Soulwoven: Exile

Chapter Seventeen

~17~

Seventy days before the destruction of Nutharion City

Litnig’s shoulders ached. So did his back, and his arms, and his hands—especially his hands. He swung a pickaxe at blue-black rock in front of him, crumbling it bit by bit into a basket. Several hundred feet of sky-blue ice dripped water on his head, and behind him a frigid river, its undulations a flat shade of slate gray, raced from the shadow of the ice into a steep valley.

Maia squatted on the other side of the water, working a bellows the size of his torso and heating a thick bed of coals in an iron container. Scattered around her were an anvil, a forge, a crucible, tongs and hammers, and other tools he didn’t recognize. When he’d asked how the objects had gotten under a glacier a hundred miles north of Du Fenlan, Maia had shaken her head and told him that he didn’t ask the right questions.

“The right question,” she’d said with a smile, “is ‘What am I to do with them?’”

Then she’d slammed her spear through his midsection so hard that it broke through his back.

He remembered the shock of it, remembered the horrible sucking feeling of the spear pulling free of him, remembered falling to his knees with the sky gray and formless above him and the roar of the glacier’s meltwater in his ears.

And then souls had wrapped around him, and the River had pulled toward and through him. The wound in his stomach had closed, and Maia had jerked him to his feet and told him that he had much to learn.

He’d learned a lot since then.

The pickaxe rose and fell. When the basket at his feet was full, Maia would heat the ore until it melted, and the metal they were searching for would separate from the waste. Eventually, she’d create enough of it that he could beat it into the shape of a weapon and imbue it with souls.

The glowing blades he’d fought with and against in Sherdu’il haunted his memories.

Now, with Maia’s help, he was going to make one.

She cursed loudly from the bellows, and the mechanism’s breathing stopped. He swung the pickaxe one final time, then turned to see what had happened. Maia was bent over the big brown folds of the machine, fiddling with something. He couldn’t see what.

“Come here, Litnig Eshati,” she called. “I do not have enough hands for this.”

He let the pickaxe fall.

It was easy to see the damage once he was next to her. One of the folds of the bellows had torn. Maia had a strip of replacement canvas ready, but it was too long for her to hold in place and sew on at the same time. She tapped her foot impatiently as Litnig picked it up and pressed it against the torn fold.

Once it was in place, she went to work.

Maia sewed with a steel needle as long as Litnig’s index finger and as thick as a finishing nail, trailing dense black thread in and out of the wounded machine. Her fingers moved with confidence, as if she’d done such repairs a thousand times before.

“Maia?” Litnig said as she worked her way closer to him. The coals on the other side of the bellows made the air sweltering. His face was already slick, and he could smell the musk of Maia’s sweat.

She grunted in reply. Their hands were nearly next to one another.

“What did you do, in Duenel?”

Her fingers brushed over his, and her body pressed against his back as he ducked beneath her to let her finish joining the top of the patch to the cloth beneath it.