Of Truth and Beasts (Noble of Dead Saga Series 2 Book 3)

by Barb; J. C. Hendee

  At least now they were behind a closed door.

  “Lay him on the far ledge,” she said.

  Ore-Locks nearly dropped Chane onto the ledge. Chane landed with a thud, but his eyelids didn’t even flutter.

  “Careful,” Wynn yelped.

  Ore-Locks backed away, not bothering to straighten Chane’s skewed limbs. Wynn pushed past and tried to make Chane comfortable, but as she lifted his dangling left arm onto the bed’s edge, she stalled.

  A dark stain—not red, but black—had spread around a slash in the side of his shirt. It was still wet. She tried to think of what to do as she tucked his arm against his side to hide the stain. How did one tend the wounds of a vampire?

  “Yes . . . I saw it.”

  She didn’t jump at Ore-Locks’s low voice. Perhaps out in the dark, Ore-Locks hadn’t noticed the stain’s true color.

  “It’s not serious,” she said, pulling part of Chane’s cloak from under him to cover the evidence.

  “Truly?” Ore-Locks returned. “No serious blood loss . . . or any crippling bone breaks?”

  Wynn stiffened and then turned slowly about.

  Had Ore-Locks tried to kill Chane in the clearing? Was this some test to confirm the dwarf’s suspicions? Regardless that a living man might have died under the dwarf’s iron staff, did he now think he had been wrong?

  Shade sat on the bed ledge nearer the door, her eyes fixed upon Ore-Locks’s back. Twice she glanced toward Wynn.

  “You saw what happened to him out there,” Ore-Locks insisted. “What is he?”

  And there it was. Ore-Locks could no longer pretend to look the other way, and Wynn could no longer hide that Chane wasn’t a living being.

  “Why should I answer, if you think you already know?”

  “That black thing, that . . . wraith, as you called it,” he went on, “came among our honored dead. You brought it, as well.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “How many of these creatures do you—”

  “You were there in the tunnel when I destroyed Sau’ilahk,” Wynn cut in. “And you know Chane was just as desperate to kill that wraith. Don’t you ever compare Chane to Sau’ilahk.” She paused. “He protects me. I thought that’s what you wanted.”

  Ore-Locks didn’t answer.

  “He’s the same man you knew yesterday,” Wynn continued quietly. “The same you’ve sailed with, who has slept across the wagon bed, who has fought beside us. Nothing has changed.”

  “Yes, it has,” he returned. “Everything has changed . . . except our destination. What else did you learn in the clearing?”

  The shift of topic caught Wynn off guard. “Nothing,” she answered.

  “I could see it in your face! You heard more out there than I did.”

  Ore-Locks took a step toward her.

  Shade hopped off the bed ledge and growled at him, but he didn’t acknowledge her presence. Ore-Locks seldom made open demands. This night’s events had clearly shaken him.

  “You tell me, or—”

  “Or what?” Wynn challenged, but she wasn’t as unafraid as she sounded.

  Only the monumentally naive wouldn’t shake to their bones in facing the threat of a dwarven warrior, especially one as tainted as Ore-Locks. But Wynn knew she had the upper hand, and certainly he knew it. He simply thought he could scare her, which was equally true.

  “I’m the one who uncovered your lost seatt,” she said. “I’m the one who can find it—not you. Even if I told you more, you wouldn’t understand it. You need me, but I don’t need you . . . and I never did.”

  Looking into his face, for an instant Wynn saw the dark figure of Ore-Locks in his sister’s smithy. As she tried to pick herself up after being thrown out of his family’s home, literally, Ore-Locks had closed on her. He loomed over her now as then, like a massive granite statue caught in a forge’s red light.

  Still, whatever Ore-Locks hadn’t figured out about Chane, or the unfathomed hints Wynn gained from the Fay, she wasn’t giving these to him. He would do nothing to her as long as she was his only way to find the burial place of his traitorous ancestor.

  Ore-Locks hadn’t moved. Wynn kept her eyes on him but waved Shade off.

  “Get out of the way,” she said.

