Child of a Dead God

by Barb Hendee

  Chane had caught strengthening whiffs of sea air for the past four nights. Tonight, the salt breeze grew stronger. The ferals smelled it, too, and became restless, shuffling about each other.

  Welstiel suddenly halted and pointed ahead. “There . . . look over the slope of trees!”

  Chane craned his neck, eyes wide as his sight expanded.

  At first he saw only a flat plain in the distance, impossibly flat. Then he caught the faint ripples upon its surfaces. Tiny shapes of waves rippled upon open water stretching to the night’s horizon.

  Then another scent filled his head.

  Life—human life.

  The curly-headed feral began hissing and spitting, and the two younger males wailed and darted forward. Chane knew the smell would be even more intoxicating for them; it was all they desired. The silver-headed man and Sabel whimpered in excitement.

  “Stop!” Welstiel ordered. “All of you hold!”

  Like puppets jerked by their strings, the scampering monks halted. One young male fell to his face, unable to keep his feet as his rush ended. Sabel buckled to the ground, rocking back and forth on her haunches as her whimpers of joy became panting moans.

  Their desperation wormed into Chane. He had gone longer without feeding than any of them, and he wanted blood.

  “Follow me,” Welstiel said to Chane, and then looked briefly at his minions. “Do not move from this place until I tell you.” He pointed toward Chane. “Or he does.”

  Chane followed Welstiel through the sparse trees. Every step along the forested ridge intensified the scent of life on the salted breeze—and the smoky odor of a campfire.

  Welstiel finally dropped and flattened on his stomach. He crawled forward as Chane did likewise, and they peered over a cliff above the shore.

  Chane was not surprised to see the men below, gathered around a campfire in a sandy beach cove, but the ship in the waters beyond was another matter. A three-masted schooner was harbored not far into the water, and two long skiffs had been dragged up the beach. Each was half-filled with barrels.

  “Who are they?” Chane whispered.

  Welstiel continued to watch the men below, so Chane returned to studying them more closely—six sailors in varied worn clothes. He could smell sweat along with their life force. Two returned to the skiffs, loading a barrel. Judging by the way they hefted it, the barrel was full of something. He could just barely hear others speaking around the fire, but he did not recognize their language.

  “Why have they come here?” he whispered.

  “Seeking fresh water, I believe,” Welstiel answered. “The tall one in the leather jerkin said something about their supply being contaminated.”

  “You speak their language?”

  "Not well. I have not heard it in many years, not since my father was ...”

  Welstiel fell silent.

  Chane’s curiosity was piqued. He knew little of Welstiel’s living days; only that the man was not a native of this continent. And that Welstiel’s father had worked his way up through the ranks of Droevinkan nobility.

  “I can pick out a few words,” Welstiel finally added. “There must be fresh water near here. Seafarers keep careful track of such things, though I wonder about any human this far north, so near the Elven Territories.”

  “They will have more to contend with than water shortage,” Chane said, true hunger mounting upon his longing. “We should bring the others.”

  “No, this is better than I hoped for,” Welstiel answered, and lifted his chin toward the anchored ship. “Magiere travels this coast too swiftly to be on land. That schooner will be useful to us.”

  Chane couldn’t believe what he was hearing and looked more closely at the rough seamen below. Some carried curved daggers tucked into their belts, and a few had squat cutlasses sheathed at their sides. Most were plainly dressed, though some had vests and tunics of leather, a lightweight armor for seafarers.

  “I doubt they are interested in passengers,” Chane said dryly. “We could feed on them, revitalize your followers, and take the ship. But I have little knowledge of sailing, and likely your monks would know even less. Do you?”

  Welstiel shook his head, eying the cove floor. “No, we will need the crew . . . and count on their greed to favor us.”

  He drew a pouch from his cloak, jingling the coins inside, and Chane stared at it blankly.

  They had lost most of their money back in Venjètz, or so he thought, and used what was left to purchase horses and supplies. But then Chane had never inquired, as they had never needed coins in the mountains.

  “Where did you get that?” he asked.

  Welstiel loosened the pouch’s string. “From a chest at the monastery.”

  “You intend to bargain our way onto the schooner?” Chane said in surprise. “I doubt the monks had enough with which to tempt those sailors.”

  “And I doubt,” Welstiel replied, “they will pay attention to anything but the clink of coins . . . and the possibility that we might have more.”

  Chane scooted back from the ridge and sat up.

