The Night Voice (8 page)

Chane had come to nearly a complete stop and set both chests on the ground. In the dark, it was hard for Chap to be certain, but it appeared Chane stared somewhere ahead as one of his hands worked at the other. Chap glanced back ahead as well.

Something gray in the night rose high out of the snow: a dome of granite with one side sheared off. And then Chap felt his hackles rise out of control. He heard something drop behind him, but before he could turn, rage swallowed him, followed by the urge to hunt.

“They are here.”

It was all Chap could do to suppress a howl as he swung around at that rasping voice. He fixed on Chane, whose hands were bare, and all Chap wanted was to pull that
thing
down and tear it . . . him . . . apart.

• • •

Chane quickly slid the brass “ring of nothing” back on his finger, but Chap still stood with teeth bared, eyes narrowed, hackles stiffened, and ears
flattened. A peeling hiss like a cat's warning escaped Chap's clenched teeth with every breath steaming in the night air.

“My apologies,” Chane said quickly. “I needed to know . . . if I could feel them, like the others.”

That was half of the truth; what he needed was to kill the hunger.

It faded as before in the close proximity to an orb, more so now that there were two. And even more in the instant he removed his ring. He had needed to have that sharper flood of relief. A thought occurred to him. Perhaps the reason he had not felt hunger for so long had been less about feeding upon the duke's body than about traveling in the presence of the orb of Spirit when he accompanied Wynn south.

On this journey north, he and Chap had been sailing without an orb, and his hunger had slowly returned. Now that he was near an orb again, the hunger was gone.

Chap watched him expectantly.

Chane hesitated but then turned his gaze from Chap and crouched to pick up the ax and the empty chests strung on the shovel's handle. Even as he rose—slowly—he did not look at Chap until he was ready to move on.

With a last grating hiss, Chap turned onward toward the huge half dome of granite.

Chane followed at a suitable distance in regained ease and clarity.

When Chap stopped before the sheered side of the granite dome, he turned and eyed Chane. Then he clawed at the crusted snow.

Chane hesitated again. This was Chap's prearranged signal for a need of the talking hide when they were alone. Here and now did it mean something else? Was he to start digging on that spot?

With a low growl, Chap took two steps and clawed again on a different spot.

Chane set down his tools, pulled out, and unrolled the hide on the ground. Chap began pawing the letters and words.

You dig. I return soon.

Chane looked up from the hide. “Where are you going?”

Chap turned away and ran off around the granite.

Chane almost called out, not that he could have shouted with his maimed voice. He still quick-stepped back the way he had come to see Chap vanish into the sparse trees, and he stood there even longer in hesitation.

Sooner or later, Chap would return. He would certainly not wish to leave the guide waiting too long into the night. Nor would he leave two orbs in the lone hands of a longtime enemy.

With a grating hiss of his own, Chane turned back to start with the pickax.

• • •

Chap raced through the trees, though in the dark everything looked much the same. It took longer than he wished to search out what he sought.

There was no need for concern about Chane and the orbs; the undead's obsession with Wynn and her wishes would keep the vampire obedient. Still, Chap was torn between turning back and going onward. He had to know—to find—one more certainty, now that he had returned so close to the place of his greatest sin.

He kept running in the freezing night.

To hide the orbs of Water and Fire, he had been forced to do something unspeakable. No one—not even the guide Leesil had hired for him at that time—could ever know the orbs' last resting place. If only it had been their last place.

Once, he had existed as part of the eternal Fay. When he was born into flesh, his kin had removed many of his memories of his existence among them. So many that only later had he suspected what they had done to him. Upon finally confronting them, he had attempted to fathom what fragments he was missing.

Among those had been the notion of a first sin—their sin . . . his sin.

So horrified by it, they had not wanted even him to remember it.

Upon creating Existence itself, a place to “be” other than in their timeless and placeless existence, they had learned they could “be” anything they perceived within this new existence. He had only suspected what that meant. His suspicion must have built itself upon something hidden deep inside from when he had been part of them that they could not extract.

