Of Truth and Beasts (Noble of Dead Saga Series 2 Book 3)

by Barb; J. C. Hendee

  Chane distrusted Ore-Locks only half as much as Wynn did, and he needed a new sword. At the offer of one of such craftsmanship, he hadn’t said a word to refuse it.

  “When do we leave?” Ore-Locks repeated.

  “I don’t know. I’m waiting for funding and . . . other matters to settle.”

  She wasn’t about to tell him anything more than necessary.

  Ore-Locks turned away. “I am at the Harvest Inn, west of the Grayland’s Empire district. Send a message when you are ready.” He paused with his back to her. “You would do well not to leave without me.”

  Shade’s rumble turned to a snarl. Though Ore-Locks’s quiet tone hadn’t changed, those last words had sounded like a threat. Or perhaps Shade had snatched a memory that rose in the dwarf’s conscious thoughts. Either way, Wynn kept silent as Ore-Locks strode toward—through—the wall.

  She sank on the bed’s edge, feeling stretched thin on all sides, and snarled her fingers into Shade’s scruff. Shade shoved her head against Wynn’s neck, but soft fur and a warm, wet tongue weren’t comfort enough as Wynn glanced at the door.

  Where was Chane?

  Upon rising at dusk, Chane dressed quickly, pausing briefly at the mirror over the short dresser. He tried to smooth his raggedly cropped, red-brown hair. Several objects, the results of his nightly errands, rested upon the dresser. As of yet, he had not told Wynn about these extra acquisitions.

  The sword that Ore-Locks had brought him now had a plain leather sheath. A fresh cloak of deep green wool, with a full hood, was folded atop the dresser’s end. Upon it lay a matching scarf, a pair of new, fitted leather gloves, and two small leather triangles with attached lacing for their final purpose.

  He still had two more items to attain, and tonight, he was already late in seeking one.

  Rushing through the small study and into the outer passage, Chane locked the door to his guest quarters and hurried to the end stairs. When he reached the building’s ground level, he did not head for the courtyard. Instead, he ducked into one ground-floor chamber laden with workbenches, books, and glass contraptions and other tools. Rounding to the back, he headed down another flight of stairs.

  Emerging in the building’s first level of underchambers, he stepped into a narrow stone corridor lit by two sage-crafted cold lamps set in wall-mounted metal vessels. Alchemically mixed fluids provided mild heat to keep them lit. By their steady light, he counted three wide iron doors on both sides of the passage. These were the lower laboratories of the guild.

  In two previous visits over eight nights, he had never seen what lay behind any but one. He had tried opening others to peek in and satisfy his curiosity. Not one budged, though there were no locks or bars on their outsides. He headed for the last on the right, but tonight it was shut tight, like the others.

  Chane let out a sigh, an old habit left over from living days. He knocked, listening for an answer, but none came. He tried the heavy iron handle, anyway, expecting the door would not open. To his surprise, it slipped inward as he twisted the handle. He hesitated and glanced along the other heavy doors.

  This was wrong. Still, perhaps she was within and had not heard him. He pushed the door wide.

  “Géorn-metade,” he called in Numanese.

  No one answered his formal greeting.

  A short, three-step access hallway emptied into the left side of a small back chamber. He had come here twice before, just past dusk, both times in haste before going to Wynn’s room. He never told her where he had been.

  Chane entered, quietly closing the door. All he could see from the hallway were shelves pegged in the chamber’s left wall. They were filled with books, bound sheaves, and some slender, upright cylinders of wood, brass, and unglazed ceramic. As he stepped out of the passage, the room filled his view.

  Stout, narrow tables and squat casements were stuffed with more texts, as well as odd little contraptions of metal, crystal and glass, and wood and leather. A rickety old armchair of tattered blue fabric barely fit into the back right corner beyond the orderly mess upon the age-darkened desk of many little drawers. Atop the desk’s corner sat the dimming cold lamp, brighter than he had first thought.

  Someone had been here recently to rub its crystal to brilliance.

