The Night Voice (13 page)

When she exhausted her questions, a moment of silence followed. Magiere's expression grew even more tense, as if what they had found and the repercussions were beginning to sink in. Looking at her face, Leesil came to life. He grasped her hand and dragged her off to the tent they shared with the sage. Wynn took a step after, paused, and then followed them.

Rest was short that day, and Khalidah roused everyone in the afternoon. They moved eastward, but as the sun touched the western horizon, he suggested they stop and set up a new base camp from which to explore this area.

While the others were busy with this, he excused himself to scout for water.

Once out of sight of the camp, he strode back into the foothills. His restraint against rage faltered. Dropping to a crouch, he jerked the medallion from inside his shirt and gripped it tightly.

Sau'ilahk!

A one-word answer took too long in coming.

What?

Where are you?

A moment of silence followed, and then . . .

We are camped a quarter league ahead of you to the east beneath a jagged foothill with an overhang.

Wait there.

He released the medallion before he could be questioned and rose to stride back toward the foothills' edge above the open desert. When certain of not being seen, he paused again with fear feeding his rage.

He hoped his rage was justified and that his fears were unfounded.

A small buzz rose inside his mind . . . Ghassan was once again trying to pester and confuse him.

“Shut up, you little insect!” he hissed.

Concentrating, he allowed an immense tangle of signs, sigils, and symbols to appear over his sight, and he lifted himself on his will. His body rose just high enough that his passage would not stir a trail of dust and sand in his wake . . . as he shot through the dusk toward the east. It was not long before he spotted the landmark of craggy foothills with an overhang.

Touching down lightly, he banished all glowing symbols from his sight and broke into a run. As he rounded the hill below its overhang, the ghost girl with her severed throat stood in his way, watching him.

There in the camp beyond her was the necromancer still strapped to his wheeled litter. Ubâd was tilted upright, as if awaiting the arrival between his two corpse attendants. Nearby stood Sau'ilahk, arms folded, his pale
skin still vivid in the twilight, though his blue-black hair nearly melded with the encroaching darkness.

Khalidah strode straight through the ghost girl, his gaze locked on Sau'ilahk.

He rarely used physical force, for he did not need to do so. There were so many better methods at his disposal. Yet now he could not stop himself. Grabbing the front of the false duke's shirt, he shoved Sau'ilahk back into the rocky hillside.

Before the wraith-in-flesh even righted himself among the sliding stones, Khalidah shouted, “What are you playing at, you self-righteous priest?”

Sau'ilahk straightened to full height, cold and quiet in a returned glare, and Khalidah suddenly second-guessed his action.

The priest's . . . the wraith's body was dead, unlike his own, but it appeared to be quite physically strong, and Khalidah had no idea of what else Sau'ilahk might be capable.

“Do not touch me again,” Sau'ilahk warned in a threatening whisper. “And what are you talking about?”

Pressing down tangled fear and fury, Khalidah fought for calm.

“You know! I told you to leave hints . . . a bit of bait to keep Magiere here until the other orbs are brought. I did not tell you to slaughter a pack of vagrant nomads. And how did you convince them of greater numbers?” He pointed to Ubâd's male servants. “Did you use them? Or has that dead necromancer created a few more ghosts?”

Sau'ilahk's brow furrowed in confusion. He did not even glance at Ubâd. Then the ghost girl suddenly appeared between them.

“What is this?” she lashed out at Khalidah. “We have not changed our position since you contacted us the night before last.”

Khalidah stiffened. As angry as he was at the idea of Sau'ilahk's giving in to an urge of excess, the alternative was worse, as he had no control over it.

“We have
not
moved,” Sau'ilahk added.

Khalidah turned away. After a moment, he related the scene of slaughter,
still not truly believing the denials—the feigned ignorance—of his confederates. For if Sau'ilahk was not the culprit, and the story of the survivors was true in another way, then the ruse Khalidah had used to lead Magiere on was no longer a ruse.

Beloved was calling its servants.

This meant their god
was
on the verge of reawakening.

Choices now became few: dangerous, and worse.

Magiere might stop scouting for proof and turn to find Beloved if more random events spurred her on. If groups of the undead and their like were now truly scurrying to the east . . .

Khalidah was not ready for this. Three orbs were still not in his possession. His only controllable allies were this miscreant High Reverent One and a necromancer with no true life to lose. And both were as starved for revenge as he was.

None of them trusted one another. In life, Sau'ilahk had made no secret of how much he despised the Sâ'yminfiäl, the Masters of Frenzy or Eaters of Silence. The feeling had been mutual between the sects.

