by Barb Hendee
Magiere looked over her shoulder, though she said nothing concerning this open admission that Sgäile was aware of Chap’s unique nature. Léshil simply turned away to gather blankets and bedrolls.
Sgäile stepped off toward a cluster of pines and motioned Chap to follow. He dropped to one knee, his back to the camp, and waited as Chap circled around to face him.
“Hear me,” Sgäile whispered. “Your kind . . . or those who at least share your form . . . have guarded my people as far back as any can remember. On their blood, you will swear.
“Reveal nothing of the path we take—or what you learn—to anyone. The place we seek must remain hidden and guarded. I take Léshil this way because I gave my word to do so, but I do not know why we are here. If you would have him continue, as you seem to wish, then do not hinder me in this. Swear to me.”
Chap shifted his weight, glancing around Sgäile toward his companions. When his eyes turned back on Sgäile, his jowls quivered slightly—almost a snarl but not quite. Finally, he blinked and huffed once.
Sgäile had witnessed this enough times to know what it meant, and he sighed in relief.
“My thanks.”
He stood up, looking upslope through the granite shelf foothills. He focused upon the shortest peak and barely made out its sheared and ragged top—the mouth of an old volcanic vent at its crest. From any farther distance, it looked no different from the others.
Chap had already returned to camp by the time Sgäile walked back.
Chane lost track of the passing nights. They trudged east through the Crown Range, into valleys and gorges, and up through saddles and passes between the high peaks, one after another. They paused only when the sky lightened ahead, quickly setting up camp and crawling into their protective tents to fall dormant. They rose each dusk to move on, over and over again.
The five remaining ferals were weakened with starvation. Chane fed them tea every few nights, and less often, Welstiel rationed out small spoonfuls of life force hoarded in his brown glass bottles. And then the terrain began to change.
The sight of dried, bent trees became more common, as well as open ground between the patches of snow. Clumps of grass and weeds and thickets soon filled the landscape, until the monotony of frozen earth and broken rock was almost forgotten.
“The coast cannot be far,” Welstiel said one night, gazing ahead through a rocky saddle between two mountainsides. “Stay with the others and make camp. I will scout ahead a little ways.”
Chane did not bother answering and turned about, searching for an optimal place to pitch their tents. The dark-haired young woman hovered behind him, always of more use than the others. He wished she could speak, perhaps tell him of her scholarly pursuits before . . .
Welstiel barked at the others to stay in their places and headed off.
Chane pushed away his wandering thoughts, but hunger for intelligent discussion quickly returned. He closed his eyes, envisioning Wynn’s oval face and bright eyes.
A patting sound jerked him from his fantasy, and he opened his eyes. The woman had crawled halfway up a rock-strewn slope and was crouching before a sheer outcrop. She slapped the stone to get his attention. Some semblance of wit still remained within her.
Chane headed upslope. She had found a place where he could tie off their canvas in a lean-to against the stone and make them shelter from the sun. She took one folded canvas from him, and they set to work. He had nearly finished when she reached for a piece of rope in his grasp to lash it around a spike driven into the ground.
He suddenly pointed to himself, his voice more rasping and hollow than usual.
“Chane . . . I am Chane.”
He did not expect a response. He was only desperate for some intelligible sound after another night of the ferals’ animal noises and Welstiel’s long silences. But she stopped struggling with the rope and looked up at him.
Her hair was a disheveled tangle, and in the death-pale skin, he spotted hints of a smattering of freckles. She pointed at herself.
“Sa . . . bel . . .”
Those slow syllables, spoken with such difficulty, startled Chane. He crouched down, and she shifted away from him.
“Sabel . . . ,” he said, “that is your name?”
A hundred questions filled Chane’s head, but he held them at bay. She sniffed the air around him, head tilted, then flicked a hand toward the eastern sky and went back to struggling with the rope.
Chane did not need to look. Gray light grew behind him over the peaks.
The other ferals were fidgeting. The curly-headed man began trying to crawl across the ground with muffled whimpers of frustration. At first, Chane thought they were agitated by the coming sun, but then he saw what the man was crawling toward—and froze in surprise.
Welstiel’s pack sat propped against a spindly gray tree.
The well-traveled undead sometimes set it down within sight, but he never left his belongings in any unsafe place. Even in Venjètz, when they had been locked out of the city and lost nearly everything, Welstiel had held on to his pack.
