Soulwoven: Exile

Chapter Eleven

~11~

Ninety days before the destruction of Du Fenlan

Zahayr stood on the armlike ridge of a tall, throne-shaped mountain as the sun vanished behind its peak. The sky above the valley erupted in blues and purples and reds. Below him stretched the rigid, cold body of a white and dusty city.

He gripped his staff. Its wood was smooth and old—light brown and dark brown in turns, patterned with endless whorls. It was a gift, a talisman, a good-luck charm, but his dreams had shown him leaving it on the ridge.

The Sleeper squatted next to him in the dimming light. He had started to grow a small patch of brown-red peach fuzz beneath his chin, and he watched the city cautiously, like a hunted animal. He wore the loose-fitting, scratchy brown shirt of Zahayr’s people, but also the trousers that had been drying by his feet when Zahayr had found him. The Waker stood behind him, brown hair streaming over her shoulders, gold eyes glinting in the sun.

The moment was much as he had dreamed it would be, except for the colors. He never dreamed in colors.

The child of his brother, wide-eyed and afraid, scuffed his feet against the ridge, and the Heartspeak sang between them. The child didn’t want Zahayr to leave. His people, left in a valley two days’ walk behind, didn’t want him to leave either, not truly, though they trusted him when he said it was necessary. He handed his staff to the child and passed him the belt from which his knives hung. The boy looked up at him sadly, and Zahayr patted his head and reminded him to take care.

Zahayr shivered. He had seen himself doing much the same in another dream, a far-off dream that ended with him falling from a height from which he was unlikely to survive.

He was still waiting for a dream that occurred after it.

The child touched the shoulder of the Waker, and she smiled at him.

The Sleeper the child did not say farewell to.

There was much to fear in the Sleeper. He had haunted Zahayr’s nights for months—a faceless being of shadow and light whose part in the worldplay had not yet been fixed. He featured prominently in the dream of falling.

Zahayr touched the two red beads that hung in his hair. They were a mark of his gift—he saw the worldplay in his dreams before it happened. That was why the people had given him permission to go to the Aleani and then to his cousins in the west, the tribes whose anger and rage seeped into the Heartspeak even as far away as the Crib.

And now he had come to the city of white bones.

Du Fenlan, the Sleeper and the Waker called it.

He raised his hand and pointed.

“Thehr,” he said. It hurt his jaw and throat to speak, and he wished for the hundredth time that the Sleeper and the Waker could feel the Heartspeak. Their eyes followed his hand. A dome of white stone jutted from the side of the mountain below them, less than a mile away. They would reach it just as sunset descended into dusk. They would clamber silently over its top and drop into its doorway.

There the dream of white bones ended.

The Sleeper swallowed. He’d been to this place before, and the memories were unpleasant to him.

“No one down there will recognize us, Zahayr. I don’t know if we can protect you.”

Zahayr smiled, though the action cracked the skin around his lips. He didn’t tax his throat by speaking. He had a feeling he would need to speak often in the city of white bones.

The Sleeper shook his head. The Waker squeezed his hand, and then the two of them set off, leading Zahayr down from the ridge, toward the end of a dream and the mystery beyond.