Soulwoven (4 page)

I am coming.

Ryse lurched up, fell back down. The world spun.

Life went on around her. The moon swung from north to south over her head, the stars from west to east. Dogs barked in the distance. More soulweavers passed into the temple, and Eldanian innocents began to trickle out on stretchers or in the arms of friends. She felt Litnig’s hand on her shoulder, heard him and his brother talking at her, then squabbling with each other.

Yenor had given her the gift of soulweaving. The Temple had pulled her from the slums and taught her how to use it. All that had been asked in return was that she
protect
those who hadn’t been given the same. And she’d failed them.
Failed everyone.
More deeply than she could’ve imagined was possible when the sun had set that evening.

Ryse tried to think of something she could do, but her mind kept returning to the dragon’s face surrounded by whiskers of fire in the darkness, smiling at her with long, dripping black teeth.

I am coming,
she heard, again and again.

I am coming.

She sat on the steps until she heard someone clear his throat. A tall, young, gray-robed man stood in front of her. He wore a blue cross on his armband, but he wasn’t one of the Twelfthmen she’d seen before.
His eyes glittered, bright blue and intelligent.
His hair was close-shaven and black.

“Ryse Lethien?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Come with me.” The Twelfthman helped her up, kept his fingertips cold and firm on her arm even after she was standing.

Ryse heard movement behind her and turned back. Cole was sitting on the steps with his bloodshot eyes focused darkly on the horizon, but Litnig had stood and was watching the Twelfthman with a face full of fear and pain and envy. Her mind found something to grasp again. The Twelfthman’s fingers tightened on Ryse’s arm, and she found a moment’s warmth hiding somewhere beneath the fear and the guilt.

“Thank you. Both of you,” she said.

Litnig opened his mouth to reply, but Ryse put on her best smile for him, shook her head, and turned away before he could offer any more of his help.

The heart dragons were broken. There was nothing he could do.

She heard the stones crunch under Litnig’s boots, and then she leaned on the Twelfthman’s arm and left the brothers behind.

Her escort moved solid and impassive next to her up the steep streets of Temple Hill, his hand tight on her arm, his gaze fixed on the road ahead of them. She shivered. If the Twelfthman had come for her, it was because the Twelve had ordered him to. Division Twelve didn’t act without orders. In the Academy, she had joked that they probably didn’t even think without orders.

The joke didn’t seem so funny anymore.

The wind blowing down Temple Hill’s wide, deserted avenues brought the sounds of muffled fear from the city. Children cried in the richly appointed, multi-storied homes and complexes she passed, and she sensed unease in the voices of the parents consoling them.

In the slums, Ryse had yearned for a life like that more than anything else. When the Temple had made her its impossible offer—to raise her up and make her something more than a street urchin—she’d accepted that she would never have it. Instead, she was supposed to work miracles with the souls of the dead to protect others who did.

And now she had failed to accomplish even that.

The crying became less frequent as Ryse approached the long, white-columned buildings that marked the entrance to Temple Complex. By the time she had walked between them into the square of white flagstones beyond, the city was already quiet again.

Ryse slowed as much as the Twelfthman would let her, drank in the clean air of the complex and let it wash out the chaos and fear in her heart. A tall marble statue of Oren the Purifier stood in the center of the square, his face stern and unyielding in the moonlight, his hand outstretched with the Book of Yenor lying open in his palm. The massive golden dome under which she’d earned her robe a year earlier loomed to her left. On the other side of the square lay the cluster of rectangular, columned halls topped in peaked red slate that formed the Academy. Directly ahead of her, the flat roof and smaller dome of the Hall of the Twelve waited in silence.

The Twelve would know what to do. The Twelve always knew what to do. Ryse was only the smallest finger on their smallest hand.

Then why,
she wondered,
do I feel guilty?

The Twelfthman moved in gray silence next to her. He was young.
Maybe even younger than her.
But every step he took was measured, every move made with purpose. She could feel the muscles in his arm shifting as they walked. It was soulweavers like him who had awed Litnig as a child, given him something to yearn for.