The stocky feral struggled on the ground, watched closely by the others, but he made no more than an inch or two of headway. Exhaustion and starvation drove him against the power of Welstiel’s command, as he knew where the bottled life force was kept.
In their time together, Chane and Welstiel had maintained the courtesies and formalities of two noblemen—now turned Noble Dead. Chane had once respected Welstiel’s privacy. But he had begun to see Welstiel’s pretense of cold-blooded intellect as nothing more than illusory posturing. And as for Chane . . .
He might be nothing more than a beast beneath his own veneer, but he had never sunk to believing his own pretense. Not as Welstiel did.
Chane had willingly served Welstiel’s madness in that monastery, but he could not stop seeing these ferals for who they had once been. Like the ghosts of lost scholars haunting dead flesh now filled with nothing but longing and hunger.
A worthless concern just the same. They were lost.
But Chane still did not care to watch Welstiel butcher another one. He jogged downslope, snatched up Welstiel’s pack, and turned away.
A hand latched onto his ankle, closing tight enough to make him buckle in pain.
Chane tried to pull free of the crawling monk, but the man would not let go. The feral lay on his stomach, muscles taut and shaking as he fought against his maker’s command, but his colorless eyes were locked on the pack in Chane’s arms.
Chane stomped down on the man’s wrist with his free foot. The feral squealed, and Chane wrenched free of its grip.
All the crystal-eyed ferals around the clearing watched him. When he headed up toward the lean-to tents, even Sabel’s gaze fixed on what he was carrying.
Chane felt the bulge of hard objects in the pack, too many to be just the brown glass bottles. His curiosity turned once more to Welstiel’s long-hidden possessions.
The closest Chane had come to uncovering their secrets was the night he first saw Welstiel’s extra bottles sitting beside the pack. He had not summoned the nerve to dig into it with Welstiel sitting vigil just up the monastery stairs. And the later night on this journey, when he had stolen one brown bottle, he was in too much hurry. He did not hesitate this time, and threw back the cover flap.
Beneath two remaining bottles, wrapped in Welstiel’s spare clothing, Chane saw other items. The first three were already familiar.
The walnut box held Welstiel’s feeding cup, along with the looped tripod rods and white ceramic bottle. Beside this rested the domed brass plate, which Welstiel used to scry for Magiere, and his frosted light-orb with its three glowing sparks like incandescent fireflies. Chane set these carefully aside.
For the moment, he ignored the two books and a leather-wrapped journal. But the next item he gripped was cold metal, and he glanced nervously toward the glowing horizon. He pulled out a hoop of steel with etched markings.
Its circumference was slightly smaller
than a dinner plate. At a loss, he was about to set it down when he smelled an odor akin to charcoal. He turned the steel hoop and dim light from the sky reflected upon its surface—except for the deeply etched lines and symbols. Their inner groves remained black, and he sniffed the object. The charred odor definitely came from the hoop.
He had little time left, for certainly Welstiel would return before full dawn breached the horizon, but Chane’s curiosity nagged him. Holding the hoop to his lips, he licked an etched line running evenly around its outer side. It tasted of bitter ash and char. He set the hoop with the other items and peered into the pack. He caught a glint of copper or brass on one rod, and then movement caught his eye.
Sabel crept in, just out of reach, and pointed east as she sniffed the air. She whined and pointed more forcefully.
Welstiel must be returning.
Chane quickly stuffed all the items into the pack, leaving the clothing-wrapped bottles to place on top. He was about to return the pack to its resting place when Welstiel appeared over the top of the saddle ridge, looking haggard and drained. Chane scrambled to the nearest lean-to with Sabel on his heels. He crouched in front of its open end, setting the pack down.
As Welstiel entered the clearing, he gave no notice to the ferals cringing around him in the half-light, and went straight for the spot where he had left his pack. When he discovered it gone, he spun about.
“I had to move it,” Chane rasped. “Even under your command, one of them tried to get to it.”
Welstiel looked upslope and spotted his pack beside Chane.
“You took your time,” Chane added. “Any longer, and you would be greeting the sunrise.”
Welstiel frowned, but seemed satisfied.
“Get inside,” he ordered, and waved the ferals up to the tents.
They scrambled for cover like dogs, and he picked his way up the slope to Chane.
“We are not far from the coast,” he said. “A few more nights at most.”
It was good news, but Chane’s mind was elsewhere.
