Soulwoven (25 page)

“Get behind me!” he snapped. “Where are the others?”

Something grabbed her by the hair and dragged her to the ground.

A bony hand grasped her ear, and it was twisting—ripping. She screamed and tried to roll over to blast it away, but there was a weight on her shoulder, and it was too heavy. Her stomach wrenched. She was going to lose an ear at the least, and if she couldn’t—

There was a flash of heat, and then the weight was gone. She scrambled to her feet and looked toward the Aleani, wondering if they’d recognized her as an ally.

In front of her stood a man in a black robe.
He was surrounded by a halo of thousands of souls. Tendrils led from his body to many of the undead in the room.

Ryse shouted for Quay even as she prepared a weaving she knew would be too little, too late.

An Aleani weaving crashed against a shield the necromancer had woven around himself. The flash lit the man within the hood. He had brown eyes. His face was sharp and angular, but soft when he smiled.
So soft…

Her throat closed. She couldn’t breathe.

She could only whisper his name.

“Leramis…”

TWENTY-SIX

It hurt when Litnig breathed.

He stood at the foot of a narrow spiral staircase. His right arm was pinned to a stone wall by a leering skeleton. A skinny, black-robed man stood before him with his face hidden in the shadows of a hood. Behind the man was a wall of blue crystal.

And buried in the wall was a golden statuette in the shape of two dragons eating one another’s tails.

The Heart Dragons of Aleana.

Litnig Jin felt very, very afraid.

He heard an explosion above. The stones of the chamber shook. The skeleton’s grip on him was so tight his hand was going to sleep, but his left arm was free. He’d torn the sling off long ago.

The necromancer stepped forward and cocked his head. He wore black gloves and black boots. Wisps of blond hair floated around the edges of his hood.

“Hmph,” the man grunted. His voice was low, curious and disdainful. He turned back to face the heart dragons.

Litnig’s stomach moved into his throat.

“Stop!” he yelled.

The necromancer turned back to him and crossed the distance between them in a swift, unnaturally long stride. He wrapped a hand around Litnig’s windpipe.

His fingers were as cold as ice and as strong as iron.

Litnig couldn’t breathe. He tried to gasp, tried to swallow, but nothing came. His head grew tight and hot. He could feel blood pooling in the veins on his temples.

“Shut. Up,” the man growled. The hand released him. Litnig coughed and spluttered. The heat in his head washed away.

The necromancer pulled down his hood.

The man was maybe thirty-five at the oldest, and his hair was long and straight. He had a disgusted look on his face, as though Litnig was an annoyance he put up with only because he had no other choice.

He could’ve killed me by now,
Litnig realized.
Why hasn’t he?

The necromancer breathed heavily. He stared at Litnig with bold blue eyes only partially obscured by the swirling whiteness of soulweaving, like he was looking for something in Litnig’s face he couldn’t find.

He pointed upward, and his voice darkened.

“One of the Black Isle’s strongest is right up there,” he muttered. There was a haunted look in his eyes. Beyond the brightness of the soulweaving, Litnig could see that they were rimmed with red.
“Just above us.
Leramis Hentworth.
Rhan’s golden boy.
The Order’s chosen one. He can’t
so
much as get down that staircase.”

The necromancer’s eyes
narrowed,
and Litnig said nothing. He didn’t understand half of what had been said, but he could hear the unspoken addendum:
What do you think
you’re
going to do?

Litnig wondered himself.

His free arm ached. He couldn’t explain why he wasn’t already dead.

The white eyes narrowed further. “My name is Soren Goldguard,” the necromancer said. “Don’t forget it.”

The black-robed man turned his back on Litnig again. The skeleton’s grip weakened for just a second, and in that second, Litnig acted.

He smashed the elbow of his broken arm into the skeleton’s wrist.

The old bones snapped beneath the blow. His own popped loose again with a jarring, white flash of pain. The sting buzzed up his arm and into his skull, his teeth, his eyes, but his right arm came free.

He lunged for the necromancer. If he could just get his good arm around the man’s throat, hook him under the
chin,
pull him to the ground where his weight would give him the advantage—

Litnig’s legs flew over his head, and he catapulted over the necromancer’s shoulder.

