Child of a Dead God (2 page)
All he could think of was the taste of terror-seasoned blood tingling down his throat to fill him with euphoria. Not for release from hunger but for the pleasure of feeding.
He heard Welstiel’s footfalls behind him, and the cracking of wood. When he pulled the last door shut, and shoved back a figure trying to emerge from the previous door, he was shaking with a wild appetite.
Welstiel carried shards of thick wood in his hands. He shoved one through each door’s iron handle and braced its end against the stone frame. Anyone who tried to pull a door inward would need enormous brute strength. Welstiel passed his gaze over each door along the passage’s sides.
“Seventeen candidates,” he muttered, absorbed in thought. “Adequate . . . since we had no opportunity for a more studied selection.” He lowered his head. “There are several still below, incapacitated. Drag them up and lock them away.”
Chane wanted to snarl, but didn’t. Instead, he pushed past Welstiel for the stairs, numbly following orders.
By his second trip down, only two priests remained in the entry room— the elderly woman and the young man Chane had thrown aside. Welstiel knelt on the floor by the latter, unpacking his little brass cup.
“Take the woman,” he said. “Leave the man.”
Welstiel refused to feed directly on blood, preferring his arcane methods to draw concentrated life force. He began chanting softly.
Chane snatched up the woman, dragging her limp body up the stairs.
By the time he returned, Welstiel had finished. The young priest was a desiccated husk, and the cup brimmed with red liquid so dark it looked black in the entry room’s low hearth light. But Welstiel did not drink. He poured the cup’s contents into a brown glass bottle and pressed a cork soundly into its neck.
“You will remain here, out of my way,” he said.
Welstiel headed for the stairs, but he paused at the first step. A shiver ran through his back. He lifted his head, staring up the dark stone staircase for a long moment, and then resumed his ascent.
Resentment could not stifle Chane’s curiosity. He drew close, watching.
Welstiel climbed in a slow, forced gait, as if bearing a weight that grew with each step, until he slipped into the upper passage beyond sight. A door creaked above, followed by a dull thump.
Chane’s suspicion sharpened, but he felt compelled to follow Welstiel’s orders not to pry—at least for now. He scanned his surroundings.
A passage ran along the building’s front from left of the front door. The stairs were set farther back on that same side and ran upward in the same direction. An old bench stood against the opposite wall, with three cloaks and a long-haired goatskin coat hanging on wooden pegs. In the rear stone wall, between the small hearth and the stairwell’s base, was an opening leading deeper into the structure.
Chane was in no mood for poking about, but he did not care to just stand there, waiting, so he stepped through the rear opening.
The passage immediately turned left, ended in a right turn, and spilled into a wide chamber behind the entry room. A lantern on the nearest table offered enough light for Chane’s hunger-enhanced sight.
Bundles of drying leaves, flowers, and branches hung from cords strung loosely across the ceiling. Below the dangling harvest, pottery and glass jars sat atop wooden tables along with rolling pins stained from long use, polished marble pestles, knives, and other instruments. It was the priests’ workshop.
Chane stepped back and retreated down the passage, and as he reached the entry room, a muffled clatter sounded from above.
He looked up the dark stairs, wondering again what Welstiel was doing. Curious, he climbed until he was high enough to peer over the last step. He saw the doors along the upper passage. A sharp squeal of panic came from somewhere behind one of them. Silence followed, and Chane crept farther up. He smelled the rich, salty blood even before he saw it.
Smeared trails led from a dark pool at the passage’s far end to the second door on the left. Chane’s longing began to build as he stared at one door after another, trying to discern which cell Welstiel was in.
The wood brace was missing from the second and third doors on the left.
The third door jerked inward and Welstiel emerged.
His cloak, shirt, and sword were gone. He braced one hand on the door frame and gagged with his mouth tightly shut. Fresh blood seeped from between his clenched lips and ran down his chin to drip upon his bare chest.
Welstiel had been feeding, while Chane had been denied a chance to do so himself.
Welstiel’s eyes rolled up, and his clear crystal pupils vanished, leaving white orbs. He faltered, wavering near collapse, then turned back to heave something from the cell’s floor. Welstiel dragged a young priest to the first door on the left, and kicked it open.
The dead youth’s eyes were frozen wide in astonishment above the red mess below his chin.
Welstiel tossed the corpse in and jerked the door shut, not bothering to reset a wood shard in the door’s handle. Instead he staggered away until his back struck a door on the passage’s opposite side. Small startled whimpers answered from within that cell.
Chane took a step, unable to hiss even one resentful word, and then Welstiel stumbled.
He fell to his hands and knees and crawled to the passage’s far end. His back arched as he vomited out blood, heaving violently. Finally, in a shadow of living habit, Welstiel drew a breath into his dead lungs and toppled.
He tried to fall clear of his own mess, but there was too much blood. It spattered across him as he landed, convulsing in the pool spreading down the passage floor. Finally, he crawled into one far corner and propped himself up against the walls.
Chane couldn’t fathom what was happening. His mind was too clouded by the smell and sight of the red trails creeping down the passage, as if seeking him out.
“One . . . mine!” he rasped. “One should be mine!”
“Get out,” Welstiel whispered and lifted a hand to hide his face. He recoiled at the crimson running down his bare arm.
“No,” Chane answered. “No more drinking from your filthy little cup! I want one of them . . . now!”
He bolted for the door across from where Welstiel had tossed the dead priest. Before Chane’s fingers touched the handle, Welstiel was there, and his hand closed in a crushing grip on Chane’s wrist.
“I said
no
,” Welstiel growled.
no
,” Welstiel growled.
Chane lashed out for his throat.
