by Barb Hendee
The ravens lighted upon the stairway’s rail high above.
Both wolves came to a halt, poised as their heads turned toward their mistress.
Li’kän stood staring at Magiere.
Magiere’s eyes were flooded pure black, and a livid snarl twisted her face. She lifted the falchion, gripping it with both hands, and closed on Li’kän.
“No!” Wynn shouted, for Magiere did not know what she faced.
Magiere looked into the naked undead’s teardrop-shaped eyes. This thing had to be one of the “old ones” that Welstiel had hinted at. But the woman looked nothing like what Magiere had expected. Frail and small, too tiny to be a true threat.
Yet she had taken two anmaglâhk before they could fight back. And she had stolen Chap and Wynn.
Magiere wanted her head.
She swung the falchion back and up. Both hands gripped the hilt as it rose past her shoulder. When she charged, she faltered at a glint of metal.
“No!” someone cried.
Magiere saw the thick ends of red-gold metal with protruding knobs about the undead’s slim throat. The white woman sprung forward with a silent snarl, and Magiere twisted aside, bringing her sword down. A frail white hand caught the falchion’s blade, and the sword stopped without cutting through.
The impact shuddered through Magiere’s arms and into her shoulders. The little woman wrenched the blade aside, and it twisted in Magiere’s grip. This only made her angrier, and her hunger erupted.
“Leesil, stop her—she cannot win against Li’kän!”
Magiere heard Leesil’s name, and her eyes shifted once to find him. Wynn struggled, pinned in one of his arms as he held a winged blade before her. A flash of doubt passed over Leesil’s face.
The woman’s colorless eyes widened, mirroring Magiere’s hunger. She shook, and her mouth gaped, exposing sharp teeth.
Magiere released one hand from the falchion’s hilt and grabbed for the undead’s white throat. More quickly, the woman latched her other hand around Magiere’s wrist.
They stood straining against each other. Black fluids ran down the falchion from between the white undead’s fingers. Magiere tried to press her blade forward but couldn’t, and her boots started to slide upon the stone floor. One of her legs began to buckle.
She let one knee drop to the floor, then thrust upward with her whole body.
The white woman’s narrow feet lifted sharply, but her grips tightened on Magiere’s wrist and sword. Magiere pivoted before the undead could come down, and whipped the woman’s small body in an arc.
Glistening black hair snapped wildly around the woman’s white face, until her body slammed into the stairway’s side. The stone railing shattered, scattering pieces across the floor.
The grip on Magiere’s wrist broke, but the woman’s momentum jerked Magiere off her feet. Her sword clattered from her hand as she hit the floor and rolled onto all fours.
The white woman scrambled to her feet amid bits of broken stone. A figure in gray-green leaped up onto the thick railing’s remains. A long, glinting wire was stretched taut between his spreading hands.
“Wynn, stop it!” Leesil shouted, and then, “Sgäile! Don’t!”
Sgäile hesitated, his amber eyes fixed upon the white woman below him. She lashed out with one hand, not even looking up at him.
Sgäile hopped up into the air. A grating screech of stone filled Magiere’s ears as the undead’s nails tore more chips from the railing. Magiere gained her feet and lunged with her bare hands.
The white woman charged to meet her—and then jerked to an awkward halt.
Magiere’s whole body grew instantly weak.
A sudden sense of weight nearly crushed the hunger out of her, and the chamber turned dim in her sight. She wavered where she stood, and when her sight cleared . . .
The white undead shuddered with narrow muscles straining beneath her smooth skin. She lifted her sagging head, but her eyelids drooped as colorless irises rolled up. She swayed like a drunkard or someone caught in waking sleep.
Wynn appeared in Magiere’s way. “Wait! She is more dangerous than you know . . . and we may need her.”
Chap trotted over, pacing before Magiere as he watched the frail-looking undead.
Magiere held her place only because hunger had slipped from her, and she wanted it back.
Nothing was as Magiere had expected. All she wanted was to kill any undead in her way, find and take the object she’d come for, and silence her dreams once and for all. She felt weary.
Magiere grabbed Wynn by the arm and pulled the little sage back behind herself. Then she remembered the shadow beasts.
The ravens were perched upon the rail of the upper landing. The inky coats of both wolves glimmered slightly. Then they all turned to translucent smoke and vanished through the chamber walls.