Chap had led that first guide, named Nawyat, and his dog team well past a spot he had chosen along the way. Then he stopped as if for the night. This guide had been simple, kind, and even strangely charmed by a dog—a wolf—like no other.

It had been so easy to abuse simple Nawyat's trust.

Chap invaded and took control of the man's flesh while temporarily abandoning his own. He needed hands to dig frozen earth and to bury the orbs in secret. And when he had returned to camp . . . returned to his own body . . .

Nawyat lay within the tent, staring blankly up at nothing. He barely breathed.

Try as Chap had, he could not find one memory in the guide's mind. He lay there beside Nawyat, trying again and again to find something of the man inside that husk of flesh. With Magiere and Leesil waiting down the coast, he was forced to leave.

He had enacted the sin, the first sin, of the Fay:
domination
—utter and complete—in mind, body, and his own eternal spirit.

Chap halted and stood in the same clearing where he had stolen Nawyat's flesh. The place was bare, filled only with crushed snow. He could not even see sunken lines where a sled might have passed more than a season ago. Chap raced about, tearing up crust with his claws in search of any sign of that previous camp he had fled.

He couldn't find anything.

He had broken with his own kin, the Fay, upon learning how much had been torn from him at his birth into flesh. Piece by piece he put together that they had wanted him to be simple, controllable, and viable as a tool. Had he agreed to this before separating from them?

His only purpose had been to keep Magiere—through Leesil—hidden away from her own nature, origin, and purpose.

Now he could not hold in his shuddering whimpers as he looked wildly about the empty clearing. Had Nawyat ever come back to his own flesh, or had that flesh simply perished, still empty in this place? Could a mortal's mind and spirit ever return once its body was taken by an eternal Fay? Had someone found and rescued him, perhaps for him to only fade and die later? Had he been found only to be buried in hiding and have all of his possessions scavenged?

Chap would never know.

He stood there alone, quaking in the frigid darkness. Cold ate all the way into his spirit, but even that was not enough to numb the pain, to drive out the shame . . . and his sin.

The one thing he had done that no one else would ever know.

• • •

Raising the pickax, Chane slammed it down again, breaking deeper into the cold-hardened earth. He took up the shovel and began digging again. He tried to call on his inner strength, to let that chained beast—monster—inside him partially awaken.

It did not.

There was no hunger to call it in the close presence of two orbs he still had not found. There was only his own anger to keep him going, as the hole grew.

Where was Chap? Where had that cursed majay-hì, bane of his life, gone to now?

He neither slowed nor rested until his shovel struck something hard, and it twisted in his grip. He stopped and squinted down, but the pit was already knee-deep or more. Not enough moonlight for even his eyes reached its bottom through the tall trees.

Chane leaned the shovel into the crook of one elbow to tear off his gloves and dig into a coat pocket. He pulled out the cold-lamp crystal Wynn had
given him and stroked it harshly three times down his coat. It lit up instantly, and he crouched to claw at the pit's bottom with his other hand.

His fingernails grated across something harder than frozen earth. Setting the crystal up on the ledge of the hole, he crouched again and began scraping away more earth with both hands and the shovel's head.

Finally, he saw the lightly dimpled but smooth gray-black of an orb. Before long, he had freed it and lifted it, only to nearly drop it.

There at the side of the pit stood Chap.

“Announce yourself next time,” Chane rasped, expecting a response of spite in return.

Chap made not a sound, dropped his head, and stared into the pit. Then he looked to the orb in Chane's hands.

Its central ball was made from a dark material, char in color rather than black. The surface looked like chisel basalt though it felt slightly smoother than such stone.

Atop it, now that Chane had righted it, was the large head of a tapered spike that pierced through the globe's center. Spike and orb looked cut from the same piece of stone with no indication that they could be separated. But the spike's head had a groove running around its circumference that would fit the knobs of an orb key or handle, or what some thought looked like a dwarven neck adornment, called a thôrhk.

Chap huffed for attention and lowered his head to look down into the pit.

Chane did not need to ask. He set the orb on the pit's ledge and crouched to dig out the next one. When finished, he climbed out and pulled on his gloves and stood there with two orbs at his feet between himself and the majay-hì.

