Soulwoven (32 page)

A sailor bought him time with his life.

The boy charged in from the side screaming a wordless battle cry and slashing with a short sword. The Van leaped back and dodged his first strike, then his second.

Len watched the beast pivot. He hurled his left ax at its chest.

The Van stepped forward. Len’s ax flew by it. It thrust.

Its left cutlass went straight into the sailor’s chest.

The Aleani’s eyes went wide. Len rushed forward. The Van’s sword was stuck in the sailor’s chest, and the boy had his hands on its hilt. He was shouting something, fighting even as he died.

Len would tell the boy’s family that, if he had the chance.

The Van had to let go of the sword to meet Len’s attack. They clashed, spun, clashed. The beast’s movements were easier to track with only one blade to follow.

But Len was down to one weapon as well.

Their duel grew tighter. Len struggled to grab one of the half a dozen weapons scattered across the
Rokwet
’s deck. The Van did the same. It angled for a short sword, and Len blocked its way. Len went for his ax, and the Van nearly took his arm off.

The fighting quieted. There were fewer other combatants to dodge around, and the screams and shouts of battle became less frequent.

Len couldn’t be sure who had won.

His breath came in gasps and grunts. His arms and legs burned. It was all he could do to keep the Van from gaining a second weapon.

Bone-deep pain engulfed his right arm.

Len tried to move it and failed. He was forced to fight defensively. The Van picked up its other cutlass.

A six-inch black dart was embedded in Len’s arm.

The Van stuck him in the shoulder and then opened a long gash on his thigh. It kicked Len in the gut, and as he fell back, its knee slammed into his head hard enough to wrench his neck. His ears rang. The world went fuzzy and distant. He felt blood on his chin, in his hair, in his mouth.

He tried to stand, but he couldn’t get his legs under him. He braced for the blow that would end his life.

It didn’t come.

Len’s feet couldn’t gain purchase on the deck. His right arm wouldn’t bear his weight. He squirmed and rolled until he could drag himself up against the ship’s bulwark, and then he pulled the dart from his arm and tried to catch his breath. The world blacked in and out around him. His head ached. He had difficulty thinking in straight lines.

The three human boys were fighting the Van giant.

One of them parried cutlass blows once, twice, three times with daggers. He almost succeeded in landing a strike to the beast’s left knee, but he caught the right in his head for his troubles.

He went to the deck, and the Van turned around to block an overhand club blow from one of the others.

Litnig,
Len thought.
Cole
—

H
is arm and stomach ached. His jaw swelled shut. His thigh and shoulder were crossed by fiery lines.

The beast kicked Litnig away and turned back to Cole.

Quay stepped between them and thrust for its torso.

Len struggled to watch. The prince showed no signs of seasickness. He fought cautiously and quickly, two swords to two. Cole regained his feet and attacked from the other side. The Van fought them both at once, one cutlass for each.

Len felt light-headed. He wanted to watch the boys continue their fight, but he couldn’t find the strength. His leg and arm were black with blood.

A dart.

The histories would read that Len Heramsun had been killed in the North Sea in the hundred and eleventh year of his life by a dart
.

Len’s chin fell to his chest, and he slumped against another body. His eyes closed. His tongue felt dry and swollen. Images of his wife and children floated before him.

Lena,
he thought.
Lena, forgive me
—
B
ut her frowning face faded away and was replaced by his youngest son’s. The boy’s dark dreadlocks, so like his grandfather’s, reached his waist. The split peak of Du Hardt winked proudly from his cheekbone. In his hands, he held a long poleaxe.

Raest.
Raest, I—

Raest disappeared. The daughter Len barely knew filled his mind. She had quiet, thoughtful brown eyes and her mother’s nose. A green dress covered her body. Her lips pressed together in concern.

Maegan, please—

But then she too was gone, and there was only one more, shrouded in shadows. A boy whose face Len could no longer see, and whose voice he no longer heard except in his nightmares.

His oldest.
His pride.

D’O—D’Orin—

And then there was nothing.

THIRTY-FIVE

Litnig pulled a sword from the chest of a monster.

His legs buckled. His arms shook. His lungs heaved with sharp, staccato breaths.

