Soulwoven (3 page)

He’d never seen anything even remotely like that graveyard.

“Lit, how are we even going to find her out here?”

His brother stopped next to a man-sized statue of a sinuous white dragon.

“We’ll just keep looking until we do,” he said.

Someone whimpered.

Litnig loped toward the sound without another word. A few seconds later, Cole found him standing in front of a skinny boy with black hair.

The boy wore a soiled white robe and crawled desperately in their direction on his elbows, dragging his legs behind him. His arms shook with each tiny advance, and his skin was pale and sweaty. He looked maybe twelve at the oldest.

“Please, help me—p-p-please…”

Cole got a look at his legs. One of them was bloody and wrenched at an unnatural angle from the knee down. He thought he saw the white of bone through a tear in the robe.

There was nothing they could do about that kind of an injury. But a soulweaver like Ryse…

“What happened?” Cole asked.

The kid took a hoarse breath. “T-t-two people, an Aleani and
a
m-man. They said they c-came to visit their ancestors’ g-graves but they were n-necromancers.” He collapsed, let his face fall into the dirt, mumbled through loose, drooling lips, “P-please. Please, you h-have to h-help—”

Cole shook his head. Litnig was already standing up again. His brother
always
wanted to help.

“Where’s the temple soulweaver?” Litnig asked.

“F-further b-back, n-not too f-f-far.
I don’t
kn-
know if she ever f-f-fou—”

Cole took a step. The boy grabbed at his leg and missed.

“P-please!
Don’t leave me, p-please, I saw—I s-saw—”

“We’ll bring help,” Cole muttered. He hoped it was true.

They found Ryse just where the boy had indicated, fifty or sixty feet ahead.

She lay in the fetal position, shaking, hyperventilating. There was no blood on her. Not even a scratch.

Litnig went straight for her, but Cole slowed down and let his eyes drift over the cracked gray headstones of the cemetery, wondering how in the world she’d been the only one to escape uninjured. She was a soulweaver, sure—maybe even a powerful one. But Cole believed the kid—the whole scene stank of necromancers, and necromancers went after Temple soulweavers like weasels after snakes. She should’ve been a target.

Memories washed over him again—he watched a man being buried in this graveyard, a frowning priest excoriating the sins of robbery and vice above him while his friends held their anger in check and stared at his cloth-wrapped body.

Cole shook free of the past and stared down at Ryse.

Even lying on the ground, she looked an inch or so taller than he was. Litnig was squatting in front of her, reaching out to touch her shoulder. Her face looked clean and smooth underneath the dirt that clung to it. Her red-gold hair jerked between her shoulder blades as she twitched. She wore the flowing white robe and sash of the Temple soulweavers. Her eyes fluttered open and closed with her breath, unfocused and empty.

Cole swallowed and looked carefully again at the graves around them, but there wasn’t
so
much as a whisper of movement.

“Ryse?”
Litnig asked.

She sat up and gripped his hand, chest heaving, her fingers digging into his palm like her life depended on it. Her eyes looked wild and terrified.

Ryse had run with them during the Plague Riots, ten years earlier. A crowd of people fleeing mounted city guards had pushed her down, and Litnig had snatched her up by the wrist a split second before she would’ve been trampled. She’d been scared then—pale, cold, sweating, panicked. But even then, she hadn’t looked scared like she did in Litnig’s arms. It was like she’d seen—

A dragon
,
said Cole’s mind, and his hands went cold.

“Ryse, are you all right?” Litnig asked.

It took a moment, but her eyes focused on Lit’s face. She pulled her hand back toward her body. Cole watched her fight to control her breathing, saw tears in her eyes.

Yenor’s eye,
he thought. She never, ever cried.

Litnig’s mouth worked silently. Ryse took deep breaths. Her arms shook. Tears ran in streaks through the dirt on her face.

She needs to be taken somewhere she can rest,
Cole thought.

But people were wounded and dying across the graveyard, and he knew what Litnig would do. Knew what Ryse would do, if she could. Litnig would prop her up, and she would do her best to save as many lives as possible, even if she couldn’t bloody well see straight while she was doing it.