It took far less time to load the orbs into the chests, lock them shut, and gather the tools. All that remained was to haul the chests one by one a reasonable distance from the pit. So Chane did this with Chap guarding the second one that remained behind. Through all of this, Chap made not a sound nor showed any desire or need to communicate.

His absolute silence unnerved Chane. They had what they had come for, so should not Chap express some relief? Once both chests were together again, far from the open pit, the question remained as to which one of them would guard the orbs while the other went for the guide and sled.

Chane had his answer when Chap climbed up and settled to straddle both chests.

K
halidah and the others had walked for half of the night, another night after many along the desert's fringe below the foothills. In the predawn darkness, he noticed Wynn dragging one foot after the other as if she could barely remain upright.

The sage had shown surprising stamina, but of the five of them, she was the least suited to this seemingly endless trek. More important, since their routine midnight rest, Khalidah had pondered how to preoccupy Magiere and the others so that he could attend to a private task. Wynn's exhaustion provided the remedy.

In one blink, the dark behind his eyelids filled with lines of spreading light. A double square formed in sigils, symbols, and signs. As his eyes opened, they fixed that pattern upon Wynn Hygeorht. All it took was a soft command at the edge of her consciousness.

Sleep
.

She collapsed face forward onto the sand.

“Wynn!” Magiere cried.

She and Leesil ran for the sage, and both crouched as Leesil rolled Wynn over.

“She's breathing all right,” he said with exhaled relief. “But she's done in.”

He scooped her up in his arms and rose as if she weighed nothing. Magiere stood up beside him. The worry on her face was clouded by thinly veiled anger.

During the days, Magiere's hair and skin were still a baffling sight. They had been under a desert sun for so long, and yet her skin retained its pale color. Bloodred tints were always visible in her black hair as well.

She was most certainly marked by Beloved.

In the dark, these traits were not so noticeable.

“Find a place to set the tents,” Brot'an called out, still managing both camels' leads. “We will make camp early.”

Khalidah still found the hulking, scarred elf an enigma.

Though Brot'an claimed to simply be assisting in Magiere's search, Khalidah did not believe so and never would. Too often, he caught Brot'an eyeing Leesil. No, that one had another agenda as yet a mystery. But he had revealed something useful earlier on.

Khalidah had been unable to penetrate the master assassin's mind to any depth, just as with both majay-hì now conveniently elsewhere. There was one anomaly that also matched the same in those annoying beasts. Brot'an had been affected exactly like all the others by the ensorcellment embedded in Ghassan il'Sänke's sanctuary.

That could be very useful, eventually. He felt Ghassan begin to rage again, but he only smiled briefly.

“I will find us a place,” Khalidah called.

He headed into the foothills. Quickly enough, he spotted one taller hill on the right that would block the sun once it rose . . . for a while.

“Here!” he called back.

Soon, the others were busy setting up tents and tending to Wynn—even the aging elf. As they worked, Khalidah studied all of their belongings and supplies as if searching for something.

“Our water is low,” he said, and Leesil looked up for an instant. “If I can find a hidden well, I will return for assistance.”

No one questioned this, as all were too concerned for the sage, and so he slipped away. But Khalidah only searched for a place out of their sight, in case someone followed him too soon. Alone again, he crouched and prepared for another “peek” at Chane and Chap's position.

The pebble he had given Chane was common knowledge to all involved. It had been meant to help them all find one another again. However, “finding” Chane was what the pebble could do for him. And he had his own vested interest in the success of the vampire and gray majay-hì.

Beyond gathering the orbs through these fortunate and unwitting companions, he had his own search to complete. His first goal was to learn where Beloved awakened. Until that was confirmed, along with the gathering of the orbs, he needed to foster Magiere's belief that all “anchors” were necessary to face their “Ancient Enemy.” The others would follow her, willingly or not.

But he—not they, or even Magiere—would be the one to finish Beloved.

In ancient times, he had known the whereabouts of Beloved's hiding place to the far east. That had been a torturous thousand years ago, perhaps more, and the exact details had long since faded from memory. For now, he did not want Magiere finding such a place until all five orbs were present.

