Of Truth And Beasts Part 42

Same excuse. She appeared to be doing a lot of copying these days, but he did not press her.

"I am going hunting," he said. "Shade can stay with you."

She nodded, but waited until he walked away before resuming her task.

Chane did not go hunting. Instead, he slipped into the shadows of a small outcrop and stood there, hidden and watching her. Again, she laid out the three old journals. She would glance at them, write briefly in the new journal, and then close her eyes and touch Shade.

After a while, she was turning pages of the old journals faster than the newer one. As little as she wrote, she was writing less and less as she went on.

Suddenly, she turned the final pages of the two blue journals, and then the final page of the brown one he had read. She touched Shade for a long moment, sat straight, and sighed as if in relief.

"All right. I think that's it-we're done."

Wynn stroked the dog's ears and slipped the new journal into her pack, which rested a few paces from the fire. And then, to Chane's shock, she picked up all three of the old journals and dropped them in the fire.

He wanted to shout at her to stop, but he braced himself to keep from running forward and kicking the journals out of the fire. Mixed feelings or not, those were her scholarly accounts! She could not have fit the contents of all three into the new journal now stored in her pack.

Chane did not know what to do and kept fighting his instincts to rush forward.

"Wynn, can you see to the horses?" Ore-Locks called out. "I will look for more firewood."

"Of course," she called back, and with one last look at the now smoldering journals, she walked away.

Chane waited only an instant more, until she was out in front of the wagon, where she could not see him. He dashed out of the shadows and grabbed the journals out of the fire, quietly stomping out their smoldering edges. Since he had already read the brown one, he quickly opened the blue ones-the oldest ones.

To his astonishment, he found numerous references to himself as he flipped through the pages. He was lost in trying to wrap his thoughts around this revelation.

Looking up, making sure she was still off with the horses, he quickly retrieved the new journal she had shoved in her pack. When he opened it, he found that he could not read it at all.

The symbols were dense, more complex than anything he had seen before written in the Begaine syllabary. The few he could discern by slowly deconstructing their combined letters and marks made no sense to him at all. Wynn had filled very few pages with these symbols, as if she had written condensed, encrypted notes-intentionally difficult to read.

Chane tucked the journal back into her pack, exactly as he had found it, and pondered this puzzle.

In her earliest work, she had included the stories of his involvement with her. Then, in her first rewrites, she had omitted him for some reason. Now that she was boiling all her journals down to encrypted notes-and far too few to hold all that she had originally recorded-she was burning anything readable.

He heard her humming, a little off-key, as she finished with the horses. She would return soon. A part of him desperately wanted to keep the three singed journals. The thought of a sage, his Wynn, destroying knowledge was like witnessing a fall from grace by one who truly mattered in this world. The thought of these journals burning felt like one of the last of Wynn's connections to scholarly pursuits would turn to smoke and ash.

How many old journals had she burned so far? And why did she stop in her reading and writing to touch Shade in silent stillness before continuing?

Chane rose in the dark as the only possible truth came to him.

Wynn could be doing only one thing with Shade-pa.s.sing memories. Shade remembered everything once it settled in her strange mind. Wynn was not copying all that she had previously written into the new journal. She was copying encrypted symbols . . . and then mentally sharing the contents of the old journals with Shade.

To his shame, he envied their closeness.

He flipped open the brown journal. There were newer, small notes she had made in the margins beside names like Sorhkafre. One read, Omit anyone who might have lived during the war. She was actively working to hide information from the wrong eyes. But foremost in his mind was still the question: Why had she omitted him completely in her first round of recopied journals and the much-later ones that had not needed to be re-created? She had mentioned all vampires but him.

Chane returned to his first revelation that Wynn was hiding knowledge. Another realization changed everything, and his hands began to tremble. She had not been trying to blot him out of her life.

Wynn had been hiding . . . protecting him.

And he could hear her coming back.

He could not risk her seeing him like this. He desperately wanted to keep the journals-especially the blue ones-to save a part of her for himself. But she had gone to great lengths to hide his existence, along with any possible information their enemies might acquire.

Wincing, Chane dropped the old journals into the fire and fled back into the shadows. He did not look back, as he could not bear to watch them burn.

