Chane had much to do before he could glimpse what it held.

He spent evenings skulking around Bela after dusk before all shops had closed. He needed to know how to restore age-hardened leather to a flexible state without destroying whatever was marked upon it. Consulting leather-workers on the pretense of refurbishing an old vest, he learned to make a cold-filtered mixture of linseed oil and white vinegar. Then he sought scribes and others familiar with inks who could tell him if the solution would affect anything written. One night, back in his room, he took a camel hair brush and delicately applied the mixture for the first time.

The scroll's tightly curved outer surface darkened suddenly.

Chane froze, fearing he'd ruined the ancient relic. But as the solution dried, the thin leather returned to its pale aged color. Caution took hold nonetheless.

He applied the restoration solution only once per day, just before dawn but keeping it in a dark, cool corner. He gently tested the scroll's flexibility at each dusk when he rose from dormancy. Twenty-seven nights passed before the scroll lay perfectly flat, but it was on the seventeenth night that Chane had caught his first glimpse of its content—or lack of it.

The top end of the scroll's inner surface was nearly black, as if wholly covered in ink that had set centuries ago.

Chane slumped in astonishment, and he almost took the scroll and tossed it in the inn's front hearth. Instead he opened the small room's one window, sick of the solution's stench, and stalked out for the night.

When he returned before dawn, senses enlivened by a fresh kill, he didn't bother testing the scroll's flexibility. He shut the window, covered the panes with a moth-eaten blanket against the coming sun, and stretched out upon the straw mattress.

A faint odor tickled his nose. Not vinegar and linseed oil, but something else just beneath that.

Chane sat up.

With fresh life filling him, his skin prickled lightly at dawn's approach. He heard someone out in the inn's front room dump a log on the hearth. Chane drew air deeply through his nose.

He got up and went to the stool he used for a worktable, carefully lifting the scroll.

He'd never before noticed the scent beneath the solution's pungent odor. Or perhaps the solution, permeating and softening the hide sheet, had revitalized something else. With the room's air cleared and his senses opened fully, he lifted the scroll, sniffing its black coating repeatedly.

At first he could not place the thin trace, but it sparked a memory.

In that lost mountain monastery of the healer-monks, called the Servants of Compassion, he had fought with Welstiel and bitten into his undead companion's leg. As Welstiel's black fluids seeped through his breeches, Chane's mouth filled with a taste like rancid linseed oil, and he smelled it as well…

That same odor rose faintly from the scroll's blackened surface.

There had been worn and jumbled writings on the ice-crusted castle's walls, made with the fluids of an undead. The same scent had lingered thinly around the writing.

Urgency made Chane's hands shudder, until the scroll quivered slightly beneath his fingertips. He recognized the scent, not from the ink coating itself, but from something hidden beneath that blackness.

Chane smelled a hint of rancid linseed oil.

A Noble Dead had written on the leather scroll in its own fluids or another's—and then blotted it out with painted ink. But then why had the scroll been kept for so long?

And how would he ever find out, with no way to read beneath the coating?

Chane couldn't reason a way to remove the ink without fear of damaging what lay beneath. So he simply continued with his painstaking restoration until the twenty-seventh night, when the scroll lay completely flat, restored to full pliancy.

He had never been alone before—or perhaps not lonely. The scroll's content, blocked from him, much as he was blocked from Wynn's world, began to conjure renewed thoughts of her.

For a quarter moon he lurked outside the old barracks. All he wanted was one glimpse of Wynn, though he still did not know if he should—could—face her again. But she never appeared. Chane saw Domin Tilswith several times, but he could not reveal his presence to Wynn's old master. Tilswith also knew what he was. Finally, one evening he could stand the ignorance no longer.

A girl in a gray robe like Wynn's ventured out of the barracks' worn door with empty milk bottles bundled clumsily in her arms. And Chane stepped from the shadows.

He did not often speak, hating the sound of his own voice. During his pursuit of Magiere she had once beheaded him in the forests of Apudâlsat. Welstiel managed to bring him back through some arcane method, but Chane's voice had never healed.

In his brushed cloak and polished boots, he looked again like a young affluent gentleman. But still, the girl almost dropped her bottles in surprise.

"I am looking for news of an old friend," he rasped. "Do you know where I might find Wynn Hygeorht?"

The girl's brow wrinkled at Chane's maimed voice, but then smoothed as her eyes widened in understanding. Though he took no pride in it, he was aware of how his tall form and handsome face affected some women. She spoke Belaskian with a Numanese accent.

"Journeyor Hygeorht? I'm sorry, but she is no longer with us. When she returned with old texts recovered from an abandoned fortification, Domin Tilswith gave her the duty of carrying them back to the home branch in Malourné. She is gone."

Chane stepped back.

The apprentice looked at him with more interest, perhaps even compassion.

"You could write to her," the girl offered, "though a letter would take a long while to reach Calm Seatt. We do send regular correspondence on the eve of the new moons. I could include yours, if you like."

He nodded, still backing away, as if the ground began slipping from under his feet.

"Yes… thank you. I will consider that."

Wynn was gone, left for home across the ocean to another continent—another world.

Chane ambled listlessly through Bela's night streets, paying no heed to where he walked. He found himself at the waterfront, standing before the great warehouses and docks. And he stared out over the bay's night water sparked by a star-speckled sky. The only other light came from sparse lanterns hanging along the double-deck piers or on ships out in the wide harbor.

This was where Wynn had boarded and left for the Numan lands, long gone from any chance to catch one last glimpse of her…

"Sir, will you be wanting tea tonight?"

At the voice, Chane was jerked from his reverie in his room in Calm Seatt. He stepped over and cracked the door.

The corpulent innkeeper, who he assumed was Nattie, stood outside. In the Crown Range north of the Farlands, Chane had picked up the habit of drinking tea. And only recently had he begun going out at dusk to track the folios. The innkeeper sometimes still checked in on him. He always paid his bill in advance, and the grease-stained owner treated him with decent manners, following a request not to knock during the day.

"No, thank you, not tonight," Chane said, and closed the door.

Time was slipping away, and he had already wasted too much reliving events he could not change. He grabbed his cloak, sword, and packs, then locked the door and left the inn.

No one addressed him as he walked quickly through the darkening streets. Wearing a long wool cloak, he was nondescript. A few drunkards eyed him as they stumbled from a tavern, but they stayed well out of his way. He headed toward the better-lit and — maintained eastern merchant district.

He knew the location of the Gild and Ink, but cursed himself for not leaving the inn sooner. It was a long way off, even if he wasted energy bolting along back alleys. Any messenger sages may have already come and gone with tonight's folio. Yet he had to be certain, and walked quickly until approaching the correct street.