by Barb Hendee
Wynn heard the study door slam shut.
She held her place for a few shaky breaths and then peered around the stairwell's turn. No one stood upon the landing, though she heard voices again inside High-Tower's study. The three spoke too softly, so she crept up the stairs, crouching low near the narrow space between the floor and door to listen.
"The war happened!" High-Tower growled in Dwarvish. "You know it… we know it. But now we have the means to prove it. And something that—"
"You will not find it in those rotted texts!" the gravel voice roared. "All you will find is ruin and—"
"And the shame of the Hassäg'kreigi?" High-Tower finished.
A moment of silence followed, but Wynn was already lost in confusion.
She couldn't make out that final word. Was it some kind of name or a dwarven clan or tribe? She struggled to think of root words from which it had been formed.
The root chas'san, if she recalled correctly, meant "passage," and hassäg sounded like a verbal noun in the vocative. Something about «passages» — no, someone making passage or using a passage—a «walker»? And chregh—"stone" — she knew well enough. In the vocative plural it might be pronounced kreigi.
"Stonewalkers?" Wynn whispered.
Then she flinched at her own voice, but no one inside seemed to have noticed.
"Even some of our own people are sick of your secretive ways," High-Tower growled, "especially the rare few who still know the myth of Bäalâle Seatt."
"Watch your tongue, brother!" the younger voice countered. "Thallûhearag was no myth!"
Wynn's eyes popped wide. High-Tower had a younger brother? That was why the younger visitor had looked strangely familiar.
"Spare me your misguided faith!" the domin answered. "And don't speak to me again of that thing. I do not share your belief. I do not accept you or it. You do not even know that false abomination's real name… and no one should, if he ever existed!"
"I believe," the same voice answered.
"Faith that denies fact is fanaticism," High-Tower spit back. "Not faith at all, when it tries to hide from truth. I will find truth. If you have no stomach for it go back to praying in your crypts."
Dead silence trailed on. Wynn finally rose to her knees, leaning an n s, leaniear close to the door.
"I said get out!" High-Tower shouted.
Wynn recoiled in panic. With no time to gain her feet, she scrambled down the stairs on all fours. One hand slipped and she tumbled over.
Wynn flopped and slid along the stairwell's downward curve until her trailing knee smacked a step. She yelped before she could stop herself, and her back hit the outer wall. Finally at a stop, she rolled to sit up and dropped another step. Her rump hit stone as she grabbed her aching knee. Panic-stricken, she bit her lip and stared up the flight of steps, waiting to be caught.
No one came down. She never even heard the study door open. And another tense moment passed.
Wynn finally found the courage to rise and limp upward, but not as quietly as she wanted. She paused, listening at the study's door, but heard no voices.
"Yes?" High-Tower growled from within. "Well, come in or be off."
With everything else she'd done to lower the domin's opinion of her, the last thing she needed was to be caught snooping about. She gently gripped the handle and slowly opened the door.
Domin High-Tower sat behind his desk, scribbling on a scrap of paper, as if merely at work. But his rough features were flushed, and perspiration glistened upon his brow beneath the wiry tufts of his gray-streaked reddish hair.
Domin High-Tower was alone.
Wynn looked about the room. Where had the other two gone?
The only way out of the room was the door. Even so, no one had come down, and the other way led up to the tower's next level—which was the top. Had they slipped out, and gone up, and she hadn't heard them? But why and to where?
She stepped in, still uncertain if she'd been overheard outside.
It was uncommon for High-Tower's people to join the Guild of Sagecraft—and some even considered it an unworthy choice. He was the only dwarf among sages that she'd ever known. High-Tower never spoke of this, but Wynn guessed he had suffered over the decision of his chosen path. He finally looked up and let out a growling sigh.
"Well, what is it?" he asked.
Perhaps he'd been so caught up in arguing with his visitors that he hadn't heard her outside.
