Soul Weaver: A Fantasy Novel (25 page)

He was seated comfortably and the weather was pleasant. He had eaten recently, a meal of stringy, dried meat and small, overripe berries. It was enough that his stomach wasn’t empty. Did he really need anything else?

Look at them, he thought. Most of them were standing, but that was their choice. They were alive, the same as him. They had eaten, the same as him. Yet they concerned themselves with other ideas, external ideas that probably didn’t matter. He didn’t understand them, or the way one or another of them would occasionally glance his way with curious, hopeful expressions which they quickly hid when they noticed him looking back at them.

There was something, he admitted. Something external and quite distant. He wasn’t sure what it might be, though he might have known once. He thought that it was actually two things, similar and very close together. They felt warm in his mind, but far, far away.

He felt both drawn to and repulsed by this far-off presence. Presence. Was that the right word? He wasn’t sure if that mattered, words and what they meant. The other people with him were using words out loud, but in the silence of his own thoughts did it really matter what symbol he used so long as he knew its meaning?

He became aware of a change in the far-away presence. He had been right: it was two separate things, and now they were split. One remained where it was, as near as he could tell. That was the aspect which pulled at him, beckoned him closer. The other was what repulsed him, and it was coming closer. Its warmth dimmed rapidly as it sped toward him, which seemed odd.

Fading, it arrived. Nearly spent, the tiny invisible flame entered him and Rez stood up decisively. Clearing his throat, he approached his surviving followers. He saw relief in all their eyes when they realized his silent vigil had ended. He smiled reassuringly, looking around the group and pausing briefly to lock eyes with each of them.

Alban and Rori; they’d come out of the city with him. There was old Collam, remarkably still alive. He didn’t know the names of the other nine; eight men and a woman, little more than a girl. She was somebody’s sister, he remembered that. Who was it…Belden, that was it. Belden wasn’t here. He was probably lying dead in the streets of Solstice.

Rez shook his head. They had run away. He had run away. When he felt the presence of the Tophylax Emperia, his only thought had been escape. He didn’t know how Kal had done it, but somehow she’d cut him off. He could no longer use his powers.

It must have been Shel, he reasoned. She was a Shadowoman. That puzzled him. He hadn’t known that before, but he was certain of it now. There was something missing in his memory. He thought briefly of that dimming flame which had entered him a moment ago. What had that flame lost on its way to him?

“We have to get back to the capital,” he said aloud. He showed nothing of his true thoughts to the others. They expected him to lead. He would do so. Even if he wasn’t sure why he led, or where. “How many of the others were with you in Solstice?”

“Everyone,” said Collam. The old man started to add something else, but a rumbling cough interrupted and he turned away to spit a thick glob of dark phlegm into the undergrowth.

“Shel and Kal, they said we had to throw everything we've got at them,” said Rori. She sounded angry. Disillusioned. When she looked at the others, there was a fierce pride in her eyes. She and Alban, they were the ones who had “rescued” him. There was something else to it, though. From the way she said Shel’s name, Rez could guess. It was good.

“Aye,” Collam agreed, his coughing fit subsided. “And I roused up every thief and scofflaw I could find in the city. Old friends and new, we turned the whole of Solstice against the Suncloaks.” He laughed, a somewhat painful wheeze. “'Twas a grand old ball.”

“One we've nothing to show for,” Rez reminded them, looking pointedly around at them.

One of the men stepped forward. Rez tried to think of his name, but drew a blank. “We've something all right,” the man said, dumping a heavy burlap sack on the ground at Rez’s feet. Sparkling jewels tumbled out of the sack, spilling on the ground. Soul stones. Kneeling, Rez picked up a fat emerald and turned it over and over before his eyes.

“Yes,” he murmured. “Thank you…”

“Dorson,” the thief said. “I was with Peele.”

“Peele, yes.” Rez shook his head. “He didn’t make it out?”

“Killed by Archon Norres,” Dorson said, lowering his eyes.

Rez shook his head, wearing a saddened expression. Rising, he pocketed the emerald and reached out to clasp Dorson’s shoulder.

