Soulwoven (41 page)

The hurricane of that last thought stirred up the darkness around the disc.

Something moved too quick to see, like the red-eyed woman had, and then in front of Litnig stood a leering black-gargoyle carving of himself.

His heart clenched.
The human dark walker.

The Aleani dark walker was free too—it sat on the edge of the disc with its legs dangling into the abyss, and it grinned at Litnig over its shoulder. The black statue of the Sh’ma remained chained to its pillar by small glowing links. The duller, simpler chains that had once bound all three walkers lay broken across the surface of the lurching disc.

The dark walker in front of Litnig spat a glob of thick black ooze onto the disc, planted icy fingers on Litnig’s chest, and pushed.

Litnig’s knees buckled. He fell backward.

As his head hit the disc, a hand grasped his shoulder. In the dream, something light and shining rushed past him.

He had the sensation of turning a somersault and passing
through
the disc, and he woke up and took a heavy lungful of air.

Cold liquid ran down his face. Something warm and sticky dripped from his chin. Somewhere, someone was crying and screaming, and in front of him, harsh white light shone on the rain-beaten face of Quay Eldani.

The prince had one hand cocked back open-palmed, as if to strike him. The other was wrapped tight in the fabric of Litnig’s shirt, holding him above the cobblestones.

Litnig’s cheek stung.

“Can you stand?” the prince asked, but he hauled Litnig to his feet before he could answer.

Behind Quay, a too-white hand lay motionless on the pavement. The world started to spin again.

Litnig found himself turned roughly around.

“Don’t look. Just walk.
First the left foot, then the right.”

Litnig felt drunk. His teeth buzzed.

“Wha, whe—?”

“Don’t talk. Don’t think. Just walk.
Faster now.”

The prince’s hand was still on Litnig’s shoulder, pressing him forward. Houses moved past them. Yellow bones crunched and rolled under Litnig’s feet.

My mother—

He heard a sob in front of him and saw two shapes dragging a third with its face in its hands. A shorter shadow strode forward ahead of them. Litnig heard footsteps behind him, where the light was coming from. Quay’s hand pushed harder.

“Faster. Can you run? You need to run.
Now.”

Shouting erupted in the street behind them. The shrill calls of whistles pierced the night. Quay’s touch grew lighter on Litnig’s shoulder, and then they were running—racing full speed into darker streets ahead of them, upcity, across the Eldwater Bridge and the muddy flood roaring against its bottom, through Temple Hill and into Thieves’ Rise.

They ran and they ran and they ran, and then they pounded breathless through a broken home and tore down a stairway that led to a trapdoor and the wet world beyond. Litnig gave up thinking about anything but his feet and his legs and his boots and the mud and the rain. Quay was a constant presence at his back, urging him to move faster, faster, faster, through grass and wind and a gray sky that grew lighter as they pressed on, and on, and on.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice whimpered,
My
mother is dead...

Again.

And again.

And again.

FORTY-SEVEN

Litnig’s heart hurt. Everything around him was wet—a soggy, miserable shadow world through which he walked while he prayed for numbness. His thoughts had calmed, but the pain got worse with every step he took. There were too many mysteries to solve, and he didn’t have the strength to face them.

Quay led Litnig and the others up a steep slope at the edge of an ocean of grass. Litnig’s knees got muddy and bruised with the climbing. He didn’t care. He didn’t even feel like crying anymore. He just felt empty.

I couldn’t save her.

The others started digging out the sopping sheet of canvas that was serving as their excuse for a tent. Dil stumbled into the dusk to try to catch something for dinner. Litnig stepped into a puddle, and a rush of cold water replaced the boot-warm liquid around his feet.

That woman kissed me.

The cold and wet didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered anymore. He lay down and closed his eyes. The others let him. They had their own things to worry about.

It’s my fault.

He didn’t let himself sleep. He was terrified of the dream.

So the guilt washed around in his head, like the souls that had circled him for one brief, shining moment in which he’d thought he could save everyone who mattered.

