Souldancer (Soul Cycle Book 2) (2 page)

Azil marched Xander to the back of the lead wagon. “I trust you can find your way from here,” the driver said before moving on to the front.

Xander wondered why his father would summon him away from guard duty. None of the possibilities were pleasant. Except…perhaps the quartermaster would finally declare his son an adult. Xander yearned for a place in the clan, but each year his rivals advanced while he remained behind.

Eldest custom required a Nesshin to demonstrate his worth as a mark of adulthood. Custom also excluded gambling proceeds, but that was the clan’s loss.

He’s probably found me a woman.
Xander winced as past candidates sprang to mind.

Thank God he couldn’t be forced into marriage. Nesshin courtship law bound the suitor to approach the prospective bride’s father. After an exhaustive interview, the family patriarch would either give his blessing or irrevocably veto the union.

However, tradition didn't stop most grooms’ parents from voicing their opinions—a right that Altor Sykes often exercised.

Very well,
Xander decided.
I will hear my father out, nod when appropriate, and ignore his advice.

Glad to be free of Azil, but anxious over what awaited him inside, Xander hopped onto the lumbering wagon. He stepped through the back door as he had a thousand times. But somehow this time felt different.

“You wish to see me, Father?” Xander asked as he entered the quartermaster’s cramped chamber. Dry sterile air gave way to the tang of spices, sawdust, and hot metal.

Altor sat cross-legged on a Thysian rug clutching a piece of silvered glass and a file in his callused hands. Xander sat down before his iron-haired sire without waiting for an invitation. Of all the Nesshin, he alone had that privilege.

The quartermaster worked in silence.

Xander glanced around the room. A jumble of heirlooms adorned the walls—relics of a vanished life. Most prominent were the mirrors, resplendent in frames of exquisitely carved hardwood. They were his father’s masterworks, testaments to a man who’d lost everything only to start again. He’d learned the trade to support a family—a son, and for a time, a loving bride.

For far too short a time.

At length, Altor set the silvered pane aside. “Yes, I sent for you. I’m surprised Azil brought you so soon. I didn’t expect you until after we made camp.”

“You are still busy with the mirror,” Xander observed. “I’m sorry I interrupted you.”

A smile made its way onto Altor’s weathered face. “Interrupted? Not at all. There is never an end to work. There is always time to speak with one’s son.”

Xander studied the gleaming square at his father’s feet. Only then did he notice fine traceries in the polished surface: ethereal towers, birds, and people frozen in silver. Reflected lamplight filled the mirror’s sky with flickering stars.

That must be the world as it was before the Cataclysm,
Xander thought. But never having seen Mithgar before its fiery chastisement, he couldn't be sure.

“You seem well suited to your new post,” Altor said. “Guarding the caravan is a vital task—especially now, if rumors among the trading camps have any substance.”

Xander seethed. He’d endured more than his share of humiliation already. “Why did you call me, Father? Was it to judge my worth as a guard, or have you another heavy-handed plan to make me a proper Nesshin? Should I betroth an obnoxious girl from a minor house desperate to win your favor? I know I can trust you to make the right match. What about Galia, Azil’s daughter? She has the perfect mix of frivolity and blind slavery to tradition!”

Altor’s head sagged. “So,” he sighed, “a deluded old man, enslaved by tradition and blind to his son’s wishes—is that how you see me, Xander?”

“No.” Xander lowered his eyes as regret stirred inside him. “But I often suspect you think me just a boy whose decisions must be made for him.”

Altor chuckled halfheartedly. “What irony that you should confess such feelings now, considering the offer I've chosen to make you.”

Taken aback, Xander weighed his father’s choice of words. “An offer? Is there a reason you use business terms with me?”

Altor nodded. “Business is precisely what I wish to discuss.” He took up his tools with shaking hands. “You see, my skill is leaving me. This piece will be my last. It’s my penance, perhaps—the price Zadok demands for sparing me from his judgment. Nevertheless, I doubt that God would begrudge an old man’s desire to pass on his life’s work. I would like to entrust my craft to you, Xander. If you agree to learn, I will teach you to fashion mirrors as the Highwater smith taught me.”

Xander brooded in silence. At last he spoke. “I respect what this offer means to you Father, but you know I cannot accept. I’m not like you. I do not wish my future laid out for me. I want to find my own way; to build my own life. Like you did.”

Altor shook his head. “I see. Somehow I knew your answer.”

“Then why did you ask?”

“As a mercy,” Altor said. “God made the land. Those whom he calls may walk it unafraid. That is the Nesshin way, and it saved us when the cities became tombs. Better to eke out a living in the wasteland than to die in the old world’s shattered remains.

“I know, my son, how you long for a place in the clan. But you have always sought something nameless; intangible. That’s why our customs chafe you so. It pains me to do this, but it is my duty as a father.”

“To do what?”

Altor swallowed; then looked at his son. “You cannot stay with us, Xander. For your own sake, and for the love of God, you must leave the Nesshin.”

Xander gaped. He’d expected criticism, rebuke, even punishment, but not exile! The choice between banishment and an offer that his father knew he could not take seemed monstrously unjust.

“We will reach Medvia in six days,” Altor said. “Once our goods are sold, we’ll decamp for the harvest in Vale. You will remain. You’ll get along with the townsfolk, unless they find out your secret.”

Xander stared wide-eyed at his father. The old man knew about his hidden gift?

