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

by Barb; J. C. Hendee

  The closer he came, the more the presence felt as if it came from below. He did not care for traversing underneath that much amassed loose gravel and earth. Angling down toward the overhang, he inched along with many upward glances.

  A flash of brown-gray darted in under the outcrop, and Ghassan froze. He could still feel it in there.

  He carefully stepped farther down as he sidled around below the outcrop, watching those tons of dirt and rock atop it for any sign of shifting. Then he saw the hole and dropped on his knees in despair.

  The lizard had simply run inside its den, a slit beneath the great stone, barely large enough to reach into. It was certainly no entrance into the mountain. But he had learned one thing.

  Ghassan did not need to search alone.

  He released the connection to its limited instincts, as it did not have the necessary mental function that he would need. A mammal of some kind would be better. He carefully hauled himself up, sidled along the slope, out of the outcrop’s path, and then turned downward. Once panicked into running, the lizard may not have dived for a true entrance. But other forms of wildlife existed here.

  Some might use other hiding holes here to take cover against high winds, cold, rain, and sleet. And perhaps one of their refuges was not naturally formed, something large enough for a dwarf, or him, to enter.

  Chuillyon stood in the remains of what appeared to be some sort of small dwarven settlement too small to even have been a village. Apparently, Wynn and her companions had spent a good deal of time here shortly past dusk, and then had moved on toward the foothills into the range.

  “What was it, do you suppose?” Hannâschi asked, crouching to finger the edge of a half-buried foundation stone by the light of her cold lamp crystal.

  Her face looked too pale, her cheeks slightly sunken, and her gold-brown hair hung dull. Shâodh was faring only a little better.

  Chuillyon cursed himself for being a fool, and not for the first time in recent nights. If he could find away to go back in time for one moon, he would have managed all of this differently. Upon leaving his homeland, he’d decided they were better off traveling light. He had requisitioned horses instead of a wagon to ensure greater mobility, should they need to bypass Wynn or shadow her more closely. They had brought water bottles, blankets, crunchy flatbread, dried fruit, and limited grain for the horses.

  In his younger days, he and Cinder-Shard had traveled long distances with far less. They’d always managed to forage for themselves, and he had not foreseen why following one small, human journeyor would be any different. But it was different, and in his zeal to discover Wynn’s true goal, he had not calculated the possible outcomes carefully enough.

  Although he had seen an ancient map showing the Slip-Tooth Pass, the distance had been difficult to gauge. They had traveled toward the mountains longer than expected, and though he had intellectually known they would enter some barren terrain, he had not fathomed quite how barren. The closer they came to the range, the less there was to forage for themselves or their horses.

  He had handpicked Shâodh and Hannâschi long ago for their skills and quick wits. They were both journeyors, and so of course they had undertaken tasks of their own abroad. But Shâodh had gone with two other elven sages to help map sections of the great jungle to the east of their homeland, while Hannâschi had spent a year at the Chathburh annex aiding in an exchange of Elven and Numan texts—and to read and account the Numans’ newest metaology holdings for comparison.

  Both had performed well and returned home with useful information, but neither had ever faced conditions like this. Sleeping on the ground in winter was beginning to take its toll, and though faithful Shâodh had believed Chuillyon knew a great deal about Wynn’s final goal, this was not exactly true.

  If and when Wynn could find Bäalâle Seatt, Chuillyon knew nothing about what she sought there. Shâodh was growing more and more aware of this, and it did not sit well with the young journeyor. Worse, Chuillyon may have underestimated Wynn.

  In spite of her surprising deeds at Dhredze Seatt, she was still only a small human. It never occurred to him that her physical constitution might outlast that of his own kind. The journey down the Slip-Tooth Pass had to be longer than she anticipated, and her supplies must be dwindling. Yet she showed no sign of giving up or turning back.

  Chuillyon should have paid more attention to the fact that she’d trekked all over the eastern continent—even to one of the highest points in the world there. She was hardier and more tenacious than anticipated, and that admittance embarrassed him.

  Shâodh crouched next to Hannâschi. “It is dwarven? You are certain?”

  “Yes,” she answered. “Not a trace of mortar was used.”

  His brows knitted. “So, they examined these remains and then headed straight south?”

  Hannâschi merely nodded.

  “Did you hear them say anything?”

  “No, this area is too exposed. I could not get close enough, even by bending light and shadow.”

  Through all of this, Chuillyon remained silent. Shâodh looked up at him, a slight touch of disgust in his usually stoic expression.

  Shâodh’s demeanor was becoming an issue—not that Chuillyon entirely blamed him. The young one was loyal to the Order of Chârmun and to the guild. When given a clear mission, he would do anything to succeed. But they had no clear mission here except to tag along in secret without a known destination or ultimate purpose.

  Only Chuillyon could feel the desperate importance of following Wynn, of finding out what she sought. That blind purpose had sunk into the core of his old bones. His fears of failing were not something he cared to verbalize for Shâodh. For now, he required assistance and obedience, and nothing less.

  Hannâschi stood up. Back home, she often chided him for his methods. Out here, she never complained or tried to get him to explain their current purpose. But she was exhausted, and he knew it.

