by Barb Hendee
It was well more than a handbreadth wide above the plain bar of its crossguard. Each of its edges tapered straight to the point. But those edges were strangely rough in an even pattern.
Wynn squinted and saw that it was serrated.
Shade’s noise remained constant, like mewling beneath a continuous shuddering snarl, but she didn’t rush at the scribe master. Wynn put a hand on the dog’s back as she stared at Pawl a’Seatt’s face.
Black hair hung straight around his features from beneath the wide-brimmed hat. The faint ribbon of light exposed skin not even close to Chane’s pallor. His eyes were brown, though too sharp and bright for the color. They were not the crystalline of an undead.
“No,” she whispered. “No, he can’t be.”
He’d been present when the guild had chosen his scribes as the ones to come work inside the guild. Pawl a’Seatt had come to the gathering before noon, in daylight.
“I will not ask again,” he said, but looked briefly out the broken window toward the street, where the conflict with the wraith had played out. “I will not allow even one of these things, let alone two . . . in my city.”
My city? As much as that utterance puzzled her, Wynn was caught by something else.
Pawl a’Seatt knew what Chane was—knew what the wraith was, or had been.
“I tell you, he is an undead!” Chane hissed at Wynn. “Believe me!”
Shade began to physically shudder under Wynn’s hand. Wynn side-stepped in front of Chane and pointed the crystal out like a spear’s head.
“We were just leaving,” she said.
Master a’Seatt shook his head.
“You go alone.” He turned his gaze on Chane. “I watched you throw yourself through that black thing. The guards died quickly, yet here you stand. And you fled from the light that drove off another undead. I do not know how you mask your nature . . . your presence. . . . Only one other has ever done this. And he left here long ago.”
Chane’s hand tightened on Wynn’s shoulder as he whispered, “Welstiel?”
Only the barest change registered in Pawl a’Seatt’s expression—but it was there, that slight widening of his eyes in intensity, and Wynn caught it. The scribe master knew Magiere’s half brother.
Welstiel Massing had been in Calm Seatt at one time? Did Chane know of this and hadn’t told her? The ring was the only connection she could think of.
Magiere and Chap could sense an undead, but Welstiel had always eluded them. And he had often hidden Chane as well.
Pawl a’Seatt spoke as if he too could feel an undead’s presence but had been baffled by the lack of such in Chane. But he never looked at Shade, as if she didn’t matter. Even an armed man, like Rodian, had reacted a little at Shade’s distress in the hospice ward. Shade’s noise kept eating through Wynn’s uncertainty.
She could remember one other time she’d heard this, but not from Shade.
Chap had reacted differently to Li’kän than to any other undead. He had told Wynn later that the ancient white female was not like other Noble Dead or vampires. Li’kän had left Chap cold and frightened instead of heated for a hunt.
Wynn found it hard to breathe.
Was Pawl a’Seatt another ancient one? Was she standing before another of il’Samar’s “Children”? And still, he had been out in daylight.
He looked alive enough to her. Even Li’kän couldn’t conceal the telltale physical signs of an undead—though Wynn had once seen her walk straight through a shaft of daylight.
Chane, still young for a vampire, also had to be wary of close scrutiny by anyone.
“You will not touch him,” Wynn managed to get out. “If you saw him in the street, then you saw what he did. He was protecting the city, protecting the guild!”
“He . . . you . . . simply accomplished what I would have done myself,” Pawl a’Seatt countered, his tone hardening, “once I finally found it. Move aside now!”
Wynn thought she saw those brilliant brown eyes of his turn suddenly pale and glassy.
They glinted, but that wasn’t possible. It was only faint street light catching in his irises, the brief spark seeming too much in a dark room.
If Pawl a’Seatt was what Chane claimed, he wouldn’t hesitate to toss her aside. She could think of only one reason he hadn’t done so already: She was one of the sages.
“The wraith isn’t an isolated incident in our world!” she nearly shouted. “Chane and I are among the few who believe something from the Forgotten History is returning. We may be among the few who can hinder or stop it! I will take him out of the city, far from here. You will never see him again.”
Pawl a’Seatt turned his head toward her. A hint of disbelief—or disdain—wrinkled his smooth brow.
“I have too much to learn . . . too much to do,” Wynn rushed on. “If you saw us out there, you know I need him if I’m to stay alive long enough to uncover the truth. You are not taking that from me.”
She slid her hand over Shade’s face and shoved.
Shade backed toward the door, and Wynn retreated, backing Chane along until she’d gotten him onto the outer steps. Only then did she withdraw the staff and its crystal.
Master a’Seatt followed slowly, his hard gaze still fixed on her. He didn’t close or strike, only maintained the same distance between them.
Wynn stumbled as she retreated down the shop’s steps. She wasn’t about to turn her back on this man—whatever he was.
