by Barb Hendee
The tops of the wall and barbican were beyond the height of a footman's pike, as any sensible fortification should be. She could still hear Shade barking in the distance.
"Now we climb," Chane said, and unshouldered his pack. "You first."
Wynn glowered at him. "No one can climb this."
He withdrew a coil of narrow rope from his pack, but there was no weight or hook on either end. Obviously it was just something he still carried from his travels rather than part of any carefully considered plan. He began making a large loop in one end, and Wynn couldn't believe they were going to try this.
Chane collected rope coils with the loop. He glanced both ways along the road, stepped away from the wall, and flung the gathered rope upward.
The rope uncoiled, but its end barely cleared the barbican's wall through a space between two rising ramparts. Chane huffed in irritation. Wynn didn't know why until he pulled on the rope, and it all came tumbling down. She realized that he was trying to loop one of the ramparts.
"Did you even think this through?" she whispered.
"I do not recall you offering a plan of your own."
She wasn't sure what angered her more—his half-witted scheme, or that she couldn't think of a better one.
Chane crouched against the wall and drew his sword. Before she could berate him again, he pulled off his cloak. He wrapped it around the blade and cinched the material tight by knotting the rope around the sword's midpoint. Wynn watched as Chane flung his muffled makeshift anchor, and then flinched at the dull thump somewhere above.
And that was all she heard.
Wynn straightened, looking off toward the rounding of the wall's southern corner. Shade had stopped barking.
Chane stood with the rope's end in hand and looked off the same way. "Is she in?" he whispered.
"I don't know. Maybe," she answered, and Chane scowled at her. "I think she needs a line of sight to… Oh, never mind, just hurry up!"
Chane pulled on the rope, and it drew taut this time.
Wynn crept along the barbican curve but didn't make it far enough to peer around. The soft clomp of boots on cobblestone carried along the street. She quickly sidled back along the wall, waved at Chane, and jabbed a finger back the other way.
Chane glanced once and couched low. He hooked a thumb in the air over his shoulder, pointing toward his own back. Wynn went wide-eyed and glanced up the wall.
Get on… now! he mouthed.
It was one thing to be caught breaking curfew. It was entirely another to be found breaking in by the city guard.
Wynn gave Chane a scathing look, but she climbed upon him, trying to grip his shoulder with her right hand. She placed her staff crosswise between her chest and his back, and then wrapped her arms around his neck. Chane lurched to his feet, hoisting her off the ground.
With one boot braced against the wall stones, he pulled hard on the rope.
Wynn lost track of footfalls on the road as Chane hauled both of them up the wall as quickly as if he were walking on flat ground. He stopped just before a space between two barbican ramparts and whispered, "Climb over."
Wynn pulled one arm from his neck and grabbed her staff. She slid it over the wall's top, and then felt Chane's hand cup under her left foot. That he managed to hold them both up with his one-handed grip surprised her. She quickly clambered over him through the rampart's space.
His cloak-wrapped sword was anchored across the opening, but when she turned back to help him, he was already up. He pushed her down, crouched beside her, and began hauling up the rope as fast as he could.
Wynn heard the footsteps again.
They came from right below in the street as the rope's trailing end flopped onto the barbican's platform. She and Chane remained still, waiting for the steps to pass by.
Then silence—the footfalls stopped altogether.
Wynn's stomach knotted.
It was far too long before the footfalls resumed, moving onward until they grew faint somewhere off toward the bailey wall's southern corner. Chane rose just enough to peer through the rampart space. He nodded to her.
Wynn glanced down at his sword. "You need to do something about that. Sages do not carry such weapons."
He nodded. "I will hide it better once we are inside."
Wynn wanted to kick herself. No matter what Chane did, he would never pass for a sage. And even without current circumstances, visitors weren't commonly allowed after dusk. What would anyone say or do if they caught her sneaking an unknown man into the guild grounds? Especially one so burned.
