In Shade and Shadow

by Barb Hendee

  Ghassan had seen the few ancient Sumanese passages he had been asked to help translate. That information alone had to be kept hidden at all cost. Still, he wondered what was in the rest of those folios, and perhaps even envied Wynn’s special indulgence. Somehow it must have been facilitated by the meddlesome captain of the city guard.

  What would happen if this knowledge, this Forgotten History, became known to the common people? So many ideologies and beliefs had eradicated what little was known of civilization’s birth—and death—in the world. Or rather its fragile rebirth since that long-forgotten war few believed had ever happened at all. It was best left that way, even for what might lie ahead.

  After supper he had planned to write another letter to his comrades at the Suman branch. Then he overheard someone mention a private message delivered for Wynn. He shadowed her, removing his presence from her mind, all the way from her room and through the library.

  Ghassan briefly closed his eyes. Glimmering strokes and marks took form in patterns across the backs of his eyelids.

  As an incantation slipped through his thoughts, he stepped off the windowsill, floated down to the wall’s top, and walked quickly off after Wynn. He caught sight of her as she rounded the southern tower and headed along the keep’s front.

  But then she stopped, hiding near the closer barbican of the gate—for two of Rodian’s men had been posted before the gatehouse. Ghassan watched her go back into hiding, and he frowned in indecision.

  Perhaps he should just leave her with no way out. Let her abandon this covert journey and go back to her room. But then he would never learn what she was up to. Touching her thoughts might suffice, but her erratic mind often required wading and waiting for things to become clear.

  Ghassan rubbed his eyes. He would have to get her off guild grounds himself. Closing his eyes again, he altered the patterns, lines, and sigils in his thoughts and then focused on the two city guards . . . on their senses . . . their hearing. . . .

  “What was that?” one asked suddenly, and looked northward along the inner bailey. But the other was already running, and the first took off behind him.

  Wynn peeked out at the voices. She stepped into the open and stared to where the men disappeared beyond the western orchard and tower. She just stood there.

  “Oh, please! Just go!” Ghassan whispered.

  Finally she rushed out and slipped through the bailey gate.

  Ghassan gave her a moment, watching her over the wall as she headed south. Then he descended directly into Old Bailey Road and followed.

  CHAPTER 13

  Chane crouched at the stable’s rear corner, uncertain what he would say to Wynn. And the smells of dung, old leather, and straw rose around him.

  The horses inside had already been fed and settled for the night. No one would come out back after dusk. This was the nearest and safest place he knew of for a private word without having Wynn walk too far at night. Something . . . someone besides him was after the folios—and it had fixed upon Wynn outside the scribe shop.

  Chane had brushed out his cloak and combed his red-brown hair, which had once hung to his shoulders. More than a year ago, in Venjètz, Welstiel had cut it jaggedly to disguise Chane for a ruse played on Magiere. The hair would never grow back. He pushed a loose strand behind his ear, closing his eyes briefly.

  Wynn would come, but how could he explain his actions, driven by obsessions that he did not fully understand?

  He watched the street from along the stable’s side. Across the way he could just make out the tops of the guild’s keep towers above shops, inns, and one eatery across the street. Then movement pulled his gaze back down.

  Wynn stepped into sight on the street, wearing a brown cloak over her gray robe.

  She gripped a walking staff taller than herself, and the two hands’ length above her head was sheathed in leather. She halted, reached into her pocket, and pulled something out. When she flattened her hand against her wool robe and rubbed brusquely, Chane knew it was her cold lamp crystal. Faint illumination filtered through her fingers, and he stepped quickly along the stable’s side to its front corner.

  Wynn halted midstreet, staring at him. Faint lines of concentration creased her forehead.

  An ache swelled in Chane’s chest at the sight of her oval face within her robe’s raised cowl. Wynn embodied what little he held worthwhile in this world—all the things he could never have. She finally came toward him, stopping a few paces off, well beyond his reach.

  Something about her face was different, not in her features but in her expression. She seemed older, too serious, and poignant. All Wynn’s youthful curiosity, her wonder and innocent passion . . . it all seemed gone from her soft brown eyes.

  But so long as he saw no fear, he could bear anything else.

  “I did not kill them,” he rasped in Belaskian. “Any of them! I would never harm a sage.”

  Watching her flinch made him hate the sound of his maimed voice more than ever before. But her reaction to his words was far more important.

  “I believe you,” she whispered, yet as her gaze searched his face, he still saw doubt. “Why did you send for me?”

  Blunt and to the point, but she certainly had many other questions. Why was he here, halfway across the world, and how was he involved with the folios’ thefts? But she had not asked him any of this. She treated him like a stranger, and the ache in his chest became a pain.