Pawl a’Seatt stopped in the doorway.
Even as Wynn went to retrieve il’Sänke and Rodian, the scribe master never took his cold gaze off of her.
CHAPTER 20
Dawn was a ways off when Ghassan il’Sänke climbed the steps to his quarters above the guild’s workshops. He had never been so tired nor wanted to be alone more than now. He knocked briefly before entering.
A glowing cold lamp rested upon his desk. By its light, Wynn sat on the floor looking calmly at the scroll’s blackened surface, with Shade lying beside her.
“Wynn,” he said in warning, “you have not called your—”
“Mantic sight?” she finished. “No, I’m too exhausted. Whatever is left in the scroll can wait.”
Through the room’s rear open door, Ghassan barely made out someone upon his bed. Wynn’s vampire lay still in the dark bedroom, though Ghassan did not know whether the undead actually slept. Chane had been injured in the conflict, although he bore no physical wounds. Wynn insisted they bring him back and that Ghassan get them all inside without detection. It had been tricky, not letting either of them know how the guards out front were suddenly gone from their post yet again.
Once Chane was put to bed and Wynn slumped upon the study’s small couch, Ghassan had left them for a while. He had a more unpleasant task to face.
Now, as he closed the door, Wynn spoke up before he could offer an explanation of his whereabouts.
“You went to speak with High-Tower and Premin Sykion,” she said, “about what happened tonight.”
He sighed. “Yes, and I thought you would be asleep by now.”
“Did they believe you?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” he said, “though they have only my word . . . and yours. But we have broken more guild rules than I can name.”
“What do you mean, ‘unfortunately’?”
Ghassan did not want to explain, but it was better that she knew. “I would guess they have believed you all along.”
The opened scroll began quivering in Wynn’s hand.
“What you know,” he said, “are things that no one outside our walls should ever learn.”
Wynn stared up at him. She looked beaten down. In having been denied for too long, outrage flushed her olive-toned cheeks.
“They treated me . . .” she began, choking on her words, “like an imbecile, like an insane little child!”
“They could not afford the panic,” he countered. “Or subsequent denial and denouncement of the guild, should others believe you—or learn what mig
ht be in those texts. Truth would not hold against the beliefs of many that the world has always been as it is.”
“What about the captain?” she snapped. “He survived . . . he knows!”
Ghassan sighed again and shook his head. “True, he now faces a crisis of faith, but not as much as you assume. The history taught by his religion, so much like secular perspectives, is false . . . but the philosophical teachings of the Blessed Trinity of Sentience are still sound. If he can distinguish that, then he may realize he has not truly lost anything.
“But by his example, we should not be so forthright with those who do not wish to know, do not need to know. The guild is safe for the moment. Translation can continue in a more expedient fashion.”
“Yes, the project,” Wynn whispered spitefully, and lowered her head.
Ghassan still found her to be a puzzle. She knew far too much, yet always remained determined to do what was right, no matter the personal cost. At the same time, she did not really want to thrust the truth in everyone’s face.
Wynn Hygeorht simply wanted acknowledgment from those who already knew. But she had received the exact opposite from the very people and way of life she cherished. It was stranger still that upon the edge of such dangerous times, Ghassan almost trusted in her judgment.
“You struggle over more than just the illusory blindness of your superiors,” he said.
Wynn picked up her journal on the floor, the one in which she had scribed words from the scroll.
“This,” she whispered, and held up the scroll as well. “I think you know—or suspect—more than you’ve said.”
“It’s no more clear to me than to you,” he answered. “All poetic metaphor, simile, and symbolism.”
And his instinct to silence her forever returned.
Even a rumored hint of such abominations as the wraith, and what it might represent, would create panic beyond control. Suspicion and paranoia would grow, along with heated denial and possibly open conflict between differing ideological factions. Ghassan had seen such things before within his homeland and the Suman Empire at large. But Wynn had served an essential purpose tonight. Perhaps that purpose was not yet completely fulfilled.
She opened the journal, scanned the scroll’s copy page, and pointed to a brief string of ancient Sumanese, perhaps Iyindu and Pärpa’äsea. Her finger traced one haphazardly translated phrase.
“Can you guess at this at all?” she asked. “What is ‘chair of a lord’s song’?”
With a tired breath, Ghassan took the journal from her.
If Wynn’s hasty strokes were accurate, the script indeed appeared to be Iyindu, both an old dialect and a writing system little used anymore in the empire. Fortunately it was not Pärpa’äsea, which was more obscure. But he did make out one error.
“You have the last of it wrong,” he said. “It is not prepositional but an objective possessive adjective, a form not found in Numanese. The first word is not ‘chair’ but ‘seat,’ so it would read . . .”