  Chane scanned stacks of parchment and three bowls of powdered substances. An array of brass articulated arms anchored to the desk’s other corner each held framed magnifying lenses. They were mounted so that one or more could be twisted into or out of alignment with the others.

  Chane stood in the private study of Frideswida Hawes, premin of the Order of Metaology. And he was tempted to dig through everything in sight.

  He understood a little of thaumaturgy, the physical ideology of magic, as opposed to the spiritual perspective of his own conjury. Still, something here might shed a spark of light on his own research. He leaned over the desk, touching nothing as he examined the stacks of parchment and paper. Most appeared mundane, concerning daily guild operations and Hawes’s own order. Considering the top one’s immature topic, one stack seemed to be papers written by initiates.

  Chane returned to the left wall’s pegged shelves.

  Spines and labels on texts and containers were all marked in the Begaine syllabary. Even after nights of stumbling through Wynn’s journals, he still struggled to understand the sages’ mutable writing system. He reached for a ceramic cylinder with a wooden cap to verify that it was a scroll case.

  “So . . . disrespect is not your only flaw.”

  Chane spun at the voice behind him and came face-to-face with a mature, slight woman in a midnight blue robe.

  “Do we now add thievery to the list?” she asked.

  Chane studied the narrow face of Premin Hawes. With her cowl down, cropped, ash gray hair bristled across her head, though any lines of age were faint in her even, small features. Severe-looking, she was not unattractive.

  “My apologies,” he began. “I was . . . only . . .”

  Chane glanced down the short passage to the chamber door.

  Hawes could not have passed by without bumping into him, so how had she entered unnoticed? He flashed back to their first meeting.

  When Wynn had been called before the Premin Council and he had been ejected, Hawes had stood inside the chamber doors. As the doors shut tight, the seam between them began to vanish. In a mere instant, the doors became one solid barrier. The image of Hawes with one hand raised, as she glared at him through the closing doors, had remained fixed in his mind. Her revealed abilities that evening were why he had ultimately sought her out in private.

  “Well?” she said.

  Chane remained calm, facing this deceptively academic-looking woman.

  “Is it finished?” he asked.

  She scrutinized him a moment longer and then turned toward her desk. Opening its top left drawer, she lifted out a narrow pouch of brown felt stacked atop two torn half sheets of paper and one of Chane’s own books. Much as he hungered to know what she made of the latter three items he had shown her, the first was the most important.

  Premin Hawes loosened the pouch’s drawstring and slid its contents into her hand.

  “This pair is smaller,” she said, “as you requested.”

  She held out a pair of glasses much like those Wynn wore when igniting the sun crystal.

  “They are the same?” he asked.

  “Yes, simple enough to duplicate . . . though these have structural improvements.”

  Smaller compared to Wynn’s, their round, smooth lenses were framed in pewter. Unlike the straighter, thick arms of the original pair, these had tin wire arms with curved ends to better hook around a person’s ears.

  Hawes had likely engaged her apprentices to make them—considering what little Chane discerned of her. Wynn had mentioned that Domin il’Sänke had scant respect for this branch’s metaologers compared to his own. Ghassan il’Sänke had not known with whom he was dealing.

  The premin, like a mage of worth, did not put
her skills on display unless necessary. Only petty dabblers made a show. From what Chane had seen at the council chamber, she was far beyond some academic practitioner.

  “They were created from your specifications,” Hawes continued, “though they will not fit you.”

  Chane said nothing. These glasses were meant for Wynn, to replace the ones she had. As to the first pair . . .

  He stepped around Hawes to her desk. Fingering aside the two half sheets of paper, he picked up the book he had left with her.

  Chane had scavenged and saved as many books, journals, and sheaves as he could from a remote keep of Stravinan healer monks, ones that Welstiel had turned into feral vampires. This text, thinnest among them all, had held Chane’s attention from the start, though he could not truly say why. An accordion-style volume of grayed leather cover plates, it had one thick parchment folded back and forth four times between the plates. Its title read The Seven Leaves of . . .

