Soul Weaver: A Fantasy Novel (26 page)

“Yes,” Sanook told her. “He was wrong. But he wasn’t incorrect.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say!” Shel spun angrily away from Sanook. The Shadowman glided to her, put his hands on her shoulders.

“That child – that very same child – destroyed our people, Shel.”

“What?” She turned back around, but the next question died on her lips. They no longer stood suspended in infinite nothingness. The world had reformed around them. They stood on the walls of a city. Beyond the walls, over Sanook’s shoulder, she could see the distant forest of black and purple trees.

“Our people made peace with the hotbloods,” Sanook told her, gesturing for her to look behind. Shel turned again, and saw the city laid out beneath her. It was a tiny city, she thought, barely a dozen streets within its walls. Most of it was given over to a horde of merchants pushing around carts and shouting their wares.

“This isn’t…is it? Solstice?”

“Correct,” Sanook told her. “This is the city that became Solstice, anyway. At the moment, it is named Autumn. The peaceful boundary where summer and winter commingle. Our people and the hotbloods did live in peace. For a hundred years, the hotbloods upheld their promise never to cut the midnight trees. Come and see.”

Sanook led her down into the fledgling city. The myriad people bustling to and fro paid them no attention. Like the people of the Midnight Forest, Shel knew they didn’t see her. She was reminded that this was all a dream, of sorts.

“Why are you showing me these things?” she asked the Shadowman at her side.

“Because you must face him soon,” Sanook told her, pausing near one edge of the street. They stood on hard-packed dirt, not yet paved, and looked into the alleyway between a tavern and a chandler’s shop. There, in the narrow opening between the buildings, stood a rickety kiosk of rough lumber.

Behind the makeshift counter stood a man of indeterminate age. He might have been twenty years old, or fifty. When he turned his head and the light struck him from a different angle, he seemed to age before her eyes. The man looked vaguely familiar. The weird agelessness of the man reminded her of Murdrek Thorne, but this man wasn’t the archon.

Shel gasped in recognition. It was the emperor, as a young man.

“He’s already more than a century old,” Sanook whispered in her ear. “He preserves himself by burning hotblood souls. Watch.”

An elderly woman hobbled up to the ratty little kiosk. The woman cut a weary figure, stooped and favoring one leg. Her face was lined with decades of worry and pain. The young man in the kiosk smiled brightly, but the glint in his eye was dark and malevolent. Did the old woman not see?

“It is the early days, yet,” Sanook explained. “The trading of souls comes much later. The emperor was the first to realize hotblood souls could be taken, swapped, bartered, and burnt. Their souls don’t last the way ours do, Shel. He uses them up, and then must take more.”

The man behind the counter, who would one day be an emperor, told the old woman he could take away her pains. He promised her an end to her suffering. She nodded eagerly and handed over some coins. Sweeping the coins into a bag, the man opened a gate to one side of his crudely constructed shopfront and beckoned the old woman to enter. She did so, and the future emperor pulled a stained and tattered curtain across the opening.

Shel and Sanook glided forward, passing directly through curtain and wood alike. They stood behind the counter now, invisible witnesses to the scene in the alleyway. The old woman knelt down painfully on the bare dirt and closed her eyes. The man who would be emperor unbuttoned his shirt, letting it hang open. The runes on his chest, forming the shape of a radiant sun, glowed faintly white to Shel’s eyes as he reached out both hands to take hold of the old woman’s head.

Her soul was wispy and faint, and he plucked it from her with ease. When it was done, the old woman sagged and opened her eyes, blinking. He smiled down at her darkly. Her cares were gone. Everything that made her human was gone as well. The old woman was Soulless.

Shel knew what happened to the Soulless. They carried on after a fashion. They lived, so long as there was someone around to make sure they kept eating. But everything that made them a person vanished. They lost much of their memory, and were often confused. They lost all motivation, all desire. They were empty shells, as this woman now was.

It was awful. And the woman had paid him for it!

Shel started forward angrily, but Sanook put a hand on her shoulder and pulled her back.

“You could don’thing anyway,” the Shadowman told her. “This is only a vision, Shel. The dream cannot see the dreamer. Come, there is more.”