Strange how she remembered things like that, even at a time like this.

He left her without a word in the large square antechamber of blue-white marble at the center of the Hall of the Twelve.

The room’s torches were out. Through a casement above her head, moonlight bathed the room in shades of gritty, dusky blue. Ryse padded on cold feet between chairs of teak and velvet, ornate black statues of stern men and frowning women, leafy plants in huge brass pots. At the back of the room, a pair of iron-bound, Isles mahogany doors stood guarded by two unmoving Twelfthmen. Beyond it, the Twelve held their councils.

No one spoke, but Ryse knew anyway that she was meant to go in.

Alone.

The Twelfthmen pushed open the doors as she approached, and Ryse stepped through.

The council room was round and mostly dark. She stood in the middle of a white-tiled aisle leading down to a large table in a depression at the room’s center. The moon shone on the table through hidden openings in a tall, painted dome above. Rows of chairs for visitors stood in empty circles around the circumference of the room, and there was just enough space at the edge of the depression for a few people to stand at once.

Eleven white-robed men sat at the table. A fat, balding, gray-haired twelfth was standing in front of his chair, glaring toward the table’s head. His gut moved in and out in rapid, pointed bursts, like he had been shouting.

Slowly, he turned and looked at Ryse.

The doors boomed shut behind her.

None of the Twelve was younger than fifty, but they were all soulweavers of great power nonetheless, mostly drawn from the Seven Noble Houses of Eldan. The man at the head of the table smiled at her. Unlike the standing man, he was still fit even at the reputed age of fifty-eight. He had hard muscles in his arms and neck, a strong jaw, no belly to speak of. His eyes shone with intelligence and charm, and when he smiled, his face creased along lines Ryse was sure had been formed from years of small kindnesses. He had been Yenor’s Highest, the head of the Order, for more than a decade, and his name was Aegelden Elpioni.

“My dear,” he intoned in a smooth, quiet voice. “We have been anxious about you.”

Ryse bowed her head and stepped into the ring of moonlight. “Thank you,
Highest
,” she said.

Aegelden leaned back and crossed one leg over his knee. His chair creaked beneath him. “You are uninjured?”

“Yes, Highest.”

“Of firm mind?”

“Yes, Highest.”

A pause.
“How many necromancers were involved in the attack on the Old Temple tonight, Ryse?”

His voice grew colder as he asked, and a shiver crawled down Ryse’s back.

The seal is broken,
whispered her mind.
He should be asking about the heart dragons.

“Two, Highest,” she said. Ryse kept her head low and focused on Aegelden. She heard impatient shuffling from the table.
“Aleani and human.
Male.
Dressed in black.”

“And how powerful were they?”

“Very.” Her voice caught in her throat. “I’m sorry,
Highest
. I—”

“Thank you, Ryse,” Aegelden said. He turned to whisper to an aide, and she swallowed the rest of her reply. She stole a look at the other members of the Twelve. They looked anxious to return to whatever discussion they’d been having before her arrival.

Aegelden turned back to her. Her heart hammered. Her tongue felt clumsy. She spoke out of turn, on impulse.

“The heart dragons were destroyed,
Highest
.”

The room went silent. Ryse heard not a rustle of fabric, not the squeak of a chair. She swallowed, kept her gaze on the floor. It was terribly disrespectful to speak to the Twelve out of turn, but she needed to share the burden of her knowledge. Needed to learn what they were going to do about the seal.

Aegelden’s reply came dangerously slowly.

“How do you know that, child?”

She was a soulweaver of the Temple, privy to all its secrets. It shouldn’t have mattered.

“I saw one of Division Twelve carrying them from the Old Temple,” she said.

Aegelden’s chair groaned. Thousands on thousands of souls slipped toward him in a great whirl.

Ryse felt like she was standing on the edge of a whirlpool and staring down.

“Two young men were with you tonight, Ryse,” Aegelden said. His voice was flat and icy. It was not a question. “Who were they?”