  That final word in old Stravinan was too obscured by age and wear.

  “Did you make anything of this, based on my attempted translation into Numanese?” he asked.

  Hawes barely glanced at the book. She slowly pivoted the other way and retrieved the first half sheet of his notes—his translation. There were now more notes written in her own hand.

  “Of ingredients mentioned, some are rare. They are mostly herbs and substances considered beneficial to healing . . . but not all.”

  Her explanation made sense, considering where he had acquired this text. To some relief, he realized what the last word of the book’s title must be.

  The Seven Leaves of... Life.

  But not all seven substances in the translated list implied leaves. Two he could not make out at all, proving difficult to copy them rote into Belaskian letters of similar sound. He glanced at Hawes’s notes, looking for those two.

  “What is . . . a muhkgean branch?” he asked.

  “A mushroom grown by the dwarves,” she answered. “Its cap spreads in branched protrusions that splay and flatten at the ends.”

  “Like leaves?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Yes, that might come to mind in looking at one. But I know of no medicinal purpose for them.”

  This left another puzzle for Chane. To his knowledge, there were no dwarves in his part of the world. So how would those healer monks have known of this mushroom, let alone what it was called by dwarves?

  “What of this . . . an-os . . . a-nas-ji . . .”

  Chane still struggled with the last of the seven terms. It was not Belaskian, old or contemporary Stravinan, or any language he knew. When Hawes said nothing, he looked up.

  She was scrutinizing him again, as if deciphering him like some ancient tome.

  “What is this text to you?” she demanded.

  “A curiosity. I would think any bit of recovered knowledge would interest a sage as much, if not more. Are these ingredients for something? Is it a type of healing salve, like I have seen Wynn sometimes carry?”

  “Not a salve . . . a draught, a liquid concoction, at a guess.”

  She paused long, never even blinking, and Chane grew unnerved. Before he spoke, she cut him off.

  “I’m uncertain of the full process, since it isn’t described in detail. By your translations, the text contains only cryptic references, perhaps key points or reminders of some more explicit procedure. It does not appear to be thaumaturgical—or, rather, alchemical—in nature, so perhaps a mundane process.”

  Chane sagged a bit. Even for these grains of knowledge gained, he had hoped for something more conclusive. His own body was almost indestructible, but Wynn’s was not. He would use anything that might keep her whole and sound. Yet if Hawes could not decipher the process hinted at, what chance would he have to do so? He was no thaumaturge, let alone highly skilled as a conjurer. He worked mostly by ritual, sometimes spell, and rarely ever artificing, even in its most common subpractice of alchemy.

  “What is this seventh item?” he asked again.

  Open suspicion surfaced in Hawes’s expression.

  “Anasgiah . . . is perhaps Old or even Ancient Elvish,” she said, correcting his failed pronunciation. “I found no translation for it, though I’ve heard something similar. Anamgiah, the ‘life shield,’ is a wildflower in the lands of the Lhoin’na.”

  Chane wanted more, but clearly Hawes’s patience thinned with each answer. Instead of pressing her on this, he picked up the second sheet of his scribbled marks before her patience ran out. This one he had shown her with hesitation; it concerned a starkly different topic.

  “And this list,” he said. “Do you know any of these ingredients?”

  Hawes whispered in warning, “What kind of . . . man . . . carries works of healing, only to stack them with something of deadly harm?”

  Malice flickered so openly across her stern features that Chane tensed.

  “It is a poison, as a whole?” he asked. “Or is only one component so?”

  He already knew some ingredients for Welstiel’s violet concoction were benign. Others baffled him, particularly the flower he knew as Dyvjàka Svonchek—“boar’s bell” in Belaskian. Hawes might be as puzzled as she was suspicious.

  “Do you know the flower?” he urged. “Perhaps by a name other than those I translated?”

  In one quick step, Hawes closed on him.

  “Who are you?” she demanded. “And make no mistake: I have no fear of you!”

  Her claim was obvious, though Chane could only guess how skilled she might be beyond what he had seen. After their encounter at the council chamber, it made him wonder again why she had assisted him at all.

