Barb Hendee: Through Stone and Sea

Bedzâ'kenge—Feather-Tongue—was the patron of wisdom and heritage through story, song, and poetry, their paragon of orators and historians. For as long as any history remembered, the dwarves kept to oral tradition rather than the literary ways of humankind.

As Wynn hurried along, she noticed faint shadows upon the granite street stones. Another glance eastward, between stout buildings on the settlement's outer edge, showed the horizon growing ever lighter.

"Are we near yet?" Chane asked.

He didn't sound concerned, but Wynn knew better. If they didn't find the temple soon, they'd have to knock on some random door and beg admittance to get him out of the coming dawn.

"We're in the right area," she half lied. "I'll recognize the street when I see it."

But she wished she'd paid better attention as a girl while visiting with Domin Tilswith.

Wynn stopped between wide steps on both sides. Another thick four-sided stone pillar stood in the intersection. Atop it, steam leaked around a huge raw crystal casting orange light and warmth about the street. Oral or not, dwarves had an ancient writing system, and columns often served the same purpose as street signs in human cities.

She circled it, scanning for engravings upon its smooth faces—not for names of streets but for places found in the direction the column's sides faced. She could read the common dialect reasonably well, but the temple of Bedzâ'kenge wasn't mentioned. Either it didn't lie along any of these routes or it was more than one level up.

Along the higher staircase, she spotted a mapmaker's shop on the first landing, its tan banner flying above a wide front door.

"There," she breathed in relief. "I remember that from the last time I was here."

She hurried up the steps past the mapmaker's shop and others, all the way to the main street's next switchback.

"I know where we are," Wynn exclaimed.

Chane raised one eyebrow. "I was not aware you were in doubt."

"Oh, just come on!"

She broke into a jog, heading the other way. At the next intersecting stairway, she turned upward again. She stopped halfway, catching her breath on a landing with sculpted miniature fir trees planted in large black marble pots. She knew she had the right path, but Chane's brow wrinkled as he glanced east.

"Almost there," she said in a gasp, and hiked her robe as she climbed again.

Shade bounded ahead, reaching the street's next switchback first. Wynn hoped at least one shirvêsh—a temple attendant—was up and about this early.

A deep tone echoed between the buildings.

Wynn pulled up short on the steps and held her breath.

"What?" Chane whispered.

She raised a hand for silence and waited, listening and hoping for more tones to come, but none did.

"Night-Winter is over!" she whispered in panic. "Day-Spring begins!"

"What does that mean?" Chane demanded.

This was no time to explain dwarven measures of night's and day's phases. She grabbed his sleeve, jerking him onward.

"Dawn is coming!"

"I do not need bells to know that," he answered.

Wynn reached Shade at the main street's next crossing. Across the way, before the next intersection pillar and its steaming crystal, was a massive structure emerging from the mountainside. Its double doors of white marble were set back beneath a high overhang supported by columns carved like living trees. But quick relief vanished.

Faint shadows from the columns began to appear upon the doors.

Wynn had to get Chane inside right now.

A dark column, like smoke thickening in shadow, grew in a small street-side terrace. It coalesced before an old fir tree nurtured in that place. And a heavy black cowl sagged across a cloak layered over a long black robe.

Sau'ilahk watched his trio of quarry scurry up the steps to the columned and roofed landing.

The sky grew light, and he could not remain for long nor risk going closer. The wolf might sense him. But he now knew these three better, having followed their nightly journey all the way from Calm Seatt.

Wynn Hygeorht, journeyor sage, kept company with a savage, tall wolf she had named Shade. But the pale one called Chane was more suspicious. He gave off no sense of presence at all. In Calm Seatt, both of Wynn's companions had been difficult to deal with face-to-face, as neither succumbed to Sau'ilahk's life-consuming touch. But Wynn frustrated and angered him most.

If not for her meddling, he might have acquired more translation folios—and perhaps a hint to the remedy of his long misery.

She did not know his name, never would, and instead referred to him as something out of her people's quaint old folklore—a wraith. She even thought him destroyed by the staff's crystal. Oh, she had injured him worse than he could remember and driven him into dark dormancy. The crystal's flare had torn him up like sunlight. But she had no notion what he truly was, whom she had interfered with. In centuries of searching, he had never come close to what he sought until the ancient texts had appeared at the guild. And now …

Sau'ilahk slid back through the massive fir and into its deeper shadows, feeling the life in its branches pass through him as if he were nothing ! That worthless tingle of life was too removed from his once living nature. It did not feed him and only made him ache for one precious thing lost an age ago.

Flesh.

By dear, deceitful Beloved, the one true deity, how he ached to have flesh once more. That singular desire might have been all that had kept him from fading into nothingness over more than a thousand years. And there was Beloved's more recent promise, given one dusk upon the edge of Sau'ilahk's dormancy.

Follow the sage … urge her, drive her. … She will lead you to your desire .

That temptation of hope ground against doubt-fueled rage. Could he ever trust his god again?

Sau'ilahk sighed, though his "voice" was nothing more than conjury-twisted air, allowing him to speak if needed. It was smothered like a weakened hiss in the mountain breeze.

Word of his supposed death—or second so—had spread through the sages' guild and beyond. Yet their leaders still chose not to send folios out to scribe shops. And it had become too risky to search farther on guild's grounds. Beloved's whispered words and this sage were all he had left.

It would be so much more pleasing to just kill her.

She thought she knew so much. It was twice as galling that in part she was correct. She knew more than her confederates, though so little of the actual truth.

Sau'ilahk would make her efforts come to nothing, once she led him to what he wanted. He needed her to find the writings of Li'kän, Häs'saun, Volyno, and others of Beloved's "Children." Wynn Hygeorht was his one and only tool for finding a way to regain flesh. But why had she come here, to this temple?

And the first bell of day sounded.

Sau'ilahk could not face the dawn any more than other undead. He let go of awareness and began slipping into dormancy. He faded from the physical aspect of all Existence to the far edge of its spiritual side—to that thin place between life and death. As he sank into dormancy, into dream, he whispered only in thought …

My Beloved … bless me again … this time in truth.

He would hunt Wynn Hygeorht once more when the sun set. Time was the one thing Sau'ilahk possessed in endless quantity.

Chane jerked up his cloak's hood, not daring to glance eastward. Perhaps his clothing would shield him if the sun came too quickly, but he had never tested this outright. He peered up the steps rising to the temple.

The building's frontage emerged from the mountainside and twin granite columns carved like large tree trunks framed the landing's end. Even so, the structure hardly seemed large or deep enough to house these shirvêsh, as Wynn called them, be they monks, priests, or whatever tending some long-dead ancestor.