Soulwoven (49 page)

Len felt sick if he tried to look straight at it, as though the world was bending around it and his eyes didn’t want to watch.

It smiled at him. Saliva glistened on its teeth.

Len’s legs wobbled. His whole body screamed at him to turn and run, but he couldn’t.

The dragon didn’t speak to him. It didn’t need to. He knew what it would have said.

I have come.

The ringing in Len’s ears subsided. He heard shouting. Hazily, he became aware of motion in the cave. The others were breaking and running up the tunnel. The black-haired Duennin with the orange sword was fighting against his former comrades. The blonde Duennin was standing motionless in front of the dragon and smiling.

Blood dripped from her white blade.

D’Orin—
Len thought. His son had been murdered. His death hadn’t been an execution but a cold-blooded betrayal.

Len had failed.

He’d failed his son, and he’d failed his people, and he’d failed the world.

There was nothing left to live for.

Len Heramsun fell to his knees and waited for the end.

“Run!” someone shouted, but he didn’t want to run. He knelt in front of the dragon, and he listened to the thunderbellow hiss of its breath, and he knew that all was lost.

Someone grabbed his shoulder.

He tried to break free, but the hand was insistent and strong. It slipped under his armpit and yanked him to his feet, and then it grabbed him by his collar and turned him and dragged him away.

Len looked up into the pale, sweat-covered face of Litnig Jin. His legs began to move again.

Litnig let go of him and took off toward the mouth of the tunnel.

Len stumbled after him.

He ran, like the others.

He ran, but he asked himself,
Why
?

FIFTY-NINE

Litnig’s heart raced. The sick tang of fear filled his mouth.

He ran as fast as his long legs would carry him.

But the cavern slope was steep. By the time he burst from the cave’s mouth and started down the steps that lay beyond it, his head was spinning. His chest burned. His breath had grown ragged. He careened from side to side.

He couldn’t see the others. He didn’t know if they were in front of him or behind him, or if they were lost or safe.

And he couldn’t bring himself to stop and find out.

The stairs were uneven and difficult, and Litnig’s legs wouldn’t move like he wanted them to. One of his feet came down sideways. His ankle rolled. His knee locked. His body twisted and tumbled, and then he ducked his head and bounced and somersaulted down the stairway.

His shoulder smashed against the corner of a step. His arm drifted away from the side of his head. His skull slammed into stone.

The impact jarred his teeth, his jaw, his nose,
his
cheekbones.

Litnig’s eyes snapped shut.

When he looked out at the world again, he was back in the dream.

The disc felt quiet and tremulous, like the plains when the green-gray clouds of a storm were massing overhead.

Litnig picked himself up unsteadily. He held a hand to his aching head. He listened to his heart pound, and he turned in a slow circle.

The light walkers had returned to the disc.

Each of them stood before one of the three pillars, pressing its dark counterpart against the stone. Dull chains, like those he’d seen on the pillars before his mother’s death, were appearing next to them and restraining the dark walkers again.

Beyond the walkers, great thunderheads of darkness towered above the disc. Tendrils of smoke snaked out from them and crawled over its edge.

The little fingers of darkness were creeping toward Litnig.

Send them back,
said a rich voice behind him.

Litnig recognized it. He’d heard its words in Eldan City and the White Forest. It didn’t belong to the walkers.

Send them back and we’ll help,
said a second voice.

Send them back and we’ll teach,
added a third.

The light walkers turned and stared at Litnig. The black clouds drew closer to the center of the disc. They reminded Litnig of the abyss in Sherduan’s eyes.

Litnig realized why he hadn’t seen the dragon in his mind.

He didn’t need to be visited by it.

It was there, in his dream, surrounding the disc.

It had always been there.

Send them back,
the voices behind him urged again.

So he did.

All it took to send the light walkers back into the darkness was the desire to do so. They left the pillars and walked into the clouds. Sherduan’s black fingers retreated before them.

The dark walkers struggled against the half-realized chains on their stone prisons.