Welstiel’s head twisted aside like a serpent weaving upon its coiled body. He heaved on Chane’s arm, turning it back and behind, and pulled it taut with a crack.
“Already twice raised”—Welstiel hissed at him—“in your first year of death!”
A fist struck the back of Chane’s skull. His head snapped down, driving his chin against his chest. The blow’s power buckled his knees, and the passage dimmed in his sight.
“And still you do not listen,” Welstiel added, “to your better!”
Pain spread through the back of Chane’s skull. He saw only the blurred, dark shape of Welstiel’s leg. He strained against his locked arm and sank his teeth through the thick canvas breeches.
No tang of warm blood filled his mouth—no salty sweetness or tingle of life flooded his throat. Only thin, bitter cold seeped from Welstiel’s breeches. It flowed quickly through Chane’s teeth and a taste like rancid seed oil coated his tongue.
Chane’s shoulder cracked again as his jaws tore free and his knees lifted from the floor. He kicked wildly, trying to find footing, and then his whole body spun in the dark and slammed sideways into a stone wall. At the same instant, something struck hard into his chest.
His spine ground into the wall, making his throat clench in reflex. Before his body slid down, he was jerked through the air again.
A second impact, and a third, and he heard but did not feel the fourth. Only half-aware of the grips around his throat and twisted arm, he cried out as both released suddenly.
Chane felt an instant of weightlessness as he tumbled through the dark. He collided roughly with the floor, edges of stone scraping at him as he flopped over and over. When all motion ceased, he weakly rolled his head.
He lay in the entry room near the bottom of the stairwell and firelight flickered off the stone walls. A deeper shadow in blood-soaked boots stood at the top of the stairs.
“Servant beasts should obey,” it whispered in Welstiel’s voice. “If they want to be fed . . . and have their wishes fulfilled.”
Chane’s eyelids sagged closed. Something inside him cowered in anguish, like a chained beast with hands instead of paws. It had fed on gristle and joints for too long, while its master had just feasted on fresh meat.
Chane opened his eyes when a cold breeze rolled across his face.
Firelight danced over a stone ceiling above him. When he turned over, he found a congealed puddle of viscous black fluid where his head had rested, and he touched the back of his skull, wincing.
Looking about the entry room, his gaze passed over the withered remains of the young priest.
How long had he lain here unconscious?
The hearth’s fire still burned as if recently fueled. A tin kettle rested near it, faint wisps of steam rising from its spout. And the cold breeze . . .
The front door was ajar.
Chane glanced up the dark stairwell. Not a sound came from above. All was silent but for the crackle of the flames and the cold air spilling around the open door. He struggled to his feet.
Twice risen, Welstiel had said, only in his first year of death. Less than a full season past, Chane had been beheaded, and Welstiel had somehow brought him back. The only evidence that it had ever happened was the scar line around Chane’s throat—and his forever maimed voice. Some among the dead would say he had been fortunate indeed.
Yet he had just tried to face an experienced undead freshly gorged on life.
Despite festering resentment, Chane acknowledged his own foolishness.
He tottered and bent over to brace his hands against his knees. His left shoulder and elbow burned as if filled with embedded needles. And now he was truly hungry. His dead flesh ached for life with which to repair itself.
But why was the front door open?
Chane stumbled over, pulling it wide. Falling snow swirled in the darkness outside, and he heard a grunt off to the left.
Welstiel knelt in a drift, still naked to the waist. Thin trails of steam rose from bloodstains on his arms and chest. He leaned down, scooping armfuls of snow, and splashed it over himself, scrubbing furiously. He repeated the process over and over.
“Why?” Chane asked.
Welstiel lifted his head. Flakes of snow clung to the locks down his forehead. When his gaze landed on Chane, his expression shifted from numb horror to startled wariness.
“Awake, are you?” he asked quietly, and rose to his feet. “And reason returns once more . . . for the moment . . . but always with one foot perched upon the Feral Path.”
“What are you babbling about?” Chane rasped, though that last strange reference seemed familiar.
He tensed as Welstiel approached, but he was in no condition for another fight.
“Perhaps I should not help you reach your sages,” Welstiel went on, but he stared into the gorge, as if alone. “Monster with a mind . . .”
Chane hesitated. Welstiel had promised him letters of introduction to gain acceptance at one of the sages’ main branches, across the sea—in exchange for Chane’s obedient service on this journey.
“A beast,” Welstiel whispered mockingly, “sent in among the learned of the
cattle
.”
cattle
.”
That last word, which Chane had used so often, suggested Welstiel was fully aware of his presence, but the tone made Chane’s instincts sharpen in warning. He sidestepped toward the switchback path down the gorge’s sheer face, ready to bolt.
“Get back inside!” Welstiel ordered.
Chane halted.
Welstiel stood as still as ice, a pale column of flesh surrounded in a swirling white snowfall.
Chane longed for the denied pleasure of a feast. Sustaining draughts from Welstiel’s cup might fuel him more than feeding would, but they left him painfully unsatisfied in other ways. But the existence he most desired still awaited him, where he would spend his nights studying history and languages in a sages’ guild. He closed his eyes and saw Wynn’s oval face. Could he attain this world on his own and no longer suffer Welstiel’s madness?
“Now,” Welstiel demanded. “Or stay and burn in the sun!”
Chane raised his eyes to the sky.
In the east, a faint glow exposed the black silhouette of the gorge’s distant ridge. Where in this desolate place would he find shelter if he ran? He backed into the entry room as Welstiel followed, slamming the door shut.
“Sit,” Welstiel instructed. “I will have need of you soon . . . to guard them until they rise.”
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