Barb Hendee: Through Stone and Sea

A large iron vessel, like a shallow, wide bowl on legs with a domed lid, rested atop a short stone pedestal. The lid's handle was insulated by a wood fitting, and slots around the lid's top let dim orange light escape.

Chane lifted the lid, its handle warm even through the wood, and the light erupted into the room.

A smattering of thumb-size glowing crystals rested inside the basin in a bed of steaming sand. Unlike the sages' cold lamp crystals, these looked raw and rough, as if taken straight from the earth, and gave off heat as well as low light.

Chane was too near collapse to puzzle over small wonders in a strange new culture. He lowered the lid and fell across the bed. The jarring impact made his eyes pop for an instant. The mattress was as stiff and hard as bare ground beneath a blanket. Wide as it was, the bed was too short. Still, he closed his eyes, drawing his feet up to lie curled sideways. The last thing that came to him before he sank into full dormancy was nagging hunger.

Like a beast with hands, chained in the dark, it whined and rumbled inside of Chane.

Wynn would not stand for his killing a sentient being in order to survive, and he would not risk doing anything that might cause her to send him away. Yet how else was he to feed in this place, under these new circumstances?

Dormancy smothered hunger and the rumbling discontent of the beast within him.

Wynn awoke in late afternoon with a stiff neck and aches, remembering they were in the temple. She hadn't slept on a dwarven bed in many years. Its mattress was little more than layered wool blankets upon a stone platform. The design might be comfortable support for a heavy dwarven physique, but it was hard as packed dirt to anyone else.

Shade stirred on the bed's end and hopped off as Wynn sat up, rubbing her throbbing shoulder. A pewter water pitcher and plain ceramic cup rested on the stone table near the door, and she realized her throat was dry.

"Thirsty?" she asked Shade.

She got up and filled the cup for Shade, taking a sip for herself straight from the pitcher. She was glad to be away from the guild, her superiors, and other sages, though that thought brought regret. Answerable to no one but her chosen companions, she was journeying once more.

As a girl, she'd loved life at the guild. Then she'd traveled with Domin Tilswith and others across the continent and the eastern ocean to what the sages called the Farlands. Their purpose had been the beginning of a new guild branch. But in Bela, the coastal capital of Chane's homeland, Wynn's life became entangled with two rough strangers and a dog.

Magiere, Leesil, and Chap had come hunting an upír —vampire—one of the highest of the undead they called Vneshené Zomrelé —the Noble Dead. When this trio finally left, in search of an artifact sought by a vampire named Welstiel, Domin Tilswith had sent Wynn along on her first solo assignment—and not a typical one for a freshly titled journeyor sage.

Their travels took them through Droevinka's dank lands, Stravina's foot-hills, and into the Warlands, then on to the Elven Territories of the an'Cróan. The journey ended far south from where they started, in the high frozen range of the Pock Peaks. There they finally uncovered the artifact—the "orb"—and the ancient texts Wynn had brought back to her guild.

But when she got home to Calm Seatt, nothing turned out as she'd expected. Nobody believed her stories of dhampirs, undead, and necromancers guarded by ghosts. Her superiors took over the texts and ordered her into silence, and "Witless" Wynn Hygeorht became the shunned madwoman of her cherished guild branch.

Then, less than half a moon past, four sages had been murdered in Calm Seatt, drained of life by what she labeled a "wraith." This previously unknown spiritual form of Noble Dead had been hunting translations from the texts penned by vampires who'd long ago served the Ancient Enemy of many names. And this enemy once used hordes of the undead like weapons in battle against the humans, dwarves, and elves.

In Wynn's journeys, she'd been exposed to fearful portents that this enemy might be returning. The appearance of the wraith, more terrifying and powerful than any vampire known, had driven her into her current search. She had to learn more of the history lost a thousand years ago, what signs to look for should war come again … or how to stop it from happening at all.

She had to find the texts, for there must be something in them. She had to believe this, for she had nothing else in which to place her hope.

Wynn donned her gray robe over her shift, and then stroked Shade's head.

"At least finding supper will be easy," she whispered.

By answer, Shade whined, and Wynn's head filled with sudden sights and sounds of a bustling city street. She knelt beside the dog, though Shade was much more than that in both breed and heritage.

Shade's father, Chap, had once been one with what the sages called the Fay, eternal spirits or beings behind all of Existence. He'd chosen to be "born" into the body of a majay-hì, one of the elven dogs descended from Fay-inhabited wolves during ancient times. His dual-layered nature, Fay spirit in Fay-descended body, gave him the ability to see rising memories in anyone within his sight line. He'd met Shade's mother, a true majay-hì whom Wynn had named Lily, during the journey through the Farlands' Elven Territories. Majay-hì communicated via memories transmitted while touching. Wynn called it "memory-speak."

Shade had inherited a mix of her kind's memory-speak and her father's memory-play, though not his ability to "speak" with Wynn via thought. Shade had her own twist on her father's gifts. Not only could she dip rising memories, she could send her own to Wynn when they touched. To Wynn's knowledge, no other majay-hì and human could do this.

Memories of city life called up by Shade made Wynn want to offer comfort to her young companion.

"I know … you don't like crowded places," she said gently, "but our search begins here."

Rising, she spotted her pack and leaning behind it by the door was the staff, its long sun crystal hidden beneath a protective leather sheath.

She fumbled in her pocket, making certain the protective spectacles made by Domin il'Sänke were still there. These pewter-rimmed glasses were essential once the staff's blinding sun crystal was ignited. The lenses would darken, protecting her eyes but allowing her to see.

Reticent to leave her other belongings, she almost opened the pack to check its contents, but her things were safe here.

Wynn stepped toward the door—one step only—and stopped.

The staff's sun crystal was irreplaceable, her only weapon against the Noble Dead. But carrying it about in the temple would only draw questions. Wynn forced herself out into the corridor, leaving the staff behind, and held the door until Shade followed.

Chane's door was still closed, and he would "sleep" until sunset, so she didn't disturb him. He and his belongings would also be left in peace, and Chane carried another of their most important possessions within his cloak's inner pocket.

As he'd left the library where she'd found the texts, he stumbled upon an old tarnished case containing a scroll. It was the very one that Li'kän, one of the oldest vampires to walk the world, had tried to make Wynn read. More baffling was that Wynn wouldn't have been able to read it at all.

The scroll had been painted over with black ink.

When Chane had later caught up with her in Calm Seatt, she'd glimpsed bits of the scroll's content with her mantic sight. A long passage of verse in obscure metaphors had been recorded in the fluids of an undead, written in an old dialect of Sumanese. She'd managed a partial and flawed translation of glimpsed fragments that told them nothing at first. But she and Chane both suspected the scroll was linked to whatever the wraith had sought.