Several nights later, past dusk, Chane watched Wynn and Ore-Locks climb higher up one of the foothills. Occasionally, they both used the ends of their staffs to pound the ground and listen for any hollow sounds echoing beneath.

Shade paced beside Wynn, sniffing dirt and rocks. Like Chane, she was a reluctant partner in this current task. The choice had been to either help or do nothing; the latter would have destroyed any illusions Wynn might still harbor that they wished for her success.

Until now, they had both tried to help despite their reservations. But Chane's recent discoveries through Wynn's journals did not make him any more bound to her mission. They made him only more determined to protect her, even from herself.

By this fourth night after stumbling upon the way station, they had found no further clues to a hidden entrance beneath the mountains. Their supplies were almost gone, and game was even scarcer here than along the ridges of the pa.s.s. There was nothing for Shade and him to hunt. Chane had been taking note of Wynn's demeanor, watching for any growing hints of uncertainty.

It was time to move on.

"This is ridiculous," he said. "We are wasting time."

When Wynn looked down from her higher vantage point, he expected her to argue, but for the briefest instant, doubt crossed her pretty, dusty face, as if she partially agreed. And he knew he had her. He required only the tiniest crack in her armor.

"One more night," she said, not sounding confident. "We'll look for the rest of tonight, and if we don't find anything, then tomorrow we'll return to the pa.s.s and move into the mountain range."

He could see the pain in her eyes as she spoke these words. Looking for a fallen mountain in a vast range was like seeking a single, special pebble in a rushing river. Shade looked up from her sniffing, swinging her head back and forth between Wynn and Chane.

"Do you want to waste another whole night looking for something that does not exist?" he challenged, crossing his arms.

This drove the doubt from Wynn's face, and she stepped toward him.

"Chane, you are not making the-"

"The decisions?" he cut in. "Apparently, neither are you. We have wandered in the foothills, wasting nearly four nights."

Her eyes widened. He rarely spoke to her like this, but he was not going to back down, not this time. Ore-Locks stopped and watched them both.

"So you think you found a way station?" Chane asked Ore-Locks. "Could it not be there for some other reason?"

Ore-Locks looked away. He never spoke to Chane anymore unless absolutely necessary.

"Perhaps it was built there as a rest stop for dwarves," Chane went on, "or it was just a lone settlement placed well off the pa.s.s to remain hidden from foreign travelers."

"Not likely," Ore-Locks said. However, like Wynn, he appeared less than certain.

"So your people are the exception among all others . . . and no dwarves would live any way other than the way you believe they should?"

No one answered, and Chane took a step closer to Wynn, softening his tone.

"It has taken so long to get this far, but there is nothing to be found here. It is time to move on."

Shade huffed once in clear agreement. Wynn looked down at her and then closed her eyes.

Chane knew the crushing disappointment she must feel. They had lost the hope of a possible path leading them straight to the seatt, and now they were back to a blind search in the mountains.

Wynn opened her eyes again, looking to Ore-Locks.

"They're right," she said bitterly, sadly. "If we're to find the seatt, we should head into the mountains now. Too much time has pa.s.sed already."

Chane waited for Ore-Locks to argue-and then he would handle the dwarf. But Ore-Locks only began descending the hill with a similar expression of defeat. His obsessive goal was to find the seatt, and they were making no progress here.

Shade gazed up at Chane in what appeared to be surprise, and then she trotted beside him back toward the wagon-as if rewarding him for this victory. Indeed, he felt as if he had just won an important battle. Wynn's chances inside the range were almost nonexistent. In less than a moon, he might yet coerce her into giving up entirely.

The chances of this were certainly better now than they had been three moments ago.

Wynn drove the wagon down the pa.s.s for three more days before they completed traveling through the foothills and reached the base of the mountains. Her heart was heavy, and all along the way she'd never stopped looking for hints or clues to the elusive entrance Ore-Locks had placed in her mind.

If only it existed. If only she could find it.

Tonight, Shade lay beside her on the bench, and Chane and Ore-Locks sat in the back on opposite sides of the wagon bed, both looking forward. The base of the range's first ridge loomed above them. In the night, Wynn could not see all the way to their tops, but Chane pointed ahead.

"The end of the pa.s.s," he said. "We may have to leave the wagon behind."

