Soulwoven (38 page)

“What would you do if I said the Council wants you to kill Prince Quay and his friends?” Rhan asked.

Fingers of ice spread from the spider’s nest down Leramis’s back. His hands tightened on the ramparts.

Rhan said nothing further.

They can’t—I couldn’t—I can’t—
Leramis thought, and then he shrank in horror from the reality of those words and everything they meant for his life.

“What if they wanted to send someone else, but I convinced them that you were the only one who could get close enough to do it? Could you?”

Leramis’s mouth dried up. His legs felt rubbery. The wind raced up the Citadel walls and over his head.

“I don’t know what your purpose is anymore,” Rhan said. “Perhaps Yenor hasn’t decided.” He smiled at the city lights to the south. “Bear that in mind when you return to the Prince of Eldan. Your orders haven’t changed.”

Leramis’s fingers trembled on the gritty stone of the wall.

A trick.
A trick of words, like many Rhan had played on him over the years they’d known one another.

His breath shook and his heart raced nonetheless.

He put his back to the wind and looked over the ocean. The sea’s black waves, sparkling as they crested in the moonlight, plodded endlessly toward Menatar’s rocky coast. Seventy miles or so to the northeast, the waves would be breaking on the shores of Eldan. Farther still, Ryse would be moving closer to Eldan City, and the Temple, and the White Forest.

Without him.

Leramis looked back at his mentor. With the moon behind him, Rhan loomed larger than life, godlike. Leramis watched the light play over the older necromancer’s skull, and he marveled at the man who’d risen to power just when he was needed, at the way the two of them had found one another in the alleys of Nucidlan, and at the fact that from the moment they’d met, Rhan had believed in him, and he had believed in Rhan.

There are no coincidences…

He felt connected to the whole world, touched by an energy that surged through every atom of his existence. Awe washed the fear from his body. He felt calm, steady, and at peace.

“Yenor makes us free creatures, Leramis, hampered only by ourselves. Remember that when you see your prince and your soulweaver again.”

Rhan squeezed Leramis’s shoulder. The angle between the Taer and the moon shifted. His godlike appearance bled away into the night.

The energy that had possessed Leramis trickled from his veins.

It left the calm behind.

“Live your life, Leramis Hentworth,” said Rhan the Eye. “You’ll do Yenor’s will, whether you see it happening or not.”

Rhan pressed Leramis’s hands between his own.

And then he walked away.

Leramis didn’t watch him. He didn’t need to. His whole life lay before him, open and free. For a long time, he stood on the ramparts of the Citadel, breathing and rubbing his chest. He thought about Ryse. He thought about Quay. He thought about death, and more than anything else, he thought about life.

He didn’t take his eyes from the sky until the Heartwren had set and the sun had dimmed the Fool’s River past seeing. The sea and sky went from black to gray. The morning breeze rasped over him. The cocks crowed.

Leramis left the Citadel, reentered Death’s Head, and walked briskly through the growing bustle of the city’s streets.

A ship would be waiting for him in the harbor.

Somewhere to the northeast, his reunion with Ryse would be waiting for him too.

FORTY-TWO

Wilderleng.

Cole watched Dil’s back rise and fall in front of him as she walked, and against his will, he remembered the stories his mother had told him.

A drop of rain splashed from his hood onto his nose. It had been pouring for four days straight, ever since the hills of Steel Hall had appeared on the horizon to the north. But neither the rain nor his mother’s tales of murder in the dark had dampened his sense of good fortune.

Overall, he and his friends had been very, very lucky. Everyone had been outside when Alain’s cabin had been destroyed except for Ryse, and the fireball had skimmed right over her.

After Cole and Dil had awoken in the grass, the two of them had found the others camped around the burnt-out remains of the cabin, arguing over whether to leave or stay and look for them. When Quay had asked Cole where he and Dil had been, Cole had spun an elaborate lie about chasing the necromancer through the night. When the prince had asked where Alain had gone, Dil had told him that her grandfather had headed for Lurathen.

