Of Truth And Beasts Part 9

"Chathburh," she said, pointing outward. "We've arrived."

Shade came trotting up beside Wynn and reared, hooking her front paws on the rail.

"Where will we lodge?" Chane asked.

"The guild annex has guest rooms. I've heard the library is small but unique. You might like it."

His chest tightened. He had almost felt as if Wynn were safe on this ship. Their sea voyage was about to end, and they would be back in the real world. The search for impossible clues would continue, opposed by even those who might have the power to a.s.sist them.

Wynn would throw herself into danger again. His place was to protect her, to keep her alive. They couldn't just sail on like this forever.

And he had been growing hungrier over the past three nights.

Chane had disembarked once-by himself-during a stop at Witenburh and tried feeding on a goat. That revolting experience had provided some life for his need. Since then, he had mulled over other options without further fracturing Wynn's confidence.

The lights of Chathburh grew brighter, closer, in the distance.

A sailor hurried past, and Chane called out, "How long to port?"

"Soon," the sailor answered. "We'll dock by second bell . . . late evening."

Chane knew that with this stop, Wynn's search for Balle Seatt would truly begin. Of course, he did not wish her to find it.

He had seen both the guardian and the safeguards placed upon the orb that Magiere had found. He did not want Wynn getting near anything so dangerous, not if he could stop it. But his place was at her side for as long as she would have him. A journey, any journey, ensured his usefulness. For now, that was enough.

Chane gazed toward the city, bracing himself for whatever might come.

"This . . . is a guild annex?" Chane asked in surprise.

He watched as Wynn trotted toward what looked like an aging four-story inn. Its unusual height was its one remarkable feature.

"I've never seen it before," she answered. "But it was once a lavish inn for wealthy patrons. When the owner pa.s.sed away, there was no heir and no one bought it. It became city property, left in disrepair for many years, until the guild finally purchased it for almost nothing."

Wynn scanned the front of many windows, appearing well satisfied.

All Chane saw was a nondescript building that had been too hastily stained without the boards being properly stripped and cleaned.

"The front parlor should be part of its library," Wynn added. "I've heard it's well designed to serve our needs." She stepped up onto the porch landing and knocked at the front door. "h.e.l.lo?"

Though well into the evening, it still was not late. The second bell for quarter night had not rung until they were off the piers. Chane a.s.sumed someone would still be awake, and he was not wrong.

The door opened, and a short, middle-aged woman in a teal robe looked out. Taking in Wynn's gray, short robe, she smiled pleasantly. Chane wondered if Wynn might be better treated where no one truly knew her.

"Journeyor Hygeorht of Calm Seatt," Wynn introduced herself, "with a message for Domin Yand. Do you have rooms to spare?"

"Of course," the woman answered, waving them all inside. "I'm Domin Tamira. The annex is never but half full. You can take your pick of rooms on the top floor. Have you had supper?"

Wynn and the domin continued chattering away as Chane stepped in, though Shade pushed past, hurrying after Wynn. Ore-Locks came last. They all pa.s.sed through the wide foyer and into a comfortable sitting room filled with old, overpatched armchairs and small couches, along with bookcases stuffed with volumes, some as old and worn-looking as the building itself.

Chane backed around Ore-Locks to the parlor's entrance. "Wynn?"

The domin's thin eyebrows rose at his maimed voice, and Wynn paused in her chatting.

"Yes?"

"I will go out . . . for a few missing supplies and return in a while."

She tensed slightly before nodding. "Yes. Find me when you're done."

Chane set down the travel chest and pulled off his own pack, leaving it by the door with his old sword. He kept Welstiel's pack over his shoulder.

"What could we need at this point?" Ore-Locks asked, watching him closely.

The ship's crew had seen to their meals on the voyage. They had not delved into their supplies.

Chane ignored him and left.

Sau'ilahk materialized in a cutway beside a fishmonger's stall down the street from the old building. He had kept his distance along the way, so that neither Chane nor Shade would sense him. As Wynn knocked, a domin of Conamology had answered.

Sau'ilahk knew of guild annexes, though he'd never bothered with one in his centuries. What could Wynn possibly seek in this out-of-the way place?

He had not risked getting close to the ship to hear anything she might say, and tonight was his first safe opportunity. His only method was through a servitor-a minor but complex elemental with enough awareness to be his eyes and ears. He cleared his thoughts, preparing to exert energy into conjury.

The annex's front door opened again, and Sau'ilahk paused.

Chane stepped out alone and strode off inland along an adjoining street.

In brief moments in Dhredze Seatt, Sau'ilahk had clearly sensed Chane as an undead. Other times, as now, he seemed more like a solid apparition-seemingly not there to Sau'ilahk's senses, and yet somehow there to see, hear, or even touch.