  “On to the foothills?” she asked. “Once they are forced to go on foot, I might be able to get closer.”

  Chuillyon nodded once, and Shâodh looked away.

  CHAPTER 20

  With little choice, Chane spent the entire night helping Wynn search for some hidden entrance to a passage beneath the mountains.

  To his silent relief, they found nothing.

  He preferred that she head into the open range, aboveground, where he could better protect her. Let her look for the “fallen mountain” among hundreds of other peaks until she finally gave up and let him take her back into civilization.

  Less than an eighth night before dawn, Wynn called a halt for the night, and they returned to their camp. After a meal of boiled oats, she sat near the fire and began repeating a ritual Chane had observed her doing more and more in her scant spare moments along this journey.

  She and Shade would sit by the fire, and Wynn would open two or three worn, shabby journals. She placed them on the ground, and then opened a newer one directly in front of her. She would glance at pages of the old ones, write in the new one, and then close her eyes and touch Shade.

  Once, he had summoned the courage to ask what she was doing. She had shifted uncomfortably and told him she was simply reorganizing her notes. His feelings toward her journals were so mixed that he did not press the point.

  In nights past, Chane had recognized several of the shabby journals she copied from . . . because he had read them. In essence, these were also copies. Wynn told him she had recreated some journals from memory after a number of them were lost in a snowstorm during her journeys with Magiere, Leesil, and Chap. One of their packhorses had been dragged over a cliff by a snowslide.

  Of course, upon returning to Calm Seatt, she had lost all her journals, recreated or otherwise, to her superiors for the better part of a year. Now that she had them back again, she seemed to be using spare moments to recopy them yet again. Chane wondered why.

  Tonight, Wynn had two journals that seemed even older lying on the ground. Their covers
were faded blue. He had seen them in Wynn’s small stack but had not read these. She also had a faded brown one lying open that he had read. It was the one that covered her encounter with Vordana in Pudúrlatsat, when Chane had saved her from the undead sorcerer. The omission of his name in that particular journal still hurt him.

  Chane moved toward her, as if to walk past. Wynn instantly took her hand off Shade, picked up the aged blue journals, and closed them.

  “What are those?” he asked casually, as if they did not matter.

  “Some older notes. When I was in Stravina with Magiere and Leesil, I managed to send Domin Tilswith a few journals before the rest were lost. He returned them to me later. I’m just copying and reorganizing.”

  Same excuse. She appeared to be doing a lot of copying these days, but he did not press her.

  “I am going hunting,” he said. “Shade can stay with you.”

  She nodded, but waited until he walked away before resuming her task.

  Chane did not go hunting. Instead, he slipped into the shadows of a small outcrop and stood there, hidden and watching her. Again, she laid out the three old journals. She would glance at them, write briefly in the new journal, and then close her eyes and touch Shade.

  After a while, she was turning pages of the old journals faster than the newer one. As little as she wrote, she was writing less and less as she went on.

  Suddenly, she turned the final pages of the two blue journals, and then the final page of the brown one he had read. She touched Shade for a long moment, sat straight, and sighed as if in relief.

  “All right. I think that’s it—we’re done.”

  Wynn stroked the dog’s ears and slipped the new journal into her pack, which rested a few paces from the fire. And then, to Chane’s shock, she picked up all three of the old journals and dropped them in the fire.

  He wanted to shout at her to stop, but he braced himself to keep from running forward and kicking the journals out of the fire. Mixed feelings or not, those were her scholarly accounts! She could not have fit the contents of all three into the new journal now stored in her pack.

  Chane did not know what to do and kept fighting his instincts to rush forward.

  “Wynn, can you see to the horses?” Ore-Locks called out. “I will look for more firewood.”

  “Of course,” she called back, and with one last look at the now smoldering journals, she walked away.

  Chane waited only an instant more, until she was out in front of the wagon, where she could not see him. He dashed out of the shadows and grabbed the journals out of the fire, quietly stomping out their smoldering edges. Since he had already read the brown one, he quickly opened the blue ones—the oldest ones.

  To his astonishment, he found numerous references to himself as he flipped through the pages. He was lost in trying to wrap his thoughts around this revelation.

  Looking up, making sure she was still off with the horses, he quickly retrieved the new journal she had shoved in her pack. When he opened it, he found that he could not read it at all.

  The symbols were dense, more complex than anything he had seen before written in the Begaine syllabary. The few he could discern by slowly deconstructing their combined letters and marks made no sense to him at all. Wynn had filled very few pages with these symbols, as if she had written condensed, encrypted notes—intentionally difficult to read.

  Chane tucked the journal back into her pack, exactly as he had found it, and pondered this puzzle.

  In her earliest work, she had included the stories of his involvement with her. Then, in her first rewrites, she had omitted him for some reason. Now that she was boiling all her journals down to encrypted notes—and far too few to hold all that she had originally recorded—she was burning anything readable.

  He heard her humming, a little off-key, as she finished with the horses. She would return soon. A part of him desperately wanted to keep the three singed journals. The thought of a sage, his Wynn, destroying knowledge was like witnessing a fall from grace by one who truly mattered in this world. The thought of these journals burning felt like one of the last of Wynn’s connections to scholarly pursuits would turn to smoke and ash.

