Child of a Dead God

by Barb Hendee

  Chane numbly stepped past Welstiel, through the work area, and into the monastery’s front entry room. All the way, his back muscles clenched at each of Welstiel’s heavy footfalls behind him.

  “We will feed them one last time—but no more than before,” Welstiel admonished. “Then you will gather what supplies this place has to offer. We leave tonight.”

  Chane crested the stairs and stared down the passage. The blood that Welstiel had disgorged upon the stone floor had dried up. Moans and whimpers of mad undead grew louder now that dusk had come and gone. But the corridor’s right side was silent, as if the occupants there did not wish to make a sound.

  Only one of the right-side doors was still barred. Welstiel slipped around Chane and opened it.

  Two shriveled corpses lay inside. Still garbed in pale blue tabards over dusky robes, it was difficult to tell if either had been male or female, though one was lighter of frame. The sight was nothing more than Chane expected, but knowing how similar the monastery’s inhabitants were to the sages, and the world he dreamed of, made him stiffen.

  And worse, the cell’s last living occupant huddled in a ball on the bed. Its face was half-buried in the corner, with one arm wrapped over its head as if to hide. Then it turned its cowled head just enough to peer toward the door.

  Chane’s twinge of excitement at the prospect of feeding wavered.

  The occupant was a man in his late twenties, haggard with thirst, hunger, and lack of sleep. Welstiel strode in without hesitation and grabbed the shoulder of his robe.

  The young monk heaved a sharp breath but didn’t have time to release a cry. Welstiel struck him down with a fist, and he flopped across the bed’s edge, unconscious.

  Chane just stood silent beyond the cell’s doorway.

  “What is wrong?” Welstiel asked.

  Chane lifted his gaze. He saw only cold resolution in Welstiel’s face— not bloodlust or even longing.

  “I will finish here,” Welstiel said, when Chane did not answer. “Search the storerooms. Gather what is of use. And look for clean robes or spare clothing for our new companions. I do not want their present state to attract undue attention if we are seen.”

  Chane turned away down the stairs, stopping only to light a lantern at the hearth’s dwindling fire.

  What else could he do? Fight Welstiel for the life of one monk by strength or conjury? Either was pointless. He had already been outmatched in the former, and as for the latter . . .

  Conjuring fire and light, or making familiars, was of little advantage. Welstiel preferred artifice rather than the ritual or spellcraft that Chane leaned on for his own conjury. But even Chane resorted to artificing at times, so it stood to reason that Welstiel could resort to the speed of spellcraft in place of the slower but more powerful effect of a ritual. And the older undead had decades of experience.

  Also, Welstiel would be guarded by his new children, waiting to feed and then serve their maker.

  Chane reached the first storage room in the front passage and pulled on the door latch, and the screaming up above began.

  A pathetic sound, it echoed through the monastery. The young monk’s cries were little more than a raw voice driven by exhales of terror, as the teeth and cold fingers of Welstiel’s children roused him with pain. Every cry made the beast within Chane thrash more wildly—until the voice suddenly stopped.

  Chane stepped into the storage room and set down his lantern. He mindlessly rummaged through clothing, blankets, and what canvas he could find for tarps and tents and makeshift packs. When he uncovered a stack of dusky robes, he halted.

  Memories of an old barracks in Bela swam in his head. The garments under his fingers felt . . . looked so much like those of young sages in gray robes.

  So much like those Wynn had worn.

  She had no power or authority, unlike those born to it by chance. No illusory position of influence that set her above the rest of humanity. No, Wynn elevated herself in more meaningful ways.

  Chane closed his fingers tightly on one dark wool robe stacked in the storage room. And he tried to crush the longing of false hunger as well. He jerked a pile of robes out and tossed them into the passage.

  He gathered whatever supplies might be useful and stacked them in the entry room. Canvas, thick wool blankets to reinforce tents, lanterns, kindling and flint, knives and other weaponlike tools, plus a pot, tea leaves, and several water flasks from the kitchen. He had learned from Welstiel that even undeads needed moisture when they had little or no blood to consume. Finally, he returned to the stairs, and when he crested the last step, he nearly retreated again.

  All the left-side cell doors were open. Welstiel stood in the passage with his six minions shifting about him.

  Chane had no revulsion to strong scents, but the stench of feces and urine disgusted him. A corpse soon released all its wastes, and these newly risen ones had not bathed since they’d awakened on their first night. Their soiled robes were shredded from assaulting each other in a frenzy of hunger. They were covered in the dried remains of each other’s black fluids, but their faces and hands were smeared red with the blood of their last living comrade.