“This is getting a little too odd,” Leesil whispered, “even for us.”
Magiere’s relief doubled at the sight of him beside her. Beyond him, Osha hurried toward Wynn, but Sgäile still perched above the white woman, watching her coldly.
The white undead lowered her head, crystalline irises rolling down to settle upon Magiere.
Chap reached for Li’kän’s memories.
Her forced breaths hissed out, twisted and broken, as her lips worked in a failed attempt to speak. She pressed a hand over one ear and appeared to whisper to herself. But she never uttered a sound.
Chap recalled a memory he had seen within Magiere—and once heard her recount.
When Ubâd had conjured Magelia’s spirit, Magiere’s mother had shown her memories from a few moons before her birth. Welstiel had wandered her father’s keep’s courtyard in the dark, whispering to a voice Magelia could not hear.
Chap saw nothing within Li’kän’s mind.
Then something blinked through her thoughts.
Not an image, but a fleeting sound, like a whisper or a hiss.
Chap could not make out any words. About to pull free from Li’kän’s thoughts, he heard the sound change.
Like a leaf-wing flutter?
That was how Wynn described hearing Chap communing with the Fay, but rather than the chorus she’d mentioned, he heard just one quick, soft buzz in the undead’s thoughts.
Then it was gone, like a blink completed.
Chap watched Li’kän tilt her head with half-open eyes, as if listening. Her lips moved silently again, and he pulled quickly from her mind.
Perhaps he had only heard Li’kän’s own voiceless whispers.
He studied this mad thing and reflected upon the “night voice” spoken of in the old parchments found by Wynn’s guild. He felt like a pup lost in a dark room, wandering to find a way out.
Chane stared at Welstiel in disbelief as dusk settled in.
“What do you mean, ‘she’s lost’?” he demanded.
“Last night,” Welstiel answered. “Sometime before sunrise.”
They crouched in the tent, facing each other across the glowing steel hoop. The ferals sensed their tension and shifted restlessly.
Chane’s mouth hung half-open. He closed it, teeth snapping together.
“You knew . . . when you returned before dawn? And you said nothing!”
“What would you have done?” Welstiel challenged. “Run off once more to save your little sage—in daylight? Spare me your outrage.”
Chane slapped open the tent’s flap. He was already ripping down the shelter before any of the others got out. Barely bothering to fold the canvas, he lashed the tent into a bundle as Welstiel sat scrying in the snow. When the undead stood, he appeared mildly surprised.
“What now?” Chane hissed, hating to even ask.
“Magiere may have gone farther than anticipated . . . or has not yet returned from the search.”
Welstiel’s continued reluctance to share information was infuriating. Chane finished packing their gear and motioned to Sabel.
“We go.”
She took up the bundled te
nt, and the other monks reluctantly gathered the remaining gear to follow. This trek of ice and starvation wore on all of them.
Welstiel stepped off upslope as they followed, but Chane hung back to walk at the line’s end. They trudged on, until spotting a crusted canvas pinned to a rock face across the slope.
“Their camp,” Welstiel said. “We can track from here along their trail.”
Chane had a fleeting urge to look inside the canvas, as he smelled no life nearby. Instead, he pushed past Welstiel along the clear path in the snow left by Magiere’s people. He followed this for a long while—up to a place where the tracks broke in all directions. Many of them turned back atop each other, all placed around a gully that forked in two directions.
“Which way?” Welstiel asked.
Chane crouched in the snow. The thought of doing anything for Welstiel’s benefit made the beast in him yowl. But he could not stop picturing Wynn lost out here in this frigid land.
“The right fork has no returning footprints,” Chane rasped. “Wherever they went, they did not come back this way . . . as on the other paths.”
The ferals crouched, sniffing about, but none seemed to catch anything of interest.
Chane stood up and pressed on. They passed through a saddle between the rocks, and he slowed at the sight of a boxed gully. As they moved inward, he found a wide split in one stone wall—and a frozen, stiff body just inside.
And a head tossed haphazardly near one gully wall.
The ferals sniffed wildly but did not rush in. Even Chane smelled no blood in the cold. Perhaps the monks were confused by the lack of scent when faced with a dead body—and no life to feed on. He glanced at the head.
A coating of snow crusted its face and open eyes.