  How many old journals had she burned so far? And why did she stop in her reading and writing to touch Shade in silent stillness before continuing?

  Chane rose in the dark as the only possible truth came to him.

  Wynn could be doing only one thing with Shade—passing memories. Shade remembered everything once it settled in her strange mind. Wynn was not copying all that she had previously written into the new journal. She was copying encrypted symbols . . . and then mentally sharing the contents of the old journals with Shade.

  To his shame, he envied their closeness.

  He flipped open the brown journal. There were newer, small notes she had made in the margins beside names like Sorhkafâré. One read, Omit anyone who might have lived during the war. She was actively working to hide information from the wrong eyes. But foremost in his mind was still the question: Why had she omitted him completely in her first round of recopied journals and the much-later ones that had not needed to be re-created? She had mentioned all vampires but him.

  Chane returned to his first revelation that Wynn was hiding knowledge. Another realization changed everything, and his hands began to tremble. She had not been trying to blot him out of her life.

  Wynn had been hiding . . . protecting him.

  And he could hear her coming back.

  He could not risk her seeing him like this. He desperately wanted to keep the journals—especially the blue ones—to save a part of her for himself. But she had gone to great lengths to hide his existence, along with any possible information their enemies might acquire.

  Wincing, Chane dropped the old journals into the fire and fled back into the shadows. He did not look back, as he could not bear to watch them burn.

  Several nights later, past dusk, Chane watched Wynn and Ore-Locks climb higher up one of the foothills. Occasionally, they both used the ends of their staffs to pound the ground and listen for any hollow sounds echoing beneath.

  Shade paced beside Wynn, sniffing dirt and rocks. Like Chane, she was a reluctant partner in this current task. The choice had been to either help or do nothing; the latter would have destroyed any illusions Wynn might still harbor that they wished for her success.

  Until now, they had both tried to help despite their reservations. But Chane’s recent discoveries through Wynn’s journals did not make him any more bound to her mission. They made him only more determined to protect her, even from herself.

  By this fourth night after stumbling upon the way station, they had found no further clues to a hidden entrance beneath the mountains. Their supplies were almost gone, and game was even scarcer here than along the ridges of the pass. There was nothing for Shade and him to hunt. Chane had been taking note of Wynn’s demeanor, watching for any growing hints of uncertainty.

  It was time to move on.

  “This is ridiculous,” he said. “We are wasting time.”

  When Wynn looked down from her higher vantage point, he expected her to argue, but for the briefest instant, doubt crossed her pretty, dusty face, as if she partially agreed. And he knew he had her. He required only the tiniest crack in her armor.

  “One more night,” she said, not sounding confident. “We’ll look for the rest of tonight, and if we don’t find anything, then tomorrow we’ll return to the pass and move into the mountain range.”

  He could see the pain in her eyes as she spoke these words. Looking for a fallen mountain in a vast range was like seeking a single, special pebble in a rushing river. Shade looked up from her sniffing, swinging her head back and forth between Wynn and Chane.

  “Do you want to waste another whole night looking for something that does not exist?” he challenged, crossing his arms.

  This drove the doubt from Wynn’s face, and she stepped toward him.

  “Chane, you are not m
aking the—”

  “The decisions?” he cut in. “Apparently, neither are you. We have wandered in the foothills, wasting nearly four nights.”

  Her eyes widened. He rarely spoke to her like this, but he was not going to back down, not this time. Ore-Locks stopped and watched them both.

  “So you think you found a way station?” Chane asked Ore-Locks. “Could it not be there for some other reason?”

  Ore-Locks looked away. He never spoke to Chane anymore unless absolutely necessary.

  “Perhaps it was built there as a rest stop for dwarves,” Chane went on, “or it was just a lone settlement placed well off the pass to remain hidden from foreign travelers.”

  “Not likely,” Ore-Locks said. However, like Wynn, he appeared less than certain.

  “So your people are the exception among all others . . . and no dwarves would live any way other than the way you believe they should?”

  No one answered, and Chane took a step closer to Wynn, softening his tone.

  “It has taken so long to get this far, but there is nothing to be found here. It is time to move on.”

  Shade huffed once in clear agreement. Wynn looked down at her and then closed her eyes.

  Chane knew the crushing disappointment she must feel. They had lost the hope of a possible path leading them straight to the seatt, and now they were back to a blind search in the mountains.

  Wynn opened her eyes again, looking to Ore-Locks.

  “They’re right,” she said bitterly, sadly. “If we’re to find the seatt, we should head into the mountains now. Too much time has passed already.”

  Chane waited for Ore-Locks to argue—and then he would handle the dwarf. But Ore-Locks only began descending the hill with a similar expression of defeat. His obsessive goal was to find the seatt, and they were making no progress here.

  Shade gazed up at Chane in what appeared to be surprise, and then she trotted beside him back toward the wagon—as if rewarding him for this victory. Indeed, he felt as if he had just won an important battle. Wynn’s chances inside the range were almost nonexistent. In less than a moon, he might yet coerce her into giving up entirely.