Soulwoven (44 page)

Quay frowned and said nothing. Litnig swallowed emptily.

The Sh’ma turned to Ryse. “The heart dragons in Du Fenlan were broken on the night of your arrival. Did you ever ask yourselves why?”

“It was a coinci—”

“There are no coincidences!” the Sh’ma spat. A burst of wind roared through the trees. Its wrap flapped sinuously to its side.

It turned in a circle and stabbed a finger toward each of them in turn.

“A soulweaver attacked you in Lurathen but left you unharmed. This boy’s mother was killed in front of your eyes, but you weren’t hurt. Did you
ever ask why?
”

A firestorm glowed in the depths of the Sh’ma’s eyes. Its long, thin eyebrows drew down and deepened the shadows on its face. It looked like the dark walkers in Litnig’s dream.

The air grew cold, and a nightmare bloomed in Litnig’s heart.

They want
me.

The thought migrated to his mind, and he couldn’t shake free of it. It spread into his arms, his legs,
his
feet. The others moved around him, but they were ghosts at the edge of his vision, crowded out and unimportant.

The first two heart dragons were broken on the night of my dream. The necromancer who destroyed the second two spared my life. That woman kissed me. And my mother—Yenor help me, she killed my mother—

He couldn’t breathe. The shadows of the forest grew and warped and pressed in around him. Blackness blossomed at the center of his vision and spread outward. His legs wobbled. His heart ached.

A hand landed on his shoulder.

Everything will be all right,
said a voice in his head.
Bring your brother.

A feeling of relief passed through him.

Cole stood nearby, looking pale and shaken. A single bead of sweat rolled down his temple. His eyes were sunken and his cheeks waxy. His pulse moved visibly in his throat.

But Litnig was as glad for the presence of his brother as he’d ever been in his life.

The feeling of relief disappeared.

Litnig stood just where he had a moment before. There was no one behind him and no hand on his shoulder. The shadows took their proper shapes. He felt sick to his stomach, but he could breathe again. He smelled wildflowers on the wind.

The Sh’ma was watching him.

“I will take you to Soulth’il,” it said.

Its tone was that of a judge pronouncing a death sentence.

Litnig’s heart plunged into his feet. He heard voices—Cole’s, then Quay’s.

“Just like tha—”

“Cole.”

Cole shut his mouth.

“Thank you,” Quay said. “We accept.”

But the Sh’ma didn’t look at him. There was a message for one in its eyes:

I know,
it said to Litnig.

But it didn’t say what.

FIFTY

Soulth’il.
The Bright City.
The Cradle of the Sh’ma.

The snakelike metropolis at the heart of the White Forest wound along the bottom of a river valley between two ridges. Miles of white-trunked trees surrounded it. Thousands of years of craftsmanship lay behind it.

Leramis had never thought that he would see it.

But eleven days after meeting Tsu’min Nar’oth, he descended the southwest ridge of the Nuar Soulth’nth and watched the crystal prominences of Soulth’il glitter in the setting sun.

The city was every bit as beautiful as he’d been led to believe.

Leramis had seen a great deal of beauty in the White Forest—motionless aquamarine lakes filling the bottoms of deep dales; the shimmering red-green foliage of the Nuar Ramith; the verdant, lofty heights of the volcano Sh’ma’ame; the sheer living vastness of the unspoiled sea of trees that was the Olenash Sh’ma.

None of it compared to the valley in front of him, or to Soulth’il.

The vista below the hill was almost beautiful enough for him to forget the circumstances under which he was seeing it.

The trail took Leramis from the crown of the ridge. Soulth’il disappeared behind the pale leaves of the forest. White tree trunks surrounded the necromancer. The rainbow gilt of old leaves passed beneath his feet. The dark backs of his friends and Tsu’min rose and fell conspicuously against the brightness around them.

Leramis had known several Sh’ma back on Menatar, but he’d never known a Sh’ma like Tsu’min.

The party’s flame-haired guide had the oldest eyes of anyone Leramis had ever met. They looked even deeper than those of Nia’na Ayth’ma, the eldest Sh’ma in the Order.

And she’d been alive for over a thousand years.

Leramis exhaled slowly and took care not to twist an ankle on the gnarled tree roots that wreathed the path.

Tsu’min had said little over the week-and-a-half-long journey through the forest. He responded tersely or not at all if anyone asked him a question.

