Soul Weaver: A Fantasy Novel

by Trip Ellington

  Sorrel, that was the family name. But wait a minute. Rez had mentioned something about the Sorrels being extinct. It had been an offhand sort of remark, and neither Rez nor Maul had elaborated on it. Shel thought it was probably significant. Both men must have known why, but they hadn’t thought to let her in on the information.

  It might be significant, Shel told herself, but it certainly wasn’t relevant now. Knowing what happened to the Sorrel family and why wouldn’t get her any closer to the other side of that crawlspace. But she had learned other things at the abandoned fortress hideout of Rez’s gang.

  “Okay,” she said aloud, without opening her eyes. The sound of her own voice echoing in the tiny cell was oddly comforting. Shel found herself smiling. She was a far cry from helpless.

  Shel turned her focus inward. She was aware of the simmering potential within herself. She coaxed the energy of her soul, drawing it out in a thin stream of power. Concentrating, she strained to widen the flow. In her mind’s eye, it was a radiant ball of pure white light afloat in an endless darkness; where she tapped into an imagined star, a crookedly meandering pseudopod of luminescence extended through the darkness. Shel imagined herself at the other end of that tendril, catching it in her hands to wind it in.

  When she opened her eyes, she saw the air around her clasped hands swimming with thick distortion like heat haze over a baking hot stretch of road. She slowly pulled her hands apart, stretching the distortion that only she – or another weaver – could see. The otherwise invisible field of esoteric power expanded, engulfing Shel and stretching out against the confines of her stony cage.

  Wisps of soulstuff probed the cracked and pitted walls, searching for weaknesses. Closing her eyes again, Shel sent her mind out through this misty extension of her will. Her consciousness floated along invisible channels carved through the air and slipped along the jagged stone. The porous rock couldn’t contain her and she found herself slipping through miniscule crevices and runnels.

  One of these twisted and turned back on itself several times on its path through the cave wall, until eventually opening out into the next cell. In her mind, Shel could see every detail of that unoccupied enclosure – including the unbarred crawlspace.

  Shel’s eyes snapped open, her head snapping around to look at the wall standing between her and potential freedom. She just had to get through that wall; the cell behind it was open. The young woman licked her lips nervously, and gathered back her ethereal strength.

  “I wouldn’t if I was you.”

  Startled, Shel spun around and dropped to her hands and knees to peer through the blocked crawlspace of her own cell. An incredibly ugly face filled the opening at the other end, lit from above by flickering torchlight. There was a bulbous nose complete with a hairy, grayish wart to one side of the tip; close-spaced eyes, one blue and the other dark brown, and pockmarked skin filled out the unpleasant face. Cruel, thin lips pulled back in a sneer that exposed the cracked and stained remains of broken teeth.

  “What?” Shel recovered quickly. For a moment, she had thought Rez had shown up again, just like the last time. It would have been a miracle. The ugly man was clearly one of her jailers. Shel shook her head and feigned confused innocence. “Wouldn’t what?”

  “One o’them walls gets knocked out, brings the whole thing down on top of us,” said the ugly man outside her cell. “Arch'n Thorne’d have me killed for losing his valuable prisoner,‘cept I’d be dead in the cave-in already. So’d you be, little girl.”

  “I am not a little girl,” said Shel, with none of the fierce – but ultimately insecure – venom she would have displayed a few days earlier.

  “Suit y’self,” said the ugly jailer. “Littler ones wriggle through the crawly-way better, though. There’s that.”

  The face moved away, out of Shel’s sight. A moment later she heard a grinding sound of rusty metal, and then the heavy protest of creaking hinges. The barred hatch swung away from the other end of the crawlspace, much to her surprise.

  “C'mon out, then, big girl,” came the jailer’s voice from somewhere beyond the crawl-way.

  Shel frowned briefly, but ducked her shoulders and slid into the tight crawlspace. She did indeed have to wiggle, moving very slowly with her arms tucked under her chest and her knees pressed together by the close, irregular walls of the tunnel.

