“One hundred and thirty-one,” answered Rez, his voice a little stiff. He didn’t like this, didn’t know where it was going, and liked that even less. “Why?”
“You do know the First Archons – and poor Daerydd, here – were all half-blood Shadowfolk, don’t you?”
“I've heard that,” Rez admitted. “Unlike most noble sons, I even half believed it. That’s one of the reasons I sought out Aemond, and later Sanook. Shel, our power comes from that forgotten heritage, from the ancestors the emperor betrayed. That’s why I abandoned my title.”
“Allowing it to pass down to your brother Murdrek,” she reminded him. “He was…how old?”
“Fifteen years my junior,” answered Rez, still puzzling over what Shel was getting at with these questions. There was something very different about her, and it was more than the vast increase in her power.
“So young,” she said in a whisper. Pursing her lips in thought, she tapped one finger against her chin. “I thought you all might have been older, like him.” Without looking behind her, she gestured to the Soulless former emperor. Then she took another step closer to Rez.
“How many generations, Rez? Do you know? How diluted is your Shadow blood now? You realize that you and I are the only ones left, don’t you? All that power, every single Shadow soul that ever was, it’s all here in this room. You and me. All that’s left. You see? Only one task remains.”
Chapter 33 - Summer’s End
Rez stepped back from Shel, and she advanced.
“No,” he whispered. “Oh no, Shel.”
“That isn’t my name,” she told him, relishing the words. She extended threads of soul and began weaving them into a pattern as she took another step closer. Rez retreated again.
Shel threw out her weaves abruptly, a dozen of them flying out to the edges of the room. Rez saw at once what she was about, and matched her weave for weave. It was a strain, pulling together so many spells at the same time, and he was rusty. But he managed to hook himself into twelve of the immobilized Tophylax.
Shel had succeeded as well, and if it was any strain for her that didn’t show in her smooth, confident features.
The Tophylax Emperia moved jerkily, coming back to life. Half were under Shel’s control, while Rez directed the others. The massive, Soulless bodyguards lumbered toward one another and began to grapple. Shel laughed as if she were having a marvelous time.
“Shel, stop this,” he begged her.
“I don’t think so.” The ornaments clinked together in her swaying hair when Shel shook her head. “All I have to do is kill you, Rez, and then all of it’s mine. All the magic in the world. I'll be the last one. The only one. You see that’s how it has to be, right?”
She hurled a spear of energy at him. Rez deflected it, with some difficulty. He staggered back under the force, but his defenses held. The floor shook beneath their feet as the massive but evenly matched Tophylax slammed into each other all around the dueling weavers in the center of the room. High overhead, the sky turned dark above the shattered dome. The first flashes of lightning flickered amongst dark clouds, and thunder rolled ominously.
“Where did this darkness come from?” Rez had to shout to be heard over the clattering, smashing sounds of battle that surrounded them. “You were good! You were innocent! What’s happened to you, Shel?”
“Innocent?” Shel’s laughter was harsh, biting, and without amusement. “What has this world ever done for the innocent? What does this world give anyone that they don’t seize for themselves? Hah! Innocent!”
“That’s his way, Shel!” Rez pointed toward the cowering Daerydd. Shel immediately attacked, half a dozen fireballs forming right in front of him and rushing in. Rez leaped backward, crossing his arms over his chest and freezing the air into a solid wall. The flames struck the frozen air, bursting and gusting around the edges of the melting ice. Rez somersaulted away and threw a spear of lightning back at her.
“I don’t want to fight you!” he called out as he tumbled.
“That’s why I'm going to win, Rez.”
Fallen stones from the broken dome trembled, vibrating against the flagstones. They lifted ponderously off the floor and flung themselves at Rez. He jumped and ducked and sent a flurry of icy daggers at Shel in answer.
She was so powerful already. Her battle with the emperor hadn’t exhausted her in the least. She seemed filled with power beyond imagining. Yet she hungered for more. Shel wanted it all. The emperor had wanted it all. Rez thought furiously as he raced over the floor in a broken pattern to avoid the constant bombardment Shel sent his way.
He was distracted. When Shel lifted up the flagstone right in front of him, Rez tripped up and went sprawling. He pulled his weavings in at once, the various patterns clustering around him in a solid wall. The Tophylax he controlled went limp, falling immediately to their vicious counterparts.
Invisible hands seized him and tore him up off the floor. His weaves were picked apart one by one, the threads dissolving as Shel squeezed him in her grasp. She stepped up to him, heels clicking on the floor, hands folded behind her back.
“That’s that,” she said. “I thought you might last a little longer, but that’s all right. There’s nothing to be ashamed of Rez.”
“Ashamed?” Rez spat on the floor at her feet. “I turned my back on the emperor and his darkness. I fought for what I believed, and for freedom. I have nothing to be ashamed of. What are you fighting for?”