  “Where do you think you are going?”

  “Water, food, bandages—”

  “Bandages for what?” He jutted his chin toward Chane. “He is not even alive.”

  “I don’t have to explain myself to you.”

  He hesitated, caught in indecision, as his gaze shifted between her and Chane. A gravelly exhale escaped him.

  “I will get them,” he said, though he paused again before turning away. “You will not leave this room until I return . . . shortly.”

  Again, he seemed worried about leaving her unguarded, even here at the guild. Or perhaps he didn’t wish to let her out of his sight. She didn’t care either way, as long as she had breathing space to gather herself. As Ore-Locks left and the door closed, this night brought one thing to clarity.

  Each of Wynn’s companions tried too hard to keep her safe for their individual reasons. At the moment, Shade seemed the only one with whom Wynn could reason fairly—and that in itself was ironic because of their difficulties in communication. Ore-Locks was no longer the one who worried her most, and his harsh words were not unwarranted.

  Something had happened to Chane out there in the forest.

  Whatever . . . however that tainted toy of Welstiel’s, the brass ring, allowed him to walk into elven lands, it wasn’t enough. He’d lost himself in that last moment, when he’d tried to assault Vreuvillä, nearly shattering a tense truce. Even that worry wasn’t the worst of it.

  Wynn had tried to put aside what Chane was for so long. It was easier, more convenient, and even a relief to have him at her side. Some might have thought it flattering, perhaps enamoring, akin to a dark-natured stranger who always appeared to save her. Chane was more dangerous than that, and Wynn was no juvenile girl with her head clogged by myths and legends coated in misguided romanticism.

  Her purpose put her at great risk. Despite the harm she’d caused along the way, in the end the price of failure—or success—could be her life, but the alternative for so many others was too great. The path ahead terrified her compared to the life she’d known and wished she could take back.

  Wynn accepted this, but Chane didn’t.

  Not even the whys and wherefores entered into it for him. He didn’t believe in the absolute necessity of her mission, not on any level that mattered beyond his own desire. All that mattered in this world to Chane, beyond himself or his vision of the guild, was her.

  Something had to be done.

  Chane opened his eyes. At first the ceiling above looked unfamiliar. Anxiety rushed in, followed by pain. He could not remember where he was or how he had gotten there.

  Apprehension increased as his sight cleared. The entire ceiling was covered in bark that flowed down the wall on his right. He rolled his head to the side.

  Wynn sat cross-legged on the floor, writing in a journal—or perhaps she was crossing something out. Shade lay on the bed ledge across the room, watching him, as usual.

  Chane realized that he lay upon a bed ledge in their room at the guild. This did not take the edge off his discomfort. His head throbbed, as did his side and left shoulder, but worse were the scattered and disconnected fragments of memories as they began to return.

  What had happened in the clearing around that barkless tree?

  “Wynn?” he rasped.

  She looked up, dropped the journal and quill, and crawled toward him.

  “Are you . . . are you all right?”

  He swung his legs over the bedside. The room swam before his eyes, and the pain in his skull and side sharpened. He had been badly damaged somehow. Hunger followed too quickly, and he forced it down.

  “What happened?” he whispered.

  “I had to . . . had to have Ore-Locks stop you. We broug
ht you back, and you’ve been dormant all the way to this evening.”

  Chane glanced toward the curtained window and then stared at her. “It is the next night?”

  “Yes. But I think I know where to start searching . . . sort of.”

  Her words barely registered.

  Chane tried to stand up, and winced as something tightened around his stomach. His shirttail hung out, the left side stained with his own fluids. When he lifted the edge, a linen bandage was wrapped around his midriff. When had he been cut?

  “I didn’t know what else to do,” Wynn said. Then she repeated, “Are you all right?”

  Chane let hunger leak slightly through his cold flesh to eat away some of the pain.

  “I will be.” Bits and pieces of the night before started coming back. “You ran off alone,” he said, unable to keep the accusation from his tone.