And now Ubâd would know that both Sau'ilahk and Khalidah despised him. Compared to them, he was a rebellious child for all of their centuries of suffering and enslavement. From what Khalidah understood, Ubâd had been taken down by a single majay-hì and not even by the dhampir herself.

Yet, all three of them had their own uses in this matter.

All three labored toward the same goal.

As Khalidah finished recounting the morning slaughter, Sau'ilahk had been as silent as the corpse master.

“If this is true,” he finally said, “if a horde is being gathered, then what of our own plans?”

“Nothing has changed,” Khalidah answered, “though it will make my dealings with the dhampir more difficult.”

“Lies from the master of lies,” the ghost girl countered for Ubâd. “The closer she comes to so many prey, the more she will want to hunt.”

“Then I will keep her from them,” Khalidah replied. “I will not allow her to find the resting place of Beloved yet . . . of anything gathering there.”

“Where are Andraso and the majay-hì?” Sau'ilahk asked. “How much longer until they return with the other orbs?”

At least this turned to better news with which to pacify his inferiors.

“They have acquired all three remaining orbs,” Khalidah assured. “They now sail south for Soráno.”

“That is still a good distance,” Sau'ilahk cut in. “Can you keep the dhampir in control until they return?”

Khalidah did not bother responding and turned to give instructions.

“Leave a few more hints for her,” he said. “And perhaps next time, something to give the little sage pause. Make Wynn wonder if the past returns to . . . haunt her . . . oh, restless spirit! Wynn's fears are shackles upon the dhampir as well.”

Sau'ilahk's eyes narrowed, and he nodded once.

Khalidah did not need to feed so long as he was in proximity to orbs, but in part, he envied the priest, for his body—Ghassan's body—still required food.

“It is more difficult to find desert denizens than imagined,” Sau'ilahk said. “And less so living ones the farther east that we go.”

“I have faith in you,” Khalidah answered dryly.

Sau'ilahk sneered and turned away.

• • •

Trapped within his flesh, Ghassan il'Sänke found that his panic grew. He was party to every action, every word that Khalidah spoke, and yet he was powerless. And he felt himself becoming weaker, fading a little more each night. It had become difficult to remember certain things too far in the past.

Somehow, some way, he had to warn Wynn Hygeorht. She was the only one who might recognize something from him, not from Khalidah.

A
board the
Kestrel
, Chane came to a decision halfway to Soráno. He had been preparing to try something and believed he was ready.

Chap and Ore-Locks had adapted to living on his schedule, sleeping through the days, though they were always up before he rose at dusk. They also chose to spend a fair portion of time on deck, which gave Chane some much-desired privacy.

He carried two packs wherever he traveled. The first contained his personal possessions, spare clothing, and now the talking hide for Chap. The second was old and faded and a guarded treasure.

That pack and most of its contents had once belonged to Welstiel Massing, another vampire, Magiere's half brother, and son in life to a vampire once a vagrant noble. Welstiel had also been an arcane practitioner of thaumaturgy by artificing, specifically alchemy. And his subtle skill with both pushed the limits of Chane's minor knowledge of conjury.

When Welstiel died, Chane had taken his pack. A number of objects inside it had proven invaluable in his own experiments. The pack also now contained texts Chane had stolen from a monastery of healers on the eastern continent.

The most critical one for this night was
The Seven Leaves of Life
.

Chane was obsessed with one page in that volume, though its instructions were archaic and obscure. It described the making of a rare and potent healing concoction. During his stays with Wynn at the Calm Seatt branch of the Guild of Sagecraft, he had privately discussed both the ingredients and the creation process with Premin Hawes, head of the branch's order of Metaology. Most of the ingredients were herbs, easy to obtain, but two were unknown to him until Hawes translated and explained them.

Muhkgean
was a mushroom grown by the dwarves. Ore-Locks had once helped him gain those mushrooms, and they were harmless.

The other had not proved harmless, at least for him.

Anamgiah
, the “life shield,” was a white flower found in the fields outside the Lhoin'na forests. Later, he had learned the same grew in the lands of the an'Cróan on the world's far continent, where it was called
Anasgiah
. Even raw, those opalescent blossoms had healing properties. And so much more when combined correctly with the other six ingredients.

When he had recognized those blossoms upon first visiting the Lhoin'na lands with Wynn, Shade, and Ore-Locks, he had been stunned. He should have never gathered them by hand, and he had nearly died the last time upon barely touching their glistening petals.

But now he had them in his possession, dried, wrapped, and stored in the second pack well away from contact with his skin. Over time, he had collected the other necessities for the formula. At last, he had everything, or so he hoped.

Before rejoining Wynn, and hopefully Shade—and before any of them faced the Ancient Enemy—he needed to be certain of saving either of them, should the worst come. His own body was nearly indestructible. Wynn's was not, and even Shade had her limits.