Wynn squinted, but he could see so much better in the dark than she could, at least from a distance. She'd known this moment was coming. They couldn't take a wagon into the range, and, eventually, they might even have to abandon the horses. She knew firsthand the dangers of bringing horses onto narrow cliffs.

"Pull up over there," Chane said, now pointing off to the left.

She sighed and pulled the wagon over. Chane jumped down to unharness the mare and the gelding. They would serve as packhorses now. Both were calm and gentle, and she hated the thought of eventually leaving them in the wilderness. She'd face that task when it arrived, as she had faced so many unpleasant tasks to get this far.

While Chane worked on the harness, Wynn climbed in the back with Shade to take down their makeshift tents, folding the canvas up with their blankets. If she packed things properly, the horses could still carry all the supplies that remained.

"Wynn . . . ?" Ore-Locks called from somewhere.

She could not see him.

"Wynn, come up!"

He rarely used her name, and she'd never heard him sound quite so agitated-or perhaps animated. Looking around, she spotted him to her right, partway up the base of the mountain.

"What is he doing?" Chane asked.

Shade rumbled softly.

Wynn jumped from the wagon's back and scrambled upward after Ore-Locks. Chane rasped something after her, but she couldn't make it out. She was too busy climbing as quickly as possible, sending small stones downward with her feet. Shade dashed up after her, and then she heard Chane cursing, as he only had the horses partway unharnessed and couldn't leave them in a tangled state.

"What?" she panted upon reaching Ore-Locks. "What is it?"

"Look," he said.

Pulling a cold lamp crystal from her pocket, she rubbed it and held it out. The light illuminated fragments of what appeared to be cut stone lying against the slope.

Wynn's heart began pounding from more than exertion.

"What are you doing?" Chane asked, coming up behind them. "I had to leave both horses loose down there!"

Wynn leaned slightly forward holding out the crystal. "These stones aren't natural."

"There," Ore-Locks said, moving up and to the left. "More of them."

Shade rumbled again, and Chane now appeared more unsettled than angry. Ore-Locks climbed further with surprising speed.

"And here," he said, pointing.

Wynn hurried after him, spotting more fragments of cut stone along the way. Soon the fragments became slightly larger, and then . . .

She glanced back and saw the pattern. It might never have been noticed if she hadn't first spotted them one by one along the way. There were two lines of those barely noticeable stones with open ground in between, as if . . .

"A path," she whispered, willing herself not to hope too much. "Are we walking an ancient path?"

Ore-Locks didn't answer. By the crystal's light, his eyes were wide and intense as he scanned the slope. He went onward and upward, and Wynn hurried after, barely aware that Chane and Shade came behind.

"I left the horses loose," Chane repeated.

"Then go down and tie them up," she said without looking back.

She didn't hear him turn back as she kept climbing after Ore-Locks.

The path began to curve and snake. Occasionally Wynn lost sight of any stones with telltale signs that they weren't natural. Ore-Locks would wave her and the others to a stop and begin clambering over the slope, searching. Again and again, he finally straightened up and waved Wynn onward. Soon they were pa.s.sing through wind-bent trees, jagged outcrops, and rougher terrain. Pauses became longer, but Ore-Locks always continued.

"How far will we climb?" Chane asked.

Again, Wynn didn't look back. "To the end."

Shade growled, but kept on as they made their way out onto the crumbled base of a cliff. It was covered in heavy brush that had grown so tall it reached above Chane's head. Ore-Locks stopped, his gaze searching the rocky ground and the sheer rise of rock above them.

"I've lost the path," he said. "It just leads into the brush."

"It must go farther," Wynn returned, peering around at the heavy brush covering the cliff's base. "It wouldn't just stop here unless . . ."

She whirled around but pointed into the brush. "Shade, search! See what is behind there."

Shade's ears flattened.

Wynn didn't understand her reluctance, but as back in the foothills, neither did the dog refuse. She trotted to the thick brush, sniffing at its scraggly branches. Ore-Locks went to try to bend some of it out of Shade's way and looked to Chane.

"Help me."

Chane strode over, and with one final pause, dropped down to grip handfuls of the thick brush, bending it aside so Shade might crawl through.

"I do not know what you expect to find," he rasped. "We are wasting more time."