  “And I told you to stay in Vreuvillä’s home,” she countered. “You were foolish to go running around in that forest . . . no matter how it worked out in the end.”

  Chane sat silent at that. Try as he might, he remembered so little beyond the moment he had found her—and then after he had pulled her away from those moving roots.

  Wynn watched him closely, with the hint of a frown. She was biting back something more, perhaps not wishing to argue. What else was wrong?

  “I’m fine,” she said, perhaps reading him. “I’ve got information that might help us find the seatt . . . and other pieces I don’t yet understand.”

  The situation was more than disconcerting. He had never lost time like this before. The last thing he remembered clearly was pressing the ring against Wynn’s shoulder in blind fear of losing her.

  Wynn sat back on her knees.

  “Let’s just move onward,” she said evasively. “I think we need to get you out of this land as soon as possible. Everything will be better, will be all right, after that.”

  It was not—would not be so. It was all broken in his head. And the beast began to rumble and whine inside him. He pushed his hair back with both hands and clenched at the sharpening pain in his head. Glancing once toward Welstiel’s pack in the room’s corner, he thought of what he needed in there. In the moment, he had a greater concern.

  “You learned the location?” he asked.

  “Not precisely. No one could possibly know that. I have a direction and something to look for.”

  Wynn related what Vreuvillä had told her and what else she had surmised. When she mentioned the Fay’s scratching “leaf-wing chorus” in her head, Chane was uncertain what to think. Had she truly heard these nature spirits, or could she have imagined this?

  “If dwarves visited among the Lhoin’na forerunners in ancient times,” she went on, “then the Slip-Tooth Pass would’ve been the most direct route. We’ll head south down the pass to where it meets the Sky-Cutter Range. I believe the seatt is on its far south side, closer to the desert, but if we travel in a straight line from the pass’s end, we’ll have the best chance to spot any ‘fallen mountain. ’ At this point, it’s the most sensible way to begin.”

  “What makes you think it will be on the south side?”

  “Something Domin il’Sänke told me. When spoken in Sumanese, ‘Bäalâle’ is pronounced min’bä’alâle, which is an ululation of praise for a desert tribal leader. That suggests the seatt was near the desert. Perhaps the dwarves of old were friendly with some desert tribe or people.”

  Taking in Wynn’s oval, olive-toned face, Chane saw a hint of her old, blind confidence there. But he pondered the strange duality of what she said she had heard from the Fay. What was the difference between “the fallen dead of the Earth” and “that of the Earth?” What did “a slave to a slave” have to do with any of this?

  None of it mattered against the mounting danger to her. It unsettled Chane that she had managed to gain enough information to head into what sounded like a correct direction.

  “We need to restock supplies,” she said, “and prepare for at least a moon’s worth of travel, if not more. I don’t know if there are settlements along the way. Certainly not once we head into the range.”

  Which meant that she had no intention of turning back, no matter what.

  Chane swallowed hard, though his throat had gone dry. At least her plans offered two immediate solutions.

  “Do you . . .” he began, and faltered. “Is there anything more you need here at the guild?”

  She looked at him in puzzlement. “I don’t think so. But it may take a few days to prepare before leaving.”

  “Then we should lodge elsewhere in the city—find an inn; be on our own.”

  Before he even finished, he saw agreement flood her expression, and perhaps relief. It would not surprise him if Premin Gyâr was having them watched. Chane had not forgotten the menace on the premin’s face in the archives.

  “Yes,” Wynn said, nodding. “On our own again.”

  Shade lifted her head, ears pricked at full attention. She hopped off the bed ledge and padded to the door, sniffing at its bottom crack near the floor.

  Chane rose, clenching his teeth against the returning pain. “Take hold of her.”

  Wynn started at his words, and then saw what Shade was up to. She pulled Shade back as Chane jerked open the door.

  He looked both ways, seeing no one along the passageway’s gradual arc. Someone had been there. Even with the ring on, the starving beast inside him sensed this as much as Shade had smelled it. And there was something more that he sensed.

  A thin and strange scent lingered in the passage. Partly cinnamon, but with another spice or two he did not recognize.

