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

by Barb; J. C. Hendee

  His offer struck Wynn as odd, but she had no idea why. He was just so amiable and eager to help. However, the thought of lying down even for a short while was tempting, and she needed to secure Chane someplace before he fell dormant at dawn.

  “We’re so tired that we may sleep all day,” she said. “Will that be all right?”

  “Most certainly,” Mujahid answered. “I have a full day with no need to disturb you until after dinner.”

  Again, he was all too eager to help, but Wynn couldn’t fault his generosity.

  “Thank you,” she told him, and then something more occurred to her. “I’m sorry to ask, but would you let the journeyor on watch know where we are? He’ll be looking for us as soon as his domin awakens.”

  “You mean Domin In-Ridge?” Mujahid queried.

  That answered Wynn’s question on how to shorten the unknown domin’s name in translation.

  Mujahid nodded with a slow close of his eyes. “I will . . . as you would say, pass the word.”

  Still uncertain but aching for sleep, Wynn followed him to the stairwell leading up.

  Sau’ilahk desperately needed life. Conjuring a servitor with consciousness and the long struggle to control it had drained him. When his creation had come upon that strangely lit glade while following Wynn, the black lash of its destruction had wounded him somehow. It was as if in riding the servitor’s consciousness, he had stepped into the clearing himself.

  Whatever had disassembled the servitor had partly reached him, and he had lost track of Wynn’s whereabouts.

  Sau’ilahk stood upon the road through the plain with no animate life within his awareness. The forest’s trees were like a wall beyond which he could see or sense nothing. Worst of all, he did not have the strength to blink elsewhere by memory over a great distance.

  He studied the tree line stretching in both directions beyond sight. Even if he found sustenance, even if he made another, more suitable servitor, how would he locate Wynn?

  Sau’ilahk began to fade, sinking into dormancy, and cried out in that darkness upon the edge of his god’s dream.

  “Beloved . . . help me!”

  Do you follow the sage? Does she still lead you?

  “I starve for my efforts!”

  Then find life, as small as it might be. Consume it in the hunt for a greater feast . . . so you may serve.

  This was no answer, and frustration frayed Sau’ilahk’s wits even more.

  “There is no life substantial enough for my need that I can reach here and now.”

  His patron’s hiss sharpened like spit-upon coals—or the grind of massive scales upon sand.

  A droplet of moisture from a corpse can be lifted from the desert, though it be barely enough for a burrowing carrion beetle.

  “Wynn Hygeorht is beyond my reach,” Sau’ilahk argued. “I cannot sense even the forest’s own life. Even if I could, how am I to find her singular spark in such a place?”

  Where life is . . . death follows. Find the latter to find the former.

  Sau’ilahk paused. In a land teeming with life that shut him out as unliving, perhaps “death” had walked into those trees if Chane had somehow followed Wynn in there. Beloved’s cryptic retort seemed to confirm this, but Sau’ilahk had so rarely been able to sense Chane’s presence. Perhaps that strange ring had also allowed the vampire to enter where no other undead could.

  His interest in Chane’s little brass ring grew.

  “I still . . . cannot,” he pleaded. “Please, my Beloved . . . I starve.”

  Unearth your need, like a droplet in sand . . . and then another . . . until you find means to serve. Dig and borrow for it, if you must, but do not pray to me to salve the wounds of your failure.

  Sau’ilahk sank deeper into dormancy under Beloved’s rebuke. The only source of life he could think of was the caravan. He did not have the strength to search for it, let alone any memory that would let him awaken at its constantly changing location. He remained lost in the black silence, not knowing for how long.

  All that was left to him were the painful past memories of his god that made him seethe in silence. The Children had never been treated this way. Though he had earned Beloved’s displeasure through disobedience, he had done all he could to regain a state of grace in his god’s awareness. When trapped between faithful service and desperate need, he was treated like . . . an insect in the dirt, just short of a whim to step upon it.

  And the world reappeared.

