by Barb Hendee
Chane kept his mind empty all the way down the long corridor of columns. But it grew harder to stay numb inside as he left, passed through the iron gates, and stumbled out upon the snow.
Magiere carefully removed the circlet from the orb’s spike and hung it back around her neck. Then she gripped the top of the spike and tried simply lifting the orb from its resting hole in the store stand. Now it felt heavy, like an anvil, and she used both hands to lift it out. With the spike intact, it did not illuminate again, and remained dormant.
Li’kän just stood there, eyes locked on the empty stand. She glanced once at Leesil, and her face wrinkled briefly.
Magiere was ready to drop the orb and step into the undead’s path. Li’kän’s world had changed for the first time in centuries. How would she react?
Confusion passed over the white undead’s face. She turned back to staring at the orb’s stone stand, as if she couldn’t understand what the empty place meant.
“Start heading for the tunnel,” Magiere whispered.
“What?” Leesil asked.
“Just do it.”
Chap and Sgäile had already gone to the cavern landing, and Magiere waited until Leesil was well onto the bridge before she turned to follow. When she stepped off into the landing’s hollow, she looked back.
Li’kän stood before the bridge’s far end. Mist began to gather once more in the cavern as the chasm’s heat rose to warm the wet walls.
Magiere could swear Li’kän was glaring at her, and that she tried to step upon the bridge. A wafting curl of mist blocked the ancient undead from sight and drifted into the cavern’s upper air.
Li’kän stood still as ice on the platform before the bridge.
Magiere backed away toward the tunnel.
The orb had sustained Li’kän for centuries, and without it, that ancient thing would soon hunger again. Magiere remembered Li’kän lifting the iron bar from the wall doors, her frail body barely straining with the effort.
“We haven’t found Chane yet,” Leesil argued.
“It doesn’t matter—just go!”
Leesil headed into the tunnel. As Magiere followed, she saw blood matting the fur on Chap’s neck and the dark stain on Sgäile’s cowl and vestment.
“It is a clean cut,” he said without slowing. “I will dress it later.”
They couldn’t stop, not with Li’kän still free behind them. Whatever held the undead back, Magiere wasn’t about to wait and see if it lasted. She felt little relief when they passed the last skeleton-filled hollows of the tunnel and approached the parted stone doors. She desperately needed her strength to last for one more task. Magiere stepped out behind the others into the dark library.
Wynn was kneeling next to Osha but gazing blankly at the floor. Such sadness lingered on her face, but it vanished when she looked up at all of them. Her eyes locked on the orb as Magiere crouched to gently set it down.
Magiere turned immediately, throwing her weight into one of the stone doors.
“Leesil!” she grunted, and he came in beside her. Sgäile joined them as well.
The door barely moved at first, and Magiere wished she had her hunger again.
Finally, the bottom edge grated along the floor. It took longer to close the other one, and both Sgäile and Leesil’s faces glistened with sweat by the time it shut.
The iron beam still lay on the floor.
Realization passed across both Sgäile’s and Leesil’s faces, followed by doubt. Sgäile had only one good arm and couldn’t be doing well with his wounded shoulder.
“One end at a time,” he said. “And you must get it off the floor before we can assist you.”
Magiere took hold of the beam’s end. In place of hunger she tried to find fury, remembering her mother dying in bed. She thrust upward with her legs.
“Now!” Magiere grunted, as the beam’s end reached her waist.
“Where is Li’kän?” Wynn asked.
Leesil and Sgäile ducked in, bracing one shoulder each beneath the beam.
They all heaved, pushing up with their legs, and Magiere’s arms began to tremble. As Leesil and Sgäile pressed upward, she poured all the strength she could summon into one last thrust.
The beam grated over the stone bracket of the closest door. As it crested the bracket’s top, Magiere shouted, “Get back!”
Leesil and Sgäile ducked clear as she let go.
The beam dropped, and a dull clang echoed through the library as it settled. Leesil bent over, panting. Sgäile wavered on his feet and was breathing shallow and fast.
“Where is Li’kän?” Wynn repeated.
Magiere slumped against the stone door. When Li’kän’s hunger returned, it would grow into starvation, and they couldn’t let her loose into the world.
“She can’t leave this place,” Magiere panted. “Ever.”