They passed back into the street, and he led her away. Time sped past as they walked, the people around them blurs of rapid motion. The light faded and the sun went down, and in the space of minutes day passed into night.

They came to an inn near the wall. A single torch flamed in the night beside the heavy door. To one side of the door was a window, a round hole cut through the wall and fitted with cheap, distorted glass. Light burst through the blurry window, and shapes moved in the common room inside. Shel leaned closer, and found she could see clearly through the glass.

Inside, not far from the window, a trio of Shadowmen sat at a rickety table. Two of them cradled steaming mugs of spiced wine in their hands. The third sat staring at the front door, hands clasped in his lap.

They each wore carved wooden masks. The masks were ceremonial within the villages of the Midnight Forest, but the People Who Swallow the Souls of the Dead wore them at all times when they went among the hotbloods. It was a sign that the peace was uneasy, that the Shadowmen were not at home in the hotblood cities.

“Aeron should have returned by now,” said one of the men with spiced wine. He lifted the mug about halfway to his lips, but set it back down without drinking.

“He should not have gone at all,” said the one with his hands clasped in his lap. His eyes flickered away from the door for only a second. “We should have quit this place the moment our business with the hotblood prince was concluded.”

The other two exchanged a knowing look. Though he wasn’t looking at them, and couldn’t have seen, the third man scowled as if he knew their thoughts.

“Aeron knows the law,” he continued in a low whisper, eyes still on the front door. “He should not have let himself be drawn in by exotic eyes and pale hair.”

Sanook tugged at Shel’s sleeve. She turned reluctantly from the scene inside the inn. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“Come.”

Sanook led her to the corner and down an intersecting street. After a few moments, he led her into an alleyway. Hiding in the shadows there they found a young couple. She was blonde and light-eyed, slender and buxom. He was Aeron, the missing Shadowman.

Shel’s eyes widened when she saw the young woman. Like the old crone from before, this woman had no soul.

Aeron could tell that something was wrong. The girl had approached him outside the manor of the prince, and even then he had felt something off about her. She was beautiful, and Aeron knew his uncle believed he’d been seduced by her exotic, hotblood wiles. But it wasn’t that which prompted him to meet her again. There was something missing from this woman…

“Merissa,” he said to her now. “Tell me, please, what is it? I can feel an emptiness in you I can’t explain. What has happened to you?”

“I was cast out,” Merissa told Aeron in a voice not entirely her own. The Soulless woman was a puppet whose strings had been cut, then taken up by another. It was the man who would be emperor who spoke through her lips. “Spurned and cursed to die, abandoned by those who were my people.”

“Merissa? I don’t understand…” Something must have alerted Aeron, though, because now he took a step back from the hotblood woman. “What are you speaking of?”

“I speak of vengeance,” the emperor said with Merissa’s voice. The pretty young woman stepped forward rapidly, seizing Aeron by the arms and pushing him up against the wall. White fire burned in her eyes.

Confusion turned to fear and dawning recognition in Aeron’s eyes. But it was too late. In a flash, the pretty blonde woman reached into her skirts and pulled out a thin dagger. Without pausing, she drove the blade into Aeron’s heart. He cried out in pain. Blood spurted across Merissa’s pretty face.

She stabbed him again. And again. Aeron’s struggles subsided and his body slumped down in the dirt. She stabbed him again. The misty essence of his soul seeped from his skin and began to rise on the chill night air. Shel stared aghast as the Shadowman died and his soul lifted away. She followed it with her eyes, and that was when she saw him.

The man from the kiosk, who would become an emperor, crouched on a rooftop looking down on the murder. He smiled greedily and reached out, calling the lost soul into himself. His lips moved in a silent chant, one word repeated again and again. Shel thought he was saying the Shadowman’s name.

“Aeron.”

As he absorbed Aeron’s soul, he shuddered in obvious pleasure. Ten years fell away from his face, and a younger man rose and stepped off the roof to glide gracefully down to the alley. He looked briefly at the dead Shadowman, then turned to Merissa.

