Soulwoven (24 page)

“You do not trust me, and I do not blame you. My chief concern is not for you or Cole or Ryse or even for myself.”

Ryse had seen the dragon when she wove souls. Cole and Len, he thought, had seen it in their dreams. Quay when he closed his eyes.

I can’t soulweave, but my dream—why hasn’t it come into my dream, or caught me when my eyes close?

“I may make mistakes, Litnig, but I do not make decisions lightly. We serve a cause more important—”

Litnig stared into the flames. He wrapped his good arm around his knees like he was a child.

Quay stopped speaking. When Litnig turned to look at him, he found the prince’s eyes fixed on his.

Ryse groaned in her sleep.

The moan was a deep, mournful sound that stretched into a long, loud, frightened one. She had a tortured look on her face. Her body was curled in the fetal position, twitching.

Litnig scrambled to her side as quickly as his body would take him. He recognized the fear on her face.

It was the same as he’d seen in Eldan City.

A lump lodged itself in his throat. He touched her shoulder with his good hand.

She sat up and grabbed his arm. Her nails dug into his skin. Her eyelids shot open, and she looked wildly at the shadows around the fire until her eyes found his face.

He ignored the pain of her grip. He knew,
knew,
that it was necromancers in Du Fenlan. Knew they would have to move, knew the others needed waking.

But he couldn’t stop thinking about the dragon.

He heard rustling and commanding whispers behind him. Ryse’s breathing calmed. Her hand left his arm.

The dragon,
he wanted to ask her.
What does it look like? What does it say?

B
ut her skin was pale, and there was sweat on her face. He couldn’t bring himself to voice the questions.

He licked his lips. Her eyes met his.

“Is it—?”

She nodded. Her chest heaved. So did his.

“If you want to stay here…”

She shook her head and pulled herself to her feet. He rose with her.

A hardness
came over her eyes. He could see the veins bulging on her temples. “I’m the only one who can sense them, Lit, and—”

She looked
north,
and something in her changed.

Goose bumps rippled over her skin. The hairs on her arms and neck stood on end. Her eyes widened, and she took a deep, shuddering breath. When she spoke, the bitterness in her voice had been replaced by wonder and a breathless trace of fear.

“Yenor will protect us,” she whispered. “We should go.”

Quay’s voice echoed over Litnig’s shoulder. “Should we run?”

Ryse closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they
glowed
pearl white.

“Yes,” she said.

And then they did.

TWENTY-FIVE

Ryse’s feet pounded a rocky, hard-beaten path. The River of Souls swirled in bright eddies around her. She still felt a little of the fever that had overtaken her in the tunnels, but she ignored it.

The valley ahead of her, a wide river plain surrounded by high mountains and dominated by a city that crept up the seat of a throne-shaped peak, was rich with souls. They poured over the tops of the ridges in heavy swells, rushed along the valley floor, pooled over villages and towns and crossed the night in great auroral arcs.

Fighting had already begun inside the city. The River was flooding into it in a vortex of light that roared over not just it but the whole valley. The Heart Dragons of Aleana hadn’t been broken—Ryse thought she would’ve felt it if they had been—but they were clearly at risk.

It wasn’t the danger to the heart dragons, however, that had set her heart racing.

Before the torrent of souls flowing into Du Fenlan had obscured all detail, she’d thought, just for a moment, that she’d felt the eddy of a soulweaver she hadn’t seen in more than two years.
A soulweaver who’d been in the Academy with her.
A soulweaver who’d died in the White Forest just before she’d gained the robe.

A hundred memories gaped before her as she ran: a boy with a drawn, darkened face drinking tea. A warm conversation in which she’d learned that he too had never known a real family.
Stealing time away from lectures and drills to meet him in empty hallways for a moment’s shared smile.
The thrill that had shot through every bone in her body the first time he’d held her. The taste of his lips…

The darkened walls of Du Fenlan loomed above.

Ryse could feel the soulweaving inside the city more clearly close up. There were two necromancers. Their weaving had a distinct, twisted aspect—pulled at the River in a way that was too easy, like a cart rolling unchecked down a steep hill. There were others weaving as well. Aleani soulweavers, she figured. They created smaller whirlpools in the River’s flow.

