Soul Weaver: A Fantasy Novel (13 page)

Her escape from Archon Thorne and his hunchbacked minion had sapped much of her strength. With a strenuous effort, Shel summoned the power within her. Her eyes emitted a faint glow as she raised both hands, palms out toward the oncoming soldiers.

They never saw the blast of solid air that slammed into them, knocking them back in confused disarray. Swords fell from their hands as they clattered off the walls and sank to the floor. Panting, Shel leaped over them and continued on her way. She had to find the way out.

When she turned the next corner, she saw the double-width doors of the main hall. Careening through the doorway, she nearly lost her balance. She drew up short in the center of the cozy gathering room and tried to remember which way the hunchback had brought her in. There! That door led to the kitchens. Shel raced through it.

Shoving startled cooks and undercooks out of her way, Shel darted through the kitchens trying to remember the confusing path they had taken earlier. That hunchback must have chosen an indirect route intentionally, because Shel was sure she was close to the exit but the room she was in – filled with free-standing hearths over which a dozen steaming cauldrons hung suspended – was one she hadn’t seen before.

Pounding footsteps behind her. Shouting cooks. “She went that way!” Shel growled a curse, picked one of the four doors leading out of the soup room, and ran.

Plunging through the scullery, with guards in hot pursuit, Shel remembered her trick in the dungeon. She wasn’t sure she had enough strength to pull it off again, but it might be her only way out. Without stopping her headlong rush, she strained to extend her invisible awareness in stretching feelers that probed the walls in search of open air and the quickest path leading to it.

She gasped with exertion, her pelting footsteps faltering. She was so weak. Shel had been tired out in the practice sessions with Sanook, but she had never felt so exhausted as she did now. Weaving had sapped her energy. Her chest heaving and pulse racing, Shel burst through another doorway and into a butcher’s workshop.

Faintly, distantly, she felt the hint of a cooling breeze drifting over her cheeks and the warmth of partially-shaded sunlight.

Shel froze in midstride, concentrating on the sensation. A startled butcher’s apprentice drew back from her, raising his blood-stained cleaver defensively. Shel ignored him. That way! She ran.

A minute later she burst through the rear entrance of the manor house into the narrow back yard. The guards were still behind her. She whirled around, looking behind. She spared a thought for Rez, wishing she’d been able to save him.

As if summoned by her thoughts, she heard him then. Rez was screaming. It was one unbroken howl of torment and agony that broke off abruptly, replaced by silence. Shel hung her head. There had been nothing more for Thorne to take; Rez would never have relinquished his own, original soul. Surely Thorne’s new ability didn’t stretch so far as to enable him to take it anyway. And if Rez was going to submit to his tortures, if there was anything at all he could tell his tormentor, he would have done so by now.

Rez was dead, and she had no time to mourn him.

The first of the guards appeared in the doorway. Red-faced and shouting angrily, he brandished his sword high overhead as he charged after her.

Shel wiped a tear from the corner of one eye and turned away from the manor house. With her last reserve of strength, she thrust both hands palms down toward the ground. Twin shafts of power burst from her palms and stabbed down at the ground. When her forceful weaves met the unyielding earth, the recoil sent Shel rocketing into the sky just as the amazed guard emerged from the house swinging his sword through empty space.

***

Murdrek Thorne paced back and forth in the main hall of the Sorrel house, livid with rage.

The servants of the house cowered in nearby rooms, fearful of any summons and striving to work silently lest they come to the attention of the man who had murdered their rightful employers and absorbed the estate into his own.

Thorne’s own armsmen stepped lightly. Those who patrolled the grounds outside were sharply alert, but beneath their painstaking attention to duty each man shared the same relief that they were not called upon to attend their master.

Those on duty within the house, and particularly those who stood at rigid attention along the walls of the main hall, sweated beneath their helmets and prayed their archon’s eye wouldn’t single them out.

Thorne was clearly feeling murderous.