He turned a full somersault, spun halfway around, and slammed into the crystal wall. The blow drove the wind from his lungs. His left shoulder took the brunt of it, and he felt it bend in a way that wasn’t normal. His left arm popped again. The pain in it grew so fierce he couldn’t feel much else.

But he didn’t bounce off the wall. Invisible bonds pinned him there by his armpits, his thighs, his wrists.

The necromancer’s eyes blazed white.

“To hell with Eshan’s plans,” he said.

Litnig felt the crystal wall behind him go warm and liquid, and the force against his limbs pressed him into it. At first, the feeling was almost comforting—like that of a warm bath wrapping over his shoulders.

Then he realized what was happening, and he screamed.

It wasn’t a shout of defiance. It wasn’t a deep and manly roar of resistance, the way he’d imagined himself going out if it came down to it. It was a mindless shriek of terror.

The blue crystal eased over his shoulders, the back of his head, his neck.

The necromancer smiled.

Litnig took a deep, panicked breath, and then the warm softness of the crystal oozed over his mouth as well.

His eyes shut themselves, but he forced them open again. The world looked hazy and blue through the crystal, as if he was viewing it through shallow water.

Calm,
he told himself.
Stay calm.

His chest felt heavy and warm. His heart pounded. His lungs were beginning to shout for air.

The heart dragons pulsed not far to the right of him. They were immaculately carved, and detailed in lacquer. Hazy light like that of the statues in his dream leaked from them.

His bonds released. The necromancer wanted him to squirm. He could feel it.

Instead, he reached for the heart dragons.

If he could just touch them, just get his fingers on them, he thought, everything would be all right somehow.

His hand grew closer, but the bonds returned and rooted his body in place again.

If I just stretch,
he thought.
Just a little more, a little farther—

The dragons glittered in their own light, but their eyes were black. One of them was facing him. He could feel its gaze on him.
Like it was watching.
Like it cared.

A burst of heat and light engulfed his hand, and then the crystal around it was gone. His fingers wiggled freely in a small tunnel where there was air—air to breathe if he could get to it.

He squirmed.

He flailed, flopped, tried to break his bonds and push or pull the crystal away and
get
his lips to the air. The crystal surrounding him grew rock solid again. He could feel the necromancer watching him, knew he was giving the man exactly the show he wanted to see, but he didn’t care.

He panicked, tried against all logic to move the crystal, strained with his whole body and thrashed desperately with his free, burned hand. There was nothing even to drown in, no way to breathe. Solid crystal was pressed up against his lips, his nose,
his
eyes.

The world grew heavy and slow.

Power descended upon the room. There was no space into which the hairs on his body could rise, but his skin drew tight anyway and tried to shift them. Tension crackled in the crystal. Energy marshaled unseen, like a thunderstorm building in the minutes before it hit.

Litnig’s skin crawled. His spine tingled. He felt like he was standing beneath a hundred-foot crack in the dome of the world, and all the energy of the endless universe was about to pour forth from it and drown him.

The heart dragons began to pulse. He saw sadness in the beady eyes fixed upon him, heard the sound of metal grinding along metal through the rock. The dragons cracked. He reached for them desperately, one last time.

His fingers grazed the nearest dragon’s surface. It was warm and smooth, like a coin left out in the sun toward the end of the day. He tried to grab it, but with a horrible, wrenching screech, it tore in half. The shards of it shot from their place in the wall toward the room beyond.

One of them cut Litnig’s hand. The sensation was dull and foreign—like the wound had been suffered by someone else. He saw his blood begin to pool in the hole left behind by the dragons.

For a moment, there was complete silence.

Then an ear-piercing shriek hit the world. Litnig’s insides bulged and twisted. Fire began in his chest and spread through his veins. Every fiber of his being screamed with agony, and he couldn’t even hitch in the breath to voice it.

He tried to writhe, tried to move, tried to express the pain that was ripping him apart. A chorus of hammers pounded in his head.

Death!
his
mind screamed.
Give me death!