  Sau’ilahk spotted the barest gray in the eastern sky, and panic set in. Had he remained dormant for too long? He could not bear a whole day in darkness amid such hunger, and he sagged like a limp scarecrow draped in black sackcloth.

  All that filled his awareness was the road.

  Not the sands of the great desert from long ago, but packed earth with stones exposed by decades of weathering and use. Drops of water were not what he needed, though they were more plentiful here than in the dunes. The sting of Beloved’s rebuke ran through him like a wasp’s poison in the veins of living flesh.

  Where there was water, or just moisture, even in another’s remains, it could sustain a tiny life. He had once been such sustenance at the end of his living days.

  That old, old memory still haunted and sickened him.

  All had been mysteriously lost at the war’s end. Or, rather, the war had simply ended for no reason he had understood. Years had passed since the night that he received the “blessing” of eternal life. Then one night, the Children simply vanished.

  Sau’ilahk went to the mouth into Beloved’s mountain, and it was gone. Not as if blocked by a collapse or filled in with stone and earth. The opening simply was not there anymore . . . as if it had never been there.

  Gone were the guardian locatha, those hulkish abominations like the offspring of a man and some monstrous reptile. The tribes and others of the horde began to disperse, but not before they turned on each other. Northerners and other defectors in the war turned against the desert tribes. Tribes turned on each other, no longer needing the excuses of old blood feuds. Packs and herds of the Ygjila—what would one day be known as goblins—tore into any but their own kind.

  They massacred each other over what little spoils of war had been gained, and then fled into the peaks and across the sands. Amid it all, the Children’s offspring from the battlefields hunted and harried the living in the nights. They slaughtered anything for as much blood, as much life, as they could gain so deep in the desert.

  Sau’ilahk fled with the remains of his underlings among the Reverent.

  In more years that followed, he searched for any trace of the Children. Each year, he grew more afraid and maddened by spite. For when he looked in his polished silver mirror, his own visage was too much to bear.

  Lines had grown on his once beautiful face. His glistening black curls of hair steadily dulled with streaks of gray. His joints slowly lost their range of motion amid growing aches at every movement. Food consumed for its comfort became mud upon his tongue, devoid of all taste. And his days became as his nights as his sight began to fail. That last loss was almost a relief from ever looking into the mirror again.

  Sau’ilahk had grown old.

  He withered, cheated by the lie of eternal life. It was not until after his heart finally halted its weak beats that a truth made his fear grow all the more. When he finally died, he could see again.

  Sau’ilahk lay in the tent upon piled rugs for a bed, amid the haze of funerary incense. All around him, the remaining Reverent in their black robes and cloaks murmured prayers for Beloved to welcome him into the afterlife. Sau’ilahk was little more than a withered bag of bones as he watched them, knowing he could not be dead if he could now see.

  His followers bowed their heads and closed their eyes, though some faces appeared subtly relieved rather than mournful. He tried to take a breath to rebuke them for prematurely dismissing him.

  Sau’ilahk could not draw air—nor could he move his mouth. He could not blink
or close his eyes—or if he did so without knowing it, no one noticed . . . and he could still see them.

  The nearest swiped a hand across his old face as if to shut his eyelids. Still he could see them, hear them.

  Some of the lesser Reverent left in that last night of his “life.” Three remained to whisper among themselves, until whispers became sharp words. They argued over whether or not to bother fulfilling his final decree concerning proper burial. In the end, two of the trio won out by using a hooked-point blade to tear out the throat of the third.

  It brought Sau’ilahk no satisfaction.

  He lay mute and paralyzed, unable to tell them he was not dead, even as they stripped and washed his withered flesh. They wrapped him in strips of black burial cloth, layer by layer, so suited to Beloved’s most reverent of the Reverent. Even as they rolled the strips over his eyes, again and again, he still watched them. He screamed from within as they bore him off, though no sound escaped his still lips.

  They lodged him in a small cave high in the great mountain range. As they crawled back to the opening, all he had left to see was a rough stone ceiling an arm’s length above him, torchlight still flickering upon it. That light began to grow dim as he heard the stones being piled.

