Child of a Dead God

by Barb Hendee

  His efforts were fruitless. Each memory he called up was quickly obliterated by the one of perpetual ice clinging to a six-towered castle. And for an instant, he glimpsed a pale-faced figure flicker past the frost-glazed pane of a window.

  Now Magiere stood by the fallen tree, dressed in breeches and hauberk, with her black hair unbound and her falchion on her hip. The Chein’âs’s long dagger was tucked slantwise into the back of her thick belt. Her dark eyes shone in the morning light with a hard intensity.

  Sister of the dead . . . my child . . . lead on!

  Chap recoiled at those words rising from Magiere’s memories, back-stepping once as he pulled from her mind.

  That voice hissing in the darkness of her thoughts . . . like something on the edge of his own memories that he could not place. He shivered, and when he looked up, Magiere was watching him.

  Chap’s earthly instincts screamed that they should turn back. And in that faltering instant, he considered committing a sin. He remembered a law of the Fay:

  Whatever they might do otherwise, no one of them would ever enslave the will of any being.

  In part, this was why he had chosen to be “born” rather than invade the spirit of one already living. But if he wished, he could take Magiere, possess her even for a moment, and turn her from this journey. In his time with her and Leesil, he had come to respect their need for free will. So how could he take that from her now?

  For that matter . . . why did he think of enslavement as the first “sin” of the Fay?

  And how did these sudden fragments of his memories—and the voice of Magiere’s dreams—connect to this artifact she sought?

  More missing pieces that his kin had torn from him at his “birth.”

  Magiere reached down to stroke his head.

  “When we get there, I’ll know what to do,” she whispered.

  The others were packed up and ready to leave. Leesil stood with Sgäile, and Wynn walked with Osha, chatting away in Elvish, forgetting to enforce his practice of Belaskian.

  Chap turned his eyes up to the west, and the high wall of the Blade Range, seemingly distant beyond the forested foothills. He traced the jagged silhouette far southward to where the range broke against the even higher snow-capped mountains.

  “We’ll travel the coast as long as possible,” she said. “I’ll know when we need to turn inland.”

  Leesil took her hand.

  As the others headed down the open beach, Chap remained a little longer. He had forsaken everything to protect his charges from death and from their fates. But a chill ran beneath his thick coat, as if the worst was yet to come, and he dropped his head, feeling helpless.

  He tried to focus on Wynn’s light chatter to Osha about screeching seabirds wheeling high above the shore. And he loped after them across the gravelly beach.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Chane was still young in his undead existence and, at times, felt he knew too little of his new nature.

  Almost a full moon had passed, and now he and Welstiel climbed into the high, snow-choked Pock Peaks south of the Blade Range. He gave little thought to the temperature dropping lower each night, as he never truly felt the cold.

  As dawn approached, his fingers would not close.

  Chane stared at his hands, paler than ever before.

  “Welstiel?” he rasped.

  Jakeb whimpered and began biting at his fingers.

  Chane tried to fold his fingers against his thigh. His legs had stiffened and barely moved.

  Welstiel cursed under his breath and dropped heavily to his knees, digging furiously in the snow with stiffened fingers.

  “Set up shelter, quickly,” he ordered, but his words were half-mumbled.

  “What is happening to us?” Chane demanded.

  Sabel and Sethè wrestled with the tent’s cold-stiffened canvas as Welstiel uncovered a flat rock beneath the snow. He fumbled with his pack, but his hands were too stiff to open it. In the end, he simply bit through the flap’s tie and dug clumsily inside before drawing out what he sought. The steel hoop with dark etchings was hooked over his wrist, and he dropped it in the hollow.

  At the clang of steel upon stone, Chane remembered the hoop’s scent and taste of char. He no longer felt his legs, but he kept silent, waiting to see what Welstiel would do.

  Humming softly, Welstiel swept stiff fingers around the steel hoop, and its hair-thin lines and symbols began to change. Red sparks appeared, quickly spread, and those dark etchings brightened until all the hoop’s markings were as fiery as a smith’s forge. Heat began to emanate from the steel.

  “Thaw your hands,” Welstiel ordered, “but keep them still until they loosen . . . or you could lose a finger. We do not have enough stored life to repair severed digits.”

  Chane dropped hard to his knees, relieved he could bend at all, and glared at Welstiel.

  “Why did you not warn me!” he hissed.

  “I thought if we kept moving,” Welstiel began, “we would not succumb to—”

  “Answer me!” Chane spit back.