Cole hadn’t contradicted her.

He stumped muddily through the drenched green fields of the Windplain, holding one end of the stretcher that Dil and Len had fashioned to carry Ryse. The weather had been mercifully quiet for most of their journey, but as the light had risen that morning, so had the winds. The air was shrieking from west to east with force, whipping the rain into the eyes of anyone foolish enough to look back the way they’d come.

Cole wasn’t looking back.

They’d almost reached Eldan City. He caught glimpses of the three hills every few minutes through the curtains of rain, and he was beginning to make out the shape of the wall around them too.

He supposed Dil could probably see the whole thing.

If she was what he thought she was, anyway.

Wilderleng.

Cole soon spotted the dark roofs of Thieves’ Rise clustered behind Temple Hill like forgotten children begging for a handout. He knew a place in the Rise where a gang of outlaws had dug a tunnel under the wall. A person could sneak into the city there, for a price.

Two months in the past, he’d shared meals, jokes, and time with those outlaws.

But all that seemed impossibly far away.

Dil drifted back to walk next to him as they approached the city. Her fingers dug lightly into his forearm.

He planted a kiss on her head in return, though doing so made him shiver a little. Wilderlengs were the bogeymen of Eldan, and it was hard to get over that. He supposed Dil’s life in Lurathen would’ve been miserable with that secret—always careful, always hiding, knowing that only behind closed doors could she be herself.

Cole squinted through the rain at her. She looked sad, drawn, and worried. There was no sign of the golden swirls he’d seen in her eyes at her grandfather’s cabin.

Maybe she isn’t Wilderleng,
he thought.
Maybe she’s just worried about her grandfather.

But the idea sounded hollow even inside his head.

An hour later, Cole squatted on the side of a small rise where once there’d been a bramblebush, digging his way through muddy soil beneath a carpet of tallgrass. Just east of him, the Northwater flowed into the city through a huge iron grate. The river was close to flood level, and Cole wondered how bad things would be further south—how high the water had gotten in the
slums
, and how many were homeless or dead already.

His fingers found metal, and he dug his heels into the ground and heaved. A small trapdoor, covered lightly in earth and grass, swung toward the sky. Cole stuck his head through it and found a rickety wooden ladder that dropped about ten feet into a puddle of brown water. He set his toes on the first rung and beckoned to the others.

“Come on,” he said. “It’ll be wet enough without the rain getting in.”

He was right. The floor was covered in about two feet of cold, muddy water, and the walls and roof were dripping. Crooked timbers scavenged from the rubbish piles in the slums stood haphazardly along the walls and roof as braces. It was a miracle that the place hadn’t caved in.

Cole fumbled around trying to light an oil-soaked torch, and Litnig pulled the trapdoor shut behind them.

The torch caught after a moment and painted the tunnel in smoky yellow light. As Cole carried the flickering brand over the water, he could almost hear his brother grumble,
If
this comes down on top of us, Cole, I swear I’ll haunt your ghost.

Almost.
Because Litnig didn’t say a word.

He’d scarcely spoken since Ryse had gotten sick. And there was something in his eyes that Cole had never seen there before—something hurt or angry or frustrated, or maybe all three. There’d been times, out on the Windplain, when Cole had become uncomfortably aware of just how
big
Litnig was.

The water deepened as the tunnel angled down to get under the foundations of the city wall. At its lowest point, Litnig and Quay had to hold Ryse’s stretcher at shoulder level, and Len was practically swimming—hopping from toe to toe with his pack held above his head. By the time the tunnel angled upward again, they were all soaked and shivering.

Cole hoped Brown John and the River Rats would have a fire going on the other side, and that the others would be willing to stop and enjoy it.

A ladder led up to another trapdoor at the far end of the tunnel. Cole handed his torch to Dil and climbed up as
quick
as he could. The wood was wet, and slick with moss.

Cole knocked three times on the door and waited. After a few moments, he knocked again.

“What’s wrong?” Quay asked.

