Soulwoven (47 page)

The ring was still in his fingers, and he held it up to look at it again. The moonlight glinted off its polished sides. It was still warm from Quay’s chest.

Behind it, the constellation of the Scythe hung low over the trees.

Cole had never been one to put his faith in the stars, but he knew what those stars meant.

Death.
Death for one or more.

He slipped the ring and the message into his trouser pocket. He’d tie them around his neck for safekeeping later.

In the meantime, he closed his eyes and held Dil tighter.

FIFTY-FOUR

Len sat in the back of a long canoe.

The sky filled with dark oranges, bright reds, and thick purples. The sun glowed over a sea of sweet-scented wild grass to the east. To the west, plains the color of burnt sugar gave way to a line of massive, hazy sand dunes that stretched to the horizon.

And to the north, a range of mountains perched on the edge of the world with its jaws open.

There was wrong in Len’s bones. He felt as if the world was a platter hanging from a tall tree by a thread, and the wind had set it swinging, and any second it would flip over or the string would break and he would be flung screaming into the abyss.

It was the same feeling he’d had just before discovering his father’s body thirty years before, when his eyes had found the open door at the top of the steps.

Back then, the feeling had proven painfully accurate.

Len’s wrists were chafed from the chains that had bound them in Soulth’il. His shoulders were sore from his arms being wrenched behind his back. There was enough spray flying up from the sides of the canoe that his eyebrows were dripping.

He hadn’t slept in days.

When he closed his eyes, he saw the face of the dragon. When he opened them, he watched a red-haired Sh’ma named Tsu’min weave some magic that kept a constant wind in a big black sail.

Len’s thoughts drifted northward again.

In Aleana, they spoke of three kinds of mountains:
Chel Keldt—
round, soft, open prominences that invited one onto and under them;
Chel Rorcht—
larger
,
balder, uncaring, away-faced peaks that hung caked with rock and snow; and
Chel Ardrt—
angry mountains—rigid, sharp, dangerous knives of rock that would do everything they could to take one’s life if one was foolish enough to offer it to them.

The mountains ahead were
Chel Ardrt.

Their tops were razor thin, carved by wind and snow into bladelike edges that looked sharp enough to bleed the sky. At their bases, charcoal-gray blocks of rock as big as small towns hung over narrow valleys strewn with slips and debris. No signs of life stirred in the shadow of the mountains. Not one speck of green broke the grays and whites and blacks. Not one fish leaped from the river.

Somewhere in that mire of angry rock, D’Orin Threi was waiting for him. Tsu’min had said that the Duennin and their helpers would be gathering in the ruins of Sherdu’il.
The birthplace of the Duennin.

Len shut his eyes. The dragon was there in an instant, hanging in the darkness behind his lids with its black teeth bared and its red-orange whiskers flickering toward him like whips of flame. He couldn’t abide it, and he couldn’t keep his eyes closed.

For the first time, he felt like he understood the power that D’Orin Threi had fallen for.

Across Len’s lap lay an ax. Not two axes. Not his axes. Those had been taken from him in Soulth’il, and he knew he would never see them again. Except for its head of solid steel, the ax on his lap was made of the crystal the Sh’ma seemed to make everything out of. The weapon’s blade was sharp, but it was long and heavy, and it was covered in carvings that meant nothing to Len.

It wasn’t the ax he had meant to kill his son with.

Len focused his bleary eyes on the children. They huddled in bedraggled knots toward the rear of the craft. Cole and Dil talked quietly against one side near a dozing Litnig. Leramis and Ryse rested against the other. Quay sat alone, just in front of Tsu’min.

Len shifted his weight from leg to leg. The Sh’ma and the Duennin had managed to make the children seem so powerless, so small.

And me as well.

He felt like a helpless graybeard.

Len ran his hands along the shaft of the ax in his lap. His world was ending. The dragon was coming. It would burn Aleana—his family, his people, his history, his future. His life would end as one long list of failures.

There was one duty left for him.

He could only pray that he wouldn’t fail at it as well.

FIFTY-FIVE

Litnig lay on his back and breathed through his mouth.