Khalidah blinked, and noted the much lighter sky. He had lingered too long and turned to his reason for slipping away. Closing his eyes, he blanked out all thoughts but one.

The pebble.

There was no sensation of crossing great distances; he instantly touched it with his emptied mind. Space and time meant nothing, and it was almost as if he were
there . . .

Everything suddenly appeared darker than where he had settled in the foothills.

He was standing nearby but unseen next to Chane, though Chane was running.

A sled drawn by dogs raced through the near dark and tall trees and over snow-crusted earth. Chap was barely visible, running on the sled's far side.
A dark-skinned man bulked up with heavy furs ran behind the sled, gripping its reins and occasionally shouting to the dogs in a strange, awkward language.

At first, Khalidah thought they were in search of the two orbs hidden in the wastes.

“Chap!” Chane tried to shout in his rasping, broken voice. “Find a clearing . . . quickly.”

The majay-hì bolted ahead into the trees, distracting Khalidah for an instant.

“We stop,” Chane added. “Set camp fast!”

Khalidah glanced aside in time to see the sled driver nod. Then he noticed the faint lightening of the darkness. Dawn would be coming, though later than here where his body sat among the foothills.

Then he realized the sled was aimed westward rather than inland.

It was burdened with three chests, as expected, but as he looked closer, two had locks on their latches. The third was not locked.

Hope expanded within Khalidah, for two out of three to be locked implied only one thing.

Chane and Chap had already recovered the orbs of Water and Fire. They were returning to the coast—and in their haste, pushing the limit of Chane's safety against the dawn.

Amid relief—and hesitation—Khalidah opened his eyes to dawn in the foothills of the Sky-Cutter Range. He would check on the undead and the dog again in several days, but for now he sat there on the edge of ecstasy.

To kill a god was to become a god . . . at least in the eyes of one's inferiors.

Without warning, a hissing voice rose in his thoughts and eradicated his joy.

My servant.

It had been so long since he had heard it that he froze, unable to answer immediately.

Yes, my Beloved?

You guard the dhampir as instructed?

Khalidah weighed his answer carefully in keeping his thoughts shielded. He knew that his god believed him to be bringing the child of its making—Magiere—for some purpose only it knew. As of yet, though, Khalidah had not uncovered that purpose, and Beloved had not been forthcoming on precisely where to bring her.

Yes, she is in my company, Beloved.
He wavered, uncertain, and then thought a sliver of truth was the best lie.
I have two of the anchors in my possession. Three are still being gathered. I thought to wait until all five were in my possession before asking where to bring all with the dhampir to you.

Khalidah lingered, waiting for a response, and . . .

That is acceptable, servant.

Yes, Beloved, as is my joy in serving my god.

No sooner had those carefully contrite words passed through his thoughts than he heard one final command.

See that you do not fail . . . again . . . as in Bäalâle.

Khalidah swallowed down spite with fear as silence filled his mind. He hated groveling to this betrayer but comforted himself in knowing he would have his revenge. Briefly touching the chain around his neck, he wondered about contacting Sau'ilahk for a location report, but he had already been gone for too long and stood up to return to the camp.

When he rounded the tall hill, a shadow fell across his path.

Khalidah looked upslope as Brot'an descended to face him. The elder elf studied him.

“You were gone so long, we grew concerned,” Brot'an said.

Khalidah kept his expression passive. Leesil was the one who accompanied him on water raids, and he knew the half-blood was beginning to grow suspicious as to why they had not been spotted, let alone caught, even once. Of course, Khalidah had used his sorcery to hide them from anyone's awareness, and his own power exceeded that of his internal captive, Ghassan il'Sänke.

Might Leesil have mentioned his suspicions to Brot'an?

“I am safe, as you see,” Khalidah said with a warm smile. “I saw no one else in my search.”

“Did you find water?”

“I fear not. Is Wynn better?”

Brot'an did not answer at first. “She is awake and coherent.”

Khalidah brushed past, eager to end this conversation. “Then let us return.”