  Chane reached into his cloak and drew out the aged tin scroll case.

  “Did you ever see this . . . while in the castle of the Pock Peaks?” he asked.

  He had found it on the floor as he fled that place, not knowing who had dropped it there.

  For a moment Wynn looked at the case in puzzlement. Then her eyes widened, staring with intensity—and recognition. She opened her hand slightly, allowing more of the crystal’s light to escape.

  “Where . . . how did you get that?” she whispered, taking two steps closer.

  Chane saw the Wynn of past days as she looked up at him with that old curious astonishment.

  “Near the passage out of the library,” he answered. “I actually kicked it as I left. I still do not know why I picked it up.”

  Wynn reached out hesitantly toward the scroll case. “Li’kän took it from the library shelves.”

  “Li’kän?” Chane asked. “Do you mean the white undead?”

  Wynn did not seem to hear him. She was fixated on the scroll case, shaking her head slightly.

  “She went right to it . . . never touched anything else,” Wynn whispered. “She wanted me to read it to her.”

  Chane hesitated before saying, “That is not possible.”

  Wynn’s brow crinkled again. Before she could ask, he pulled off the case’s pewter cap. Scholarly wonder always got the better of her, and Chane was more than willing to distract her from the harder questions concerning him. He slid out the leather scroll and opened it.

  “You could not have read this to her,” he said.

  Wynn stepped all the way to him and held the crystal closer. It was instantly clear what he meant when she saw the ink coating.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, her small fingers lightly touching the blackened surface.

  “There is something hidden beneath it,” he added. “Something marked in the fluids of a Noble Dead.”

  Her gaze flicked up, and he could swear her face paled.

  “How do you know that?” she asked.

  “I can smell it.”

  Doubt and suspicion returned to Wynn’s eyes. “It’s too old. No scent would last that long. No one, even something . . . someone like you, could catch it.”

  Chane tried not to flinch: some . . . thing . . . like him—an undead with senses to match any feral beast’s.

  “I did not smell it until I had nearly finished restoring the scroll’s leather. The scent was faint but exactly the same as freshly spilled fluids from one of my kind.”

  “Like the writing on the cas
tle’s inner walls,” she whispered, gazing again at the scroll.

  Chane remembered the vague, thin smell inside the white undead’s fortress.

  “This is why I want to see the folios,” he said carefully. “From those texts, from that same library, I had hoped to learn what it is, if not what it contains. I could not risk stripping the coating to see what was hidden. Then I heard . . . saw how the works that you brought back had placed you and the guild in danger.”

  “Why?” she demanded. “Do you know what is hunting us?”

  Sharp as it was, her earnest question held no accusation toward him. The pain in his chest lessened a bit.

  “I do not,” he answered. “At first I assumed the texts you chose were ones clearest to read. But with your project still ongoing, that must not be the case for all of them.”

  “I selected a range of works from the library,” she explained, “based on what was oldest but still sound enough to transport . . . and what I—or others skilled in old tongues—might have a chance at translating.”

  “Yet the work continues,” he said.

  Wynn shrugged weakly. “Yes, the translation has been . . . seems more difficult than I guessed.”

  “Someone hid whatever is in this scroll,” he added with his own emphasis, “either the author or someone else, in place of simply destroying it. I believe it is of importance. More so now, as your Li’kän wished you to see it, knowing there was nothing here you could read. Perhaps it might be a key to uncovering other secrets in your texts. . . . Why else would that black figure be shadowing the folios and killing for them? I think it, too, is having difficulty in finding what it seeks.”

  Chane held out the scroll to Wynn.

  She took it and stepped around him along the side of the stable. Leaning her staff against the wall, she dropped cross-legged on the ground and opened the scroll upon her lap. Holding the crystal above it, she touched its black surface.

  “This is why you came to Calm Seatt,” she said, not even looking up. “Why you came after me again.”

  Chane crouched beside her but thought better of mentioning the dog like Chap that he had followed at first.

  “Domin Tilswith and other sages in Bela would have never trusted me long enough to ask anything.”

  “May I keep it, for now?” she asked. “I need to take it back for further study. There may still be one or two people willing to help me.”

  A flash of anxiety overwhelmed Chane at relinquishing the scroll. But more than one phrase from Wynn’s lips left him wondering. What did “further study” actually mean, since there was nothing in the scroll that could be studied? And her last words implied that she, too, now had few people to trust in the world, even among her own kind, it seemed.

  What had happened to her in the guild branch of her homeland?

  But he trusted her above all others, and he could only cling to the belief that she trusted him a little.

