~2~
Cole stepped into a shallow puddle on the moonlit street outside his home, bit off a curse, and wondered what the hell was wrong with him. It was late. It was cold. It was wet. His nose hurt.
He’d had a hell of a day. Hot and sticky, polished off with a punch to the face, and he’d missed the Equinox Festival. All he really wanted to be doing was lying in bed pretending he was someplace else.
And yet, he thought, you let a dream chase you out.
Cole didn’t put much stock in dreams. Nor did he put much stock in the stars that hung above his head, the Tenets of Yenor, fortune tellers—none of it. He put stock in himself, in his friends, and every so often, in his brother. That was all. Period.
But still.
He wrinkled his swollen nose and frowned. The night was chilly, soak-your-bones damp in a way that made it feel more like winter than spring. The street outside his house shone bleached white in the moonlight, and he could smell the sewer stink of the slums wafting up the River Eld to his right. In the north, a white quarter moon hung above the twinkling lights of Temple Hill.
Closer were his dark-haired lummox of an older brother, a growing dampness in the toes of his boots, and the thick, fearful memory of a nightmare.
Cole stepped farther into the street while his brother locked the door. He remembered a dozen times he’d run away from home on nights like this, only to return within a few days. He remembered bloody noses. Bloody ears. Black eyes. Bruised ribs.
The memories always came after his father hit him.
The cobblestone thoroughfare outside his house was deserted, but the orange light of candles flickered from the second-story windows of a few white-plastered houses. He thought he heard children crying. The memories of his life faded away. The image of a black-scaled dragon’s head filled his mind, and he remembered a scream, a horrible, ear-shattering scream, and the feeling that the world was ripping apart and he was ripping with it.
He pulled his collar up.
Just a dream, he told himself, but he didn’t believe it.
The moon broke through the clouds. The wind shifted, replaced the fetid stench of the slums with the scent of clean, wet earth and stone, and Eldan City shone bright and glistening in front of him. The three hills that framed it rose prominently from the sprawl of houses in the river valleys below them, shadowed sentinels glittering with yellow lights. Friendly, open, full of life.
Cole took a deep breath and followed his brother toward the river. It would be good to have a walk, get his mind off his nightmare. It might even be good to see Ryse, if she could get off her newfound high horse long enough to talk with them.
The craggy shadows of the city stretched before him, silhouettes clustered along the rivers and reaching up the hills. He smiled. He’d spent much of his life in those shadows. They’d been the father he’d always wanted. They’d let him grow.
A mile or two ahead, across the rush of the River Eld, the white pillars and golden dome of the Temple of Eldan glittered atop the blackened shapes of Temple Hill. “Welcoming sinners and the pious alike,” its white-and-black-robed priests told anyone who would listen.
Cole had never put much stock in them either.
At the bottom of Temple Hill, the iron gates and moss-covered stones of the Old Temple stood in cold, stark contrast to the garish dome above them. The Old Temple had been built smaller than the New, with a peaked roof and the stories of the Book of Yenor carved in relief upon its gables. It was thousands of years older than the complex above it and got more attention from one-penny storytellers than priests. He remembered going there with Litnig and his mother when he was a kid, to hear the tales of Eldan’s great triumphs in the name of Yenor. The place, in his mind, was one of sunny afternoons and pleasant naps.
It was there that Ryse Lethien stood watch at night.
The city was unusually quiet—no rats, no owls, no cats chasing one another in the cool shadows. The festival poles were still, their ribbons hanging limply at their sides. The bonfires had burned down to cold piles of black ash. Neither Cole nor his brother broke the silence. They passed the gold-painted wooden figurines of the Fishbridge and crossed over the broad silver stroke of the Eld into Temple Hill without meeting a soul.
Cole’s toes got wetter and colder, and he wrapped a scarf around his ears. Temple Hill was always quiet at night, but at least it was safe. Nobody much wanted to risk mugging a soulweaver by accident. He’d seen that happen once. The woman’s scream, as soulwoven fire engulfed the hand holding her knife, had been as high as a child’s.
It wasn’t until the darkened gates of the Old Temple grew almost close enough to spit on that Cole spotted even the slightest hint of life.
It was a much slighter hint than he was comfortable with.
Two people lay on the temple steps, their bodies at odd angles, bent in ways that would be uncomfortable at best and painful at worst. They wore the white sash of the temple across their chests. There was a liquid, sticky darkness underneath them, almost black in the moon’s white glow.