His body was sore. His nose was swollen and full of dried blood. He was the only one in the Sh’ma’s black canoe who had the space to lie down, and while a part of him was ashamed of that, he was mostly just grateful.

He felt so, so tired.

The moon had set an hour before, but a thousand points of light still filled the sky. The Lumos splashed a low tattoo against the side of the canoe next to Litnig’s head. The air felt cold and smelled of wet grass.

Litnig was glad for the bedroll on top of him, and for the one behind his head.

Cole sat against the canoe’s inwale at Litnig’s feet. His chin rested on his chest. His arms were crossed over his stomach.

Litnig hoped he was sleeping. Tsu’min had said they’d reach Sherdu’il the following day. He’d said they’d confront the Duennin there, again.

He hadn’t said how the confrontation would turn out any differently than the one in Soulth’il had.

Litnig made the mistake of trying to breathe through his nose and snorted a chunk of dried blood into his mouth. He spat it out in the bottom of the canoe, but the taste lingered. Blood trickled down the back of his throat.

He swallowed and bore it.

Ryse hadn’t offered to heal his body.
Neither had Leramis.
He didn’t want to ask them to.

Inhuman.
Unnatural.

He shut his eyes and thought about the red-eyed woman and man.

Twice, the red-eyed woman had offered him a kiss. Twice, she’d put him through hell and spared his life.

Why do you want me?
he
wondered.

Litnig’s eyes landed on Ryse again. She was leaning her head against the side of the canoe across from him. Leramis sat a few feet away from her.

And why don’t you?

Cole shivered. Dil, tucked against him, opened her eyes and tugged the blanket they shared over his chest and arms. Her eyes gleamed gold in the low light of the stars.

She smiled at Litnig before she closed them again.

Litnig returned the gesture, but his heart beat a little faster.

Wilderleng,
he thought. In spite of the warmth beneath his bedroll, he shivered.

He wondered what it was like not to be human. Not to have a brother who would look after you through the end of your days.

But only briefly.

Inhuman.
Unnatural.

He pushed the words aside. Cole stirred against his feet. In Litnig’s memories, their mother smiled.

You were born on a rainy night in Twelvemonth. Your father was out, but old Mrs. Bettins was in, and she helped. It was an easy delivery—much easier than with your brother. Do you remember his? I was so happy to have you, Litnig. I still am.

She’d told the story on his birthday every year that he could remember. If there was one thing Litnig was certain of, it was his humanity.

If there was a second, it was his brother.

FIFTY-SIX

Keep peace…

The Lumos shallowed rapidly. The scent of smoke streamed through the air on a cold gray wind. It smelled dense and dark and rocklike, as if it came from a thing long dead pressed into use against its will. The stench scraped against the back of Ryse’s throat and left it feeling raw and poisoned.

As the canoe rounded a bend in the river, Ryse spotted a boat drawn up on a pebble beach. Its sail flapped emptily in the wind. A set of tracks led from it toward a cliff with a thin gray path scratched up its face.

She’d wondered how the Duennin had escaped Soulth’il.

Behind Ryse, Tsu’min stood at the canoe’s tiller and guided their boat through a field of narrow, toothlike boulders that stood between it and the shore. He’d been weaving for four days to keep the wind in the boat’s sail, and he didn’t even look tired.

He glanced at Ryse as the canoe ran onto the pebbles.

I could teach you,
his eyes seemed to say,
but you’re not worth the time.

Ryse shivered. She knew that look.
Knew the feeling that accompanied it.
She’d hoped becoming a soulweaver would free her from both forever.

She dropped from the canoe onto a bed of pebbles and was startled to see her breath misting in front of her. Her hands were stiff. Her clothes were damp. She hadn’t realized it was quite so cold.

A hand squeezed her shoulder, and a black-robed man moved past her toward the cliff face.

Ryse took a deep breath.

She hadn’t forgiven Leramis.

There were other things to worry about. Somewhere above her, the end of the world was about to be brought into existence. The monsters responsible had already shown that neither she nor anyone with her could stop them. Litnig was a Duennin. Len had been acting strangely. Quay had been treating her and Leramis with suspicion.