However, instructions to make the potion appeared deliberately vague.

This elixir was powerful enough to be feared in the wrong hands, and he had reasoned why. A tyrant or butcher of the battlefield could be nearly untouchable with the ability to heal the gravest wounds in short order. And
from what Chane surmised, this elixir might as well be protection against poison, venom, disease . . . anything that caused living flesh to fail.

He studied the page with a translation that he and Hawes had made, pausing on the word “boil” and not for the first time.

This suggested water or liquid; every concoction he had ever read of related to nonliquids used thrice-purified water as the medium. He suspected the same herein, though like many things in the fields of hidden knowledge and practice, it was not explicitly mentioned by the author.

Chane picked up a copper bottle but did not remove its matching stopper. He gently turned it, feeling its contents slosh. He had taken great pains to make as much thrice-purified water as he could.

From the journey's earliest part, he had caught clean rain in a bowl held out the cabin's porthole whenever he could, and he stored the rainwater in a glass vessel.

When he had enough rainwater, he sterilized an empty copper bottle with wood alcohol, pouring that out to save, and blowing out excess fumes, and then carefully inverting the bottle over the flame of a candle.

Any ignition had been extinguished.

After this, he prepared an oil-fueled burner with several
Anamgiah
accoutrements. He took up the glass vessel filled with rainwater and the copper one he had sterilized. Upon filling the copper bottle with rainwater, he replaced its stopper with a ceramic elbow-shaped pipe.

He set the glass bottle under the elbow's other end.

Steam rose into the ceramic elbow and dripped into the glass bottle's mouth. It took a while, and the process had to be repeated twice. In the end, he had less than a third of the original water, now thrice purified. He stored this in the sterilized copper bottle.

On the night the
Kestrel
docked at Chathburh, less than halfway to Soráno, Chane steeled himself to attempt making the elixir from
The Seven Leaves of Life
. He feared failure, for there would be no chance to replenish the two most important ingredients, but he could no longer put off the attempt. When he,
Ore-Locks, and Chap went up on deck, he waited for Chap to wander off toward the forecastle.

Chane pulled Ore-Locks aside. “Do you trust me?”

Ore-Locks blinked and frowned. Neither had ever asked such a pointed but general question of the other.

It was a long moment before Ore-Locks nodded. “Yes . . . I do.”

Equally surprised by the answer, Chane realized he trusted Ore-Locks enough to share part of the truth.

“I need time alone in the cabin to make something for Wynn's protection—and maybe others'—should the worst come.”

In spite of his prior claim, Ore-Locks frowned. “Make something?”

“Medicine,” Chane answered, for this was partly true, though if successful, it would be more than that. “No one else should know for now, and Chap does not trust me enough to stay out of my way. Can you keep him from the cabin for as long as possible?”

Ore-Locks's frown deepened, and he growled, “Very well.”

About to leave, Chane then wondered what the errant stonewalker might be able to do about Chap. Asking would waste time, so with a nod, he hurried for the aftcastle door. The last thing he did was to borrow a bucket of cold seawater from a deckhand.

Once inside the cabin, Chane bolted its door from inside and set to work.

He had attempted something similar only once before.

Welstiel had possessed an elixir that allowed a vampire to remain awake during daylight, though it had to stay out of direct sunlight. When Chane had stolen the pack after Welstiel's death at Magiere's hands, he had found a small amount of this elixir in the pack.

And there were journals and notes as well.

After obtaining a key component—a poisonous flower called
Dyvjàka Svonchek
or “boar's bell”—he had later managed to re-create that elixir by using himself as a test subject. The process was unpleasant and dangerous,
but he succeeded after multiple attempts and gained the advantage of guarding Wynn constantly during some of their worst times.

Unfortunately, he had used up all of that elixir, and there had been no opportunity to procure more boar's bell.

Now he was to try something he could not test on himself, for it would contain extract from
Anamgiah
blossoms. The result would be “deadly” to any physical undead. There would be no room for mistakes, no way to test it, and no certainty of success until it was needed.

Chane slowly opened Welstiel's faded pack.

One by one, he took out the components, tools, and necessities and laid them out upon the floor. A clear glass vessel was among them. After this, he prepared the oil-fueled burner. Then he took up the copper bottle filled with thrice-purified water.

Opening
The Seven Leaves of Life
, he turned to the correct page and laid the book out on the floor. With the copper bottle wedged between his folded legs, he began to powder and prepare the ingredients. Again, he guessed—hoped—the list in the book represented the proper order for adding ingredients. For such a concoction, adding all at once did not make sense; this was not some cook's soup. For each ingredient added, he applied heat to the copper vessel and then poured a tiny amount into the glass one to examine it.