The guards, he thought. Posted outside, just in case. His stomach jumped into his throat.
Litnig quickened his pace. Cole slowed down, tried to push away his memories of sunshine and story and fire and dragons and screams and let his ears listen for trouble the way he’d done in the shadows a hundred times since he’d been old enough to sneak out on his own.
He heard nothing. Just the wind, whistling along the Eld and between the pillars of the Old Temple.
Cole stopped a few feet from the guards. The darkness underneath them was a thick, viscous pool the black-cherry color of drying blood. His hand went to his hip, expecting to find two daggers he’d been given long ago, and came up empty. He hadn’t anticipated violence, hadn’t anticipated bodies.
“Lit, we should go.”
His brother stopped with his foot on the first step, facing the dark, open archway of the temple with the light of the moon on his face.
“Ryse is in there.”
“She’ll be fine.” Ryse was a bloody soulweaver. If she wasn’t fine, there sure as hell wouldn’t be anything they could do about it. Whoever had killed those guards, whoever was confident or stupid enough to just slap the Temple in the face like that, he and his brother didn’t want any part of them.
Cole looked back. Behind them, the street looked empty, cold, wet, safe. Like it always had.
When he turned forward again, Litnig was already walking into the temple. And Cole couldn’t let his brother go alone.
So he shut his eyes, told the smarter half of his brain to shove off, and followed.
The temple gates hung open and abandoned, creaking on rusty hinges in a draft that moaned cold and heavy out of the temple proper. Cole crept through them behind his brother into a large, domed chamber with a hole in its roof and a sparkling cistern in its center. Fading, chipped frescoes of stories from humanity’s past covered the ceiling—Mennaia’s Awakening, the Exodus, the Discovery of the Sea. Extinguished torches sat black and abandoned in their sconces, scattered around the circumference of the dome.
Cole had never seen the torches like that. They were supposed to light the main room all night long. There should have been people and life there. After the dancing, after the drinking, after the fires, the faithful prayed and visited the graves of their ancestors on the spring equinox. Every year there was a gathering in the gardens behind the temple. He should’ve been able to hear it.
But there was only the wind and the hollow echo of his footsteps.
The doors in the north wall of the room snapped back and forth against the chains that held them open. Cole’s whole body stood on pins and needles.
Litnig slipped through the open doors, and Cole followed him down a short, dark hallway.
It’ll be fine, he thought. Everything’ll be fine. It was probably just thieves after something in the temple. They probably got what they wanted and got out already. It was probably just the guards who got offed. It was—
When they reached the gardens, there were bodies everywhere.
They lay scattered over the greenery that extended from the temple’s back steps, stretched between rows of headstones and statues beyond, sprawled halfway out of mausoleums in all states of decay. He saw haphazard piles of bones that looked like collapsed skeletons, rotting corpses with scraps of flesh hanging from their limbs, and bloated, putrescent things still vaguely recognizable as people. Fresher bodies lay on the ground in their funeral finery, and others looked new, brand-new, with dark red bloodstains soaking the simple clothes of everyday life upon them. The earth was torn in places, like the corpses had been dug up, and some of the old bodies were covered in the guts of the new. Cole bent over, and his stomach emptied itself all over his feet.
He had no memories to match this, except for the gut-wrenching feeling he’d had staring into the eyes of the dragon in his dream.
When he straightened again, he noticed that a few of the bodies were moving, twitching, alive, and that Litnig was still walking forward, heading into the graveyard with his body as tense as a horse in a surging crowd.
“Lit—” Cole started, but his brother cut him off.
“Ryse,” Litnig said. The name was stretched, his skin pale and drawn. “We have to find Ryse.”
Why? Cole wondered. What’s so bloody important about her right now?
But Litnig was already moving, and Cole could only take a deep, earth-scented breath and follow.
He tried not to look too hard at the people they passed, but it was impossible. Most of them were dead, none of them conscious. Their faces were contorted in pain, their bodies mangled, ripped apart. Cole had seen violence before. He’d seen people trampled, beaten, run down and killed during the Plague Riots as a kid. He’d watched knife fights in the Thieves’ Rise.
He’d never seen anything even remotely like that graveyard.
“Lit, how are we even going to find her out here?”
His brother stopped next to a man-sized statue of a sinuous white dragon.
“We’ll just keep looking until we do,” he said.
Someone whimpered.