It had taken five of them, working together, to kill the Lost One.

Cole stood on shaky feet near the
Rokwet
’s rail with blood dripping from his nose. Quay leaned heavily against the ship’s center mast. On the deck, pulling his leg from under the Lost One’s
body,
lay a red-faced Captain Aldric Derimsun.

The ship groaned. The stairs to the aft gallery creaked as Dil descended from the perch from which she’d saved them. The sails flapped aimlessly in wind that had come too little, too late.

Beyond that, there was only silence. The Lost Ones had fought to the death.

Litnig’s lungs burned. His temple was sore from a blow the Lost One had given him with the guard of one of its swords. He had a piercing headache.

In the end, after Litnig had been knocked to the deck and the orphan breaker had soared into the sea, Aldric Derimsun had faced the beast alone. The Aleani captain had lost his balance. A cutlass had gone for his chest.

An arrow had caught the Lost One in its scaly throat.

A second had struck it in the arm, then a third in the ribs. It had staggered forward, smiling through blood that welled between its teeth. Litnig had grabbed a broken sword from the deck and rammed it into the beast’s black heart with both hands.

Still, the Lost One had taken nearly a minute to bleed out on the
Rokwet
’s deck.

The creature lay below him. Its pale muscles had gone soft and dead. Its scaly yellow feet lay sole-up. Its eyes stared blindly at the sky above a satisfied, ecstatic smile.

Litnig turned from the body and helped Derimsun to his feet. The Aleani captain ran a hand through his beard and surveyed his ship.

Litnig closed his eyes. He didn’t want to look again.

The sight of the ship filled his mind anyway.

The dead lay everywhere. At least fifty corpses, Lost One and Aleani alike, occupied the deck. Below, gray sharks set the sea seething as they took care of those who had fallen into the water.

The gorge rose in Litnig’s throat, and he focused on breathing.

Soft footfalls echoed behind him. His brother’s hand, light and reassuring, landed briefly on his shoulder and then was gone.

Litnig opened his eyes and found that Derimsun had moved and Ryse was kneeling by the bulwark. Her eyes were tinged white. The torn, singed hem of her robe dripped with blood.

Beneath Ryse, Len slumped against the shoulder of a dead Aleani.

A long, thin dart sat in his open palm. His leather armor was dark with his blood, but his chest rose and fell in slow, peaceful repetition. Every so often, his lips moved, as though he was murmuring in his sleep.

Ryse exhaled heavily. She ran a hand through her hair and used the ship’s rail to help her stand.

When her eyes met Litnig’s, she looked away. Her gaze drifted toward the ship’s forecastle, where more Aleani were lying.

Where Leramis was lying.

The blood rushed to Litnig’s face.

Cold,
he thought.
Colder than the wind and the sea and the sky.
Colder than the world had felt as he’d stared into the void with his life bleeding
away.
A long-ignored part of his heart told him to forget her, to leave her to her damn necromancer, if that was what she wanted. He’d seen the look on her face when Leramis had been mangled by the fireball, and it had changed the way he saw her anger, the way he saw her distance, and the way he saw her years of silence in the Academy.

He spun around, grabbed the railing of the stairs that led to the aft gallery, and took a step upward.

“Lit!”

There was pain in Ryse’s voice.

He turned back to face her.

“I want to talk to you, Lit, later. Just…” Her right hand wrenched her hair into a tangled mess.
Her
left twisted the cloth of her robe. She looked like a spring wound too tight—coiled, ready to break.
“Just not yet.”

Litnig nodded. He didn’t speak. He didn’t apologize. He didn’t let his heart soften.

He could be cold too, when he had to.

On the aft gallery, he found Derimsun speaking in low tones with ten other Aleani. The captain’s eyes came up when Litnig approached.

“I’ll nayd yer halp, bay,” he said. “Thare’s only a fyaw
af
us laft can craw tha’ shap. Raggin’ nayds redone.
Bodies nayd clarrin’.
Sails ta bay r’set.”

Litnig nodded. Behind the Aleani captain, Cole and Dil were standing near the ship’s wheel, forehead to forehead, holding each other’s hands.

Cold,
he told himself.

