by Barb Hendee
Leesil stepped wide to the left, leaning low, and then shifted right, putting all his weight behind a swing. His right blade tip tore along the woman’s waist, splitting her robe open.
Viscous black fluids spilled down her bared abdomen as shock filled her colorless eyes. She screeched and grasped her belly, trying to hold herself together. Leesil brought his left blade across and high when he shifted back to the left.
A heavy weight slammed into his back.
He toppled onto the gutted woman.
Leesil lost sight of the others in a tangle of cold bodies and limbs.
Wynn watched numbly as Chane fled down the passage. She barely even noticed the stocky undead he had thrown into Leesil’s back.
So many times she had wondered where Chane was, if he was all right, and if he would finally stay far from Magiere. To see him in company with Welstiel . . . it was too much.
Wynn came to her senses.
Leesil twisted on the floor in the tangle of two vampires. Sgäile was down, and Chap was in trouble. Any one of them could die.
Wynn clambered to her feet with Magiere’s old dagger in her hand as Leesil rammed his elbow back and up. The muscular undead with the iron bar lay atop him, back to back, and its snarl choked off in a grunt as the wing tip of Leesil’s blade sank through into its ribs.
Osha tried to close on the muscular undead, his hooked bone knife now gripped in place of one stiletto. The undead rolled off Leesil to its feet and went straight at Osha.
Sgäile curled, trying to pull his knees under and get up. Beneath the warmth of spreading blood, pain spiked in his left shoulder and spread up his neck. He lifted his head, and saw Chap half-buckled beneath two undead, their teeth buried in his neck.
Sgäile cried out.
And then a tingling wave washed over him.
It was much like what he had felt when he fully opened his awareness of Spirit to the life of his people’s land. This gift he had been born with, which his grandfather had wanted him to use to become Shaper, had once raised his startled awareness to a majay-hì like no other. He had stood upon a rooftop in Bela, with Léshil in the sight of his shortbow. Then his gaze had fallen upon on Chap for the first time.
As Sgäile kneeled on the chamber floor, the overwhelming sense of Spirit enveloped him.
It radiated from Chap’s hunkered form.
Both undead clamped upon the majay-hì began to shudder, but Sgäile saw only death feeding upon what was sacred. He flattened one foot on the floor stones and dove as he stretched out his right hand.
His fingers closed on the younger undead’s robe-waist. He tried to twist, pulling down and away as he fell, but the effort cost him. As he crashed to the floor and rolled, all he could do was hold tight.
He pulled the undead away more easily than expected.
Its shriek pierced Sgäile’s ears as it tripped on him and fell. Sgäile rolled clear of its flailing limbs and snatched his hand away. He rose on his knees, looking for Chap.
The majay-hì stood braced on all fours.
But the silver-haired undead no longer clung to him. It lay upon the stone floor and began to convulse.
Chap slowly turned his head, torso heaving in strained breaths. His muzzle was nearly black, and his neck was matted in his own blood as he glared at the undead.
Sgäile’s gaze fixed on dark lines spidering across the pale form’s face and bare forearm.
Black fluids welled around its eyes and ran from its ears. The spidering lines ruptured into cracks that bled more viscous fluids. Steam rose from its wounds in the chamber’s cold air, as if heat had suddenly filled this dead thing to bursting.
Then it went limp, as did the younger one. Both lay as still as corpses, steaming as if freshly dead in the frigid air.
Chap snarled once and snapped his jaws closed on the old undead’s neck. He ripped and tore at it for an instant, then halted, looking expectantly at Sgäile.
Léshil and Magiere had spoken of how they hunted undead, and Sgäile knew what Chap wanted.
He pulled the tie holding Léshil’s old blades to his back. As the bundle hit the floor, he ripped it open and gripped one winged blade.
Sgäile hacked down through the younger corpse’s neck with all his weight. Chap released the old one, stepping back, and Sgäile took its head as well.
Leesil heard an angry grunt as the heavy vampire rolled off his back. Before he could twist and slash at its legs, the woman beneath him latched her hand about his throat.
Her mouth widened with lips pulled back from long fangs and sharpened teeth.
Leesil slammed his left blade point through her side.
Her head arched back, eyes clenching shut, but her grip on his neck didn’t break. Leesil couldn’t get any air.