Cole ground his teeth. He shouldn’t have even
been
there. He should’ve been asleep, safe and warm in bed.

And then what good would you have been to anyone?
a
part of him asked, and he ignored it.

His brother seemed utterly at a loss for words.

“Lit,” Ryse said. She blinked at him. “Why are—” She swayed a little and put her hand to her head. “Forget it. Are people hurt?”

Litnig swallowed. He nodded. His face looked pale.

Ryse’s eyes cleared and focused on the graveyard beyond. “Help me stand,” she said.

Litnig offered her his hand. She took it and swayed to her feet. “Where are they?” she breathed.

Cole just sighed.

THREE

A sheen of sweat clung to Ryse’s arms. A second skin of dirt shrouded her legs, her face,
her
neck. The stars glowed cold and damp in a black sky, her mouth tasted of earth, and she hung unwillingly from the arm of an old friend.

She felt completely, utterly powerless.

Once, when she’d been an undersized, red-haired orphan living in Eldan City’s vicious slums, she would’ve sat down and worked out what in the world had just happened to her. She would’ve climbed to the highest, safest place she could find, and once alone she would’ve licked her wounds and tried to calm her racing heart, wrapped her arms around herself and cried and told herself that everything was going to be all right.

Then, later, she would have gone and found Litnig and Cole. They would’ve cheered her up, if she still needed cheering. They would’ve laughed and played games with her, treated her like she mattered—made her feel loved and safe in a world that offered neither love nor safety to people like her.

But Ryse was no longer that child. And there were people dying nearby. She could hear them. They needed her.

The ground was uneven and damp, and Ryse nearly lost her footing with her first step. She didn’t want help. She wanted to walk on her own, had bought that with years of training, years of study, years of devotion. She had earned the right to be the strong one.

Litnig mumbled something. Ryse held his arm and let him walk her toward the moans, and she tried to make sense of the world.

She’d faced necromancy for the first time in her life. Thousands of the River of Souls’ tiny, glowing spheres had been woven into marionette strings, pulling on the arms, the legs, the backs of the dead. She’d stood tall in the chaos and dirt of the graveyard, breathing huge gulps of the River in and out with her soul. The soulflow had been thick and difficult to weave in, but the River had moved like air, like water, in ways she’d seen it move before.

Then it had surged toward the temple and rebounded.

The movement had pulled her off-balance. A hot wind had roared over her body, and a flood of souls had drowned her in a bright, bewildering maelstrom. She’d lost herself in the light, confused and desperate as a speck of dust on a hummingbird’s wing, an insect in a hurricane.

And then the scream.

“Ryse?”

She stood next to Litnig over a boy with a dislocated knee, probably torn ligaments,
possibly
broken bones. His face was pale and sweaty. His hand shook when he reached for her.

Breathe,
she told herself.

Ryse could treat his knee. If he had a strong draw with the River of Souls, he might even walk without a limp someday. She knelt beside him in gray mud and clay and pumped warm air against the crispness of the night. The thousand thousand peaceful souls of the River floated past her, calm and comforting, waiting to be grasped.

She closed her eyes. When she reopened them, tiny, bright spheres drifted around her in gentle streams, a tapestry of light and warmth waiting to be called to use.
Waiting for her.

Breathe.

She inhaled not just with her lungs but with her soul. Her chest filled with air and the heavy, warm void of the River alike. The souls drifted toward her, already whispering in her head, wondering what she would ask of them.

And then their voices were cut off. A black cloud enveloped her mind, and a thick, bilious feeling bubbled up inside her until it produced three words, dark and clear as crystal:

I am coming.

Ryse sucked in a shuddering slug of air and lost sight of the River. She saw only stark white moonlight on the body of a dying boy and cold, unfeeling darkness beyond. The urge to run, to scramble away on her hands and knees and bury herself in the deepest shadows she could find, burned deep in her chest. She saw two eyes of red light set in a bony, snakelike dragon’s head, swimming in the darkness above the boy’s body. It was the same nightmarish vision that had held her petrified for the eternity between the scream and the moment Litnig had touched her arm.