Sau'ilahk hung in indecision, wondering whom to spy on: Wynn or Chane? He finally blinked to the corner, spotting Chane moving on with a steady gait.

Chane picked up his pace when he breached the city's inland edge. Trotting into the surrounding farmlands, he let his senses widen fully. Even with the bra.s.s ring on, somewhere ahead he smelled life, alone and isolated. Perhaps it was his hunger that overrode the ring's dulling of his senses.

He kept on, losing track of time, and wishing to be farther away before attempting what he had planned. Traipsing through a copse of near-leafless maples, he peered out over a fallow field to a small, thatched barn. Smoke drifted lazily from the clay chimney of a nearby cottage. He silently closed on the barn, pausing, listening for anyone nearby before entering.

It was a poor little place, with only three cows stabled inside. The nearest one had a black face and tan body. Kneeling on the hay-strewn floor, he dropped Welstiel's old pack and dug inside it to pull out an ornate walnut box.

Chane opened the box to study three hand-length iron rods with center loops, a teacup-sized bra.s.s bowl with strange etchings, and a white ceramic bottle with an obsidian stopper. All rested in burgundy padding. He slipped back in memory to the first time he had seen Welstiel use the cup.

They had been starving in the rocky, jagged wilderness of the Crown Range north of his homeland when they came upon an elderly wandering couple huddled by a campfire. Chane had wanted to lunge, but Welstiel stopped him with a warning.

"There are ways to make the life we consume last longer."

True, and Chane now reenacted exactly what he had seen Welstiel do.

He took out the rods, intertwined them into a tripod, and set his dagger on the ground beside it. Placing the bra.s.s cup upon the stand, he lifted the white bottle. Its contents-thrice purified water-were precious. Pulling the stopper, he half filled the cup, remembering Welstiel's cold, clinical explanation.

"Bloodletting is a wasteful way to feed. Too much life is lost and never consumed by our kind. It is not blood that matters, but the leak of life caused by its loss."

Chane glanced at the black-faced cow. To his best knowledge, Welstiel had never tried this on an animal.

The very idea of the cup was revolting, not to mention the humiliation of feeding on livestock. But he needed life to continue protecting Wynn. He could not risk feeding on a human, or she might hear rumors of someone missing or found dead and in a pallid state.

Chane approached the cow. The animal raised her head and blinked liquid eyes at him with no fear. Grasping her rope halter, he led her out of the stall and moved her to one side into a clear place to fall. He pressed slowly and steadily with his foot into the back of her front knee. As she began to kneel, he tipped her over, pinning down her head. She bellowed once in panic, struggling to get up, and then relaxed.

He took up the dagger and made a small cut on her shoulder. Once the blade's tip had gathered leaking blood, he carefully tilted the steel over the cup.

A single drop struck its pure water.

Blood thinned and diffused beneath dying ripples as Chane began to chant. He concentrated hard on activating the cup's innate influence. When finished, he waited and watched the cup's water for any change.

Nothing happened.

His incantation was based on researching Welstiel's journals and the tiny engravings on the cup's inner surface. Something was wrong. As with any mage, their workings were individual, and seldom could one successfully use the workings of another.

The cow let out a low sound. Suddenly her ribs began to protrude, as if she were turning gaunt.

Chane released his grip and scooted back.

The cow's eyelids sank as her eyes collapsed inward. Jawbones began to jut beneath withering skin. It was not long before the animal became a dried, shrunken husk as vapors rose briefly over her corpse. As Chane heard the cow's heart stop, he turned his gaze to the cup.

The fluid was so dark red, it appeared almost black, and it now brimmed near the cup's lip.

Chane did not know whether to feel elated or revolted. He knew what awaited him in drinking the conjured liquid. The first time, Welstiel had warned him with only two words.

"Brace yourself."

Chane shuddered once before he downed the cup's entire contents. When he lowered the bra.s.s vessel, it was completely clean, as if it had held nothing at all. For a moment, he tasted only dregs of ground metal and strong salt. Then he gagged and collapsed on the straw-strewn dirt.

His body began to burn from within.

Too much life taken in pure form burst inside him and rushed through his dead flesh, welling into his head. Curled up, he waited with his jaws and eyes clenched until the worst pa.s.sed and the convulsions finally eased.

Had he used a mortal human in this fashion, he could have gone a half-moon without feeding again. He did not know how long the life energy of a cow would last.

Sitting up, Chane stared at the shriveled husk until his false fever subsided, and then he carefully packed away his equipment. Strong and sated, in control of his senses, he prepared to drag the carca.s.s into the distant stand of trees. It would be a few days before it was found. He and Wynn would be gone by then, and any talk of its condition would never be connected to him.