He levered his blade through her torso, until the point ground through her to the stone floor. When he lurched upward, her arm snapped straight, and he raised the right blade and fell on her.
The blade’s outside edge sank into her throat. Leesil shoved down hard.
Black fluids welled over his hand and forearm, and then his blade cracked through her neck bones. Her head rolled away to one side, and Leesil turned over, ripping her limp hand from his throat.
Leesil gasped in air—just as he looked up to see Wynn ram her dagger into the back of the stocky vampire grappling with Osha.
Wynn scrambled in as Osha caught the muscular undead’s wrist.
He pulled the man’s swing aside but barely avoided the iron bar. As he slashed the bone knife at the undead’s throat, Wynn ducked in and rammed her dagger into its back.
The undead twisted sharply and jerked Wynn around by her grip on the hilt. A sharp crack sounded as something narrow and solid whipped down across her thigh.
Wynn’s leg gave way, and she crumpled with a sharp whimper. She fell, and the dagger ripped downward a few inches.
Something rancid and oily spattered across her face.
Wynn tightened her grip, and the blade came out. She quickly turned over, pushing up with one hand. The dagger was coated in dripping black.
Osha slid down the wall near the passage.
Blood seeped from the side of his mouth below one clenched eye. Before Wynn could call to him, the large undead whipped around above her and raised its iron bar.
A long split ran from its throat down its upper chest. Osha’s knife had struck true, but the undead did not even notice. Wynn shrank away, raising the dagger to shield herself.
A snarling howl echoed through the chamber.
The undead lifted its head and froze, staring beyond Wynn.
“Don’t let it get out!” Leesil shouted from somewhere behind Wynn.
The muscular undead spun and bolted down the passage.
Magiere stepped out behind Li’kän into a landing hollow on the edge of a vast cavern.
The glowing orange light was strong in here, filling a space nearly as large as the underground plateau where the “burning” one had crawled from the fiery fissure. But the hot air was far more humid here. Vapors misted off the near and more distant walls, as if the snow and ice above seeped down through the earth to be eaten by the cavern’s heat.
“I am here,” Magiere whispered, but the cavern’s silence made her voice seem loud.
She stepped forward to the landing’s edge.
A long and narrow stone walkway stretched out over a round chasm, so deep that Magiere couldn’t see the bottom. The orange glow rose from below.
That one bridge joined three others, all reaching out from the distant cavern walls. They connected at a center point and blended with a stone platform suspended over the chasm. Looking around, Magiere saw pock-marks on the nearer cavern walls.
No, not marks, but more burial hovels carved in the stone—and more bone figures so old they resembled the color of the surrounding rock. Skeletons crouched and cowered with their heads and eyes cast down. They filled the cavern walls halfway up to its domed top.
“Who are th
ey?” Magiere asked.
She didn’t expect any answer, but Li’kän let out a voiceless hiss that grew too loud in the cavern’s silence.
Li’kän looked at Magiere, the same way she had at Wynn, as if fascinated that anyone spoke to her. But the white undead never glanced at the walls.
A trace of disdain crossed her pure features, like one who saw nothing of any interest. Not even for those centuries-old dead, who still bowed before this ancient one—and whatever it served.
“Did you lock them down here . . . once they finished making this place?”
Li’kän didn’t respond.
Magiere felt no rage at such injustice. What more could she expect from a monster?
A lightening sensation had washed through her from the moment she’d stepped into the tunnel. The deeper she had gone, the more it had taken away her hunger, but it also kept her dhampir nature at its peak. Yet anger, the source of all her strength and will, felt smothered.
Even the loss of that did not matter.
Magiere looked to the meeting point of those narrow stone walkways— to the landing hovering above the chasm’s depths. Something stood upon it, barely visible through the misty air.
Li’kän stepped onto the narrow walkway.
Magiere followed, and waves of humid heat rose around her.
In the long depths below, she saw clouds gathered above a glow of orange-red. Water trickling down the chasm’s walls met with severe heat somewhere below, and vapor collected in thick mist, obscuring the depths.
Vertigo filled Magiere, and she quickly turned her gaze on the walkway’s narrow stone.
What was she doing here, following a voice in her dreams and an instinctive pull she couldn’t name? That visitor hidden in her slumber hissed its words, and all she’d seen of it were writhing black coils.
This same voice had whispered to Welstiel—and to Ubâd, instructing him in Magiere’s creation using the blood of five races. But it had abandoned the necromancer.
