~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.
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.
“Yes,” Rhan said. “Len Heramsun is with him. So are two boys and a Temple soulweaver.”
Leramis frowned. He caught a whiff of salt and seaweed on the air before the wind changed direction. The ponies reached the far side of the Chasm and continued on toward the docks.
“The soulweaver could make things difficult,” he said after a moment.
“So could Aleana’s former king-in-waiting,” Rhan replied. “Do not underestimate them.”
Leramis nodded. Rhan turned them down a narrow street between two warehouses that caught the sounds of the ponies’ hooves and amplified them.
“The council wants you to intercept the prince in Du Hardt, if possible,” Rhan said. “Or in Du Fenlan if not.”
The sea was coming into view at the end of the street—it was covered in a light skin of fog that shifted and wisped in a gentle mirror of the waves beneath it. Directly ahead of him, Leramis could see one of the jagged black stacks the necromancers called The Teeth yawning toward the cloud-covered sky like a broken bicuspid.
“Eshan and Crixine may move to destroy the Heart Dragons of Aleana at any time, Leramis. Be ready.”
Leramis adjusted the lie of his satchel behind him. He remembered Eshan and Crixine. Tall. Strong. Dark-haired and white-haired, respectively. They had claimed to be Duennin when they’d come to the Order, and Leramis had believed their story. There had been something cold and vicious about them—something violent and disdainful in their eyes from the start.
He had not been surprised when they had left. Nor when others had followed them, or when Rhan had told him that they were likely responsible for the destruction of the heart dragons.
The ponies found their way out of the warehouse shadows and slowed to a stop. Leramis looked at Rhan. The older necromancer sat with his hands crossed over the pommel of his saddle.
“My proposal to send our people to protect the heart dragons was voted down,” Rhan said.
Leramis grimaced. ‘Safeguard the River,’ Faide the Wise had written when the Order of Necromancers had splintered from the Eldanian Temple. ‘And respect the Vision of Yenor for the World.’
In recent years, the Council of Taers seemed to have taken that to mean “do nothing, ever.”
Rhan shifted his weight in his saddle and looked out over the water. The faint hint of a smile played around his mouth. “As Olen of the Mind so eloquently put it this evening: ‘Sherduan is the knife Yenor gave the world to slit its own throat. It is not our place to stop the world from doing it.’” His eyes floated over the water, darting from rock to sea to land and back, seeing everything. Leramis shivered.
“Incidentally,” Rhan added, “he did not think you were up to serving as ambassador to Prince Quay.”
Leramis’s stomach soured. He had been a plaything of the Council of Taers before—been kept on the isle for this small duty or that unimportant detail, kept from returning to the mainland and doing anything important, because the other Taers did not want to see Rhan’s chosen man succeed.
Rhan kicked his pony into motion again, and Leramis followed.
“You are to convince the Prince of Eldan that we are not behind the attacks on the heart dragons, and to keep him from enlisting the help of the Aleani in his father’s war against us. You need do no more.”
The ponies wormed gently past ships tied to deep, stone pylons along the stone seawalk by the docks. Near the south end of the walk, a small craft with one lateen-style mainsail and a triangular jib bobbed on the waters. Its deck was lit by oil lamps. Black-robed sailors crawled over it in the smoky, orange light.
“But I am sending you to Prince Quay for a reason, Leramis.”
Rhan dismounted when they had gotten close enough to the little ship to see the flat silhouette of its captain on the aft deck. Leramis stepped down from his saddle and was surprised to note that his thighs felt sore even after such a short ride.
Rhan clasped his hand and pulled him close.
“There is one more thing,” the older necromancer whispered in his ear. The water slapped gently against the pylons of the dock. Leramis could hear his ship creaking on the swells. A cool breeze rushed down off the island and over his close-shorn head.
“The soulweaver who travels with the prince, Leramis. She is your age, and her hair is red as summer fire.”
Leramis’s heart clenched. His fingers tingled. He fixed his eyes on the top of the Tooth in the bay.
“Yenor steers the world with the breath of Sh’his soul,” Rhan said. “Everything happens for a reason.”
Ryse, Leramis thought. He’s talking about Ryse.
Rhan shook his hand.
“Good luck,” the older necromancer said, “and go with the Grace of Yenor.”
And then Rhan the Eye tied Leramis’s pony to the saddle of his own, mounted up, and rode into the yawning darkness of the streets of Death’s Head.
Leramis gazed out over the sea. He listened to it whisper against the pylons, the seawalk, the Teeth. He felt the breeze ebb and flow. He watched the mist move over the water and the clouds slide across the sky.
But the movements of the body of the world told him nothing.
Rhan was sending him forth, at last, to do great things.
But Leramis was not entirely sure what they were.
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