The noise stopped. The pain did too. Litnig grew light-headed. His lungs burned, and his chest felt as if it was crumpling in on itself like a folding piece of parchment. Dancing spots filled his eyes.

His mind reeled, and on some level, he realized he was dying.

Explosions echoed above. A man screamed in pain. Out of the corner of his eye, Litnig saw a young woman in white tumble down the staircase. She stood. He caught a flash of disheveled, red-gold hair on her shoulders.

A wall of flame obscured her.

Then there was only darkness.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Litnig awoke in the dream. His body vibrated. His skin felt numb. The three pillars loomed above him. There was no sound.

He sat up. His hands looked pale and unreal—shadow-things that were less than solid, less than whole. He felt no pain, no broken bones, not the faintest whisper of air over his arms. It was like the dream had died.

The disc shifted.

It wasn’t violent. The edge behind him tipped softly down, the edge in front softly up. It seemed natural. His body wanted to slide, but it was caught on the disc’s ridged surface.

His heart fluttered, faint and desperate.

I’m dying,
he realized. His chest had shriveled up like a dried plum.
I’m dying, and the dream’s dying with me.

He lurched to his feet.

The disc continued to tip.

The darkness,
he thought. It was suddenly terrifying, a pit of a thousand hungry mouths after his soul.
If I fall, it’ll kill me catch me destroy me—

The words blurred into one long stream of fear. Litnig tried to run, but his legs were hard to move. The angle of the disc increased. He started to slide, and there was nothing to grab on to. The nearest pillar was too far. The little ridges on the disc weren’t tall enough to catch. And try as he might, he couldn’t get his feet to bite.

He slid past the pillar closest to the bottom of the disc. There was a flash of light. A hand wrapped itself around his wrist.

Litnig looked up into the sad eyes of the skinny, wasted walker. It had one hand around the chains that bound its doppelganger to the pillar. The other held his wrist. The walker’s body shone brilliant white against the darkness, against the gray, against everything.

It was stronger than it looked. The white muscles of its arms had a grip like iron. Litnig felt its strength flow into him, and he grabbed the walker’s wrist with his other arm.

The disc went fully vertical.

The walker hung from the chains. Litnig dangled over the darkness.

Litnig’s heart slowed. His hands seemed less and less real to him. The gray glow of the disc was all but dead, and only the walker was solid. Only the walker wasn’t dying. Its grip tightened. Litnig’s vision blurred.

The air moved.

The disc quivered and began to turn back the way it had come. Litnig’s heartbeat strengthened. His vision started to clear.

Soon, the walker’s feet were back on the disc, and then so were Litnig’s. The disc came up underneath him until his knees, then his elbows, touched it. The strength of the walker filled him, flowing like golden sap along his bones.

The disc went horizontal. The walker let go.

Litnig knelt on the gray stone.

I’m breathing again,
he thought. His chest heaved. He could hear his lungs making deep, healthy inhalations over his head. The disc hummed with gentle energy. Its glow, though dim, seemed steady.

The walker crouched in front of him. There was sympathy in its narrow, almond-shaped eyes.
And kindness.
And understanding.
It opened its fingers and extended one white palm toward Litnig. He thought of the Aleani walker’s bead.

Litnig took its hand. His body jerked.

The walker’s memories filled him.

Baggy pants flapped around his knees. He wore no shirt. His muscles were strong and wiry, and his toes dug bare and callused into soft moss.

Tall trees shone on all sides of him in shades of white, silver, and pale green. The ground was blanketed in a rolling carpet of emerald and amber moss. Turquoise and ruby flowers perfumed the air with the scents of tangy fruit and incense. A city of iridescent
crystal,
built in and among the trees, stood in front of him and shone with rainbow colors in the dying light of the day. He held a fishing pole in his hand.

Others stood nearby—tall, laughing figures with brightly colored hair.

He wasn’t human. He was Sh’ma.

Other memories flew by. He was taught to read the wind and stars and forest, taught soulweaving, history, philosophy, mathematics,
engineering
. He learned of humans, and he peppered his tutors with questions—what were they like? Where did they live? How did they speak? Could they think? Could they soulweave?