  Until that flicker vanished altogether, and there was only silence.

  Sau’ilahk’s silent screams turned to sobs as he came to know Beloved’s truth. He had his eternal life, but not eternal youth. All his beauty was gone, but not the prison of his flesh in its death.

  How long did he wait until they came?

  Something entered his awareness in the dark. Like a spark he could not see, it skittered around the space of his tomb. And then another—and another.

  Something pulled, jerked, and tore at the cloth strips over his sunken belly. A small form scuttled over his face and burrowed into the cloth over his right eye.

  Were they worms, beetles, flies? What had crept and flitted too many times, too close across his cloth-wrapped face, only to wriggle through the wraps over his desiccating flesh? How long had it taken for them to amass?

  Was it days, moons, or even years in that dark silence, until all he felt and heard was their burrowing, their biting and gnawing? It became a distant thing to be eaten alive—eaten dead—like a wound so harsh, the mind shuts it out. Horror numbed any sensation too torturous to bear.

  For slow ages Sau’ilahk lay there, eaten away in small pieces while the rest of him decayed, until . . .

  Out of dark dormancy Sau’ilahk rose one night through the mountain-side, his first utterance a scream that had built within him over a century. No longer anchored in flesh, dawn soon cut into his madness and drove him back down into a dormancy as dark as his tomb had been. But he rose again under the stars after the following dusk, still mindlessly wailing and unable to touch anything, most of all himself.

  Even now, as he stood upon the road Wynn had taken, Sau’ilahk quaked under those endless years. Only the sound of scuttling in the dark had kept him company. That and the screams of his thoughts, so loud they could have cracked his dried bones if he had had a true voice.

  Sau’ilahk lowered and thrust his incorporeal hands through the road. He sank his arms nearly to his shoulders, feeling in the earth for any drop of animate life.

  Be it a worm, a burrowing beetle, or a grass grub, when he touched something, that small spark of life vanished into him. They were no more than that drop of water in a dune. But he persisted, sweeping his arms slowly through earth. He worked his way into the field at the road’s side, blades of tall grass passing through him. And once he touched something else.

  A sting of cold rushed through Sau’ilahk.

  He jerked his hands out of the earth, still aching and burning from whatever his fingers had passed through. What was buried down there that caused him this discomfort? Even if he sank his cowl into the ground, he would not see it, and he had too little energy to solidify a hand with which to dig. But it had felt like . . .

  That cold burning that had torn at him from within whenever his hand had passed through Chane Andraso.

  This made no sense, and he returned to foraging carefully for more tiny lives. He reached deep this time, and worked his way farther into the field. He swept his way along through the grass, its blades not even bending in his passage, until . . .

  Sau’ilahk’s shoulder swept through a dome of flowers, and his shriek became a wind that tore the grass around him. In retreat, he nearly passed through another cluster of blooms before he lurched the other way. He burned inside, the sensation like shudders and dizziness, though he had no flesh.

  He stared down at white velvet petals, shaped like leaves, as they began to darken, turning dull yellow at first. They withered to an ashen tan and died, crumpling to the earth and blowing away to catch in blades of grass.

  Sau’ilahk slowly turned as he scanned the plain in all directions. What was this place with such hidden blights that could hurt him?

  It was somehow familiar. Not as if he had been here, but perhaps something he had heard of once. As eternal as he was, his mind was no more immune to forgetfulness than that of any living being. Over a thousand years, no one continued to remember everything that they once had. Memories faded, particularly ones that seldom came to use.

  Still starving, Sau’ilahk slipped carefully back to the road, avoiding any domes of flowers. There was no time left to ponder them, or what he had felt under the earth. Dawn was near, and with what little life he had gained, he still had to find the caravan. Once he had fed properly, he would have little trouble remembering this place to reawaken here after the next dusk.

