Soul Weaver: A Fantasy Novel (4 page)

More shouting, and the pounding of feet. Shel tried to speak, tried to tell Rez to let her down, but her throat felt tight and dry and she could make no sound. In her unfocused vision, brown and tan and dun gave way to pale yellows and greens. Then everything faded to a colorless blur that slowly went black.

For the second time that day – was it the same day? – Shel woke up and didn’t know where she was.

She was lying on a rough mattress stuffed with straw. She could feel the straw, poking against the fabric and sometimes piercing it to jab into her back.

Her mouth was dry. Shel licked at her lips and tried to work some moisture into her mouth, then swallowed. She could see clearly now, but her view was limited to the wooden beams of a low ceiling over the bed. Light streamed into the room from somewhere, a window she couldn’t see. She was out of the dungeons, but where was she?

It took more of an effort than she expected to sit up, and as soon as she did her head began swimming again. Propping herself up on the uncomfortable mattress with one hand, she put her other hand to her forehead and blinked against the dizziness.

“Easy now,” said a woman’s voice from beside her. Shel turned her head and saw a young woman sitting beside her bed wearing a look of gentle concern. The woman was perhaps five years older than Shel, still young and quite beautiful. Honey colored hair draped itself luxuriantly over her shoulders and her eyes were a deep, rich shade of green. They almost seemed to glow with an inner light.

The thought of glowing eyes snapped Shel back to reality. The memories came crashing back, startling the young thief. She recoiled from the woman, scrambling back across the mattress to get away.

“Whoa,” said the blonde woman, leaning over the bed and taking hold of Shel’s shoulders with both hands. “Take it easy, I said. Relax. You're okay. You're safe.”

Shel stopped trying to get away, but still viewed the strange woman with suspicion. Her eyes darted around the room, taking in her surroundings. Stone walls, so very like the cold dungeon but dappled with sunlight streaming through the window at her back. Wooden ceiling, wooden door. Thin carpets overlapping on the stone floor, mismatched and ragged. Safe? But where?

“Where am I?”

The woman frowned, but it didn’t seem to be an expression of anger or even disappointment. More like concern. “Who are you?” Shel asked the woman.

“My name is Kal,” said the honey-haired beauty. “And you're Shel, right?”

Shel narrowed her eyes.

“Rez told us your name,” Kal explained with a gentle smile. “Relax, Shel. Truly, you're among friends. No one will harm you here.”

“And where is here?” asked Shel, her suspicions not allayed. She couldn’t understand what had happened to her in the dungeon. That man, the one with those marks…Shel’s hand flew to her throat unbidden, and her fingers grasped at the collar of her shirt. Relieved that no one had undressed her, she dropped her hand and tried to cover the movement by smoothing the front of her shirt.

Kal watched her with a puzzled frown and said, “I'm afraid I can’t tell you that. Not yet, anyway. Rez brought you to us because he didn’t know what else to do with you. It’s good you weren’t awake. We try to keep this place secret.”

“You're not exactly reassuring me, you know that?” Shel glanced around the room again. It didn’t have the look of a cell. On the other hand, it hardly looked like someone’s comfortable spare bedroom either. There was no furniture save the mattress, which rested on the bare floor. Kal had been sitting cross-legged on one of the mismatched carpets. The whole room had a makeshift quality and no sense of permanence. Shel looked at the honey-haired Kal again, a new suspicion taking root in her gut.

“I'm in your gang’s secret hideout,” she guessed.

One of Kal’s eyebrows lifted, and then the woman laughed. It was an easy laugh, and genuine. She had let go of Shel’s shoulders, but now she reached out with one hand and rested it on the girl’s arm. “I can see why he brought you here,” she said.

Shel nodded, more in response to her own inner thoughts than to anything Kal had said. It made sense. Rez was a member of one of the gangs. There weren’t that many, even in so large a city, but there were a few. Thieves that banded together tended to live longer. But, Shel suddenly remembered, there were other criminal activities besides thieving. And she had never heard of a weaver thief.

