Барб Хенди - The Night Voice

He dropped to his knees, slammed his hands down, and ground his fingers into the hardpack. As he bled away what he had left for a last conjury, Sau’ilahk, once the highest of Beloved’s followers, screamed out ...

“You—you caused all of this!”

That shriek of hate cut through Chap’s agony, and he pushed up to all fours with his head aching. He saw a white-skinned woman trying to grab two majay-hì that attacked her over and over. Still he was not certain what he saw. His skull pounded inside, he tasted blood in his mouth, and the scent of it made his head ache even more.

“If not Beloved, then I finish you—tool—to strike our maker!”

This second scream pulled Chap’s full focus. What he saw froze him, and that instant stretched out in his returning awareness.

A young man with blue-black hair, tall and well formed, hunkered on the ground with his fingers grinding into the hard earth. His face had a gash in the right cheek, and a like one bled at his left shoulder.

Chap sensed something more as he stared.

Undead ... another undead.

A memory surged up in the voice of Wynn as his mind replayed something she had told him. That face had a name for a young duke, but someone else hid behind it. Wynn had claimed that Chane destroyed this one, yet here he was.

—Sau’ilahk—, whispered Wynn’s voice out of memory.

How could he still be alive and whole?

Chap saw things scurry in around the man. Small, with single glowing eyes like balls of crude glass, they were half the size of a dog. Spindly like insects, their gnarled limbs looked like darkly stained wood.

And Chap remembered ... the prey ... his prey ... Magiere.

He gagged on the taste of her blood still in his teeth.

“Before dying,” Sau’ilahk went on, “Beloved will suffer as I have, helpless when I take your life. And when you are dead flesh, I will take its precious anchors as well. Tell that to your master when it creeps into your head.”

He sounded as if the Enemy wanted the orbs brought to it.

Chap went still and cold. Over the last season and before, he and those with him had sought to recover the orbs—the anchors. Had they unwittingly served the Enemy’s own wishes? Had he been so easily manipulated?

“Beloved will never be free!” Sau’ilahk hissed.

This recalled the words of Chap’s kin in the Lhoin’na forest.

Leave the enslaved alone.

If the Enemy had called the orbs to itself, was it already bound in some way? Had it never left the mountain in all of these centuries? And how would the orbs free it?

Those questions brought blind panic. Could everything they had done here have been wrong and exactly what the Enemy wanted?

His thoughts raced to what he had seen when he had touched the orb of Spirit.

As with the others he had touched at some time, he had felt a presence inside it. The Enemy—the dragon in that placeless timelessness—was a Fay. So why did it want the orbs, the anchors? Did its greater minions—Sau’ilahk, the specter, and others—seek the orbs for it or against it? Did some of them wish to destroy the Ancient Enemy themselves?

Leave the enslaved alone.

The Enemy had manipulated him to bring the orbs together and had done nothing to stop its own servants from the same purpose and worse. Did the ancient one—the Night Voice—want someone to use those orbs to kill it? Why?

Chap looked around at the carnage Magiere had created. Yet nothing had stopped her or the Enemy’s forces, as if it were all as desired. And Leesil now had the orbs somewhere inside the mountain in seeking out the Enemy.

The implications were beyond any terror.

Chap had seen five Fay who sacrificed to create Existence. Had one of them sought retreat from that? Was the Ancient Enemy one of those five? If so, what would happen if it vanished from existence?

He remembered the presence he had felt when Magiere mistakenly opened the first orb beneath the six-towered castle in the Pock Peaks. Leesil had claimed he saw a shadow in the shape of a massive serpent with a head that Wynn later claimed was a weürm, a serpentlike dragon.

Leave the enslaved alone.

Chap began to tremble. Caught between bringing Magiere back to herself, and pulling Sau’ilahk down, and finding a way to halt Leesil, he was too late in ...

Magiere tore loose from one majay-hì. The other was down and not moving. She charged for Sau’ilahk. The earth cracked around Sau’ilahk’s hooked fingers as something began to emerge.

Snarling, Chap charged on a line between them.

The night suddenly lit up from the north.

Caught in a chorus of screams all around, Chap stumbled, blinded for an instant.

Osha halted short of the battle and quickly unstoppered the small bottle Wynn had forced on him.

It should not be this way. What it held should have been for her. And what she had asked of him should have never been asked.

He pulled the last two arrows with white metal tips and sank each head, one at a time, into the bottle. After replacing the stopper, he tucked the bottle away inside his tunic. Then he rose and nocked one arrow with the other pinched between two fingers of his hand around the bow’s handle.

Still, he hesitated.

If what Chane claimed was true about the fluid affecting the undead ...

If he did what Wynn asked to stop Magiere ...

Osha did not want to think of murdering a friend. He looked toward the chaos before him, not hearing the shouts, raging snarls, growls, and screams. All he heard were his own shallow, quick breaths and the hammering of his heart.

Light filled the dark from behind him.

So many out there scrambled to escape, though the staff was too far to burn most of them. As they scattered, he saw so much more.

Magiere rushed at another target, and even from afar, Osha could see her fully black eyes. This time, Wynn’s light did not bring Magiere back. The dhampir was all that was left of her. As tears leaked from his wide eyes, he wiped his sleeve across them.

Then he raised and drew his bow, knowing he could not miss his target.

As Chap’s sight cleared, his every thought stilled at the sight of Magiere.

She screeched and snarled as one of Sau’ilahk’s small stick-creatures leaped into her face. Even as she clawed the thing off, the large male majay-hì rammed her legs from behind. Magiere toppled back and hit the ground.

“No!” Sau’ilahk screamed out. “She is mine!”

One of those glowing-eyed stick things went at the majay-hì as Magiere thrashed over onto all fours.

The ground around Sau’ilahk’s hooked fingers began to break apart.

Chap howled as he charged at Magiere’s back to stop her before whatever came out of the ground. She spun, and he faltered.

Magiere’s eyes fixed on him as if she had forgotten any other target. There was nothing left of the woman he knew, only the dhampir, only a monster out of his worst nightmare.

All he saw was her, just as he had once seen her in that sorcerous phantasm in the forests of Droevinka where everything living around her died.

Was he to die here at the hands of someone he loved?

She charged, and he set himself, ready to lunge.

Magiere’s snarl twisted into a shriek of rage—and she stumbled and lurched.

An arrow stuck out through her hauberk between her chest and right shoulder.

Chap saw his own shock mirrored in Magiere’s white face.

That face twisted quickly into pain as smoke welled out around the arrow’s shaft. Black lines spidered through her face and then her hands, and she dropped the falchion.

Magiere fell screaming and thrashing upon the ground. And there was Sau’ilahk on his feet, staring in shock.