by Barb Hendee
He needed minions—mindless, savage, without mortal weaknesses—to serve him in the coming days.
He needed ferals.
Halfway through the third night’s vigil, Chane’s reason began to fracture. He could barely hold off the false hunger brought on by the wails and hammering within the cells. And though he tried to bury himself in memories of Wynn and fancies of an existence far from this place, it did not work.
At the sound of splitting wood, Chane lurched to awareness and rushed the first door on the left.
The top corner above the latch warped inward. Pale fingers with torn and split nails wedged through the space. They were smeared in fresh and dried black ichor. Chane slammed an iron bar against the wriggling knuckles.
An outraged snarl erupted behind the door, and the stained fingers jerked from sight. The door slapped back into its stone frame, and Chane jammed a second iron bar through the handle.
He covered his ears, trying to shield himself from the yelps and moans and scratching upon wood. Then he retreated down the corridor to the far end—as far as he could get without fleeing the upper floor altogether.
To hunt . . . feed . . . and the blessed release of blood filled up his thoughts.
His gaze drifted to the other side of the passage, and the doors barred only by wood.
How long would Welstiel starve his new children before feeding them? What if there was not enough for them—or nothing left for Chane but Welstiel’s little cup? He turned away from the doors, and his gaze fell upon the sixth right-side cell. Its door was still ajar from Welstiel’s night of gluttony.
Chane shuffled over to look inside, though his lantern left by the stool provided scant light, even for his keen night vision. A shadowy stain of congealed and dried blood marred an old canvas pillow on a plain bed. Little else in the room promised distraction from torment, from a small discolored chest of tin fixtures to the oval rug woven from faded fabric scraps. The little bedside table . . .
Chane’s eyes fixated on the book resting there. He stepped in and seized it.
Its page edges were rippled from long use, and he felt deep creases in the thick leather cover. Old but well crafted, what use would religious recluses have for such a soundly bound volume? Chane stepped out into the passage for better light.
The cover’s gilded lettering was half-gone, but he still made out the title written in old Stravinan.
“The Pastoral Path,” Chane whispered, and flipped pages at random.
It was a book of poetry and verse. He stared into the vacant room, wondering about its previous occupant. Why would anyone living such an austere existence want a poetic work?
A sudden twinge tightened Chane’s shoulder and the side of his neck.
He headed back to his stool, skirting the cells of the living but averting his eyes from those of the undead. But as he settled in the passage corner, the book still in hand, he could not stop gazing at those silent doors on the right, their handles barred with only wood. A nagging, unformed thought turned in the back of his mind.
With it came a fear he didn’t quite understand.
He flung the book down the passage. It skidded until it caught in the congealing pool of blood.
A loud screech from the first barred cell brought Chane to his feet, and he grabbed another iron rod. He heard wood breaking, followed by growls of fury, but the door did not buck in its frame this time. Something was happening inside the cell.
One voice—female—screamed louder than the first. Her sound was smothered by the hungry wail of a third. A pain-pitched shriek ripped out of her, along with the sounds of tearing cloth and bestial snarls. Her voice broke in panting sobs, then gags. A wet tearing followed.
Chane stood staring at the door, unable to move.
Struggles within the cells faded more each night, but by the fifth, Chane was almost deaf to them.
Welstiel stepped out of the stairwell.
He was dressed in black breeches and faded white shirt, and carried water skins and small sacks that smelled faintly of old bread. He approached the first door on the right, opened it, and tossed in a water skin and a sack. Before anyone within could speak or move, he slammed the door and reinserted its wood brace. He repeated the process twice more.
How often had he done this?
“We must keep them alive,” Welstiel said absently and then tilted his chin toward the stairs.
Chane’s night watch ended once more, and he slipped down the stairwell.
Each dawn, he’d discovered small oddities about the entry room. Nothing extraordinary, but something different each time. One night, Welstiel’s pack had rested by the fireplace. Strange rods of differing dark tones peeked out the side of its top flap, but Chane was too mentally worn to be curious. Later, he had noticed the old tin teapot near the hearth, but no cup in sight and no lingering aroma of brewed tea.
On the fourth night, the room was more orderly but smelled of crushed herbs—and something fishy and sweet that Chane could not identify.
Tonight, Welstiel’s pack sat upon the bench, and beside it rested a small bottle and a leather-bound box, longer and narrower than the walnut one which held his brass feeding cup.
Chane had never seen this box before.
A few times in their journey he had wondered what items an artificer of conjury like Welstiel might carry. All he knew of were the brass cup and Welstiel’s “ring of nothing,” which shielded him and anyone he touched from those who could sense the undead.