"News that couldn't wait," she answered quickly. "Today's folio wasn't returned. Master Shilwise's scribes didn't finish, and he refused to turn over work to our messengers… he kept the drafts as well."
High-Tower stood up. "What?"
"There is nothing you can do," Wynn said, but he was already rushing for a cloak thrown over the spare chair. "The shop has been closed and locked for the night."
"Closed?" High-Tower's black pellet eyes widened as he set his jaw.
Wynn had no wish to upset him more than he already was. Neither did she care to be the only target available for his ire.
"All the scribes have gone home," she added quickly. "But the drafts should be safe for one night. Master Shilwise's shop is in a good neighborhood."
High-Tower's gaze drifted—not to the stairs or the door, nor did it wander about the room. It fixed upon the study's northwest side, and Wynn followed it.
Through one deep-set window, she saw the keep's northwest wall. But upon a second check she found High-Tower wasn't looking out the window. He was staring at the study's curved wall to the left of it—in a direct line with that outer wall.
"Fools and fanatics!" he hissed to himself.
He seemed to come to his senses, glancing at Wynn. His voice rumbled like a distant sea storm closing upon the city.
"This is the last work Shilwise will ever see from us! I must tell Sykion."
High-Tower headed for the study's open door, sidling sideways to get through it, and Wynn felt his heavy steps through the floor stones. She was lost in her own jumbled thoughts as the domin vanished down the curving stairs.
Thallûhearag… Hassäg'kreigi… Bäalâle Seatt…
That last was a myth that the world had forgotten, though Wynn knew better.
During travels in the Elven Territories, Magiere had seen the distant memories of Most Aged Father, reaching all the way back to the «mythical» war. The Enemy's forces had laid siege to a dwarven stronghold called Bäalâle Seatt. Both sides had perished, though no one then ever learned what happened there. The place itself was forgotten as much as any of the Forgotten History.
But within the domin's chamber had been two who knew it. And what of those other Dwarvish terms?
Wynn studied the wall to the window's left, whispering again, "Stonewalkers?"
Where had High-Tower's two visitors gone?
Chane Andraso woke from dormancy with a start. Dusk had fallen, and he had not even stirred at the eighth bell marking the end of the day. He should gather his cloak and head fast for the Gild and Ink, the scribe shop of one Master Shilwise.
It had not taken him long to map out the pattern of the scriptoriums being utilized. The guild had hired five shops and rotated them on the same daily basis: the Upright Quill, the Gild and Ink, the Inkwell, the Feather & Parchment, and Four Scribes in House. But as he sat up in his shabby bed, his mind still lingered on the previous night.
He had seen Wynn for the first time in well over a year.
His existence had once been so intricately connected with hers that he knew every line of her face. Back in Bela, when she had joined the journey of Magiere, Leesil, and Chap, Chane had reluctantly accepted a kind of servitude to a Noble Dead named Welstiel—Magiere's half brother. And the two of them had secretly followed Wynn and her companions across entire countries, seacoasts, and mountain ranges, all in search of Welstiel's coveted "orb." But in the end, only Magiere could find and retrieve it. And Welstiel lost his head in the ice-trapped castle of the Pock Peaks, his body dropped into the misted depths of a m
olten fissure.
But Chane survived.
Running a hand across his face, he rose, looking about the faded walls of his small attic room.
When he had first arrived in Calm Seatt, with little money, he had taken the cheapest accommodation he could find. It was a run-down inn called Nattie's House on the outskirts of the city's poorest sector, which the locals had dubbed "the Graylands Empire." Over time he had acquired coins from his prey and could have afforded better lodgings, but he did not care enough to make the effort. Remaining in this obscure, little-noticed shambles suited his needs.
Chane went to crouch before his belongings, all piled in the corner where the ceiling rafters slanted down to the streetside eaves. He reached for the nearest of two packs, opened it, and removed an aged tin scroll case. With this in hand he closed his eyes, drifting back to the night Welstiel had taken his "second death." The same night Chane had walked away from Wynn in the library of the ice-bound castle.
