Soulwoven (15 page)

An arm encircled his shoulders.

“Just breathe, Lit, breathe…”

Cole.

No—
he thought, but he couldn’t speak. His brother started to rub his back.

“Yenor’s eye, Lit, what happened? Did you get jumped or—”

Litnig shook his head and gestured violently toward the alley.

“Nothing there, Lit. Relax. Just breathe.”

Litnig stood and watched the darkness. His eyes cleared. Nothing moved in the shadows.

Relief sank into him bone deep. He was in no shape to fight a soulweaver. He didn’t even really know how to.
Stupid.
So stupid not to have realized what was happening in the inn and turned back then.
So, so stupid.

Cole slipped his head under Litnig’s arm and took his weight. Litnig’s legs buckled. Breathing felt like sucking down gobs of fire.

“C’mon, Lit.
Hells!”

Cole dropped him, and Litnig fell to his hands and knees. The pavement looked blurry. He realized he was coughing.

“What in Yenor’s bloody name happened?”

Litnig took a few halting gasps.

“The waiter,” he rasped when he trusted his voice enough to speak. He took another breath in three parts, sat down, and leaned against the side of the building. Cole’s face looked ashen in the shadows. It occurred to Litnig that his brother had chased after him without understanding why he was running.

“That waiter—” His breath came a little easier. He found the sorest spot on his chest and rubbed. “He was spying on us. And he was a soulweaver.”

Cole went stone still.

A warm breeze kicked up and whirled dust and grit into Litnig’s face. The plate dripped nameless muck onto the street from above. A rat scurried by somewhere in the shadows.

And Litnig continued to breathe.

“Yenor’s eye, Lit.” Cole swallowed. He put both hands on the back of his head and stared at the ground, then the plate, then the alley, and finally back at Litnig. “He could have killed you.”

A denial reached Litnig’s lips, but he didn’t voice it. There was real, solid fear in his brother’s eyes. Fear he’d never seen there before.

Litnig took his hand off of his chest and stared at his palm. Gravel from the street had lodged in it. He was bleeding.

He hadn’t even felt the pain.

***

Ryse faced a wretched excuse for a fire in a wretched room in a wretched inn in a wretched city and felt utterly wretched. An old, splintering chair creaked under her weight. Dil, Quay, and Len stood around her in a semicircle.

She’d known—the shaved heads, the unusual quietness, the way the River had bent around them—she’d known what their waiters were, but she hadn’t wanted to believe it, hadn’t wanted to fight two necromancers in close quarters in the middle of Nutharion City. And because of that fear, she’d failed.
Again.

That was new, the fear. A few weeks before, she would’ve faced any threat calmly, with the knowledge that Yenor was behind her. But after the Old Temple, she could think only of the dead, of the dragon’s horrible, smiling face, of her training and how it had failed her, and of how she’d been so wrong about so much.

And now she’d told Litnig and Cole that she could protect them, and she’d been wrong about that too.

She gripped the black limbs of the chair. She trusted nothing the Temple had taught her, she realized.

Not even my own power.

She took a shaky breath. A mug of tea that had long grown cold sat on the floor next to her. Dil had made it for her after the others helped her into the chair.

Ryse shut her eyes. She was supposed to be strong. Yenor was her ally.

For a moment, she doubted.

Even as she did, the placid, loved feeling she’d always associated with her god’s presence washed over her. Her fear melted away. Her breathing slowed down. She looked up from the flames and heard heavy footsteps, and she was unsurprised when the brothers Jin entered the room a moment later.

They looked terrible. Cole’s face was a color of gray she’d seen only in the rawest recruits of the Academy. Litnig’s was little better. His left hand was rubbing his chest.

She frowned. “You’re hurt.”

“I’m fine, Ryse, it’s just a bruise.”

She rose and put her hand on his chest. His skin felt hot through the fabric of his shirt.

“Let me see,” she said.

His hand wrapped lightly around her wrist. “
It’s
fine, Ryse.
Really.”
His voice was quiet, filled with more concern for her than for himself.

