The Soul Weaver (21 page)

By the time I dragged my cloak out of the pile, Paulo held his gray saddlebag in one hand and was cramming a biscuit into his mouth with the other. He offered me the bag. “Breakfast.”

We trudged downward. The provisions stowed in our recently empty saddlebag were no more than dry, sweetish biscuits, old cheese, and weak ale, but they settled in the stomach as nicely as a Long Night feast.

 

Even if Vroon could have transported us straight to our destination, I would have insisted on walking. The Lord Parven had been a master of military strategy for a thousand years, and he had taught me everything he could stuff into my head during my time in Zhev'Na. Several of his lessons came to mind that night. Never accept favors from either an ally or an enemy unless it is to save your life. And never enter an ally's stronghold without knowing how to get out of it as easily as you got in.

We walked briskly in the wild purple-and-green storm, able to move faster as we headed out of the craggy foothills into the lowlands. The ground was packed hard and mostly barren, though at a distance I could see a few twiggy trees no taller than I. Between the trees, the land showed a softer profile that might indicate low grasses or scrub.

Distances were deceptive. The closest tower had looked to be a good two hours' march, but we'd not been walking half that when we passed by it.

Paulo stopped and looked over his shoulder. “Did you see him?”

“See who?”

“The fellow by that pile of rock back there. He had two arms on one side of him, a regular one, and a little, stubby one. Never saw the like.”

“No, I didn't see.”

“He bowed as we went by. Look . . . there's another.”

A ragged, hunchbacked old woman was standing beside a short squat tower. As we walked past she lifted her hands and fell to her knees, her eyes fixed on me. Just beyond her, a man with bright red hair and no eyes popped into view just beside another tower, as if he'd been inside and had stepped right through the wall onto his front stoop to learn what passed by his door. The towers looked like piles of solid rock, but I began to wonder if they were dwellings of some sort. The eyeless man's head followed us just as though he could see, and as we left him behind he bowed very low.

“It's like they're worshipping you. Like you were their
Lord
. . .” Disgust boiled out of Paulo like sap from a burning pine branch. I kept walking. He could believe what he liked.

The rain lashed our faces until we were numb, and the gale made it difficult to stay upright, but every tower produced someone to pay homage as we passed. All were dressed in shapeless tunics of grayish brown, and almost every one of the people appeared to be malformed—missing limbs or extra ones, bodies too wide or too tall, twisted or misshapen. Yet they were men and women, not monsters.

Seeing these people made me think about the shepherd's son whose tale had led us here. He had been born with only one hand, so his father had said, and had believed he was going to a “place where he belonged.” And the Queen of Leire had said that most of those who had disappeared from the Four Realms in the past year had been people mutilated or malformed. But I had never seen such monstrous deformities as some of these.

Soon we came to an even larger cluster of towers, hundreds of them crowded together like a city. As Zanore threaded his way between them, I pulled off my hood and wiped the rain from my eyes so I could see more. The towers were every shape and size, some as tall as the towers of Comigor Keep, some no more than a jumble of stones, some smooth-sided spirals soaring into the low clouds, some squat and ugly stacks of pebbles or piles of sticks and mud. Most were made of a greenish stone streaked with dirty pink, though a few were dark-colored or of indeterminate grays. In the dim light I could see no doors or windows or other openings in their sides. The occupants moved in and out with a soft
thwop.

The rain finally stopped, and the sky settled to a mottled black and purple, with charcoal-colored clouds floating across the sparkling green stars. The wind turned warm and died down to a sighing moan.

I stopped for a moment to gape at an immense tower, the tallest in the cluster, knobby and bulging at its base, but soaring smoothly upward into a bulb-shaped knot on the top. The colors of the stone seemed unsettled: here more pink, there more green, now reversed or taking on a purple cast. I couldn't tell whether the shifting was a property of the stone or only a result of the uncertain light.

“That is the tower of the long-lived one, the Singlar who taught us how to harvest tappa and use it to—”

Vroon was interrupted by a sharp snapping sound over our heads. Someone in one of the towers gave a horrific shriek. Then, the world fell apart.

Skull-cracking explosions thundered behind, above, and on either side of me. Jagged rents of searing white shattered earth and sky into a hundred fragments. The huge tower sheared down the middle, a blurred cascade of color pouring out of the ruin into the white brilliance of the gaping chasm that opened between its halves. Three . . . four horrified faces plummeted through the air and vanished into the white fire, shrill, agonized screams trailing behind them, as the stone shells cracked and toppled after.

“Majesty! Have care!” screeched Vroon, yanking me aside as I gawked at a snaking white line that ripped the black road threatening to pass right between my legs.

This was my dream all over again. Every streak of white that split the world stabbed a red-hot lance into the region just behind my eyes.

A rift appeared underneath a young man with a twisted shoulder who was running toward us down the road. Screeching, he reached out his arms toward me as he hung for just a moment over the fiery void. But I couldn't move. His cries filled my head long after he had dropped into the rift . . . or perhaps I was screaming, too, as I held on to my head to keep it from shattering right along with the world.

“Wake up. Wake up,” I yelled, as I always did when my nightmares became unbearable. But this time, I didn't wake.

Vroon and Ob were cut off from me by another rent, and a powerful hand jerked me away from the brink of a yawning white chasm.

“Demons of the deep, watch yourself.” Paulo.

Three more times he pulled me away from toppling towers or flaming cracks. Our dark island grew smaller. Shards of rock bounced around us like granite hailstones. Dust and ash swirled and stung my eyes. I had to end this. Even if a tower didn't crush us or a rift open up under our feet, if this world came apart . . . if I couldn't ease the pain in my head . . . I was going to lose control of myself. The Lords would find me . . . take me back.