  Outside, she rose up dusting herself off and took in the thoroughly ugly man holding a torch and waiting for her in the much larger, main chamber of the dungeon cavern. Beyond him, a pool of light spilled down stairs leading up. The ugly jailer, who was no taller than Shel’s elbows and misshapen in the shoulders and legs to boot, motioned in that direction with his too large head.

  “C'mon, then. Off we go.”

  “Where are you taking me?” asked Shel, not sure she wanted to know the answer. Her jailer made no reply. Instead, he turned and shuffled off toward the stairs. Shel followed him. She didn’t have much choice.

  The stairs were wooden planks set in place on top of a natural rise in the cave floor, mortared in place to give sure footing over the treacherous incline. At the top, the floor became level once again – if a bit uneven – and shortly led to an opening.

  The ugly jailer stored his torch in an iron bracket pounded into the wall just inside, and led Shel out into bright sunlight. She saw the entrance to the dungeon was a natural fissure in a one side of a tall, broad rock jutting out of the dirt at the edge of a dense forest.

  “This way, this way.” The misshapen little man turned to the right and went around the side of the big, flat boulder. He led the way across a narrow yard. To either side in the near distance, Shel could see row upon row of evenly spaced fruit trees. Directly ahead was the manor house, a towering affair of brick, stone and stone with stained glass windows on the upper floors.

  Pennants flapped from the turrets and spires of the manor, and banners hung over the battlements. They all bore the sigil of Archon Murdrek Thorne. When Shel and her guide reached the rear entrance, however, she saw a different coat of arms carved in the masonry above the door. That must be the sign of Sorrel, she thought, wondering again what had happened to the family that built this estate.

  Shel followed the ugly hunchback through the entrance, which let into the kitchens. Her jailer-turned-guide hurried past busy kitchen workers and undercooks at their cutting boards and wash-basins and led Shel through the enticing smells and delicious aromas hanging in the air around the brick ovens, until at last they emerged through a service door into the main hall. They crossed the cozy hall – far smaller than the one at the gang’s hideout – and passed through a double-wide, arched doorway into a foyer.

  From there, the jailer took her down a narrow and intermittently torchlit corridor until they reached an iron-reinforced door of sturdy oak near the back of the house. With an evil, crooked leer at Shel, the hunchback rapped once on the door before shoving it open. Turning back to the frightened but determined young woman, he extended an arm to indicate the doorway and sketched a mocking bow.

  Swallowing her hesitation, Shel stepped forward. She held her head high as she passed the still-leering hunchback and entered an oblong room. The tapestries and carpets that masked the stone construction elsewhere in the house were conspicuously absent. Bare stonework was lit by the harsh, naked flame of half a dozen oil lamps.

  Near the center of the chamber rested a heavy desk. Behind this slab of wood sat Murdrek Thorne. The archon had his elbows braced on the desk top, forearms held vertically with his hands held palms together and his fingers steepled and resting lightly against his chin. He studied Shel with those dark eyes, his expression giving nothing away.

  The only other furnishings in the room were two wooden contraptions in the basic form of tables. On one, the rectangular shelf that would have formed the table top turned on a pivot set atop the table base. The shelf was currently tilted back with one end a few inches from the floor and the other end about five feet higher. Leather straps dangled from
near the edges and in the exact center. Shel would have known what those were for even were it not for the other torture-rack.

  Rez was strapped down tight on that one.

  The leader of the gang was unconscious, slumped limply in the tight leather straps that held him by wrists, ankles, waist and throat. A length of wood, wrapped in scarred leather, was threaded between his teeth and held in place by a taut strap wound around his head. A thin dribble of spit hung pendulously from one corner of his mouth.

  Bruising shone sickly yellow and blotchy, purplish gray on Rez’s bare chest and legs. Dried blood was caked here and there on his skin where he’d been cut. Angry red patches – some of which oozed with a thick, white liquid – looked like burns. It was quite clear that Rez had been most thoroughly tortured. Shel swallowed a lump in her throat, trying not to show the feelings of dread that welled up in her guts at the sight of her unconscious friend. At least he was breathing, even if it was shallow and audibly ragged.

