Soul Weaver: A Fantasy Novel (30 page)

The luster of the gemstones faded and vanished, and then Rezdurth cast them aside carelessly to clatter among the ever-growing scatter of dull, lifeless jewels on the floor to his right.

Thorne was squatting in the burnt-out, filthy tavern like some dirty peasant. His power grew by the minute, however, and soon he would seat himself in a far more properly accommodating setting. The smile which never left his lips his sharp and predatory. His dark eyes gleamed with dreams of unlimited power.

In the opposite corner, near the empty doorframe which led to the street, a corpse still smoked. The fire that destroyed more than half of this tavern had burnt out hours and hours ago, its coals gone cold at last. The man – perhaps it had been the tavern owner – had died ten minutes ago, when he unwisely interrupted Rezdurth Thorne.

Thorne had burnt him to a crisp without ever looking up from his treasures.

Now, however, Thorne did look up. His hands, gently clutching a exquisitely cut and still-sparkling ruby, drifted downward as he narrowed his eyes and concentrated on what he felt in the air. His fingers loosened, and the ruby dropped to the floor between his feet. Thorne hardly noticed and gave no thought to the precious soul imprisoned in the crimson-gleaming facets.

The wave of thundering power was like the shock of a nearby explosion. It buffeted him like the winds of a spinner, the incredibly destructive storms which periodically devastated the southernmost of the Southern Islands. Thorne rose – or perhaps he was lifted. He closed his eyes and leaned back his head, spreading his arms out to either side as the power washed over him. For a moment he hung poised in the corner, balanced on the forward half of his feet his knees still bent sharply forward of his chest and his arms spread. To the right kind of eyes, Thorne glowed.

All about Thorne, the dust and soot didn’t stir. The walls, two of them charred and ending abruptly a foot or so lower than they once had, didn’t shake. Nothing was happening here.

What Thorne experienced was an echo of what happened elsewhere. It was a shockwave, all right, and Rezdurth Thorne knew at once the meaning of the entirely psychic storm he had just weathered. He couldn’t tell, solely from the aftermath, who had been the victor. But he knew that the confrontation between the Emperor and the half-blood Shadowgirl had just ended.

Thorne made his decision in an instant. While he had already absorbed the bounty from most of the gems he had gathered, a significant number remained to be tapped. However, the contest which had just ended some miles away had been decided by an enormous use of power. The victor would never again be so thoroughly exhausted, not if Thorne waited a thousand years for his chance. The chance – the only chance – was right now.

His palms slapped against his thighs as his knees straightened. Thorne rocketed up from the dirty tavern floor, shot like an arrow into the cloudy sky.

***

All around the river gate, in exactly the same instant, each and every Tophylax Emperia simply stopped. Whatever the spiky-armored soldiers had been doing, they froze. Some, off-balance, toppled over. They made no attempt to right themselves, even those which fell beneath the water.

***

Shel stood over the ancient, broken man who had once been emperor. His eyes still wide with shock, Daerydd stared back up at her with incomprehension. She had tricked him, made him utter his own name without recognizing it. He had never heard it before in his life, not that he could remember. It was the name given by a mother he had never met. A name which, for a thousand years, no single soul had dared whisper to him even when he swallowed them.

His weaving had turned upon him immediately and irrevocably. All his power was torn from him in a heartbeat. In a whisper. In a single word.

Daerydd’s mouth fell open but no words emerged. A low, whining moan cut off abruptly as he clamped his jaw shut. The Soulless man shook his head. He couldn’t remember what he had meant to say.

Shel caught his eyes with her own, searching him. She nodded, satisfied by what she saw. One of her hands curled loosely, as though she were holding a round object. Daerydd’s eyes dropped from her face, and he stared with wonder at the increasingly bright glow which only they two could see. Shel drew on the wooden ornaments in her hair, channeled her power through them like she was spinning her yarn before using it to weave. The single threads grew as she spun them through the midnight wood. She had so much. She had it all.

When Daerydd looked back up to Shel’s face, he flinched away from the fiercely glowing eyes and the frightening, merciless smile.

