by Barb Hendee
• • •
Chap swerved as something gray and shadowy scrambling through the legs of the others tried to grab his foreleg with a bony hand. He barely glimpsed its head when it was suddenly stomped to a pulp under a huge booted foot. There had been no time or chance to see it clearly.
He kept running.
More than once he’d had to ram or brush one of his companions to get the male or female to break off an assault upon an undead. Keeping them with him in all this became harder with each panting breath.
There was only one target they—he—had to find. And his hunger was aroused by all around him, everywhere, with so many undead mixed in the slaughter.
Chap barely hung on to sanity, and that was slipping. His instincts nearly overwhelmed him; time and again he fought against turning on an undead that tried to assault him. Too much hunger and too many screams of fury and terror were coming at him from everywhere. Then he was struck by a hunger greater than the others—a hunger for one target. He fought to keep himself from hunting that one.
Yet when he sensed it, he clung to it and instantly lost himself. He swerved to seek it out as awareness of all else stripped away.
There was now only the hunt, and Chap had only one prey.
• • •
Sau’ilahk wove through the battle in a tangent toward where three majay-hì were headed. He had already lost two of his ground-level servitors along the way. Then his watchful one above showed him the large gray dog bolting in a fixed direction. The other two majay-hì fell behind in trying to keep up.
The battleground was thinning as more combatants fell, not all of them dead for a first or second time as they crawled and clawed across the parched ground. In a cluster ahead, one fought amid others all attempting to get at her. When she twisted to strike out at an opponent with hooked fingers, and follow with a wide and long single-edged blade, in the dark he saw her too-pale face curtained in flailing black hair.
Even among the other undead, he felt her most of all.
The urge to go at her with his bare hands was immediate.
Sau’ilahk restrained himself, fighting for self-control. Why did he feel driven with hunger? Something more was wrong about her, and then he sensed her life.
That was impossible for an undead.
Was that why the others went at her with such insane hunger? Her eyes were like nothing living, pure black without pupils, and yet she saw everything.
She had to be the source of whatever had happened to the horde. If so, was this somehow Beloved’s own doing? Who else could have done this, controlled this woman?
She nearly cleaved a ghul in half with her broad blade.
Planned or not, if this was Beloved’s doing, then that was enough for him. Betrayed again and again, if he could not strike down his tormentor of a thousand years, then he would end any of its tools. And by the way he took her life, Beloved would know who had taken her.
The gray majay-hì broke into sight and charged at the woman.
Sau’ilahk stalled again. Was it enough to simply watch Beloved’s tool be destroyed?
No, it was not.
• • •
Chap saw only the undead woman; he ignored all others. He broke through a tangle of those killing and those dying and fixed on the one that he hunted.
White face and black eyes were all that he saw. His hackles stiffened upright, his ears flattened, and his jowls pulled back. The need to hunt compelled him. This need fixed upon that one greatest hunger he sensed, even as the tiniest, deepest part within him shriveled in fright of himself.
And still he could not stop.
Some gray thing of slit nostrils and eyes as black as hers split slantwise under the strike of her sword. As its halves fell, he leaped through its spattering fluids and hit her straight on before she recovered from her swing.
In that scant moment, he saw only a tall woman’s pale, feral face, her fangs and distended teeth, and her eyes as fully black as darkness. Everything in the night tumbled as they both slammed down on the parched earth. He righted himself as she came at him on all fours.
Her hand clamped on his throat, choking off his breath.
With a twist of his head, he bit down on her forearm, grinding on flesh.
When that white face came at him with jaws opened wide, he raked it aside with his foreclaws and then tore at her abdomen, trying to rip through studded armor.
Something else slammed into both of them. He heard snarls, snapping teeth, howls, and screeches that were not his own as he tumbled. His head and body pounded on the hard ground again and again under the weight of others.
Chap smelled—tasted—something that cut through the hunger.
Blood?
• • •
Sau’ilahk barely evaded one ghul long enough for his servitors to assault it. When he spun around that tangle, he stumbled into a break in the battle to a sight that froze him.
The woman in studded leather armor rolled across the ground under the assault of two majay-hì, while a third such animal shook itself in trying to rise.
He was close enough to see her more clearly now.
She had the face of an undead—a vampire—lost in a bloodlust madness. But that face was also marred with scratches and claw marks that bled . . . red, not black.
All around her lay dismembered bodies of ghul, other white-skinned men and women, as well as once-living things and other humans. The ground itself was soaked dark with blood and other fluids that stained her and the majay-hì as they thrashed and tore at each other.
She was a living woman who acted like an undead caught in maddened hunger.
That thing—she—had to be the one he sought. Given that she was unnatural in both life and death, nothing natural could have made her that way by birth, so she could have only one maker.
And that was the one who had made—tricked—him a thousand years ago with a wish for eternal life.
He saw in her some little part of what Beloved should have given him, instead of eternity as a fleshless spirit. This woman was the tool of his tormentor, his betrayer. But there were still those majay-hì in his way. He could not face all those at once and alone.
