All it took was devouring a life—suddenly, quickly, all at once—and the close contact of a Noble Dead in the instant between life's end and death's coming. Chane had been lucky in the past not to have any of his prey rise.
Or had they? In recollection, aside from his time in Bela with Toret, he had always been on the move with Welstiel. He had never stayed long enough in one place to be certain.
Chane wanted no minions. And certainly not this side of beef sitting limp in the alley. The last trickles of blood ran down the corpse's neck, staining his filthy shirt like black ink in the alley's darkness.
Chane closed his eyes and saw Wynn's pained face staring back at him in accusation.
He opened his eyes, pulled out a fish knife stolen off the docks, and cut the man's throat deeply. When the corpse was found, his death would seem a common murder by some desperate cutpurse. Kneeling down, he searched the man and took every coin he found for his own needs.
Chane stepped from the alley and retrieved his own pouch, adding new coins to old. He began walking «home» toward the inn and never looked back.
Chapter 8
Wynn spent the next day in the catacombs with two terms stuck in her head—Âthkyensmyotnes and blâch-cheargéa.
She searched deep through the archives, even trying to find possible variations on the term “vampire.” But her continent's earliest peoples had no such words in any language. The varied ones she'd learned in the Farlands wouldn't be found in this branch of the guild. Several times she got lost in the maze of stone chambers and rooms. All she could do was follow the elemental symbols upon the edges of bookshelves.
Spirit, Fire, Air, Water, and Earth.
Circle, triangle, square, hexagon, and octagon.
The fewer the symbols in a column, the closer she was to the catacomb's front below the keep's rear wall. The most primary and general texts for each field of knowledge, indicated by one lone geometric shape, were closest to Domin Tärpodious's main chamber. Soon enough she found her way back and headed into other reaches of the archives.
Whenever she found a tome, sheaf, book, or scroll of interest, she backtracked to the nearest alcove. There she settled to read, never certain of how long she sat alone in the light of her cold lamp. Again, Wynn gained little more than a headache and tired eyes—until sometime close to supper.
…Master Geidelmon stared at the warth, though he could not make out its face within the cowl. The dark harbinger drifted into the kitchen's dim candlelight, appearing like a tall figure clad in a wafting shroud of black…
That one word—“warth”—wasn't familiar to Wynn, but she quickly turned the page of the old ghost tale.
…Tall and trim, its stature was much like Geidelmon once had, before he had sunk into years of gluttony. Rapture in food and wine had left him so rotund he could not even rise and flee. And following the portentous visitation, the next morning he was found slumped dead upon the table, a joint of mutton still lodged between his teeth.
The term, and even the whole tale, sounded like something Wynn had read before. But everything was beginning to sound like something she'd read before. She propped her elbows on the table, resting her head in her hands. She'd finally had enough of it.
Just the same, she recorded the term in her journal and then left for the comfort of her own room. But as she emerged into the castle's main floor, she paused.
The new library wasn't far off.
Wynn wove through the passages to its nearest entrance. It had no door, only a tall double-wide archway of finely crafted frame stones. The topmost four were engraved with Begaine symbols, one after the other, for the sages' creed.
TRUTH THROUGH KNOWLEDGE… KNOWLEDGE THROUGH UNDERSTANDING… UNDERSTANDING THROUGH TRUTH… WISDOM'S ETERNAL CYCLE.
Hurrying in, she fingered along a tall bookcase on the main floor, passing over a dozen lexicons, until she found the one she sought on the bottom shelf. Groaning at its bulk, she hefted it up and dropped it on a table. It took time to find any similar term.
waerth, n. [Origin unknown; found in early southern regional dialects, prenationalization of the Numan Lands.] One of several possible alternate spellings for the obscure modern Numanese term wraith [râth].
Wynn flipped pages to find the referenced entry for “wraith”: a dark or black apparition, sometimes similar to, or in the likeness of, a particular person. Found in folklore as an omen of immediate impending demise, though sometimes said to be seen shortly after an individual's death.
Wynn slammed the thick book shut—portents indeed!
More superstitious nonsense, which brought her no closer to the truth concerning what hunted her people and the folios. She jotted down the new term and definition next to her entry for the warth and left the library, hurrying all the way to her room.
Once inside, with the door tightly shut, Wynn flopped onto her bed. After a while she crawled over to peer out her narrow window. Somewhere in the distance, beyond the keep's walls, she heard eight bells ring out softly.
The last eighth of day, called Geuréleâ—“day's winter”—in the dwarven time system used throughout the Numan Lands. Dusk was coming, and the day's work hardly seemed useful.
Every time she thought of how she'd carried back a wealth of texts written by ancient undead but wasn't even allowed to see them, it left her so angry that her stomach burned. If she could only find some common thread within the folios' contents, she might provide Premin Sykion with a possible motive.
But for this to happen, the premin council had to acknowledge that the folios—and the entire project—were connected to the deaths and thefts. Otherwise, even a sound theory of motive would be disdainfully dismissed, like her tales of dhampirs, vampires, ghosts, and…
Wynn sighed and dropped back down on the bed. Rubbing her temples, she tried to drive angry obsession from her head. She needed clarity and calm as she went to her table-desk and began reviewing her notes.
Nonsensical accounts of animated corpses feeding on flesh replaced anger's burn with queasiness. She wished Domin il'Sänke would finish the sun crystal. But at least she was shut away in her room once again, where she worked best.
Her possessions were simple: a bed, a table for a desk, her cold lamp, a small chest, and all her journaling equipment. In spite of slight nausea, she was getting a bit hungry, having not eaten since breakfast.
At a knock on her door her heart thumped hard, and she thought, Please let it be il'Sänke, with the sun crystal finally completed. She ran for the door and jerked it open.
Nikolas stood outside, his face drawn and pale.
Wynn sagged in disappointment but tried to express concern. "What's wrong?"
He opened his mouth once, then closed it, and Wynn forgot her own worries.
Others called him little Nervous Nikolas, but he wasn't exactly little. He was slender, but not spindly, and of medium height. Perhaps his constant cringing and the twitching worry in his plain brown eyes had led to that nickname. She wondered what in his past had rooted this perpetual anxiety.
"Come in," she said, stepping back, "and tell me what's wrong."
He quickly slipped past her, but not before glancing both ways along the outer passage.
"I'm… I'm…" he began in a stammer.
Wynn took a deep breath and waited patiently.
"I'm being sent for tonight's folio!" he blurted out. "Me, with Miriam and Dâgmund, and they were followed last night!"