Soul's Reckoning (Broken Well Trilogy) (11 page)

‘I thought it might make you feel better,’ said Eosene, ‘to know your idea was flawed from the start, so cannot be blamed on any deficit in your own abilities.’

Losara nodded. ‘I see.’

‘Reddle,’ called Eosene as they drew nearer, ‘I retract my favour. You owe me nothing.’

Reddle collapsed to his knees, sobbing. ‘Forgive me, lord! It was the weaver! I could not stop! Please .
 
.
 
.’

Clandra fell beside him, encircling him protectively in her arms. ‘He did not mean it, lord! It was that bird!’

Their voices combined to a pitiful gabble, which Losara quickly found irksome. ‘Enough! You will not be punished.’ He grimaced. ‘I have learned what I needed to, and cannot ask for more.’

‘Do not fault yourself, lord,’ said Eosene. ‘Weaver magic is a complex thing, bestowed only upon my kind.’

‘Yes,’ said Losara. ‘I will have to find some other means.’

Eosene flew down to the ground, and hopped about to face him.

‘Taking your leave now, lord?’

Losara stared at her blankly for a moment. ‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘I should return to the army.’

‘Yes,’ said Eosene. ‘Return to your army, and do not pander to them any more. They are yours to do with as you will, and just as you have no right to weavers’ secrets, they have no right to yours.’

Losara felt the words sink in and take root in his mind. Eosene was right. There was no need to waste time getting sidetracked in this attempt to indulge the curiosity of those who were born to serve him without question.

With a renewed sense of purpose he sped away across the Ragga Plains, and as he went he found his head beginning to clear. Strange, as he had not noticed it fogging in the first place, but looking back now he remembered his recent actions only dimly, as if he’d taken a strong drink. Surely the bird had not .
 
.
 
. but yes, as the distance between them grew, he began to feel sure that Eosene had been manipulating him. Then came the realisation that this expedition had put him in danger, and he had not even noticed it happening. At worst he had been toyed with. At best he had received advice that now seemed tainted despite the truth of it. But still, it was as he’d always been told, yet somehow forgotten in his need – never trust a weaver.

•

Eosene watched the Shadowdreamer depart, impressed with the way he could come and go wholly in the shadows. Thank goodness the champion of Fenvarrow had some talent, at least. She shook her little head. Such arrogance to think he could master her gift simply by seeing it occur.

She glanced at Reddle, still snivelling in the dirt. Would she have preferred that he had somehow succeeded in killing the dreamer? With the death of the blue-haired men, balance would have been restored, but that mattered little to Eosene – all she cared about was that Arkus did not win.

I suppose a good way for that to happen would be if he were destroyed for all time
, she thought.
Thus I suppose I will hope for such an outcome, and not be the one to try killing you, Shadowdreamer.

Meanwhile the two pig farmers were finally realising that Losara was gone.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘it seems you no longer owe me a favour, Reddle, although your wife now does. So unless you want me to have her walk into Ryme Lake up past her head, or close her legs to you forever, you’ll go fetch me some fresh meat.’

She cast a last look in the direction Losara had departed. ‘Bugs indeed,’ she said, and twittered merrily.

Fahren tried to steady his hands despite the roiling in his guts, and closed his eyes, blocking out the sight of her as she lay there, so peaceful, still looking like that young girl who’d shown such promise. ‘Surely there is another way,’ he murmured.

‘You have the orders of your god,’ came Battu’s voice behind him. ‘If you cannot follow him, who do you fight for?’ Once again Fahren found himself wishing that Arkus had left Battu as he had been. It was true that, after being bound to help, Battu’s trustworthiness was no longer in question .
 
.
 
. but as a side effect Battu was now free to be as unpleasant as he liked, and the subservient, even friendly, demeanour he had previously carried was gone. Evidently he no longer felt he had to impress Fahren with decorum, as he had nothing left to prove.

Taking a deep breath, Fahren began to channel. His power entered Elessa’s corpse, and dimly he sensed the path her soul had taken when it had departed beyond the veil of the world, like footprints of the soul almost faded away. He let his power follow those footprints, felt it meet some kind of resistance, then slip through into an unknown other side.