  He would lure and enslave a more natural servant—something that could move within the Lhoin’na lands. If he could not find the one life of Wynn from afar, the one unlife of Chane Andraso might more easily bring the sage back under his scrutiny.

  Sau’ilahk fled up the dirt road like roiling streams of black vapors in the dark.

  CHAPTER 12

  Wynn opened her eyes at the sound of a nearby whine, and then she flinched to see a bark-covered wall a hand’s length from her nose. She lurched upright and away, nearly falling off the bed shelf she lay on. She spun about, wrestling out of the blanket.

  For an instant, she thought she’d awakened in an an’Cróan tree home. Shade sat fidgeting on her haunches as she whined, but Wynn was still lost for a moment.

  The bed wasn’t a raw shéot’a cloth mattress stuffed with straw and wild grass. It was fitted with heavy linen. She was in a room at the guild branch of the Lhoin’na. As she swung her legs over the bed ledge, her head filled with a rush of memories.

  She saw the guild keep’s rear grove, the forests on the way to Dhredze Seatt, and the wild woods they’d encountered on their present journey. More and more wild places popped up in Wynn’s own perspective, showing Shade scurrying off into the brush.

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “Just . . . give me a moment.”

  Poor Shade needed to go out quite badly. But the next rush of memories showed a variety of meals.

  First was the guild hall, then her room, complete with all the smells that didn’t fit well together. A late breakfast of dried salt fish at the temple of Feather-Tongue mixed with a greasy sausage bought in a dwarven market.

  —outside . . . food . . . outside, outside—

  Wynn grabbed her head. “Shade, stop it. I’m coming, already.”

  A large umber-glazed washbasin sat beside the room’s teardrop-shaped door. She’d set it there last night for Shade, filling it from its matching water pitcher. The basin was completely empty.

  “Did you drink that whole bowl?”

  Shade spun off her butt, and scurried to the door.

  —outside, outside, outside—

  With a groan, Wynn hauled herself up. A heavy gray curtain covered the room’s small window, though a little light filtered around its edge. She wasn’t certain of the time of day. At the room’s far side, Chane lay stretched out on another bed l
edge, completely covered, a blanket pulled up over his head.

  Barefoot in only her shift, Wynn hastily wrapped herself in her robe and tiptoed to the other inner door. She cracked it open and found Ore-Locks snoring away in the adjoining room. He’d stretched out on the floor, likely unable to get his bulk onto a bed ledge. He’d been living on Chane’s schedule since their caravan trip began and would likely sleep half the day.

  Wynn quietly shut the door, and Shade’s whine shifted to a discontented rumble.

  “Hold on,” she whispered as she reached for her clothes draped over the travel trunk.

  She’d been too exhausted last night to do anything but crawl into bed, but now she took clearer notice of the room. Stacks of books, loose paper, and leather satchels were scattered about haphazardly. Mujahid wasn’t particularly orderly for a sage. Two unlit, half-burned candles sat on the small table, along with a crucible and a mortar and pestle.

  Wynn picked up one book. Its flaked, gilded title, written in exaggerated elven script, read The Wells of the Elements, by Premin Glhasleò ácärâj Jhiarajua Avcâshuâ. She vaguely recognized the name.

  Premin “Gray Light” or “Dusk Light” had been one of a few metaologers to become a high premin—and the only such among the Lhoin’na. About three hundred years ago, he’d been criticized and suspected by his peers for his manic interest in the arcane. He’d died in bed at only seventy-two, after eating a plate of mushrooms. It was recorded that he’d gathered them himself, so theories of foul play were dismissed.

  Wynn lifted a finely crafted parchment from the desk and scanned its Elvish writing. It was a conservative treatise on the hazards of thaumaturgical practices involving elemental Spirit. What, exactly, was Mujahid researching here?

  Suddenly, Shade growled, bit down on Wynn’s robe, and jerked, making her stumble back. Wynn dropped the book and page on the table. Shade’s urgency also left her feeling a bit too nosy. Whatever Mujahid’s reasons, he’d been generous with his rooms, and she shouldn’t take advantage.