He hated dwelling on the past, but it was not the first time or even the hundredth that his thoughts slipped to events that led him down this current path…
When he had left Wynn in the library of that castle, which housed one ancient undead, he had stumbled out alone onto the snowy plain.
Free for the first time in his undead existence, he had no place to go. In that moment he had no future, no Wynn, and no fantasies of existing in her world. She did not deserve a monster driven by lust for the hunt and the euphoria of a kill. The need to survive, to feed, was the only thing that kept him moving. Wandering to escape the lifeless Pock Peaks, he drifted slowly west.
Bela was the place where his existence as a Noble Dead had begun—and where he had met Wynn and her sages for the first time.
Part of him believed she would leave Magiere and return there, to the newly established branch of her guild. She belonged there, and eventually she would realize this. Even as Chane crossed the Belaskian border, still far from the king's city, he knew he should not try to touch even that small part of her world. But with each step across the homeland of his living days, Chane's mind slipped backward, desperate to erase his past and live only as a sage…
Among books and parchments, a cold lamp's crystal lighting the dark, with one companion of choice…
Impossible—for he was undead, and the beast inside him would never sleep.
When he finally reached Bela, he stayed clear of the old barracks given to the sages. Instead he took a room in a dingy little inn beyond the city's outermost wall. He still had all of Welstiel's possessions and his own, as well as the books he hethe boohad saved from the monastery, where Welstiel had killed and raised healer-monks as feral undead. Chane also had the scroll case, the only thing he had taken from the ice-bound castle.
And every time he held it, a part of him wished it had been Wynn he had taken from that place.
He tucked the scroll case from sight, distracting himself with other things.
Welstiel's belongings and books baffled him, for that arrogant undead had been more than Noble Dead. He had been a skilled conjurer, better than Chane in many ways, though the man preferred artificing over Chane's use of ritual and scant spells. Welstiel's journals were written mostly in Numanese—Wynn's native tongue—and took much time to read. Chane was functional in speaking the language, due to Welstiel's tutoring, but not in reading it.
Welstiel's arcane objects, from the steel hoop that conjured heat within its metal, to the metal rods, the life-conjuring cup, and a strange box of vials, were as unfathomable as the man's two arcane texts. Aside from scattered notes, those latter handwritten volumes were filled with esoteric symbols and characters that likely Welstiel had developed himself.
That was the way of all mages, whatever they practiced. Breaching the personal symbol systems of another mage, born from his fathoming of magic, could take long, if it were possible at all. And even with pieces that Chane worked hard to understand, after only a few moons he found himself holding the ancient scroll case once again.
It represented his one remaining connection to Wynn. And one he could not push aside.
The first time he pulled off its pitted pewter cap, carefully sliding its contents out, the scroll was hard and brittle. Made from a sheet of thin hide, it was too pale even in age for any livestock animal. And he could not unroll it without risk of breaking and crumbling.
Chane had much to do before he could glimpse what it held.
He spent evenings skulking around Bela after dusk before all shops had closed. He needed to know how to restore age-hardened leather to a flexible state without destroying whatever was marked upon it. Consulting leather-workers on the pretense of refurbishing an old vest, he learned to make a cold-filtered mixture of linseed oil and white vinegar. Then he sought scribes and others familiar with inks who could tell him if the solution would affect anything written. One night, back in his room, he took a camel hair brush and delicately applied the mixture for the first time.
The scroll's tightly curved outer surface darkened suddenly.
Chane froze, fearing he'd ruined the ancient relic. But as the solution dried, the thin leather returned to its pale aged color. Caution took hold nonetheless.
He applied the restoration solution only once per day, just before dawn but keeping it in a dark, cool corner. He gently tested the scroll's flexibility at each dusk when he rose from dormancy. Twenty-seven nights passed before the scroll lay perfectly flat, but it was on the seventeenth night that Chane had caught his first glimpse of its content—or lack of it.