Wynn frowned. They wouldn't say anything at first, because they'd be wondering how she'd sneaked out.
She led the way along the wall's ramparts and kept glancing up. But she never saw even a flicker of light in any of the tower windows.
When they reached the library on the northeastern side, Chane boosted her by one foot. She peeked through the nearest window, but by the light of wall-mounted cold lamps she saw no one along the nearest shelves facing the windows. When they climbed inside, Wynn peered around the casement's end. The next row and the cubby beyond it were empty as well. When she turned back for Chane, she found him scanning the texts upon the shelves.
Some hint of pain filled his pale features beneath a gaze filled with awe. Or was it longing?
She couldn't help wondering what he'd been like in his living days. A scholar or just another spoiled, useless noble? Perhaps both. Few times had they ever spoken of his past—before or after she'd learned what he was.
"This way," she whispered.
He blinked as if waking from some dream, and the wonder faded from his eyes. But that hint of pain took an instant longer to follow. He nodded. They sneaked along the library's southern end and down the side staircase.
At every turn, archway, or door along the way, he waited behind as she stepped out to see if all was clear. Not that she wouldn't look suspicious in her old elven clothing, but everyone here already thought she was odd. The last path to the keep's double doors was the worst.
The entryway was empty, but she heard voices carry from the common hall. She cracked the left door and peered into the courtyard. It was empty as well, but this wasn't a welcome sight.
Where was Shade? Had she failed to get in?
Wynn began frantically trying to think of some way to find Shade and bring her in. Then a shadow moved at the courtyard's far left corner. Wynn tightened her grip on the crystal's staff.
The shadow shifted around the cistern beyond the dormitory's end. Two crystal blue eyes sparked in the light of the iron-bracketed torches burning upon the gatehouse's inner wall.
Shade stepped a little way out into sight. Her ears rose as she peered back across the courtyard, and Wynn started breathing again.
She stepped back to wave Chane forward, and they both ducked out, cloak hoods pulled up. They sneaked around the courtyard, rushing quickly as they passed the line of sight with the gatehouse tunnel. Shade was already waiting at the dormitory door. Once Wynn was certain the stairs and upper passage were clear, all three of them hurried to her room.
Closing the door tightly, Wynn leaned against it, took a deep breath, and dug for her cold lamp crystal. When she rubbed it hard, its light exposed Chane standing before her desk, glancing at her mess of quills, journals, and paper. She still couldn't believe that Shade and Chane had somehow traveled here together. He had a lot to explain.
"I must be mad," she said. "The premins and domins already think so… for all my warnings about undead. Now I've got one into my room."
Chane glanced over. He didn't even scowl at such a bad joke. He only shook his head.
"They are the mad ones… in discounting your greater experience in these matters. At least you think for yourself. I would have thought better of your elders here. Tilswith had a far more agile mind."
"I miss him," Wynn said.
Chane fingered a blank sheet on the desk. "So do I, at times."
She stood straighter, watc
hing him roll a quill shaft with his pale fingertip. He was such a mass of confusing contradictions. Shade hopped up on the bed and settled. Everything else in Wynn's room looked the same.
Only a vampire and a majay-hì were new additions.
No, there was also the scroll.
Wynn stripped away her cloak as she leaned the staff in the corner. "My journal notes from today are on the desk. See what you make of them while I prepare."
"My grasp of the Begaine syllabary is not good," he said, picking up the journal.
"Some of it is in plain Numanese letters. Can you read those?"
"A little, from what Tilswith taught me. Welstiel tutored me in speaking while we traveled. I learned more from my time in this city."
Wynn's education in languages was more extensive, required by her vocation as a cathologer. But Chane's intellect was impressive. Domin Tilswith had commented on his natural gift for picking up bits and pieces so quickly. At that time her old master hadn't known Chane's true nature. Perhaps Chane's ability was more than natural, but it was impossible to say, since she'd never known him in his mortal life.