“T’
Rokwet
nayds sax on dack at all tams.
Y’ll nayd t’ halp craw har.”

“Could we turn back?” Litnig asked.

Derimsun shook his head.

“Na’.
T’ winds blaw t’ wrong d’raction.
Et’d tahk us as lang t’ ga back as fahr’ard.”
His eyes hardened.
“I’d jast as soon w’ sahl on, mahk sure t’ craw dadn’t da in van.”

Litnig dipped his chin down and up again.

And he became a sailor.

He threw himself into the work recklessly. His body was tired, but his heart was broiling. Ryse went from body to body, helping those she could. And every time he saw her ministering to a feverish-looking Leramis, the steam in his blood grew hotter.

He wrestled mangled Lost One bodies unceremoniously into the ocean. He hauled coils of rope from below, and he pulled and stretched and strained to wind them through new tackle. He cleared the deck of fallen rigging, threw his weight against the ship’s capstans and cinched the sails down turn by turn until they filled with the brisk eastern wind.

Derimsun took the helm, and the
Rokwet
took course north and west, away from the shore and into the open ocean and the shipping lanes its crew had never meant to stray from. By sunset, the ship had returned to some semblance of order.
As Litnig was limping from fore to aft, two Aleani sailors appeared from below with a supper of biscuits, cheese, salted meat, and pickled cucumber.

Litnig ought to have been hungry, but he wasn’t. The ship’s bell, chipped and dented on the aftcastle, rang twice.

The Aleani set the meal on a blanket near the center of the freshly scrubbed midship. Litnig sat next to it and watched his friends and the crew hobble toward the food. Some of the sailors had blood-soaked bandages wrapped around their heads, their ribs, or their limbs. Cole and Dil looked at the food with exhausted, sunken eyes. Quay collapsed in a heap near the others and lounged unceremoniously on his side. Litnig could see big lumps on his forehead and a shallow cut along the side of his neck.

The crew and the party sat together, a circle of bruised and bloody shadows breaking bread, equals under the sun’s last rays.

Litnig was given a piece of cold meat, and he bit into its salty flesh and chewed. The sun slipped below the horizon in a fountain of blues and purples and yellows and reds. The stars flared forth in clusters and fits, until they speckled the heavens like a thousand grains of sand.

Silence reigned. The sounds of eating and the ship filled the gloaming, and Litnig didn’t disturb them. His hands were raw from club and rope. His face was swollen and bruised. And his stomach—his stomach—he looked down and saw the flapping cloth where the Lost One’s spear had gone through him, and his stomach twisted itself in knots.

When the food was gone, Derimsun stood without a word. His mouth turned down. A white-haired, wrinkled Aleani sitting next to Litnig lurched to his feet, and one by one the rest of the crew followed him. The quiet grew pregnant.

Derimsun headed for the forecastle, where the bodies of his crewmen had been laid in rows.

The sailors followed him reverently. One of them produced torches from a chest near the door to the captain’s cabin, lit them, and placed them in what brackets remained on the ship’s railings. The moon rose nearly full on the northern horizon. Derimsun proceeded to the middle of the group of shrouded corpses that had once been his men.

Litnig followed. As he reached the forecastle, the wind picked up behind him, and the moon took flight.

Derimsun leaned his head back and began to sing.

His crew joined him. Their tune was slow and sad and complex, rising and falling and drifting and filled with Aleani words that Litnig didn’t understand. Some of the sailors wept. Others wrapped their arms around one another or pressed them against their own bodies.

They grieved.

Derimsun walked among the dead sailors. He raised each Aleani’s shroud, touched his or her eyes, murmured something, and moved on. Three of the singing sailors went to join him, and together they gently lifted their compatriots over the
Rokwet
’s rail and released them into the sea. The bodies hit the waves with soft splashes, and with each splash the Aleani dirge rose into the same phrase.

Litnig mouthed it with them, and something in his mind translated,
Walk with Yenor, fly south with Hir grace.
He recalled the memories of the Aleani walker in his dream, and he shivered.

Several sailors left to tend to the ship’s course. Only one singer remained. She was an older Aleani with a soft, beautiful voice, and she sang the highest strain of the requiem.