Altor’s mouth curved in a sad smile. “You keep no secrets from me, my son. Your mother called it God’s touch. This world is coming back to life, but too late for me.” Moisture rimmed his eyes. “I hope and pray son, that one day a woman will bless you with her love. Your mother gave me my most precious gift before she left us.”

Xander sat stunned, incredulous at what his father had said. His mother’s death was an open wound that time had never healed.

Tilting his grey head to peer at his son, Altor gave his final advice. “I thought that God’s wrath had stripped me of love,” he said. “Then He sent my Sarel, and we taught each other to survive. Do not grow cold, my son. Perhaps you need no one else, but you may find someone who needs you.”

Xander had entered the lead wagon as a favored son. Now he stumbled out as an exile.
How dare he invoke the memory of my mother?
Would he stoop so low to have the last word?

He didn't realize that he’d strayed from the caravan’s path until he heard the guards’ cries. Their voices became thin and strained as if emanating from a great distance, but distorted and stretched like the call of a rider on a speeding mount.

Xander strained to see what was going on, but all he could make out were the dim figures of the caravan guards, who gestured frantically at the sky. A deep hum pounded in his head as the world dimmed and went black. Then blazing white. Then black again.

Xander slowly became aware of cold coarse sand stinging his face as he ran. His memory of how he came to be running faded like the remnants of a nightmare. He recalled only harsh whiteness; a deep hum jarring his teeth and rippling up his spine.

The darkness. The light. There are
shapes
in the light. Shadows crowding over me!

The sound of his own scream brought Xander fully awake. He fled alone through a trough between dunes. The moon had waned to blackness, but stars glinted in the cloudless sky.

Xander shivered. He was still dressed for midday guard duty; not night in the deep desert. He consulted the stars and found the red dot of Keth hanging low in the western sky.

“Six hours,” he muttered as he stopped to catch his heaving breath.
Six missing hours.
Fear, fatigue, and the nightmarish yet vivid memory of the light conspired to shake his sanity.

Xander thought back. Reeling from his father’s harsh decree, he had wandered off…and then what?
I must have gone heat-mad.
Yes, guarding the wagons in the hot sun had left him vulnerable to delirium. Unless he really
was
mad, it was the only explanation.

Perhaps Altor Sykes had judged rightly. The admission brought rueful heat to Xander’s face and an old saying to his mind:
A Nesshin never turns his back on a foe, and the desert is our greatest adversary.
Deep knowledge of that enemy’s treachery, learned over centuries in Mithgar’s smaller, pre-Cataclysm wastes, begat the first maxim’s twin:
No Nesshin fights alone.
If a single tribesman went missing, eldest tradition bound the whole caravan to cease its journey for his sake.

A grim revelation dawned. “No one came to find me,” Xander said in a guarded whisper. Then, with a shout that pealed across the dunes, he cried, “
Thera emitte sherrad
—all of you!”

Something shifted above, sending a rill of sand flowing down the dune face.

Xander paused. He heard nothing, but the shifting wind carried a gamey musk that reminded him of a dog that Azil had once put down.

Xander took a cautious step away from the source of the smell. He kept his eyes on the crest of the dune, where a dark form rose and loped toward him. The sound of deep, panting breath passing through a fanged maw alerted him to the presence of another beast on the opposite hilltop.

Xander broke into a run. His own breath poured from his mouth in gouts of steam as he struggled to gain speed on the deep sand. None of the frantic glances he cast back over his shoulder revealed signs of pursuit, but there was a new sound that froze his blood—the beating of leathery wings.

Desert life had acquainted Xander with wonders to make men praise God’s glory and perils to make them beg His mercy. Rabid wolves were not unheard-of, but the alien dread hunting on unseen wings drove Xander to double his pace.

Not the homecoming I’d expected,
Sulaiman mused. Like himself, Mithgar had changed beyond recognition in his millennia-long absence.

Yet his change had brought advantages.

Sulaiman vaulted to the crest of a dune. Invisible eyes watched him, but he paid his keeper no mind. Highest purpose bid him cross Mithgar’s new desert. Luckily he’d grown used to deserts, and the moonless night seemed a bright spring day compared to the darkness that had lately bound him.

A sudden weight pressed upon Sulaiman’s heart. Time had so estranged him from emotion that he had to pause and consider the feeling. Was it nostalgia? The alienation of a prisoner returned from distant wars to find his home destroyed?

How else should I have found it?
Imprisoned in perhaps the one corner of the cosmos that the fire hadn’t touched, he had weathered the Cataclysm unaware. Yet his liberators’ warnings had ill prepared him for Thera’s desecration of his former world.

One more sin to avenge upon her.

Sulaiman’s wrath flared like a remnant spark of the Cataclysm. He imagined the heat and pressure forging his heart into a sun, but dismissed the presumption.
No prophet foretold my coming. I seek not to save, but to render justice long denied.

The flame quenched, Sulaiman pulled his green cloak tight against the cold and slid down the windward slope. Haste was needful. Much remained to be done before he could exact vengeance from the murderess who styled herself a god. And others sought her life for vicious ends, including—as the loathsome scent in the air attested—his most ancient foe.

A smile creased Sulaiman’s bearded face as he thanked whatever power had set Hazeroth in his path.

Xander struggled up the leeward side of a tall dune as dawn broke. Though a hundred unseen daggers stabbed his limbs with each step, thoughts of the vicious pack urged him on. He never saw his pursuers clearly, but the little he had seen of them—along with their cruel habit of feigning retreat only to alert him to their presence with a brief sight, sound, or scent—convinced him that he wasn’t being hunted by normal wolves.