Cole stared at the unmoving door. He listened to the dripping of water and heard nothing else. No voices. No fire. No footsteps. No laughing or music.

“I don’t know,” he whispered.

He knocked a third time, and there was still no response. “They should’ve answered by now,” he said. “They always have someone watching the door.”

He braced his legs on the ladder and pressed his hands against the door itself.

It rose at his touch. His fingers grazed a piece of twisted metal.

The lock,
he realized,
or what’s left of it.

He froze.

But there was nowhere to go but up.

He eased the door open and lowered it until it rested on the floor. He remembered the room beyond as a warm, well-lit, comfortably furnished basement in Brown John’s home. The place had usually been filled with men and girls and boys and women gambling and talking and laughing around a cask or two of beer and a game of skull rummy or Yenor’s bones.

Instead of that room, he found cold, empty darkness.

He turned back to the others, gestured for silence, and held out his hand. Dil offered him his torch, but he shook his head and crooked a finger toward her instead.

She hesitated, chewed her lip, then handed the torch to Len and started up the ladder.

Cole moved off of it and sat on the cold stone of the floor. His feet dangled next to Dil.

When she reached the top of the ladder, her eyes
glowed
liquid gold.

“Can you see?” he whispered.

She nodded, took a shaky breath, and described the room.
Signs of struggle.
Two tables and chairs near the staircase smashed to pieces. Torches scattered on the floor, still smelling of smoke.
The stale stink of dried beer from the remnants of a cask in the corner.

“Bodies?” he made himself ask, but she shook her head no.

“No signs of anyone alive, either,” she said. Her face was sweating, despite the cold.

Cole squeezed her shoulder and touched his nose to hers in the dark.

It was the best thanks he could muster.

“Quay, send a torch up.”

The others followed the torch one by one. Litnig handed Ryse on her stretcher up to Quay and Len. Cole helped them off the ladder and into the room,
then
shut the trapdoor behind them. The door slid into place with an empty
thunk.

In the light from the torches, Cole could see everything Dil had described.

A curious empty feeling washed over him. In one corner lay the patch of floor on which he’d learned to throw dice. In another, he’d drunk his first beer. In a third, he’d thrown it up shortly thereafter.

That life seemed shattered, torn apart in a flash of violence that hadn’t even touched him.

He shivered.

And then he heard a noise upstairs.

It was a quiet, repetitive knocking. Dil’s eyes flicked to the stairs, but no one else seemed to notice. Quay and Len talked quietly to each other near Ryse’s stretcher. Litnig stared blankly at the broken tables and cask.

Cole’s heart beat faster. Something was moving up there.
Maybe something alive.
Maybe someone who would know what had happened. He knew he ought to wait for the others, knew he ought to make some kind of plan, but the thought of Brown John and his gang dead or dying somewhere moved his feet. His hands flew to his daggers, and he padded up the stairs as quick as silence would let him, eyes wide, torch left behind.

The scene at the top was similar to the one below. Gray light poured through broken windows over smashed furniture and shards of glass in John’s sparsely furnished living room. The floor was littered with debris. The wooden stairs that led to the upper level of the house hung splintered and unsteady from their moorings.

The knocking stopped.

Cole turned in a slow circle. His heart pounded. His limbs tingled. His eyes—

He spotted motion to his right.

He pulled his daggers from their sheaths and spun to face the movement, but all he found was a piece of the door, still on its hinges and banging against the side of the house in a draft.

Cole took a shaky breath, waited for any new disturbances, and then slipped his daggers back into his belt.

Footsteps approached him from behind.

“What happened here?” asked Quay.

“I don’t know,” Cole grunted. He kicked a broken chair across the room. “It could’ve been a rival gang, I guess, like the Red Caps or the Large Men, but they’d have left their signs.” He sighed, almost to himself, and ran his hand through his hair. “I hope John’s all right.”

Silence.

Cole took a deep breath. Quay probably had his mind on the street outside, was already planning their next move,
wasn’t
even listening.

“I’m sure—”

The wind caught the door fragment and sent it flying toward Cole’s face.