for trouble the way he’d done in the shadows a hundred times since he’d been old enough to sneak out on his own.

He heard nothing.
Just the wind, whistling along the Eld and between the pillars of the Old Temple.

Cole stopped a few feet from the guards. The darkness underneath them was a thick, viscous pool the black-cherry color of drying blood. His hand went to his hip, expecting to find two daggers he’d been given long ago, and came up empty. He hadn’t anticipated violence, hadn’t anticipated bodies.

“Lit, we should go.”

His brother stopped with his foot on the first step, facing the dark, open archway of the temple with the light of the moon on his face.

“Ryse is in there.”

“She’ll be fine.” Ryse was a bloody
soulweaver
. If she
wasn’t
fine, there sure as hell wouldn’t be anything
they
could do about it. Whoever had killed those guards, whoever was confident or stupid enough to just slap the Temple in the face like that, he and his brother didn’t want any part of them.

Cole looked back. Behind them, the street looked empty, cold,
wet
, safe.
Like it always had.

When he turned forward again, Litnig was already walking into the temple. And Cole couldn’t let his brother go alone.

So he shut his eyes, told the smarter half of his brain to shove off, and followed.

The temple gates hung open and abandoned, creaking on rusty hinges in a draft that moaned cold and heavy out of the temple proper. Cole crept through them behind his brother into a large, domed chamber with a hole in its roof and a sparkling cistern in its center. Fading, chipped frescoes of stories from humanity’s past covered the ceiling—Mennaia’s Awakening, the Exodus, the Discovery of the Sea. Extinguished torches sat black and abandoned in their sconces, scattered around the circumference of the dome.

Cole had never seen the torches like that. They were supposed to light the main room all night long. There should have been people and life there. After the dancing, after the drinking, after the fires, the faithful prayed and visited the graves of their ancestors on the spring equinox. Every year there was a gathering in the gardens behind the temple. He should’ve been able to hear it.

But there was only the wind and the hollow echo of his footsteps.

The doors in the north wall of the room snapped back and forth against the chains that held them open. Cole’s whole body stood on pins and needles.

Litnig slipped through the open doors, and Cole followed him down a short, dark hallway.

It’ll be fine,
he thought.
Everything’ll be fine. It was probably just thieves after something in the temple. They probably got what they wanted and got out already. It was probably just the guards who got offed. It was—

When they reached the gardens, there were bodies everywhere.

They lay scattered over the greenery that extended from the temple’s back steps, stretched between rows of headstones and statues beyond, sprawled halfway out of mausoleums in all states of decay. He saw haphazard piles of bones that looked like collapsed skeletons, rotting corpses with scraps of flesh hanging from their limbs, and bloated, putrescent things still vaguely recognizable as people. Fresher bodies lay on the ground in their funeral finery, and others looked new, brand-new, with dark red bloodstains soaking the simple clothes of everyday life upon them. The earth was torn in places, like the corpses had been dug up, and some of the old bodies were covered in the guts of the new. Cole bent over, and his stomach emptied itself all over his feet.

He had no memories to match this, except for the gut-wrenching feeling he’d had staring into the eyes of the dragon in his dream.

When he straightened again, he noticed that a few of the bodies were moving, twitching, alive, and that Litnig was still walking forward, heading into the graveyard with his body as tense as a horse in a surging crowd.

“Lit—” Cole started, but his brother cut him off.

“Ryse,” Litnig said. The name was stretched, his skin pale and drawn. “We have to find Ryse.”

Why?
Cole wondered.
What’s so bloody important about her right now?

But Litnig was already moving, and Cole could only take a deep, earth-scented breath and follow.

He tried not to look too hard at the people they passed, but it was impossible. Most of them were dead, none of them conscious. Their faces were contorted in pain, their bodies mangled, ripped apart. Cole had seen violence before. He’d seen people trampled, beaten, run down and killed during the Plague Riots as a kid. He’d watched knife fights in the Thieves’ Rise.