  Two were young men not much older than twenty, but they crouched like animals, grunting and sniffing. One drooled heavily, his saliva stained pink.

  An older woman straightened up behind Welstiel. She swayed and whispered something as her eyes wandered, but her words made no sense. A tall beardless man with silvery hair hunkered near her like a lost puppy—the same who had torn apart his younger female companion in the first cell.

  And that young woman, the one Chane had insisted was worth saving . . .

  A mass of snarled brown-black hair hid half her face as she huddled against the wall. Once she might have been pretty, but now Chane couldn’t tell. Her face and throat, wrists and exposed chest, were a mass of half-closed wounds set starkly against pallid flesh. She had not fed enough to heal fully. When she looked at him, nearly all color gone from her eyes, her features twitched from either terror or hunger.

  The sixth stood with his back against the wall. He was stocky and muscular, and his fingers hooked like claws where his hands pressed against the stone. He had curly dark hair and a square jaw, and he sniffed the air like a wolf—sniffed at Welstiel, intently watching his maker’s back.

  Chane felt their glittering eyes shift toward him, one by one. Their yearning to feed roused an echo in him, but Welstiel seemed unaffected.

  “I made sure they left something for your trouble,” he said.

  His cloak was brushed free of most of the dried mud stains and other debris of the wilderness. His hair was carefully groomed, exposing the white patches at his temples. Welstiel looked wholly the gentleman Chane had first met outside of Bela, though perhaps a little more traveled. And he stood there like a noble among his fetid servants, fully composed.

  But his eyes were cold, devoid of even hunger’s passion. He had no concept of what he had done here—what he had forced Chane to do.

  Welstiel cocked his head toward the last door on the passage’s right.

  “Be quick about it, as it is the last chance you will have for a long while to sate your lust.”

  He snapped his fingers, which made the cowering young female cringe, and then pointed toward the stairs. Chane slipped aside to let them pass.

  Only the curly-headed man paused to look him up and down with a sniff, checking to see if he was something to feed upon. When they were gone, Chane crept toward the last door on the passage’s right. It had been left ajar. He reached out and pushed it wide with his fingertips.

  The boy lying on the cell’s floor had red hair and freckled pale skin. He was younger than any of the others Chane remembered locking in these rooms, but his memory of that first night was hazy. The neckline and sleeve ends of his wool robe were torn and smeared with blood, as were his throat and wrists. One slender hand had a slight callus on the index finger from holding a quill or stylus for long hours.
<
br />   His eyelids flickered. Shallow breaths escaped his diminutive mouth.

  Chane crouched over the boy and gripped the back of his skull. Longing—that false hunger—came again.

  Left as he was, the boy would bleed to death—a wasted life. But that life had been gone the moment Chane came to this place. He leaned his face close to the boy’s own as his canine teeth begin to ache and elongate. He hung there silently, close enough to feel the weak breaths rush over his face.

  “What did you study here?” he asked.

  No answer came but a brief flutter of the boy’s drooping eyelids.

  What might he have become? Perhaps something better than another head in the vast herd of human cattle.

  Chane closed his other hand across the boy’s jaw and pulled it upward. The wounds in that mangled slender throat leaked a fresh trail of blood. He gripped the small head tightly between both hands.

  And wrenched it sharply to the side.

  With a crack of vertebrae, the boy’s rattling breaths ceased.

  Chane dropped the body on the stone floor and turned away on his hands and knees.

  He clawed up the door frame and lurched out. Halfway down the stairs, he pressed his face into the wall’s cold stone, grinding his jaws shut against his elongated teeth.

  The boy was lost . . . all here were lost, one way or another. Only what they had accomplished remained, and even that would fade, forgotten by the world in this hidden place.

  Chane’s fingernails grated down the wall.

  An impatient Welstiel was waiting outside, but Chane’s mind was elsewhere. He ran down the stairs and raced for the back study and its library. Then he froze in the doorway, panic overwhelming his senses.

  His gaze ran along the shelves, over and over, and he shook his head. All the books and scrolls, volumes and sheaves—he could not just leave them. And he could not carry them all away. How could he choose what to take with so much to leave behind?

  Time would not work in his favor.