Overhead, the dome collapsed in a sudden cataclysm. Masonry dust exploded into the chamber in an immediate, blinding cloud that descended like a curtain. Heavy stone blocks tumbled ponderously to the floor. Sunlight burst through the now-open roof. Stones crashed into the floor, cracking and shattering the marble and sending up another billowing cloud of dust.

Shel instinctively threw up her arms. The motion was unnecessary. In the same breath, she extended her soul and wove its strands into an invisible shield over her head. Tumbling blocks of stone impacted on her aegis, crumbling and falling away. The flying dust was everywhere, and Shel prepared another weave and pushed it outward from her body to dispel the dust. A circular area all around her rapidly cleared, even as the debris rained down on everything else.

Another empty bubble of clean air floated downward through the swirling dust. Within this woven pocket of clear air, Rezdurth Thorne stood with his arms crossed over his chest and his dark eyes locked on Shel. He was surprised, yet pleased.

So, the Gutterweave had beaten an emperor. Somehow. But she was young and inexperienced, and no doubt exhausted from the battle. This would all be over soon.

Thorne alighted on the cracked marble floor several paces away from Shel and the cowering, frail old man who had been the mightiest ruler this world had ever known. The dust began to settle. The walls shuddered and groaned, and small pieces of debris continued falling from the shattered dome overhead. Shel turned slowly around to face the final Archon.

Thorne wasted no time, attacking the moment his feet touched the floor. Already surrounded by a tightly meshed bubble of solid spirit, he extended the shield in front of him. Feeding heavy threads of power into the weave, Thorne sent a spear of energy lashing out at Shel.

The crackling bolt of power impacted against her own shield with a hot sizzle which rapidly dissipated. Untouched, Shel smiled and lifted one hand to playfully bat at her hair. Dark wooden ornaments, woven amongst the locks, clicked together dully.

“You are
far
too late,” she said, with an almost good-natured laugh. “Sorry.”

“How did you defeat him?” Thorne gestured to the Soulless old man at Shel’s feet. Daerydd still lay on the floor, a blank expression on his open-mouthed face. The emperor was gone; the body, though it lived, was an empty shell. This half-blooded peasant girl had taken everything he had been. “How?”

“He sought a name.” Shel shrugged. “I named him.”

Thorne had always heard there was power in a name, a true name. He had never understood that ancient saying until now. He still didn’t know the details of the emperor’s secret ritual, but it centered on a name. What name? The last archon looked at Shel with a sinking feeling. She remained sublimely confident beneath his gaze.

“Even if you knew,” she said, guessing his thoughts with a smile, “you’d never be able to beat me. Not now, little archon. It doesn’t matter anyway. I have no intention of fighting you, Murdrek Thorne.”

So she knew. It mattered little. Thorne tightened his shield in anticipation as Shel extended one hand, but no attack came. Daerydd whimpered as ghostly fingers crawled into his robes and lifted out a glittering jewel. Thorne understood at once, and despaired.

“No, don’t!” he cried.

Shel crushed the gemstone to dust.

A soul, released from its confinement, flew into Thorne’s body. The invader spread through the form of Rezdurth Thorne, seizing the vessels and organs and taking control. It chased Thorne through the tunnels of the mind and the solemn chambers of the heart and there, it devoured him.

Rez staggered, clutching one hand to his chest and sucking in a loud, gasping breath. Maintaining her shield, Shel waited calmly.

When Rez had caught his breath, he turned an awe-struck look her way. “You've done it,” he said. The last Rez remembered, the girl he’d rescued from the dungeons of Solstice was fleeing Thorne’s guards in the Sorrel manor, and his brother was just completing the weave that would pluck out his soul. He looked around him now at the ruined chamber and the paralyzed Tophylax at the walls – Rez knew them from before he stepped down as Archon – and whistled in appreciation. Clearly, he had missed a lot. “Shel, I don’t know how…but you've done it.”

“Not yet,” she surprised him by saying. Shel took a slow, almost dainty step across the rubble-strewn floor toward Rez. “One task remains, I'm afraid. Tell me something, though.”

“What’s that?” Rez had an uneasy feeling that grew as Shel took another step closer. His eyes flickered over to the fallen emperor and back. He wondered if that monster had ever truly been young. Well, of course he had. Was he as innocent as Shel had been, before learning to control the power? Was it the power itself that had ruined his soul?

