Soul Weaver: A Fantasy Novel (11 page)

She didn’t know how long she’d been out, but it couldn’t have been that long. She doubted she was more than half a day’s travel from the site of the battle. Less, most likely.

That she was in Thorne’s power was obvious. Therefore, this was Thorne’s dungeon. It was most likely beneath some palace or outpost of the powerful archon’s holdings. Shel thought back to the maps Maul had shown her in the days leading up to the failed heist.

The gang had lain in ambush beside a stretch of the King’s Road far from any city or town. It was a full three day’s ride from Solstice; longer for the archon’s convoy, most of which was afoot. But Thorne wouldn’t spend nights in the open, or even at some low inn. Shel closed her eyes, trying to conjure up mental images of the maps.

Maul had pointed out a small estate a bit further along the King’s Road toward Solstice from the ambush point. A modest sized orchard, bounded by thick forest on three sides. It was owned by a noble family called…Shel struggled to remember the name, and why Maul had thought the estate significant. That’s right, she remembered; Rez and Maul had agreed it was the archon’s most likely stopping point for the night of the ambush.

Sorrel, that was the family name. But wait a minute. Rez had mentioned something about the Sorrels being extinct. It had been an offhand sort of remark, and neither Rez nor Maul had elaborated on it. Shel thought it was probably significant. Both men must have known why, but they hadn’t thought to let her in on the information.

It might be significant, Shel told herself, but it certainly wasn’t relevant now. Knowing what happened to the Sorrel family and why wouldn’t get her any closer to the other side of that crawlspace. But she had learned other things at the abandoned fortress hideout of Rez’s gang.

“Okay,” she said aloud, without opening her eyes. The sound of her own voice echoing in the tiny cell was oddly comforting. Shel found herself smiling. She was a far cry from helpless.

Shel turned her focus inward. She was aware of the simmering potential within herself. She coaxed the energy of her soul, drawing it out in a thin stream of power. Concentrating, she strained to widen the flow. In her mind’s eye, it was a radiant ball of pure white light afloat in an endless darkness; where she tapped into an imagined star, a crookedly meandering pseudopod of luminescence extended through the darkness. Shel imagined herself at the other end of that tendril, catching it in her hands to wind it in.

When she opened her eyes, she saw the air around her clasped hands swimming with thick distortion like heat haze over a baking hot stretch of road. She slowly pulled her hands apart, stretching the distortion that only she – or another weaver – could see. The otherwise invisible field of esoteric power expanded, engulfing Shel and stretching out against the confines of her stony cage.

Wisps of soulstuff probed the cracked and pitted walls, searching for weaknesses. Closing her eyes again, Shel sent her mind out through this misty extension of her will. Her consciousness floated along invisible channels carved through the air and slipped along the jagged stone. The porous rock couldn’t contain her and she found herself slipping through miniscule crevices and runnels.

One of these twisted and turned back on itself several times on its path through the cave wall, until eventually opening out into the next cell. In her mind, Shel could see every detail of that unoccupied enclosure – including the unbarred crawlspace.

Shel’s eyes snapped open, her head snapping around to look at the wall standing between her and potential freedom. She just had to get through that wall; the cell behind it was open. The young woman licked her lips nervously, and gathered back her ethereal strength.

“I wouldn’t if I was you.”

Startled, Shel spun around and dropped to her hands and knees to peer through the blocked crawlspace of her own cell. An incredibly ugly face filled the opening at the other end, lit from above by flickering torchlight. There was a bulbous nose complete with a hairy, grayish wart to one side of the tip; close-spaced eyes, one blue and the other dark brown, and pockmarked skin filled out the unpleasant face. Cruel, thin lips pulled back in a sneer that exposed the cracked and stained remains of broken teeth.

“What?” Shel recovered quickly. For a moment, she had thought Rez had shown up again, just like the last time. It would have been a miracle. The ugly man was clearly one of her jailers. Shel shook her head and feigned confused innocence. “Wouldn’t what?”

“One o’them walls gets knocked out, brings the whole thing down on top of us,” said the ugly man outside her cell. “Arch'n Thorne’d have me killed for losing his valuable prisoner,‘cept I’d be dead in the cave-in already. So’d you be, little girl.”