‘Like fishing,’
said Battu. ‘Except the fish is already hooked and you create the line.’

It was odd to think that part of him was now entering Arkus’s Great Well of Souls. He let his power spool out, felt a warm glow travel back along it to suffuse him.

‘Do not be seduced,’ he heard Battu say. ‘Search.’

He concentrated, trying to find anything that recognised the body he channelled through. For a time there was nothing, and he wondered if he had done something wrong. Then he felt a contact at the end of his ‘line’. It bounced brightly as he seized it tightly, mercilessly.

It
, he chastised himself.
No kind word for that which remains of Elessa’s soul.

As he retracted his power, she struggled frantically. It sickened him to hold onto her so fast, drawing her towards him. The warmth he had been feeling turned stiflingly unpleasant, hot in his lungs. There was a faint popping as he dragged her through whatever barrier separated the Well from the world, into herself. For a moment nothing happened, and he dared to hope that he had failed.

Then Elessa Lanclara opened her eyes with a gasp. Fahren’s hands trembled as he lowered them, staring with disbelief upon what he had wrought. In all his life he had never done anything that felt so viscerally wrong .
 
.
 
. yet he had stepped through the door and there was no turning back.

‘Well,’ said Battu. ‘Didn’t think you had it in you.’

Elessa’s hand went unsteadily to her chest, as if she sensed she had no breath, and that her heart did not beat. Slowly she lifted her head, and Fahren forced himself to meet her gaze, though he wanted nothing more desperately than to bury his ashamed face in his hands. He tried to smile, and felt as if his face would crack like dropped crockery if he managed it.
How much of her is left
? he wondered. So long in the Well meant that parts of her would be gone, dissipated into the collective, perhaps reborn. Would she even remember who she was? Maybe it would be a blessing if she didn’t.

‘Fahren?’ she croaked, dispelling the notion that he might escape so easily. Then she looked about at the casket she was in, and gave a little cry that almost broke him.

‘Here,’ he said with an attempt at a comforting tone, going down on one knee and reaching towards her. ‘Let us get you out of that thing.’

She reached back, but then her eyes widened. Her hand twisted from reaching to pointing, and a blazing beam shot over Fahren’s shoulder. Battu staggered under the attack, the air around him dark with a hastily cast defence.

‘Elessa!’ shouted Fahren, over her howl of rage.

‘Call her off,’ grunted Battu through gritted teeth as the shadows around him wavered under the onslaught.

Fahren crawled along the side of the open casket until he could put a hand on Elessa’s shoulder.

‘Elessa! Battu is not the enemy!’

She did not seem to notice – maybe she did not even feel his touch. He gave her a shake and her gaze snapped to his, while the beam continued burning at Battu’s ward.

‘Please listen to me,’ said Fahren. ‘You must stop – Battu will not harm you. In fact, he helped me bring you back.’

‘Bring me back?’ she echoed, confused.

The beam sizzled out as she raised her hand before her eyes, turning it for inspection.

‘A strong one, that,’ puffed Battu, the shadows around him fading.

The horror on Elessa’s face was more than Fahren could bear.

‘High Mage,’ she said, ‘what have you done?’

•

Elessa wound her way haltingly through the graves of the Inviolable. Smooth white pathways ran out before her, leading off in various directions through well kept gardens and graves. They passed polished glass plates set in the ground, beneath which lay perfectly preserved bodies. It was a serene place, though the last thing she felt was serene. Beside her trod Fahren, and the man who had been Shadowdreamer the last time she had known of him. For nearly twenty years now she had not been confined to a body, and functions that had once been mechanical and instinctual now demanded intense concentration. Worse, the flesh atop her skeleton had the sensation of a heavily constrictive cloak. Certainly as she touched things she knew they were there, but there was no
depth
to that knowing, no pleasure or pain. The sun was shining, yet there was no heat on her skin.

