by Barb Hendee
A wordless hiss in Chap’s skull drove cold into his bones. For an instant it almost shifted to a leaf-wing crackle in his head.
He felt it clearly—another Fay—a second, yet singular and alone. It wormed through him like winter’s ache, the same one that had tried to coil around his awareness as he fled from Li’kän’s mind.
The presence vanished from Chap’s awareness. The tingle within him ripped away as he choked.
Within the painful light upon the platform, Magiere had done something to awaken or activate the ancient artifact.
He did not yet understand what or why, but there was a reason that the orb had been left fallow in the frozen mountains and burning chasm. Water droplets raced from the stone walls toward its light as vapors from the chasm twisted upward.
“What is happening?” Sgäile shouted.
Chap scurried forward with eyes down, barely making out his paws’ outlines upon the stone floor. The glare broke away on both sides, leaving only a narrow strip running ahead. It had to be the bridge.
Chap padded blindly out, heading for the platform.
Leesil grappled for Magiere’s hands, turning his face from the blinding orb. Though it burned with a green-blue glow, the light filling the air was searing white. He felt rain patter on his body. But it fell inward from all around, all directions. Droplets stung him and seemed to roll over his limbs, sucked away toward the orb.
He closed his eyes and shouted, “Let go! Damn it, Magiere, let it drop!”
No matter how hard he pressed on her hands, she remained rigid and unyielding.
Something grabbed the back of Leesil’s hauberk.
Wrenching force heaved him backward, and his fingers tore from Magiere’s hands. He landed hard on stone and flopped over once. He quickly flattened in fear of blindly tumbling over the platform’s edge.
Leesil looked back for Magiere, and his eyes watered instantly in the glare. Tears beaded and ripped from his face. They joined a thousand droplets racing through the cavern toward the light beyond Magiere.
Her body shielded the orb, as if she stood directly in line with the sun, turning her into a darkly blurred silhouette. White light radiated around her, blurring everything else from sight.
Until another hazy silhouette closed on her.
Narrower and shorter, it reached out beyond Magiere, somewhere above the orb.
Leesil turned his face aside as he crawled toward Magiere. He could barely make out the open cavern. Vapors thinned from the air, and the far walls were lit up. The pocket cavities of the dead, not as bright as the open stone, were little more than oval blotches in his blurred sight.
He saw them begin to move.
Like shadows that the light couldn’t smother, they shifted along the cavern walls and flowed in a slowly swirling pattern.
Leesil dragged the back of his hand over his eyes, trying to clear his warped vision.
The swirling of shadows undulated. They flowed together in turning paths like a snake with no beginning or end, and those huge shadow coils turned everywhere across the cavern’s walls.
Leesil continued crawling toward Magiere. As he got closer, her body shielded him enough to raise his head and look at her.
A dim form rose above her silhouette.
More muted shadows joined into the shape of a head, growing larger . . . or closer.
At first, Leesil thought he saw the outline of the serpent guardian he’d faced before the burial ground of the elven ancestors. But it kept growing until its dull oblong took on more features.
Pale outlines of ridges . . . or horns . . . or spikes . . . ran back across its top from above lidless eyes. Those faint staring globes, set wide on its face, were surrounded by bulged and thickened scales that trailed in twined rows down a long snout.
Its reptilian head rose, mounted upon the end of the shadow coils worming along the cavern walls. The faint outline of its jaws widened.
Leesil scrambled up.
Within the beast’s huge maw, Leesil saw rows of dark translucent shapes, like teeth as long as his legs.
It was no snake or serpent. He didn’t even know what to call it.
He shut his eyes against the glare and sprang, throwing his arms around Magiere’s torso when his chest collided with her back.
He opened his eyes once, looking up.
The scaled monster’s jaws widened, as if it would swallow the whole platform, and it came down on them.
Leesil wrenched Magiere away with all his weight.
Magiere saw no cavern, felt no circlet. She saw nothing but white light. Then all the pure light snapped to blackness.
Enormous dark coils turned around her.
A whispering hiss surrounded her, as if she’d fallen asleep for the last time and slipped into that dark dream. But no clear words came from the hidden voice of the coils.
Hunger rushed through Magiere. If she’d had breath, she would have choked.