Wynn stood up, but Leesil cut in before she could speak.
“Did Chane come out?”
Wynn swiveled toward him. Her mouth opened, then closed as she glanced toward the path around the ends of the bookcases.
“Yes,” she finally answered. “But he left. He is not in the castle.”
Leesil groaned in frustration. “You don’t know that. Chap, see if you can sense him.”
Chap growled, loping off along the row of bookcases.
Magiere glanced toward the iron beam’s other end still resting on the floor. Leesil and Sgäile were spent, and she didn’t feel any better. But they had to finish.
Li’kän must never leave this place.
“What was that thing?” Leesil suddenly panted out.
Magiere shook her head, not because she didn’t know, but rather that she didn’t want to think about it.
“An undead,” she sighed. “That’s all I felt, but worse than any other . . . I could barely stand it.”
“Not Li’kän,” Leesil said. “In the light . . . what was that misshapen serpent . . . horned snake . . . whatever tried to swallow us?”
Magiere stared at him, baffled by what he said. Chap loped back into sight, coming up beside Wynn. The dogged huffed once for “yes.”
Wynn’s mouth tightened. “As I told you, Chane is gone.”
Magiere turned back to Leesil in puzzlement.
“I didn’t see anything in the light,” she said.
Sgäile shook his head. “I saw nothing, just light too bright to look into.”
Leesil straightened, his sweating face gone blank.
“How you could miss it?” He glared at everyone in disbelief. “It could’ve swallowed the whole platform. It had teeth instead of fangs, and rows of horns taller than you, and scales all over its face and snout. Its coils were turning all over the cavern!”
“Coils?” Magiere whispered.
She hadn’t seen a serpent’s head—just the coils in her waking dream, and the sense of an undead all around her . . . within her.
“Don’t look at me like that!” Leesil snapped. “I know what I saw. Those coils were taller than two men . . . maybe three!”
“No,” Magiere said. “I didn’t see—”
“Fay?” Wynn whispered.
Magiere stared dumbly at the sage.
Wynn knelt beside Chap, looking into his eyes. “He says he sensed a Fay. Not all of them together, as when they come to him. Just one alone . . . cold . . . malicious.”
“It was an undead!” Magiere snapped.
Wynn ignored her and frowned at Leesil. “You couldn’t have seen . . . what you say. Maybe you heard or read something and the shadows played tricks on you.”
“No!” Leesil snapped. “We were practically blinded, there was so much light.”
Magiere was so tired, she didn’t care anymore what anyone had seen.
Wynn shook her head at Leesil. “I can only guess, but it is not real— only a myth. Even less, just a metaphysical emblem, a wêurm or—”
“What are you babbling about now?” Leesil growled.
“It is Numanese, my l
anguage,” Wynn growled back, “for a type of dragon.”
Chap snarled and lunged between all of them.
Wynn flinched. “Stop shouting at me! We heard you the first time—a Fay!”
The sage’s anger vanished when she spotted blood-matted fur on his neck, and she reached for him.
Sgäile’s angry voice startled Magiere. “Enough talk! We must bar the doors!”
She turned wearily along the tilted beam to grab its other end. But Chap’s and Leesil’s claims of what they’d experienced below—what either had seen or felt—ate at her.
One had sensed a Fay, and the other had seen a dragon, while she had felt the presence of an undead.
It was nonsense, nothing but the madness of this place. Leesil and Chap were wrong.
Magiere called the last dregs of her strength and hoisted the iron beam’s grounded end.
“Someone comes,” Dänvârfij whispered and notched an arrow to her bowstring.
“Wait,” Hkuan’duv warned in a hushed voice and belly-crawled a short way out from the wall.
His companion was having difficulty breathing the frozen night air, but they had to retain their vigil. In the moonlight, he saw the tall, auburn-haired man slip out of the castle gates and trudge across the snow. But he was alone.
Hkuan’duv waited, but neither the man’s white-templed companion nor their robed followers came out.
The man kept on with two bulky packs over his shoulders and a large folded canvas in his arms. He paused to look back.
Hkuan’duv let the hood of his white-covered cloak drop low and peered under its edge, watching.
The man closed his eyes, sagging where he stood. He looked lost and defeated when he gazed listlessly about the white plain. The man turned and pushed on, never looking back again.
