Barb Hendee - In Shade and Shadow

"Yes?" High-Tower growled from within. "Well, come in or be off."

With everything else she'd done to lower the domin's opinion of her, the last thing she needed was to be caught snooping about. She gently gripped the handle and slowly opened the door.

Domin High-Tower sat behind his desk, scribbling on a scrap of paper, as if merely at work. But his rough features were flushed, and perspiration glistened upon his brow beneath the wiry tufts of his gray-streaked reddish hair.

Domin High-Tower was alone.

Wynn looked about the room. Where had the other two gone?

The only way out of the room was the door. Even so, no one had come down, and the other way led up to the tower's next level—which was the top. Had they slipped out, and gone up, and she hadn't heard them? But why and to where?

She stepped in, still uncertain if she'd been overheard outside.

It was uncommon for High-Tower's people to join the Guild of Sagecraft—and some even considered it an unworthy choice. He was the only dwarf among sages that she'd ever known. High-Tower never spoke of this, but Wynn guessed he had suffered over the decision of his chosen path. He finally looked up and let out a growling sigh.

"Well, what is it?" he asked.

Perhaps he'd been so caught up in arguing with his visitors that he hadn't heard her outside.

"News that couldn't wait," she answered quickly. "Today's folio wasn't returned. Master Shilwise's scribes didn't finish, and he refused to turn over work to our messengers… he kept the drafts as well."

High-Tower stood up. "What?"

"There is nothing you can do," Wynn said, but he was already rushing for a cloak thrown over the spare chair. "The shop has been closed and locked for the night."

"Closed?" High-Tower's black pellet eyes widened as he set his jaw.

Wynn had no wish to upset him more than he already was. Neither did she care to be the only target available for his ire.

"All the scribes have gone home," she added quickly. "But the drafts should be safe for one night. Master Shilwise's shop is in a good neighborhood."

High-Tower's gaze drifted—not to the stairs or the door, nor did it wander about the room. It fixed upon the study's northwest side, and Wynn followed it.

Through one deep-set window, she saw the keep's northwest wall. But upon a second check she found High-Tower wasn't looking out the window. He was staring at the study's curved wall to the left of it—in a direct line with that outer wall.

"Fools and fanatics!" he hissed to himself.

He seemed to come to his senses, glancing at Wynn. His voice rumbled like a distant sea storm closing upon the city.

"This is the last work Shilwise will ever see from us! I must tell Sykion."

High-Tower headed for the study's open door, sidling sideways to get through it, and Wynn felt his heavy steps through the floor stones. She was lost in her own jumbled thoughts as the domin vanished down the curving stairs.

Thallûhearag … Hassäg'kreigi… Bäalâle Seatt…

That last was a myth that the world had forgotten, though Wynn knew better.

During travels in the Elven Territories, Magiere had seen the distant memories of Most Aged Father, reaching all the way back to the «mythical» war. The Enemy's forces had laid siege to a dwarven stronghold called Bäalâle Seatt. Both sides had perished, though no one then ever learned what happened there. The place itself was forgotten as much as any of the Forgotten History.

But within the domin's chamber had been two who knew it. And what of those other Dwarvish terms?

Wynn studied the wall to the window's left, whispering again, "Stonewalkers?"

Where had High-Tower's two visitors gone?

Chane Andraso woke from dormancy with a start. Dusk had fallen, and he had not even stirred at the eighth bell marking the end of the day. He should gather his cloak and head fast for the Gild and Ink, the scribe shop of one Master Shilwise.

It had not taken him long to map out the pattern of the scriptoriums being utilized. The guild had hired five shops and rotated them on the same daily basis: the Upright Quill, the Gild and Ink, the Inkwell, the Feather & Parchment, and Four Scribes in House. But as he sat up in his shabby bed, his mind still lingered on the previous night.

He had seen Wynn for the first time in well over a year.

His existence had once been so intricately connected with hers that he knew every line of her face. Back in Bela, when she had joined the journey of Magiere, Leesil, and Chap, Chane had reluctantly accepted a kind of servitude to a Noble Dead named Welstiel—Magiere's half brother. And the two of them had secretly followed Wynn and her companions across entire countries, seacoasts, and mountain ranges, all in search of Welstiel's coveted "orb." But in the end, only Magiere could find and retrieve it. And Welstiel lost his head in the ice-trapped castle of the Pock Peaks, his body dropped into the misted depths of a molten fissure.

But Chane survived.

Running a hand across his face, he rose, looking about the faded walls of his small attic room.

When he had first arrived in Calm Seatt, with little money, he had taken the cheapest accommodation he could find. It was a run-down inn called Nattie's House on the outskirts of the city's poorest sector, which the locals had dubbed "the Graylands Empire." Over time he had acquired coins from his prey and could have afforded better lodgings, but he did not care enough to make the effort. Remaining in this obscure, little-noticed shambles suited his needs.

Chane went to crouch before his belongings, all piled in the corner where the ceiling rafters slanted down to the streetside eaves. He reached for the nearest of two packs, opened it, and removed an aged tin scroll case. With this in hand he closed his eyes, drifting back to the night Welstiel had taken his "second death." The same night Chane had walked away from Wynn in the library of the ice-bound castle.

He hated dwelling on the past, but it was not the first time or even the hundredth that his thoughts slipped to events that led him down this current path…

When he had left Wynn in the library of that castle, which housed one ancient undead, he had stumbled out alone onto the snowy plain.

Free for the first time in his undead existence, he had no place to go. In that moment he had no future, no Wynn, and no fantasies of existing in her world. She did not deserve a monster driven by lust for the hunt and the euphoria of a kill. The need to survive, to feed, was the only thing that kept him moving. Wandering to escape the lifeless Pock Peaks, he drifted slowly west.

Bela was the place where his existence as a Noble Dead had begun—and where he had met Wynn and her sages for the first time.

Part of him believed she would leave Magiere and return there, to the newly established branch of her guild. She belonged there, and eventually she would realize this. Even as Chane crossed the Belaskian border, still far from the king's city, he knew he should not try to touch even that small part of her world. But with each step across the homeland of his living days, Chane's mind slipped backward, desperate to erase his past and live only as a sage…

Among books and parchments, a cold lamp's crystal lighting the dark, with one companion of choice…

Impossible—for he was undead, and the beast inside him would never sleep.

When he finally reached Bela, he stayed clear of the old barracks given to the sages. Instead he took a room in a dingy little inn beyond the city's outermost wall. He still had all of Welstiel's possessions and his own, as well as the books he hethe boohad saved from the monastery, where Welstiel had killed and raised healer-monks as feral undead. Chane also had the scroll case, the only thing he had taken from the ice-bound castle.