by Barb Hendee
She shifted her pack to relieve pressure on her shoulder. Chane seemed oblivious to the weight of his own two packs. Gripping her tall staff, a leather sheath covering its top end, Wynn led the way farther up the main street. When she glanced back, she paused, spotting a great open archway in the mountain’s side behind the crank house.
The entire lift station could have fit through it with room to spare. The orange light of the dwarves’ heated crystals spilled from its interior over people coming and going. But she had no time for a closer peek and instead looked eastward.
The star-speckled night had lightened farther along the distant horizon, and urgency took hold.
“We must find the temple,” she said.
Any visitor in a foreign place had to find lodging, but in Chane’s case, it was foremost. She needed to get him inside before the sun rose.
“Find?” he echoed. “You do not know where it is?”
“Of course I know. It’s just . . . been . . . a long time.”
Wynn hurried up the street’s gradual slant, deeper into Bay-Side, and quickened her pace. In spite of her assurance to Chane, she wasn’t certain of the temple’s location. It was still the best place to take shelter, away from other travelers at an inn. It was also a place where a visiting sage would be welcomed.
Dwarves practiced a unique form of ancestor worship. They revered those of their own who attained notable status in life, akin to the human concept of a hero or saint, or rather both. Any who became known for virtuous accomplishments, by feat and/or service to the people, might one day become a thänæ—one of the honored. Though similar to human knighthood or noble entitlement, it wasn’t a position of rulership or authority. After death, any thänæ who’d achieved renown among the people over decades and centuries, through the continued retelling of their exploits, might one day be elevated to Bäynæ—one of the dwarven Eternals. These were the dwarves’ spiritual immortals, held as the honored ancestors of their people as a whole.
Wynn sought lodgings at the temple of just such a one.
Bedzâ’kenge—Feather-Tongue—was the patron of wisdom and heritage through story, song, and poetry, their paragon of orators and historians. For as long as any history remembered, the dwarves kept to oral tradition rather than the literary ways of humankind.
As Wynn hurried along, she noticed faint shadows upon the granite street stones. Another glance eastward, between stout buildings on the settlement’s outer edge, showed the horizon growing ever lighter.
“Are we near yet?” Chane asked.
He didn’t sound concerned, but Wynn knew better. If they didn’t find the temple soon, they’d have to knock on some random door and beg admittance to get him out of the coming dawn.
“We’re in the right area,” she half lied. “I’ll recognize the street when I see it.”
But she wished she’d paid better attention as a girl while visiting with Domin Tilswith.
Wynn stopped between wide steps on both sides. Another thick four-sided stone pillar stood in the intersection. Atop it, steam leaked around a huge raw crystal casting orange light and warmth about the street. Oral or not, dwarves had an ancient writing system, and columns often served the same purpose as street signs in human cities.
She circled it, scanning for engravings upon its smooth faces—not for names of streets but for places found in the direction the column’s sides faced. She could read the common dialect reasonably well, but the temple of Bedzâ’kenge wasn’t mentioned. Either it didn’t lie along any of these routes or it was more than one level up.
Along the higher staircase, she spotted a mapmaker’s shop on the first landing, its tan banner flying above a wide front door.
“There,” she breathed in relief. “I remember that from the last time I was here.”
She hurried up the steps past the mapmaker’s shop and others, all the way to the main street’s next switchback.
“I know where we are,” Wynn exclaimed.
Chane raised one eyebrow. “I was not aware you were in doubt.”
“Oh, just come on!”
She broke into a jog, heading the other way. At the next intersecting stairway, she turned upward again. She stopped halfway, catching her breath on a landing with sculpted miniature fir trees planted in large black marble pots. She knew she had the right path, but Chane’s brow wrinkled as he glanced east.
“Almost there,” she said in a gasp, and hiked her robe as she climbed again.
Shade bounded ahead, reaching the street’s next switchback first. Wynn hoped at least one shirvêsh—a temple attendant—was up and about this early.
