Child of a Dead God (43 page)

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Authors: Barb Hendee,J. C. Hendee

Tags: #Fantasy

BOOK: Child of a Dead God
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Instead, a pile of fist-sized crystals glowed like coals in its black iron depression. These filled the small room with more heat than light, raising the temperature above freezing.
“How long have I been asleep?” she asked.
Chap kept his gaze fixed outside of the opening.
Day has come . . . I have seen traces of sunlight down the corridor outside.
Wynn’s stomach rolled slightly at his words. Her right leg throbbed painfully, but she could feel her toes again. She crawled over to where Chap sat vigil, remembering translucent wolves, ravens, and swirling dark forms.
“Are they still out there?” she asked.
They appear and vanish . . . but they are there, always.
“What are they?” she whispered.
Chap remained silent for a long moment.
Undead . . . though I have never heard of animals as such . . . let alone ones like shadow and yet not.
She rose up on her knees to peer over Chap. Nothing distinct met her gaze—but something like shifting soot moved in the dark spaces across the corridor outside.
“We are prisoners,” she whispered. “But why does she keep us alive?”
Chap did not answer, and Wynn wondered where the white undead might be. She dug out the cold lamp crystal and rubbed it quickly.
The room was perhaps twelve by fourteen paces with no other openings. Its old stone walls seemed deeply marred in places by wild swirls of tangled scratches. A decayed desk near the back wall had collapsed on one side, and its slanted top had long ago spilled its contents on the floor. Iron brackets supporting shelves were mounted on the right wall, but the lowest wooden board lay in pieces on the floor amid scattered papers and books grown brittle and tattered with age.
“Where are we?”
Chap growled at the doorless opening but did not answer.
“Last night . . . ,” she said, “you kept looking, until you found me.”
He turned his head and quickly licked her hand.
Wynn was thirsty, but she saw no sign of food or water. Then she spotted two small bottles among items near the broken desk. She crawled over and picked one up. Remnants of dried black stains flaked off its open mouth, and she realized it once had held ink. Quills lying in the mess were nothing but stems, the feathers rotted completely away.
“We’re in an abandoned study,” she said, and went to inspect the shelves.
A few books were so old that their covers were damaged with mold. They looked so weak and brittle she was afraid to pick one up.
Another shelf held rolls of rough wood-pulp paper and animal skins stripped clean of fur. She knew enough about old archives not to touch them just yet, lest they crumble and break in her hands. Down another shelf she found stacks of old bark with markings on their inner sides.
Other works were bound in sheaves between hardened slats of leather or roughly finished wood panels. One was sandwiched between what looked like scavenged squares of iron the size of a draught board.
“Chap . . . come and look at these.”
Look to the walls first.
Wynn glanced at him, but he had not turned around. What would she want with decaying walls? She stepped closer, holding the crystal high.
The marks on the walls were not the etchings of age.
The crystal’s light spilled over a mass of faded black writing. Patches of words, sentences, and strange symbols covered the stones. They ran in wild courses, sometimes overlapping and tangling in each other. Wynn tried to trace one long phrase.
It might have been a sentence, if she could have read it—but it seemed to go on without end. And the words were not all in the same language. Even the symbol sets differed, and some had faded, becoming illegible.
One word was composed of Heiltak letters, a forerunner of Wynn’s native Numanese, but the letters were used to spell out words in a different tongue, one that she did not recognize. A piece of old Sumanese was followed by an unknown ideogram, and then a set of odd strokes tangled with short marks. She found one possible Dwarvish rune, but it was so worn she could not be certain.
The passages were in scattered patches, as if the author had run out of paper or hide, or anything else to write upon. Over time, driven by some desperation, this disjointed and manic record had been made on any surface available. But what had the author used for ink that would adhere to stone for so long?
Wynn shifted back, until all the lines and marks became tangled chaos.
Like reading madness itself recorded on forgotten walls.
Now . . . look next to the archway.
Chap’s words startled her. Obviously he had been nosing about before she awoke. Stepping toward the doorless opening, she found a column of single . . . words? It seemed so, though again the languages and symbol sets varied.
The highest lines were too faded, as if the words had been rewritten in a downward progression over many years or decades. Midway to the floor, Wynn recognized what seemed to be ancient Elvish by its accent marks, written in the rare Êdän script. Further on was more roughly scripted old Sumanese. Near the bottom, almost to the floor was . . . was it some form of Belaskian?
And each line was only one word.
The symbols differed, yet they always recorded two syllables or sounds.
“Li . . . kun . . . ,” she sounded out, and glanced at Chap. “Do you know this term?”
More than a word, I think. . . .
Wynn studied the repeating column of the word. “A name?”
Chap slowly turned his head. He scanned the column once before looking back out into the dim corridor.
I think it is her.
Wynn gazed out the archway, suddenly fearful that the white woman might appear as if called.
“If those shadow animals have not entered by now, perhaps they will not.”
No, they only keep us in.
Chap stood up and padded across the room, studying the walls.
Can you read any of it?
“Not truly. I know some of the languages, and some of the symbol sets are familiar. But many do not match the language they are used for.”
She rubbed the crystal harder, and held it close to the patch beside the shelves.
“Old pre-Numanese tongues . . . and Êdän, an older Elvish system,” she whispered.
Can you read it?