  Tearing her eyes from her battered comrade, Shel returned her attention to the architect of their mutual misfortune. Thorne stared back at her for a long, tensely silent moment before sitting back, folding his hands in his lap, and favoring Shel with a warm and cultured smile.

  “My dear,” the archon greeted her. His voice was a rich and mellow sound, coldly melodious. “I have been so looking forward to this conversation.”

  Shel flashed the dark-eyed nobleman a defiant grin. “So have I,” she said, and lashed out with the pent up soul energy she’d been holding onto ever since crawling out of her cell. Her invisible attack whipped violently across the room, but impacted against an invisible shield as if the air turned solid. In the same instant, she felt herself caught up in a tight, invisible grip. She stared at Thorne, confused. The archon had made no move, and no tell-tale haze around him suggested he had woven.

  Snide laughter behind her revealed Shel’s mistake. The ugly jailor! When she had probed the edges of her cell, he had known about it. She cursed inwardly at her own oblivious stupidity. Of course the hunchback was a weaver, and now her one chance to strike at Thorne – her only hope of getting out Rez and getting out of here – had been snatched away.

  Chapter 12 - The Rebellion

  “Come now, my dear,” said Thorne, rising from his straight-backed and ornately decorated chair. Circling around the desk, he moved to within a pace of Shel where she stood, rigidly held by the hunchback weaver. “I want us to be friends.”

  “I doubt that,” Shel said through clenched teeth. She struggled against her bonds, but to no avail. She glared at the archon, but her venom was met with indifference.

  “I assure you, it’s the truth,” said Thorne, turning away and speaking in a conversational tone. He gazed across the room at the unconscious Rez. “Our mutual acquaintance Rezdurth here isn’t a friend.” He turned back to Shel then, eyebrows drawn down ominously. “To either of us.”

  Shel tried to shake her head, but couldn’t move even that little bit. She sneered at Thorne instead. “I'm sixteen, not stupid,” she told him. “You don’t really think I’d fall for that, do you?”

  Thorne’s smile appeared sad. But all it took was one look at the malevolent, black pits of his eyes for Shel to be certain he was entirely false.

  “My dear,” the archon said, moving across the room to stand in front of Rez strapped to the table. He lifted his arm in its voluminous silk sleeve to indicate his tortured prisoner with the ring-laden fingers of one hand. “This man, he isn’t the roguish hero you think he is.”

  “He’s a thief,” said Shel, and she would have shrugged if she was able. “What of it? I've been a thief all my life.”

  “Oh, I doubt that.” Thorne looked back at her over one shoulder, his smile taking on a cruelly mischievous aspect. “I'm sure you were a grubby little child at one point, like most of your kind. Lots of gutter urchins learn to steal, it’s their lot in life. It’s how they are bred. The listless poor, spawning endless hungry mouths that refuse to take up honest trade. Most of them turn to thievery. Not that many of them learn to weave. None, really. You see, I find that interesting.”

  Thorne turned fully around, fixing Shel in a steely gaze that sent a shiver up and down her spine. “I find you interesting, Gutterweave.” he added.

  Shel bristled at his words, but deep within her they struck a chord of self-doubt she had never before acknowledged. It had always lain there waiting, however. She had always told herself thieving was hard work; she knew that was true. But she certainly couldn’t argue that it was honest work. Was she really any better than her father had been?

  Her eyes slid aside, finding Rez across the room. Was he any better?

  When she looked back at Archon Thorne, her doubts melted back into the darkness of her soul. He was an obviously cruel man, an undeniably malevolent force, and she refused to be defined by the judgment of one such as he.

  “Nothing interesting here, friend,” she said, summoning all her courage and forcing herself to match the nobleman’s casual tones. She knew she had to avoid telling him anything. She didn’t know how many of the gang had escaped, or how many others waited back at the hideout. She wouldn’t give them up, she vowed. Besides, whatever Thorne thought she knew and could tell him…she didn’t. “I'm just a thief who knows enough to go after the biggest prize around. End of story.”

