Soulwoven

Chapter Eight

~8~

Ryse shivered. Cold, viscous mud oozed over and under and around her feet and shins. Misty rain fell lightly on her skin. The sun was fading through a high layer of gray cloud, the air smelled of damp earth and sewage, and she was walking behind Litnig and Cole into a place she’d sworn she would never return to.

The slums.

They stretched flooded and bloated and dilapidated before her, a mile or more of ramshackle hovels dotted with canvas tarps, tents, bonfires, and garbage. A hundred shantytowns, each with its own name: Bottomdwell, Riverfuck, Pitbin, Overswell, Undercarry, and more she didn’t care to remember. Thick, foul-smelling smoke hung above the place, and the dirty and downcast of Eldan City moved through it like ghosts in the rain. Why in the world Cole had sent Quay Eldani there ahead of them, she couldn’t fathom.

But he seemed to know what he was doing. At the front of their group of three, Litnig’s little brother picked his way confidently through the muck in a heavy brown cloak. He had never abandoned the slums. He was still fascinated with them, and it made her sick.

The slums were a place of death and filth and misery. Not a place for bored merchants’ children to play in. Only the Temple had been willing to take her out. Only the Temple had saved her.

And she was leaving it to go straight back in.

Her stomach churned. There’s no turning back, she reminded herself, but the thought didn’t help.

She watched the long club hanging from Litnig’s belt sway back and forth ahead of her in the rain. He had kept watch for hours while she’d slept in a little nook in the rocks near the hooked summit of Sentinel Hill. When she’d awoken in the early afternoon, he’d been sitting next to her, staring into the rain, and he had smiled and talked her into coming over for dinner. No one had been home, but after they’d eaten a little bread and cold meat with mustard, his brother had shown up with a dark look in his eye, told them he was going to leave the city, and asked them to come along.

There were no coincidences. Yenor steered every twist and turn of the world with the beating of Hir heart.

Still, the decision to follow Cole into the slums had been a hard one to make.

Ryse slipped in the mud and nearly fell, looked back up to find the black hang of Sentinel Hill silhouetted in dying light to her right, and shuddered. The heart dragons had been broken. She’d seen Sherduan in her mind. Yenor had given her her power, and it was to Yenor that she owed her debts. On all that she was clear.

But by Hir eye, the slums—

Cole turned left along a broken footpath and walked between clusters of hungry-eyed, tiny hovels. Ryse had grown up in shacks like that, moving from one “family” of orphans to the next, never getting attached, never letting anyone get close enough to hurt her.

She pinched the cloth of her robe, hidden beneath a plain gray cloak, between her fingers. It was all that held her apart from the filth. From becoming what girls without families, without friends, without money, inevitably became in the slums, no matter how smart, no matter how strong, no matter how clever. She held tight to the hems and told herself that she was above that, forever, that the slums couldn’t hurt her anymore, and she breathed.

Cole slipped along a line of huts toward a large, dirty tent with a massive red fist painted on the top of it, and Ryse finally understood why he’d chosen this destination. The smoke-belching tent was a royalist tavern in the high-lying shantytown of Kings’ Run, where the slum dwellers believed that the monarchy was all that held back a cresting wave of darkness threatening to overwhelm the world.