She felt an undead presence, as if buried in it—swallowed by it.
Only those coils—coils of an undead—and hunger rupturing her within remained in the sudden dark dream.
Something touched Magiere’s hands—she felt her own hands once more—and her sight filled with a flash of brilliant white.
Small pale hands pressed down atop her own—and someone else squeezed tightly around her chest and heaved.
Magiere came to a stop, lying prone atop whoever had pulled her back.
All around her, the cavern had suddenly returned to its dim red glow.
For an instant, water droplets hung in the air. They all fell suddenly, and the patter of a rainstorm filled the platform. The cavern air became silent and empty.
Magiere looked toward the orb—and saw Li’kän standing beside the pedestal.
The white undead’s hands rested atop the circlet and the spike had settled back into place. It had melded into the orb’s dark rough form, the two parts once more a whole and unbroken shape. The teal light was gone, and the only glow came from the chasm’s depths.
Someone shuddered beneath Magiere’s back, and she spotted Leesil’s hands clenched across her chest. She broke his grip and twisted over.
His eyes were shut so tightly that his features became a strained and wrinkled mask. Spattered water had soaked his hair and face. She clawed up his body and grabbed his head.
“Look at me!” Magiere shouted. “Leesil . . . open your eyes!”
His eyes snapped open, and he began breathing too fast. He shook his head free of her grip and craned his neck, looking wildly about the cavern.
“Leesil!” Magiere whispered, and took his face again. “Leesil?”
She’d never seen so much fear in his eyes.
Chap appeared beside them, rumbling as he paced around to watch Li’kän and the orb.
Li’kän hadn’t moved or taken her eyes from the ancient object.
Chane watched everything as it happened. He saw water bleed from stone, droplets race inward, and vanish as if swallowed in the painful light. When the light grew too strong, he had to duck and cover his eyes.
In the brilliance that stung him, he felt his hunger return.
It churned inside him, unrestrained. He curled within the rock pocket as the beast inside him began to thrash.
As the glare piercing Chane’s eyelids faded, so did hunger. It vanished into nothing—and the beast within him whimpered, cowering in the dark.
He opened his eyes to look out. The white undead stood before Welstiel’s lost treasure, but Chane did not care.
He had only scorn for Welstiel, who had risked everything for something so powerful—even if the man had believed it would sustain him without feeding. Welstiel was a fool for all his knowledge, and had died for it. This thing—this orb—should have remained lost and forgotten.
But Chane had been a follower through all his short existence as a Noble Dead, from rising in servitude to Toret and then taking up with Welstiel. And freedom, now that it came, left him with nothing
again.
Chane was uncertain what he felt at Welstiel’s second death. A part of him had even wanted Welstiel to win—to finish Magiere instead. Or, better, wanted each to have taken the other over the edge.
He watched the wounded elf run along the bridge to join the others upon the platform. No one remained in the hollow of the tunnel’s entrance.
But where was Wynn?
Perhaps Leesil had hidden her somewhere safe, up in the castle.
Chane kept silent as he slowly crawled to the pocket’s front and reached around its side.
Neither Magiere’s nor Chap’s awareness of undead, nor even Leesil’s strange amulet would sense him, now that he wore Welstiel’s ring of nothing. But the last thing he needed was someone locating him by sight. He quickly swung into the landing hollow and crept along the wall to the tunnel’s entrance. Once deep enough into the tunnel’s upward turn, he ran.
The heavy doors at the tunnel’s end were still cracked open, and Chane carefully leaned through.
The younger elf, who had held Wynn amid the battle, lay unconscious upon the floor. But Wynn was not there.
Chane leaned out enough to peer around the doors’ edge, and he saw her.
She stood at the back end of the last tall bookcase, but she was studying the library’s stone wall rather than a text from the shelves. She traced faded dark writing on the stones with her small fingers, silently mouthing what she read.
“Wynn . . . ,” Chane rasped, and hated the sound of his voice.
She spun, backing against the wall.
Her liquid brown eyes went wide at the sight of him. Wispy brown hair tangled about her small, olive face—dirtier than in his nightly visions, but otherwise the same face he remembered. In place of gray robes, she wore loose, dusky-yellow pants and a long hide coat.
