Soulwoven (8 page)

“What if they’re already destroyed?” he asked instead.

“Then at least we’ll know.”

Cole broke eye contact with his friend and studied a crack in the tiled floor. The road to Aleana ran through dangerous territory. The Sh’ma killed Eldanians on sight. “Until we’re dead,” he grumbled.

For a moment, he considered turning Quay down. It was possible. He’d done it once or twice before.

But he’d seen the hard-edged look on Quay’s face before as well, when someone dared to presume he was bluffing at King’s Conundrum. The prince would go alone, if Cole didn’t go with him. He would go, and with no one to help him he would fail, and Cole didn’t want to live with that. When he was sad, when he was angry, when he was hurt or he needed a place to run, Quay was always there for him.

So he ran a hand through his hair and sighed.
“All right.”

After all, he had always wanted to see West Eldan.
And Nutharion too.
He’d heard the women there were beautiful, and the weather was so nice they wore nothing but colorful, see-through silks.

And the dragon is real, you thrice-damned idiot—you’ve seen it in your dreams.

The serious expression on Quay’s face faltered. His hands, folded on the table, relaxed. He looked for a second like the boy whom Cole had befriended long ago.

“We’ll be fine, Cole,” he said. “I promise.”

Cole looked at the elaborately carved beams above his head, the paintings on the walls, the soft furniture and gilded mirrors, and then turned his eyes back to Quay.

“And if you’re wrong?
If we never see this place again?
What then?”

Quay leaned back, tented his hands under his chin, and with flint and steel in his eyes said simply, “I’m not.”

Cole stared at him. Quay stared back. And Cole, like always, cracked first.

“You have a cloak with a hood, right?” Cole asked, running his hands along the grooved wooden rim of the table. He didn’t need to see Quay nod. He already knew the answer.

“Get it,” he said. “And change out of that clown suit. It’ll stick out like a beggar’s palm where we’re going.”

EIGHT

Ryse shivered. Cold, viscous mud oozed over and under and around her feet and shins. Misty rain fell lightly on her skin. The sun was fading through a high layer of gray cloud, the air smelled of damp earth and sewage, and she was walking behind Litnig and Cole into a place she’d sworn she would never return to.

The slums.

They stretched flooded and bloated and dilapidated before her, a mile or more of ramshackle hovels dotted with canvas tarps, tents, bonfires, and garbage. A hundred shantytowns, each with its own name: Bottomdwell, Riverfuck, Pitbin, Overswell, Undercarry, and more she didn’t care to remember. Thick, foul-smelling smoke hung above the place, and the dirty and downcast of Eldan City moved through it like ghosts in the rain. Why in the world Cole had sent Quay Eldani there ahead of them, she couldn’t fathom.

But he seemed to know what he was doing. At the front of their group of three, Litnig’s little brother picked his way confidently through the muck in a heavy brown cloak.
He
had never abandoned the slums.
He
was still fascinated with them, and it made her sick.

The slums were a place of death and filth and misery. Not a place for bored merchants’ children to play in. Only the Temple had been willing to take her out. Only the Temple had saved her.

And she was leaving it to go straight back in.

Her stomach churned.
There’s no turning back,
she reminded herself, but the thought didn’t help.

She watched the long club hanging from Litnig’s belt sway back and forth ahead of her in the rain. He had kept watch for hours while she’d slept in a little nook in the rocks near the hooked summit of Sentinel Hill. When she’d awoken in the early afternoon, he’d been sitting next to her, staring into the rain, and he had smiled and talked her into coming over for dinner. No one had been home, but after they’d eaten a little bread and cold meat with mustard, his brother had shown up with a dark look in his eye, told them he was going to leave the city, and asked them to come along.

There were no coincidences. Yenor steered every twist and turn of the world with the beating of Hir heart.

Still, the decision to follow Cole into the slums had been a hard one to make.

Ryse slipped in the mud and nearly fell, looked back up to find the black hang of Sentinel Hill silhouetted in dying light to her right, and shuddered. The heart dragons had been broken. She’d seen Sherduan in her mind. Yenor had given her her power, and it was to Yenor that she owed her debts. On all that she was clear.