  “We have bodies, dead or not,” Welstiel returned in a low voice, “susceptible to freezing . . . but unlike the living, we do not succumb to pain . . . so we had no warning.”

  More secrets of Chane’s new existence—fire and beheading were not the only things for a Noble Dead to fear. And again, he’d narrowly escaped a harsh lesson before Welstiel finally revealed the truth in little pieces.

  “Put out your hands!” Chane whispered at the ferals.

  He held his own above the arcane source of heat. Monks scrambled in around him to do likewise. Within moments, Chane’s fingers began to flex, though his legs and arms were still stiff.

  They raised the tent over the snow hollow and the glowing hoop, and then huddled together once more around the source of warmth. Welstiel shed his gloves, warming his fingers more directly, and Chane noticed his ring of nothing was now on his left hand. Perhaps the change meant nothing, and he never asked. He would not get an answer anyhow, and he passed the crawling time in seething over Welstiel’s continued secrecy.

  The only thing keeping him steady as he felt the sun rise outside the tent was the knowledge that Wynn had survived the shipwreck.

  During one predawn pause in the foothills of the Broken Range, Welstiel had slipped down to the shore to check Magiere’s trail. Chane could stand it no longer. He had followed at a distance, watching from hiding.

  Welstiel had crouched low just beyond the reach of the noisy surf surging up the beach, and then he went a little farther, turning toward the tree line. He stopped to study the ground there. When he finally turned away, he headed back toward camp at a slow and steady pace. Whatever Welstiel sought, he looked no further.

  Chane knew what Welstiel had found.

  Magiere had finally turned into the foothills, headed for the mountains.

  The moment Welstiel was out of sight, Chane had rushed south through the trees rather than heading for the beach. He came upon a stream weaving down the rocky slope. At a lip of sod overhanging the trickling water, he found three distinct footprints among others in the mucky earth. Small and narrow, they could only be Wynn’s.

  As Chane hunched in the tent over the glowing steel hoop, he clung to that memory. He tried to shut out the presence of Welstiel and the ferals as he curled up on the ground. Soon dormancy took him, and he sank in the brief respite of dreamless nothingness for the day.

  More nights passed.

  Welstiel led them on, always following after Magiere. Each night, the temperature dropped lower as they climbed higher. Chane learned to keep moving.

  As long as he did so, his body resisted freezing. Friction was also useful, for though his dead flesh generated no heat, rubbing his joints harshly and often kept them limber. He taught the ferals to do the same.

  The steel hoop became a common sight, always present at dawn when they crawled into the tent. Sometime during the day’s dormancy, its burning lines always faded to
charcoal black. When they rose at dusk, Welstiel briefly reinitialized the hoop while they broke camp.

  Chane tried to study it, to learn more.

  One night, Welstiel shut down the hoop but was distracted by another disturbance from Sethè. He left the hoop lying in the snow hollow, and Chane surreptitiously crouched and reached for it.

  He snatched his hand back at the sizzle of his fingertips and stepped away before Welstiel saw him.

  When Welstiel returned from giving another beating to Sethè, he absently reached down for the hoop to return it to his pack. Chane heard nothing as Welstiel gripped it, and he suppressed his awe—and his frustration. Welstiel did not even flinch.

  Chane appreciated secrecy. No mage revealed more than he had to. But he was tired of Welstiel doling out tidbits concerning undead existence only when necessary. Now it appeared that Welstiel’s arcane knowledge was greater than Chane had estimated.

  To create an object that conjured fire within itself was one thing. But Welstiel’s steel hoop included something more that made only him immune to its damaging effects. But a few nights later, a more immediate problem reared up. The last of Welstiel’s stored life elixir was gone, and the monks grew difficult to control—especially Sethè.

  Chane awoke one dusk to find Welstiel gone. He stepped quickly from the tent to find his half-mad companion sitting in the snow, scrying for Magiere.

  “I feel she draws close to her destination,” Welstiel said, as if sensing Chane’s presence.

  Chane did not care. The monotony of hunger, cold, and suffering continued each night. And for what—the promise of a better existence?

  “Then we are not long from completing our bargain,” Chane whispered.

  “Yes,” Welstiel answered. “You will have your letter of introduction to the sages’ guild.”

  A twinge whipped through Chane. The beast inside of him scurried into a corner, hiding from an unseen threat. Chane stared at Welstiel’s back.

  This had happened once before, as he had left the monastery behind Welstiel. Twice was too much to ignore.