“Justice,” whispered Shel, a faintly puzzled look flickering across her eyes. “I fought for justice.”
“Justice? Justice for who?”
“Justice for you, Rez.” Shel looked away for a moment. When she turned back to him, her eyes had gotten very wide. They glistened wetly in the half light of the ruined sanctuary.
“This is how that quest ends? With you ripping the soul from my body?”
“It can only end this way, Rez. Don’t you see? Only one of us can hold on to this power. If I let you live, sooner or later you'll try to kill me.”
“How can you be so sure?” Rez strained against her weaves, but the pattern held and he couldn’t break free. He thought he was getting through to her. “Shel, listen to me. Maybe you're right.”
That got her attention. Shel narrowed her eyes and leaned forward. One hand came around and took him by the throat, turning his head slightly as she leaned even closer and stared into his eyes.
“You're right, Shel. All this power…between just the two of us…one of us is bound to kill the other eventually…to have it all.”
She sneered at him. “I'm glad you understand.”
“But there’s another way.”
She dropped her hand from his throat and stepped back as if he’d scalded her with hot water. She shook her head violently. Yet still she asked, “What other way?”
“Let it go,” he pleaded with her.
“What do you mean?”
“Think back, Shel. Before you knew what you were, what you could do. Before you’d ever tasted this power. Do you remember?”
“I remember that everyone called me‘girl’and it made me angry,” she said. Her expression hardened. “They were right, though. I was a child.”
“Maybe so, Shel, but I want you to remember something else. Do you remember how you looked at me, the first time we met? In the dungeons, right here in Solstice, do you remember? When you realized I was a Soulweaver.”
The glow from Rez’s eyes grew in intensity until it was nearly blinding in the otherwise dark pit of the dungeon. The iron bars grated against their stone housings. Then, with a terrific, wrenching sound they were torn free and fell with a clatter to the stone floor outside the cell. Rez’s fiercely glowing eyes faded, leaving stark afterimages floating in Shel’s eyes.
“You're a Soulweaver,” she said bluntly.
Shel had little idea of what a Soulweaver could do. It was the rarest of talents, and she had never met one before. Most were high nobles of the empire, or at the very least rich merchan
ts. She thought back to the soul trader in the market place, trying to entice the young beggar boy with gold.
“So what?” she snapped now, forcing the memory away. She didn’t like to be reminded of how she had been before she found this power. With the midnight wood in her hair, and all these souls hers to use, she didn’t need to remember.
What good was remembering? What were her memories worth? Her rotten parents, and running away. Life on the streets, as a slum district cutpurse and later a sneak thief, had been a step up. Then there had been people like Rez and his brother and the archons and the emperor, and Shel knew that to those kinds of men the likes of her were like insects. Why would she want to remember being a nothing?
“Don’t you remember?” Rez licked his lips nervously. He couldn’t tell if he was still getting through to her. This was his only chance to save her from the darkness. If he failed, she would kill him and all the magic would be hers. No one would ever be able to stand against her again. The world would fall.
“I remember a soul trader and a little boy,” she said, and the scorn she now felt for both of them was clear in her venomous tone. “The boy gave up his soul for promises and a handful of gold. Now, if he even still lives, he is an empty shell like that pitiful creature who called himself eternal.”
Almost as if he knew he was being spoken of, Daerydd whimpered in fear from the other side of the room. One of Shel’s Tophylax seized the ancient man and snapped his neck.
“He shouldn’t have sold his soul, then?” Rez thought he saw a trace of the girl he’d rescued from the dungeons. She’d been disgusted by soul traders, and absolutely terrified of weavers. She’d tried to be brave, not show it, but he had seen it. He hoped that part of her was still somewhere inside, as yet uncorrupted by the spreading darkness.
“Of course not! What kind of an idiot would release their soul?” Shel stepped back, spreading her arms to the sides and howling with mad laughter. “Seriously, Rez? What fool would make such a bargain?” She lunged forward, seizing him once more by the throat. Bringing her face in close to his, she hissed into his ear.
“When I take your soul, I will own you. I will swallow your spirit and bind it to my own, and I will keep your body to use as a living puppet. Knowing that, would you agree to let me have it? I'll give you some gold for it, little boy.”
Her voice was oily and vile in his ear, her breath hot and sticky against his cheek. Rez shivered in spite of himself. The Shel he had thought might one day join his lieutenants or even take command of his rebellion should he fall, that young woman was gone. He lowered his head hopelessly.
“Do it then,” he sighed. “Feed the people your empty promise, and take the very soul of the realm.”
She jerked his head round to face her fully. Was there a hint of doubt in her eyes? A question forming on her slightly pursed lips?