Good,
said the second voice behind Litnig.
Now you must restrain the others.

Litnig willed the chains to form, and to bite, and to bind.

There was pushback. A part of his heart screamed at his mind not to put it away. The dark walkers’ anger flared in his chest, hot and heavy and strong.

But not unmasterable.

The dark walkers fell back against their pillars. The chains wrapped around them and bit hard into the stone.

The disc hummed.

Litnig’s arms and legs trembled. His throat burned. His knees gave out, and his head drooped toward the disc.

A warm hand grasped his elbow and held him up.

Not yet,
said the third voice.
You mustn’t leave yet. You need to know.

Litnig swayed to his feet and turned around.

Three new walkers stood at the heart of the disc. Their clothes shifted and wisped, like the lines in a pastel drawing as someone’s fingers rubbed them out. Their bodies shone both white and black. One was Aleani, one was Sh’ma, and one was human.

They didn’t belong in Litnig’s dream. He could feel it. They were foreign to him, and foreign to it.

His eyes felt drawn to the new human walker. It was tall, like he was. It was heavily built, like he was. It looked strong and intimidating, but an undercurrent of kindness flowed through its stony eyes.

Litnig knew those eyes, though he couldn’t have said where from.

Good,
said the Aleani.
You’ve seen us.

Now,
said the Sh’ma,
learn what you are.

The human placed its hand on Litnig’s chest.

Its memory came fast and strong.

So much rain filled the air that for a moment Litnig thought he might drown in it. Lightning snaked across a black sky above him. Warm blood mixed with water and poured from his large hands. Something wriggled and kicked on his back.

A blade slid from his stomach. His knees gave out. His lips went numb.

He fell on his face in the streets of an alien city, and he waited for death.

Why’re you showing me this?
Litnig whispered to the things in his dream. The city looked familiar.

The tip of a long sword filled his vision. It
glowed
the liquid orange of molten iron, and it steamed in the rain. A thick layer of blood covered it.

A lean young man squatted behind the sword. He had black hair and a long, crooked nose.

Eshan,
a rich voice thought.
My son.

Eshan frowned. Rainwater ran over his face and poured from his chin. He took a soulforged sword from the cobblestone street.

The weapon was nothing,
the rich voice whispered.
The child was everything.

His second son, whom
he’d
brought to Eldan City to put into Eshan’s keeping.

No.

Rain dripped from Eshan’s black eyebrows. He stretched his long frame slowly to its feet and handed the sword he’d taken to a young woman with long white hair. The blade glowed bright white when she took hold of it.

No…

Litnig held up a hand to block the light, but he couldn’t keep it there. His fingers fell back to the stones. Water pooled underneath him and soaked his clothes, his skin,
his
beard.

His eyes closed.

Some time later, they opened again. Eshan and his woman were gone. Litnig’s body felt cold, stiff, and unresponsive.

He dragged it over frigid water and ridged stone toward the nearest door.

No,
Litnig thought again.
Please, no.

The world dimmed. He lost feeling in his hands, his feet, his nose,
his
lips. The child on his back squirmed. The shapes around him mixed with ones that Litnig knew from outside of the memory. He saw a courtyard he’d once played in, and the house where Ail the butcher had hit him upside the head for tracking in mud, the doorframe of a home that no longer existed—

No. No, no, no—

Cry, little one,
the rich voice urged,
cry with all your heart.

And while the lightning cracked and the rain fell, the boy on Litnig’s back wailed the wrenching, magnet call of an infant in peril. The door that no longer existed opened. Two thin legs and two small feet appeared within it, wreathed in yellow light and escorted by a puff of warm air.

Litnig knew those legs as well as he knew his own. He’d known them for as long as he could remember.

Forming words,
the rich voice said,
was difficult.

“Please,” he croaked. “Please, my son—”

A pair of young hands reached past him. A buckle on his back slid open. A girlish voice mumbled a question.

Timid fingers landed on Litnig’s shoulder.