She knelt down and reached under her bed, pulling on the scroll case pinned against a support board. She popped its pewter cap and slid out the scroll, then her gaze fell on Shade's long charcoal-colored face peering over the bed's edge.
How nice to be so naturally camouflaged for night. Wynn leaned in and lightly stroked Shade's cheek.
"You clever girl."
Shade sprang up to all fours and snarled at her, sniffing wildly, and Wynn lurched back as she heard Chane rushing toward her.
Shade dropped her head low, her sniffing nose extended, and Wynn looked down at the scroll in her hand.
"What is wrong with her?" Chane rasped.
Wynn unrolled the scroll, studying its faded black coating. "It seems you're not the only one who can smell what's hidden here." Very slowly she touched the top of Shade's muzzle. "Enough… it's all right."
She spun about on her knees, facing the open floor of her small room. Chane dropped the journal on the bed.
"How does this work?" he asked.
She handed him the empty scroll case. He was no stranger to the arcane, but the taint of mantic sight wasn't something controlled just by learned skill. Since her first so-called successful attempt, traces of the sight had never left her, and summoning it had never worked out well.
"It's not like what you do," she said. "More just intent, wishing, and focus… It's hard to explain."
And she didn't care to, especially not with how she used the memory of Chap as a means to summon her sight. When she lifted her head, Chane stood over her, arms crossed.
"No more arguments," she warned.
He stepped back, giving her space to lay out the scroll upon the floor.
Wynn pushed all thoughts from her mind. Domin il'Sänke had taught her tricks as well—not true ritual or spellcraft but some of their trappings. But even that hadn't been any use in ending the sight once it came. With her right first finger, Wynn traced a sign for elemental Spirit on the floor and then encircled it.
At each gesture she envisioned the pattern in her mind, as if actually drawn upon the stone. She scooted forward, kneeling upon the imagined symbol and circle, and then traced a wider circumference around herself. A simple pattern, but it helped bring her into focus and shut out the world for a needed moment.
Remaining still, Wynn closed her eyes.
She focused upon letting the world fill her with its presence and tried to feel for a trace of Spirit in all things, starting first with herself. Then she imagined breathing it in from the air, feeling it flow upward from the floor's stone. In her darkened sight, she held on to the first simple pattern stroked upon the floor.
Wynn called up—constructed—an image of Chap, just as she'd once seen him in her mantic sight, his fur shimmering as if made of a million silk threads. His whole body was encased in white vapors that rose like flame from his form.
Moments stretched on tediously, one after another.
An ache in her knees threatened her concentration.
She tried hard to hold on to Chap's image… to hold him there behind the envisioned circle around the symbol of Spirit. Until vertigo came—and nausea—in the dark behind her closed eyes.
"Wynn?"
She felt as if she were falling and threw out her hands.
They slapped hard against cold stone, jarring her shoulders, but she stopped herself from slamming face-first into the floor. In fright, Wynn opened her eyes too quickly.
Nausea lurched up her throat, and she gagged.
A translucent mist of white, just shy of blue, permeated every dimly lit object in the room. It covered everything in a second view of the world overlaying her normal sight… smothering her normal sight.
"Wynn!"
She raised a hand, weakly waving Chane off, but she didn't dare look up at him. She didn't want to see him with mantic sight. Turning her head the other way, a beacon of bluish light atop the bed nearly blinded her.
Beneath that brilliance was Shade's own shape and dark color. Her Fay-imbued body glowed more powerfully than anything around Wynn. But where Shade's father had been a blaze of fiery silken threads for fur, Shade was a wolf of night overlaid with a burning aura that hurt Wynn's eyes.
Shade lowered her head, her eyes like blue gemstones held before the sun, and her wet nose touched Wynn's cheek. So close to Wynn's face, Shade's light grew too intense, and Wynn flinched her head the other way.
Chane filled up her sight.
Wynn recoiled from him and then stared in shock.