  Getting out of this forsaken range was an attractive prospect, but he saw holes in Welstiel’s plan. Unless Welstiel knew these seafarers’ language better than he suggested, they could end up embroiled in a fight before a bargain was struck. The sailors below looked more likely to rob wayfarers out of the wilderness than to offer rescuing passage to the nearest port. And even so, how did Welstiel think they would react when his monks emerged from the dark, full of witless gibbering and hungry stares?

  “We will circle around and search for a path down the ridge,” Welstiel said.

  Chane shook his head but followed. In the end, he believed they would still have the ship—with no one left who could sail it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Welstiel poured most of the monastery’s coins into his own pouch, but he kept out a small sum of silver pennies.

  Chane watched in puzzlement. “How did monks obtain that much?”

  “A wealthy patron, perhaps,” Welstiel suggested, but he did not care.

  He filled the emptied pouch with small stones, adding the pennies on top so the pouch would clink when jostled.

  “What are you doing?” Chane asked.

  “Just follow me.”

  Welstiel led the way around the cliff until they found gradual sod shelves leading down to the beach. During their descent, he contemplated the best way to approach these marauders.

  Though he could pick out a few words of the mishmash Ylladon tongue, he could not truly speak it. Perhaps they’d once had a central language, or several, from whatever long-forgotten descendants had first come to this continent’s shores. Now they spoke a conglomeration of differing dialects fostered among their individual city-states. Some factions spoke old Droevinkan as well.

  In his living youth, Welstiel had only had brief contact with the Ylladon, when his father came to seek his fortune on this continent. They stayed in one city-state, but his father had quickly realized that the lack of a stable hierarchy offered little opportunity for him. The Ylladon raided each other’s territories as often as they raided any outsiders’ they could reach.

  They were parasites. Slavers, pirates, and thieves by the very make of their fragmented culture, but to call them unintelligent was rash. Their way of life had survived as long as the continent’s western nations, and perhaps longer.

  Still, he could think of only one reason these sailors might travel so far north. And trying to hit the lower settlements of the Elven Territories marked them as foolhardy, from Welstiel’s perspective.

  “Keep your sword sheathed unless I say otherwise,” he advised.

  Chane followed in silence as they stepped onto the beach above the cove, and Welstiel rounded the point until he spotted the campfire. He called out a greeting in old Droevinkan.

  Men scurried around the beached skiffs, then poised, waiting as he entered the firelight’s reach. All six drew cutlasses and thick knives, except the
one with the horn bow aimed at him. In their mismatched attire and oiled-down hair, each was nonetheless dressed for efficiency in duty. Most wore leather vestments or tunics and either hide or heavy canvas breeches. Half had studded or steel-ribbed bracers on their forearms.

  They were surprisingly robust; none appeared malnourished or inebriated. They quickly shifted positions, two flanking Welstiel on the shoreward side to back him and Chane into the water if needed.

  “Be at ease,” Welstiel called, and held up both gloved hands.

  The pebble-filled pouch dangled by its string hooked around his fingers, but the Ylladon did not lower their weapons. One sailor between the skiffs glanced toward the campfire as another man stepped forward from beyond the flames.

  Somewhere in his late twenties, he wore a close-trimmed beard and was rather short of stature. He barked at the others, but his gaze never left Welstiel. This man had not drawn a weapon. The sheath on his hip was too narrow for a sailor’s cutlass, perhaps made for a saber instead. The sleeves of his azure shirt beneath the quilted and padded leather vest were a cleaner cut than the rest.

  “Stop there,” he said in the old Droevinkan, his words strangely sharpened by the accent of his native tongue.

  Welstiel halted, as did Chane.

  “You are the captain?” Welstiel asked, and jingled the pouch. “We seek passage on your vessel.”

  “Passage?” the man repeated.

  He looked Welstiel up and down, snorted, and then cocked his head toward one of the two who had flanked Welstiel at the beach top.

  “He captain,” the young man said in his broken speech. “But he not speak your words. I am helm.”

  “Helmsman?” Welstiel corrected politely.

  The short helmsman said nothing as the captain took a few steps down the sloping sand.

  He was the tallest and bulkiest, and shirtless beneath his cloak and tunic. His thick leather vestment was adorned with spaced steel studs shaped like diamonds. Heavy armor for a seafarer.

  His hair and face were hidden beneath a helm of hardened, shaped leather, with three evenly spaced flat iron strips across its skull top. The long nose guard and wide cheek and jaw wings were reinforced as well. This left only two eye loops connected to the narrow opening exposing the middle of his mouth and the front his chin. Welstiel found it difficult to gauge the man’s expression.

