In Shade and Shadow

by Barb Hendee

“We’ve put other customers’ needs second to the guild’s,” Shilwise shouted back. “On top of that, what happens when word gets out that a’Seatt is your favorite? I demand you fulfill your contract . . . or I’ll see you in court, Sykion!”

  Several of the premins pushed in around Sykion, all whispering to her. Sykion tried to wave them off and fixed her full attention on Master Shilwise. Her voice shocked the hall’s air, startlingly loud for her tactful nature and frail stature.

  “Compensation will be offered as promised. The matter is closed!”

  At this, the master of Four Scribes in House tried to pull Shilwise back. But Shilwise shoved the stout man off, casting a seething glare to the hearth’s far left end.

  Pawl a’Seatt stood silent and unaffected, his heavy cloak and wide-brimmed hat in hand. Stooped old Master Teagan pushed round spectacles up his beaked nose, and he wrinkled that nose at Shilwise. But then he glanced nervously up at his employer.

  Shilwise shoved through his competitors and strode out between the crowded tables and bystanders. He headed straight for the hall’s main archway.

  As he passed, Wynn saw his glistening face.

  Master Shilwise had broken out in a sudden sweat. The owner of the Gild and Ink seemed more panicked than outraged as he rushed out. Wynn turned back but stopped halfway, her awareness catching on Domin il’Sänke.

  His head was half bowed, as if he’d lost interest in the events. Instead he focused completely on Rodian.

  The captain stood partly twisted around, staring after Shilwise, clearly as perplexed as Wynn by the scriptorium owner—not because of the man’s outrage, but the extreme nature of it, and the strange change that came over Shilwise as he fled. Instead of turning back to the proceedings, Rodian’s gaze dropped to Wynn. Only after a discontented breath through his nose did he turn away.

  Wynn heard a sharp sigh—from il’Sänke—and she quickly looked up.

  The tall domin’s brow wrinkled under the barest shake of his head before he turned his own attention back across the hall.

  Wynn kept looking about, from the captain to the domin to the archway where Shilwise had vanished. And she started to feel dizzy.

  What had just happened? Why was Rodian even here? And was il’Sänke aware of the captain’s suspicions?

  “There is more,” Sykion called out, pulling Wynn’s attention. “Until further notice, all members—from initiates to premins—will remain within guild grounds between dusk and dawn. Those with family or homes elsewhere in the city shall also remain here. There will be no exceptions. Thank you, that is all.”

  Premin Sykion stepped down from the hearth’s ledge, gathering with the other council members to speak in soft tones. The murmur in the hall grew as people began to rise, joining into small groups or drifting toward either exit.

  The audience was over, but Rodian remained. Sages young and old passed around him, but he only watched the council before the hearth. With nothing further to hear, Wynn turned to leave.

  “Wynn!” a deep voice called, and she whipped around.

  Domin High-Tower stood near the hall’s center. This was the first he’d spoken to her since Rodian’s office the night before. She glanced up at Domin il’Sänke.

  “You had best go,” he said.

  Wynn took one more worried look at High-Tower before she pushed forward against the current of others leaving the hall. High-Tower was already heading for the narrow side archway. At his gesture, she followed him.

  He said nothing more, leading her all the way to the north tower and his study. Wynn steeled herself, and any relief at not facing dismissal before the entire guild was gone. It would be no better in the private chamber of Domin High-Tower. But when they entered, he didn’t sit down. He stood before one narrow inset window, looking outside along the keep’s old battlements.

  “Premin Sykion . . .” he began, and then faltered. “We have decided you may have access to pages translated so far, but not the original texts . . . and only on the condition that you give up this treacherous notion of a claim.”

  Wynn held her breath, caught somewhere between relief and frustration.

  A claim in the people’s court before the high advocate concerning all the texts could take moons to settle. There were precedents regarding the rights of anyone working in any form of guild, and in the end she might still lose. For now she needed to see only the translations, to try to learn what the black-robed figure was after.

  And she wasn’t being cast out.

  But Wynn was not about to let High-Tower hear her wild relief.

  “And the codex,” she said, not a quaver in her voice. “I need the codex as well to know which pieces of finished work are related to or from the same source. Too many pages and drafts have been lost so far.”

  He would already know this. She would need to see every stage of the translation to truly understand what the murderer sought.

  High-Tower never turned from the window as he nodded curtly.

  “How soon?” she asked.

  “Tomorrow,” he replied. “Preparations will be made for you.”

  A moment’s frustration passed over the prospect of another delay, but Wynn didn’t argue. If no more folios were carried back and forth, tomorrow would be soon enough.

  And still, Domin High-Tower wouldn’t look at her.

  In his profile she could see that he thought her ungrateful and disloyal— or certainly above herself. But all that mattered was that an undead was hunting sages, maybe even hunting High-Tower, eventually. And no one but her seemed willing to acknowledge the truth or follow a proper course of action.

  “Agreed,” she said, and turned for the door.