***

Quay chewed on a wad of sweet waygrass and failed to solve a puzzle.

The muddy body of the Broadwater River fanned out ahead of him and lost itself in a marsh under flat morning light. Rain fell onto his shoulders and squeezed down the back of his neck. His breath formed cold, ragged clouds.

He had no idea what he should do next.

He’d dragged the others into the most persistent rains he’d ever seen, tramped them east for ten days through the grasslands bordering the Breadplain, and turned them northeast along the densely forested edges of the Eastgate Hills. He’d found the Broadwater as it left Foltir. He’d tracked the river to its end in the vast, wet wastes of the Estmarsh.

They were getting closer to the White Forest every day, but as Quay steered his party cross-country, its members were melting in the rain. The party had gone hungry for several nights and had spent several days drinking rainwater. They were moving slower and slower as the bite of the hunger and the damp got worse.

Quay turned from the Estmarsh and walked downhill toward the fire, rocks, and canvas lean-to that formed his camp. There’d only been time to grab two packs during the flight from Eldan City, and the lack of supplies hadn’t stopped causing problems since. Sleep, crammed into a wet ball of people under dripping canvas, had been difficult at best. Spare clothing was sparse. They’d lost one of Cole’s daggers and most of Dil’s arrows.

For all that, it was the morale problems he felt most incapable of solving.

The rain intensified as Quay slid down the muddy slope. His companions were gathered like ghosts around a breakfast fire more smoke than flame. The Jin brothers seemed utterly
despairing
. Litnig’s eyes were dull and distant. Cole’s remained bright but desperate.

Quay frowned.

He pitied the brothers. He’d lost his mother too. He remembered the wrenching loneliness, the guilt of things undone and words unsaid, the longing for just a day, an hour, a moment more of her presence—enough time to say that yes, he really loved her, and yes, he would always remember her, and no, he’d never meant the harshest things he’d said.

He’d been unable to find words of comfort for Cole and Litnig nevertheless.

That fact bothered him.

Always be kind…
said his mother’s voice in his memories.

Focus,
said
his own
.

The red-eyed woman who’d killed Lena Jin had been one of the Duennin breaking the heart dragons, and the manner of her strike worried Quay. Lena’s death had deprived him of both Cole and Litnig at once. He was being forced to baby them along at a snail’s pace. The Duennin woman had chosen not to kill him and his companions, but to hobble them.

She broke their hearts.

And Quay couldn’t figure out why.

He ran a hand through his rain-soaked hair.

Rest,
he thought.
We need rest. We need food. We need sleep.
He’d looked at his map so often it was seared into his brain.

But there was nowhere they could go for supplies and nobody they could trust to take them in and feed them and warm them up.

During his night alone in Eldan City, he’d crept through the rain to the bedroom of his cousin Misha. He’d woken her and learned that the full array of his father’s enemies was looking for him—Houses Elpioni and Pendilon, the Temple, even House Redpath and House Greydawn. Arayi Elpioni was agitating to be named prince in his place if he couldn’t be found.

Misha thought the people looking for Quay wanted to make sure he never
was
found. She’d also seen no signs and heard no talk of necromancers being involved in Eldanian politics.

Another mistake.

After his conversation with Misha, Quay had returned to the others and found the Jin house in ruins, Lena dead, Litnig and Cole incoherent, and the city watch on its way.

He rubbed his freezing hands against his trousers and dropped into a crouch near the breakfast fire. The serendipity of his timing was one of a growing number of phenomena that he didn’t understand, and his ignorance made him nervous.

The necromancers they’d fought had been fully capable of destroying the heart dragons in Eldan and Aleana simultaneously, but they’d chosen not to. They’d been fully capable of killing members of the party in Du Fenlan, then again in Lurathen, and again in Eldan City. And they’d chosen not to.

There was some piece of the puzzle he was missing.

Dil pulled a rabbit from a skewer, and Quay settled in next to Leramis for his share of their meager breakfast. The necromancer hadn’t shorn his head in days. Little drops of water clung to the thin crop of black hair that poked up around his skull.