  What was this abrupt panic springing from mere words that only his instinct seemed to know? Not just suspicion or wariness, but an ache in his head, like atrophied muscles used too harshly before they could be strengthened.

  But the sensation left Chane with one unexplained certainty.

  Welstiel was lying to him.

  A full moon after the shipwreck, Magiere tightened her coat’s collar and resecured her face wrap beneath her hood. Fortunately, Osha had carried a spare pair of gloves. The fingers were too long, but she did not care. She forced one foot after another through the deep snow.

  After finally reaching the high mountain altitudes of the Pock Peaks, south of the Blade Range, she had not seen a tree in the last six days. Only crusted snow choked the paths between jagged outcrops and canyon walls, and charcoal black peaks speared into the dingy white sky.

  The icy winds were harsher than those of the Broken Range, when Leesil had dragged her through to the Elven Territories. And worse, breathing took effort. They halted often in the thin, frigid air and buckled where they stood to catch their breath.

  Daylight waned, and Magiere could barely make out anyone’s face beneath their cowls, hoods, and the cloth wraps Leesil had made by shredding spare clothing.

  Chap pushed on ahead. Wind-driven snow coated the blanket lashed around his body and neck. Leesil and Sgäile trudged directly behind Magiere. Wynn and Osha staggered along at the rear.

  Wynn was too fragile for this terrain, and her small body lost heat quickly. Her short legs took more steps to cover the same distance as the others. Osha had never been outside the elven forest and its constant climate. The cold heights were proving a shock to his body, and he had the most trouble breathing.

  But these worries remained faint in Magiere’s obsessed thoughts. Only the pull upward and the dreams mattered. Only finding the orb before anyone else could.

  Chap barked from ahead, and Sgäile struggled past Magiere.

  “Here,” he called, voice muffled beneath his face wrap.

  Magiere almost shouted at him to keep moving. They still had daylight, and she was still on her feet. She had to go on.

  Chap struggled halfway back through the deep snow. He stood in her path and would not move. Magiere looked beyond him.

  He’d found a depression at a granite wall’s base. The vertical face curved away from the wind, and the pocket was large enough for them to take shelter.

  So far, Sgäile and Chap had managed to find a suitable place to camp each night. In the worst cases, Sgäile and Osha piled and packed snow walls, which they would then roof and enclose with a canvas tarp. Everyone huddled together, sharing coats and cloaks as blankets, having long abandoned all sense of modesty.

  Magiere heaved a breath, and its vapor tore away in the wind. She knew they couldn’t pass up shelter so close to dusk.

  Leesil trudged over and looked inside the depression’s mouth, only the slits of his eyes visible within his cowl.

  “This is good,” he said. “We can curtain the opening with canvas . . . and trap some heat from the fire.”

  Osha’s hands shook as he tried to dig in his pack, and Sgäile took the pack from him.

  “You and Wynn go inside,” he ordered.

  Without a word, Osha crawled to the depression’s back with Wynn close behind. He leaned against the stone wall, opening his cloak, and she collapsed against him. He drew the cloak closed, and she became nothing but a gray-green lump on his chest.

  Sgäile pulled his face wrap down, exposing cracked lips as he glanced at Leesil. They were both freezing and exhausted.

  Magiere finally rolled her pack off her shoulders.

  Without a word, they set to staking the canvas tarp to block the depression’s entrance. When they finished, Magiere took the small pot from Sgäile’s pack.

  “Start the fire,” she said, her voice cracking. “I’ll get snow to melt.”

  She slipped out through the canvas’s edge as Sgäile arranged a small pile of deer droppings and Leesil retrieved their nightly rations.

  They were all sick of berries, which turned mushy once thawed, and flaking fish made bitter with powdered fungus. Most of them couldn’t even take food until they’d downed tea or hot water to warm up. For the past three nights, Wynn only wanted sleep when she stopped, and someone always had to force her to eat.

  Magiere scraped the pot against the snow, filling it, and ducked back into their enclosure. The stench of smoldering dung filled the space. The barely recognizable lump of Osha and Wynn heaped together hadn’t changed, except that Chap now lay curled up against Wynn. The shelter began to grow warmer, at least above freezing.

  Leesil unwrapped his hands and pulled the tattered cloth from his face. His lips and the skin around his eyes were badly chapped. He leaned against the depression’s side, rubbing his hands together as he held them out to the tiny fire. Magiere settled beside him as Sgäile took the pot from her.

  “We should let Osha and Wynn rest a while,” Leesil said. “Even into midday tomorrow.”