She turned away from him before he could see her frustration. She wanted to scream at him to just let her
help
him, that all she wanted was to bloody well make up for the mistake that had gotten him hurt in the first place.

Instead, she turned to Cole. The younger Jin brother’s eyes were fixed on the wall.

“And you?” she asked.

Cole jerked as if he was surprised to find her in front of him. His voice sounded far away. “Fine,” he mumbled. “I wasn’t even there.”

Ryse returned to her seat before the fire unused, unwanted. She heard the brothers telling their story to Quay, heard the prince and Len discussing what it meant, but she knew already.

While she’d been worrying about Len, necromancers had been looking for them and necromancers had found them.

The words of the others filtered through her mind.

“Then we race to Du Fenlan as quickly as possible.”

“We could go home instead—”

“It is a good plan, princeling. We should leave now, if the others can manage it.”

There was a moment of silence, and Ryse flushed.

“I can handle it,” she whispered.

More silence followed, and she wondered for a second if Len had been talking about someone else. Feet scuffed the stone floor. Quay spoke slow and heavy.

“Good,” he said.

She heard packs opened, stuffed, closed.

“Get your things,” said the prince. “We won’t rest again until we reach Du Hardt.”

SIXTEEN

Peace.

Leramis Hentworth sat cross-legged on the floor of his apartment, across from a peg where the black robe of the order he’d forsaken much to join hung. The walls around him creaked in the wind. It was late spring, and still cold near the sea in Menatar. He had no fire. He needed no fire.

The fire was supposed to be in his soul.

The necromancer kept his back
straight,
let his head nod forward until his chin rested nearly on his chest. His hands lightly touched the ends of his knees. In his mind, he envisioned an endless field of soft, warm light, waiting to wrap him in a quiet embrace.

Peace.

It had been two and a half weeks since the Heart Dragons of Mennaia had been broken. Two weeks since word of it had reached the Order of Necromancers.
One week since he’d been asked to make himself ready for a long journey.

Peace wouldn’t come.

Leramis floated in a sea of memories. He watched himself leave a creaking, empty manor house, saw a black casket garlanded with white roses buried in a moss-filled cemetery by the sea. He caught flashes of the sneering faces of old rivals, heard taunts leveled at him by those who considered themselves his betters, recalled wrestling semi-naked in the cold dawn in the Academy and the pride he’d felt as he donned the white robes for the first time.

And he remembered a girl with flame-red hair who’d made him feel things he’d never known existed.

Ryse.

He’d had a dream about her, not long ago.
Had heard her calling his name in the darkness.
It hadn’t been the first time he’d dreamed of her.

You will do great things, Leramis, if you find the courage to seize them.

His mentor Rhan had said that to him on the night he’d made his pact and become a necromancer.

Leramis had been in the Order for two years, and he hadn’t done anything great yet.

He sighed and rose to his feet. The sparse furnishings of his apartment—a chair, a bed, a desk—formed pools of shadow in the milky light leaking through a frosted glass window in his wall.

He crossed to the window, threw it open, and gazed onto the night-lit roofs of Death’s Head.

The city looked like the symbol it had been named for. The docks at its southern end jutted into the black sea like rectangular teeth. The empty market of the Centerspach formed a dark eye of quiet chaos at its heart. The Chasm ran like a jagged scar across its face.

He could see it all from his home near the top of the hill at its northeastern corner. Before him, the city slanted gently down from the monolithic wall that hemmed it in to the north until it reached the inky waters of the Bay of Hope. If he leaned out of his window, he could even see the massive black fastness of the Citadel jutting like a thumb from the mountains beyond the wall.

Rhan would be there, he guessed, meeting with the rest of the Council of Taers.

It was near three o’clock in the morning, and something was wrong.

Leramis had sensed a parcel of souls winging its way to the Citadel, borne on the bones of a half-rotted hawk. And as he’d sensed it, he’d known that it brought bad news.

He rolled his shoulders and stretched his neck. Sometimes he saw through the veil of the world and grasped the shape of Yenor’s plans. He remembered knowing, calmly and detachedly, that his father was going to die several months before he took sick. He remembered knowing when the Temple came to test his draw in the River of Souls that he would never return to the Lars Dors’ School for Boys except to pick up his belongings.