She wanted to stay focused on that. She wanted to think about how in the world she was going to counter the kind of soulweaving she’d seen in Eldan City, and Du Fenlan, and Soulth’il.

But she couldn’t.

All she could think was that things were wrong between her and those closest to her, and that she didn’t have time to fix them.

She bit her lip. She hadn’t done that since her first year in the Academy.

Be strong,
she told herself.
Be…

The words broke apart in her mind.

As the sky had darkened the night before, Ryse had done what she’d always done in times of need. She’d prayed.

And nothing had happened.

No wisdom, no warmth, and no sense of belonging or love had filled her. She’d reached for Yenor and found nothing, and that scared her even more than the towering cliffs above, or the smell of death on the wind, or the steepness of the path ahead.

Keep peace with those around you,
she’d learned long ago,
and Yenor will keep peace with you.

Ryse started up the cliff-face path in silence. Within minutes, she borrowed one of Cole’s daggers to cut her robe off below the knee.

The climbing was difficult enough with her legs unhindered.

Close to an hour later, Ryse pulled herself up a cleft of chunky black rock into the sky atop the cliff. The riverside and the boats sat like tiny wooden models hundreds of feet below her. Teeth of wind tore at her face, her hair,
her
clothes. The smell of smoke continued to clog her nostrils.

Ryse leaned into the gusts. Her thighs burned. Her breath was ragged.

The others were huddling behind an irregular round boulder on a sloping field of sand and pebbles ahead of her. Beyond them, the cliff top slipped downward for a few hundred feet and then dropped away into a deep gorge. Crumbling peaks jabbed into the sky to Ryse’s right and left. Behind one of them, the valley she’d climbed out of turned and met the gorge beneath the gray, jagged shelves of a glacier. The white cap of the ice was pocked with blue lakes.

The wind shrieked. Someone called Ryse’s name.

Ryse tightened the hood of her cloak around her face and missed the warmth of her robe on her lower legs. She could see a few hundred crude structures clinging to the striated face of a mountain across the gorge. The buildings seemed organized around a steep central boulevard. In places, they canted dangerously over the void. Above them, a yawning black cavern spewed the stream of putrid smoke into the air.

Sherdu’il
, Ryse thought.
The city of the dragon.

A flimsy rope bridge stretched across the gorge between the city and the cliff top she stood upon.

Ryse heard hard breathing behind her.

Quay, the last to finish the climb.

“Ready?” the prince asked. His voice was hoarse.

Ryse followed him to the boulder and tried to ignore the cold that was creeping up her limbs.

Something felt wrong.

She opened her eyes to the River, and her breath caught between her lungs and the sky.

The flow of souls into Sherdu’il was astonishing. The tiny orbs poured over the mountains. They swept in from the clouds. They ran through the valleys and climbed up their walls.

The cavern at the city’s crown sucked them down like a drunken man slurping his beer.

The soulflow pressed against Ryse and begged to be used. Even the weakest soulweaver would be powerful in conditions like that. For someone like Tsu’min, or the Duennin—

“You see it?” Leramis whispered. He was facing the city, puffing staccato bursts of cloud into the air. “It’s like another set of heart dragons, bigger than the rest.
A more powerful draw.”

“There are no more heart dragons,” said Tsu’min.

The Sh’ma stood a few feet from the boulder, arms crossed tightly over his chest. The hood on his cloak was thrown back. His eyes looked lost in their own depths, buried somewhere a thousand miles or years from where and when the rest of his body was.

“It’s a wall that draws the souls,” Tsu’min said. “
A wall like
black glass, sixty feet wide and thirty feet high. It sits at the back of an underground chamber.”

Ryse watched the wind tug at Tsu’min’s cloak. Next to her, Cole and Dil shivered. Litnig looked as gray as a ghost. Leramis rocked from foot to foot.

Keep peace…
Ryse thought.

“Behind it,” said the Sh’ma, “the worst of Yenor sits outside of this world, waiting for someone to call upon it.”