The face of Sherduan.
The dragon.
The destroyer.

Before that night, she had never seen it before.

The vision faded. Litnig’s large, warm hands were holding her. The wounded boy lay in the dirt with his breath misting before him. His skin looked pale and chalky.

Litnig mumbled something.

“Nothing.
It’s nothing,” Ryse whispered in reply.

She pulled herself from Litnig’s grasp and reopened her mind to the River. Her arms shook. Her head spun, and her chest felt raw and ragged. But the souls responded when she pulled, flowed gently toward her until they formed a bright, pulsing cloud around her body.

The air grew warmer. Ryse breathed the cloud into thin, ropelike strands, pushed them over the boy and set a tiny hook of soulwoven light in his soul. She breathed again, and the River seeped along her strands, crawling over his body and bathing it in white light. She pulled the boy’s knee into a more normal position, caught a glimpse of ligament reforming out of thin air before his skin closed and the wound began to scab. The boy gasped, and then his breathing eased. His eyes closed. His head went limp, and he fell into what she hoped was a restful sleep.

The boy’s hand was hot with the energy that had washed over him. For a moment, Ryse knelt and held it, trailing her fingers gently over his knuckles as the air around them cooled. Once the boy’s skin had returned to a normal temperature, she rose unsteadily to her feet, took Litnig’s arm as it was offered, and focused on filling her lungs with fresh air.

The dragon was Yenor’s hatred for the world made flesh. Once, long ago, it had been summoned to Guedin, and it had nearly destroyed the world.

Its face wasn’t an image she wanted to see, and its voice wasn’t one she wanted in her mind. Those things weren’t holy, weren’t
right.

Litnig nudged her gently forward, and she moved on to a woman with a broken arm, a man oozing blood from a wound in his neck, a girl whose injuries would be more mental than physical. She kept hold of the River, healed those she could and prayed for those she couldn’t.

Your job was to protect them,
whispered her mind.

The moon was noticeably lower before Litnig jerked his head up and Ryse spotted other soulweavers walking toward them from the darkened door of the temple.

Six,
she counted in disbelief.
Only six—

She had sent a distress signal nearly two hours before.

Ryse’s relief wore the gray robes and blue-crossed armbands of Division Twelve, the personal guard of the Temple of Eldan’s ruling council.
The strongest, the most pious, the most loyal soulweavers in the whole of the kingdom.
They stood tall and stiff, their movements cold and confident as they strode past. Ryse recognized none of them, but a balding man who seemed to be in charge of them told her to wait on the temple’s front steps. He didn’t say for what.

She padded numbly through the blue shadows and familiar, flaking murals of the Old Temple, and when she reached the smoothness of its front steps, she sank down and laid her head in her hands. Her eyes hurt. Her fingers were cold. Her skin felt rubbery.

The faces of the dead and maimed, pale and agonized, stared at her in her mind.

Why didn’t you save us?
they
asked.

And, finally, the tears fell.

A few moments later, Ryse heard footsteps and looked up.

Litnig and Cole were walking down the stairs behind her. Lit’s lips were thin, his face pulled tight. Cole’s eyes flitted over the shadows in the street and settled on two dark stains on the steps.

Ryse swallowed.

“I—”

Two men hurried out behind the brothers in a flurry of gray. As one of them dodged around the stains, he tripped and pitched down the steps. A statuette of a golden dragon, just larger than her hand, flew from his fingertips and slid along the flagstones. Its eyes were rubies. Its claws were diamond-tipped. Its mouth was open as if it was crying out, and something had sheared the end of its nose clean off.

Ryse froze.

The Twelfthman jumped to his feet, scooped up the broken dragon, and wrapped it in his robe. His eyes caught hers briefly. There was sweat beading on his forehead.

Then he was gone into the night with his companion, and she was left with her heart pounding in her throat.

The little golden dragon had been buried in a wall of clear blue crystal below the Old Temple, fused to another just like it. Three pairs like that existed.
One in Eldan City, one in Du Fenlan, and one in the city of Soulth’il.

If they were all broken, the stories said, Sherduan would return to burn the world.