Soul Weaver: A Fantasy Novel Read Free Page A

side-street and then cut down an alley way. She took every turning she found, but she could hear the pounding of boots on her heels. The Suncloaks shouted for her to stop, and then they stopped shouting and just chased after her. How could she have been so stupid?
    Shel turned another corner and collided with a broad-chested man. Bouncing back from the impact, she fell painfully on her backside and sprawled in the street. Looking up, Shel felt her pounding heart skip a terrified beat. Of course, the man she’d run into was another Suncloak. Even before the two guardsmen pursuing her rounded the corner, he’d lifted his cudgel in warning and grabbed the scrambling girl by one wrist.
    “Why the hurry, little girl?” he demanded with a sneer.
    “Let me go!” Shel struggled against his grip, but it was hopeless. “Let me go, let me go!”
    “Shut up,” said the Suncloak. He lifted his cudgel and the last thing Shel saw was the heavy wooden club coming at her face. Then there was pain and blackness.
Chapter 2 - The City Dungeons
    The darkness receded a bit but didn’t go away. The air was stuffy and dank, but cool. Blinking, Shel pushed herself up to a sitting position on the damp, straw-covered floor. She thought it was straw, anyway. She could barely see. She squinted and blinked against the oppressive darkness, trying to figure out where she was. Then she remembered.
    The fat man, the purse – it was gone now – and the Suncloaks. Shel rubbed at her head, feeling the painful lump near the hairline. There was little doubt where she was. The Solstice dungeons.
    It wasn’t a place most people ever saw. Shel didn’t even know where the dungeons were located in the city. Most people never thought about them. Of course everyone knew the dungeons existed; they were hardly some dark, hidden secret. Even the Great and Glorious Empire of the Long Summer hadn’t succeeded in completely erasing crime. Shel knew that first hand, and not simply by virtue of her life as a thief.
    Shel didn’t want to follow that line of thought, but in these dismal surroundings it was impossible for her not to think of her father. A violent and hateful drunk, he had never been satisfied with their life in the small village of Vallen in the northern foothills. Where most all the citizens of the empire were content to work and contribute to the greatest society the world had ever known, Shel’s father was a malcontent and a troublemaker. He had also beaten Shel and her mother in his drunken rages, and the day he was carted off in chains by a company of Suncloaks had been one of the happiest days of Shel’s life.
    Until she had learned to steal, that is. The Great and Glorious Empire of the Long Summer might offer plenty of opportunities for even the lowest of its citizens, but Shel had long since discovered that nothing truly compared to the life of a thief. She was no fool, and she saw the heavy burden of taxes on her fellow citizens. She was no beggar, not some layabout who thought the rest of the world should just hand her a decent living. But there was work, and there was work. Shel had learned a trade, but it was one she enjoyed and was even proud of – it just happened to be one that most of the empire frowned upon.
    Most of the people of the Great and Glorious Empire were farmers. Agriculture fed the people, but Shel had seen how hard that life could be and rejected it in unconscious imitation of her disreputable father. Farmers struggled under the weight of taxation, but they also waged a constant battle against small animals and natural poachers. But no one ever suggested sticking the rabbits and groundhogs in the city dungeon. That was how Shel had come to think of herself: like the rabbit, who nibbled away at the gardens of the empire.
    But it had landed her here just the same. She was a long way from Vallen, but it seemed she would share her father’s ignoble fate anyway. The dungeon was chill and dank, its atmosphere thick with a