Chane crept closer. As he crouched down, a fishy-sweet odor rose around the leather-bound box. When he picked up the bottle, it was strong with the same scent. He returned the bottle to its place and reached for the pack’s top flap.
Someone shifted in the upper passage of cells.
He froze, his hand poised above the pack, and glanced toward the stairs as his hearing widened. Welstiel shifted upon the stool in the upper passage. Chane clenched his hand into a fist and lowered it.
If he could hear Welstiel, then the mad undead might just as easily hear him.
And mingling with the fishy odor was the scent of herbs, just as he had smelled in the back workroom.
What had Welstiel been doing down here all through the night?
Chane rose slowly. He paused at each step, listening for movement in the upper passage, until he rounded the second turn into the workroom. The scent of herbs was strong. He ducked and wove his way between the tables and dangling bundles of drying plants, searching for anything odd or out of place.
And on one table, he found a mess.
Among knives and pestles and scraps of wax paper was a tin dish, blackened inside as if a substance had been boiled within it. Then he spotted the dried flowers. He leaned closer and caught the faint residue of color—pale yellow but darkening to plum at the centers—and he lifted a fragile dry petal, taking a careful whiff. The sweet, fishy scent was powerful, and he quickly pulled the blossoms from his face as recognition hit him.
It was Dyvjàka Svonchek, called “boar’s bell” in Belaskian, after the shape of its yellow flowers and the superstition that only wild boars and the heartiest beasts could eat it. It had other folk names, with meanings like Flooding Dusk, Nightmare’s Breath, and Blackbane.
In other words, poison—toxic and mind altering, if inhaled too deeply by the living.
Chane turned a full circle, looking around.
What use would a Noble Dead have for poison?
What had Welstiel been doing in here?
CHAPTER TWO
“Magiere, look there,” Sgäile said, pointing past her. “Your ship comes to harbor.”
Magiere stepped to the dock’s end beside him and shielded her eyes with one hand against the bright sun.
“That large one?” she asked.
Sgäile nodded, still watching the ship. “Yes.”
Even from a distance, the tawny-hulled vessel appeared to glide across the waves as it headed for port at the elven city of Ghoivne Ajhâjhe—Front of the Deep. It rod
e strangely high, as if moving from one wave top to the next. Iridescent shimmers reflected from its sails like white satin under the late winter sun—or what should have been winter. Here on the Elven Territories’ northern shore, the air felt more like early spring.
An ocean breeze whipped a tendril of Magiere’s black hair across her eyes. She brushed it aside and peered intently at this strange vessel come to carry her and her companions away. Long and sleek, its prow stretched to a point like a headless spear, and the hull’s lip seemed lightly curved like a holly leaf’s edge. For an instant, she thought a ripple of dark green flickered across its hull from light reflected off the water, but the color quickly returned to rich golden tan.
Other vessels, both small and large, sailed in and out of the vast bay or were already harbored in its waters and at the long docks. Various barges that had come down inland rivers were tied off at the piers. Elves upon the docks unloaded and reloaded goods to be exchanged with city shops and outbound vessels.
“Ah, seven hells!” someone muttered. “We’re actually going to board that thing?”
Magiere glanced back, and Leesil grimaced as he stepped in beside Sgäile. She looked them over.
Sgäile was full elven and an anmaglâhk—a trained assassin and spy, who’d sworn to protect Leesil and his companions, including Magiere herself. She hadn’t known him long and could rarely read his subtle expressions.
Leesil was only half-blooded.
With oblong ears less peaked than those of a full-blooded elf, he shared other traits with Sgäile’s people, from silky blond hair—white-blond, in his case—to amber eyes and tan skin. Leesil’s eyes were smaller than a full-blooded elf’s, though still slightly larger than a human’s, and his complexion was lighter. Above average height for a human, like Magiere, he was short by elven standards. Beardless—as were all male elves—his wedged chin looked blunt compared to Sgäile’s.
“My dinner’s coming up just looking at it,” Leesil added, glowering at the approaching vessel.
“There’s no other way,” Magiere said. “Unless you care to cross the mountains on foot again.”
She was in no mood for his whining. They’d only been on one short sea voyage, to Bela, and Leesil had been sick the entire journey. With a dramatic sigh, he shouldered around Sgäile to grasp her gloved hand.
After traveling downriver on a barge from Crijheäiche—Origin-Heart—they’d spent only one night and day here, but Magiere was anxious to be off again. Sgäile had brought her to the docks the moment he heard their ship neared harbor.
“When can we leave?” she asked.
Sgäile lowered his eyes to hers. “The ship returns from its run along our eastern coastal settlements. Once cargo is exchanged, it will be ready to depart.”