The captain of the guards stood nervously alongside the “royal” table, the only of several heavy wooden tables that remained in the room. It had stood apart from the rest in the old days, a smaller table with room for the principal members of the Sorrel house. Its fellows had long since been removed, but this one remained. On it now rested a serving platter carrying a jug of wine and two wooden goblets; an unrolled map of the southern half of the Golden Empire; a sparkling amethyst jewel with swirling clouds in the depths of its facets; and a wooden bowl containing a dirty-looking pile of ashes: all that remained of the hunchbacked jailer.

Thorne paced back and forth in front of the table and his captain stood beside the table and struggled to keep his fear from showing. The girl had escaped.

“I want her found,” Thorne said, for perhaps the tenth time. His voice was low and dangerous, a rough growl in place of the usual silken, cultured tones. “I want her found and brought to me at once.”

“Of course, my lord,” the guard captain answered at once. His response had been the same with each repetition.

Thorne stopped his pacing, whirling around and jabbing an angry finger at the captain. “Send all of your men, Captain. Accompany them yourself. I want that gutter-rat found, is that perfectly clear?”

“Yes, my lord…” began the guard captain.

“It had better be,” the archon cut him off. “Send scouts back to the ambush. Backtrack to that pitiful gang’s hideout. I'm certain it won’t be far off. Find it, you may find the rest of them. I want everyone else slashing and burning their way through that forest until the Gutterweave is found.”

“But, my lord,” the captain said, swallowing a terrified lump in his throat but pressing on despite fear of his master. “What about defending the house? My lord…”

“Should the rebels try taking this estate, let them have it. Put the house to flames before you depart. I have no further need of it.”

“But, my lord…what of yourself?”

“I will continue on to the capital,” Thorne said, his dark eyes narrowed dangerously at the captain’s questioning. “Alone.”

“But sir!”

“I have no need of bumbling armsmen and guards!” snapped Thorne, and his eyes flashed with dreadful inner light. The guard captain felt his master’s anger like a physical blow and recoiled from it. Thorne sneered at him, and swept out of the room.

***

Shel picked herself up from where she had fallen. Damp, dead leaves clung to her clothes and dirt streaked her face. She looked around in a daze.

She hadn’t been able to maintain her wild flight. That first incredible jump had drained the last reserves of her power. Utterly spent, she had plummeted from the sky. It felt like she had knocked into every single tree branch in the forest on her way down. She was bloodied and bruised, shaken from the fall. She didn’t realize how fortunate she was in hitting so many limbs; they had slowed her fall.

Turning around, Shel saw that she had nevertheless torn a shallow furrow along the forest floor. Leaves and debris were swept away, and she had dragged at the dirt as she tumbled. Shel shook her head and brushed as much of the dirt and the dead leaves away as she could.

Then she looked all around, trying to figure out which way to go. Still lost, she thought. At least there weren’t any guards this time.

Her thoughts were sluggish. It was more than exhaustion. Shel didn’t know it, but she was in a light shock. She stumbled away from her crash site, numbly pushing branches and vines aside as she walked.

Rez was dead.

She couldn’t have saved him, she knew that. She knew there wasn’thing she could have done. If she had tried to rescue him, Thorne would have recovered from her initial attack and probably destroyed her. She had sensed his power and it was immense. Maybe if Rez had been able to help, together they could have stood off the archon. But Rez was on the edge of death already, with all his accumulated souls stripped from him. He couldn’t have helped, and without him Shel didn’t stand a chance.

She knew she had made the right decision, and she didn’t feel guilty about Rez’s death. Rather, she felt responsible for it. She couldn’t help but think Aemond would have known what to do. If not in the manor house, then back on the road when Thorne first emerged from his carriage.

If Rez and the gang hadn’t been depending on her, an untried novice weaver, things might have gone differently. It wasn’t her fault – not really – but would it have still happened if Shel hadn’t been there?

Had Rez died for her?

Shel wandered on in a daze, hardly seeing the forest all around her until it had thinned. She staggered out of the tree cover unexpectedly, and found herself standing at the edge of a wide meadow. In the distance, a flat ribbon of gray cut straight across the grass. The King’s Road.

