Soulwoven (50 page)

I know,
Litnig thought drunkenly.
I know what you are.

The Duennin looked at him and raised the sword. His hair streamed down the gorge in the wind.

No.

Eshan cut the ropes mooring the bridge.

The planks closest to Sherdu’il snapped toward Litnig and fell. Eshan stood in silence, his sword a line of fire against the gray.

The bridge dropped away beneath Litnig’s feet.

He turned and snatched at it, and he caught hold of one of the fraying guide ropes.

The bridge swung him toward the other side of the gorge. The rope in his hands stretched. The wind screamed past his ears. The rock wall in front of him grew closer and closer and bigger and bigger.

Too fast,
he thought.

But there was nothing he could do about it.

He put his legs in front of him and exhaled as he hit the wall. His body compressed. His breath rushed out of him. He lost his grip on the rope, but his fingers found one of the bridge’s planks and latched on.

A weight attached itself to his leg. His knee and hip snapped with the jerk of stopping its fall.

Litnig clung to the splintered wood beneath his hands and hugged himself as close to the cold, sharp wall as he could. The bridge swung back and forth.

Eventually, it came to a rest.

He was alive. He was breathing.

But he was slipping. His arms were exhausted.

“Len,” he grunted, “can you grab something else?”

There was no response.

“Please. I can’t—” He risked a look down.

Len was hanging from his leg.

Below him, the bridge had broken apart.

Its lines snapped and flailed in the wind. The cliff face in front of them was sheer and slick. There was nothing for Len to grab on to.

The Aleani looked left at the snapping lines, then right at the cliff face, then down at the roaring river. His forehead was purple and red. Several of his teeth were missing.

A look of anguish washed over his face.

“Len, no,” Litnig croaked.
“Not—don’t—”

“Tell my family I’m sorry, boy,” the Aleani said.

His voice was calm and level. The wind tugged at his dreadlocks.

Litnig wanted to scream.

“Tell the others too,” said Len. He licked his lips and looked down, then up again. There was fear in his eyes. “And go back to them.”

Len’s fingers dug deeply into Litnig’s calf and thigh. His chest was pressed against the back of Litnig’s knee.

The fingers loosened.

They hesitated.

And then they let go.

The thick, matted touch of dreadlocks brushed Litnig’s calves.

Litnig tried to shout something manful and pained, but all that came out was a boyish squeak.

He watched Len’s body fall. He expected the Aleani to move, or to flail, or to drift gently downward, but he didn’t. Len dropped straight into the gorge, bounced once against the wall with a wet
crack,
and then spun and rolled and tumbled until he struck the river, so far down that Litnig couldn’t even hear the splash.

The wind froze Litnig’s fingers. The wood chilled his palms. He could still feel Len’s imprint on his calf, and his thigh, and his knee, where the warmth was fading.

His breath came in choked gasps. His head spun. He clung to the remains of the bridge.

Don’t think. Climb. Just keep moving.

Litnig found a wooden plank above him and pulled himself up. He rested. Then he did it again.
And again.
The planks didn’t break. The ropes didn’t snap. His feet found wood to rest on, and then he used his legs and his trunk to climb instead of relying on his wasted, shivering arms.

Don’t think.

He reached the top of the gorge. His fingers sank into cold, soft scree. He dragged himself away from his death.

For a moment, he lay on the ground just breathing.

And then he lurched to his feet, staggered forward, and climbed onto the path down the cliff.

Don’t think.

“Lit!” someone screamed.
“Lit!”

Litnig put one foot ahead of the other and fought the downward slide of his body. He leaned on the stone of the cliff, and he stumbled and slipped and swayed down the path toward his brother.

Cole hoisted one of Litnig’s arms over his shoulder. Ryse slid beneath the other. Dil stood just behind them. “Are you all right? Where’s Len?” Cole asked.

The others would be waiting by the river below. They’d be seeing only him returning. They’d be wondering the same thing.

“Gone,” Litnig mumbled.

Don’t think.

They kept moving. The ground beneath Litnig’s feet leveled out and became a pebble beach. The rush of the river grew louder. A black sail flapped in the breeze.