A deep tone echoed between the buildings.
Wynn pulled up short on the steps and held her breath.
“What?” Chane whispered.
She raised a hand for silence and waited, listening and hoping for more tones to come, but none did.
“Night-Winter is over!” she whispered in panic. “Day-Spring begins!”
“What does that mean?” Chane demanded.
This was no time to explain dwarven measures of night’s and day’s phases. She grabbed his sleeve, jerking him onward.
“Dawn is coming!”
“I do not need bells to know that,” he answered.
Wynn reached Shade at the main street’s next crossing. Across the way, before the next intersection pillar and its steaming crystal, was a massive structure emerging from the mountainside. Its double doors of white marble were set back beneath a high overhang supported by columns carved like living trees. But quick relief vanished.
Faint shadows from the columns began to appear upon the doors.
Wynn had to get Chane inside right now.
A dark column, like smoke thickening in shadow, grew in a small street- side terrace. It coalesced before an old fir tree nurtured in that place. And a heavy black cowl sagged across a cloak layered over a long black robe.
Sau’ilahk watched his trio of quarry scurry up the steps to the columned and roofed landing.
The sky grew light, and he could not remain for long nor risk going closer. The wolf might sense him. But he now knew these three better, having followed their nightly journey all the way from Calm Seatt.
Wynn Hygeorht, journeyor sage, kept company with a savage, tall wolf she had named Shade. But the pale one called Chane was more suspicious. He gave off no sense of presence at all. In Calm Seatt, both of Wynn’s companions had been difficult to deal with face-to-face, as neither succumbed to Sau’ilahk’s life-consuming touch. But Wynn frustrated and angered him most.
If not for her meddling, he might have acquired more translation folios—and perhaps a hint to the remedy of his long misery.
She did not know his name, never would, and instead referred to him as something out of her people’s quaint old folklore—a wraith. She even thought him destroyed by the staff’s crystal. Oh, she had injured him worse than he could remember and driven him into dark dormancy. The crystal’s flare had torn him up like sunlight. But she had no notion what he truly was, whom she had interfered with. In centuries of searching, he had never come close to what he sought until the ancient texts had appeared at the guild. And now . . .
Sau’ilahk slid back through the massive fir and into its deeper shadows, feeling the life in its branches pass through him as if he were nothing! That worthless tingle of life was too removed from his once living nature. It did not feed him and only made him ache for one precious thing lost an age ago.
Flesh.
By dear, deceitful Beloved, the one true deity, how he ached to have flesh once more. That singular desire might have been all that had kept him from fading into nothingness over more than a thousand years. And there was Beloved’s more recent promise, given one dusk upon the edge of Sau’ilahk’s dormancy.
Follow the sage . . . urge her, drive her. . . . She will lead you to your desire.
That temptation of hope ground against doubt- fueled rage. Could he ever trust his god again?
&nb
sp; Sau’ilahk sighed, though his “voice” was nothing more than conjury-twisted air, allowing him to speak if needed. It was smothered like a weakened hiss in the mountain breeze.
Word of his supposed death—or second so—had spread through the sages’ guild and beyond. Yet their leaders still chose not to send folios out to scribe shops. And it had become too risky to search farther on guild’s grounds. Beloved’s whispered words and this sage were all he had left.
It would be so much more pleasing to just kill her.
She thought she knew so much. It was twice as galling that in part she was correct. She knew more than her confederates, though so little of the actual truth.
Sau’ilahk would make her efforts come to nothing, once she led him to what he wanted. He needed her to find the writings of Li’kän, Häs’saun, Volyno, and others of Beloved’s “Children.” Wynn Hygeorht was his one and only tool for finding a way to regain flesh. But why had she come here, to this temple?
And the first bell of day sounded.
Sau’ilahk could not face the dawn any more than other undead. He let go of awareness and began slipping into dormancy. He faded from the physical aspect of all Existence to the far edge of its spiritual side—to that thin place between life and death. As he sank into dormancy, into dream, he whispered only in thought . . .