In the Well she had floated free, part of a collective, but as an individual her memory was fragmented, her sense of self uncertain. All that remained were the barest structures. Maybe it was a blessing, considering the supreme wrongness of what had been done to her – the last thing she needed was more of herself present to feel such deep violation. She had been at peace, in paradise, yet now she was back, pulled harshly into a world she should never have seen through these eyes again.

The High Mage – now the Throne, it seemed – was gabbling away about something, his voice piercing with a metallic ring. In fact, everything she heard seemed that way, as if sound was not entering through her ears, but being magnified directly into her mind. It was the same with sight – she was not really
looking
, but rather
knowing
things instantly for what and where they were. With such elevated senses, it all fast became busy and confounding. If she’d been able to feel her guts, she would have emptied them.

He was talking about why he’d done this thing to her, asking her to forgive him, bringing up their time together as student and teacher, maybe in an effort to reignite her identity, or make her somehow feel a part of things again. She felt about as much a part of things as a bird drowning in mud. She tried to listen, but anger distracted her .
 
.
 
. of all the people who might inflict this on her, she would not have suspected Fahren! Certainly the presence of Battu, and Fahren’s evident alignment with him, was something she did not yet understand. Of her mortal life, the night she remembered best was her last, when she had died at the hands of Battu’s minions – and yet here the man was, walking beside her, casting her dark glances. She thought of the dagger wound that had been her undoing, ran a hand under the white dress they had buried her in. There – a patch of smooth skin like the hide of a drum stretched tight, ringed by the ridges of a blade’s entry, where she had sealed herself to stop the bleeding. She had never actually healed properly underneath, so the slightest tear and the wound would gape open .
 
.
 
. yet in her present state it would not harm or hinder.

What did she look like? She suddenly needed to know. Was her face grey and rotting, her eyes dim and lifeless? Had she been bruised when she’d died, or even as they had put her in her grave? Was every scratch now permanently affixed?

‘A mirror,’ she said, interrupting whatever Fahren had been saying.

‘Sorry, Elessa?’ he said.

‘Bring me a mirror!’ she shouted.

He took a step back before her wrath, pale and stricken. What did he expect, that she would happily return to this wasted carcass?

‘Allow me,’ said Battu. He waved at grass nearby, and dewdrops rose from the ground. He whorled them together into a sphere, then flattened it out into a circle. As it drifted towards her, she wondered vaguely how such a prettily shining thing could come from such a man. Then she noticed it was backed with shadow, a thin film that stopped the other side showing through, ensuring she would see her reflection clearly. It arrived to hover before her face, the watery surface taking a moment to still .
 
.
 
. and then she saw herself.

Whatever abhorrence she had feared to find staring back blankly, what she actually saw stunned her. She went on looking, on and on, and time must have passed, for Fahren started talking again. He was explaining about something she had to do, something involving that goblin Tyrellan, the one who’d stuck her with his dagger, whom she had cursed forever in return. She turned her face this way and that, but could not bring herself to believe that so little had changed. A moment of relief came to her, a relic of vanity that left her grounded as she rediscovered something human in herself .
 
.
 
. but the moment passed quickly. Perhaps she looked normal, yet how could she be, when she felt so different? The vanity was nothing but an echo of a woman’s concern, not one for a ghoul.

She waved her hand and shattered Battu’s mirror to mist. It sprayed against him and he grinned, beads dripping from his nose. Inexplicably, she felt an odd affinity with him. Battu understood what had been done to her more than Fahren did, she felt sure – at least he was not nattering away, trying to distract her from dealing with her own desecration.

‘How could you?’ she said to the man she had once revered. ‘It is not the way of the light. I should not be here.’

Fahren wiped his cheeks with his sleeve – how long had he been crying?

‘We are in very great need, Elessa,’ he said. ‘Please, you will not be long amongst us, but your presence could save us all.’

Something else sparked in her then, very deep and dim, a firefly trapped in a jar that sank into the sea – the love she had once held for her land and her people, her family and friends. Days spent in the shining sun. Holding Kessum’s hand.

No
, she thought.
I never did that. I only dreamed about it.

A sob wanted to burst from her chest, but all that emerged was a grating rasp, and no tears formed in her dry, dead eyes.

Maybe she could try to endure for a while.