Litnig leaned on his brother, even though it sickened him to do it. He didn’t want to profane Cole with his presence. He didn’t want to let him love a lie.

He didn’t want Cole to die for him too.

The others called out questions. Cole answered them. Litnig drifted toward the black craft that would take him from the mountains.

Don’t think.

He settled against the edge of the canoe and wrapped himself in a cloak. The boat slid from the shore into the river. The sail filled with wind. The current spun the craft around and took it south.

Litnig leaned his head against the damp, freezing wood behind him, closed his eyes, and tried not to think.

SIXTY

Tall gray cliffs flew by above Dil’s head.

Freezing spray foamed up from the river Lumos and landed on any bit of skin she left exposed. High clouds blew in endless streams over the tops of the mountains. Even wrapped in her cloak, even pressed against Cole’s side, she felt cold.

Dil faced rearward in the bow of the canoe and watched Tsu’min handle the tiller. The Sh’ma’s left arm hung limp against his side. He was breathing hard. There was a cut on his cheek. Below him, the others huddled in a lumpy, brown mass of tattered cloaks and bruised bodies.

Except for Len.

Len was gone.
Forever.

Dil swallowed and did her best to ignore the chills creeping up her limbs.
Tsu’min should’ve known what was going to happen in that city,
she thought.
He should’ve told us we’d have no chance.

The Sh’ma looked exhausted, but not surprised.

Dil tugged at Cole’s cloak, but all of his attention was on his brother. Litnig’s eyes had closed. His head had slumped against his shoulder.

So Dil sat and contemplated the fire-haired Sh’ma into whose hands she’d placed her life.

Tsu’min’s eyes glowed white. His good hand moved the tiller deftly back and forth, and the canoe sped southward around jagged rocks and white-haired rapids.

A single perfect snowflake landed on Dil’s sleeve.

And then the mountains shook.

A screech ripped through the icy stillness. The ground heaved from left to right and back. The river sloshed against one side of the valley and returned, then did it again, then devolved into a bubbling tangle of waves and whirlpools. The canoe slid from side to side. Dil pitched forward and rolled into Litnig’s legs.

The screech faded. The shaking stopped.

Dil heard a
snap,
then a
crack,
then another and another, until the sounds had merged into a thunderous, rolling orchestra. She scrambled upright. At first, she thought the canoe had struck a rock and was breaking apart.

But it wasn’t the boat that was breaking.

It was the mountains.

No,
she thought.
No, no, Yenor, please, no.

Huge chunks of the cliffs and glaciers to the north crumbled into the river and threw fountains of water the size of houses into the air. To the south, Dil saw more of the same. The air snapped and popped like corn above a fire. The river grew black and frothy. The canoe jumped back and forth like a toy.

Dil clung to the side of the boat and tried to lean with the flow. Next to her, Cole kept one hand on the canoe and the other on his brother’s chest.

He looked terrified.

The canoe skidded off a rock and careened to the left. Tsu’min screamed something into the wind, and then the boat hit another rock, then another. A boulder dropped into the water beside Dil, and the wave it created poured over the bow and into her lap. Another large rock barely missed them.

Dil caught a glimpse of a place ahead where the valley widened and the danger seemed less.

Please,
she thought. She slipped a hand over Cole’s thigh and squeezed.
Please.

She heard a tremendous roar to her left.

The side of a mountain let go and dropped and slid and avalanched into the river in front of the canoe. When the debris hit the water, it launched a cloud of brown-and-white spray several stories into the air. The muddy fountain crashed over Dil with a wet slap. She tried to inhale and got a nose full of water.

The canoe drove through the falling spray onto the new landmass, rolled, and threw her from its grasp.

She landed with a grunt on jagged brown stones and darted to her feet. The world continued to fall down. Icy water poured from the sky and pooled around her boots.

The canoe’s bow was jammed between two black boulders above her.

“Right it! Right it!” someone screamed.

