Soulwoven

Chapter Sixteen

He crossed the creaking floorboards of his apartment and opened his door.

In the wood and stone hallway beyond, a pale girl in a black robe stood fidgeting with her strawlike hair. Her eyes were sunken and waxy—probably, Leramis assumed, from lack of sleep.

“Jenna,” he said quietly.

Her hands moved to the edges of her long, dark sleeves. “Rhan is waiting below, Leramis,” she said. Her voice was as cool and damp as the wood beneath his feet. “He has a task for you.”

Leramis nodded and closed the door. He put on a pair of long woolen stockings from his wardrobe, donned and laced his most comfortable pair of leather boots. The satchel of food and clothes and money he had prepared for his journey lay under his bed, and he retrieved it and set it by the door.

Lastly, he took his warm, black robe from its peg and pulled it over his head.

Rhan was waiting for him in the street below. Leramis caught the sharp, brown eyes of his mentor on him as he left his home and felt as if a spider had tap-danced down his spine.

Rhan had the same gift as Leramis, but on a grander scale. Rhan the Eye saw everything. It was the reason he had earned his nickname even before taking the post of Taer of the Eye, and the reason he had earned that post a full decade younger than any necromancer before him. Even after two years, Leramis felt uncomfortable standing under Rhan’s gaze. It was like going naked before the Eye of Yenor itself.

Rhan nodded to him as he approached. The Taer was mounted on a shaggy black pony. A second was tied riderless to a post near the building’s sagging entrance. Jenna was nowhere to be seen.

“Good morning,” Leramis said quietly.

Rhan jerked his chin toward the pony. “There is a ship leaving on the morning tide, Leramis. You need to be on it.”

Leramis had not ridden in years, but the pony was not large, and his muscles remembered what to do. He untied the animal and swung into the saddle easily.

Rhan set off toward the docks at a brisk trot, and Leramis followed. The darkened windows of his neighborhood passed by. The pony’s iron-shod hooves clacked and sparked on the Black Hill cobblestones as the animal took him down and south, down and south.

“Is this going to be my great thing?” he asked softly.

Rhan pulled his pony right at a fork in the road. One corner of his thin mouth tugged upward.

“Perhaps,” he said. His shaved head gleamed in what moonlight filtered through a thick skein of clouds above.

Leramis wished he could see the stars.

“The rumors are true,” Rhan said. “The Prince of Eldan travels to Aleana. He blames the Order for what happened to the Heart Dragons of Mennaia.”

The news was not unexpected.

“And?” Leramis asked.

Rhan spared him a glance. The ponies clopped their way around a roped-off hole in the street. “And the council has chosen you to convince him otherwise.”

“The council?”

Rhan smirked again. “At my request.”

They came down off the hill and approached one of the many bridges, built of stone but paved with wooden planks, that spanned the Chasm. Tall shops, dark and skeletal beneath the weak light, stood shuttered around them.

“Is there anything else I should know?”

The tenor of the ponies’ hoofbeats changed from sharp clacking to heavy thudding as they moved onto the bridge.