Shel blinked, and almost ran blindly back into the forest for fear of being caught by Thorne’s soldiers. But there was no one else in sight, and after a moment Shel let herself sink heavily to the ground. Sitting there, she leaned her back against the tree and looked off at the road for a long time.

She could follow the road back, find the place where they had set the doomed ambush. From there, she could find her way back to the fortress. But would any of the gang still be there?

Shel might be only survivor now. That meant the others who hadn’t come along on the ambush wouldn’t know what had happened. But when Rez and the rest didn’t return, surely they would know it had gone wrong. If they had any sense – and Shel was pretty sure they did – they would abandon that hide-out immediately.

Tears ran silently down Shel’s dirty cheeks as she contemplated her predicament. In the end, she decided there was nowhere else for her to go. It would take her the better part of three days, and she would have to stay hidden out of sight all the way, and she would likely find only disappointment when she reached the fort. But she would go.

Having decided, Shel slipped into an unconsciousness that wasn’t quite sleep.

Two days later, Shel crouched behind a large, flowering bush alongside a narrow country road. She had seen movement a moment ago, and ducked for cover. Now she scanned the road, but saw no sign of anyone.

She was tired and sore. Wherever her clothes didn’t cover her, her skin was marked with crisscrossing bramble scratches, most of them scabbed over. Where her clothes did cover her, the bruising from her fall out of the sky was only half-healed at best. She was dehydrated and thirsty, having been unable to find anymore fresh water since well before noon that day.

None of that worried her, though. Her other strength had refreshed itself and was full.

The sun was low in the sky and Shel had most of a day to go before she reached the abandoned fortress. That was all right. She had already chosen a camp. There would be fresh water there, and a patch of wild carrots she could dig up. She had felt these things out with scouting tendrils of invisible energy. They lay just a few minutes away – on the other side of this road.

She would have to cross, and when she did Shel knew she’d be exposed. She gave up straining her eyes in the failing light, and closed them instead. Clearing her mind, she imagined the burning white mass of her souls. She summoned that power for herself and sent it outward, questing delicately into the gathering twilight on the other side of the road for the complementary and telltale warmth of other living things.

She encountered it immediately. Shel’s eyes flew open, startled, just as the slender woman and burly young man stepped out of the foliage at her back and trained their crossbows on the base of her neck.

“Don’t turn around,” hissed the woman, and Shel recognized her voice at once. Other than herself and Kal, Rez’s gang was short on women and from the brief time she’d spent at the fortress Shel knew that voice.

“Rori,” she said, speaking slowly and clearly. “It’s me, Shel. I was with Rez and the others. It’s me.”

“Quiet,” snapped the man. “Don’t try to talk, and don’t turn around!”

“What?” Shel shook her head slightly. “What are you talking about? Why not?”

“Be quiet!” Rori shrieked at her. What was going on? Suddenly, Rori circled around in front of her and Shel saw the tip of the crossbow bolt pointed straight at her face. She sucked in a breath, eying Rori in confusion.

“Rori!” started the man, but Rori shook her head.

“You know it doesn’t work like that, Alban,” she told her companion, never taking her eyes off Shel. “With a Soulweaver, doesn’t matter if she can see us or not.”

Shel opened her mouth to speak, but the auburn-haired woman gestured violently with the crossbow. Shel closed her mouth.

“No speaking, though,” Rori said. “Not going to let you trick us with your words.”

The expression on Shel’s face was so incredulous, so stunned, that Rori lowered the crossbow about an inch and looked back at the other young woman speculatively.

“Where are you headed, then?” she asked.

“Rori!” said Alban, who had come around Shel’s other side. He was a burly youth, and might well have been related to Maul. Right now he looked exasperated, and he took his eyes off Shel to roll them at Rori.

“Hush,” his companion said. “I don’t think her magic depends on talking, either. You think Rez ever had to depend on his mouth to get him out of trouble?”

“Did he ever depend on anything else?” countered Alban. Shel drew her head back slightly, surprised by the retort. She had to admit, Alban made a compelling argument.

Rori just scowled, though, and tightened her grip on the crossbow. “Speak up, Shel. Where are you headed?”