The necromancers were frighteningly powerful. And one of them wove just like a man she’d been told was dead.

Her mouth felt dry. The others stood in front of a small door cut into Du Fenlan’s massive wooden gates. Len was shouting at someone.

Through a slit in the door, Ryse spotted orange light and a pair of beady eyes. She couldn’t understand the words of the Aleani on the other side of the gate, but his tone was clear. They wouldn’t be let in.

She started weaving.

She laid a web of souls over the door and stepped forward. Her voice surprised her with its coldness.

“We are coming in,” she said. “If you value your life, you will step back.”

She scarcely registered the gatekeeper’s face. Aleani, dreadlocked, tattooed, it didn’t matter.

He moved, and she blew the door off its hinges.

She was running then, racing past columned buildings of limestone along a river and then moving up a steep hill tinted blue in the moonlight. Flagstones flew by under her feet. Souls streamed past her in the thousands.

Leramis’s father had been a scoundrel and a lush. The soulweaver she’d sensed could have been an illegitimate brother, a sister, a cousin. It didn’t have to be him. But he’d been powerful, woven so smoothly, so surely—

Just like these necromancers.

Ryse outdistanced the others. She had to know, even if it was neither the time nor the place to find out. She wanted to protect the heart dragons, and she wanted to protect her friends, but she also needed to ascertain whether Leramis was alive, what in the world he was doing with the necromancers if he was—

And why he’d let her cry for him if he’d lived.

The disturbance in the River centered on a bright limestone temple set into the hill she was climbing. The building looked eerily similar to the one she’d once guarded in Eldan City. It was garlanded by huge white columns that supported a pyramidal roof. A short flight of long white steps led from a small plaza up to its door. The door itself formed a tall rectangle of darkness in the moonlight.

Tall houses loomed above her, but she scarcely noticed them. The night was clear and crisp. The River surged throughout it.

She ran as fast as her legs would move.

A crowd of Aleani surrounded the temple. Ryse heard the crack and thunder of heavy soulweaving within the hill. A bald, armored Aleani staggered out of the darkened doorway carrying a yellow-robed, blood-covered shape. He roared something at the onlookers in a language Ryse couldn’t understand. They looked at one another and didn’t move.

Ryse drew closer. The temple’s entrance beckoned from the center of a wall of polished, rose-colored granite. The crowd parted like wheat. The shouting Aleani shut his mouth.

Thousands upon thousands of souls were flooding through the door and into the temple beyond, moving in a rush so heavy it brought the wind with it. A bolt of light lit the temple interior, then another, and a third. There was an explosion. Ryse saw a shape she hoped was already dead blasted into pieces.

She stepped through the rose door, and she knew pandemonium.

Souls flew about her like blind-fired arrows, pulled in a hundred different directions by dozens of soulweavers. Spears of light tore through the air. Explosions woven from hundreds of souls rocked rows of undead. Heavyset Aleani corpses ran amok—not moving slowly like the ones in Eldan City had, not meaning to terrify or to chase or to haunt, but to kill. Kamikaze skeletons and half-rotted corpses hurled themselves at banks of soulweavers and guards, where they tore and rent until they were cut to pieces or blasted apart. The undead seemed chaotic, insane, not calmly driven by a single will. Some of them were even ripping at one another.

The Aleani temple seemed to focalize around the huge, circular room that Ryse had stepped into. Three wide hallways led from it at right angles, and two smaller ones opened diagonally between them in a sunburst shape. Huge pillars filled the space. The undead were massed toward the north and center of the room, and the Aleani had taken a position near the southern hallway.

You’ve been trained for this,
she told herself. Memories of the graveyard in Eldan City floated at the edge of her consciousness, but she pushed them back.

Ryse moved into the complex but kept to the edge of the battle. Her heart pounded. Her limbs buzzed. In Eldan City, she’d learned the limits of her power. Turning the tide of a conflict like this one was beyond her.
But if the mystery soulweaver
was
Leramis, and if she could find him…

Maybe he could help.