“Should I fire?” Dänvârfij whispered.
Hkuan’duv considered having Dänvârfij bring the man down. But they would have to move into the open to retrieve him, risking exposure, and then hide a body once they had finished questioning him.
Only the artifact, and dealing with Magiere, mattered to Hkuan’duv.
“He is nothing to us,” he whispered to Dänvârfij. “Let him go.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Magiere explored the castle’s near reaches with Leesil and Chap, while Wynn tended to Sgäile and Osha in the library. They had all agreed to wait out the night and return to camp after dawn, but their efforts quickly became pointless.
They found no beds, blankets, kitchens, or sculleries. Either no furnishings had been brought to fill this place, or they had long ago decayed and been cleared away. They gave up and returned to the library, finding Osha awake.
As they entered, Wynn went still for a moment as if listening. “Since you did not find anything, Chap says we should move to the study that he and I first occupied. Though small, there is a heat source there.”
Magiere nodded and heaved up the orb. “All right.”
Sgäile and Leesil supported Osha as Chap led them through the varied passages to a tiny room. Neither Chap nor Wynn understood anything about the floor brazier filled with glowing fist-sized crystals, but Magiere didn’t care. Without fuel for a fire or a place to burn it, any heat was welcome. The castle had grown colder as the night stretched on, and they had all slept in worse places.
Then again . . .
Not with madness written upon walls in an undead’s fluids. Not with an ancient undead, perhaps impossible to kill, locked in the depths beneath them.
Doubts nibbled at Magiere. More so as she set the orb with its deceptive spike in the study’s back corner. Still far too close for her peace of mind.
“Will Osha be all right?” she asked.
“I believe so,” Wynn answered. “And Chap’s neck appears to be healing.”
Magiere ran her hand over the dog’s head. She hadn’t forgotten Chap’s claim that he’d sensed a Fay in the cavern. It was harder to dismiss than Leesil’s claim from half-shadows glimpsed within the orb’s glare. Then again, she’d seen coils in her dreams.
“Sgäile’s wound is the worst,” Leesil said. “He may have chipped his collarbone, but I dressed it as well as I can.”
“At least we’re all alive,” Magiere said, but didn’t add for now.
Whatever had led her here and toyed with Li’kän—and by whatever name anyone called it—their three separate perceptions of what had come to the cavern didn’t match up.
Undead. Fay. Dragon.
Magiere didn’t want to know the answer to that puzzle. She didn’t like thinking that the voice Chap had heard in Li’kän’s mind was the same one in her own dreams. And when she looked at the orb in the corner, she didn’t even want to stay in this room.
In another life, another time, could she have been just like Li’kän?
“I need privacy,” she muttered. With her dagger and falchion, she shoveled in the floor brazier, pincered a glowing crystal between the blades, and headed for the door. She paused there, looking to Leesil.
“Are you coming?” she asked.
He picked up their coats to follow.
“Stay within calling distance,” Sgäile advised.
Magiere headed for the closest opening along the corridor’s wall. The door was long gone, and she stepped into a bare room, dropping the hot crystal in the rear corner. Leesil laid out one coat near it and began stripping off his hauberk. Magiere considered stopping him.
She didn’t want him dropping his guard in this place. But by the time she finished second-guessing, he’d already slumped tiredly against the wall and reached out for her.
Magiere knelt down and collapsed against his chest. Leesil pulled the other coat over both of them as she shivered, but not from the cold.
Many pieces of an ancient mystery had been unearthed in the last half year. The few that made any sense suggested that this “night voice”— il’Samar—had planned her birth. Welstiel hadn’t seemed to know even that much, and certainly not that she’d been made to master a horde of undead and serve as general for the return of an ancient enemy.
But it didn’t matter. She wouldn’t be pushed onto any path but the one she chose.
And as to the rest, all the fragments of the Forgotten they’d stumbled onto, which Wynn’s sages so desperately wanted . . .
“I know what I saw,” Leesil whispered. “Maybe it wasn’t real. I mean, wasn’t really there . . . but I couldn’t have come up with that out of pure fancy.”
Magiere tilted her face up. “I believe you, but something isn’t right, especially about Chap’s claim.”