Ghassan paused, studying Wynn’s attempt at translation, and then he looked down to the corresponding Iyindu characters. The word “maj’at” meant “seat,” but the final character of Iyindu script had been doubled. Had Wynn copied it wrong as “maj’att” ?
“Fine,” Wynn said, “so what does ‘seat of a lord’s song’ mean?”
“Seatt,” il’Sänke whispered, adding the sharpened ending of the last letter.
Wynn straightened, craning her neck, but she could not see and so scrambled up to peer at her scroll notes.
“Seatt?” she repeated. “Like in ‘Calm Seatt’ . . . or Dhredze Seatt, the Dwarvish word for a fortified place of settlement?”
Ghassan frowned. “Possibly . . . but the other part of your translation needs correction as well. Iyindu pronunciation changes according to case usage, though the written form of words remains the same.”
Wynn huffed in exasperation.
“You translated based on ‘min’bâl’alu,’” il’Sänke continued, “which is not just a song but an ululation of praise for a tribal leader. In this case, and declination, the spoken pronunciation would be “min’bä’alâle.”
Wynn stiffened, as if in shock.
Ghassan wondered if she was all right. Before he asked, a breath escaped her with a near-voiceless question.
“Bäalâle Seatt?” she whispered.
Ghassan had no idea what the truncated reutterance meant.
The phrase kept rolling in Wynn’s mind.
“Do you know this term?” Domin il’Sänke asked. “Something you have heard?”
Oh, yes, she’d heard it twice before.
She’d never seen it written, except when she recorded its syllables in Begaine symbols within her journals of the Farlands. Even then, she knew the first part of the term wasn’t Dwarvish as she knew it. If il’Sänke had read that one brief mention in her journals, he wouldn’t have remembered it among the stack she brought home.
The first time Wynn heard of Bäalâle Seatt was from Magiere.
They’d reached the glade prison of Leesil’s mother in the Elven Territories, and Magiere lost control of her dhampir nature. Most Aged Father had somehow slipped his awareness through the forest and into the glade’s trees. He witnessed everything. At the sight of Magiere, appearing so much like an undead, terror-driven memories surged upon the decrepit patriarch of the Anmaglâhk. Magiere lost her footing amid the fight and touched a tree. Through that contact she’d slipped into Most Aged Father’s remembrance.
Lost in his memories, Magiere heard one brief passing mention of a Dwarvish term.
Most Aged Father, once called Sorhkafâré, had been a commander of allied forces and alive during the war of the Forgotten History. He received a report of the fall of one “Bäalâle Seatt,” and that all the dwarves of that place perished, taking the Enemy’s siege forces with them. But no one knew how or why.
Wynn peered at the scroll. Here was that place-name again, hinted at in the obscure hidden poem of an ancient undead.
And the second time she’d heard the name of this forgotten place was far more recent.
A pair of black-clad dwarves—the Hassäg’kreigi, the Stonewalkers—had spoken of it as she eavesdropped outside of High-Tower’s office. Then they were simply gone when she entered to speak with the domin.
And the wraith had come at her twice, wanting this scroll as much as any folio it had killed for.
“I need more!” she demanded. “You have to finish translating what I copied so far!”
“Wynn, no,” il’Sänke said. “We finally have a moment’s peace. This can wait until tomorrow, after we—”
“Now!” she insisted. “I need more so I can go to High-Tower for assignment. Something happened among the dwarves during the Forgotten History, and I’m going to Dhredze Seatt across the bay. It’s the only place to begin and to find out what happened, or where . . .”
Wynn trailed off, for il’Sänke was shaking his head.
“In the morning,” he insisted, but by his following pause, she knew there was something more.
“We both go before the premin council—in the morning,” he explained.
Wynn had nothing to say to this. What could one say when one’s way of life was about to end? They were going to cast her out.
Did it even matter anymore? Yes, if she were ever to see the translations again, or the original texts she’d taken from Li’kän’s library. None of the council knew of the scroll, but that by itself wasn’t enough, even when or if it was fully translated.
“Sleep for a while,” il’Sänke said. “We will rise early to eat. Facing the council’s formal summons is not good on an empty stomach.”
Wynn stood there numb as he retrieved the old tin case from the floor and slipped the scroll away.
“And Wynn,” he added, his tone colder, “remember that whatever you have learned must be guarded . . . only for those who can intellectually comprehend—and face—its truth. It cannot be shared
elsewhere.”
Dropping on the couch, she looked up at him with her serious brown eyes.
“I know,” Wynn answered. “I think I truly do know that now.”
At dawn Rodian sat at his desk, exhausted and ill. He should’ve rested, but throughout the night’s remainder he’d tried over and over to write his report. Most of those dark hours had been spent merely staring at a blank sheet of paper.