“I am not a little girl,” said Shel, with none of the fierce – but ultimately insecure – venom she would have displayed a few days earlier.

“Suit y’self,” said the ugly jailer. “Littler ones wriggle through the crawly-way better, though. There’s that.”

The face moved away, out of Shel’s sight. A moment later she heard a grinding sound of rusty metal, and then the heavy protest of creaking hinges. The barred hatch swung away from the other end of the crawlspace, much to her surprise.

“C'mon out, then, big girl,” came the jailer’s voice from somewhere beyond the crawl-way.

Shel frowned briefly, but ducked her shoulders and slid into the tight crawlspace. She did indeed have to wiggle, moving very slowly with her arms tucked under her chest and her knees pressed together by the close, irregular walls of the tunnel.

Outside, she rose up dusting herself off and took in the thoroughly ugly man holding a torch and waiting for her in the much larger, main chamber of the dungeon cavern. Beyond him, a pool of light spilled down stairs leading up. The ugly jailer, who was no taller than Shel’s elbows and misshapen in the shoulders and legs to boot, motioned in that direction with his too large head.

“C'mon, then. Off we go.”

“Where are you taking me?” asked Shel, not sure she wanted to know the answer. Her jailer made no reply. Instead, he turned and shuffled off toward the stairs. Shel followed him. She didn’t have much choice.

The stairs were wooden planks set in place on top of a natural rise in the cave floor, mortared in place to give sure footing over the treacherous incline. At the top, the floor became level once again – if a bit uneven – and shortly led to an opening.

The ugly jailer stored his torch in an iron bracket pounded into the wall just inside, and led Shel out into bright sunlight. She saw the entrance to the dungeon was a natural fissure in a one side of a tall, broad rock jutting out of the dirt at the edge of a dense forest.

“This way, this way.” The misshapen little man turned to the right and went around the side of the big, flat boulder. He led the way across a narrow yard. To either side in the near distance, Shel could see row upon row of evenly spaced fruit trees. Directly ahead was the manor house, a towering affair of brick, stone and stone with stained glass windows on the upper floors.

Pennants flapped from the turrets and spires of the manor, and banners hung over the battlements. They all bore the sigil of Archon Murdrek Thorne. When Shel and her guide reached the rear entrance, however, she saw a different coat of arms carved in the masonry above the door. That must be the sign of Sorrel, she thought, wondering again what had happened to the family that built this estate.

Shel followed the ugly hunchback through the entrance, which let into the kitchens. Her jailer-turned-guide hurried past busy kitchen workers and undercooks at their cutting boards and wash-basins and led Shel through the enticing smells and delicious aromas hanging in the air around the brick ovens, until at last they emerged through a service door into the main hall. They crossed the cozy hall – far smaller than the one at the gang’s hideout – and passed through a double-wide, arched doorway into a foyer.

From there, the jailer took her down a narrow and intermittently torchlit corridor until they reached an iron-reinforced door of sturdy oak near the back of the house. With an evil, crooked leer at Shel, the hunchback rapped once on the door before shoving it open. Turning back to the frightened but determined young woman, he extended an arm to indicate the doorway and sketched a mocking bow.

Swallowing her hesitation, Shel stepped forward. She held her head high as she passed the still-leering hunchback and entered an oblong room. The tapestries and carpets that masked the stone construction elsewhere in the house were conspicuously absent. Bare stonework was lit by the harsh, naked flame of half a dozen oil lamps.

Near the center of the chamber rested a heavy desk. Behind this slab of wood sat Murdrek Thorne. The archon had his elbows braced on the desk top, forearms held vertically with his hands held palms together and his fingers steepled and resting lightly against his chin. He studied Shel with those dark eyes, his expression giving nothing away.

The only other furnishings in the room were two wooden contraptions in the basic form of tables. On one, the rectangular shelf that would have formed the table top turned on a pivot set atop the table base. The shelf was currently tilted back with one end a few inches from the floor and the other end about five feet higher. Leather straps dangled from near the edges and in the exact center. Shel would have known what those were for even were it not for the other torture-rack.

Rez was strapped down tight on that one.