Shel looked at Kal, studying the woman. For her part, the honey-haired Kal didn’t seem to mind the scrutiny. She sat back down beside the straw mattress and waited patiently. There was a gentleness about her that Shel couldn’t deny. She didn’t think this woman was a murderer; but what about Rez? He’d said that man in the torture chamber was his friend, but he had slapped the man – hard – and wanted him to do something he didn’t want to. Who was Rez? What sort of gang was he in?

“Are you…” Shel hesitated. She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know how many people were in this gang, how many potential enemies she might face if they turned out to be unfriendly after all. But there was really only one way to find out. “Are you thieves?”

Kal laughed again. Her green eyes sparkled with mirth. “Yes, Shel,” she said when her laughter subsided. “What did you think, you’d fallen in with a pack of murderers and scoundrels? We're thieves.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Shel said, though she was still not certain. Something about Rez had made her very uneasy. Kal was pleasant and friendly, but Shel couldn’t shake a sense of foreboding. She didn’t understand what had happened to her back in the dungeon, but it obviously had to do with that strange, battered man – and with Rez. She decided to keep her eyes sharp. “So when do I meet the rest of the gang, then?”

“Soon enough, I think,” said Kal, and then her expression turned serious. “You're not injured or sick or anything. Actually, we're really not sure what happened to you…Well, Rez might have an idea but he’s being even more tight-lipped than usual. We're all very curious about it, actually. Maybe you could…”

Shel shook her head. “I don’t know,” she admitted. It was possible Kal knew more than she let on, but Shel was finding it difficult not to trust the easy-smiling woman.

“Well, that’s okay too,” Kal said with only a trace of disappointment, quickly masked with another good-natured chuckle. “You'll find that most people don’t really know what’s happening to them.”

“That’s an odd thing to say.”

“Not really.” Clearing her throat with a suddenly guarded expression, Kal changed the subject. “The rest of the gang are eager to meet you, you know. It’s not often Rez brings someone new to the hideout. The place is abuzz with gossip; everybody wants to know what he sees in you.”

“Rez is your leader?”

Kal regarded her slyly and didn’t answer right away. “You'll want to get cleaned up first, I imagine,” she said instead. “Forgive me for saying so, but you stink like the pits. That’s a stay in the dungeons for you. Nasty places. If you feel up to moving, I'll take you down to the baths. No one’s down there this time of day so you'll have some privacy…”

Kal saw the suspicion returning to Shel’s face and sighed. “Yes,” she said. “Rez is our leader. And I'm sure he’d rather explain everything to you himself.”

“He told you not to talk to me?”

“What? Of course not!” Kal laughed again, but it wasn’t the same easy-going laughter from before. There was an edge to it, a self-consciousness. “He just doesn’t like anyone to steal his thunder, that’s all. Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.”

***

Kal led Shel down a cramped, stone corridor to a narrow stair that twisted around on itself in a steep descent. They passed no one else on their way to the bathing chamber, which was three floors below the room in which Shel had woken. The air was cooler down here, and Shel suspected it might be underground.

From the hallways and the staircase she had guessed they were in some kind of castle or fortress. Not that it told her much; the countryside was littered with forts and castles, some occupied but most long-abandoned. There had been no need for a standing army in the Great and Glorious Empire of the Long Summer since…

Well, Shel didn’t know how long. Centuries. Possibly as long as the Long Summer. Shel had never really thought about things like this before. As Kal led her into the baths, she wondered what other things she had never considered.

The bath chamber was a long room with a low, arched ceiling. Dark stained stone pillars – some of them crumbling in places – supported the ceiling. Between the columns, in two rows along the sides of the room, were the baths. They were thick-walled bowls of copper large enough for a grown man to stretch out in, and deep enough to hold two feet of water. The tubs sat sunken halfway into the flagstone floor and were fed by large copper pipes that jutted from the wall above the head of each tub.

A constant cloud of steam hovered beneath the low ceiling, and warm mist spread tendrils throughout the chamber. Wooden racks sat at the foot of many of the tubs, laden with towels and other bathing implements. There were long-handled wooden brushes with stiff bristles, and jars of scented oils.

