Soulwoven

Chapter Sixteen

~16~

Peace.

Leramis Hentworth sat cross-legged on the cold wooden floor of his apartment. He kept his back straight, let his head nod forward until his chin rested nearly on his chest. His hands lay lightly on the ends of his knees. In his mind, he envisioned an endless field of soft, warm light, waiting to wrap him in a quiet embrace.

Peace.

It had been two and a half weeks since the Heart Dragons of Mennaia had been broken. Two weeks since word of it had reached the Order of Necromancers. One week since Rhan the Eye, Leramis’s mentor and one of five men who governed the thousands of soulweavers of the Order, had asked him to make himself ready for a long journey.

Peace would not come.

Leramis floated in a sea of memories. He watched himself leave a creaking, empty manor house, saw a black casket garlanded with white roses buried in a moss-filled cemetery by the sea. He caught flashes of the sneering faces of old rivals, heard taunts leveled at him by those who considered themselves his betters, recalled wrestling semi-naked in the cold dawn in the Academy and the pride he’d felt as he donned the white robes for the first time.

And he remembered Rhan’s words to him, when the older necromancer had been trying to convince him to leave the Temple.

You will do great things, Leramis, if you find the courage to seize them.

Leramis had been in the Order for two years, and he had not done anything great yet.

He sighed and rose to his feet. The sparse furnishings of his apartment—a chair, a bed, a desk—formed pools of shadow in the milky light leaking through a frost-glass window in his wall.

He crossed to the window, threw it open, gazed out onto the night-lit roofs of Death’s Head.

The city looked like the symbol it had been named for. The great docks at its southern end jutted forth like rectangular teeth. The empty market of the Centerspach formed a dark eye of quiet chaos. The Chasm ran like a jagged scar across its face.

He could see it all from his home atop Black Hill. The crooked dwellings of the other necromancers of the Eye surrounded him. The city slanted gently down from the tall, dark wall that hemmed it in to the north until it reached the inky waters of the Bay of Hope. If he leaned out of his window, he could even see the massive black fastness of The Citadel jutting like a thumb from the mountains beyond the wall.

Rhan would be there, he guessed, meeting with the rest of the Council of Taers.

It was between two and three o’clock in the morning, and something was wrong.

Leramis had sensed a parcel of souls winging its way to the Citadel, borne on the bones of a half-rotted hawk. And as he had sensed it, he had known that it brought bad news.

He rolled his shoulders and stretched his neck. He had stopped trying to understand how he grasped such things long ago. Sometimes, he simply saw through the veil of the world and grasped the shape of Yenor’s plans. The gift had been with him a long time—he remembered knowing, calmly and detachedly, that his father was going to die several months before he took sick. He remembered knowing when the Temple came to test his draw in the River of Souls that he would never return to the Lars Dors’ School for Boys except to pick up his few belongings.

It did not come as a surprise to him when, an hour or so after he sensed the message, someone knocked at his door.

A crow called somewhere over the city. A gust of wind slammed the window shut in Leramis’s face.