Barb Hendee - In Shade and Shadow

Chane reached into his cloak and drew out the aged tin scroll case.

"Did you ever see this… while in the castle of the Pock Peaks?" he asked.

He had found it on the floor as he fled that place, not knowing who had dropped it there.

For a moment Wynn looked at the case in puzzlement. Then her eyes widened, staring with intensity—and recognition. She opened her hand slightly, allowing more of the crystal's light to escape.

"Where… how did you get that?" she whispered, taking two steps closer.

Chane saw the Wynn of past days as she looked up at him with that old curious astonishment.

"Near the passage out of the library," he answered. "I actually kicked it as I left. I still do not know why I picked it up."

Wynn reached out hesitantly toward the scroll case. "Li'kän took it from the library shelves."

"Li'kän?" Chane asked. "Do you mean the white undead?"

Wynn did not seem to hear him. She was fixated on the scroll case, shaking her head slightly.

"She went right to it… never touched anything else," Wynn whispered. "She wanted me to read it to her."

Chane hesitated before saying, "That is not possible."

Wynn's brow crinkled again. Before she could ask, he pulled off the case's pewter cap. Scholarly wonder always got the better of her, and Chane was more than willing to distract her from the harder questions concerning him. He slid out the leather scroll and opened it.

"You could not have read this to her," he said.

Wynn stepped all the way to him and held the crystal closer. It was instantly clear what he meant when she saw the ink coating.

"I don't understand," she said, her small fingers lightly touching the blackened surface.

"There is something hidden beneath it," he added. "Something marked in the fluids of a Noble Dead."

Her gaze flicked up, and he could swear her face paled.

"How do you know that?" she asked.

"I can smell it."

Doubt and suspicion returned to Wynn's eyes. "It's too old. No scent would last that long. No one, even something… someone like you, could catch it."

Chane tried not to flinch: some… thing … like him—an undead with senses to match any feral beast's.

"I did not smell it until I had nearly finished restoring the scroll's leather. The scent was faint but exactly the same as freshly spilled fluids from one of my kind."

"Like the writing on the castle's inner walls," she whispered, gazing again at the scroll.

Chane remembered the vague, thin smell inside the white undead's fortress.

"This is why I want to see the folios," he said carefully. "From those texts, from that same library, I had hoped to learn what it is, if not what it contains. I could not risk stripping the coating to see what was hidden. Then I heard… saw how the works that you brought back had placed you and the guild in danger."

"Why?" she demanded. "Do you know what is hunting us?"

Sharp as it was, her earnest question held no accusation toward him. The pain in his chest lessened a bit.

"I do not," he answered. "At first I assumed the texts you chose were ones clearest to read. But with your project still ongoing, that must not be the case for all of them."

"I selected a range of works from the library," she explained, "based on what was oldest but still sound enough to transport… and what I—or others skilled in old tongues—might have a chance at translating."

"Yet the work continues," he said.

Wynn shrugged weakly. "Yes, the translation has been… seems more difficult than I guessed."

"Someone hid whatever is in this scroll," he added with his own emphasis, "either the author or someone else, in place of simply destroying it. I believe it is of importance. More so now, as your Li'kän wished you to see it, knowing there was nothing here you could read. Perhaps it might be a key to uncovering other secrets in your texts… Why else would that black figure be shadowing the folios and killing for them? I think it, too, is having difficulty in finding what it seeks."

Chane held out the scroll to Wynn.

She took it and stepped around him along the side of the stable. Leaning her staff against the wall, she dropped cross-legged on the ground and opened the scroll upon her lap. Holding the crystal above it, she touched its black surface.

"This is why you came to Calm Seatt," she said, not even looking up. "Why you came after me again."

Chane crouched beside her but thought better of mentioning the dog like Chap that he had followed at first.

"Domin Tilswith and other sages in Bela would have never trusted me long enough to ask anything."

"May I keep it, for now?" she asked. "I need to take it back for further study. There may still be one or two people willing to help me."

A flash of anxiety overwhelmed Chane at relinquishing the scroll. But more than one phrase from Wynn's lips left him wondering. What did "further study" actually mean, since there was nothing in the scroll that could be studied? And her last words implied that she, too, now had few people to trust in the world, even among her own kind, it seemed.

What had happened to her in the guild branch of her homeland?

But he trusted her above all others, and he could only cling to the belief that she trusted him a little.

"Of course," he answered, handing over the case and cap.

Wynn carefully rolled the scroll and slipped it back into its protection. Then it struck Chane that he could not—could never—go back to the guild with her, as one more she could rely on in deciphering this new mystery.

"I should get back," she said, rising. "Where are you staying?"

Clearly she wanted to be away from him. Chane would never blame her for that.

"Better you do not know," he answered. "I will send word soon, when and where we should meet again."

He stepped into the street, heading away from her.

"Do you still… kill to survive?" she wh srvi

Chane did not let those words make him falter, not until he rounded the nearest turn.

He stopped there, half collapsing against a shop's side wall. Peering back around the corner, he watched Wynn until she slipped beyond his sight.

Wynn's heart pounded so hard that her ribs ached. She forced herself to walk calmly without looking back. She'd almost forgotten the long, clean lines of his face.

Chane was part of a past she had given up. Once she'd heard Leesil mutter to himself, "One should never walk backward through one's own life." It was trite, of course, but a sound thought nonetheless.

Yet, how long had it been since she'd spent even moments with someone who actually cared for her—who knew her? Someone who not only believed her accounts of undead, but who knew more of them than she did.

He was one of them—akin to that robed monster murdering her people—and yet he'd come across the world to seek help and to help her. She needed help from someone, anyone, who fully realized what her guild faced.

Part of her longed to linger in his company, but he hadn't answered her last question. His omission spoke volumes—like any accounting of all his victims.

Wynn slipped the scroll case and her crystal inside her cloak.

As she walked, she kept the staff from striking the cobblestones and making any sound that would attract attention. In spite of her warring emotions over accepting Chane's assistance, a flicker of hope seeded in her thoughts.

Her superiors had finally granted her access to translated passages and the codex. Now Chane had provided her with Li'kän's chosen scroll. The combination might lead to answers—if she could find a way to uncover what was hidden beneath a coating of old ink, written in the dried fluids of an ancient undead. She tried not to think about such impossibilities, or her seeds of hope might be ground to dust. She turned down Leaful Street, headed toward the Old Bailey Road.