  “You do not agree with the way the guild has treated Wynn,” he said, hoping to throw her off balance.

  “Agreement is irrelevant,” she returned instantly. “The guild’s purpose comes first. Answer my question.”

  To Chane, there were few who mattered among the common herds of human cattle. Fewer still who would be a loss at their death. Wynn was foremost among these.

  Hawes was obviously well beyond the unworthy masses, and beyond many here within the guild’s walls. Had he stumbled upon a hidden, if adversarial, ally that Wynn had not recognized?

  “I am the one who keeps Wynn safe,” he answered.

  Hawes lifted only her eyes, not her head, glaring up at him, as if his superior height were nothing but an annoyance.

  “It has been called Léchelâppa,” she said.

  Chane frowned. It sounded Numanese, but he could not translate it in his head.

  “Corpse-Skirt,” she added in different terms. “It was used by some in the past as a common way to draw out and kill vermin . . . foolishly, considering livestock were attracted to it. I know of no one who carries it or sells it . . . or would be allowed to do so.”

  So it was known in this part of the world.

  Chane was grateful for the information, but one thing disturbed him. Hawes openly discussed an illegal substance, but she never asked what this second deadly concoction was for. This left him wary.

  He slowly reached out and took the list of components from The Seven Leaves of Life out of her hand. Clutching the book and his note sheets, he held up the glasses, peering once through their clear lenses.

  “My thanks,” he said. “I am late in meeting Wynn.”

  If his sudden desire to leave startled the premin, she did not show it. She cocked her head to the side, still eyeing him, and simply nodded.

  Without another word, Chane strode out and down the passage. Late as he was, his own quarters were close, so he took both flights of stairs two at a time. Fumbling briefly with the key to unlock his guest quarters, he went directly to the desk, hiding the glasses and his other burdens in a lower drawer. As Chane turned to leave, his gaze fell upon Wynn’s stacked journals, and he winced.

  The mere sight of them hurt for what he had found—or rather not found—in their pages.

  At first, he had allowed Wynn to work with him, helping him interpr
et so many symbols he could not follow. The further he traveled within her stories of the Farlands, the more he wanted to study and absorb her writings by himself. He later took to struggling alone in his own room with copious notes made in her company.

  Doing so without her assistance was daunting, but he began to grasp the syllabary’s premise of compressing and simplifying multiple letters into symbols of fewer and fewer continuous strokes. These were combined with special marks to account for pronunciations and special sounds in any language. It was all elegant, concise, adaptable, and so much could be condensed within a single page.

  Fascinated as he was by each of the experiences he wrested from the symbols, something odd began to trouble him. Soon he stopped paying attention to actual events, paged backward, and focused on her accounts of the Noble Dead, most specifically the vampires.

  She wrote of Toret—Chane’s own maker—once called Rat-Boy, and of Sapphire, Toret’s doxy. There were many passages concerning Welstiel Massing, Magiere’s half-brother, and Li’kän, that ancient undead now trapped beneath the castle in the Pock Peaks’ frozen heights. Wynn wrote of the feral monks Welstiel had created to fight his battles as they had raced for that castle. She even recounted meeting a vampire boy named Tomas in a decaying fortress outside of Apudâlsat in Magiere’s homeland.

  Chane paged faster, but some of Wynn’s encounters with the undead that he knew of were missing.

  At times, he had been an intricate part of her life—of her stories. But she had omitted how he had protected her from an undead sorcerer named Vordana, simply noting that Vordana escaped to be later destroyed by Leesil. She omitted how he had saved her from two mindless undead sailors in those same swamps and marshes. The account of Magiere severing his head was missing entirely.

  As for the orb’s discovery, guarded by the deceptively frail Li’kän, Chane found only a mention of “another undead” in Welstiel’s company. And, that in the end, one of Welstiel’s “servants” had betrayed him. That one was never described, let alone named.

  It had been Chane himself. There were so many holes in the tales, and he felt as if he were falling through all of them at once into nothing.