Барб Хенди - Of Truth and Beasts

“Yes, I brought it in case I needed it when ordering your dinner last night.”

Wynn sighed in relief. “Oh, good. I thought I’d lost it. You keep it for now. I have some of the money Ore-Locks got in barter.” Then she paused, as if something else was wrong. “He was angry when you went out and left me alone.”

Wynn patted Shade’s head, looking away in a pensive moment.

“What else?” Chane asked.

Again she hesitated. “I think he’s getting close to demanding some answers. I wish ... I wish he wasn’t with us. I don’t trust him.”

That much had been obvious from the beginning. Chane could not help a stab of guilt that she had been dealing with Ore-Locks on his behalf—especially considering the last part of his outing. But he would do anything to protect Wynn, at any cost.

“When do we board?” he asked.

She glanced at him, as if surprised by the change of subject. “As soon as we’re packed.”

For Chane, this third sea voyage was a torment of trial and error. He disembarked at a few ports along the way, heading off alone just past nightfall, to collect small bottles from various shops.

Several times he sought out livestock, looking for collections of cattle or goats so that one missing animal would not raise immediate notice. He drank only once from the dark, life-giving substance gathered via Welstiel’s feeding cup. Overflushed with life, he began using the cup to fill his collection of bottles. These he stored in the bottom of his pack for times ahead when there might be less opportunity to hunt alone.

Soon, however, he came to a decision, one he could not put off. He began excusing himself from Wynn’s company on the ship to work alone in his cabin. He did not reappear for several nights. His first attempt at recreating Welstiel’s concoction was a painful failure.

He spent three delusional days and nights between dormancy and coherence, where fear of the sun escalated. Either he had not used enough corpseskirt—boar’s bell—or he had incorrectly estimated other ingredients. When the concoction’s effect wore off quicker than expected, he increased the amount of corpse-skirt by half.

The result was so much worse.

He squirmed in convulsions on his bunk, the sounds of waves pounding upon the ship’s hull nearly deafening him. During the days, he could not stop the sense of burning, as if sunlight crawled and wormed through the hull to seek him out.

Wynn repeatedly knocked every night, calling to him through the blocked door.

But on the fifth night of so much horror, even the beast within him fell silent as if dead and gone, and he knew he was closer to the correct formula. When he came out late on the sixth evening, still not having gone dormant, Wynn was on him in an instant.

“What are you doing in there? Why are you locking yourself in your cabin?”

Her tone was demanding, but her eyes were filled with worry.

“I need privacy,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back so she would not see them shake. “Soon we will be among crowds again. I take my solitude while I can.”

She looked sad and frustrated at his obvious lie, but she did not press him further. There was no way to tell her, not for the way she always viewed Welstiel’s pack of toys. That was always the way she would see it, or anything to do with him. And what would she think of Chane trying to recreate anything of Welstiel’s, the one who had plagued her and her companions across half a continent?

Three nights later, Chane tried again, though the last dose had not fully worn off. Worst of all, he was running out of thrice-purified water.

During the journey’s earliest part, he had caught clean rain in a bowl held out of a porthole. This was boiled in a glass vessel sterilized with wood alcohol, and he had to hold both glass and burner steady against the ship’s rolling. Steam rose into a ceramic, elbow-shaped pipe, cooling and dripping into another sterilized container. The process was repeated twice more with the same water. Less than a fourth of the rain remained in a thrice-purified form.

It had not rained again since before he had prepared the last dose.

Chane had only enough water for one more attempt, with no possibility to continue trial and error once they reached Soráno. When he finished the third batch before dawn, its color, consistency, purity, and opacity perfectly matched the remaining half vial that Welstiel had made.

Side effects seemed inescapable, though Chane was learning to bear the amplified terror, that paranoia of the sun just outside the covered porthole. But as he held up a vial’s capful, far less than the dosage he had first thought necessary, he hesitated with the draught a fingernail’s breadth from his lips.

How had Welstiel ever borne this ... drug of the dead ... without one sign of discomfort?

Chane watched the violet liquid in the cap betray his trembling hand. He threw the fluid into the back of his throat, washing it down with a gulp of water from the ship’s casks. As he stared at the three remaining vials made from this batch, he hoped he would not have to discard them like the last two.

He did not—but final success brought him no relief.

When the sun rose outside the ship, Chane was curled in the corner at the bunk’s head, shuddering in a wide-awake hell for the third time. On the fourth night, rather than the fifth, he managed to leave his cabin to find Wynn, though she was no less worried.

Time lost meaning as waves rushed past, one after another. One night past dusk, Chane stood on the deck, wind at his back as he heard Wynn’s light steps.

“Soráno is close,” she said. “We’ll make dock before another bell.”

He looked down to find her gazing toward the passing coastline, though her living eyes would never make it out in the dark. Wisps of brown hair danced across her olive-toned cheek below her eyes.

They were going back into the world again.

Wynn didn’t know what they would find in the port city of Soráno. She’d read a good deal on the Sumans, farther south, and knew something of the Lhoin’na to the east. But as she walked beside Shade through the streets, she couldn’t help noticing something startling about these people. That realization came only a breath before Chane’s shocked rasp.

“They all look like you.”

He wasn’t wrong.

Wynn had never been in this part of the world, never been farther south than Witeny. While growing up, she’d seen people in Calm Seatt with her complexion, hair, build—but very few.

Fine boned, though round cheeked, the people of Romagrae Commonwealth weren’t as tall as the Numans of Malourné, Faunier or Witeny, nor as dark-skinned as Sumans. Nearly everyone walking past wore strange pantaloons and cotton vestment wraps of white and soft colors. But they all had olive-toned skin with light brown hair and eyes, just like her.

Wynn was still a little daunted when she noticed Chane staring at every passerby. His open fascination began making her uncomfortable.

Soráno’s streets were clean, most of them cobbled in sandy-tan stones. Smaller, open-air markets appeared more common than in Numan cities, or at least Calm Seatt. She spotted three in sight along one wide main street. Everyone appeared to be either some kind of merchant or farmer with crops that grew well beyond the seasons up north. The number of items available was overwhelming.

Arrays of olives, dried dates, fish, and herb-laced cooking oils were abundant. Occasionally some scent reminded Wynn of what Domin il’Sänke or his quarters smelled like during his visit—spicy and exotic. She slowed briefly as they passed stacked bolts of fabrics with wild, earthy patterns common in the Suman nations farther south.