The question was repeated, but the world was swimming into the future and leaving him behind. His sight grew dimmer. The walker’s memory faded.

Except that it existed for Litnig too.

Somewhere in the deep places of his mind, he could recall a night of rain and cold and fear, when the hands of a woman had rescued him from a horror he couldn’t remember. She’d loved him, raised him, died for him, because of him—

Becauseofyou becauseofyou she died becauseofyou she died she died she died becauseofyou—

No!

The word left his mind with the force of a hammer blow. The memories evaporated, and he saw the disc again.

A soundless wind swept it. It ruffled the clothes of the new walkers. It shook the chains on the pillars. It swirled the darkness of the dragon into an angry, towering mass that threatened to drown the little gray wafer of light beneath it.

You were born Eranyi Eshati,
said the human walker.

Litnig felt sick to his stomach. His hands shook.

You’re Duennin,
said the Aleani.
Accept it.

The dark walkers strained against their chains. The links began to crack.

Letusfree letusfree we will scourgethem hurtthem breakthem makethemleave—

Litnig fell to his hands and knees, rasped his fingers against the stone of the disc, and screamed. The dream shivered and shifted.

Outside of it, someone was shouting, “Boy! Boy!”

Ignore him,
said the Sh’ma.

But Litnig didn’t.

He smashed his forehead into the disc.

And then he woke up.

He was lying on cracked flagstones at the foot of the staircase in Sherdu’il. Crumbling, roofless ruins sagged against one another to his right and his left. He smelled smoke on the air and tasted bile in his mouth.

The gray sun haloed the battered, bloodstained form of Len Heramsun in front of him. The Aleani’s dreadlocks were blowing nearly sideways in high winds.

Litnig’s body felt cold and wet. His head felt hot and stuffy. The stone underneath him was damp and foul smelling.

Len had a hand on Litnig’s arm. The Aleani was shaking him.

“I’m awake,” Litnig mumbled.

Len’s arm dropped away. Litnig’s shoulder was numb. His stomach felt sore and empty. He swayed to his feet and realized that he’d vomited all over the stones below him. His face was slick with sweat and blood and puke.

He wiped some of it off and staggered forward. His legs felt weak and untrustworthy.

Don’t look,
said Quay’s voice in his memories.
Don’t look, just walk.
First the left foot, then the right.

Len put a hand on Litnig’s arm again. The Aleani said something, but Litnig couldn’t process it.

Don’t think.

Litnig staggered through the gray, empty ruins of the city of the dragon, wrapped his arms around himself, and tried to keep from thinking.

It’s a lie,
he told himself.
That memory is a lie.

But his heart didn’t believe it.

He nearly stumbled right onto the rope bridge.

The rotting framework of wood and cord lay a few feet beyond Sherdu’il’s last dilapidated stones. It swung and bounced in the wind over the deep gray gorge that flanked the city. Several hundred feet below it, the Lumos frothed and roared like a madman.

Litnig stopped moving. The wind howled over his head.

He didn’t trust the bridge.

“We have to move, boy,” said Len behind him.

“We’ll die,” Litnig whispered.

Len put a hand on his back and pressed him forward.

Litnig clung to the guide ropes at the sides of the bridge. He moved one foot at a time. His legs quivered with every step.

The river thundered from left to right below him. He felt sick again.

“Where’re the others?” he mumbled.

“At the river by now.
Waiting, I hope. I doubt the Sh’ma will want to stay put for long.”

Litnig put one foot ahead of the other.

He was halfway across the bridge when something felt wrong in his chest.

There was someone behind them. He could feel it.
Someone waiting for the right moment to do something terrible.

Litnig’s hands shook hard enough to set the rope bridge bouncing. He shut his eyes and stopped moving.

“Len,” he whispered.

“Keep moving, boy.”

“Len, there’s something wrong.”

“Just keep moving.”

Litnig looked back.

Eshan stood at the Sherdu’il end of the bridge. His orange sword glowed in his hands.