The Soul Weaver (28 page)

“Hold on. I'll get us out of here.”

After a little while, I couldn't hear him any more. Not even a moan.

“Hey, are you all right? Paulo!” No amount of shouting or rattling my chains roused him. I almost broke my wrists jerking on the cursed manacles.

The Guardian despised Paulo. I remembered his question to the Source about insolent strangers. I had to get Paulo away before the bastard killed him. But I had nothing to work with. My cell was absolutely bare. Not a spoon, not a pebble, not anything to use. No weak links in my chains. My wrists were already raw.

That left only one way to do anything in a hurry, no matter how much I hated it. I focused my attention on the shackles that bound me to the wall, hearing the words the Lord Notole would have used to teach me:
Mold your thoughts around the iron. See it. Feel it. Hear it. Take in its essence of brittle strength, of holding, of restraint and connection. Now reach for power . . . draw it together . . . shape it to your desire . . . thrust it between the links and wrench them apart. . . .

Nothing happened.

Pitiful beggar . . . Try again.
I worked harder, shoving aside my worries about Paulo and maintainers and Singlars, concentrating only on the work, drawing together everything I knew of such enchantments, reaching for whatever power I could find while keeping my back against the door in my mind, and my thoughts as far as possible from the Lords of Zhev'Na. No better result.

Demonfire, how could I have nothing? Maybe sorcery didn't work in the Bounded or it was dampened by some binding enchantment around the cell or the dungeon. Surely I'd know whether or not something like mordemar was hampering me; it would have eaten away half my mind as it had done to the Dar'Nethi slaves in Zhev'Na.

A faint moan came from beyond the cell door.

“Paulo! Come on, answer me! Wake up!” If sheer will and effort could have broken chains or pulled down a stone wall, I would have been free at once.

Silence.

Try again.
Dropping to my knees and closing my eyes, I delved deep inside my mind, clawing for any scrap of power. Something had to be there. I was Dar'Nethi. I tore through my stores of knowledge and experience, pushed past the evidence of my senses, tossed aside sounds and images and memories, seeking the power born in me because I was my father's son, the power nurtured and grown in me because I was the Lords' favored pupil.

Deep . . . very deep . . . something huge and unidentifiable began to expand within me, crushing my lungs until I could not breathe. Swelling my chest until I felt as wide as Ob. Stretching my skin to the verge of ripping. Filling my veins until I must surely spray blood from my fingertips. My eyes felt pushed out of their sockets, and my head seemed to split in two until I could see myself cringing in terror against the wall of my cell while still feeling the enormous pressure within.

Horrified, certain that this was exactly what I had feared, some intrusive power of the Lords, I fought to push the monstrous thing back where I'd found it. Control. I needed control.

It required every thread of will and strength I could muster to bury the monster again. But, after much too long a time, bury it I did.

“Gods and demons, Paulo, I can't . . .” I was on all fours, my head drooping, sweat dripping from my face and neck. My breath came in wheezing gasps; I could scarcely even whisper. “Wake up, Paulo. Please, wake up.”

Somewhere amid the slowing beats of my heart sounded a dull thud, accompanied by a soft groan. Hanging onto the wall, knees wobbling, I got to my feet again, strained forward, and peered out of my cell.

Paulo couldn't possibly answer me. Two of the Guardian's thugs had unlocked him from the suspended chain and thrown him on the floor between the flogging posts. Bloody stripes crisscrossed his back and shoulders. He had curled into a ball, and even as I watched, the taller of the two guards aimed his heavy boot at Paulo's head.

“Stop,” I shouted. “I command you. Leave him alone.”

The tall fellow paused, his jaw slack and doltish. A second maintainer, who had legs like tree stumps and clawed hands the size of a sheep's haunch, nudged him. “Go tell the Guardian the impostor's awake.”

As the taller maintainer trotted out of sight, the claw-handed fellow grinned at me and kicked Paulo in the gut. Paulo's body jerked backward, and he retched blood.

“Leave off!” I said. “You're killing him.”

He did it again.

A mistake to let him see I cared about his victim. I had to get control here. “How dare you disobey me? Don't you believe I'm your king?”

“Guardian says you're not.” He wiped his piglike snout with the back of his hand. “He'd never put our king down here. Kings are fine folk.”

I babbled about greed and fear and motives, but the dolt ignored me and shuffled out of view. After the distinct sound of water sloshing in a stone cistern, he came back into sight, carrying a pail, which he emptied over Paulo.

Paulo jerked, choking and coughing, wrapping his arms about his gut. With his huge paws, the guard caught Paulo's wrists and dragged him onto his back. Paulo's face was battered, his eyes swollen shut, blood running freely from his nose and mouth. He breathed in tight, irregular gasps.

“Now this is a sorry sight.” The Guardian strolled into my range of vision. He bent down to get a closer look, shaking his head. “The impudent lad is feeling a bit pinched, it seems. Well, we'll relieve him of his burdens soon enough. And you”—he approached my cell and peered through the bars—“you who dared violate the Source—”

“Have you told your people of the garden?” I said. “Do they know what marvels lie so close to this deadness you've left them? Do they know of the light? Or are you the only one who sees the jeweled cave, a wonder such as I've not seen in three worlds?”

“You know nothing of our life or our laws. You are an impostor, and your mouth is filled with lies.”