He paused once upon opening the barn door and glanced toward the quiet cottage. Then he dragged the husk across the fallow field.

Sau'ilahk lingered well beyond a copse of barren maples, watching in fascination as Chane dragged a desiccated carca.s.s toward the trees. What had Wynn's guardian been doing in that barn? Then he felt the tingle of a living presence and heard dead gra.s.s crackle in another direction. He froze in place, a still, black shadow barely more than a deeper darkness amid the night.

Something else moved along the copse's left. Only a dark hulk at first, it circled around the outside of a leafless tree into sight.

Ore-Locks stood hidden at the copse's backside, watching Chane, as well.

Sau'ilahk was certain the dwarf had not been there an instant before; he would have sensed a life in this empty place. So where had the dwarf come from so suddenly? His attention shifted as Chane walked out the copse's far side, becoming more obscured by the small stand of trees.

His pale face had a hint of color. Had he been feeding on the cow? No, that could not be. The animal was shriveled to the bones. Bloodletting would not have had this effect.

The puzzle of Wynn's companion only grew.

Once again, slight movement pulled Sau'ilahk's attention.

Ore-Locks watched Chane leave and then turned about, placing one great hand on a tree as if bracing himself. Unlike Sau'ilahk's fascination, the dwarf was scowling. Perhaps the errant stonewalker did not know Chane's true nature. Had Ore-Locks seen anything that happened inside the barn?

The dwarf straightened, arms slack at his sides beneath his cloak, and appeared to sink-drop-straight down.

Sau'ilahk quickly drifted to the side of the corpse. Few things surprised him after a thousand years of wandering in the nights. He found heavy footprints where the dwarf had stood, but none coming in or out. Ore-Locks had appeared from nowhere and vanished the same way. This matched what Sau'ilahk had seen in the dwarven underworld.

Stonewalkers had leaped out of the walls at him. Now it appeared Ore-Locks and his caste could pa.s.s through earth as well as solid rock.

Two more things became clear as Sau'ilahk circled back to watch Chane striding the inland road toward Chathburh. First, mystery though Chane might be, he required life energy like any other undead, and second, he had taken effort to slip off and do this in secret.

Mulling this over, Sau'ilahk blinked out of sight.

After a late supper, Wynn delivered her sealed message to Domin Yand, head of the annex. A jolly elderly man in the Order of Naturology, he had eaten a few too many honey cakes in his life. He was quite puzzled but in no hurry to open the message so late in the evening. Ore-Locks had finished his own supper quickly, not bothering even to sit, and then vanished to find a room. He never reappeared.

From what Wynn observed in the Stonewalkers' underworld, she guessed he'd spent much time in dim light, in the Chamber of the Fallen. Sailing under the open sky, constantly surrounded by other people, must feel quite foreign to him. Perhaps he longed to be alone.

She didn't miss his company, and lingered downstairs in the annex's library. At least until Shade required her nightly trip outside before bed.

When they finally headed up the central staircase, all the way to the top floor, Wynn found Domin Tamira true to her word. Most of the rooms were empty, and those available had their doors fully open. Wynn picked a large room with a window overlooking the front street. She could just make out the lights of the port between the high rooftops. The faded, four-poster bed was draped with a soft, thick quilt, and old velvet curtains graced the windows. Shade immediately turned a full circle before settling on a washed-out braided rug at the bed's foot, and then she gazed watchfully at the closed door.

Wynn pulled out one of her three cold lamp crystals. Once it was glowing, she shut the curtains, stripped off her boots, and sank to the floor before the scrollwork dresser.

"Come," she said. "Time for more words."

Shade simply wrinkled her nose and remained watching the door.

"Come on," Wynn repeated, holding out her hand.

Shade rumbled and began to squirm. She fidgeted all the way around, until she faced fully away from Wynn.

"You have to learn, Shade. It'll make things easier."

So far, lessons had focused on simple terms for common objects and actions, as well as basic commands. The last were certainly demeaning, considering the intelligence of the majay-h.

"Shade," Wynn said, clearing her mind, so as not to give any clues by memory, "show me . . . High-Tower."

She reached out and touched Shade's haunch, hoping the dog understood enough to call up or send an image of the stout dwarven domin.

Nothing came. Wynn tried to think of other ways to describe High-Tower, from his gray-shot red hair and braid-tipped beard to his- Suddenly, the domin's image rose in her head. A brief moment of elation came, followed by disappointment.

"No cheating!" she said, taking her hand away. "You must get it from the words, not my memories."

Shade had to use words as cues and understand which one of Wynn's memories to call up to answer back when they weren't touching.

"Show me . . . my room."