Chap repeated, his tone impatient in her head.
“I told you no!” Wynn answered, but her brief anger was born of fright. “All I can make out is gibberish . . . between words that have already faded.”
Try another wall.
She looked about and spotted smaller writings above the desk’s remains. As she crossed, she tried not to step on the old parchments stuck to the floor by years of dried humidity. Holding the crystal close, she traced lines of marks, careful not to touch them.
“This word . . . looks like tribal Iyindu—old Sumanese—and part of it is in the correct letters.”
What does it say?
“Give me a moment!” Wynn snapped. “It is nearly a dead dialect.”
She struggled to sound it out in her head. The middle characters were too faint. She sighed in frustration. But the beginning and end caught in her mind, and the sound was familiar somehow. She thought she remembered it written somewhere else in other letters.
Wynn hurried back to rescan the tangled passage beside the shelves. She came to one word written in Êdän-Elvish, but it spelled out the same beginning and ending as the Iyindu-Sumanese—and its middle was clear to read.
“Il’Samar!”
Wynn whispered.
What?
Chap shoved in beside her.
Where do you see this?
Wynn pointed.
“Samar” was obscure, meaning something like “conversation in the dark.” And “il” was a common prefix for a proper noun, sometimes used for titles as well as predecessors in a person’s lineage. The old necromancer Ubâd had cried out this name as Magiere and Chap closed in upon him in Droevinka.
Wynn hurried back to the wall above the desk, forgetting to watch her footing, and brittle parchment shredded beneath her feet.
Now she understood the word with the faded middle, and she went over and over that sentence, trying to pick out more, but it was so badly worn.
“ ‘Guardian’ . . . no, ‘guardians for’ . . . something that is ‘unmaking’ . . . and then
il’Samar.
”
Wynn slumped in exasperation.
“That is all I can follow. Is she . . . this woman, one of these? Welstiel spoke of ancient ones guarding whatever treasure he sought. By the look of her, she is undead, but that would mean . . .”
All the wall writings appeared to be in the same hand, though Wynn was not certain, considering the rough surface. But she had read mention of more than one “guardian.”
She scanned among the shelves’ contents, finally reaching for the bottom iron-bound sheaf, which looked relatively sound. It weighed more than she expected, and she knelt awkwardly, trying to set it down. The old leather binding strap had turned as hard as wood.
“Bite this open for me.”
Chap began gnawing the hardened hide strip.
What are you looking for?
“Other writing . . . in other hands.”
The leather tie cracked in Chap’s teeth, and Wynn lifted the top iron plate with effort.
The inner sheets were made from squared hide stretched thin and had withstood time better than parchment or paper. They were now as hard as bone, and their inked lettering was difficult to read on the dark squares. Wynn lifted multiple sheets at once, watching for changes in handwriting.
And she saw them.
At least three different people had recorded entire pages in this volume. Unlike the wall writings, these passages were coherently scripted in one matching language and letter system at a time. How old was this sheaf?
“There are other guardians,” she whispered, growing frightened again. “Perhaps two or three. How long have they been here?”
No . . . she is now the only one.
Wynn raised her eyes. “We have seen no more than the corridor and this room. But at least three different hands have written these pages.”
I sense only her . . . I cannot even sense her shadow servants . . . only her.
Wynn glanced toward the archway, and then to the mad writing surrounding this old, decayed room.
She has been alone . . . for longer than we can measure. And even before the others were gone . . . I would guess she has been here since . . .
“Since the war,” Wynn finished in a whisper. “Since the Forgotten History and the war that erased it.”
Wynn shivered in her coat, though the room was nearly warm from the brazier’s strange crystals.
How many languages can you read?
She squinted, making a mental count. “Well, my own tongue, Numanese, and some of its earlier predecessors . . . um . . . classical Stravinan, Belaskian of course, and the Begaine syllabary of my guild . . . general Dwarvish and one of its formal variants . . . Elvish—modern and ancient scripts, including the Êdän, though I have not fully grasped the variation used by the an’Cróan. Some Sumanese, but not much of its older derivations or the desert—”
Wynn!
Chap lowered his head, snout pointing to the hide pages.
What is written here?
She held the crystal closer. “This page is very old Sumanese—Iyindu, I think—and the handwriting does not match what is written on the walls. I learned a bit of the modern dialect, but I have little grasp of the lesser-known desert dialects.”
Wynn placed a hand on Chap’s shoulder. “The passages are not signed, but this one mentions a name. ‘Volyno,’ in the past tense, so I would guess he was no longer present when it was written. Wait . . . here is another . . . a Sumanese name—‘Häs’saun.’ Perhaps the author of this passage, but I could be mistaken.”
She sat back, lowering the crystal into her lap, and Chap huffed, wrinkling his snout in frustration. A flicker in the archway drew their attention.
The translucent outline of a shadow wolf showed against the lighter dark in the corridor. The entire animal was soot black, even its eyes. All thoughts of language fled from Wynn’s mind.
The wolf remained in the doorway, but something pale approached behind it—and walked straight through the beast into the small chamber.
Wynn clutched the fur between Chap’s shoulders at the sight of their returned captor.
Slender as a willow and barely taller than Wynn herself, the woman’s white body was lightly tinged with orange from the brazier’s glow. Shining hair hung like wild black corn silk across her shoulders and down over her small breasts. And where Wynn had sometimes seen a trace of brown in Chane’s eyes, she now looked into irises like hard quartz. Even the woman’s small mouth was as pale and colorless as her skin.

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