Someone else screamed something in return. The water rose over Dil’s feet, then her ankles. Ryse and Quay and Leramis and Tsu’min scrambled toward the bow of the canoe. Litnig lay crumpled in the swelling river. Cole squatted over him and held his head out of the water.

Dil stood and did nothing. She could hear a dull, constant roar within the crackling of the landslides. She blew a drop of water from her nose and faced upriver.

She found the source of the roar.

Less than a mile away, a wall of water was cascading down the valley, crashing over anything and everything in its path. It was sixty feet high, at least.
Huge.
Unavoidable.
As if a whole lake had been dumped into the Lumos’s narrow channel.

She and the others would never get the canoe righted before the water hit, and even if they did, a flood that big would just swamp the boat again.

The others looked north, and Dil watched them come to the same conclusions that she had. The canoe was abandoned. Ryse’s lips moved silently. Leramis’s eyes filled with bright white light.

“No!” Cole shouted.

His hands grasped Dil’s waist and threw her up the slip the boat had run aground on. She took a few steps and looked back down.

Cole was standing over Litnig’s body, struggling to drag his brother upward by the arms. The hem of his cloak was floating in the rising water around his calves. She could see the veins bulging in his neck.

“Go!” he shouted at her. “Dammit,
go!
”

She looked at the oncoming wall of water, then at the slip. The jumble of rocks, big as it was, wasn’t big enough. The floodwater would wash over it like it would wash over everything else in the valley. To be safe, she and the others would need to get twenty or thirty feet above it somehow.

Dil’s brain slid back into motion. There was a ledge on the cliffs to her left, sixty feet or so up from the top of the slip. It was wide enough to hold her and others, if it didn’t collapse.

But they’d never reach it before the water got to them, even if they ran full speed and climbed as fast as they could. They’d never reach it—

Without me,
she thought, and she opened her eyes to the Second River.

The stream of yellow orbs moved calmly through the shadows of the valley, as if nothing was happening around it. Dil’s heartbeat slowed. She scanned the souls around her.

Salmon, mountain parrot, kestrel, silverfish, bottle-fly, smalldove.

Leapfrog.

She pulled the leapfrog inside and felt it fill her.

The rest of the world came into sharp focus. The others were running and shouting around her, trying to haul Litnig or sprinting for the top of the slip.

Standing became uncomfortable. Dil yanked her boots from her feet and dropped to all fours. She spread her legs and arms out wide.

“Onto my back!” she shouted. Her heart sped up again. The wide-eyed twitchiness of the frog pushed at the edges of her consciousness.

Relax,
she told herself.
You know what’s coming. Master it. Ride it. Be one with it.

“Get on my back!” she yelled, and the fear built inside her and her little heart beat faster and faster.

She scuttled forward until she was next to someone, and then she knocked against his thighs and he fell on top of her. His arms wrapped around her torso. She bunched her legs and leaped as she’d been born to leap, boulder to boulder, high to the top of the slip in two bounds, then toward the ledge above. The extra weight was little bother.

She landed hard on the side of the mountain, just below the ledge. The tiny ridges on the skin of her fingers and toes hooked easily onto the rock.

“Off,” she croaked.

Whoever was on her back slid tentatively onto the
wall.

And then Dil was off again, falling and pinwheeling back to the slip.

She landed lightly on all fours, found someone else, and repeated the process. Then she did it again.

Not quick enough,
she told herself.
Not quick enough.
The people on her back took ages to scramble onto the wall, and the water was still approaching.

Too close, too close.

Dil bounded back down. She saw one tall, skinny person left to carry. She scrambled to him, and he climbed onto her back, and then she turned and leaped for the wall.

Her fingers found the cold, sharp edges of the rock. The ridges on her skin caught and held. The person on her back crawled off.

Dil let herself relax. She let the leapfrog go.

She jammed her hands and feet into tiny crevices and hung from the wet rock like the others.

And she laughed. The wind whipped her hair out. Her arms and legs felt strong and sure.

She’d done it. She’d saved them. She felt like crowing, like shouting.
That
was what a Wilderleng was.
That
was what a Wilderleng could do. She flushed and beamed up at the others.