“How many elves were trailing Magiere?” he asked.
“Uncertain,” Welstiel answered. He stepped close to the corpse in the chute.
A fist-sized hole gaped in the man’s chest. Chane studied it from where he stood.
“Could Magiere have done this?”
Welstiel leaned over the wound before answering.
“No . . . this is not the way an undead kills, even her.” But he did not sound sure. “We press on. There’s nothing more to learn here.”
“Press on?” Chane hissed. “To where?”
But he followed as Welstiel turned up the rocky chute.
Hkuan’duv and Dänvârfij watched the pack of crouching humans and their two leaders approach Sgäilsheilleache’s camp.
“Downwind,” he mouthed, and they slipped south.
Dänvârfij’s eyes narrowed as she took her first clear look at these people.
The dark-haired one with white temples led, while the younger brought up the rear. Both wore cloaks and heavy clothing and swords. Both looked grim and weather-worn and pale, but otherwise like any common human Hkuan’duv had encountered.
But the hunkered ones sniffed and grunted like dogs, often crouching on their hands and feet.
The taller man with red-brown hair took the lead, following the broken trail in the snow.
Hkuan’duv waited until the last of them vanished into the broken mountainside. He had expected Sgäilsheilleache to bring his charges back, but no one had returned to the camp. He began second-guessing his decision to wait.
What if Magiere had not assisted in searching for her small companion? What if she had already found what she sought, whether the others located the young female or not? And what did these other two and their hunched entourage have to do with any of this? Did they seek the artifact as well?
“Follow?” Dänvârfij asked.
Hkuan’duv finally nodded. They slipped out of hiding, trailing low and carefully in silence.
Welstiel did not need to scry for Magiere. Out the chute’s top, he found a clear trail again. The strides of the footprints were long, as if Magiere and her companions were running, and Welstiel picked up the pace.
They traveled a long while until they reached a steep rocky incline narrowly breaching two tall peaks. Three ferals grunted in protest, but he drove them on to the top and stopped upon the crest.
Out on a vast white plain, couched between high peaks all around, rested the six-towered castle.
After so much effort, and so much planning and manipulation . . .
Welstiel looked upon the end of his search and the promised end of his suffering.
His night sight sharpened under the moon, and the relief inside him wavered.
Even in darkness, the castle was not the same as in his dreams. It looked old and decayed. The trail resumed at the slope’s bottom, heading toward the fortification.
Magiere was already there.
Welstiel hurried down the rocky slope.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Hkuan’duv and Dänvârfij followed from a safe distance, letting the pack of humans keep a good lead. But when they reached the boxed gully, Dänvârfij halted, still as the snow, and stared at Kurhkâge’s frozen corpse in the chute.
A’harhk’nis’s head lay uncovered where someone else had found it. Hkuan’duv knew that Sgäilsheilleache would be aware he had been followed, and his suspicions might grow.
Dänvârfij sank to her knees. “What could have done this?”
When Hkuan’duv had returned to camp last night, his need to suppress shock and pain had kept him from relating too many details. She had not pressed for more.
“I believe this white woman is one of the humans’ undead,” he began, and then faltered. “They had no defense against her . . . she was too fast and strong.”
“But this,” Dänvârfij said, looking at A’harhk’nis’s head, “to one such as him . . . We cannot leave them untended.”
“We will perform rites after our purpose is fulfilled.”
Dänvârfij lifted her eyes to him and, for a moment, he thought she might argue. Then her expression flattened until no trace of anger or grief remained. Their purpose came first, even if it meant irreverence for their dead. Dänvârfij stepped up the chute as if she had seen nothing at all.
Hkuan’duv followed and suppressed his trepidation as he passed between the stone walls—past the place where he’d seen a white face with colorless eyes like ice.
They breached the chute’s upper end and saw no one, but the trail in the snow was clear. They trekked in silence until the path led to a rocky slope through a narrow saddle between two high peaks. When they crested the top, they both halted above a wide white plateau between the mountains.
“Look,” Dänvârfij whispered, pointing.
Upon the sunken plain stood an ancient fortification of pale gray stone, and the distant specks of the two male humans and their band drew closer to it.
Hkuan’duv hurried down to the plain’s edge and crouched to wait and watch. There he spotted a paw print in the snow near the rocks.