The leader of the gang was unconscious, slumped limply in the tight leather straps that held him by wrists, ankles, waist and throat. A length of wood, wrapped in scarred leather, was threaded between his teeth and held in place by a taut strap wound around his head. A thin dribble of spit hung pendulously from one corner of his mouth.

Bruising shone sickly yellow and blotchy, purplish gray on Rez’s bare chest and legs. Dried blood was caked here and there on his skin where he’d been cut. Angry red patches – some of which oozed with a thick, white liquid – looked like burns. It was quite clear that Rez had been most thoroughly tortured. Shel swallowed a lump in her throat, trying not to show the feelings of dread that welled up in her guts at the sight of her unconscious friend. At least he was breathing, even if it was shallow and audibly ragged.

Tearing her eyes from her battered comrade, Shel returned her attention to the architect of their mutual misfortune. Thorne stared back at her for a long, tensely silent moment before sitting back, folding his hands in his lap, and favoring Shel with a warm and cultured smile.

“My dear,” the archon greeted her. His voice was a rich and mellow sound, coldly melodious. “I have been so looking forward to this conversation.”

Shel flashed the dark-eyed nobleman a defiant grin. “So have I,” she said, and lashed out with the pent up soul energy she’d been holding onto ever since crawling out of her cell. Her invisible attack whipped violently across the room, but impacted against an invisible shield as if the air turned solid. In the same instant, she felt herself caught up in a tight, invisible grip. She stared at Thorne, confused. The archon had made no move, and no tell-tale haze around him suggested he had woven.

Snide laughter behind her revealed Shel’s mistake. The ugly jailor! When she had probed the edges of her cell, he had known about it. She cursed inwardly at her own oblivious stupidity. Of course the hunchback was a weaver, and now her one chance to strike at Thorne – her only hope of getting out Rez and getting out of here – had been snatched away.

“Come now, my dear,” said Thorne, rising from his straight-backed and ornately decorated chair. Circling around the desk, he moved to within a pace of Shel where she stood, rigidly held by the hunchback weaver. “I want us to be friends.”

“I doubt that,” Shel said through clenched teeth. She struggled against her bonds, but to no avail. She glared at the archon, but her venom was met with indifference.

“I assure you, it’s the truth,” said Thorne, turning away and speaking in a conversational tone. He gazed across the room at the unconscious Rez. “Our mutual acquaintance Rezdurth here isn’t a friend.” He turned back to Shel then, eyebrows drawn down ominously. “To either of us.”

Shel tried to shake her head, but couldn’t move even that little bit. She sneered at Thorne instead. “I'm sixteen, not stupid,” she told him. “You don’t really think I’d fall for that, do you?”

Thorne’s smile appeared sad. But all it took was one look at the malevolent, black pits of his eyes for Shel to be certain he was entirely false.

“My dear,” the archon said, moving across the room to stand in front of Rez strapped to the table. He lifted his arm in its voluminous silk sleeve to indicate his tortured prisoner with the ring-laden fingers of one hand. “This man, he isn’t the roguish hero you think he is.”

“He’s a thief,” said Shel, and she would have shrugged if she was able. “What of it? I've been a thief all my life.”

“Oh, I doubt that.” Thorne looked back at her over one shoulder, his smile taking on a cruelly mischievous aspect. “I'm sure you were a grubby little child at one point, like most of your kind. Lots of gutter urchins learn to steal, it’s their lot in life. It’s how they are bred. The listless poor, spawning endless hungry mouths that refuse to take up honest trade. Most of them turn to thievery. Not that many of them learn to weave. None, really. You see, I find that interesting.”

Thorne turned fully around, fixing Shel in a steely gaze that sent a shiver up and down her spine. “I find
you
interesting, Gutterweave.” he added.

Shel bristled at his words, but deep within her they struck a chord of self-doubt she had never before acknowledged. It had always lain there waiting, however. She had always told herself thieving was hard work; she
knew
that was true. But she certainly couldn’t argue that it was honest work. Was she really any better than her father had been?

Her eyes slid aside, finding Rez across the room. Was
he
any better?

When she looked back at Archon Thorne, her doubts melted back into the darkness of her soul. He was an obviously cruel man, an undeniably malevolent force, and she refused to be defined by the judgment of one such as he.