Twice the water was cloudy; twice he reapplied heat. More puzzling was how the water eventually turned clear again after the first two ingredients. He took this as a sign of correctness for all others that followed . . . until the last two.

Chane glanced at those two still wrapped in folded paper. Opening the first, he uncovered the dried
Muhkgean
, strange gray mushrooms with caps that spread in branched protrusions. Though now withered, each branch's end splayed and flattened in a shape like a tiny leaf. He powdered the mushrooms with a pestle and mortar.

Quantities for ingredients were another guess, and so far with measures, he had assumed all ingredients were added in equal quantities. He did the
same with a pinch of powdered
Muhkgean.
But no matter how often he checked and reboiled the mixture . . . something had gone wrong.

Chane sat staring at the cloudy, slightly grayed water, caught between panic and anger at failure. Had he used too much or too little of the mushrooms? Had he done so with one or more of the other ingredients? There was not enough left of some to try again. And how much longer could Ore-Locks keep Chap from returning to the cabin?

Panic and frustration turned into desperation as Chane stared down.

The tiny leaf-shaped petals of dried
Anamgiah
had lost almost all of their opalescence, though they were still pure white. There was nothing he could do now but finish.

He took out a pair of small tin tweezers from among Welstiel's tools and carefully pinched dried petals to grind with mortar and pestle. Even dried, he dared not touch them with his own flesh, so measuring an “inch” on the tip of a knife made him freeze up for an instant.

Chane tilted the knife's tip over the copper bottle. And just before he placed the copper vessel back upon the tripod above the flame . . .

Hope failed him, and neither fear nor rage could bring it back. There had been too many variables in the process.

All he could do was continue.

• • •

Up on deck, Chap strolled about in the fresh air. It was far better than being cooped up with his traveling companions. Eventually, he elicited one too many annoyed glances from the crew members rushing about in their duties, so he turned back from the bow.

Then he noticed Ore-Locks was alone, and he paused. Chane often spent some of his waking time belowdecks, but not usually so early in the evening. Where had he gone? Ore-Locks was turned away to the near rail, looking out to sea, and Chap decided to go below and see what Chane was doing. He headed toward the aft doorway.

“Majay-hì.”

Chap halted and looked to the dwarf. Ore-Locks rarely spoke to him, and he had little idea what to even think of the young stonewalker.

In a few overheard conversations with Chane, Ore-Locks had sounded displeased when he learned they would be stopping at the city of the Lhoin'na before the long trek to Bäalâle Seatt. It seemed the stonewalker had a deep mistrust of anything he considered to be “elven.” Worse, Ore-Locks's attitude made it plain that he considered Chap to belong in that category.

Chap watched as the dwarf left the rail and came toward him.

“Majay-hì,” Ore-Locks repeated, “my master said that you spoke into his thoughts with words out of his own memories, and in the voices of others in his past. Can you do so . . . with me?”

Chap's surprise—and suspicion—grew as the dwarf continued.

“Chane said you cannot speak to him because of the ring he wears. Is this also true?”

That Chane and Ore-Locks had discussed this was another surprise. Chap had never spoken directly to the vampire and did not wish to do so, ever. He could only imagine what atrocities Chane had committed in the past that might rise out of his memory. The cries of his past victims were the last thing Chap wished to use for a voice—of words—with that
thing
.

Or did Chane ever even think of the slaughter he had left in his passing?

Still, Chap did not answer Ore-Locks.

Until recently, Chap preferred to keep his new ability to himself. His way of communicating with Wynn was unique. He had limited the other, newer method to Magiere, Leesil, and Wayfarer. Only desperation had pushed him to use “memory-words” with Cinder-Shard and reveal himself as more than he appeared to be.

He did not like letting that secret out.

“As we will travel,” Ore-Locks went on, “with other challenges to meet and who knows what else . . . perhaps it is best if you and I could speak? Or you with me, that is.”

Chap sighed, for it was certainly sensible and practical. And in this case, there was no secret left to be kept, though he wondered why Ore-Locks had waited until now.

—What . . . would you like . . . me . . . to say?—

Ore-Locks's eyes widened, blinking rapidly, until he swallowed and cleared his throat.

Chap wanted to roll his canine eyes. But someone knowing he could do this and experiencing it firsthand were worlds apart.

“By the ancestors!” Ore-Locks whispered.

—Did you think . . . your master . . . lied . . . about me?—

“No, no . . . but . . .” and then came a furtive glance toward the aftcastle door.

Chap stiffened. After this mostly one-sided conversation, something else occurred to him.