  “What has happened to you, Wynn?”

  She froze with her hand on the latch. He sounded sad, almost defeated. She jerked the door open, stepping out into the tower’s spiral stairway.

  “I grew up,” she answered.

  She didn’t look back as she shut the door.

  CHAPTER 12

  Just past dusk, Chane paced about his shabby attic room.

  Wynn had seen him—and knew he had broken into a scriptorium to steal a folio.

  He stopped and settled slowly on the bed’s edge, looking around at the faded four walls and slanted ceiling. Events seemed to be hurtling forward without direction, without his control. How had he come to this state?

  He pushed his red-brown hair from his forehead, thinking back, remembering what had driven him from Bela all the way to this continent. . . .

  After learning that Wynn had returned to the Numan Lands, he seemed merely to exist, passing from night to night in Bela with little purpose and no future.

  In desperation he often worked on furthering his grasp of Welstiel’s arcane objects or deciphering bits from the man’s two journals. Little came from great effort, but he uncovered one mystery, seemingly unrelated to Welstiel’s conjury.

  The oldest of the journals had a parchment covering folded over it. The covering was annoying in handling the book, so Chane took it off. And there on the left of its inner surface was a list. Though most were common herbs, one was written in Belaskian among the other Numanese terms.

  Dyvjàka Svonchek—“Boar’s Bell.”

  Chane knew it, also called by other folk names such as Flooding Dusk, Nightmare’s Breath, and Blackbane. Its yellow bell-shaped flowers faded to dark plum at the edges. Toxic and deadly to the living, its mere odor could also cause delirium. He knew its fishy scent in two ways. One from dried petals left on a table in the back room of the healer-monks’ hidden mountain monastery. And the other . . .

  Chane fished deep in Welstiel’s belongings.

  He pulled out a long and shallow box, bound in black leather and wrapped in indigo felt. Inside were six vials in felt padding, each with a silver screw-top cap. But only one and a half held any of the strange liquid. The unwary might have thought it watery violet ink.

  Chane carefully sniffed at the full one without even opening it. Hi
s head filled with its fishy sweet odor, and he quickly pulled the vial from his face.

  He looked back to the parchment cover’s inner surface. On the right half was a diagram with symbols, most of which he didn’t know. Perhaps it was a formula of some kind.

  All the vials had been full when he and Welstiel had left the monastery—in company with six monks raised as feral undeads. Somewhere along the journey to the Pock Peaks and the castle of that ancient white female vampire, the rest of the vials had been used. What purpose had Welstiel’s concoction served? And how was it made, let alone used?

  All Chane knew was that during the journey, Welstiel continued to grow more agitated and more obsessed with getting his “orb.” That and when Chane slipped into dormancy each night, Welstiel was still up and alert. When Chane arose the next dawn, Welstiel was already up and about, perhaps for a long while.

  Chane had no doubt the list of ingredients was for this deadly liquid, and only the flower would be difficult to find. Some claimed it had healing properties, but he did not think so. Chane rewrapped the vial case, stored it in the pack, and refitted the parchment cover on the journal.

  On a few nights his frustration at too little progress began to mount, and he would return to Bela’s great docks. Or he would wander to the city’s southern edge and stand upon the shore, staring out over the Inner Bay and ocean beyond. He did take the time to seek an apothecary, who reluctantly admitted that he carried Boar’s Bell in secret, for sale to select customers. Chane paid heavily for a small amount, not having the time or opportunity to search for the flower in the wilderness.

  Sometimes he hunted, turning more often to the lowly districts.

  His existence became more and more pointless, until one night he caught a flash of dark fur near a loading platform on the southernmost pier.

  He ignored it at first. Dogs often roamed the city’s quarters, scavenging for a quick meal. But the animal’s movement pulled his attention back.

  The dog hung its head over the dock’s upper level and watched the men below.

  On the lower level of that nearest dock, three men busily loaded cargo into a wide, flat-bottomed skiff. Even under the dock’s hanging lanterns, they couldn’t see as well as Chane in darkness. He stepped close to the dock’s landbound end, having nothing better to occupy him.

  The dog was taller than he had first thought, perhaps the height of a timber wolf, but with long legs and muzzle, and taller ears. Charcoal-colored, its coat seemed to shimmer faintly in the lantern’s light.

  “I’m sick of all the rush,” said one sailor below. “When are we going to take time for some eats?”

  “Get on with it!” another snapped. “We’re outbound by dawn, and we’re short on cargo for the crossing. So much for profit shares at the journey’s end.”

  “We’ll fix that once we hit the far coast,” the third replied.

  The dog lifted its head and looked out toward a three-masted vessel in the harbor, almost as if it knew what the men spoke of.

  Chane saw its blue crystalline eyes catch the lantern light.

  The animal slunk silently to a side-hanging walkway and padded softly down the ramp to the dock’s lower level. For a moment, Chane thought he was looking at Chap.