  “Of course,” he answered, handing over the case and cap.

  Wynn carefully rolled the scroll and slipped it back into its protection. Then it struck Chane that he could not—could never—go back to the guild with her, as one more she could rely on in deciphering this new mystery.

  “I should get back,” she said, rising. “Where are you staying?”

  Clearly she wanted to be away from him. Chane would never blame her for that.

  “Better you do not know,” he answered. “I will send word soon, when and where we should meet again.”

  He stepped into the street, heading away from her.

  “Do you still . . . kill to survive?” she whispered, a little too loudly.

  Chane did not let those words make him falter, not until he rounded the nearest turn.

  He stopped there, half collapsing against a shop’s side wall. Peering back around the corner, he watched Wynn until she slipped beyond his sight.

  Wynn’s heart pounded so hard that her ribs ached. She forced herself to walk calmly without looking back. She’d almost forgotten the long, clean lines of his face.

  Chane was part of a past she had given up. Once she’d heard Leesil mutter to himself, “One should never walk backward through one’s own life.” It was trite, of course, but a sound thought nonetheless.

  Yet, how long had it been since she’d spent even moments with someone who actually cared for her—who knew her? Someone who not only believed her accounts of undead, but who knew more of them than she did.

  He was one of them—akin to that robed monster murdering her people—and yet he’d come across the world to seek help and to help her. She needed help from someone, anyone, who fully realized what her guild faced.

  Part of her longed to linger in his company, but he hadn’t answered her last question. His omission spoke volumes—like any accounting of all his victims.

  Wynn slipped the scroll case and her crystal inside her cloak.

  As she walked, she kept the staff from striking the cobblestones and making any sound that would attract attention. In spite of her warring emotions over accepting Chane’s assistance, a flicker of hope seeded in her thoughts.

  Her superiors had finally granted her access to translated passages and the codex. Now Chane had provided her with Li’kän’s chosen scroll. The combination might lead to answers—if she could find a way to uncover what was hidden beneath a coating of old ink, written in the dried fluids of an ancient undead. She tried not to think about such impossibilities, or her seeds of hope might be ground to dust. She turned down Leaful Street, headed toward the Old Bailey Road.

  Two patrolling men in red surcoats stepped out from the intersection’s left side.

  Wynn quickly scurried over against a shop’s front wall. She held her breath beneath the awning’s deeper night shadows.

  She’d seen only two of Rodian’s men when she’d slipped out of the keep. It never occurred to her that he would’ve put even more on patrol around the whole grounds along the loop of the Old Bailey Road. She listened as their boots clomped slowly along.

  How was she going to reach the gate, let alone get past the pair stationed before the gatehouse? How many guards had Rodian sent out here?

  She’d been gone only a short while, but if she didn’t hurry back, someone might miss her—especially if il’Sänke turned up at her room. She had certainly badgered him enough about learning to use the staff.

  Wynn swallowed hard.

  If she were caught outside, in defiance of Premin Sykion’s mandate, it would most certainly weigh against her. It might even cost her access to the translations.

  Wynn crept along the shops and peeked around the corner.

  The guards were still too close to the intersection for her to slip past behind them. Her hand clenched the staff, and she turned back down Leaful Street.

  With a frustrated exhale, she cut into the next street paralleling the southeast side of Old Bailey Road. She stuck close to the buildings until she spotted a narrow walkway that would take her back to the loop around the keep. When she ducked in, she could just make out the alley’s far end. Beyond, she spotted part of the wall across Old Bailey Road. She needed a vantage point farther behind the patrolling guards to check for any others circuiting the guild. And as yet, she still had no idea how to get past the two at the gatehouse.

  Wynn padded along the narrow space and suddenly came upon a widened area midway. It opened on her left, and for an instant the change confused her in the dark.

  A quick staccato of scratches filled the space. Wynn backed against the alley’s opposing wall.

  Digging in her pocket, she was already scanning the dark area as she pulled out her crystal. Light washed over a wide alcove behind the building.

  Tall, narrow barrels and a few crates were stacked around three worn wooden steps leading to a rear door. A tawny rat darted across the alcove’s floor stones into hiding beneath those stairs.

  Wynn took several slow breaths. Her nerves were so on edge that now she was startled by vermin. Wouldn’
t that have given Leesil something to gibe her about, after all the dangers they’d faced in their journeys?

  Fearful of revealing her presence, she stuffed the crystal back in her pocket and turned toward the alley’s far end.

  There was only darkness ahead. No faintly lighter space showed where the alley opened into Old Bailey Road. Only impossibly deep black filled the narrow alley.