The top end of the scroll's inner surface was nearly black, as if wholly covered in ink that had set centuries ago.
Chane slumped in astonishment, and he almost took the scroll and tossed it in the inn's front hearth. Instead he opened the small room's one window, sick of the solution's stench, and stalked out for the night.
When he returned before dawn, senses enlivened by a fresh kill, he didn't bother testing the scroll's flexibility. He shut the window, covered the panes with a moth-eaten blanket against the coming sun, and stretched out upon the straw mattress.
A faint odor tickled his nose. Not vinegar and linseed oil, but something else just beneath that.
Chane sat up.
With fresh life filling him, his skin prickled lightly at dawn's approach. He heard someone out in the inn's front room dump a log on the hearth. Chane drew air deeply through his nose.
He got up and went to the stool he used for a worktable, carefully lifting the scroll.
He'd never before noticed the scent beneath the solution's pungent odor. Or perhaps the solution, permeating and softening the hide sheet, had revitalized something else. With the room's air cleared and his senses opened fully, he lifted the scroll, sniffing its black coating repeatedly.
At first he could not place the thin trace, but it sparked a memory.
In that lost mountain monastery of the healer-monks, called the Servants of Compassion, he had fought with Welstiel and bitten into his undead companion's leg. As Welstiel's black fluids seeped through his breeches, Chane's mouth filled with a taste like rancid linseed oil, and he smelled it as well…
That same odor rose faintly from the scroll's blackened surface.
There had been worn and jumbled writings on the ice-crusted castle's walls, made with the fluids of an undead. The same scent had lingered thinly around the writing.
Urgency made Chane's hands shudder, until the scroll quivered slightly beneath his fingertips. He recognized the scent, not from the ink coating itself, but from something hidden beneath that blackness.
Chane smelled a hint of rancid linseed oil.
A Noble Dead had written on the leather scroll in its own fluids or another's—and then blotted it out with painted ink. But then why had the scroll been kept for so long?
And how would he ever find out, with no way to read beneath the coating?
Chane couldn't reason a way to remove the ink without fear of damaging what lay beneath. So he
simply continued with his painstaking restoration until the twenty-seventh night, when the scroll lay completely flat, restored to full pliancy.
He had never been alone before—or perhaps not lonely. The scroll's content, blocked from him, much as he was blocked from Wynn's world, began to conjure renewed thoughts of her.
For a quarter moon he lurked outside the old barracks. All he wanted was one glimpse of Wynn, though he still did not know if he should—could—face her again. But she never appeared. Chane saw Domin Tilswith several times, but he could not reveal his presence to Wynn's old master. Tilswith also knew what he was. Finally, one evening he could stand the ignorance no longer.
A girl in a gray robe like Wynn's ventured out of the barracks' worn door with empty milk bottles bundled clumsily in her arms. And Chane stepped from the shadows.
He did not often speak, hating the sound of his own voice. During his pursuit of Magiere she had once beheaded him in the forests of Apudâlsat. Welstiel managed to bring him back through some arcane method, but Chane's voice had never healed.
In his brushed cloak and polished boots, he looked again like a young affluent gentleman. But still, the girl almost dropped her bottles in surprise.
"I am looking for news of an old friend," he rasped. "Do you know where I might find Wynn Hygeorht?"
The girl's brow wrinkled at Chane's maimed voice, but then smoothed as her eyes widened in understanding. Though he took no pride in it, he was aware of how his tall form and handsome face affected some women. She spoke Belaskian with a Numanese accent.
"Journeyor Hygeorht? I'm sorry, but she is no longer with us. When she returned with old texts recovered from an abandoned fortification, Domin Tilswith gave her the duty of carrying them back to the home branch in Malourné. She is gone."
Chane stepped back.
The apprentice looked at him with more interest, perhaps even compassion.
"You could write to her," the girl offered, "though a letter would take a long while to reach Calm Seatt. We do send regular correspondence on the eve of the new moons. I could include yours, if you like."