“It was a bold plan,” he admitted, feeling a reluctant admiration for the Shadowgirl’s audacity. “And our losses are not all in vain. You dealt a heavy blow to the emperor’s Conclave of Archons. But the job’s not finished yet.”

He looked back down at the sack of gemstones. So much power. There were more of the sacks, he saw, lying on the ground. They hadn’t made it out with all of them, not by a long shot, but the tribute of at least three archons was stuffed into those burlap sacks. So much power.

Rez realized the hand he had rested on Dorson’s shoulder had tightened until the other man was wincing slightly. He released the lad and stepped back. Whatever Kal had done to him – whatever Shel had done – there had to be a way to undo it. He couldn’t accept the idea of all this power at his fingertips, useless to him.

The trouble was, he had so little time. The emperor would be off-balance, but it wouldn’t be long before the old vulture took charge of the situation. The girl, Shel – she’d be dead already, of course – had given him an opportunity, but if he didn’t seize the moment it would pass. Yet, she had also stripped his power from him. Without his weaving, and with only a dozen weary, wounded soldiers to call his own, how could Rez hope to finish the job of toppling an emperor?

He ground his teeth in frustration. There had to be a way.

***

It was dream-like, but not a dream.

Shel knew she was asleep, her body lying on the damp stone floor of a featureless cell in the emperor’s dungeon. But if she were dreaming, she didn’t know where her body was. There were other ways that this was like no dream she had ever had.

She was in the Midnight Grove, with Sanook. Sanook was dead, though, so this clearly wasn’t real. Yet Sanook seemed to know he was dead, which meant it wasn’t a memory. Maybe it was a dream, she thought.

“It’s not,” Sanook said.

The Grove was different. She had never seen it this way. Somehow, although she couldn’t directly see it, she knew the Grove was much larger than she had known it. These Winterheart pines stretched out in a vast, shadowy forest that covered the land. These woods were full of tiny villages. Her people lived here. This was the past.

“Correct,” Sanook said.

The Shadowman stood at her side and they moved. Shel was unaware of having taken a single step, but now they stood elsewhere in the ancient, vast Midnight Grove. It was the edge of a village. Two dozen small huts blending into the surrounding trees, the midnight wood of their construction unvarnished and largely unadorned.

The huts were generally large enough for three rooms inside, some as many as five. Some were built around the boles of taller trees which spread their lowermost boughs gently over the roofs. Others were hidden in those branches, evident only from the black wood ladders jutting down from amongst the nettles. One stood apart, in the center of the village. It was the largest, but it contained only one room.

Shel and Sanook stood at the doors of the meeting house. The entire village gathered within. The young men gathered in a loose knot to one side. The older men stood with their wives, some of whom held nursing babes to their breast. Young women stood with their mothers, most of them clutching hands. The rest of the children sat quietly in the back with two old matrons watching after them.

The villagers wore loose, shifting clothes in shades of black and purple. Men and women alike wore sleeveless, vest-like garments for shirts above their baggy trousers. A few wore hats, though no two of the hats were the same. The caps were small but quite elaborately constructed, and they denoted the occupation of the wearer. There was the triple-peaked, cup-brimmed cap of a Caregiver. On the other side of the room, the conical hat with its myriad dangling ornaments identified a Woodsinger.

They didn’t wear their delicately carved wooden masks, not here. Their faces and arms were bare, in some cases their chests as well. Their marks stood out in stark contrast against their universally pallid skin. A thousand symbols inked by birth, spinning dazzling webs across their flesh. No two bore identical markings, but the same symbols appeared in different combinations and designs.

The meeting house held no chairs. There were no benches or couches for sitting. The floor was bare earth, and the walls undecorated, midnight-black wood from the Winterheart pines. At the heart of the room stood its sole ornamentation, a miniature black-barked, amethyst-nettled midnight tree. From amongst the spreading boughs of this tree emerged other branches, narrow and twisting and bare of nettles. These curled in a loose filigree around the tree, rising and then spreading outward. The tips of these vine-like branches flattened into broad, sturdy pads on which sat smoking, dimly burning candles.