An explosion cracked a pillar beside her, but she didn’t flinch. Every fiber of her being danced on edge, ready to act, ready to weave, ready to duck or to move or to do whatever was required to survive.

She’d been trained.

She circled north against the wall and held on to as much of the River as she could. The bones of the fallen crunched under her feet. The Aleani shouted and fought behind her. When she had to, she blasted her way through corpses.

The necromancers were in separate places. One was somewhere below her. The tendrils of souls that linked the undead to him flowed out of the hallway along the northeast edge of the room.

He wasn’t the one who wove like Leramis, however. The one who wove like Leramis was—

“Ryse!”

Quay’s hand closed around her wrist. He held a sword in his other, and he’d been cut from his forehead to the bridge of his nose. He was bleeding.

“What the hell are you doing?” he snarled.

He squeezed her wrist hard enough to hurt and hurled her roughly against the wall, where Cole and Dil were pressed with their weapons out. A corpse flew at them, and Quay sank his sword deep into its chest, then pulled the blade out and cut off its head. He kicked it back into the melee and there was a moment of rest.

“Where is he?” the prince barked.

Ryse blinked.

“I…”

Quay’s grip tightened. His face grew darker. Spittle flew from his lips when he spoke.

“The necromancer!
Where is he?”

The situation came back to her. Her priorities came back to her.

What the hell
am
I doing?
she
thought.

Quay released her arm.

She pursed her lips and read the flow of the River. “There are two of them,” she said. “One downstairs through that hallway, and the other—”

Cole shouted a curse. He tried to move into the fray, but Quay grabbed his shirt and yanked him back against the wall. Ryse realized that Litnig and Len were missing.

“Why are they fighting each other?” Quay asked. He held Cole’s shirt in one hand, and he was staring at the undead. The ragged corpses in front of them were ripping into each other as often as they ran for the living.

“I don’t know,” Ryse said. The second necromancer, the one who wove like Leramis, was somewhere in the main room, but he was masking his presence well. She couldn’t find him. “Which way are the heart dragons?” she asked.

Another explosion tore through the corpses, and Quay’s eyes narrowed. “We got separated before Len could show us.”

Ryse swallowed.

“To hell with the bloody dragons!
What about Lit?” Cole’s eyes blazed. His cheek had a large red welt on it.

Quay ground his teeth. “We can worry about him—” He turned and cut down another corpse that got too interested in them.

But in order to do that, he had to release Cole. Ryse saw it happening and snatched at the younger Jin brother’s collar, but Cole was too quick. He ducked under her swipe and shot into the melee, kept low, bull-rushed a skeleton and slipped between two shaggy corpses. A third exploded next to him. Dil took off in his wake.

“No, damn your eyes! Cole!” Quay’s voice was raw and ragged.

He raced forward and left Ryse alone by the wall.

She took a deep breath, and she wove.

It was difficult to see the others. There was little natural light, and the room was clogged with souls. But she was able to pull the little orbs into gnarled, unruly balls of light and blast two corpses away from Cole, one away from Dil.

Slowly, she began to work her way across the room.

The groups of undead grew thicker and more vicious as she and the others approached the northeast hallway. Cole’s dagger was in his hand. Behind him, Quay seemed to be doing all right, and Dil was hugging close between them both.

But the three of them were tempting fate.

The Aleani soulweavers didn’t know or care who they were, and they were heading into the heart of the bombardment. Ryse couldn’t bend or block so many weavings—not when she didn’t know where they would come from, what shape they’d take. She couldn’t protect them from the Aleani.

A ball of souls coalesced in front of her, and it took all of her strength to weave even a small barrier around it before it exploded. The shockwave threw her off-balance. She lost track of Cole and Dil, shut her eyes to ward off the light and the smoke.

Something grabbed her arm, and she shook it free. Her knee went for wherever the grab had come from and was blocked. She opened her eyes and saw an angry, sooty, bleeding Quay. He pulled her against the nearest wall. They’d made it to the east side of the room, just yards from the hall, but Cole and Dil were nowhere to be seen. The prince was heavily favoring his left leg.