The Soulless woman stood still, holding a slim dagger that dripped dark blood on the ground. She didn’t move when the man reached down to take her knife, didn’t resist as he cut her throat with it. Dropping the dagger in the dirt between the two bodies, the man walked away into the night.

***

The Eternal Emperor of the Great and Glorious Golden Empire stood over the still form of the captive Shadowlass, flush with power. His eyes glittered in the darkness. His body thrummed with energy, all the souls his archons had been able to offer.

They burned so quickly, these hotblood souls. Those fools who had called themselves archons knew nothing of the powers that raged at the emperor’s command. They used their souls for petty tricks and charades of power. Which of them could hold winter itself at bay for even a single season, let alone a thousand years? That was power.

There was power in this sleeping girl. He could feel it, radiating from her like the intense heat of a furnace. He could almost taste it.

He could take it from her. The ritual was prepared. Two of his Tophylax Emperia waited in the hall outside this cell to carry her up to the tower where the implements were laid out. The emperor smiled. Murdrek Thorne thought he knew of stealing souls. The man had known nothing. Stealing the souls of hotblood peasants. Faugh!

He could take this girl’s soul, despite her Shadow blood. He knew the ritual, the incantations. He had gathered the instruments. Her delicious power could be his. And such power…She must have absorbed the souls of another Shadow, he knew. One that his purge had missed. One who, in turn, held the souls of many. She burned so brightly in the darkness. And it could all be his.

With such a store of power, he could turn back winter for another thousand years.

Yet the girl must be awake for the ritual to work. Her mind must be present and alert and open to him. He couldn’t complete the ritual without her name.

The girl slept. It was no natural sleep. The emperor scowled at the sleeping girl. He didn’t know by what magic she kept herself unconscious, but for so long as she slept her mind couldn’t be opened to him. He narrowed his eyes in the darkness of the cell and spat angrily on the floor.

She would wake. She must wake. She couldn’t evade him forever.

Turning on his heels, the ancient, half-breed emperor strode angrily out of the cell. The Tophylax would alert him when she stirred, and then her mind would be opened. He would plumb its depths to find her name, and then her power would be his.

Jacin Verret led a ragged group of thirty survivors through the verdant edge of the forest, hoping to avoid any Tophylax
or
rebels. Most of the men had happily discarded the brilliant golden cloaks that would now identify them only as deserters. Verret had a tougher time convincing them to ditch their expensive, high-quality armor along with the cloaks.

He didn’t know why the men followed him. When he came across Barres and Horum about to scale the wall, they had all agreed the best thing to do was get outside the city and then scatter to the winds. But once they made it outside, they grudgingly amended it might be best to stick together at least as far as the woods.

Crossing the distressingly open fields surrounding the capital, always keeping the city between themselves and the imperial palace to the south, Verret and the others had stumbled over other men with the same plan. Singly or in groups of two or three, they had fallen in with Verret, Barres, and Horum. Night descended just as the still-growing column of survivors reached the first edge of the forest.

It only made sense to make camp as a group. They would go their separate ways in the morning.

Horum woke long before the others, and when Jacin Verret woke he thought the tavern brawler turned City Watch conscript was simply the first to head off on his own. He expected the men would trickle off one by one, heading for childhood homes or distant family or simply taking to the hills. Then Horum came rushing back into camp talking about Tophylax.

Verret went back with Horum to the edge of the woods. Crouching in the undergrowth, he saw them. Two of the dreaded Tophylax Emperia, trudging solemnly along beyond the trees. Watching them, he noticed their steps never strayed into the shadow cast by the trees. They walked in the sun, with their eyeless helmets turned toward the trees.

Like as not, they were hunting the rebels. That’s what Verret told the others when he and Horum got back to the camp. He noticed none of the survivors had departed while they were gone. None had left his group since, either. Most of them had seen firsthand what the Tophylax had done in the Noble District; the rest had heard it from those who did.

For some reason, they all looked to Verret to lead them. It was his own fault, speaking up like that when Horum brought him back to camp. He should have kept his mouth shut, let the burly common room tough guy explain what they had seen and let the others work it out for themselves. But he hadn’t, and for some reason they all listened to him.