Soulwoven Read Free Page A

fire and dragons and screams and let his ears listen for trouble the way he’d done in the shadows a hundred times since he’d been old enough to sneak out on his own.
    He heard nothing. Just the wind, whistling along the Eld and between the pillars of the Old Temple.
    Cole stopped a few feet from the guards. The darkness underneath them was a thick, viscous pool the black-cherry color of drying blood. His hand went to his hip, expecting to find two daggers he’d been given long ago, and came up empty. He hadn’t anticipated violence, hadn’t anticipated bodies.
    “Lit, we should go.”
    His brother stopped with his foot on the first step, facing the dark, open archway of the temple with the light of the moon on his face.
    “Ryse is in there.”
    “She’ll be fine.” Ryse was a bloody soulweaver . If she wasn’t fine, there sure as hell wouldn’t be anything they could do about it. Whoever had killed those guards, whoever was confident or stupid enough to just slap the Temple in the face like that, he and his brother didn’t want any part of them.
    Cole looked back. Behind them, the street looked empty, cold, wet , safe. Like it always had.
    When he turned forward again, Litnig was already walking into the temple. And Cole couldn’t let his brother go alone.
    So he shut his eyes, told the smarter half of his brain to shove off, and followed.
    The temple gates hung open and abandoned, creaking on rusty hinges in a draft that moaned cold and heavy out of the temple proper. Cole crept through them behind his brother into a large, domed chamber with a hole in its roof and a sparkling cistern in its center. Fading, chipped frescoes of stories from humanity’s past covered the ceiling—Mennaia’s Awakening, the Exodus, the Discovery of the Sea. Extinguished torches sat black and abandoned in their sconces, scattered around the circumference of the dome.
    Cole had never seen the torches like that. They were supposed to light the main room all night long. There should have been people and life there. After the dancing, after the drinking, after the fires, the faithful prayed and visited the graves of their ancestors on the spring equinox. Every year there was a gathering in the gardens behind the temple. He should’ve been able to hear it.
    But there was only the wind and the hollow echo of his footsteps.
    The doors in the north wall of the room snapped back and forth against the chains that held them open. Cole’s whole body stood on pins and needles.
    Litnig slipped through the open doors, and Cole followed him down a short, dark hallway.
    It’ll be fine, he thought. Everything’ll be fine. It was probably just thieves after something in the temple. They probably got what they wanted and got out already. It was probably just the guards who got offed. It was—
    When they reached the gardens, there were bodies everywhere.
    They lay scattered over the greenery that extended from the temple’s back steps, stretched between rows of headstones and statues beyond, sprawled halfway out of mausoleums in all states of decay. He saw haphazard piles of bones that looked like collapsed skeletons, rotting corpses with scraps of flesh hanging from their limbs, and bloated, putrescent things still vaguely recognizable as people. Fresher bodies lay on the ground in their funeral finery, and others looked new, brand-new, with dark red bloodstains soaking the simple clothes of everyday life upon them. The earth was torn in places, like the corpses had been dug up, and some of the old bodies were covered in the guts of the new. Cole bent over, and his stomach emptied itself all over his feet.
    He had no memories to match this, except for the gut-wrenching feeling he’d had staring into the eyes of the dragon in his dream.
    When he straightened again, he noticed that a few of the bodies were moving, twitching, alive, and that Litnig was still walking forward, heading into the graveyard with his body as tense as a horse in a