The Night Voice (35 page)

• • •

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 limbs 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.

L
eesil 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.”

Leesil felt completely at a loss.

End what? There was nothing here but that hiss, whatever it was. From what he'd once seen when the first orb was opened, opening all of them wouldn't touch anything that wasn't physically here, alive or dead. And the orbs were supposed to be a last resort.

And no one knew for certain what the orbs would do.

—My child . . . where is she? What have you . . . they . . . done with her?—

Leesil went cold.

He knew “child” meant Magiere. This thing—whatever and wherever—might be what had spoken in her dreams, and if so, had it lost touch with her? What had happened to Magiere?

—Then you will serve me a last time—

“Ignore it!” Ghassan ordered. “Get the orbs, quickly, and take off your thôrhks for use.”

Leesil looked around, wondering to whom that voice was actually speaking. Was it to him, someone else here, or all of them?

“Why do you hesitate?” Ghassan whispered, rushing two steps toward Leesil. “This is why we came here.”

“What is happening?” Chane rasped, making everyone start.

Leesil twisted about and startled Chane in turn. The vampire watched only Ghassan.

—Open the anchors . . . end this now . . . and forever—

“Do you not hear it?” Ore-Locks whispered.

In one glance at the dwarf, Chane's eyes drained of all color, becoming clear in the light of Ghassan's crystal. Chane turned to Leesil.

“Do not listen to what you think you hear!” he rasped.

Leesil's every instinct took hold of Chane's warning.

• • •

Whirling in search of the archer, Chap spotted Osha. The young one stood not far off, haloed by Wynn's distant light. And that light glinted too brightly on the head of another drawn arrow.

Osha's large amber eyes streamed tears down his long face.

He had shot Magiere, most likely with a white metal arrowhead from the Chein'âs. Chap could not even guess what that had done to her. Osha's eyes then blinked. Did his aim falter at something else?

Chap quickly looked back.

Sau'ilahk had recovered from shock, and he slammed his hands to the earth again.

Twisting around, Chap shouted into Osha's thoughts.

—No!— . . . —Shoot Sau'ilahk, the duke!—

Osha's aim shifted instantly, and the arrow released. Chap heard the shriek before he could follow the arrow's path.

Sau'ilahk reeled back on his knees, mouth gaping. An arrow still shuddered from impact in the center of his chest, and he began to shake. Inky lines spread up into his face from beneath a strapped leather collar and then down into his hands as well. Those lines split and bled as smoke rose from the same cracks. He fell back upon the broken earth.

Sau'ilahk's wild thrashing was quickly obscured by the increasing smoke, though his wails and screeches still rose in the night.

Chap bolted for Magiere, lying still and prone, and he lunged past her, planting himself between her and the wild thrashing amid the smoke.
Uncertain of anything, he watched the broken ground for whatever might still come out of the earth from the conjurer's touch.

One shriek cut off too suddenly. Not another sound or movement disturbed the billowing smoke.

Chap remained rigid in waiting and watching, even when he heard Osha come running. As the smoke began to thin, he saw something more. The body was still, dead, and the skin was blackened. Chap began to wonder if something more than just Chein'âs metal was at work here. But nothing came out of the earth where Sau'ilahk had crouched a moment ago.

Doubtful relief kept him watching longer. Osha stepped beyond him toward the duke's finally fallen and charred body, at last the corpse that it should have been. Then the young one turned, looking back beyond Chap.

Osha cringed, back-stepped once in visible anguish, and dropped his bow.

No matter what Chap felt, no matter what he wanted, he had no time for Magiere. She would not be the only one to die if he did not reach Leesil, and there was only one way to accomplish that.

Chap snarled at Osha with a snap of teeth and a short lunge.

—Where is Chuillyon . . . where did you part from him?—

Osha back-stepped, looking down.

—Answer!—

“With . . . Wynn . . . and Wayfarer and Shade,” Osha panted out, pointing toward the light.

Chap could not help glancing at Magiere, lying still and black marked. He gave Osha a final command before bolting toward Wynn's light.

—Pick her up and follow—

• • •

Osha went numb as Chap raced off.

Remaining in place, Osha cringed at the thought of what the elder
majay-hì had demanded. He could not bear to look upon Magiere's remains—upon what he had done.

Slowly, Osha crept toward Magiere's body but only looked to her nearest hand. There was no smoke rising from it. He did see the lines in her flesh, as if every vein beneath her pale skin had blackened and swelled. But the skin had not split, bled, or charred as with Sau'ilahk's stolen flesh.

