Soulwoven (45 page)

A thousand memories flickered through Tsu’min’s mind.

He’d gazed through the throne room’s round walls for a hundred hundred days. He’d sat on the dais at its center and served as a minister of the Sh’ma Ith’a. He’d worn coats of blue, red, orange, and black underneath the dome, and he’d seen it filled with light and laughter and gloom and sadness. He’d observed sunrises, sunsets, thunderstorms, stars, moons, comets, supernovae and more through the prism of its crystal. He’d watched the sinuous curves of the throne at its heart take shape over centuries.

And he’d seen them broken.

He remembered his father’s blood staining the seat black. He remembered the cracks crawling over the throne’s once flawless surface. He remembered bowing and letting Lomin grind his skull into the floor before his father’s blood had even dried.

Because he’d made a promise.

Lomin still sat comfortably on the broken throne.

“I didn’t send for you, Tsu’min Nar’oth,” Lomin growled in Sh’ma.

Tsu’min frowned.

At first glance, Lomin seemed to have altered little since his ascendance. His face still showed the same combination of youthful softness and harsh experience. His cheekbones remained prominent. He wore the same style of half coat, fading from black at top to red at bottom, and the same flared white trousers and tall golden boots. He sat with his right leg crossed flat over his left and his back relaxed, and he was twirling the violet-black shape of his sword
Aythguar
point-first into the crystal at his feet.

But as Lomin’s eyes darkened, Tsu’min found that the second Sh’ma Ith’a
had
changed. The crowd of young Sh’ma whom Lomin had once kept close to serve as students and messengers was absent. The hollows beneath the Ith’a’s eyes had grown deeper. The purple points of his hair, always spiked and unruly, had sharpened.

Twelve guards appeared around the circumference of the throne room.
Their eddies
pulled the River into a speeding circle. Their weapons glowed red.

Tsu’min didn’t bow.

One didn’t scrape before a den of vipers.

“You need my words nonetheless,” Tsu’min replied. He looked pointedly at the guards. “Send these away. You won’t need them.”

Lomin shifted his weight from one side of the throne to the other. He made no move to dismiss his bodyguards.

“We’ll see,” he said.

The sun slid below the eastern rim of the world. The room atop the palace slipped from sunset into twilight. Next to Tsu’min, one of the outlander children shivered.

“Why have you brought these here?” Lomin asked. He jerked his chin toward the outlanders.

“They have a warning for you,” Tsu’min replied. “There is a threat to the heart dragons.”

Lomin’s gaze darkened further. His fingers tightened around the hilt of his sword, and he stopped spinning it. “Ramith and Miuri said as much to me months ago. I will say to you what I said to them: ‘What of it?’”

Tsu’min’s frown deepened.
What of it?
wasn’t
a proper response from the being charged with protecting the barrier between the dragon and the world.

The guards around the edges of the room moved closer.

“Ramith and Miuri never returned,” Tsu’min said. “What have you done with them?”

Lomin moved his right leg off of his left and planted it on the floor. “You don’t ask the questions here,
nar’oth,
” he spat. “I say again: ‘What of it?’”

“The dragon, Lomin.”

The Sh’ma Ith’a looked at the floor. “The dragon,” he whispered. “Always the dragon…” His eyes rose again, full of fire and hate. “I remember the dragon,
nar’oth,
” he rasped. The River flowed headlong toward the throne. “I will never forget it. Nor will I forget
what
brought it on our people.”

The guards continued to advance.

“Where are Ramith and Miuri?” Tsu’min asked again.

Lomin smiled.

Tsu’min’s skin crawled. Ever since Sherduan had laid waste to the Sh’ma on the Gray Reach, Lomin’s smile had been a thing of horror. The Ith’a’s lips curled up and bared his teeth in a way that wasn’t friendly, wasn’t amused,
was
none of the things a smile was supposed to be.

“I sent them to protect the heart dragons.”

A cold weight sank into Tsu’min’s chest.

The heart dragons were on the bottom of the Soulth’nth.