Wynn rushed toward him, or so he thought, but she stopped between him and the unconscious elf.
“I will not let you harm him,” she said. “He is one of our protectors.”
Chane went numb, not because she sought to protect this man from him, nor even at the way she looked at him in frightened suspicion. He could not blame her for either of these things. But it hurt that she was correct in both.
“I saw you die,” she whispered.
“Did you mourn for me?”
The question came out before he could stop it. Even as he spoke, the words sounded so petty and self-centered compared to all they had not said to each other.
“Yes,” she answered. “I wept that night . . . and many nights after.”
He stood looking at her. No one in his lost life—not his mother or his companions of youth—had ever cared enough to cry for him.
“But I mourned the scholar I remembered,” Wynn added. “Not the true Chane . . . the one who would help Welstiel murder . . . the Servants of Compassion and make them into mindless, savage beasts.”
Beasts. Chane flinched, anger growing inside him. He wanted to shout at her, but she only spoke more truth.
He had deceived himself as much as her. When they first met, had he not tried to pass himself off as a young, gentle scholar seeking like-minded company? And later, had he not helped Welstiel destroy the scholars within that monastery of healing?
“I did not turn them,” he rasped at her and then faltered. “But I did not stop him either . . . and have regretted it ever since.”
Her gaze softened, but only briefly. “Are my companions safe?”
More suspicion—and still legitimate. Chane knew he did not have much time left.
“Magiere took Welstiel’s head . . . and the orb he sought. I thought it would be a small thing, created by some forgotten undead who no longer wished to feed. But . . . it is much more. What is it, Wynn?”
Her small brows drew closer. “It was created in the time of the Forgotten. I have been trying to find pieces—hints and clues—written by one of its guardians on these walls. It may have been created by whatever made her and the other undead who first appeared in the war.”
She was close enough for Chane to reach out and touch.
“The orb belongs with the sages,” she added.
The sages. Once Chane had believed that he, too, belonged among them—and with her. She did not seem to fear him now, but she should.
What place was there in her world for such a beast?
One that would never stop hungering and straining at its bonds.
Chane stepped out, walking wide as he turned his eyes from Wynn’s.
He tried to hide his expression by studying the texts upon the shelves. He should leave and get as far from her as possible. But he could not bring himself to go just yet and lowered his gaze to the unconscious elf.
Bitterness slipped out. “Who is that?”
“I told you. One of our guardians . . . an envoy of the elves. It is a long story.” She glanced at stone doors. “You should go. If Magiere and Chap find you here . . .”
Chane shook his head at her wish to protect him.
Wynn Hygeorht the sage—and sweet, naïve little guardian of monsters.
“So, you will take the orb to your guild?” he whispered.
“Yes.”
Chane closed his eyes, seeing the Wynn he remembered, clothed in gray robes and drinking mint tea in a warm study full of scrolls and books.
He would never be part of that vision. He had been lying to himself for too long. If she ever saw that feral beast inside of him, he could not bear to exist any longer.
“I will not follow you anymore,” he said with back turned. “You will not see me again.”
He did not mean to turn and look, but he did.
Wynn stood with tears running down her olive-toned face.
It was last time he would cause her pain.
Chane strode along the dark row of bookshelves, and it was hard not to look back. He almost reached the side passage when his boot toe kicked something across the floor.
It rattled like hollow metal, and he glanced down. In the dark, he spotted an old tin scroll cylinder rocking slightly where it had come to rest by the wall.
Chane stepped into the passage, and then paused. He turned and stared back at the dark casements.
So much was here upon the shelves. Perhaps Wynn would salvage what she could before leaving, though likely she would not carry away much. It would have been good to be there when she returned with her finds to Domin Tilswith in Bela, especially after all she had been through to reach this lost place.
Chane stepped back out and looked down at that lone scroll case, now motionless where it lay. He stooped and picked it up, then turned back down the passage.
When he reached the stairway chamber, with its archway to the wide corridor of columns, the bodies of feral monks littered the floor, headless and still. He found his pack and tucked the scroll away with the books taken from the monastery. He slung both his pack and Welstiel’s over his shoulders along with a piece of canvas and a length of rope. He left everything else behind.