In my dreams I could quench the fire, but here . . . I needed darkness. Not the empty, cold dark—the dread, unfeeling power of Lordship that I was trying so hard to keep shut away—but darkness soft and enveloping like dreamless sleep, like hiding your face in your father's cloak, like racing through a cool midnight on Jasyr's back. I knew only one place dark enough, even in a world as dark as the Breach.

Forcing my lungs to keep breathing, I sank to my wobbling knees, closed my eyes, and turned inward. As I knew it would be, the firestorm was inside me as well as outside, the network pattern of blazing white seared into the blank canvas of my mind. But here I could control it.

 

“Stay away from him. Let him breathe.” From some indescribable distance, I heard Paulo. “Curse it all, leave him be.”

I opened my eyes. I was sprawled on the hard, damp earth, two sharp, pointed rocks digging holes in my back. Paulo stood at my side, his long arms spread out to either side of me, shielding me from a growing crowd of people creeping toward us, hands outstretched. Craning my neck, I saw that Vroon, Ob, and Zanore had their arms spread, too, the four of them making a complete circle about me.

“Cripes, I thought you'd never come out of it,” said Paulo, grabbing a scrawny youth with mottled skin who had crept past his barricade and was tugging at my cloak.

“I wish Jasyr and Molly were here,” I said, hoarsely, rolling to my side. “I could use a ride.” I felt as dry as a September hay field, and I was shivering like aspen leaves.

“They'd be dead of fright,” he said. “I was close enough to it.” He used one of his long legs to prevent a bald woman from pulling off one of my boots. “It was your dream, then . . . come to life just like the rest of this?”

“Yes.”

I pulled my cloak tight and climbed to my feet, surveying the destruction. About a quarter of the towers in this group were crumbled to dust or missing altogether. The road we'd traveled was erased, and, in fact, the whole landscape was in a jumble, like broken pottery hastily crammed back together. Ridges and ravines, pits and potholes and piles of rubble had appeared where there had been none before.

“Let's go,” I said.

Paulo marshaled my protectors, and we set off again before the anxious, the curious, or the awestruck could prevent us. “No wonder you'd wake the house when you dreamed.”

“It never lasted so long as this,” I said, rubbing my face. Cheeks and nose and lips felt numb. “What happened?”

“You stopped it. As soon as you knelt down, every crack headed straight for you. But before very long, they stopped coming. Closed up. The earthquake, whatever it was, quit like it never happened.
Everything
stopped. The whole cursed world went black as pitch, so's I thought we were all dead. But then the world started up again, or I woke up, or whatever. We just couldn't get you awake for a while. You lay here like you were dead. An hour it's been.”

“I can't explain it.”

The stars cast a soft greenish glow on the path. Zanore trotted ahead of us, Vroon and Ob to either side. After a time Paulo nudged me. “Have you noticed? Behind us.”

I glanced backward. For as far as I could see into the gloom stretched a straggling crowd of the misshapen residents of the Breach. Only now that I looked did I notice the constant rustling noise of shuffling feet and excited whispering. The dim air was warm and dry, and the starlight illuminated a sea of oddity. They all caught their breath when I turned to see them better and sighed as one when I shrugged my shoulders and turned back to follow Zanore again. Unless I was sorely mistaken, they would have followed me had I walked off a cliff.

With gestures and shouts, a horrified Vroon tried to shoo the ragtag mob back to their homes. “Begone, begone! The maintainers will see!” But the strange folk shook their heads and stood their ground, and when we started walking again they trailed after us.

“Punishment terrible do they risk for leaving their fastnesses,” said Vroon. “The Guardian did not give them allowing to do so.”

I certainly didn't know what to do about them. If they had such rules, it was up to them to obey them or take the consequences. “Tell us about the towers,” I said. “These people live in them?”

The firestorm seemed to have left our three companions chastened and ready to answer at least a few of our questions. Each tower housed a single being—a Singlar, Vroon called them. The larger or more elaborate the tower, the longer and more successfully the Singlar had been
real
. Neither Vroon nor his friends could explain how the Singlars had come to be real, or what they were before they were real. If I understood him correctly—and that was never certain with Vroon—the towers were actually part of the land itself, shaped and nurtured by the thoughts and deeds as well as the hard labor of the residents. That is, they grew.

I looked at the towers differently after that. As we walked through the dark, wet, misshapen land, I wondered if I would observe them changing right in front of me. Of course I didn't see any such thing. I supposed it was like a person's growing. You never saw the change happening, not even in yourself. Only the result of it.

No Singlars had names, they told me. A name was the greatest gift one could receive, the culmination of the mysterious process of becoming
bounded
. But Singlars could not give each other names. I gathered that it would have been something like one loaf of baking bread telling another it was done.

The three admitted, reluctantly, that while traveling the world beyond the moon-door in search of the king, they had come across persons who looked like Singlars and acted like Singlars, and so they had brought them to the Bounded even though they had not been specifically commanded to do so. They promised to introduce me to some of these newcomers, once my business with the Guardian was done.

They didn't want to talk about the other things they'd done in my world. Vroon said they would do so only at my “royal command.” As I had no intention of encouraging their foolish beliefs in the matter of royalty, I let the matter drop. “We'll talk more of these things another time.”

“Quietness,” said Ob, nodding sagely and smiling at the other two as he lumbered alongside us.

Vroon smiled and poked Ob's massive, humped shoulder in a brotherly way, and then leaned close to my shoulder. “Ob has always believed our king will be a quiet person, whose words are deep like his own. One person we found, a noisy, ever-talking one who claimed to be a king already, we took straight to the Guardian, lest perchance we be mistaken. But we always believed that the one we sought would be unmatched in wholeness. As you are.”