Kal went to one of the nearer tubs on the left-hand side of the room, Shel trailing behind her. The honey-haired thief went to the wall and turned a large, stiff iron wheel that stuck out from the wall above the copper pipe. There was a gurgling sound, and after a moment steaming hot water began to issue from the mouth of the pipe. It splashed into the tub in a growing torrent, rapidly filling the sunken tub. Kal shut off the flow, which dwindled to a trickle and then to an intermittent drip, when the tub was three quarters of the way full.

“I'll leave you to it,” said Kal, turning away from the wall. Her smile was meant to reassure Shel. “I'll just be right outside. No one will bother you. Take as long as you like.”

Kal left the room, closing the heavy wooden door behind her. Shel looked at the door for a long moment before turning back to the tub. She could feel heat rising from the clear water. She went to the rack at the foot of the tub, selecting one of the clay jars at random and pulling the cork stopper free to sniff at the oil. The scent was lavender mixed with something faint she didn’t recognize. Shrugging to herself, Shel poured a measure of the oil into her bath and then replaced the jar on its shelf.

Glancing again at the door, Shel undressed quickly. While she did so, she looked around the massive, low-ceiling bath chamber. At the far end there was a window, or half a window, right at the ceiling. The semi-circular opening was crisscrossed with an intricate pattern of narrow metalwork. Weak sunlight filtered through the filigree, dispersing in the thick steam collected under the sloping ceiling.

Shel folded her clothes and set them on the top shelf of the wooden rack, beside a short stack of towels. Nude, she stepped into the water. It was very hot, almost scalding. It felt wonderful. She looked down to be sure of her footing as she lowered herself into the bath.

Pausing, Shel frowned. When she looked down, she saw the marks.

Her birthmarks had always been a mystery to Shel. Tiny, irregular discolorations of her skin circled her waist like a loose belt. Irregularly shaped, no two were alike except in coloration: a dull and faded blue-gray like an old tattoo. One resembled a crooked spiral; another had the shape of a star. Yet another, an inch or so below her belly button, was a hollow circle with two curling lines extending from top and bottom. The line of marks rose from the center, following the curve of her hips and extending around to the small of her back. They were regularly spaced. Shel had kept them hidden all her life.

She had never known why she was so self-conscious over her odd birthmarks. No one had ever seen them except for her parents. It wasn’t just the placement, though of course that was a part of her body Shel had never shown anyone.

The marks were strange. Despite no two being alike, there was an undeniable regularity and pattern to the markings. They set her apart. They meant something, Shel had always been sure of that.

They were very much like the thick markings she had seen on the dying man in the dungeon. What did it mean?

Eager for answers to her many questions, Shel pushed thoughts of her enigmatic birthmarks – as well as the dead man and the strange thing he had done – out of her mind and hurried through her bath. When she was finished, she toweled herself off and dressed quickly. Not only was she impatient to meet the rest of this gang and get some answers, she also feared Kal coming back into the bath chamber and seeing the marks. She had never shown them to anyone; after recognizing the same marks on the dying man, she was doubly determined to keep them secret.

Kal seemed surprised that Shel’s bath had been so short, but offered no comment. “You must be hungry,” was all she said.

Kal took Shel back up the stairs, ascending a single floor before leading the way into a wide hall with a high ceiling. Shel followed, looking this way and that and peering through every open door they passed. She saw a series of chambers, most of them quite large and empty, before Kal stopped before a wide-open double door that opened onto a massive hall filled with long, wooden tables.

Half a dozen men sat at one table on the right, talking and laughing boisterously over their meals or drinking thirstily from carved wooden tankards of dark brown ale. At another table on the other side of the room, a single man sat alone wrapped in a heavy, hooded cloak. The cowl was pulled low over this man’s face, hiding it in shadow. While the six laughing men at the first table fell silent and stared with unabashed curiosity as Shel followed Kal into the great hall, the hooded man showed no sign that he had even noticed them.

Opposite the entryway, a much shorter table – long enough for three on each side – sat perpendicular to all the others. The table was laden with serving platters filled with steaming meats and vegetables, tureens of soup, and several moisture-beaded pitchers of wine, ale, water, and juice. Seated behind the copious spread was Rez. The tall, slender man set down his pewter tankard – a finer cup than the carved wood the others used – and wiped a bit of foam from his upper lip as he watched Shel and Kal approach.