But by Hir eye, the slums—

Cole turned left along a broken footpath and walked between clusters of hungry-eyed, tiny hovels. Ryse had grown up in shacks like that, moving from one “family” of orphans to the next, never getting attached, never letting anyone get close enough to hurt her.

She pinched the cloth of her robe, hidden beneath a plain gray cloak, between her fingers. It was all that held her apart from the filth. From becoming what girls without families, without friends, without money, inevitably became in the slums, no matter how smart, no matter how strong, no matter how clever. She held tight to the hems and told herself that she was above that, forever, that the slums couldn’t hurt her anymore, and she breathed.

Cole slipped along a line of huts toward a large, dirty tent with a massive red fist painted on the top of it, and Ryse finally understood why he’d chosen this destination. The smoke-belching tent was a royalist tavern in the high-lying shantytown of Kings’ Run, where the slum dwellers believed that the monarchy was all that held back a cresting wave of darkness threatening to overwhelm the world.

Cole had filled her and Litnig in on the things Quay had told him. From the sound of it, if the prince was recognized, Kings’ Run was one of only a few places in the city he might be safe.

The Red Fist was practically silent. The city had been muted all day, but Ryse had figured the slum dwellers would come out to drink, especially with the floods on. They only stayed in when they were scared, and slumfolk didn’t scare easily. It would take something big to keep them from the drink on a rainy spring night. Something like visions of a black dragon that mirrored the Kings’ Run stories of dark apocalypse.

Cole didn’t lead them into the Fist. He turned left just before it and climbed over a pile of collapsed stone and lumber into an alley surrounded by empty-looking hovels. Partway down it, he stopped in front of a three-walled, sagging hut of split timber and old thatch. After glancing up and down the alley, he pulled the moth-eaten curtain that covered it aside and gestured inward.

Within the hut, the air smelled of stale piss and wet straw. A small fire burned red and smoky near the back wall, next to a pile of peat and sticks. Makeshift, splintered benches lined the walls. Ryse stepped inside after Litnig. Cole followed.

A man hidden in shadows sat on the bench at the far wall, warming his hands. Wordlessly, he took a slab of peat from the pile and threw it on the fire. He was young, between Litnig and Cole in height, dark skinned and athletic looking. A gray cloak draped from his shoulders over drab clothing that fit him only loosely. Two swords hung comfortably from his belt. He looked like he belonged there.
Just a vagabond taking refuge for the night in a part of the city that asked few questions.

But Ryse had seen Quay Eldani’s face when her cohort at the Academy had ascended, and she hadn’t forgotten it. As she entered the hovel, he watched the whole way. Stared at her as if he was reading everything she was and everything she ever would be. By the time she reached him, she was already starting to kneel.

“This is Ryse Lethien—” Cole began, but the prince cut him off.

“Don’t,” he said, looking at her. “Remember who I am, but do nothing that might show another.” She stood up, and he leaned forward, his voice hard and serious. “Why are you here?”

She fumbled for words. The prince didn’t shift a muscle, simply kept his eyes pressing down on her like a stone weight.

“The heart dragons have been broken,” she said. Not a flicker of emotion passed over the prince’s face.

“Do the Twelve know where you are?”

She shook her head. Somehow, he’d seen her robe. She’d thought she’d hidden it well, but—

“You’re prepared to sever ties with the Temple?”

A hundred dead memories swept over her. “I already have,” she mumbled.

Quay Eldani took a deep breath, let it out, and then nodded. He pulled a map case from a large leather backpack that sat at his feet and slid a small scroll from it. Ryse was ignored. Not accepted.
Tolerated.

But she had questions.

“My pr—” she began, and then she caught herself. “You believe in the dragon?”

The question had been vexing her all afternoon. On her way back to the city, she’d heard a priest on a corner explaining to an anxious crowd that the story of Sherduan was nothing more than a legend. She’d heard another doing the same near the Jin household.

Quay’s eyes landed back on her, brown and cold and bracing. “Three thousand years ago, the heart dragons were broken. On separate occasions, a black beast was seen in the skies all across the continent. The land of Mennennar sank beneath the Gulf of Teeth. An army of barbarians descended from the north and nearly broke the power of the rest of the world. That’s the history. The rest I am less sure about.”