“I see. So you
do
keep it all to yourself. You protect your pleasures well, just like you keep the good food and fine linens. And there are so many pleasures . . . Tell me, Maintainer, does this Guardian come down here to watch the floggings? Does he smile and lick his lips when you torture Singlars in the name of safety? Does he go to watch when Singlars are thrown over the Edge?”

“Silence, impostor!” He did those things. I could see it in his face. And behind him the two maintainers were nodding their heads as if such pastimes made perfect sense.

“You can't bear to give up your sovereignty, for you enjoy the nasty bits so very much. The king might not agree with what you've made of this place, or he might not let you watch any more. Have you told your people what the Source says concerning the Bounded King?”

All I wanted to do was to keep them from killing Paulo, but my mouth wouldn't stop. “Did you tell them that he was just out of boyhood, that his hair was shot with fire, or that his hands bore scars of bitterness that would never fade?” I held up my palms, burned on the day I became a Lord of Zhev'Na. “Look on these, Guardian, and tell me I'm not your king!”

He snarled and averted his face. “I see no king. Only an insolent boy. It doesn't matter, anyway. I'll neither kill you nor send you away. Those things the Source has forbidden me. But I was not told to feed you, and if you're locked up here for trespassing our laws then that's your affair, not mine.”

“So you'll never allow them their rightful king?”

“We don't need a king.
I
care for the Bounded. The Singlars listen to me, and they are better off for it.”

He snatched a whip from the maintainer's clawed hand, and the air whistled and cracked, as he laid another bloody stripe across Paulo's arm and shoulder. “If you are a king, then show us your strength, traveler. The Source has told me that our king will shape the destiny of all bounded worlds. If he cannot fight a weak Guardian like me, then that seems very unlikely.”

He tossed the whip back to the tall maintainer and pointed to Paulo. “Have your way with this one; just make sure he's dead at the end of it. Leave our ‘king' where he is. Then, seal this dungeon so that no one will ever come here again.”

“What of the other prisoners, Guardian?” asked one of the brutes.

“They can be his subjects.”

His laughter echoed long after he was gone, until it was drowned out by the sounds of Paulo's beating. I tried to make them stop, to command them, to bribe them. I babbled about the garden and the jeweled cave, about the other worlds and the Breach, which they called the Unbounded, and of what I believed about the miracle of their existence. They would pause and listen carefully, then shake their heads and go back to their fun.

Once, Paulo stirred as if he might get up, and I threw a screaming fit to distract the maintainers' attention, but my friend made it no farther than his knees before the short one spotted his movement and kicked him sprawling again.

“Sorry.” That was the only word he spoke in that awful time. Gods . . .
sorry.
As if he were responsible. . . .

Before very long, Paulo was too far gone to give them sport, and they began to discuss how they would finish him. They laughed and stretched him out on his back, tracing a shallow, bloody circle on his heaving chest with their knife blades. They would cut a little deeper each time, they said, until they could take the heart out of him.

“Paulo!” I begged. “Get up, Paulo. Fight them!” He tried, but could not. His face was unrecognizable, his hands pulp, his breathing ragged.

I willed him to wake up. To find strength.
Paulo, don't die.

Their gross, callow ugliness set me tearing at my bonds again. I saw in them the same things I'd seen—and felt—in Zhev'Na: the enjoyment of pain, of fear, of horror and death. I'd seen it in both worlds and in myself, and I loathed it with a fury that burst from me like a firestorm. This was Zhev'Na all over again, but I was powerless. . . .

“No!” A mad fury exploded through me. This was Paulo, who had made me care about him when I cared about no one in the universe. He and my mother had saved my soul. My mother might lie dead from whatever wickedness had followed us to Windham—I could do nothing for her right now—but if I could summon one scrap of strength or power to prevent it, Paulo would not suffer the same fate.

And then the monstrous thing lurking in my depths broke free. Again my chest swelled and my blood surged, and again my head split until I could see myself collapsed in a limp heap at the extent of my chains.
Paulo! Get up and fight. You will not die here. I won't let you.

Ready to summon power, I took a deep breath . . . and almost fainted from the pain of it.
Ribs broken . . . three, four at least. Don't do that again.
Suddenly my hands were screaming at me . . . worse than the ribs and the lacerated back, worse than my aching gut and my throbbing face, so swollen I could barely see the knife hanging in the air above me . . . ready to cut out my heart.

I felt the maintainer's neck crack between my legs, and with the last of my strength I forced the other one's knife into his own belly and jerked upward until I felt the satisfying rip.

One more squeeze with the legs to make sure . . . one more twist of the knife to make sure . . .
I shoved the corpse off my chest and struggled to get air into my lungs.

For a long while I lay on the stone floor of the dungeon, fighting to stay alive.
Breathe, don't think. Rest. What I wouldn't give for my father's healing touch! Don't sleep. It's death if you sleep . . . maybe death if you don't. Sit up. That will ease the breathing . . . ah, demonfire, how can it hurt so much?

Carefully, I eased myself up until I was leaning on the flogging post. I couldn't use my hands. They'd crushed them early on with wooden clubs until I fainted from it, until I begged them to cut them off as it wouldn't be half so bad. But then they stomped on them instead, saying as how the impostor was plotting to destroy the Source, and they would see him stopped. Breathing was a little easier, as long as I kept it shallow.

Ought to stop all this blood. It's going to leave me dry as an ale barrel at midsummer.
But I couldn't see where all of it was coming from. Everything was blurry.

But I couldn't figure out why I had to unlock my cell. I was already out. I'd come out to fight . . . to save Paulo . . .