by Barb Hendee
Wynn's guilt welled over lying so easily. More bad skills learned in Leesil's company, no doubt, but she had to continue the ruse.
"I didn't know High-Tower sought to become a shirvêsh."
High-Tower was a private individual. He would be mortified at such information landing upon Wynn's ears.
"He was my acolyte for only a short time," Mallet replied. "But I can introduce you to a few who knew him better. We were all stunned by his decision to … to become a scribbler of words."
Again, Wynn ignored the slight.
"I prefer to start with his earlier life," she corrected. "Can you direct me to his family?"
At this, Mallet straightened on his stool as if thinking carefully.
Wynn grew worried that she'd asked the wrong thing but had no idea why it was wrong. Had she made Mallet suspicious?
He looked her straight in the eyes. "I do not know an exact location and can only point the way. He hails from the Yêarclág—the Iron-Braids, in your tongue. A small family, and the last I knew, they lived in Chemarré … in its underside."
Wynn faltered once more. "Underground?"
Shirvêsh Mallet didn't answer.
Chemarré, or "Sea-Side," was one of the seatt's four main settlements, situated on the mountain's far side facing the open ocean and the Isle of Wrêdelîd. "Underside" was a polite reference for those living in the deepest—poorest—levels below the surface.
"Go back to the Cheku'ûn market and take the tram to Chemarré," Mallet instructed. "I do not know that settlement's underways, but someone at the Chemarré way station can start you off."
His tone had changed, as if speaking of something embarrassing, but Wynn wasn't finished.
"Shirvêsh, while I'm here, I wanted to conduct research for the guild's archives on the Stonewalkers. So little is … known of …"
Wynn trailed off as Mallet's eyes stopped blinking. His black pupils looked like hard pinpoints.
"Young Hygeorht …" he began, voice lowered, "your guild has ferreted out more than I realized … or did High-Tower mention this to you? How do you know of the Hassäg'kreigi?"
"I've heard the term only a couple of times," Wynn replied. "I know little other than they are a sacred sect among your people."
"Little more is known by my own people," he countered, but the way he spoke implied that he knew more.
Mallet sighed through his nose, plainly resigned to an annoyance he couldn't politely escape. This chat clearly covered much different ground than he'd expected.
"The Stonewalkers, as you call them, are guardians of our most honored dead." He paused, either for emphasis or to weigh his words. "Only Thänæ, who wear the thôrhk around their necks, so marked for their great achievements, are tended by the Stonewalkers. When a thänæ dies … and is to pass into earth … Stonewalkers may come to take him or her to the underworld. In their care, a thänæ of the greatest renown might one far day become known to the people as one of the Bäynæ—what you call our Eternals—and an ancestor to all of us, like our blessed Bedzâ'kenge."
Wynn's fascination didn't stop her from blurting out the obvious questions.
"This ‘underworld,' where the Stonewalkers live … this is a real place? Where can I find it?"
Mallet rolled his eyes and rose, and this time his sigh was disapproving.
"That is not a question to be asked, let alone answered … or recorded!" His tone softened as he patted her shoulder like an indulgent grandfather. "What I have told you is all you need to know. Now, finish your supper, perhaps walk that beast of yours—outside, please! Then focus on your biography of High-Tower. Only the Eternals know if something useful will come of it."
Wynn knew that in his kindness, Mallet had no idea how condescending he could be. She'd pushed the limits of good judgment with her questions, but who knew when she would be granted his undivided attention again? She rose, halting him before he left.
"Shirvêsh, forgive me, but one more question. In all your remembered tales, do you recall anything of a place called Bäalâle Seatt … and someone named Thallûhearag who—"
A rushing pallor flooded Mallet's wrinkled features, and Wynn stiffened in silence.
He looked as if her words had struck him ill. Revulsion spread across his broad face. A long moment followed before his calm finally returned. Wynn grew frightened under his silent scrutiny.