  The captain never looked at the pouch—only at Welstiel—and inched forward with a thick short sword poised in his grip. Clearly these men thought it easier to take Welstiel’s money, and his attempt at barter was not even worth amusement.

  Welstiel flipped the pouch up with his fingers and caught its falling bulk in his palm.

  The captain paused, but still his gaze did not shift. Welstiel opened the pouch, pinching out silver coins into plain sight.

  “We need passage for seven.”

  “Seven?” the helmsman repeated, and rattled off something to his captain.

  The captain growled a few words to the man behind him. That sailor scurried off the way Welstiel had come. Another bolted along the cove’s southern curve.

  “Welstiel!” Chane hissed. “What are you doing?”

  He stepped in, pushing back his cloak to expose his longsword, and kept shifting his head, watching all the sailors still in sight.

  Again the captain appeared unimpressed, but he took a few quick glances. Not at the pouch and coins but toward the cove’s far reaches, where his two men had run off.

  Welstiel slowly pushed back his cloak to expose his own sword.

  The captain did not seem foolish, and the mention of seven in Welstiel’s party had made him wary. A piercing whistle carried from the north, and then another from the south. The captain clenched the shortsword’s hilt hesitantly.

  Welstiel took another step forward. The helmsman closed quickly on him, but Chane moved in to block his path.

  “Let him come,” Welstiel instructed.

  Chane backed up one step and held his ground with a soft hiss.

  “I offer more as well,” Welstiel said, waiting as the helmsman translated for his captain. “Something rarer than coin.”

  He slowly swung his pack off his shoulder and dug inside it. At the glimmer rising from the opened pack, the captain raised his sword, its point reaching out.

  Welstiel lifted his globe of three flittering lights.

  “Tell him the lights never go out,” he said, and waited while the helmsman explained.

  The captain reached out and wrapped thick fingers around the globe. He lifted it before his face.

  Its light flooded the shadowed openings of his helm. He did not appear remotely awed, but his interest was clear. A good light source requiring no fire was useful to a seafarer.

  Welstiel held up both pouches and shook the one from the monastery, so that its few silver pennies made noise.

  “A third now . . . the rest when we reach the first port on your route.”

  The helmsman repeated, and the captain returned a question.

  “Why is you out here, where is nothing?” the helmsman asked.

  “Not your concern,” Welstiel returned. “My people will stay below deck, and we are not to be disturbed. We have our own food and water, so we will be no more burden than the rest of your . . . cargo. Passage is all we require.”

  The captain and helmsman broke into a quick and sharp exchange, and then the captain looked at Welstiel and nodded once. The helmsman held out his hand, and Welstiel rendered up his smaller pouch containing nearly all his true coin. When he reached for the globe, not offered as down payment, the captain curled it back in his grip and turned away.

  The helmsman merely smirked.

  Welstiel understood this game. The captain accepted the bargain, but now he would wait. Once his passengers were aboard in the hold, it would be far easier to take all of their possessions. No one would even find the bodies, sunk to the sea bottom.

  “My name Klâtäs. You get people,” the helmsman encouraged. “We leave soon.”

  Welstiel decided to stay and keep his eyes on these men. He also knew how Chane longed for real blood.

  “Bring the others,” he told Chane, “but only as far as the turn into the cove. Keep them away from the camp until it is time to board.”

  Welstiel found it puzzling that his ferals obeyed Chane in most things, especially the young female. As Chane disappeared down the beach, passing a returning Ylladon scout, Welstiel backed toward the water and away from the skiffs to consider his options.

  Magiere traveled south, but she had not come this far, judging by her position in his last scrying. Whatever might come, he could not allow her to get away from him. If she stopped short and headed inland, he would have to force the Ylladon ship to turn back north. But that was not likely, since the impassable Blade Range separated the eastern from the western coast. Magiere was far more likely to sail onward beyond the range’s southern end, where it broke into the scattered rugged terrain of the Pock Peaks. It was the only place he could think of that she might enter the high mountains on foot. If that was her plan, her ship might eventually catch up to Welstiel’s, and then he would have harder decisions to make.

  Sgäile pulled in the oars and stood up as the skiff floated in beside the ship. No one had spoken since they pushed off the beach, and both Magiere and Léshil had been unusually quiet during their three-day return. Chap was fully recovered, much to Sgäile’s relief, but he dwelled on the gifts that the “burning” one had brought—and for whom the last two were intended.