Then Osha's gaze worked upward, first to the hauberk's shredded skirt, then to the sword belt nearly severed, upward to the torso, and finally to where that arrow was still embedded in her shoulder.

Osha choked once and stumbled, doubting what he saw. He dropped beside her, putting an ear near her mouth—and heard a shallow breath.

Quickly straightening, again he hesitated, not knowing if he should jerk out the arrow. That might worsen any bleeding and end what little life to which she clung. Rising to his feet, he cast around.

Most of the nearby fighting had scattered, as even the living members of the horde had fled when the nearest undead had run from the light and tore at anything in their way. Fighting was still intense farther south, and he saw one rider among others harrying everything within reach.

Osha put fingers to his mouth and whistled over and over as loudly as he could.

Finally, that one rider clear of the others wheeled its mount his way. At a distance, he could not tell who it was, even as it charged toward him.

Dropping to one knee, he pulled a knife from a sheath at his back and set its edge low against the arrow's shaft. Using the blade, he snapped the shaft some three finger widths above Magiere's armor. He then slung his bow and reached down to grip Magiere beneath her shoulders.

He had barely lifted her to sitting in a slump when a horse's hooves thundered up beside him, and he looked up into the severe eyes of Commander Althahk. The commander of the Shé'ith appeared little better than Magiere, blood marred, torn, and ragged, with his sword's blade obscured in black and red smears.

“You abandoned your squad!” Althahk shouted at him.

Osha ignored this and pointed down at Magiere. “I must take her north to the light while she still lives. The majay-hì demands it!”

The commander barely noticed the black-haired woman leaning unconscious against Osha's right leg. A puzzled, confused scowl turned to outright fury.

“We have dead and injured scattered everywhere,” Althahk snarled. “And more if we do not stop it . . . and you deserted!”

Osha realized there was nothing he could say that would accomplish what he needed. Then his frantic, wandering eyes fixed on Althahk's mount. Froth-covered and stained in sweat and blood, En'wi'rên snorted over and over, watching him.

The Shé'ith did not see their horses as mere mounts but as their allies, their battle mates. Could
she
possibly understand what the commander would not?

He had never learned enough about her kind, but he had no other recourse.

“Please,” he begged. “I must do this . . . as the majay-hì commanded.”

That did not even make sense to him. How could anyone—even she—understand what he asked? Or understand how different Chap was from even his own Fay-born kind?

En'wi'rên whinnied—and then bucked and twisted violently.

Althahk's eyes snapped wide. He dropped his sword to grab for the saddle's front edge.

Osha almost backed away, but he would not leave Magiere undefended as the horse pranced wildly. The commander's furious shouts were impossible to follow in his strange dialect. En'wi'rên did not relent until . . .

“Bithâ!”
Althahk shouted, over and over.

En'wi'rên settled. With a final thrash of her head and a sharp snort, she looked to Osha, and he stared back in disbelief.

“Very well,” Althahk snapped. “Osha, get the woman up and over, behind the saddle.”

Osha quickly put his hands beneath Magiere's arms. As he lifted her up, he could not help a last glance at En'wi'rên. It was a struggle to get Magiere draped over the horse's haunches, even with the commander's help, but as Althahk reached behind himself to grip hold of her belt, Osha stepped back, at a loss.

There was no space for him to mount as well.

“Grab the stirrup's strap!” Althahk ordered. “And run with her!”

Osha took hold, and En'wi'rên lunged.

• • •

Chap's claws scratched hard ground as he ran for Wynn's light. The closer he came, the more he squinted, until he finally could not look at it at all. He heard other paws coming toward him, but when he glanced ahead, he almost blinded himself again.

The sun crystal had never been that brilliant before.

Those other paws grew closer.

Shade caught up on Chap's right side, and he conveyed a message to her with as few words as possible.

—Osha . . . Magiere . . . behind . . . bring—

Without answering, Shade veered off, and he ran onward.

Something broke the light's glare, and Chap looked ahead. A tall figure in a long dark robe stood too close to the sun crystal to be an undead.

Chap slowed, panting as he approached.

Even with his hood pulled forward, Chuillyon had to squint amid the bright light as he looked down at Chap in stunned silence. Somewhere beyond the tall elf was Wynn with her staff and Wayfarer as well. Chap could not help wondering again how the staff's crystal had been made so brilliant this time.