Mallet glanced sidelong over his shoulder, but none of the other shirvêsh had looked up. Either they hadn't heard or they didn't know what Wynn spoke of. Mallet turned on her, leaning into her face as he whispered through clenched teeth, "Where did you hear that title?"
It was so sharp and abrupt that she flinched as she struggled for an answer. She could think of only one.
"Domin High-Tower must have mentioned it to me."
Mallet settled back.
"I am disappointed in my former acolyte," he said. "No one, especially one so young as you, should be told of such a thing … let alone seek it out! It is all but dead in my people's memories, and lives on in fewer by the years … I will not resurrect it!"
The meal hall had grown too quiet.
Barely a murmur passed among the others at the far table. Wynn found herself the object of blank and puzzled stares. She was an outsider who'd given some serious offense.
"Thank you for the meal," she said quietly. "I should check on Chane."
Wynn backed away under Mallet's intense scrutiny, passing her hand over Shade's head to bring the dog along.
"We'll head to the station tonight," she added, "and take the tram to Sea-Side, as you suggested. We might not return for a couple of days."
"You are always welcome," Mallet answered calmly.
But as Wynn hurried toward the main corridor, she grew obsessed with his reaction. Mallet had said nothing of Bäalâle Seatt, and she wasn't about to ask him again anytime soon. But as to Thallûhearag …
Mallet had called that a title, not a name—and a thing not to be remembered. That was a serious condemnation for an oral culture, where loved and honored ones lived on in remembered stories. Why was he so repulsed at the mention? He even wished to deny its immortality in memory … yet whatever, whoever, it was had been given a title, raising it above the common.
It was all very confusing, and try as Wynn might—and she'd done so before—she couldn't decipher the term. Perhaps it was some older form of Dwarvish, one of the most changeable languages known to her guild. As Wynn rounded the temple chamber, her thoughts drifted to Chane.
She and Shade weren't the only ones who needed sustenance. Chane's "food" wasn't pleasant to consider, but she couldn't just let him go hungry. It was unkind, if not dangerous. Wynn looked down, uncertain how much to share with Shade.
Wynn spun about and hurried to the front marble doors.
"Come, Shade. We have an errand to run before dusk."
Chane opened his eyes to a dim glow escaping through slits in the iron pot's lid. A moment's disorientation passed, and as he sat up, the previous night came back to him. He was in a room in the temple of a dwarven "Eternal," and he had fallen dormant while still dressed, creasing and rumpling his clothing.
Rising, he tried to brush out his attire. Without even thinking, he went to check his cloak's inner pocket.
The old scroll case was still there. This action had become a nervous habit.
Deciphering the scroll's mystery was what had brought him to Wynn. It had given him a justifiable reason to seek her out. Losing it would be like losing any chance to stay within her world, aside from the puzzle it held.
His other worldly possessions sat on the floor where he had dropped them, including his cloak and sword. Both packs were lightly stained from a night two years ago when he and Welstiel had abandoned a sinking ship and swum for shore. His own pack contained mainly personal items but also a small collection of texts and parchments acquired from a monastery of healers. They too were water damaged, though he had wrapped them carefully before jumping overboard.
Wynn had not seen these. Considering what Welstiel had done to the monks who had first possessed them, Chane was uncertain whether he would ever show them to her. But it had seemed wrong to abandon them in high, barren mountains.
Most of the works were written in old Stravinan, which he could read somewhat. One often stuck in his mind. It was the thinnest one, an accordion-style volume of thick parchment folded back and forth four times between grayed leather cover plates. The title read, The Seven Leaves of … something. The final word was obscured by age and wear.
Though Chane had taken these texts from others, he saw himself as their keeper now. There was no one else left to care for them. This sentiment did not carry to the second pack's contents, which had once belonged to Welstiel.
Chane had stolen it the night in the ice-bound castle when he had betrayed Welstiel to Magiere. He crouched to flip open its canvas flap and look inside. The pack contained an array of arcane and perhaps mundane creations. Though technically they were now his, Chane never stopped thinking of those items as belonging to his old companion. Perhaps he never would.