When Lomin had taken power, he’d murdered Tsu’min’s father’s supporters and thrown their bodies into the river. Their blood had stained the riverwalks. Their corpses had clogged the waters for weeks. Lomin had called it “protecting the river.”

Lomin stood and pointed
Aythguar
at Tsu’min. “I told you long ago,” he said, “that your outcasts would bring destruction to us all.” The Sh’ma Ith’a cocked his head and addressed Tsu’min as he might have a child. “You brought a Duennin to my doorstep. What did you think would happen?”

He lowered his sword. His guardsmen surged forward. The outlanders shouted and struggled and squirmed as they were grabbed and beaten and bound.

Tsu’min didn’t fight back. At the heart of the tenfold palace, surrounded by Lomin’s lackeys with no one to aid him but a gaggle of children, he would not have survived a battle. Instead, as his wrists and ankles were chained, he opened himself to the River of Souls, pulled it quickly to his body, and pushed it away. The rebound created a vibration in it that would stretch for miles.

Some of his friends wouldn’t be far away.

Not too far to come. Not too far to help.

Or so he hoped.

FIFTY-TWO

Blood dripped into the water in front of Litnig’s swollen face. Each drop looked different—a dark cloud that swirled for a moment against a bright backdrop and dissipated, pulled away to the left.

Litnig heard crickets. His head pounded. His neck was sore.

I was unconscious.

He remembered rope being wrapped around his wrists. Someone had thrown him to the floor. The butt of a spear had spun toward his forehead.

And then the world had gone black.

His nose was killing him. His mouth was dry. The water in front of him looked cool and inviting, but when he tried to reach for it, his arms didn’t budge. They’d been twisted behind his back and anchored to a heavy weight. His legs were bound as well. The ropes had been exchanged for chains.

“Shit,” he mumbled. The blood in the water was his. It was dripping from his nose and trickling into the river Lumos from the crystal boardwalk he was lying on. The light behind it shone from within some waving stands of plant life on the bottom of the river.

“Es’na,”
grunted a voice above him. Something thwacked into his rib cage.

Litnig couldn’t see the others. His head felt foggy. Tsu’min had been talking to the Sh’ma on the throne. The guards had rushed forward—

He heard a splash. At the edge of his vision, something white sank into the river.

His blood went cold.

Ryse.

His aching brain lurched into motion. He remembered what had happened in the throne room.

Litnig tried to wrench his wrists free of their chains, but with his arms pinned behind his back, he barely had the strength to pull the metal links taut.

Cole,
he thought.
Maybe Cole can get free, maybe he can—
but even if his brother did slip out of his chains, what would he do? The Sh’ma had already shown
themselves
more than capable of overwhelming him and his friends.

Maybe I can find the River again. Maybe the weaving will work better than last time.

Litnig shut his eyes, held his breath, and willed himself to see the stream of glowing orbs.

Nothing happened.

He didn’t have a clue how to find the River.

He fought for calm and tried not to think that any second there might be another splash, that Ryse might already be sucking in water down
below, that
Cole could be next, that
he
could be next—

“Tsu’min!
Na’oth’na
e!”
someone shouted.

A flash lit the night. A thunderclap broke the world’s sticky stillness into tiny pieces. A burst of wind raced over Litnig’s back, and then he heard shouting and the pounding of feet. There was a heavy
crack,
and a network of snow-white fractures appeared in the crystal beneath him. The boardwalk tilted in the direction of the river. The tinkling of breaking glass filled the air.

The boardwalk canted further, and Litnig slid toward the water. He tried to dig his feet, his face, his chains—anything—into the crystal, but there was nothing to catch himself on. He couldn’t stop.

He hit the river shoulders first.

His head bobbed toward the surface, and he had the giddy thought that he was going to float.

The thought didn’t last long.

He heard a splash. A rock with something wrapped around it plunged by him on its way to the bottom of the Lumos. His chains went taut.

He strained and pulled at the iron links until his muscles felt like they would tear themselves from his bones.

But all he could do was drift down.

And down.

And down.