“I will grant them peace,” she said, not sounding entirely convinced. “I will end their suffering, Rez. I've put an end to the emperor and the archons and their entire way of doing things. No one will buy and sell souls again. I will have all that I can ever hold, and no one but me can hold them. Don’t you see? And I will not allow wars, or poverty, or starving. I will not allow the harvests to be anything but bountiful. I will harness the storms on the sea. I will do these things, Rez, and they are good.”
“May the summer never end,” spat Rez.
The words shook Shel, and she stepped back from again with a loud gasp. Clutching both hands to her chest, she opened her mouth wide. No sound came out.
She heard Sanook’s voice speaking in her mind. He had been speaking for some time, in fact clamoring for her attention. She had ignored him, blocked him out. She had no need for the counsel of a dead Shadowman. But now, for some reason, he made himself clearly heard.
Your parents named you Naedezh, he told her. In our tongue it means Hope.
There was another presence with Sanook. It was a woman, her skin a canvas of runes. Shel knew it was her own mother. Sanook had found her soul amongst the myriad which Shel had swallowed when she tricked the emperor. Her mother reached out to her, whispered her name. Naedezh.
Hope.
A tear fell from Shel’s eye, but she wrenched herself out of the vision. It was only a dream. This was real. Rez hung suspended before her, trapped by her weave. She would crush him, and take all that he had, and that would be an end to it.
And yet…
Hope.
Squeezing shut her eyes, Shel confronted the spirit of her mother. Leave me alone!
Naedezh, I hated to lose you. I never wanted to leave you with your father’s brother. But the soldiers killed your father and they came for me. I had to hide you away. The emperor took my soul but I hid you from him even then. Oh, my daughter, to know you again…but you must listen to the man.
Rez wants me to release my power, argued Shel. To let go of all the souls. Even yours, mother. You say it is so wonderful to know me again, but the first you ask is that I send you away. A mother’s love?
A mother’s hope, countered the spirit in her mind.
And Shel felt her mother’s love then, emotions spilling into her consciousness from somewhere deeper and hidden. Love, yes, and hope as well. Hope that a daughter wouldn’t fall to the darkness growing within her, the corruption of power. Unlimited power…
Shrieking in frustration, Shel threw up her hands and fell to her knees. Raw power blasted from her splayed fingertips, rays of solid flame lancing up into the sky or drilling instantaneously through the stone of the walls. She howled in pain and fear and anger and she threw all of these things into the streams of power that flowed through her.
Smoke rose from the wooden ornaments in her hair, and they began to sizzle and char. Her eyes burned brighter than the sun, and ghostly white light spilled over her writhing lips.
Then it was over and she collapsed. In the same moment, Rez fell to the floor. He was released. He reached out to Shel with all his senses, and found her diminished. She had really done it. She had expelled every soul she held. And she was still alive. One single soul remained, unbloated, unswollen, unblemished.
He went to her, knelt at her side and picked her up in his arms. Cradling her against his chest, he whispered to her.
“It’s all right now, Shel,” he told her as she slipped into unconsciousness. “Everything is going to be wonderful now.”
Then Rez turned his eyes up to the darkened sky. He opened his mouth. And he let everything go. Five minutes later, he still knelt in the shattered sanctuary with Shel in his arms. He was only a man, with one soul and one life, and she was only a young woman cradled into his arms.
Outside, snow began to fall for the first time in a thousand years.
END
***
Check Out This New Fantasy Bundle by Trip Ellington:
EverMage: The Complete Series
As a wizard's apprentice, Mithris always seems to feel like a duck out of water. Clumsy, awkward, naive, and frequently a nuisance to his mentor wizard, it was hard for Mithris to believe he'll ever become a great and powerful wielder of magic...
But everything changes for the young apprentice one day when vicious and foul creatures attacked his master's tower, killing his mentor, and driving Mithris into exile in the wild world outside.
Alone and left to care for himself for the first time in his life, Mithris must find the strength and courage to become the very thing he never expected he could be...a powerful wizard.
And he must do it in time to stop the monsters, avenge his master's death, and save the world from the clutches of a power-hungry wizard.
***
A Personal Appeal from the Author, Trip Ellington
My name is Trip Ellington and I have an offer that I think you will find very favorable.
In my continued efforts to improve the quality of my works, I have created a group referred to as my ‘Beta Readers.’ I rely on my Beta Readers to read my as-yet-unreleased stories and provide me
with much needed feedback and I keep them informed of my latest releases. There is no charge to become a Beta Reader.
For those of you who would like to help me in this cause and become a Beta Reader, I will send you a digital copy of any of my published stories for free.
To apply for the Beta Reader group, simply click or navigate to this link:
==> http://tripellington.com/beta/
Thank you for being a loyal reader and supporting an independent author.
Sincerely,
Trip
***
The Cover Incorporates a Stock Image That is Kindly Licensed and © Can Stock Photo Inc. / coka and magann
Soul Weaver: A Fantasy Novel Page 25