Leramis found his silence unnerving.

The party bunched at the bottom of the ridge, where the trail crossed a deep, fast-flowing stream, and Leramis ended up pressed close to Litnig’s back. The big young man looked taut as a rope. He’d looked like that since meeting Tsu’min, and he’d kept as far as he could from everyone.

Especially the Sh’ma.

Litnig’s not a man,
Leramis reminded himself.
He’s Duennin.

Ryse waded through the water in front of Leramis with her robe bunched around her thighs. The necromancer had agreed to keep the things he’d seen in Eldan City from the rest of the party at her request, but he couldn’t keep them from his own mind.

Such power.

He’d seen the redness in Litnig’s eyes, and he’d seen the way he wove, and he’d known what Litnig was.

Leramis’s foot slipped into a hole. He took a shivering, involuntary breath.

Tsu’min’s questions had opened his eyes. The soulwoven barrier around Crixine had clearly weakened, if it hadn’t dissipated entirely. Even alone, she had the power to have broken the heart dragons several times over. If the barrier around Eshan had weakened as well, the two of them could have released Sherduan months before, even without the help of D’Orin Threi and Soren Goldguard.

But they hadn’t.

They were waiting for something.

Leramis’s eyes settled on Litnig again. The younger man was helping a silent Len Heramsun onto the far bank.

Not man, Duennin.

It was too easy to forget.

Litnig had shown power that dwarfed Leramis’s and Ryse’s. And then Crixine had shown them all that even his power was meaningless before hers.

Leramis stepped out of the stream and glimpsed the shining reaches of Soulth’il through the trees again. The leaves whispered under his feet.

Tsu’min was old, he told himself. Tsu’min was powerful. Tsu’min was wise.

The other heart dragons hadn’t been broken until Litnig had been close to them.

Leramis could only hope that Tsu’min knew what he was doing.

FIFTY-ONE

Tsu’min Nar’oth hadn’t set foot in Soulth’il for nearly a hundred years.

For once, it felt like a long time.

The bones of the city had changed little. Still intact were the leaf-carpeted streets; the crystalline buildings of pearlescent
soulth’sha;
the seven bridges; the eight parks; the tenfold palace—all the landmarks of his childhood.

Gone was the last remaining shred of the vitality that had once made Soulth’il the only home of the Sh’ma.

Tsu’min bowed his head and led his band of outlanders from the edge of the capital toward its heart. He hadn’t been to Soulth’il in a century because Lomin Miuri’ma, the Sh’ma Ith’a and the cancer that sat at the heart of the city, hadn’t called for him. Lomin had lost interest in the reports on the outside world for which he relied upon Tsu’min. He’d lost interest, according to most, in almost everything.

Tsu’min had not.

He and his compatriots among the
na’oth’na
had kept their ears open for word of the heart dragons, as they’d sworn to do. They’d made sure the barrier that kept the Duennin in the wastes remained intact. They’d lived in exile, with no one to trust but each other, and they’d watched over a world that didn’t know they existed and a people who’d grown to loathe and fear them.

Tsu’min squeezed a jade bead that hung from his right wrist. He remembered the dragon. He remembered his people burning, broken, shattered—the grasslands in flames, the banners destroyed.

Promise me,
Mi’ame had said as she’d died.

He’d promised to watch over the world.

And for three thousand years, he had.

Tsu’min moved slowly along the shining waters of the Soulth’nth. His people stared at him from shadowed archways and distant balconies. When they saw the outlanders at his back, they frowned and whispered. Several left their homes and ran ahead of him toward the heart of the city.

The red-tinged crystal apartments of the First Ward rose on Tsu’min’s right and lost themselves in the oranges and yellows and browns of the Second. The hues of the Eighth and Seventh Wards swept from navy blue to violet to aquamarine on his left. Most of Tsu’min’s people lived in the Wards. They led slow, quiet lives there.

Tsu’min crossed the Soulth’nth on the Bridge of Rainbows over beds of the kelplike plant that produced the
soulth’sha.
Ahead of him at the end of an arrow-straight boulevard lay Soulth’il’s one great hill, a marble of dark forest surrounded by glittering buildings and crowned by the ten towers and seven minarets of the Sh’ma Ith’a’s crystal palace.