Hunger flushed through him, and he began digging into Welstiel's pack. Aside from two arcane journals, with scant Numanese writings scattered amid pages of indecipherable symbols and diagrams, there were odd objects and boxes.
Chane eyed three unmarked rods, each a forearm's length and as thick as his thumb. One was red brass or copper, the second gray like pewter but harder, and the last looked obsidian, though it clinked like metal. Lying against them was a thick, polished steel hoop the diameter of a plate, with hair-thin etchings that smelled of char.
Two boxes lay in the pack's bottom.
He ignored the long and shallow one bound in black leather and wrapped in indigo felt. Instead, he pulled out the other walnut box. Inside of it, resting in burgundy padding, were three hand-length iron rods with center loops, a teacup-size brass bowl, and a stout bottle of white ceramic with an obsidian stopper.
Chane had partially fathomed the steel hoop, but he had not learned its full power. Welstiel had been able to pick it up while it was still searing hot, and Chane could not. He understood the brass cup as well, though he could not use it. Welstiel used it to drain and trap a mortal's life energy in thrice-purified water from the ceramic bottle. This had allowed him to go for long periods without feeding otherwise.
Chane had drunk that burning, bitter fluid more than once. The draft was revolting, devoid of the hunt's joy and feeding's euphoria. But as he was Wynn's companion among the living, feeding had greater risks. Foremost that she would learn how he continued to survive—to exist.
So far, the cup's actual usage remained unfathomable. But his intellect and knowledge of minor conjury made him long to learn the secrets of Welstiel's creations, including that filthy little cup. If he could feed only once per moon, it would be one less obstacle to remaining at Wynn's side. But he would still have to keep such an act from her awareness, for the victim still died in the process.
A knock sounded at the door.
"Are you awake?" Wynn called from the other side.
"One moment," Chane rasped loudly.
He hurriedly returned the cup's box to Welstiel's pack, went to open the door, and then froze.
Wynn carried a glazed clay urn. She looked visibly queasy, a thin sweat leaving a sheen on her face.
"Are you ill?" he asked.
When she did not answer, his gaze dropped to the urn. A familiar scent began to reach his nostrils.
"What is that?" he asked.
Wynn swallowed audibly and pushed past him into his room. Before Shade could follow, she kicked the door, slamming it shut. Shade began barking and scratching outside, but Wynn ignored her.
"It is … is …" But she never quite finished, and Chane already caught the coppery, salty scent.
"Blood?" he whispered.
"Goat's blood," she blurted out, nearly squeaking. "I went to a butcher … so it's … it's fresh."
Wynn swallowed again, or rather gagged. Chane quickly snatched the urn out of her grip, horrified at what she had done.
"I told the butcher it was for … blood sausage," she whispered, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "I'll come back in a while," she mumbled. "I have things to gather before we set out tonight."
She quickly turned for the door and slipped out. Shade finally ceased barking.
Chane just stared at the urn.
Wynn must have realized his hunger had grown each night of their journey here, though he thought he had kept that much from her. He had come as her protector—or that was what they both professed. In truth, he would have sworn anything to remain close to her. Now she had requested—perhaps watched—a goat be slaughtered, so she could purchase its blood as fresh as possible.
It had sickened her, and worse … it was a wasted effort.
Blood was sweet and salty all at once, but it was not what fed him. Blood was good, but only for what laced it as it rushed from a thrashing victim's flesh in the last moments.
It was only a medium of transference.
Chane had learned this too from Welstiel, another truth of the Noble Dead: Bloodletting was a method by which a victim's life was released furiously enough to be consumed by a vampire's inner hunger and close proximity. Aside from Welstiel's cup, there was only one source of this to sustain Chane—the living.
This blood was as dead as the goat it had come from.
The urn grew heavy in Chane's hands. Wynn's naïve sacrifice, her attempt to "feed" him, left him only humiliated. He never felt self-loathing, but it now stretched between his need for her and what his true nature desired.