“How long will that take?”
“Several days, perhaps. It depends on the cargo to be acquired.”
More delays.
But compared to everything Magiere had been through since entering the Elven Territories, arriving at the city had brought some relief. It was good to see ocean again and breathe sea air, as in Miiska, her faraway home, but it was still elven land. She peered back at Ghoivne Ajhâjhe stretching along the coastline.
Inland elves resided in cultured wild groves of living tree dwellings, but this one and only city was constructed partly of ornately carved wood, partly of stone, and partly of other materials she couldn’t name. A wild array of structures spread along the shore above the beach amid sparse but massive trees, not only behind her, but also where the shore continued on the far side of the Hâjh River’s wide mouth spilling into the bay.
Various shops, dwellings, tents, and inns bustled with activity. She could just make out the tawny roof of the tall inn where she and Leesil were lodged—along with their companions, Chap and Wynn. It rose three stories high around a giant elm with branches spread like a second roof over the building.
The elves here still treated Magiere like a savage outsider—a human— though more discreetly than their inland brethren. She had long since grown accustomed to thinly veiled loathing, but the greater part of her drive to leave came from something more unsettling.
A dream—and the polite urgency of an old sage in Bela.
The journey’s next leg was a search for a long-forgotten artifact. Magiere was determined to keep it out of the hands of a murdering Noble Dead— her half-brother, Welstiel. Wynn’s old master sage, “Domin” Tilswith as he was titled, was the one who’d first requested help from Magiere and Leesil. He feared letting an ancient device from the Forgotten History fall into any such hands.
Until recently, Magiere had put aside the master sage’s concern. In addition to not knowing where to search for the artifact, she’d had other goals which meant more to her. Then black-scaled coils appeared in her dark dream on the first night within the city.
Taller than a mounted rider, the creature showed her a six-towered castle locked in ice, and a voice whispered . . .
Sister of the dead, lead on.
Magiere had awoken in a cold sweat, crying out for Leesil.
She’d seen the coils once before in far-off Droevinka, but she’d been awake that time, outside the dead village of Apudâlsat. She and her canine companion, Chap, fought to escape from the decrepit necromancer Ubâd. When they gained the upper hand, that madman had called upon something by name.
il’Samar.
Turning black coils materialized ghostlike among the dank trees around the clearing. The voice that came like a whisper throughout the forest ignored Ubâd’s plea and left him to Chap’s savagery. Earlier that same night, while Magiere had been lost within her dead mother’s spirit-memories, she’d witnessed her half-brother, Welstiel, whispering in the night . . . as if to something no one else could see or hear.
Perhaps that something was the same black-scaled thing that had whispered in Magiere’s dream—and in the clearing with Ubâd. Perhaps it was the same ancient force behind the old necromancer’s scheming of her birth by Welstiel’s undead father. In the days following her dream, Magiere remembered a few words Wynn and Domin Tilswith had translated from an old scroll out of the Forgotten. It mentioned an ancient enemy called “the night voice.”
And Wynn had translated “il’Samar” as a name or title akin to “conversation in the dark.”
In Magiere’s time in the Elven Territories, she’d learned that no undead had ever entered elven land, not even in the faraway sanctuary on Wynn’s continent, where the last of the living had fled in the war of the Forgotten. But she, daughter of a Noble Dead, had entered here. Her very touch drained life from its trees, and she had taken to wearing gloves, avoiding any direct contact with the elven forest.
Magiere feared all these connections closing in on her. And since the night of her dream, she’d learned to fear sleep as well. As always, fear made her angry—enough to find this forgotten artifact, be done with it, and go home.
And in the dream’s wake, she knew where to go, or at least in which direction to start. It pulled at her from within. Magiere hoped the elven ship’s crew finished quickly with their cargo.
“We were not in the shop too long! I barely had time to glance about before you pushed me out the door!”
The familiar high-pitched voice drew Magiere from her heavy thoughts to see a silver-gray dog and a tall elf in dark gray-green coming down the dock. Chap led the way, tail high but head low as he glared blankly ahead with an occasional twitch of jowl that exposed sharp teeth. Brot’an walked behind him.
Unlike his people, Brot’an was broad and solid, built almost like a human, but tall even for an elf. His white-blond hair was rather coarse, and its gray streaks turned silvery under the sun. As he neared, four long scars stood out upon his faintly lined face. They ran down his forehead’s right side, jumped his eye, and continued across his cheekbone. He was dressed like Sgäile in the monotone cloak, tunic, and breeches of the Anmaglâhk, the caste of elven spies and assassins—though they wouldn’t describe
themselves as such.