He led the way, but even more than before, he felt a need to know the assassin's true agenda here.

• • •

Several evenings later in White Hut, Chap sat alone outside the tent on the fringe of the settlement. Inside, Chane sat alone with all three chests, two containing orbs. They had been unsuccessful in attaining passage south, for no new ship had arrived . . . until now.

Chap lingered in watching an arriving vessel until certain it had anchored and longboats were headed out to exchange cargo. Then he whirled, nosed through the tent's flap, and snatched up the talking hide in his teeth. Chane had his full attention before he even dropped the hide, clawed it open, and began pawing out the news.

Chane ducked out of the tent to take a look before Chap finished.

Chap followed and had barely stepped outside when Chane rushed back into the tent to begin their preparations for departure. It did not take long.

“I need to hire a few boys to help carry the chests,” he said.

Though the thought of this delay tried Chap's patience, he knew it was necessary that they transport everything to the shore at once. Whether this ship granted them passage or not, they had to be ready and waiting.

Soon enough, Chane returned with three strong-looking boys. Chane carried the chest with the orb of Water. One of the boys carried the empty chest, and the other worked together to half carry, half drag the chest with the orb of Fire—as it was heavy and their going was slow. Chane never let
them out of his sight, but in the end, he set his orb on the shore for Chap to guard and jogged back to carry the orb of Fire for the final stretch.

Once on shore, all three boys ran as soon as they were paid.

Chane then spoke briefly to a sailor in a longboat, and when that boat was emptied, he climbed in and rode back over the waves toward the ship to see if he might arrange for passage.

Chap remained behind to guard the orbs, and while waiting alone on the beach, he had too much time to think as he sat between the two locked chests. He had not realized how much the sight of them being unearthed would haunt him . . . as if the memory of Nawyat were a ghost he would never escape.

He almost wished he could open one of those locked chests. While in the simple guide's body, in handling the orbs, he had to remove the man's glove. He had touched an orb for the first time with his own . . . with Nawyat's flesh.

There was a presence trapped inside each one—a Fay, singular, like himself. And still he had not stopped. He buried alive two of his kin in a frozen grave. At the time, he had told himself that all he had done had been for the good of the world. And now?

Now he had taken company with a Noble Dead, gone into the northern wastes, and unearthed the same orbs. And again, he believed this was necessary.

He could not call it right or good—only necessary.

How many more great but lesser sins would he bear next to Nawyat?

Closing his eyes, he pictured Magiere, Leesil, and Wynn, who trusted in him, and yet he no longer truly trusted himself. He did only what he hoped was right in the end even though many things he had done felt wrong.

Questions built like whispers in the depths below his thoughts.

There was only one—and the many—who had answers: his kin, the Fay. Part of them—like himself—had somehow been trapped inside those orbs. If he touched one again, could he find answers?

To do so he would need to have Chane unlock the chests, and Chane would want to know why. Chap could never tell any undead what was hidden inside the orbs.

A rhythmic splash shook him to awareness, and he looked out over the water. The longboat was returning to shore, and quickly enough, Chane leaped out to rush up the frozen beach.

“The ship sails south at dawn,” he rasped. “Let these sailors load the orbs. We need to board now.”

The longboat's prow ground to a halt on the beach, and two sailors hopped out to approach.

With some reluctance, Chap huffed once at Chane in agreement. He did not like the idea of letting the sailors handle the orbs, but even if Chane loaded all the chests onto the longboat himself, it would still take several men to get them onto the ship.

Chane lifted one chest himself. A young Numan sailor gripped the handles of another one and attempted to heft it up. Chap had worried about this. Although the orbs were about the size of a helm, they were unnaturally dense and heavy.

“What have you got in here?” the sailor asked, trying a second time with more effort.

Chane glared at the man without answering. The sailor said nothing more and managed to lift the chest with both arms while his companion carried the third, empty chest.

Moments later, they were on the water, and then it was not long before they boarded the ship . . . with a darkened, bloodstained deck and huge hooks on chains coiled along its side.

“Whaling vessel,” Chane said in a half whisper.