  Chane backed into the room and shut the door.

  “Take Shade and find Ore-Locks,” he said. “Make sure he gathers everything. We are leaving immediately.”

  Wynn studied him for an instant and then looked to the door. Her eyes narrowed just before she nodded. Without a word she got up, passing her small fingers over Shade’s head, and they both left. As soon as the door closed, Chane rushed to the corner.

  He slumped down the wall, digging furiously into Welstiel’s pack, and pulled out a brown glass bottle wrapped in a felt scrap. Fumbling from exhaustion, he managed to open it, and he downed what was left of its contents. In his rush, a single dribble rolled out the side of his mouth to his jawline. The fluid was so dark red, it was nearly black.

  That stolen life, taken by Welstiel’s filthy little cup, burned down Chane’s throat to the pit of his stomach. He buckled over, shuddering and clenching as life flooded through his dead flesh.

  It seared him, and he suffered all the more for his broken state. It would heal him somewhat, though it would not bring back his memories of what had happened in the clearing.

  And this made Chane feel more powerless than ever in protecting Wynn.

  Ghassan il’Sänke sat in his small camp among the thin palm trees along the coast. He required time to think. His instincts had once told him to silence Wynn forever. He had chosen otherwise, and even assisted her in translating part of an ancient scroll alluding to a place called Bäalâle Seatt.

  Had he chosen wrongly? He could not count how many times he had second-guessed that decision since he had last heard from Mujahid.

  The medallion against his chest began to grow warm.

  Ghassan jerked it out by its chain and squeezed it in his hand, and Mujahid’s voice filled his mind.

  Domin?

  Yes, I am here.

  She leaves soon, a few days at most. I am sorry I did not learn more. I was outside her room, and their voices were uneven. I picked out only a few words.

  Do you know her destination?

  The young journeyor’s grasp of thaumaturgical alchemy was sound, perhaps beyond his years, but he showed less aptitude for . . . more subtle skills. He was forced to rely on stealth and his above-average hearing.

  I do not. Only that she will follow the Slip-Tooth Pass. Does this assist you, Master?

  Ghassan closed his ey
es.

  What he had translated of the poem in Chane Andraso’s scroll, with its mention of Bäalâle, had combined with other bits and pieces he had gleaned over a lifetime. During the great war, word had spread to the westernmost forces that a dwarven seatt had fallen. For that message to have reached them, the seatt in question had to have been somewhere on the western third of what the Numans now called the Sky-Cutter Range.

  Ghassan had never learned a name for that lost seatt until Wynn had tampered with that scroll. And now, knowing her penchants, she had to be seeking that mythical fallen seatt. But for what purpose?

  Master, do you wish me to follow her? If so, I should find a map and—

  No. Where possible, complete work assigned by your group’s leader, Domin Nahid. When it is time, return home as if nothing is amiss. I may not be reachable again for some time.

  Good fortune, my domin.

  And to you . . . to all of us.

  As the medallion cooled, Ghassan rose and stood gazing down into the small fire. So little light tried to push back the dark. How ironic that in darkness was where he had always learned what would be needed in the coming days.

  Wynn slipped down the passage but hesitated at knocking on Ore-Locks’s door. If only he hadn’t been there in First Glade to hear even the smallest part of where they would go next. She might’ve taken Shade and Chane and slipped away before Ore-Locks knew. But he had been there.

  And if he hadn’t, what would’ve happened when Chane went mad? No matter who might’ve died in that moment, she wouldn’t have gained anything from Vreuvillä either way. Still she couldn’t help wanting this tainted stonewalker gone.

  The wraith had once followed her to the ancient texts. She’d unwittingly led it right to the dwarven underworld and a hidden prince of Malourné. But even these mistakes, not of her own choice, seemed paltry compared to leading Ore-Locks to Bäalâle Seatt.

  What did he want there? If only she knew.

  Shade sat down beside her in the passage. Steeling herself, Wynn knocked. She heard heavy footfalls. The door cracked open, and Ore-Locks looked out at her.