Aside from the three short rods he had not had time to inspect, he had heard a dull knock when he set the pack down. Something else rested in its bottom; something that he had not yet seen.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Three days of being dragged behind Sgäile wore Leesil’s patience thin. Blindfolded, with a rough walking stick in one hand and a rope gripped in the other, he trudged onward, with Magiere behind him. Chap ranged somewhere nearby, his claws scrabbling over dirt and stone.
Chap assisted with warning barks whenever they strayed or came upon uncertain footing. Sgäile carefully steered them around anything larger, but the going was painfully slow. From time to time, Magiere settled a hand on Leesil’s shoulder.
They exchanged few words on this blind side journey, and Leesil wondered why he had ever agreed to this. Why did he keep giving in to whatever bizarre requests Sgäile made?
Privately, Leesil knew why—to find out what Brot’an—and his mother—had arranged.
Had this been Brot’an’s plan alone, Leesil would have rejected Sgäile’s requirements. But for his mother . . . no, he’d abandoned her to eight years of imprisonment, and he couldn’t refuse her now.
Chap barked, brushed against Leesil’s leg, and then dashed away. Leesil heard a small cascade of stones tumble beneath the dog’s paws.
“What’s wrong?” Leesil asked.
“We have to climb another chute between stone sides,” Sgäile replied. “The bottom is littered with debris. I will loop the rope through your belts, so you may use both hands to steady yourselves. Toss aside your staves, as you will no longer need them.”
“Then we’re close?” Magiere asked.
For a moment, Sgäile didn’t answer. “Yes,” he replied, as if he didn’t care to reveal anything.
Leesil tossed aside his staff as Sgäile looped the rope through his belt. He waited as Sgäile did the same for Magiere and then took the lead once more. Leesil stepped forward, and his left foot shifted on loose stones.
Someone snatched his right wrist and guided his hand to the side, pressing it against a vertical wall of rough stone.
“As I said . . . take care,” Sgäile admonished.
Leesil felt his way up the granite chute. Before long, he reached out and felt only empty air. Another step and the ground leveled off. But when he tried to hook the blindfold with one finger, Sgäile pulled his hand down.
“No,” he said sharply. “Not yet.”
Moving onward again, Leesil grew aware of a slight downward decline. Then he smelled dust, and the sounds around him began to reverberate. He realized they had gone underground.
Sgäile began turning them, this way and that.
Leesil tried to count off the lefts and rights, but he lost track after a while. By the time Sgäile halted their procession, Leesil was slightly dizzy from the winding downward path.
“It’s warmer here,” Magiere said.
She’d been unusually quiet for the past three days. Leesil reached back until he felt her arm.
“We are far enough,” Sgäile said. “You may remove the blindfolds.”
Leesil ripped off the cloth, blinking as he rubbed his eyes.
For a moment he wasn’t sure the blindfold was gone, as everything around him was so dim. Then the world sharpened slightly.
Magiere’s pale face was strangely illuminated by an orange glow— Sgäile had already lit a torch. They stood within a natural rock tunnel wider than Leesil’s arm span and half again the height he could reach up on his toes.
“We continue,” Sgäile said and walked off down the tunnel.
“We’re not there yet?” Magiere asked, but he ignored her.
Leesil sighed and trudged on. When he glanced back past Magiere and Chap, he saw nothing, for the tunnel curved sharply into the dark. He couldn’t even guess how far or deep they had come.
They walked down winding passages with craggy walls, but the floors were smooth. Leesil’s patience was beginning to wane when suddenly the torch’s light reached only open space, and he followed Sgäile into a vast cavern. Before he could look about, his gaze caught on the cavern’s most prominent feature.
A large oval of shimmering metal was embedded in the cavern’s far wall.
Magiere pushed around him, heading straight for it. Leesil followed with Sgäile and Chap trailing more slowly. When he was within arm’s reach, Magiere ran her gloved hand over the metal.
Leesil saw the barely visible, razor-straight seam. The oval split down the center into two doors, but he saw no handle or hinges, or other way to open them. Orange-yellow torchlight glimmered on their perfect polished surfaces, a bleached silver tone too light for steel or precision metals. Leesil recognized the material.
These doors were made of the same metal as anmaglâhk blades.
“They’re warm,” Magiere whispered.
Leesil put his hand upon the metal. More than warm, they were nearly hot.
“Turn away,” Sgäile said wearily.
“Why . . . how do they open?” Leesil asked.
He heard cloth crumple on the cavern floor, and the sound of a blade sliding across leather.
Chap growled.