Arrayed before the candletree, the three eldest men of the village in their ashy gray robes stood in stern judgment over the young couple who knelt before them. They alone wore the wooden masks, each depicting a solemnly stylized depiction of the true visage beneath.

She was dressed as all the others, her vest of rough wool dyed a brilliant violet and her loose trousers the lightest of blacks, more nearly gray. She had long, silken black hair that hung over one shoulder in a thick, intricate braid. The markings on her face were delicate and circled round her eyes above and beneath, converging at the outer corners of the eyes and trailing from there down behind the jaw to descend her neck in two narrow bands. The blond-haired man who knelt at her side, little more than a boy, wasn’t of the People Who Swallow the Souls of the Dead.

He wore tight fitting breeches and a shining coat of amber silk. The cut and design was unusual and unfamiliar, but Shel thought she saw just the tiniest resemblance to certain traditional fashions back home in Vallen. His tanned face was turned up in politely restrained defiance at the three elders.

The girl looked only at the floor. She cradled an infant to her breast and blew soft, quiet noises to her child. She made no other sound.

The babe was no more than a week old and wrapped tightly in a woven blanket. The First Elder reached down for the baby and when she gave him over the old man twitched aside the blanket and examined the naked child he held. The baby was pink-skinned, but his flesh bore the markings of a Shadowman, concentrated almost entirely on his chest.

The Second and Third Elders insisted this had never happened before. It was an entirely new thing, quite aside from being inherently bad. The First Elder remained unconvinced. Before Naykela’s pregnancy, he hadn’t believed it was possible for their people and the hotbloods to create a new soul. The evidence of his own eyes showed otherwise, and the First Elder was no fool. If it could happen, it had probably happened before. In another village, another corner of the Great Midnight Forest.

Perhaps even across the waters in the Other Land, the old land where the Forest was all. It was said there were no hotbloods there, only the People Who Swallow the Souls of the Dead. But the hotbloods went everywhere. It was their nature to spread themselves into each new place they could find.

It saddened the First Elder. He could read between the lines of the Most Ancient Teachings. He knew his own people had been like that once. He suspected the trickster demons of his people’s oldest stories had once been real, and that the first of the tribe had truly stolen the world from them. He suspected that ten thousand years from this night, some hotblood elder would have similar notions about his people.

This was the beginning, the First Elder knew. He held it squirming in his hands, and now it began to howl and bawl. The hotbloods changed the things they chose to claim. When they decided to make their home on the land, they changed the land. When one tribe decided to take the home of another tribe, the conquered people soon wore the same bizarre clothes as the invader.

With his people, they would do more than cut down the trees and dress them in strange clothing.

The First Elder looked down at the innocent child in his hands. He beheld the tiny, midnight blue birthmarks which swirled on the infant’s torso in the shape of the sun. He knew the child itself wasn’t evil, whatever the Second and Third believed. Nor were its parents, not even the hotblood father. That fact magnified his sorrow, for he was forced to agree with his colleagues. This child, and all children like it, must not live.

If they did, one day the people of the Midnight Forest would disappear forever.

When the Elders announced their consensus, the child’s mother lifted his eyes for the first time from the floor. In a panic, she rose from where she knelt and reached for her baby. She wailed and there were no words in the sound, only the most terrible wound imaginable. They wouldn’t give her the baby, for they knew she would do anything to save its life.

The First Elder turned, carrying the baby away from its mother. She rushed forward, and the other two Elders restrained her. She threw out her arms and howled, “Daerydd!”

The spell which had held Shel frozen in place as all this unfolded snapped, and with a sympathetic cry she leaped forward. But the meeting house dissolved into swirling black mist and she lunged through wisps of nothing.

Spinning around, she saw Sanook still with her. She shook her head, choking on what she wanted to say. There were too many words, and they tangled in her throat. In the silence she realized there were no words, nothing she could say.

She knew these visions had been real. This thing had happened. That it was long ago made little difference. She had seen her people, as they once had been. And they had been ready to murder an infant for the sin of its blood. That Elder had known – and somehow, Shel had known all that he knew – yet he had still done it. And for what?