Had it abandoned Welstiel as well? Was that why he’d never found this place on his own—and had tried in Bela to get her to join him?
Magiere knew she had followed the whispered urgings of some thing that couldn’t be trusted. And now she was passively following a mad undead across a chasm to seek . . . what?
She saw the three other bridges leading off to three other hollows in the cavern walls. Perhaps above there were other barred stone doors. The burial hovels around the cavern and in the winding passage suggested that hundreds had labored here, perhaps hauling up excavated stone to build the immense fortification above.
Li’kän blocked Magiere’s view of the platform, but when the undead reached it, she stepped aside.
A four-legged stone stand rose smoothly from the platform. A perfectly round opening had been carved through the center of its top.
In the wide hole rested a globe, slightly larger than a great helm.
It was made of a dark material Magiere couldn’t name, as dark as char and faintly rough across its round surface. Atop it, the large tapered head of a spike pierced down through the globe’s center—and the spike’s head was larger than her fist. When she crouched to peer through the stand’s four legs, she saw the spike’s tip protruded a hand’s width through the globe’s bottom.
Magiere saw no mark of separation to indicate that the spike could ever be removed. Both spike and globe appeared to have been chiseled from one single piece.
Was this the “orb” she had come for?
All Magiere’s doubts slipped away. It was trapped here, and she had to free it—protect it—keep it from all other hands. This was why she had come. And still all trace of her hunger was gone.
Magiere rose from her crouch and looked at Li’kän. “This is how you’ve survived. It . . . sustains you.”
Li’kän just stared at the orb, as if she had not seen it in a long time.
Magiere saw grooves around the spike’s head. Looking closer, she found that they ended in notches on opposing sides of the spike, and she glanced back at Li’kän.
The undead raised her slender hand, and her fingertips brushed the circlet around her neck. Like the one Magiere wore, its open ends were adorned with inward-pointing knobs.
Magiere’s eyes widened as she looked down upon the spike’s grooves and notches.
“How do I—”
“This is not what I expected,” said a refined voice.
Magiere whirled about.
Welstiel stood halfway across the narrow stone bridge.
Leesil had barely crawled to his knees when Sgäile and Chap leaped past him.
But the last robed undead was already gone. Panic hit him as he scrambled up and grabbed the back of Wynn’s coat.
“Come on!” he growled, pulling her up. “Welstiel and Chane are already after Magiere, and now that big undead!”
Then he saw the state of his companions.
Chap’s neck was matted with blood, and a split in Sgäile’s cowl collar and the shoulder of his tunic were soaked in dark red. Wynn favored one leg, though she stayed on her feet, but Osha was slumped unconscious against the wall. Blood trailed from his hair across his temple, and more leaked from the side of his mouth.
Leesil wavered, desperately wanting to find Magiere.
“Wait,” Sgäile said.
He held one of Leesil’s old blades in hand and looked to the first undead Li’kän had left broken near the wall. It did not move, but its body was intact. Without hesitation, Sgäile walked over and hacked the winged blade through the undead’s throat.
A wet and muffled crack sounded as the blade severed its spine.
Leesil watched Sgäile with a flicker of surprise. Apparently the man had overcome his revulsion of dismemberment. Sgäile returned and gripped Osha’s limp arm, and Leesil helped lift the younger elf over Sgäile’s good shoulder.
“The library,” Sgäile said.
Leesil took Wynn’s arm, steadying the limping sage as they headed down the passage. When they reached the vast library and turned toward its far end, they saw that the iron beam now lay on the floor.
The stone doors were partly open.
Sgäile lowered Osha, and Wynn caught the young elf’s shoulders, helping ease him onto the floor.
“I will tend him,” she said. “Go after Magiere—hurry!”
“I can’t just leave you here!” Leesil shouted in frustration.
“Yes,” she insisted. “You heard Welstiel tell those mad undeads, ‘Protect my way.’ He commands them. That is why the large one ran to assist him when the others were destroyed. Now go!”
Leesil looked uncertainly to Sgäile, standing before the doors and cradling the arm below his wounded shoulder.
“I can still fight,” he said flatly. “Now come!”
Chap loped past Sgäile through the space in the doors.
Leesil’s instincts screamed for him to run to Magiere, but another part railed against leaving Wynn alone.