Back when she'd first summoned mantic sight in Pudúrlatsat, she'd seen shadows. Small ribbons of black had flowed through Magiere's living flesh. And Vordana, the walking corpse of a sorcerer, had been pure blackness within. All the mists of Spirit had drifted toward him like an ebbing tide to be swallowed within his inner black silhouette.
And Chane…
He'd come for her when Vordana had cornered her in the town's smithy. She hadn't seen whether the mists were swallowed into him as well. But he'd been so black within, so devoid of elemental Spirit, that she could barely make him out in the forge's darkness.
But now he was just Chane.
There was no darkness, no shadow copy of his flesh—and no ghostly duplicate of blue-white mist permeating him, either. He looked exactly as he had before she began straining to call up mantic sight.
"Are you all right?" he demanded, crouching low to study her face, her eyes. "Did it work?"
His appearance, so untouched by Spirit, worried Wynn. She glanced at his left hand braced upon the floor.
The ring was gone.
She didn't remember seeing him take it off, and he wouldn't have, if it hid him from Shade's awareness. Nausea rolled through Wynn's stomach, and she clutched her mouth.
"Yes… it worked," she managed to get out.
Her doubled view of the world made her so dizzy and sickened. She wondered if she would be able to see anything in this state as she panned her gaze to the scroll.
It was not completely black anymore.
The coating of old ink, spread nearly to the scroll's edges, had lightened with a thin inner trace of blue-white. Whatever covered the words had been made from a natural substance, and even after ages it still retained a trace of elemental Spirit.
Within that space pure black marks appeared, devoid of any Spirit at all.
"I can see them," she whispered.
"What is there?" Chane asked.
"It's Sumanese," she breathed out, trying not to gag. "Old Sumanese… I think."
But those swirling, elaborately stroked characters weren't written as in the other texts. Short lines began evenly along a wide right-side margin. Written from right to left, they ended erratically shy of the page's left side. The lines of text appeared to be broken into stanzas of differing length.
"It looks like a poem," she whispered. "But the dialect… I can't make
out what it says."
She tried, but only a few words seemed vaguely familiar compared to what little she knew of contemporary Sumanese.
"Children… twenty and six steps… to hide… five corners?" Wynn mumbled. "To anchor amid… the void."
She skimmed down the page, at a loss over how little she could translate. Those black characters blurred for an instant under her shifted gaze.
"Consumes its own… of the mountain under… the chair of a lord's song?"
The dark marks blurred again, though she hadn't moved her eyes. Wynn's stomach convulsed.
"My journal," she moaned, buckling forward. "Get me something to write on. Quickly!"
Three labored breaths passed before she felt Chane lift her hand and fit a quill between her fingers. She raised her head as he slid a blank sheet in next to the scroll. Wynn began to write, not even trying to read anymore, and Chane guided her hand each time she tried to re-ink the quill's head. She had to keep her sight clear and be certain of each blindly copied stroke.
The «Children» had to be the same as those she'd read of in the translations, but what of "twenty-six steps," "hide," and "five corners"? The only thing she remembered was that Beloved—il'Samar, the Night Voice—had sought refuge when its Children "divided." And she had no idea what "the chair of a lord's song" meant. And how could a «mountain» be under a chair?
Häs'saun was a Sumanese name, and as one of Li'kän's companions perhaps he had written this cryptic work. But why had he hidden it under the ink? Or had someone else done so later? Why hadn't it been destroyed instead of being painted over so that no one could read it?
Nausea sharpened again, and Wynn choked as Chane grabbed her arm.
"Enough," he said. "Whatever you have so far is enough!"
No, it wasn't. She had to get it all, or she might never learn to understand its hidden meaning.
"Wynn, look away!" Chane rasped. "Now!"
She looked up.
He was the same as he had been before her sight came. No white mist or black void overlaid him, and her nausea weakened.
"Twenty and six steps… five corners," she mumbled.