My Beloved . . . bless me again . . . this time in truth.
He would hunt Wynn Hygeorht once more when the sun set. Time was the one thing Sau’ilahk possessed in endless quantity.
Chane jerked up his cloak’s hood, not daring to glance eastward. Perhaps his clothing would shield him if the sun came too quickly, but he had never tested this outright. He peered up the steps rising to the temple.
The building’s frontage emerged from the mountainside and twin granite columns carved like large tree trunks framed the landing’s end. Even so, the structure hardly seemed large or deep enough to house these shirvêsh, as Wynn called them, be they monks, priests, or whatever tending some long-dead ancestor.
Wynn hurried upward with Shade, but Chane followed more slowly.
“Don’t worry,” Wynn assured him. “I’ll have you inside in a moment.”
The panicked edge in her voice was less than reassuring.
A heavy oblong arc of polished brass hung between the columns like a gateway. Suspended from the roof’s front by intricate harnesses of leather, its open ends dangled a shin’s length above the landing’s floor. It was so tall he could have walked through and not touched its top with an upstretched hand.
Chane climbed closer and noticed its metal was formed from a hollowed tube and not a solid bar. Wynn grabbed a short brass rod from a bracket on one column as Chane looked through the strange gateway to the shadowed front doors.
The emblem of a tablet was carved into the white marble and would split down the middle when the doors opened. Harsh-stroked characters were chiseled inside the tablet’s shape as if it held some ancient epitaph or edict. Or was it a warning?
Chane took the last step onto the landing’s edge with sudden reluctance.
Was this a true holy place?
He had heard the tales—undead could not enter a sanctified space. There were many such superstitions concerning his kind. Some were true, such as sunlight, the essence of garlic, and fire. Others turned out to be false. He had uncovered a few of those in frightening, accidental ways.
“What’s wrong?” Wynn asked.
She was watching him, as if aware he feared more than just the sun. How could he explain if she did not already know? He shook his head at her. With nowhere to hide, and no way to distinguish this truth, Chane stood trapped between sacred ground and the coming dawn.
“You are certain this is the place?” he rasped.
She didn’t answer and instead struck the rod hard against the great brass arc.
Chane’s whole body clenched as a baritone clang assaulted his ears. Wynn struck twice more, and the sound vibrated inside him, sharpening the prickling sting growing upon his skin. The tones rolled along the street like an orator booming for attention.
“Someone should be up,” she said, but too much nervousness leaked into her voice.
The brass arc’s tones died, and Chane was uncertain what to hope.
What would happen when—if—he stepped across the threshold? Would he burn as in fire; would that be what the sun did to him if he did not cross over? Or would he merely drop dead beyond the threshold like a corpse finally lifeless?
One door began to open without even the grating of metal hinges.
Wynn sighed audibly, and a solid, white- haired dwarf leaned out of the opening.
He studied the trio upon the landing, his face rather flat and wrinkled, like a half-dried grape. Wavy hair flowed down and broke over his wide shoulders, becoming one with his thick beard, though no mustache sprouted below his broad nose. He was dressed in brown breeches and typical heavy dwarven boots, his muslin shirt overlaid with a hip-long felt vestment of fiery burnt orange.
Not typical attire for any clergy that Chane had ever seen.
At the sight of Wynn’s robe, the dwarf’s eyes widened a little. Before he spoke, Wynn grabbed Chane’s sleeve.
“May we enter?” she asked quickly.
At her anxious tone, the old dwarf stepped aside, raising an ushering hand toward the interior. Shade trotted ahead as Wynn pulled on Chane, but Chane jerked free at the last instant.
He would not have her touching him when . . . if something happened.
Wynn looked up, startled and frightened, cocking her head toward the door as she sidled through it. When he crept to the threshold, he forced his eyes to remain open but quickly lowered them, watching only his dragging feet until . . .
