by Barb Hendee
When Chane rose again, the nights were always the same.
Chap was still watching, as if never having gone to sleep, and Chane’s thoughts turned to Wynn. He imagined her in the desert with the others—with Magiere—hunting for unknown undead. He shared that fear with no one here, and something more now plagued him in this fifth night.
He was hungry . . . again.
Chane had promised Wynn that, so long as he wished to remain in her company, he would never again feed on humans. Since then, he had fed on only animals, usually livestock. Then another change came, but he had not told her of this one.
In their search for the orb of Spirit, they had traveled to the keep of an isolated duchy without knowing what they would find. In a single night, they learned of an orb hidden in the keep’s lower levels; the orb was being guarded and used by a wraith who was an old threat to Wynn.
The wraith, called Sau’ilahk, used that orb to transmogrify a young duke’s body.
After a thousand years as an undead spirit like no other, Sau’ilahk regained flesh.
But only for one night.
Chane’s only companion in the final hunt had been Shade. When they caught Sau’ilahk in the guise of the duke’s flesh, the wraith struck down Shade, and Chane thought her dead. He lost control, pinned the man, bit through his neck, and bled him to death. He fed from a body possessed by a thousand-year-old spirit who had served the Ancient Enemy.
Since that night, he had felt only a twinge of hunger a few times.
Those quickly passed, and he had feared and then hoped this change might last. While on the sea voyage north, he had felt that twinge twice again. Perhaps it had lasted a little longer than before, but now . . .
It would not stop, and it was more than a twinge.
There was no livestock out here; there were only the dogs needed to retrieve the orbs.
Running beside the sled on this fifth night, he was too preoccupied, and Chap’s sudden bark startled him. He did not see Chap halt out ahead until Igaluk pulled his team to a stop with a harsh exclamation.
Chane ignored the guide’s barked demand and ran onward, dropping to one knee near Chap.
“Why have you stopped us?” he whispered. “Are we . . . there . . . here?”
Chap huffed twice for “no.”
Chane was lost for an instant, and as he was about to go for the talking hide, he understood.
“Somewhere nearby,” he whispered.
Chap huffed once and looked toward the sled.
Chane immediately got up and trotted back. He began digging out a pick and shovel they had procured in White Hut.
“What are you doing?” Igaluk asked, wrapping the reins on the sled’s handle as he stepped closer.
“You will wait here,” Chane ordered.
Before the guide could respond, Chane slipped the shovel’s handle through the end handles of two empty chests. He left the third chest in the sled and grabbed the shovel in the middle to lift both chests. Then he dug out the talking hide, stowed it under his coat, and took up the pickax as Igaluk stepped even closer.
“Why?” the guide demanded. “Where are you going?”
Chane ignored the questions. “I will be gone for a while, perhaps most of the night, but I will return. That is all you need to know. And you have our . . . my belongings as security for my return.”
Without waiting for more arguments, Chane turned and headed for where Chap stood waiting.
“Go on,” he ordered.
Chap started off, and Chane followed, focusing on nothing but Chap. He paid some attention to the night landscape around him, mostly as a way to ignore the hunger. A long while passed before Chap slowed to a halt, as did Chane. When Chap still lingered, slowly looking about in the dark, Chane set down the chests strung on the shovel’s handle. And still Chap hesitated.
• • •
“Are you lost?”
Chap snarled in answer for Chane’s question. No—and yes—would have been the truth. He had purposefully taken a different path from when he had first hidden the orbs. It was not a matter of the guide seeing the hiding place that would never be used again. It was the orbs themselves that he wanted no one else to see . . . and perhaps a secret more personal.
Now that he had a moment to get his bearings, he knew where to go for his first stop, and he lunged off across the snow-crusted ground. Sometime later, he slowed to a trot, for he could feel what he sought. Then he realized that he heard only his own steps and slowed to look back.
Chane had come to nearly a complete stop and set both chests on the ground. In the dark, it was hard for Chap to be certain, but it appeared Chane stared somewhere ahead as one of his hands worked at the other. Chap glanced back ahead as well.
Something gray in the night rose high out of the snow: a dome of granite with one side sheared off. And then Chap felt his hackles rise out of control. He heard something drop behind him, but before he could turn, rage swallowed him, followed by the urge to hunt.
“They are here.”
It was all Chap could do to suppress a howl as he swung around at that rasping voice. He fixed on Chane, whose hands were bare, and all Chap wanted was to pull that thing down and tear it . . . him . . . apart.
• • •
Chane quickly slid the brass “ring of nothing” back on his finger, but Chap still stood with teeth bared, eyes narrowed, hackles stiffened, and ears flattened. A peeling hiss like a cat’s warning escaped Chap’s clenched teeth with every breath steaming in the night air.
“My apologies,” Chane said quickly. “I needed to know . . . if I could feel them, like the others.”
That was half of the truth; what he needed was to kill the hunger.
