Soulwoven: Exile

Chapter 25

~25~

Thirty-six days before the sack of Death's Head

It took Leramis the rest of the day to reach the Atar. For hours, the blue-tinged hills that hid the honeycomb of caves hung tantalizingly close, but the going was slow. His legs were rubbery. His arms numbed. Every time he strained, his heart raced and he had to stop and catch his breath. The morning's misting rain intensified into a howling storm that soaked him so thoroughly his robe doubled in weight. His head grew hot and his vision blurry. His knees picked up new scrapes. Climbing into and out of the gullies left his hands raw and a muscle in his right leg seizing at uneven intervals.

He heard no sounds of pursuit.

In the hour just before dark, Leramis eased his exhausted body into a bracken-filled gully and found what he was looking for-a small cleft between two slabs of black rock, overgrown by long brown brambles and thick blue-green bushes with spiked leaves. He pushed through the vegetation, squeezed through the cleft, and stepped into the stillness of the Atar.

The rain ceased to touch him. The air on his face grew still. He couldn't see in the darkness, but he didn't care. The quiet, the calm, and the peace were all that mattered.

Leramis stepped forward, leaned against the wet rock of the cave, and coughed. The sound echoed sharply over the hollow howls of the wind in the hills. He rubbed his chest. His eyes drifted shut. He slid down the rock wall until he was seated.

Get up, he told himself. Get up and go deeper. You're not safe here.

It was no use. His body wouldn't listen.

Get up, he tried again. Get-

He woke hours later to the feeling of his head being jerked back and the touch of something sharp to his throat.

"You weave, you die," someone growled. "You move, you die. You do anything other than exactly what I tell you, you die. Do you understand?"

Leramis's arms felt limp. His legs as well. The cool, calm air of the Atar surrounded him, but he could see nothing other than harsh white light through a dark cloth across his eyes.

Blindfolded, he realized. A cloth was stuffed in his mouth too. And gagged. He tried to mumble an affirmative. A female voice spoke.

"He's no threat. I have him well wrapped."

She's irritated, he thought. His mind felt slow. And I'm not bound in rope.

He was bound in souls instead. Strands of them had been wrapped around him, biting into the muscles of his arms and legs to sap his strength. The souls formed stronger bindings than the stiffest chains. As he woke, he felt more of them, as well as the flow of the River around him. There were two soulweavers close by, plus a third person whom the River didn't bend around. The latter held the blade to his throat.

"I don't care," said the man with the knife. "You keep him wrapped, I'll keep a knife to his throat, and we'll take him to Lord Steelhill."

A few cords of souls were removed from Leramis's body. Feeling and coordination returned to his legs in a rush, as if the limbs had fallen asleep and their circulation had just been reestablished. The blade pressed against his throat.

"Stand and walk," said the man.

Leramis did-right back into the rain and the cold and the death and the misery from which he'd fled.

The camp his captors took him to was less than an hour away from the Atar, past three gullies and sited on the ridge road itself. Getting there was still difficult. In the end, the feeling was returned to Leramis's arms, then his hands as well, and the man with the blade was forced to remove it from his throat while they climbed.