He could never tell her why her effort was useless. Better to let her think she had helped and be certain she never did so again. He would see to his own needs.
Chane placed the urn beyond the bed, out of sight, and left his room. He found Wynn's door across the way cracked open. Her back was turned as she checked her belongings.
"Best pack up," she whispered.
Only Shade watched him steadily from where she lay curled upon the bed.
"Where are we going?" Chane asked.
"Through the mountain."
Chapter 3
Wynn trudged by tall pylons. Large raw crystals steamed in the night, casting pools of fuzzy orange radiance upon the street. She was silent the whole way, not saying a word to either Chane or Shade. As she approached Cheku'ûn "Bay-Side" way station, a cluster of fishmongers with emptied carts boarded the cargo lift headed back down the mountain. But that wasn't the way she was taking.
Her thoughts churned over Mallet's vague directions for finding the Iron-Braids. She'd always pictured Domin High-Tower coming from a family of rank, perhaps even with an elder clan relation in the conclave of the five tribes. Why had she imagined this—because of his pride, his arrogant demeanor? But High-Tower's closest kin lived "underside," well beneath the settlement's surface community, or even its upper tunnels and halls. Wynn knew so little of her old teacher.
She quickened her pace.
Just behind the way station, she saw the cavernous archway in the mountainside. A dull glow flooded from that place over the round crank house's backside along with a thrumming murmur, like a massive furnace mouth yawning in the dark.
"That's the main entrance to Bay-Side's underground," she said.
Chane walked close on her right, but Shade trotted a little ahead, as if knowing where they headed.
"Have you been inside before?" he asked.
"No, but Domin Tilswith told me about the trams. They're the quickest way between settlements, besides the lifts to the mountaintop and Seattâsh—Old-Seatt. But we're going all the way through the mountain to reach Chemarré … Sea-Side."
Chane stopped, forcing Wynn to pause.
"Even in a straight line, that will take days … nights," he replied, watching the mountain's glowing maw.
"No," she countered, and patted her leg to call Shade back. "We'll m
ake Sea-Side before dawn."
Chane glanced doubtfully at her. "It is fifteen, maybe twenty leagues away. Nothing moves that fast."
Wynn wasn't sure how to answer. All she had were Domin Tilswith's brief descriptions, and his assurance that dwarven trams were the fastest way from one settlement to another.
"You'll see," she said. "It would take longer to stand in the cold and explain."
An exaggeration, but she'd never actually seen the trams for herself.
Shade fidgeted in the street, ducking sideways whenever someone passed too near or cast a suspicious glance at a tall black wolf standing with two humans.
"Come on," Wynn said. "I'm guessing scheduled departures will be fewer after dusk."
Chane sighed, casting a sour glance at the cargo lift. Now full of fishmongers and others with late cargo, it rolled over the landing's lip, out of sight, and down the mountain. Wynn grabbed his sleeve and tugged him onward. But when they rounded the great frame stones of the mountain's mouth, Wynn's jaw went slack at the spectacle.
A thinned forest of sculpted columns the size of small keep towers rose to the high domed roof of this smooth, chiseled cavern. The chaos of vendors, hawkers, peddlers, and travelers filled the open spaces. All forms of goods were being traded at carts and stalls and even makeshift tents. Everything from meat pies and tea to small casks of dwarven ale and honey-coated nuts were bartered for by dwarves on their way home for the night.
In the avenues between the columns, more large glowing crystals steamed atop stone pylons, as in the streets outside. Smoke from portable braziers and steam escaping around crystals filled the great cavern with a hazy orange-yellow glow.
"Oh … my," Wynn whispered.
Chane turned a full circle as Wynn recovered from shock. She cast about, trying to figure out which way to go.
Standing near the entrance's side, she couldn't see clearly through so many people, columns, and pylons. She did spot the tops of four large tunnel archways around the cavern's back, heading deeper into the mountain. But which one did they need?
