Барб Хенди - Of Truth and Beasts

“The front parlor should be part of its library,” Wynn added. “I’ve heard it’s well designed to serve our needs.” She stepped up onto the porch landing and knocked at the front door. “Hello?”

Though well into the evening, it still was not late. The second bell for quarter night had not rung until they were off the piers. Chane assumed someone would still be awake, and he was not wrong.

The door opened, and a short, middle-aged woman in a teal robe looked out. Taking in Wynn’s gray, short robe, she smiled pleasantly. Chane wondered if Wynn might be better treated where no one truly knew her.

“Journeyor Hygeorht of Calm Seatt,” Wynn introduced herself, “with a message for Domin Yand. Do you have rooms to spare?”

“Of course,” the woman answered, waving them all inside. “I’m Domin Tamira. The annex is never but half full. You can take your pick of rooms on the top floor. Have you had supper?”

Wynn and the domin continued chattering away as Chane stepped in, though Shade pushed past, hurrying after Wynn. Ore-Locks came last. They all passed through the wide foyer and into a comfortable sitting room filled with old, overpatched armchairs and small couches, along with bookcases stuffed with volumes, some as old and worn-looking as the building itself.

Chane backed around Ore-Locks to the parlor’s entrance. “Wynn?”

The domin’s thin eyebrows rose at his maimed voice, and Wynn paused in her chatting.

“Yes?”

“I will go out ... for a few missing supplies and return in a while.”

She tensed slightly before nodding. “Yes. Find me when you’re done.”

Chane set down the travel chest and pulled off his own pack, leaving it by the door with his old sword. He kept Welstiel’s pack over his shoulder.

“What could we need at this point?” Ore-Locks asked, watching him closely.

The ship’s crew had seen to their meals on the voyage. They had not delved into their supplies.

Chane ignored him and left.

Sau’ilahk materialized in a cutway beside a fishmonger’s stall down the street from the old building. He had kept his distance along the way, so that neither Chane nor Shade would sense him. As Wynn knocked, a domin of Conamology had answered.

Sau’ilahk knew of guild annexes, though he’d never bothered with one in his centuries. What could Wynn possibly seek in this out-of-the way place?

He had not risked getting close to the ship to hear anything she might say, and tonight was his first safe opportunity. His only method was through a servitor—a minor but complex elemental with enough awareness to be his eyes and ears. He cleared his thoughts, preparing to exert energy into conjury.

The annex’s front door opened again, and Sau’ilahk paused.

Chane stepped out alone and strode off inland along an adjoining street.

In brief moments in Dhredze Seatt, Sau’ilahk had clearly sensed Chane as an undead. Other times, as now, he seemed more like a solid apparition—seemingly not there to Sau’ilahk’s senses, and yet somehow there to see, hear, or even touch.

Sau’ilahk hung in indecision, wondering whom to spy on: Wynn or Chane? He finally blinked to the corner, spotting Chane moving on with a steady gait.

Chane picked up his pace when he breached the city’s inland edge. Trotting into the surrounding farmlands, he let his senses widen fully. Even with the brass ring on, somewhere ahead he smelled life, alone and isolated. Perhaps it was his hunger that overrode the ring’s dulling of his senses.

He kept on, losing track of time, and wishing to be farther away before attempting what he had planned. Traipsing through a copse of near-leafless maples, he peered out over a fallow field to a small, thatched barn. Smoke drifted lazily from the clay chimney of a nearby cottage. He silently closed on the barn, pausing, listening for anyone nearby before entering.

It was a poor little place, with only three cows stabled inside. The nearest one had a black face and tan body. Kneeling on the hay-strewn floor, he dropped Welstiel’s old pack and dug inside it to pull out an ornate walnut box.

Chane opened the box to study three hand-length iron rods with center loops, a teacup-sized brass bowl with strange etchings, and a white ceramic bottle with an obsidian stopper. All rested in burgundy padding. He slipped back in memory to the first time he had seen Welstiel use the cup.

They had been starving in the rocky, jagged wilderness of the Crown Range north of his homeland when they came upon an elderly wandering couple huddled by a campfire. Chane had wanted to lunge, but Welstiel stopped him with a warning.

“There are ways to make the life we consume last longer.”

True, and Chane now reenacted exactly what he had seen Welstiel do.

He took out the rods, intertwined them into a tripod, and set his dagger on the ground beside it. Placing the brass cup upon the stand, he lifted the white bottle. Its contents—thrice purified water—were precious. Pulling the stopper, he half filled the cup, remembering Welstiel’s cold, clinical explanation.

“Bloodletting is a wasteful way to feed. Too much life is lost and never consumed by our kind. It is not blood that matters, but the leak of life caused by its loss.”

Chane glanced at the black-faced cow. To his best knowledge, Welstiel had never tried this on an animal.

The very idea of the cup was revolting, not to mention the humiliation of feeding on livestock. But he needed life to continue protecting Wynn. He could not risk feeding on a human, or she might hear rumors of someone missing or found dead and in a pallid state.

Chane approached the cow. The animal raised her head and blinked liquid eyes at him with no fear. Grasping her rope halter, he led her out of the stall and moved her to one side into a clear place to fall. He pressed slowly and steadily with his foot into the back of her front knee. As she began to kneel, he tipped her over, pinning down her head. She bellowed once in panic, struggling to get up, and then relaxed.

He took up the dagger and made a small cut on her shoulder. Once the blade’s tip had gathered leaking blood, he carefully tilted the steel over the cup.

A single drop struck its pure water.

Blood thinned and diffused beneath dying ripples as Chane began to chant. He concentrated hard on activating the cup’s innate influence. When finished, he waited and watched the cup’s water for any change.

Nothing happened.

His incantation was based on researching Welstiel’s journals and the tiny engravings on the cup’s inner surface. Something was wrong. As with any mage, their workings were individual, and seldom could one successfully use the workings of another.

The cow let out a low sound. Suddenly her ribs began to protrude, as if she were turning gaunt.

Chane released his grip and scooted back.

The cow’s eyelids sank as her eyes collapsed inward. Jawbones began to jut beneath withering skin. It was not long before the animal became a dried, shrunken husk as vapors rose briefly over her corpse. As Chane heard the cow’s heart stop, he turned his gaze to the cup.

The fluid was so dark red, it appeared almost black, and it now brimmed near the cup’s lip.

Chane did not know whether to feel elated or revolted. He knew what awaited him in drinking the conjured liquid. The first time, Welstiel had warned him with only two words.

“Brace yourself.”

Chane shuddered once before he downed the cup’s entire contents. When he lowered the brass vessel, it was completely clean, as if it had held nothing at all. For a moment, he tasted only dregs of ground metal and strong salt. Then he gagged and collapsed on the straw-strewn dirt.