It faded as before in the close proximity to an orb, more so now that there were two. And even more in the instant he removed his ring. He had needed to have that sharper flood of relief. A thought occurred to him. Perhaps the reason he had not felt hunger for so long had been less about feeding upon the duke’s body than about traveling in the presence of the orb of Spirit when he accompanied Wynn south.
On this journey north, he and Chap had been sailing without an orb, and his hunger had slowly returned. Now that he was near an orb again, the hunger was gone.
Chap watched him expectantly.
Chane hesitated but then turned his gaze from Chap and crouched to pick up the ax and the empty chests strung on the shovel’s handle. Even as he rose—slowly—he did not look at Chap until he was ready to move on.
With a last grating hiss, Chap turned onward toward the huge half dome of granite.
Chane followed at a suitable distance in regained ease and clarity.
When Chap stopped before the sheered side of the granite dome, he turned and eyed Chane. Then he clawed at the crusted snow.
Chane hesitated again. This was Chap’s prearranged signal for a need of the talking hide when they were alone. Here and now did it mean something else? Was he to start digging on that spot?
With a low growl, Chap took two steps and clawed again on a different spot.
Chane set down his tools, pulled out, and unrolled the hide on the ground. Chap began pawing the letters and words.
You dig. I return soon.
Chane looked up from the hide. “Where are you going?”
Chap turned away and ran off around the granite.
Chane almost called out, not that he could have shouted with his maimed voice. He still quick-stepped back the way he had come to see Chap vanish into the sparse trees, and he stood there even longer in hesitation.
Sooner or later, Chap would return. He would certainly not wish to leave the guide waiting too long into the night. Nor would he leave two orbs in the lone hands of a longtime enemy.
With a grating hiss of his own, Chane turned back to start with the pickax.
/> • • •
Chap raced through the trees, though in the dark everything looked much the same. It took longer than he wished to search out what he sought.
There was no need for concern about Chane and the orbs; the undead’s obsession with Wynn and her wishes would keep the vampire obedient. Still, Chap was torn between turning back and going onward. He had to know—to find—one more certainty, now that he had returned so close to the place of his greatest sin.
He kept running in the freezing night.
To hide the orbs of Water and Fire, he had been forced to do something unspeakable. No one—not even the guide Leesil had hired for him at that time—could ever know the orbs’ last resting place. If only it had been their last place.
Once, he had existed as part of the eternal Fay. When he was born into flesh, his kin had removed many of his memories of his existence among them. So many that only later had he suspected what they had done to him. Upon finally confronting them, he had attempted to fathom what fragments he was missing.
Among those had been the notion of a first sin—their sin . . . his sin.
So horrified by it, they had not wanted even him to remember it.
Upon creating Existence itself, a place to “be” other than in their timeless and placeless existence, they had learned they could “be” anything they perceived within this new existence. He had only suspected what that meant. His suspicion must have built itself upon something hidden deep inside from when he had been part of them that they could not extract.
Chap had led that first guide, named Nawyat, and his dog team well past a spot he had chosen along the way. Then he stopped as if for the night. This guide had been simple, kind, and even strangely charmed by a dog—a wolf—like no other.
It had been so easy to abuse simple Nawyat’s trust.
Chap invaded and took control of the man’s flesh while temporarily abandoning his own. He needed hands to dig frozen earth and to bury the orbs in secret. And when he had returned to camp . . . returned to his own body . . .
Nawyat lay within the tent, staring blankly up at nothing. He barely breathed.
Try as Chap had, he could not find one memory in the guide’s mind. He lay there beside Nawyat, trying again and again to find something of the man inside that husk of flesh. With Magiere and Leesil waiting down the coast, he was forced to leave.
He had enacted the sin, the first sin, of the Fay: domination—utter and complete—in mind, body, and his own eternal spirit.
Chap halted and stood in the same clearing where he had stolen Nawyat’s flesh. The place was bare, filled only with crushed snow. He could not even see sunken lines where a sled might have passed more than a season ago. Chap raced about, tearing up crust with his claws in search of any sign of that previous camp he had fled.
He couldn’t find anything.
He had broken with his own kin, the Fay, upon learning how much had been torn from him at his birth into flesh. Piece by piece he put together that they had wanted him to be simple, controllable, and viable as a tool. Had he agreed to this before separating from them?
His only purpose had been to keep Magiere—through Leesil—hidden away from her own nature, origin, and purpose.
Now he could not hold in his shuddering whimpers as he looked wildly about the empty clearing. Had Nawyat ever come back to his own flesh, or had that flesh simply perished, still empty in this place? Could a mortal’s mind and spirit ever return once its body was taken by an eternal Fay? Had someone found and rescued him, perhaps for him to only fade and die later? Had he been found only to be buried in hiding and have all of his possessions scavenged?
Chap would never know.
He stood there alone, quaking in the frigid darkness. Cold ate all the way into his spirit, but even that was not enough to numb the pain, to drive out the shame . . . and his sin.
The one thing he had done that no one else would ever know.
• • •
Raising the pickax, Chane slammed it down again, breaking deeper into the cold-hardened earth. He took up the shovel and began digging again. He tried to call on his inner strength, to let that chained beast—monster—inside him partially awaken.