Leramis had promised Quay that the White Forest could be reached through the Estmarsh.

The marsh was dangerous, but the other routes to the White Forest were worse. Trying to sneak past Bywater Castle or the Middlefort would expose the party to detection by the Seven and the Temple. Trying to go all the way around the Estmarsh would pin them between it and the Mudplain, where there would be little food, little water, and paths no better than those in the marsh.

Just keep moving,
Quay thought, but the words felt sour. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being herded.

He took a bite of the rabbit. It was overcooked on the outside and undercooked on the inside, lean and gamey and an unpleasant combination of crunchy and slimy at the same time. The prince swallowed as quickly as he could and watched Litnig and Cole eat listlessly in the rain.

He sympathized with them.

But all he could think of to help was to try his best to keep them alive.

By that afternoon, Quay was watching the others move cautiously through the fog of the Estmarsh with Dil in the lead. The rain had slackened into a thin, omnipresent mist. The Broadwater had frayed into dozens of smaller channels. Dil was doing a good job finding paths, but she seemed uncomfortable picking her way through the Estmarsh’s shifting bogs and hidden mudsinks.

Distracted,
Quay thought.

He didn’t blame her. She’d lost a home already, and now it looked to him like she was losing Cole as well. Quay’s friend was a soggy stump of his old self, humping through the muck in misery.

Always be kind…
he thought.

Still, no words came to him.

He and the others moved through the marsh in near-silence, getting muddier and muddier while their stocks of food dwindled. The lack of sunlight and few differences between one lump of wet, spiky grass and another made navigation difficult. Quay lost his sense of direction numerous times, only to find it again when the clouds thinned enough to present the white circle of the sun’s light.

He imagined Dil was doing only slightly better.

“One cannot regain a lost advantage without accepting risk,”
he told himself.
The marsh is a good risk.

The axiom was a quote from House Eldani’s Manual of War. The supposition that followed it was Quay’s own, and it became a mantra for him. The marsh stretched for miles in all directions. It had no known inhabitants. No one Quay was aware of had successfully mapped it. Eastern rumormongers whispered of vicious beasts in its waters and dark happenings that occurred within it at night.

For their first three days, the party encountered neither dark happenings nor vicious beasts, and Quay held tightly to his mantra and his decision to keep moving, whether he was being herded or not.

On the afternoon of the fourth day in the fog, Dil held up a hand to stop them.

They stood on a piece of spongy yellow bog that stretched across a chunk of open water and vanished into the mist. Quay grimaced and worked his way around the others until he was next to Dil. She was squatting low and close to the muck, thrusting her face into the air in front of her.

Her eyes gleamed wide and bright.

“What is it?” Quay asked.

“I don’t know.” Dil reached for her bow. Her nose twitched. “It’s too quiet.”

Quay let his hands drift to his swords. She was right. Even in the stillness of the marsh, there were always sounds—the bogs shifting,
water dripping
from the boughs of skeletal black trees, fish and eels sliding through the water, the hum of insects.

But at that moment, the silence was entirely unbroken.

“Be ready,” Quay whispered. He slipped his swords from their sheaths as quietly as possible. His message passed from person to person behind him.

For a moment, the marsh stayed quiet.

Leramis began to say something.

The water to Quay’s left exploded.

Something brown catapulted at him with a high-pitched shriek. He twisted away, then struck from low to high with one hand and high to low with the other. His swords bit through flesh and bone. The shriek stopped.

Something slammed into his stomach anyway. He lost his footing and fell. His swords dropped from his hands.

As the bog shifted underneath him, Quay found himself face-to-face with the tapered, auburn-scaled head of a creature the size of a large dog.

Two brown eyes glared at him from the center of its lizardlike snout. A dark tongue lolled between several rows of gleaming, knife-shaped teeth in its mouth. The creature’s head linked into a thick mud-brown neck and body. A row of red spots ran down its side. A fin stretched the length of its spine. It had two clawed forelegs and a single back leg that ended in what looked like a cross between a flipper and a foot.