  He snatched one book, and then another. He chose texts he had seen before, their titles vaguely familiar, and some so thick with fine script that they seemed to hold the greatest content. He shoved as many as he could into a canvas sack scavenged from the outer study. Even when the sack was full, he looked wildly about at all that was left. He finally turned to run out of this lifeless place.

  Outside, Welstiel stood watchfully over his six children as they scrubbed their naked bodies with snow. He then dressed them in fresh robes and armed them with utility and kitchen knives tucked in their belts. The curly-headed man took up an iron bar as a cudgel.

  “Take the baggage,” Welstiel ordered them, and like puppets jerked by their strings, the obedient ferals twitched into motion.

  Chane winced at this, for he knew what it felt like. His own maker, Toret, had used such a voice on him when he grew reluctant to obey. When a Noble Dead created another of its kind, that newborn was forever doomed to abide by any willfull order from its maker.

  Unless—until—that maker was destroyed.

  Chane eyed Welstiel as the elderly undead headed for the switchback trail, glancing once at the sack bundled in Chane’s arms.

  “Soon enough, you will have all the books you could want,” Welstiel said, and stepped down the first leg of the narrow path.

  Chane waited as the ferals ambled after their master. About to follow, he looked back once more to the monastery carved from the gorge wall. The door was still open.

  He grabbed the handle and pulled, making certain the door was soundly closed. If only he could so easily shut away all memories of this place—as if he had never come here.

  “In time, you will have your own place among your beloved sages as well,” Welstiel called out from below.

  The beast inside of Chane lunged excitedly against its chains, as if clutching at some offered and coveted morsel.

  “Fulfill your obligation,” Welstiel added, his words seeming to rise from the dark, “and then I will fulfill mine.”

  At those last words, something snapped sharply inside of Chane.

  The beast inside him backed warily into a corner. It saw no choice joint of meat in its master’s hand. It smelled nothing for its longing hunger. It only heard a spoken promise.

  That twinge made Chane whip about and stare at the top of the switchback path.

  He had never felt this before. It left him startled, even panicked.

  At dawn, half a moon into the voyage, Avranvärd held back near the bow. She watched Sgäilsheilleache standing with the dark-haired human woman.

  He leaned on the port-side rail-wall and pointed ahead, speaking some ugly guttural language Avranvärd could not understand. She did not need to in order to know what he was saying. They had reached the peninsula and would now turn south along the eastern coast.

  Relief flooded the woman’s pale features. Sgäilsheilleache nodded, as if glad to offer her such welcome news.

  His reputation among the an’Cróan was so pure. Not as revered as Brot’ân’duivé or the great Eillean, he had still traveled foreign lands and faced humans to protect all the an’Cróan. Now he stood with one of the savages, and Avranvärd swallowed hard in revulsion.

  Perhaps his attempt to appease this woman was pretense, for Sgäilsheilleache must have a good reason. When Avranvärd joined the Anmaglâhk, then maybe she would understand.

  Predawn’s first yellow streaks glowed at the base of the horizon. Avranvärd looked to the hkomas standing behind the helm, busy directing the crew to change sail for the southern run. She slipped quietly into the near stairwell beneath the forecastle, and climbed below to find a private place among the cargo. Her oversized boots caught once on the bottom rung, but she righted herself before stumbling.

  Most of the crew was on deck, along with some of the “passengers.” She hesitated in the passage, staring at the door where the humans and the half-blood lodged. But it was too risky to nose about in there, so she headed along the starboard passage toward the cargo bay. Once there, Avranvärd crouched behind the barrels of drinking water and pressed her word-wood against the ship’s hull.

  “Are you there?” she whispered.

  Report.

  The voice in her head was cold, emotionless. She did not even know his name, only that he was a Greimasg’äh and deserved her obedience. Still, he treated her like a necessity and no more—not like a comrade.

  “We have reached the peninsula and turn south. The crew changes sails as we speak.”

  When is your next stop?

  “Four days at most—we exchange cargo at Énwiroilhe.”

  What have you learned of this artifact the humans seek?

  The question surprised her, as he had not asked this before. “I should be listening? I cannot speak their language.”

  Do not risk suspicion, but anything of use you overhear, report to me.

  She hesitated. “Sgäilsheilleache is too protective . . . it seems as if he cares for them.”

  The Greimasg’äh was silent for too long, and Avranvärd began to wonder whether he was still listening. His voice came again, far colder than before.

  You will not speak of him with disrespect. Unless the unexpected occurs, report in four days.

  Avranvärd waited, reluctant to answer after this rebuke. Her silence drew out until she knew he was gone.