It did not.
There was no hunger to call it in the close presence of two orbs he still had not found. There was only his own anger to keep him going, as the hole grew.
Where was Chap? Where had that cursed majay-hì, bane of his life, gone to now?
He neither slowed nor rested until his shovel struck something hard, and it twisted in his grip. He stopped and squinted down, but the pit was already knee-deep or more. Not enough moonlight for even his eyes reached its bottom through the tall trees.
Chane leaned the shovel into the crook of one elbow to tear off his gloves and dig into a coat pocket. He pulled out the cold-lamp crystal Wynn had given him and stroked it harshly three times down his coat. It lit up instantly, and he crouched to claw at the pit’s bottom with his other hand.
His fingernails grated across something harder than frozen earth. Setting the crystal up on the ledge of the hole, he crouched again and began scraping away more earth with both hands and the shovel’s head.
Finally, he saw the lightly dimpled but smooth gray-black of an orb. Before long, he had freed it and lifted it, only to nearly drop it.
There at the side of the pit stood Chap.
“Announce yourself next time,” Chane rasped, expecting a response of spite in return.
Chap made not a sound, dropped his head, and stared into the pit. Then he looked to the orb in Chane’s hands.
Its central ball was made from a dark material, char in color rather than black. The surface looked like chisel basalt though it felt slightly smoother than such stone.
Atop it, now that Chane had righted it, was the large head of a tapered spike that pierced through the globe’s center. Spike and orb looked cut from the same piece of stone with no indication that they could be separated. But the spike’s head had a groove running around its circumference that would fit the knobs of an orb key or handle, or what some thought looked like a dwarven neck adornment, called a thôrhk.
Chap huffed for attention and lowered his head to look down into the pit.
Chane did not need to ask. He set the orb on the pit’s ledge and crouched to dig out the next one. When finished, he climbed out and pulled on his gloves and stood there with two orbs at his feet between himself and the majay-hì.
It took far less time to load the orbs into the chests, lock them shut, and gather the tools. All that remained was to haul the chests one by one a reasonable distance from the pit. So Chane did this with Chap guarding the second one that remained behind. Through all of this, Chap made not a sound nor showed any desire or need to communicate.
His absolute silence unnerved Chane. They had what they had come for, so should not Chap express some relief? Once both chests were together again, far from the open pit, the question remained as to which one of them would guard the orbs while the other went for the guide and sled.
Chane had his answer when Chap climbed up and settled to straddle both chests.
CHAPTER FIVE
Khalidah and the others had walked for half of the night, another night after many along the desert’s fringe below the foothills. In the predawn darkness, he noticed Wynn dragging one foot after the other as if she could barely remain upright.
The sage had shown surprising stamina, but of the five of them, she was the least suited to this seemingly endless trek. More important, since their routine midnight rest, Khalidah had pondered how to preoccupy Magiere and the others so that he could attend to a private task. Wynn’s exhaustion provided the remedy.
In one blink, the dark behind his eyelids filled with lines of spreading light. A double square formed in sigils, symbols, and signs. As his eyes opened, they fixed that patter
n upon Wynn Hygeorht. All it took was a soft command at the edge of her consciousness.
Sleep.
She collapsed face forward onto the sand.
“Wynn!” Magiere cried.
She and Leesil ran for the sage, and both crouched as Leesil rolled Wynn over.
“She’s breathing all right,” he said with exhaled relief. “But she’s done in.”
He scooped her up in his arms and rose as if she weighed nothing. Magiere stood up beside him. The worry on her face was clouded by thinly veiled anger.
During the days, Magiere’s hair and skin were still a baffling sight. They had been under a desert sun for so long, and yet her skin retained its pale color. Bloodred tints were always visible in her black hair as well.
She was most certainly marked by Beloved.
In the dark, these traits were not so noticeable.
“Find a place to set the tents,” Brot’an called out, still managing both camels’ leads. “We will make camp early.”
Khalidah still found the hulking, scarred elf an enigma.
Though Brot’an claimed to simply be assisting in Magiere’s search, Khalidah did not believe so and never would. Too often, he caught Brot’an eyeing Leesil. No, that one had another agenda as yet a mystery. But he had revealed something useful earlier on.
Khalidah had been unable to penetrate the master assassin’s mind to any depth, just as with both majay-hì now conveniently elsewhere. There was one anomaly that also matched the same in those annoying beasts. Brot’an had been affected exactly like all the others by the ensorcellment embedded in Ghassan il’Sänke’s sanctuary.
That could be very useful, eventually. He felt Ghassan begin to rage again, but he only smiled briefly.
“I will find us a place,” Khalidah called.
He headed into the foothills. Quickly enough, he spotted one taller hill on the right that would block the sun once it rose . . . for a while.
“Here!” he called back.
Soon, the others were busy setting up tents and tending to Wynn—even the aging elf. As they worked, Khalidah studied all of their belongings and supplies as if searching for something.