Litnig loped toward the sound without another word. A few seconds later, Cole found him standing in front of a skinny boy with black hair.
The boy wore a soiled white robe and crawled desperately in their direction on his elbows, dragging his legs behind him. His arms shook with each tiny advance, and his skin was pale and sweaty. He looked maybe twelve at the oldest.
“Please, help me—p-p-please…”
Cole got a look at his legs. One of them was bloody and wrenched at an unnatural angle from the knee down. He thought he saw the white of bone through a tear in the robe.
There was nothing they could do about that kind of an injury. But a soulweaver like Ryse…
“What happened?” Cole asked.
The kid took a hoarse breath. “T-t-two people, an Aleani and a m-man. They said they c-came to visit their ancestors’ g-graves but they were n-necromancers.” He collapsed, let his face fall into the dirt, mumbled through loose, drooling lips, “P-please. Please, you h-have to h-help—”
Cole shook his head. Litnig was already standing up again. His brother always wanted to help.
“Where’s the temple soulweaver?” Litnig asked.
“F-further b-back, n-not too f-f-far. I don’t kn-know if she ever f-f-fou—”
Cole took a step. The boy grabbed at his leg and missed.
“P-please! Don’t leave me, p-please, I saw—I s-saw—”
“We’ll bring help,” Cole muttered. He hoped it was true.
#
They found Ryse just where the boy had indicated, fifty or sixty feet ahead.
She lay in the fetal position, shaking, hyperventilating. There was no blood on her. Not even a scratch.
Litnig went straight for her, but Cole slowed down and let his eyes drift over the cracked gray headstones of the cemetery, wondering how in the world she’d been the only one to escape uninjured. She was a soulweaver, sure—maybe even a powerful one. But Cole believed the kid—the whole scene stank of necromancers, and necromancers went after Temple soulweavers like weasels after snakes. She should’ve been a target.
Memories washed over him again—he watched a man being buried in this graveyard, a frowning priest excoriating the sins of robbery and vice above him while his friends held their anger in check and stared at his cloth-wrapped body.
Cole shook free of the past and stared down at Ryse.
Even lying on the ground, she looked an inch or so taller than he was. Litnig was squatting in front of her, reaching out to touch her shoulder. Her face looked clean and smooth underneath the dirt that clung to it. Her red-gold hair jerked between her shoulder blades as she twitched. She wore the flowing white robe and sash of the Temple soulweavers. Her eyes fluttered open and closed with her breath, unfocused and empty.
Cole swallowed and looked carefully again at the graves around them, but there wasn’t so much as a whisper of movement.
“Ryse?” Litnig asked.
She sat up and gripped his hand, chest heaving, her fingers digging into his palm like her life depended on it. Her eyes looked wild and terrified.
Ryse had run with them during the Plague Riots, ten years earlier. A crowd of people fleeing mounted city guards had pushed her down, and Litnig had snatched her up by the wrist a split second before she would’ve been trampled. She’d been scared then—pale, cold, sweating, panicked. But even then, she hadn’t looked scared like she did in Litnig’s arms. It was like she’d seen—
A dragon, said Cole’s mind, and his hands went cold.
“Ryse, are you all right?” Litnig asked.
It took a moment, but her eyes focused on Lit’s face. She pulled her hand back toward her body. Cole watched her fight to control her breathing, saw tears in her eyes.
Yenor’s eye, he thought. She never, ever cried.
Litnig’s mouth worked silently. Ryse took deep breaths. Her arms shook. Tears ran in streaks through the dirt on her face.
She needs to be taken somewhere she can rest, Cole thought.
But people were wounded and dying across the graveyard, and he knew what Litnig would do. Knew what Ryse would do, if she could. Litnig would prop her up, and she would do her best to save as many lives as possible, even if she couldn’t bloody well see straight while she was doing it.
Cole ground his teeth. He shouldn’t have even been there. He should’ve been asleep, safe and warm in bed.
And then what good would you have been to anyone? a part of him asked, and he ignored it.
His brother seemed utterly at a loss for words.
“Lit,” Ryse said. She blinked at him. “Why are—” She swayed a little and put her hand to her head. “Forget it. Are people hurt?”
Litnig swallowed. He nodded. His face looked pale.
Ryse’s eyes cleared and focused on the graveyard beyond. “Help me stand,” she said.
Litnig offered her his hand. She took it and swayed to her feet. “Where are they?” she breathed.
Cole just sighed.