Ryse’s stomach clenched. The souls continued to flow, and not just toward Aegelden. Ryse looked up. The others on the council were leaning forward in their chairs, their eyes dark and inscrutable in the moonlight. Her mind told her to speak the truth. Her heart screamed that there was danger in it.

The hair on Ryse’s neck
raised
on end, and time seemed to slow. She noticed everything around her—the subtle shifting of the council members at the edge of her vision, the sound of the wind through the dome above. She remembered watching men look at her in the slums as they tried to make up their minds about whether a skinny child was worth their trouble.
Ryse had learned about danger then, learned when to walk away, when to seek help, when to run.

She had put that part of her to bed long ago, but under the cold eyes of the Council of Twelve it crawled back out and over her with frightening completeness.

The mind of Ryse’s childhood calculated wildly while the mind of her older years tried to restrain it. She didn’t want to anger the Twelve any further, but she didn’t want to implicate Litnig and Cole in whatever was about to happen, either. They were her friends. They’d been trying to help her.

“Answer us!” Aegelden barked. His eyes shone dark and pitiless, and the little girl in Ryse’s memories told her what to do.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Every word felt like a stone on her chest.

The Highest stayed silent. Long moments stretched in which she stood bowed before him, eyes low, head curled as close to her stomach as she could get it.

Run,
said the child she’d once been.
You wait for your chance and then you run hard and don’t look back. Never look back.

“Ryse,” Aegelden said, “look up.”

She did. He was still sitting in the black lacquer chair of his office. His feet were planted on the floor. His face
glowed
marble cold in the white light. Every word he said was icy, furious, disappointed.

“If you are lying, child…” He wet his lips. His fingers dug into his armrests. “Think long on the consequences.”

She felt bile in her throat. The room had grown stiflingly hot. He knew, had to know.

“Rest now, child, if you like,” he said. The words dripped like cold rain through her veins. “We will hear from you again tomorrow.”

The mass of souls in the River didn’t dissipate as she walked away.

Ryse barely breathed, didn’t dare even to raise her head until she was well clear of the Hall and nearly back to her dormitory. Her chest ached. Her mind raced.

Between the close stone walls of the cell in which she slept, Ryse scratched out a note to her best friend and slid it under the partition of the room they shared. The moon glowed bright and white outside. Her robe hung from a peg near the door. Ryse stuffed a bag full of spare clothing and the little bit of food she had on hand, but there was only the one robe.

Run,
said the girl she had once been, and she listened.

FOUR

I’ve been here before,
Litnig thought.
This is the same dream.

He stood on a stone disc the gray of a winter sky. His arms felt heavy and slow, his legs glued in place. His heartbeat sounded thready and fast somewhere above him, and he tasted the acrid tang of burning metal. There was no sky over his head, no earth below.
Nothing but the disc and heavy clouds of darkness that swirled and tumbled around it like ink suspended in water.
Bursts of purple and indigo and gray flashed sporadically around him, so dim he could barely be certain he saw them at all.

It had only been hours since he’d left the Old Temple.
Only slightly longer since he’d had the first dream of his life.

And already he was dreaming again.

The disc felt fragile beneath his feet, like a wafer of flagstone over a hidden sinkhole. Tiny ridges covered its surface. A pillar of dusty stone rose into shadow a yard or so away from him. It was as wide as his arms could reach and as tall as a house.

He remembered it from his first time in the dream. It had something to do with whatever had woken him up sweating and afraid.

Pieces of broken chain lay scattered around the base of the pillar. Ten or twenty feet beyond it, he could see the edge of the disc.

Think,
he told himself.
Reason.
But it was hard. The darkness seethed back and forth around the disc like water on some great shore. It called to him, as familiar as an old lullaby and as terrifying as if it were sung from rotting, cancerous lips.

Litnig turned in a circle. Two other pillars formed a loose triangle with the third around the center of the disc, tall and carved with looping black symbols. The broken chains lay at the foot of the closest pillar. He knelt to touch a link, and it crumbled into dust.