  But this dog was much darker, more slender in build, and a younger animal, perhaps not yet having gained its full weight. Chap was unique, a hunter of undead, yet the animal was certainly of the same breed. Chane moved quietly out to peer over the dock’s side.

  The dog crept around a massive, slightly dented trunk waiting to be loaded. The sailors were busy grumbling and wrestling with cargo and never noticed as the dog parted the trunk’s lid with its nose. It squirmed inside amid piles of folded cloth.

  Chane watched in fascination before he called out, “You, there . . . where is that ship headed?”

  One sailor straightened up, wiping his sweating brow with a sleeve.

  “Langinied, at first light,” he replied, “if we can get her loaded in time. We’ve cargo going straight across; then we’re south for the long haul to the eastern Suman coast.”

  Chane lifted his eyes to the vessel out in the bay. He knew of Langinied, a large island off the coast across the ocean. It was supposed to be one of the few civilized places this side of that continent—Wynn’s continent. There was a long land journey beyond that to reach the far west coast and her homeland.

  Two sailors picked up the old trunk and hefted it atop the crates already overburdening the skiff.

  A strange dog stowed away on a ship bound for Wynn’s continent. The only other of its breed that Chane had ever seen was a close companion to Wynn.

  “Is it still possible to buy passage?” he asked.

  “What?” the third sailor called back, steadying the skiff as his mates loaded a rope-bound bale. Perhaps he could not catch Chane’s words in his voiceless rasp.

  “Passage!” he called again.

  The man huffed at him. “All passengers are supposed to be onboard already. You’ll have to speak to the purser . . . over there.”

  The sailor pointed along the pier’s lower level. Chane spotted a gaunt man directing others in loading water casks onto another skiff.

  Before long Chane had arranged passage, and the price took nearly all the money he possessed. He ran inland, and was well beyond the port before finding a coach to hurry him the rest of the way out of the city to his inn. By the time the coach returned him to the docks, the eastern skyline was just barely lightening. The purser was waiting impatiently by an empty skiff.

  The moment Chane boarded the ship, he hurried below, but not to his cramped quarters. He crept into the cargo hold, searching among lashed crates, barrels, and bundles for that one old trunk.

  If the dog were truly like Chap, it could sense an undead, let alone anyone else’s approach. But this did not concern Chane—he wore Welstiel’s ring of nothing. More than once the ring had hidden Welstiel and himself from Chap’s and Magiere’s unnatural awareness. And Chane needed to learn why this animal appeared to be heading in Wynn’s direction.

  He found the trunk, its straps still unbuckled, but he hesitated at flipping it open. Though the ring hid his nature, startling the dog could ignite an assault. He lifted the trunk’s lid half a handbreadth, but it was too dark in the hold for even his eyes to see into the hidden space. Finally he had to open it wide.

  The trunk was empty but for the bolts of cloth.

  Chane glanced about the hold. There was no sign of the dog, nor could he smell it. He finally turned away, heading back for his small cabin.

  At least the animal was not trapped, would not starve to death on the voyage. Beyond that he wanted nothing to do with it, other than to learn why it was here—and if it was truly headed toward Wynn.

  In the long voyage, he took only two victims: one penny-poor passenger, lodged in steerage, and one sailor. But only during rough weather at night, when he could dump the bodies overboard, as if they had been lost at sea. Otherwise he held himself in check, trying not to exert himself and force further feeding.

  Not once did he see the dog, and he wondered if it lived on vermin in the hold or had somehow settled in with the crew. Perhaps it had even been taken in by one of the officers in the fore or aftcastle quarters.

  To his relief, the ship reached the free port of Langinied, the long island off the coast of the middle continent—and it docked at night. He insisted on leaving immediately, though the purser was put off at arranging oarsmen and a skiff before dawn.

  Though the city sprawled over a large rocky area in both directions beyond sight, it was far from an actual nation or even a city-state, more like a chaotic growth of trade operations and other businesses with residents needed to support them. Langinied had spawned long ago from the needs of whatever ships came up the coast from the Suman Empire before making the difficult run across to what the sages called the Farlands. Added to this, some caravans braved what he learned were called the Broken Lands. A wild, uncivilize
d territory spanned the continent from this eastern coast to nearly the edge of the Numan Lands on the western side.

  Chane stayed in Langinied, watching the ship as much as he could, until it left port on the fifth dusk. He never saw the dog again. Without its lead he was left adrift, once more questioning his actions. He had sworn to Wynn that he would never reenter her life—but he eventually set out for Calm Seatt on his own.

  The journey across land made the sea voyage seem short.

  Little along the way came to bother an undead. At times he lingered in places past dusk, trying to decipher more of Welstiel’s writings. Or he paged through the varied texts taken from the healer-monks’ monastery. Every ink mark made with quill, no matter what it said, reminded him of Wynn . . . sitting in a room by the light of her cold lamp, perhaps doing likewise with the ancient texts she had recovered.