His left boot toe slid from the landing’s granite onto a tiled mosaic floor.
Chane faltered. He stepped onward, waiting for . . . something, until a dull thump echoed all around. He stopped and looked up when the door closed. The first thing he saw was Shade sitting before him on the tile floor. She was watching him, her unnatural blue eyes slightly narrowed.
Shade could sense any undead but him. While he wore the arcane “ring of nothing,” it blocked his nature and presence from all unnatural awareness beyond normal senses. Shade had no idea of his true nature, though she made her dislike plain enough.
She finally huffed and began padding about the entry room.
“What is the matter with you?” Wynn whispered, and Chane flinched.
He stood inside a temple, and nothing had happened to him.
“Thank you, Shirvêsh Mallet,” Wynn said to the old dwarf. “We just arrived, and winter mornings are far too cold up here. It’s so good to see you again.”
The old dwarf—this shirvêsh—squinted. He had recognized her robe but not her. Eye-to-eye with short Wynn, he fixed upon her face. One bushy eyebrow crept upward until his eyes widened again.
“Little Apprentice Hygeorht?” he said in perfect Numanese.
“Of course! You remember me?”
“Remember?” The old one snorted.
Shirvêsh Mallet grabbed Wynn’s shoulders in his bear-paw hands.
Chane was so shaken by entering unharmed that he was taken by surprise. The dwarf could have tossed her about like an empty robe. But she never even teetered as the shirvêsh leaned in and kissed her cheek.
“My hair may be white, but my mind has not turned to ash,” he said. “And I warrant it is sharper than yours . . . with your obsessive need to write everything down!”
Chane frowned, uncertain what the last comment meant.
Wynn cleared her throat, or perhaps choked down a giggle, as if the old one’s words were a common welcome. She pulled a folded tan paper from her pocket and held it out.
“I’m a journeyor now, here on assignment. Domin High-Tower sent this for you.”
The shirvêsh took the paper, unfolding it as Wynn gestured to Chane. “This young scholar is Chane Andraso.”
“A bit of
a tall, pale one,” the dwarf muttered, not looking up from the letter. “Perhaps not from around here?”
“From the Farlands, on the eastern continent,” Wynn quickly explained. “He’ll be assisting my research. And that’s Shade.”
Shade’s ears pricked at her name.
“Can you spare two rooms?” Wynn asked. “I don’t know how long we’re staying.”
All this familiarity left Chane further out of place. One did not walk into a temple and request rooms for an indefinite period. Yet here he stood in a sacred place, not quite believing he did so. And Wynn carried on as if she and the old one had stumbled upon each other at some public house. It was too casual . . . too presumptive.
The shirvêsh finished the letter and folded it up.
“Yes, yes, you need not ask,” he returned. “Any from the guild are welcome, and it is good to hear from Chlâyard . . . I mean High-Tower, as you would say . . . though that pup could have written more than once in a decade!”
Chane had seen High-Tower, and the elder domin was certainly no puppy. How old was this shirvêsh?
“Have you eaten?” Mallet asked. “We are preparing breakfast. By the Eternals, what drove you to our doors before dawn?”
The two prattled on as if sudden visitors requesting what amounted to charity were commonplace. Chane had been born into a minor noble family in a world where no one made unannounced visits. Since rising as a Noble Dead, he had paid or fought for the smallest comfort or refuge.
“I think we’re too tired to eat,” Wynn said, hefting her pack again. “Could we just join you for dinner? We’ve been traveling all night.”
“By night?” The old dwarf blinked hard. “Now I am curious about such a rush along the bay road. And with a foreigner from . . . where did you say?”
“Belaski,” Chane rasped.
Shirvêsh Mallet nodded, giving Chane’s maimed voice no notice, and ushered Wynn onward.
“Let us be off, child, and find you rooms.”
The two led the way toward the open arch across from the doors, and Chane’s attention wandered around the surroundings.