“How old are you, Rezdurth Thorne?”

Rez flinched away from his full name. He truly had missed much. Rez hadn’t used his house name for so long, he wasn’t even sure anymore why he kept it secret. Perhaps out of habit, along with all the other secrets he kept. Well, this girl must know all those secrets now.

No, he told himself, not a girl. Not at all, not any longer. He smiled at the memory of her temper regarding that subject. Shel was truly a woman now, truly and completely grown up. It saddened him greatly to see it, and he thought back to his own melancholy youth and grim awakening to the cares of adulthood. So long ago, now…

“Assuming I was in that jewel no more than four months,” he told her, seeing no reason to hide the information, “then I am seventy-four years old.”

A single note of laughter burst from Shel’s lips.

“I thought you might be thirty-five when we first met,” she told him. “And then I thought you must be about twenty or so. I did wonder about that quite a bit.”

Returning her smile, Rez explained. “It’s the weaving. Nobody knows why or how, but the more souls you weave the longer you stay young.” He resisted the urge to glance again at the ancient, shriveled old man on the broken flagstone floor.

“Yes,” Shel agreed. She already knew. “Still,” she went on, giving her head a tiny shake. “Seventy-four. How old was your father when he passed the title on to you?”

“One hundred and thirty-one,” answered Rez, his voice a little stiff. He didn’t like this, didn’t know where it was going, and liked that even less. “Why?”

“You do know the First Archons – and poor Daerydd, here – were all half-blood Shadowfolk, don’t you?”

“I've heard that,” Rez admitted. “Unlike most noble sons, I even half believed it. That’s one of the reasons I sought out Aemond, and later Sanook. Shel, our power comes from that forgotten heritage, from the ancestors the emperor betrayed. That’s why I abandoned my title.”

“Allowing it to pass down to your brother Murdrek,” she reminded him. “He was…how old?”

“Fifteen years my junior,” answered Rez, still puzzling over what Shel was getting at with these questions. There was something very different about her, and it was more than the vast increase in her power.

“So young,” she said in a whisper. Pursing her lips in thought, she tapped one finger against her chin. “I thought you all might have been older, like him.” Without looking behind her, she gestured to the Soulless former emperor. Then she took another step closer to Rez.

“How many generations, Rez? Do you know? How diluted is your Shadow blood now? You realize that you and I are the only ones left, don’t you? All that power, every single Shadow soul that ever was, it’s all here in this room. You and me. All that’s left. You see? Only one task remains.”

Rez stepped back from Shel, and she advanced.

“No,” he whispered. “Oh no, Shel.”

“That isn’t my name,” she told him, relishing the words. She extended threads of soul and began weaving them into a pattern as she took another step closer. Rez retreated again.

Shel threw out her weaves abruptly, a dozen of them flying out to the edges of the room. Rez saw at once what she was about, and matched her weave for weave. It was a strain, pulling together so many spells at the same time, and he was rusty. But he managed to hook himself into twelve of the immobilized Tophylax.

Shel had succeeded as well, and if it was any strain for her that didn’t show in her smooth, confident features.

The Tophylax Emperia moved jerkily, coming back to life. Half were under Shel’s control, while Rez directed the others. The massive, Soulless bodyguards lumbered toward one another and began to grapple. Shel laughed as if she were having a marvelous time.

“Shel, stop this,” he begged her.

“I don’t think so.” The ornaments clinked together in her swaying hair when Shel shook her head. “All I have to do is kill you, Rez, and then all of it’s mine. All the magic in the world. I'll be the last one. The only one. You see that’s how it has to be, right?”

She hurled a spear of energy at him. Rez deflected it, with some difficulty. He staggered back under the force, but his defenses held. The floor shook beneath their feet as the massive but evenly matched Tophylax slammed into each other all around the dueling weavers in the center of the room. High overhead, the sky turned dark above the shattered dome. The first flashes of lightning flickered amongst dark clouds, and thunder rolled ominously.

“Where did this darkness come from?” Rez had to shout to be heard over the clattering, smashing sounds of battle that surrounded them. “You were good! You were innocent! What’s happened to you, Shel?”