Anguish, hate, envy, and spite became one.
He dropped to his knees, slammed his hands down, and ground his fingers into the hardpack. As he bled away what he had left for a last conjury, Sau’ilahk, once the highest of Beloved’s followers, screamed out . . .
• • •
“You—you caused all of this!”
That shriek of hate cut through Chap’s agony, and he pushed up to all fours with his head aching. He saw a white-skinned woman trying to grab two majay-hì that attacked her over and over. Still he was not certain what he saw. His skull pounded inside, he tasted blood in his mouth, and the scent of it made his head ache even more.
“If not Beloved, then I finish you—tool—to strike our maker!”
This second scream pulled Chap’s full focus. What he saw froze him, and that instant stretched out in his returning awareness.
A young man with blue-black hair, tall and well formed, hunkered on the ground with his fingers grinding into the hard earth. His face had a gash in the right cheek, and a like one bled at his left shoulder.
Chap sensed something more as he stared.
Undead . . . another undead.
A memory surged up in the voice of Wynn as his mind replayed something she had told him. That face had a name for a young duke, but someone else hid behind it. Wynn had claimed that Chane destroyed this one, yet here he was.
—Sau’ilahk—, whispered Wynn’s voice out of memory.
How could he still be alive and whole?
Chap saw things scurry in around the man. Small, with single glowing eyes like balls of crude glass, they were half the size of a dog. Spindly like insects, their gnarled limb
s looked like darkly stained wood.
And Chap remembered . . . the prey . . . his prey . . . Magiere.
He gagged on the taste of her blood still in his teeth.
“Before dying,” Sau’ilahk went on, “Beloved will suffer as I have, helpless when I take your life. And when you are dead flesh, I will take its precious anchors as well. Tell that to your master when it creeps into your head.”
He sounded as if the Enemy wanted the orbs brought to it.
Chap went still and cold. Over the last season and before, he and those with him had sought to recover the orbs—the anchors. Had they unwittingly served the Enemy’s own wishes? Had he been so easily manipulated?
“Beloved will never be free!” Sau’ilahk hissed.
This recalled the words of Chap’s kin in the Lhoin’na forest.
Leave the enslaved alone.
If the Enemy had called the orbs to itself, was it already bound in some way? Had it never left the mountain in all of these centuries? And how would the orbs free it?
Those questions brought blind panic. Could everything they had done here have been wrong and exactly what the Enemy wanted?
His thoughts raced to what he had seen when he had touched the orb of Spirit.
As with the others he had touched at some time, he had felt a presence inside it. The Enemy—the dragon in that placeless timelessness—was a Fay. So why did it want the orbs, the anchors? Did its greater minions—Sau’ilahk, the specter, and others—seek the orbs for it or against it? Did some of them wish to destroy the Ancient Enemy themselves?
Leave the enslaved alone.
The Enemy had manipulated him to bring the orbs together and had done nothing to stop its own servants from the same purpose and worse. Did the ancient one—the Night Voice—want someone to use those orbs to kill it? Why?
Chap looked around at the carnage Magiere had created. Yet nothing had stopped her or the Enemy’s forces, as if it were all as desired. And Leesil now had the orbs somewhere inside the mountain in seeking out the Enemy.
The implications were beyond any terror.
Chap had seen five Fay who sacrificed to create Existence. Had one of them sought retreat from that? Was the Ancient Enemy one of those five? If so, what would happen if it vanished from existence?
He remembered the presence he had felt when Magiere mistakenly opened the first orb beneath the six-towered castle in the Pock Peaks. Leesil had claimed he saw a shadow in the shape of a massive serpent with a head that Wynn later claimed was a weürm, a serpentlike dragon.
Leave the enslaved alone.
Chap began to tremble. Caught between bringing Magiere back to herself, and pulling Sau’ilahk down, and finding a way to halt Leesil, he was too late in . . .
Magiere tore loose from one majay-hì. The other was down and not moving. She charged for Sau’ilahk. The earth cracked around Sau’ilahk’s hooked fingers as something began to emerge.
Snarling, Chap charged on a line between them.
The night suddenly lit up from the north.
Caught in a chorus of screams all around, Chap stumbled, blinded for an instant.
• • •
Osha halted short of the battle and quickly unstoppered the small bottle Wynn had forced on him.
It should not be this way. What it held should have been for her. And what she had asked of him should have never been asked.
He pulled the last two arrows with white metal tips and sank each head, one at a time, into the bottle. After replacing the stopper, he tucked the bottle away inside his tunic. Then he rose and nocked one arrow with the other pinched between two fingers of his hand around the bow’s handle.
Still, he hesitated.
If what Chane claimed was true about the fluid affecting the undead . . .
If he did what Wynn asked to stop Magiere . . .
Osha did not want to think of murdering a friend. He looked toward the chaos before him, not hearing the shouts, raging snarls, growls, and screams. All he heard were his own shallow, quick breaths and the hammering of his heart.
Light filled the dark from behind him.
So many out there scrambled to escape, though the staff was too far to burn most of them. As they scattered, he saw so much more.