The river wasn’t particularly deep. Litnig landed on a sandy flat maybe fifteen feet from its surface. Waving strands of a midnight-green, seaweedlike plant surrounded him. In the middle of them, a crystal slab lay flush with the river bottom. It pulsed with gentle white light.

Litnig could guess what would lie in its center.

The heart dragons.
The last two heart dragons.

Eyesss…
whispered a voice in his head.

A white robe curled and fluttered in Litnig’s peripheral vision. Ahead of him, a shadow was sinking toward the sand.

Litnig’s heart pounded. His head throbbed. His chest began to shout for air.

Clossse eyesss…
the voice whispered, more insistently.

Litnig had the unnerving feeling it was coming from the plants.

But he did as it said. There was nothing else to try.

He fell immediately into the dream.

It felt good to be back again. The cold gray ambience was bracing and welcoming, like starlight on a frozen winter night. The carved disc and its three pillars looked comfortably familiar. They weren’t even tilting.

Litnig spotted the Sh’ma light walker sitting cross-legged at the heart of the disc. Its ivory hands gripped its shoulders across its chest. Its head was craned back. Its eyes were closed. A peaceful smile sat upon its face.

When Litnig approached it, it opened its eyes and gestured open palmed toward the edge of the disc.

The human and Aleani dark walkers were waiting there, leaning against the pillars that had once chained them. The darkness swirled in thick clouds behind them.

They were smiling too.

The human dark walker straightened and strode toward Litnig.

There was no threat in its body language. A malevolent fug surrounded it, but its hatefulness didn’t seem directed at anything in particular. It came closer. Its aura rolled over the disc like a cloud of putrid smoke.

Anger seeped into Litnig’s bones.

He thought about fate. He thought about the world. He thought about how he’d been beaten by his father, mocked by those who were smaller and smarter than him, belittled by the Temple, ignored by the girl he loved. He thought about how he’d been dragged through challenges that would’ve killed a lesser man, and how no one had once praised him for it. He thought about how he’d failed those closest to him, and he thought about how he was going to die, alone in the abyss, with nothing—no god, no brother, no friend, no love—to save him.

The dark walker drew even with him. Its stone chest heaved. Its skin crackled and flaked. It laid a hand on Litnig’s shoulder, and Litnig decided that never again would he allow the world to dictate the terms of his life. He would fight it. He would break it.

He would make the
world
listen to
him.

The dark walker whipped his legs out, grabbed him by the face, and rammed the back of his head into the disc.

Litnig woke with vengeance in his heart and the River in his eyes.

The swirling stream of souls rushed along the bottom of the Lumos. It came from all directions, circling the heart dragons like the froth in a draining barrel of beer. Its souls flowed into the crystal slab in the river’s floor, pooled, and then erupted toward the surface in a geyser of light.

There was soulweaving happening above.
Lots of it.

When Litnig breathed in with the thing beneath his lungs, the River was reluctant to come to him.

He ground his teeth. He needed air. He needed to be free.

He would
make
the River come.

Savagely, ferociously, he sucked at it.

And the harder he sucked, the more souls came to him. He siphoned ten, a hundred, a thousand and more from the torrent that was racing upward. He wrapped them around the chains on his wrists and his ankles. He told them to break the iron, and they did, pulsing with his soul until the links had crumbled to dust in the water.

But he wasn’t through.

Strength,
he told the souls,
give me strength
. He pumped the little orbs in and out of his body. He coiled them around his arms, his legs,
his
chest. He pushed them inside of himself and layered them over every muscle he could think of. His whole being felt energized.

He swam easily through the current of the Lumos to Ryse. She was chained to a big black rock. Her eyes were closed. Her face was pale. Her robe and her hair floated in a ghostly halo around her.

Litnig wrapped his arms around Ryse’s warm body, set his feet against the black rock, and pushed. The chains binding her to the rock straightened, then warped, then broke.

It took him only two kicks to break the surface.

The night air swept over his face, and he took a long, deep breath. Ryse was heavy, but not so heavy that he couldn’t lift her out of the water if he kicked hard enough. He swam her over to the sloping crystal boardwalk.