Ryse’s eyes met Cole’s and Litnig’s in the firelit shadows.
The rest.
The white dragon Arenthor.
The Duennin.
The black wings of a monster that had once been a man.

It was the soulweavers who stood strongest against them,
she remembered.
The children of Mennaia.
Men and women and Aleani and Sh’ma, all together.

Her stomach twisted, and she felt small and insignificant and alone.

“We will move as quickly as possible.” The prince traced his finger across the black, iron-inked lines of a handsome sheepskin map as he spoke.
“North out of Eldan City, then west, skirting the borders of Nutharion through the Broken Lands until we reach Aleana and eventually Du Fenlan itself.
It will take us a month, if we’re lucky.” He rolled the map back up and inserted it into its case.
“Longer if we’re not.”

A voice through the wall to Ryse’s left scoffed, “Two if you’re lucky, and never if you’re not.”

She froze. Cole paled. Quay glared at the younger Jin brother in a way that made Ryse wince.

Footsteps echoed beyond the thin hovel walls, and Ryse could think of nothing to do but watch as a stout Aleani ducked under the curtain into their firelight and wiped his hands on his trousers. He was tall for his kind, the top of his head about even with Cole’s sternum, his skin dark and leathery. He wore thick, heavy clothes under a loose-fitting traveler’s robe, and hanging from his waist she thought she spotted the flash of steel. His dark-brown hair was matted into thick, flowing dreadlocks and pulled through a loop into a ponytail.

She exhaled. He wasn’t the Aleani she’d fought the night before, nor, judging by Litnig’s muted reaction, the one Litnig had told her about seeing in the streets. He was too tall, and his teeth were white and straight. But still—

The prince asked his name.

“Len Heramsun,” she heard him say, and the rest of the conversation blurred past as she watched him. He moved easily, even surrounded by four humans he had interrupted in the slums of a city that for the most part feared and disliked his kind. He had a heavy build—thick cords of muscles in his arms, wide legs underneath his robe.
Flat, broad feet.

The Aleani’s eyes were a deep brown similar to the prince’s and very sharp.
Alive, intelligent.
He spoke casually of the wide sky and desert hazards of the Broken Lands, the difficulty of the hills beyond, and the pathless reaches of Aleana that lay between those hills and Du Fenlan. He suggested that they travel west through Nutharion, then north through Aleana. But he didn’t smile, and he didn’t laugh, and he was much too interested in the four of them.

What in the world is he doing here?
She wanted to ask, but it was clear to her that Quay was to do the talking.

There was a lull in the conversation, and the Aleani’s eyes met hers. Her mouth went dry. He knew what she’d been thinking. Somehow, he knew.

He turned his eyes back to Quay and said quietly, “Hunting the necromancer named D’Orin Threi.”

Ryse’s hands trembled. She was afraid that if she looked at the River, she might find souls eddying around the Aleani. Afraid he might be a necromancer, or worse. There were more than two soulweaving orders in the world. None of them, she realized, friends, now that she’d left the Temple.

But ignorance wouldn’t make her any safer.

As Quay talked, she opened her eyes to the River and found its glowing spheres moving placidly past the Aleani, who glanced at her and then shucked under the curtain and into the rain beyond.

“Ryse,” Litnig said.

His eyes were on hers. So were Quay’s. She let the River fade and focused on the prince’s cold, harsh face.

“I asked you whether he’s a soulweaver,” Quay said.

She blinked.

“Is he?”

“No,” she said slowly. It was a strange question for him to ask, especially since the Aleani had left.

“Then we’ll take him,” Quay said.

And she understood in a flash what Quay and the Aleani had been talking about, and she and Litnig and Cole were all speaking at once.

“My prince—”

“Quay—”

“But he—”

Quay stood to his full height, and she snapped her mouth shut. Even short as he was, the prince managed to look down on her, on all of them. His gaze was withering and condescending, and she was suddenly very aware of just whom she was speaking to. She wanted to kneel again, to apologize, but he had forbidden it. The most she could do was incline her head and listen as he spoke just loudly enough to be heard over the rain.