Magiere rushed at another target, and even from afar, Osha could see her fully black eyes. This time, Wynn’s light did not bring Magiere back. The dhampir was all that was left of her. As tears leaked from his wide eyes, he wiped his sleeve across them.
Then he raised and drew his bow, knowing he could not miss his target.
• • •
As Chap’s sight cleared, his every thought stilled at the sight of Magiere.
She screeched and snarled as one of Sau’ilahk’s small stick-creatures leaped into her face. Even as she clawed the thing off, the large male majay-hì rammed her legs from behind. Magiere toppled back and hit the ground.
“No!” Sau’ilahk screamed out. “She is mine!”
One of those glowing-eyed stick things went at the majay-hì as Magiere thrashed over onto all fours.
The ground around Sau’ilahk’s hooked fingers began to break apart.
Chap howled as he charged at Magiere’s back to stop her before whatever came out of the ground. She spun, and he faltered.
Magiere’s eyes fixed on him as if she had forgotten any other target. There was nothing left of the woman he knew, only the dhampir, only a monster out of his worst nightmare.
All he saw was her, just as he had once seen her in that sorcerous phantasm in the forests of Droevinka where everything living around her died.
Was he to die here at the hands of someone he loved?
She charged, and he set himself, ready to lunge.
Magiere’s snarl twisted into a shriek of rage—and she stumbled and lurched.
An arrow stuck out through her hauberk between her chest and right shoulder.
Chap saw his own shock mirrored in Magiere’s white face.
That face twisted quickly into pain as smoke welled out around the arrow’s shaft. Black lines spidered through her face and then her hands, and she dropped the falchion.
Magiere fell screaming and thrashing upon the ground. And there was Sau’ilahk on his feet, staring in shock.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Leesil crept onward behind Ghassan, who still held his glowing cold-lamp crystal while carrying one chest, as they went deeper into a ragged tunnel they’d found in the chasm’s far side. Leesil supported the forward ends of the poles for two chests with Brot’an behind him at the poles’ back ends. Somewhere farther back were Chane and Ore-Locks doing likewise.
They did not go far before Ghassan halted suddenly, and Leesil lurched to a stop.
The domin turned about, set his chest aside, and straightened with a finger over his lips. Leesil quietly lowered his poles and only released and set them down once he felt the chests settle.
Ghassan turned ahead once more, and upon stepping forward, Leesil saw the crystal’s light expand into an immense cavern of walls that all slanted leftward. The domin halted again, and Leesil stepped up beside him. He was too fixed on what he saw to even notice the others gathering.
There were huge bones spread out in the cavern’s rear, as if the creature to which they’d belonged had simply lain down for the last time and never moved again. Nearest was its skull. If he walked up to it, the top would be taller than he was. The rest was just as large.
All of it was darkened and discolored. Some bones glittered, as if ages of dripping moisture had embedded minerals in the crust over its bones.
Fearful of stepping closer, Leesil noticed something else. It had no limbs. Just the spine of bones curled like a serpent too immense to imagine all the way to that skull with three ridges of what might’ve been horns.
The side rows ran
around the back from empty eye sockets big enough to crawl into. The much smaller center spikes started near the bridge’s midpoint and ended at the midtop.
“A serpent,” Brot’an whispered somewhere behind Leesil.
“No, gí’uyllæ,” Ore-Locks corrected.
“All-eater,” Chane explained, “or dragon.”
“I have never heard of one so large in any tale,” Ore-Locks added.
Leesil stepped carefully toward it, listening and watching everywhere for anything. More than once he slowed or paused. The skull grew larger in his sight the closer he came to it. Of what teeth were still whole, the longest had to weigh more than two—or even three—of the men who’d come with him. The more he stared at the huge skull, imagining what such a creature would have once looked like, the more his mind rolled backward to a memory.
Below the six-towered castle in the Pock Peaks, Magiere had been caught in a daze when they’d found the first orb, and she had opened it with her thôrhk. In the chaos that followed, as the orb of Water tried to swallow all moisture in that cavern, Leesil had seen an immense shadow coil through the cavern’s upper reaches. Like a serpent bigger than any of the towers, its open maw had come down as if to swallow her.
“What is this?” he asked aloud.
In answer, a hiss echoed throughout the cavern.
—Where is my child?—
Leesil retreated from the skull and pulled both blades. He heard the others spread out as they drew weapons, so they’d heard it too, but he kept his eyes on the enormous skull. Had he really heard those words in his head? Hesitantly, he looked about at the others.
Chane did the same, though he was frowning in confusion.
Leesil thought they’d all pulled their weapons. Not Chane, but he did so upon seeing that everyone else had.
Then Leesil saw Ghassan.
A strange manic look covered the domin’s face. Was it fear, hate, or both? Wide-eyed, his head rolled about, perhaps looking into the cavern’s heights, but then his gaze resettled to glare at those bones.
“It is still here,” he whispered slowly. “The bones do not matter. We will set up the orbs and end it here, now.”