  Thorne smiled humorlessly. “Friends don’t lie to one another, Shel. That is one of the reasons Rezdurth isn’t my friend.” A thoughtful look came over the archon’s face. “I’d wager it’s one of the reasons he’s no friend of yours, as well.”

  As if in response to his name, Rez moaned weakly and shifted in his bonds. He didn’t wake or open his eyes, and the brief movement subsided quickly. Thorne ignored him, never taking his eyes from Shel.

  He was trying to confuse her, to make her doubt her friends. He wanted to sow seeds of distrust, thinking she would turn on Rez and the rest. Well, he didn’t know Shel very well…

  Then again, whispered a treacherous voice in the back of her mind, Rez is extremely secretive. Dismayed by the idea, Shel pushed the thought away. It was true the leader hadn’t told her everything. Why should he have? She was new, untested. She knew he would tell her everything she needed to know eventually.

  “A thief who goes after the biggest prize around,” mused Thorne. If he was aware of Shel’s momentary struggle with doubt, he gave no sign of it. He chuckled, tapping a finger against his chin. “You think Rez and his gang are in it for the gold? You think they sell their ill-gotten bounty on some kind of black market for souls?”

  At that, Thorne threw back his head and laughed with what seemed like genuine mirth and amusement. It was the first spark of truth he had allowed her to see, and Shel found the rich vibrance of his laughter deeply unsettling coming from the otherwise enigmatic and sinister nobleman.

  The laugher broke off abruptly, and Thorne snapped his eyes back on Shel. They shone with relish as he dropped his bombshell. “They keep them, girl. Think. How many Soulweavers in this merry band of rogues? Hm? How many, besides Rez and yourself? And where do they get their power?”

  Again, Shel would have shrugged. She wasn’t sure what Thorne was getting at, but she had a sinking feeling she wouldn’t like it when he finally got to the point.

  “So what?” she asked, but most of the fire had gone out of her defiant show.

  “So what?” echoed Thorne, chuckling again. “It’s not about gold. It’s not about living free or any of the other nonsense he might have told you. It’s about power. It’s about gathering that power and hoarding it up. And, ultimately, it’s about seizing ever more of that power until his power is the greatest. Rez wants nothing less than to overthrow the empire, girl. He would tear down the emperor and seat himself on the throne!”

  Thorne’s voice rose excitably, building to a crescendo at the end. He gestured violently to emphasize his point. In response to the thundering announcement, Rez moaned and shifted again. He still sound
ed weak, but Shel thought she saw his eyelids flutter.

  She was only distantly aware of it, though. What Thorne said made sense. That didn’t mean she was convinced. Rez had told her the gang lifted souls and sold them. Souls were the most expensive items in the world. Selling them, using the gold to buy food and clothes for the gang and whatever else, that made just as much sense. But it didn’t make more sense, she was surprised to note. Rez had referred to his band of thieves as the cold wind.

  The cold wind, a thing virtually unknown in the Great and Glorious Golden Empire of the Long Summer. Cold winds were a thing of winter. Had Rez really been saying that his gang opposed the empire itself? Was he the leader of some kind of rebellion? Why would anyone want to bring an end to the Long Summer?

  And what else could Rez have meant? They planned on stealing the souls Thorne was taking as tribute to the emperor. Depriving the emperor of new souls would weaken his power, threatening his mastery of the elements and his ability to repel invasions by hostile armies.

  The Golden Empire was warmth and bounteous, never-ending harvests; prosperity for all who were willing to stand up and take their part of it; safety from the evil, half-human tribes that lurked on the mainland worshipping their dark, wintry gods. Why would anyone oppose the Golden Empire?

  Shel took a good, long look at Archon Murdrek Thorne – arguably the second most powerful man in the empire, the highest authority beneath the emperor himself – and thought she could probably come up with at least one good reason.

  “If Rez wants to tear down the empire,” she said, “then I'm sure he’s got his reasons for that.”