It didn’t come as a surprise when, an hour or so after he sensed the message, someone knocked at his door.

A crow called in the city. A gust of wind slammed the window shut in Leramis’s face.

He crossed the creaking floorboards of his apartment and opened the door.

A rotund girl in a black robe stood straight as a plank of siding in the wood-and-stone hallway beyond. Her eyes were sunken and waxy—probably, Leramis assumed, from lack of sleep.

“Jenna,” he said quietly.

Her hands moved to the edges of her long sleeves. “Rhan’s waiting below,” she said. Her voice was as cool and damp as the wood beneath his feet. “He has a task for you.”

Leramis nodded and closed the door. The satchel of clothes and money he’d prepared for his journey lay under his bed. He retrieved it and added what food he had that was fit for traveling.

Before leaving, he took the black robe from its peg and pulled it over his head.

Rhan was waiting for him in the street below. The Taer of the Eye was a small, thin man with quiet hands whose shorn head masked baldness that had struck him young. He wore the same plain black robe as everyone else in the order, despite his station. He didn’t gravitate much toward outward displays of power.

His strength came from within, and it was all the more potent for it.

Leramis caught Rhan’s sharp brown eyes on him as he left his home and felt as if a spider had danced down his spine.

Rhan had the same gift as Leramis, but on a grander scale. Rhan saw
everything.
It was the reason he’d earned his nickname even before taking the post of Taer of the Eye and the reason he’d earned that post a decade younger than any necromancer before him. Even after two years, Leramis felt uncomfortable standing under Rhan’s gaze. It was like going naked before the Eye of Yenor itself.

Rhan nodded as he approached. The Taer was mounted on a shaggy black pony. A second was tied riderless to a post between the sagging, gray entrance of Leramis’s building and the sloping front porch of the one next to it. Jenna was nowhere to be seen.

“Good morning,” Leramis said quietly.

Rhan jerked his chin toward the pony. “A ship is leaving for Nutharion on the morning tide. You need to be on it.”

“Why?”

Rhan let out a brief sigh. He reached into his robe for something—probably a sprig of mindleaf—then seemed to think better of it and put his hands on the reins again. His shaved head gleamed in what moonlight filtered through a thick skein of clouds above. “The rumors are true,” he said. “The Prince of Eldan travels to Aleana. He blames us for what happened to the heart dragons in his city.”

Leramis frowned and swung into the pony’s saddle. He hadn’t ridden in years, but some things were difficult to forget.

“And?”
Leramis asked.

Rhan set off, and Leramis followed. The ponies clopped their way around a roped-off hole in the street. “And the council has chosen you to convince him otherwise.”

“The council?”

“At my request.”

Rhan’s face was unreadable in the moonlight.
His pony’s shoes clip-clopped against the cobblestones, occasionally emitting little sparks that flared into the night, burned bright, and died.

“We want you to intercept the prince in Du Hardt, if possible,” Rhan said.
“Or in Du Fenlan if not.”
They came down off the hill and approached one of the many bridges, built of stone but paved with wooden
planks, that
spanned the Chasm. Tall shops, dark and skeletal beneath the weak light, stood shuttered around them.

Intercept the prince.
A shiver went down Leramis’s spine. Eldanian nobles didn’t tend to appreciate being intercepted. Especially not by necromancers, and especially not when they were already on edge. “How many are with him?”

“Five.” Rhan paused and half turned in the saddle, so that he was facing Leramis. “One of them,” he continued, “is a temple soulweaver about your age, with fiery red hair.”

Leramis couldn’t help the hiss of breath between his teeth, or the sudden thudding of his heart.

Peace,
he told it, but there was little chance of it listening. Rhan had told him, several weeks back, that their agents in the Temple had heard quiet whisperings that Ryse Lethien had disappeared from Temple Complex the night the heart dragons were broken. She was wanted back, alive, for questioning, by the Twelve.

The hand of Yenor guided everything in Guedin. Potential paths of causation ran through Leramis’s mind, one with every heartbeat.