shops and rotated them on the same daily basis: the Upright Quill, the Gild and Ink, the Inkwell, the Feather & Parchment, and Four Scribes in House. But as he sat up in his shabby bed, his mind still lingered on the previous night.
He had seen Wynn for the first time in well over a year.
His existence had once been so intricately connected with hers that he knew every line of her face. Back in Bela, when she had joined the journey of Magiere, Leesil, and Chap, Chane had reluctantly accepted a kind of servitude to a Noble Dead named Welstiel—Magiere's half brother. And the two of them had secretly followed Wynn and her companions across entire countries, seacoasts, and mountain ranges, all in search of Welstiel's coveted 'orb.' But in the end, only Magiere could find and retrieve it. And Welstiel lost his head in the ice-trapped castle of the Pock Peaks, his body dropped into the misted depths of a molten fissure.
But Chane survived.
Running a hand across his face, he rose, looking about the faded walls of his small attic room.
When he had first arrived in Calm Seatt, with little money, he had taken the cheapest accommodation he could find. It was a run-down inn called Nattie's House on the outskirts of the city's poorest sector, which the locals had dubbed 'the Graylands Empire.' Over time he had acquired coins from his prey and could have afforded better lodgings, but he did not care enough to make the effort. Remaining in this obscure, little-noticed shambles suited his needs.
Chane went to crouch before his belongings, all piled in the corner where the ceiling rafters slanted down to the streetside eaves. He reached for the nearest of two packs, opened it, and removed an aged tin scroll case. With this in hand he closed his eyes, drifting back to the night Welstiel had taken his 'second death.' The same night Chane had walked away from Wynn in the library of the ice-bound castle.
He hated dwelling on the past, but it was not the first time or even the hundredth that his thoughts slipped to events that led him down this current path…
When he had left Wynn in the library of that castle, which housed one ancient undead, he had stumbled out alone onto the snowy plain.
Free for the first time in his undead existence, he had no place to go. In that moment he had no future, no Wynn, and no fantasies of existing in her world. She did not deserve a monster driven by lust for the hunt and the euphoria of a kill. The need to survive, to feed, was the only thing that kept him moving. Wandering to escape the lifeless Pock Peaks, he drifted slowly west.
Bela was the place where his existence as a Noble Dead had begun—and where he had met Wynn and her sages for the first time.
Part of him believed she would leave Magiere and return there, to the newly established branch of her guild. She belonged there, and eventually she would realize this. Even as Chane crossed the Belaskian border, still far from the king's city, he knew he should not try to touch even that small part of her world. But with each step across the homeland of his living days, Chane's mind slipped backward, desperate to erase his past and
Among books and parchments, a cold lamp's crystal lighting the dark, with one companion of choice…
Impossible—for he was undead, and the beast inside him would never sleep.
When he finally reached Bela, he stayed clear of the old barracks given to the sages. Instead he took a room in a dingy little inn beyond the city's outermost wall. He still had all of Welstiel's possessions and his own, as well as the books he hethe boohad saved from the monastery, where Welstiel had killed and raised healer-monks as feral undead. Chane also had the scroll case, the only thing he had taken from the ice-bound castle.
And every time he held it, a part of him wished it had been Wynn he had taken from that place.
He tucked the scroll case from sight, distracting himself with other things.
Welstiel's belongings and books baffled him, for that arrogant undead had been more than Noble Dead. He had been a skilled conjurer, better than Chane in many ways, though the man preferred artificing over Chane's use of ritual and scant spells. Welstiel's journals were written mostly in Numanese—Wynn's native tongue—and took much time to read. Chane was functional in speaking the language, due to Welstiel's tutoring, but not in reading it.
Welstiel's arcane objects, from the steel hoop that conjured heat within its metal, to the metal rods, the life-conjuring cup, and a strange box of vials, were as unfathomable as the man's two arcane texts. Aside from scattered notes, those latter handwritten volumes were filled with esoteric symbols and characters that likely Welstiel had developed himself.
That was the way of all mages, whatever they practiced. Breaching the personal symbol systems of another mage, born from his fathoming of magic, could take long, if it were possible at all. And even with pieces that Chane worked hard to understand, after only a few moons he found himself holding the ancient scroll case once again.
It represented his one remaining connection to Wynn. And one he could not push aside.
The first time he pulled off its pitted pewter cap, carefully sliding its contents out, the scroll was hard and brittle. Made from a sheet of thin hide, it was too pale even in age for any livestock animal. And he could not unroll it without risk of breaking and crumbling.
Chane had much to do before he could glimpse what it held.
He spent evenings skulking around Bela after dusk before all shops had closed. He needed to know how to restore age-hardened leather to a flexible state without destroying whatever was marked upon it. Consulting leather-workers on the pretense of refurbishing an old vest, he learned to make a cold-filtered mixture of linseed oil and white vinegar. Then he sought scribes and others familiar with inks who could tell him if the solution would affect anything written. One night, back in his room, he took a camel hair brush and delicately applied the mixture for the first time.
The scroll's tightly curved outer surface darkened suddenly.
Chane froze, fearing he'd ruined the ancient relic. But as the solution dried, the thin leather returned to its pale aged color. Caution took hold nonetheless.
He applied the restoration solution only once per day, just before dawn but keeping it in a dark, cool corner. He gently tested the scroll's flexibility at each dusk when he rose from dormancy. Twenty-seven nights passed before the scroll lay perfectly flat, but it was on the seventeenth night that Chane had caught his first glimpse of its content—or lack of it.
The top end of the scroll's inner surface was nearly black, as if wholly covered in ink that had set centuries ago.
Chane slumped in astonishment, and he almost took the scroll and tossed it in the inn's front hearth. Instead he opened the small room's one window, sick of the solution's stench, and stalked out for the night.
When he returned before dawn, senses enlivened by a fresh kill, he didn't bother testing the scroll's flexibility. He shut the window, covered the panes with a moth-eaten blanket against the coming sun, and stretched out upon the straw mattress.
A faint odor tickled his nose. Not vinegar and linseed oil, but something else just beneath that.
Chane sat up.
With fresh life filling him, his skin prickled lightly at dawn's approach. He heard someone out in the inn's front room dump a log on the hearth. Chane drew air deeply through his nose.
He got up and went to the stool he used for a worktable, carefully lifting the scroll.
He'd never before noticed the scent beneath the solution's pungent odor. Or perhaps the solution, permeating and softening the hide sheet, had revitalized something else. With the room's air cleared and his senses opened fully, he lifted the scroll, sniffing its black coating repeatedly.
At first he could not place the thin trace, but it sparked a memory.
In that lost mountain monastery of the healer-monks, called the Servants of Compassion, he had fought with Welstiel and bitten into his undead companion's leg. As Welstiel's black fluids seeped through his breeches, Chane's mouth filled with a taste like rancid linseed oil, and he smelled it as well…
That same odor rose faintly from the scroll's blackened surface.
There had been worn and jumbled writings on the ice-crusted castle's walls, made with the fluids of an undead. The same scent had lingered thinly around the writing.
Urgency made Chane's hands shudder, until the scroll quivered slightly beneath his fingertips. He recognized the scent, not from the ink coating itself, but from something hidden beneath that blackness.