The wind stirred the leaves on the bridge.

Aysh’a,
they whispered.
Aysh’a.

Change.

Lomin had brought change across the Bridge of Rainbows in the past. With it had come blood and fire and pain and death.

Tsu’min felt the eyes of his people upon his back. He heard their whispers. They wondered if he was bringing the same kind of change that Lomin had.

In truth, he didn’t know. Fire and blood and death were coming to Soulth’il. That much he saw when he read the stars, the wind, and the River.

But he hadn’t seen how or why the destruction would come, or what his role in its coming would be.

He rubbed the jade bead, closed his eyes, and waited. Tall trees whose pale crowns thrust into the sky like verdant scepters stood sentinel at the end of the bridge. The long fronds on the bottom of the Soulth’nth waved sadly.

Tsu’min felt a ripple in the River of Souls.

Lomin was angry.

And that meant it was time to proceed.

Tsu’min crossed the Bridge of Rainbows, and the emerald edifices of the Fifth Ward rose around him like embellished cliffs of green glass. Lomin’s Red Guards, in their bright coats, their white pants and their golden boots, would be arming themselves—digging their shining weapons from the velvet-lined crystal chests in which the blades remained unless Tsu’min or his comrades had come to Soulth’il.

Tsu’min wondered how long it had been since the weapons had been used. Two of his fellows had gone to Soulth’il ahead of him, to tell Lomin of the breaking of the Heart Dragons of Mennaia. They hadn’t returned. And in their absence, Tsu’min had gone to the border of the human lands to think, and to wait, and to watch.

The boulevard beneath his feet passed by.
The river grew distant. The trees thickened and greened and aged.

Before long, Tsu’min stood in front of the deep-blue archway that marked the entrance to the Sh’ma Ith’a’s palace. The ten towers, each a different color, loomed above him. The seven minarets stretched thin and high into the pink-and-orange sky. Four guards stood before him. They carried long spears topped with curved blades, and they wore bright red coats.

They made no move to stop or challenge him. No one, save Lomin himself, did that anymore.

He was Tsu’min Nar’oth, the gadfly, the mouse, and the thunder.

And he was older and more powerful than all of them.

Tsu’min glanced at the outlanders behind him. The brown-haired boy and the Wilderleng girl stared openmouthed at the palace. The prince’s eyes glimmered with fear and uncertainty. The Aleani’s dark skin paled.

Tsu’min had led dozens of others into the heart of Soultholenash before, and he’d seen the looks many times. The tenfold palace was the living embodiment of the Sh’ma, tall and ancient, built of translucent crystal imbued with metals and dyes. Over thousands of years, it had been carved and inlaid and decorated with stories and forms so subtle a person could stare at its walls for hours without even realizing what he or she was looking at. Its hallways progressed through blues from indigo to azure, reds from rose to cinnabar, purples from violet to amethyst, and greens from mint to emerald, moving so subtly from one color to the next that it was impossible to say where one hue stopped and the next began. The palace was a place for the eternal, built over millennia and meant to be experienced over millennia. It wasn’t there for humans. It wasn’t there for Aleani. It wasn’t there for Wilderlengs.

And yet,
Tsu’min thought, watching the female soulweaver run a hand through her hair while her head-shorn companion stared feverishly at the crystal,
over the years they’ve brought it many of its most beautiful moments.

That was a truth that Tsu’min understood and the Sh’ma Ith’a did not.

Tsu’min walked. The hallways shifted from blue to purple to red and back through orange to yellow to green to pale, icy blue. The outsiders gawked. The palace’s red guardians watched but didn’t stop them.

When all the colors of the rainbow had passed, Tsu’min led his outlanders to the large, round room from which Lomin Miuri’ma ruled the Sh’ma.

Tsu’min paused with his hand on one of two sun-mottled columns that framed the room’s open entrance. Water trickled down the crystal walls behind him into troughs. Gold leaf crowned the ceiling. The city and the river twinkled several hundred feet below.

Tsu’min didn’t look back at those he was leading. He didn’t need to.

“Do not speak unless spoken to,” he said to them.

He walked between the columns.

The room beyond them had changed only once. Its dome yawned into the sky. Its walls remained as clear as perfect, polished glass. Soulth’il’s slender body curled around it on all sides, nuzzled at the edges by the green rim of the forest.