Soulwoven

Chapter Fifty-Six

~56~

Keep peace…

The Lumos shallowed rapidly beneath the canoe carrying Ryse Lethien. Sheer, black, glacier-capped mountain walls hung above her head. Spine-like ridges raced between the mountaintops above them. The scent of smoke streamed through the air on a cold, gray wind. It smelled of something dense and dark and rocklike, something long dead being pressed into use against its will. The stench scraped against the back of Ryse’s throat and left it feeling raw and poisoned.

As the canoe rounded a bend in the river, Ryse spotted a thin boat drawn up on a pebble beach ahead. Its sail flapped emptily in the wind. A set of tracks led from it toward a cliff with a thin, gray path scratched up its face.

She’d wondered how the Duennin had escaped Soulth’il.

Behind Ryse, Tsu’min stood at the canoe’s tiller and guided their boat through a field of narrow, tooth-like boulders that stood between it and the shore. The Sh’ma had been weaving for four days to keep the wind in the boat’s sail, and he didn’t even look tired.

He glanced at Ryse as the canoe ran onto the pebbles.

I could teach you, his eyes seemed to say, but you are not worth the time.

Ryse had never understood why her people constantly warred with the Sh’ma, but she thought she might be learning. There was something incompatible about the way the two cultures saw the world. She felt at times as though the Sh’ma didn’t even recognize humans as people—as if to them, nothing any Eldanian did would ever matter.

Ryse was a calm person. She could look at the Sh’ma and judge them for that without anger.

Most of her countrymen were not of the same outlook.

She dropped from the canoe onto a bed of loose pebbles and was startled to see her breath misting in the air. Her hands were cold and stiff. Her clothes were damp. She knew her mind was foggy—she’d slept little since Soulth’il—but still, she should have noticed something so simple, and so important.

A hand squeezed her shoulder, and a black-robed man moved past her toward the cliff face.

Ryse took a deep breath.

She had not forgiven Leramis.

There were other things to worry about. Somewhere above her, the end of the world was about to be brought into existence. The monsters responsible had already shown her that neither she nor anyone with her could stop them. Litnig was a Duennin. Len had been acting strangely. Quay had been treating her and Leramis with suspicion.

She wanted to stay focused on that. She wanted to think about how in the world she was going to counter the kind of soulweaving she had seen in Eldan City, and Du Fenlan, and Soulth’il.

But she couldn’t.

All she could think was that things were wrong between her and those closest to her, and that she didn’t have time to fix them.

As the sky had darkened the night before, Ryse had done what she’d always done in times of need: she had prayed.

And nothing had happened.

No wisdom, no warmth, and no sense of belonging or love had filled her. She had reached for Yenor and found nothing, and that scared her even more than the towering cliffs above, or the smell of death on the wind, or the steepness of the path ahead of her.

Keep peace with those around you, she remembered learning long ago, and Yenor will keep peace with you.

Ryse started up the cliff-face path in silence. Within minutes, she had borrowed one of Cole’s daggers to cut her robe off below the knee.

The climbing was difficult enough with her legs unhindered.

#

Close to an hour later, Ryse pulled herself up a cleft of chunky, black rock into the sky atop the cliff. The riverside and the boats sat like tiny wooden models hundreds of feet below her. Icy teeth of wind tore at her face, her hair, and her clothes. The smell of smoke continued to clog her nostrils.

Ryse leaned into the gusts. Her thighs burned. Her breath was ragged.

The others were huddling behind an irregular, round boulder on a sloping field of sand and pebbles ahead of her. Beyond them, the cliff top slipped downward for a few hundred feet and then dropped away into a deep gorge. Tall, crumbling peaks jabbed into the sky to Ryse’s right and left. Behind one of them, a mile or so to the north, the valley she had climbed out of turned and met the gorge beneath the gray, jagged shelves of a glacier. The white cap of the ice was pocked with blue lakes.

The wind shrieked. Someone called Ryse’s name.

Ryse tightened the hood of her cloak around her face and missed the warmth of her robe on her lower legs. She could see a few hundred crude structures clinging to the striated face of a mountain across the gorge. The buildings seemed organized around a steep, central boulevard. In places, they canted dangerously over the void. Above them, a yawning, black cavern spewed a stream of putrid smoke into the air.

Sherdu’il, Ryse thought. The City of the Dragon.

A flimsy rope bridge stretched across the gorge between the city and the cliff top she stood upon.

Ryse heard hard breathing behind her.

Quay, the last to finish the climb.

“Let’s go,” the prince said. His voice was hoarse.

Ryse followed him to the boulder and tried to ignore the cold that was creeping up her limbs.

Something felt wrong.

She opened her eyes to the River, and the hair on the back of her neck stood up.

The flow of souls into Sherdu’il was astonishing. The tiny orbs poured over the mountains. They swept in from the sky. They ran through the valleys and climbed up their walls.

And the cavern at the city’s crown sucked them down like a drunken man slurping his beer.

The soulflow pressed against Ryse and begged to be used. Even the weakest soulweaver would be powerful in conditions like that. For someone like Tsu’min, or the Duennin—

“You see it?” Leramis whispered. He was facing the city. His breath misted in front of him. “It’s like another set of heart dragons, bigger than the rest. A more powerful draw.”

“There are no more heart dragons,” said Tsu’min.

The Sh’ma stood a few feet from the boulder. His arms were crossed tightly over his chest. The hood on his cloak was thrown back. His eyes looked lost in their own depths, buried somewhere a thousand miles or years from where and when the rest of his body was.

“It is a wall that draws the souls,” Tsu’min said. “A wall like black glass, twenty meters wide and ten high. It sits at the back of an underground chamber.”

Ryse watched the wind tug at Tsu’min’s cloak. Next to her, Cole and Dil shivered. Litnig looked as gray as a ghost. Leramis crossed his arms over his chest.

Keep peace… Ryse thought.

“Behind it,” said the Sh’ma, “the worst of Yenor sits outside of this world, waiting for someone to call upon it.”

Tsu’min clutched a round, green bead that hung from his wrist.

“Sh’nag i’neth,” he whispered. As they moved forward, he did not speak again.

Ryse Lethien walked behind him into the shadows of the City of the Dragon.

Keep peace…

She prayed as she walked.

But nothing happened.

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