In Shade and Shadow

stopped in a quiet garden or copse of the inner bailey, an occasional passerby could be heard beyond the wall.

'Get, you mutt! Stay out of my garbage!'

That angry voice interrupted Wynn's sulking, and she peered up the wall's height, greater than a footman's pike. Some cook in an eatery must have come out back and shooed off a stray dog. Wynn moved on through the remains of a garden.

The tomato bed was barren, its last harvest sun-dried for winter storage. Deflated by Premin Sykion's refusal to let her see the texts or her journals from the Farlands, Wynn contemplated what to do next.

'Why do they deny these crimes have anything to do with the translation work?'

Wynn pulled her cloak tighter as a late-autumn breeze sent aspen leaves raining down around her. She talked to herself too often these days.

High-Tower and Sykion hadn't made her life easy since her return, but they weren't fools. Even if they wouldn't accept what she suspected, that the killer might be an undead, surely they recognized that guild members carrying folios might be in danger.

Half a year of work had passed, and now someone or something was clearly desperate to see material recently touched upon. Whoever it was could read the Begaine syllabary; otherwise the folio pages would be worthless.

But how had anyone outside the guild learned enough about the folios' content to want to see them at all? Most of the guild, besides those involved in translations, knew even less than Wynn did of the content of those old texts. Unless…

…someone within the guild—at a high level—had already read something of importance.

But what could drive someone to kill for it?

She passed through the narrow space between the wall and the newer southeast dormitory building. Beyond it and the keep's wall was the old barracks and her own room.

Wynn shook her head at the notion that the murder might be someone within the guild. If a vampire was living among them, she should've spotted it long ago. Once, she'd been deceived by Chane, but looking back she remembered all the signs. He'd always visited at night, never ate, and drank only mint tea… his pale face… and his strange eyes, sometimes brown… sometimes almost clear.

Still, there were the moneylender and the young man who'd threatened Elias to consider.

No, the murderer had to be an undead, and one that killed without leaving any marks, and it had to be outside of the guild's population.

She rounded the east tower and peered along the keep's back at the near end of the new library. Every side of the keep but the front had an additional building added on. Only the spaces around the four towers, as well as the front side, were left open for gardens and other uses.

The two-story library, barely more than two-thirds the keep's height, was tall enough to view the surrounding city from its upper windows. Although its new stone was pleasant compared to the ancient castle's weathered granite, the library contained only the best selected volumes copied for use by the guild at large. Wynn had always been more drawn to the catacombs beneath the castle—the master archives.

She remembered the sight of Jeremy's and Elias's ashen skin and rigid, horrified expressions. They'd died quickly but in terror and agony.

Wynn turned about, heading back toward the keep's front.

Rodian had said that whoever took the folio from Master Shilwise's shop gained entrance and then had to break out. Wynn was sick of every new discovery making no sense.

How and why would a Noble Dead gain unnoticed entrance, and then not be able to slip away just the same? She rounded the southern tower, returning through autumn aspens and fallow gardens, and then heard someone walking outside along the Old Bailey Road.

The steps scraped and clicked, like a small or short-legged person hurrying to keep up with someone else. But she heard no one else.

Beyond the undead that Wynn had seen or learned of, she knew little about the Noble Dead. Called the Vneshené Zomrelé in native Belaskian—or upír, or even vampyr in Droevinkan—the term referred to an undead of the most potent nature. Unlike ghosts or animated corpses, they retained their full presence of self from life. They were aware of themselves and their own desires, able to learn and grow as individuals in their immortal existence.

And her peers would think her mad if she said such a thing out loud.

But all this was recorded in her journals. No doubt all involved in the translation project had read them.

As a girl she'd sometimes assisted Domin Tilswith with his research in Numan folklore and legend. She'd enjoyed her master's dabbling, up to a point. It often left her wondering why he'd become a cathologer, instead of joining the Order of Metaology, like il'Sänke. Tilswith's fascination would've been better served that way. She remembered the day he mentioned an old term—àrdadesbàrn.

It meant 'dead's child' in one of the pre-Numanese dialects, the child of a living woman and a recently deceased man. She'd forgotten that bit of nonsense from her days as an apprentice, until later, when she had met Magiere.

'Ghosts and walking dead…' she muttered, 'àrdadesbàrn and dhampirs…'

Wynn stepped out of the bailey's south grove, headed toward the wall's gateway across from the massive gatehouse.

If Domin Tilswith could find references to the àrdadesbàrn, what else might be waiting in the catacombs below the guild, unread and untouched for years? What vampire could enter a scriptorium covertly, have to leave it by force, and could feed without leaving a mark?

Her thoughts were interrupted by a skittering outside the bailey wall.

A memory rose sharply in Wynn's thoughts. She stumbled midstep and froze in place.

Crouched behind a water trough at night, in a small river town of Magiere's homeland, Wynn had seen everything before her permeated with the blue-white mist of Spirit. That first time she'd raised mantic sight by dabbling in magic, she'd watched a pale undead come up the main road through the town.

Vordana.

Grayed, emaciated flesh stretched over the bones of his face and hands, and filthy white hair hung in mats out the sides of his cowl. His white shirt-front beneath the soiled umber robe was stained dark by old blood.

And the mist of Spirit in all things seemed to drift toward Vordana.

Beneath his filmy white eyes and pallid skin, Wynn had seen no translucent blue-white mist. Only darkness, as if his whole form were a void that no light could penetrate. Those drifting trails of Spirit within all things were slowly swallowed into him.

Vordana had fixed upon Leesil.

Leesil buckled to his knees as his life began to drain away into that undead, though Vordana never even touched him.

Wynn snapped to her senses in the castle's inner bailey as a cold gust of wind pulled on her cloak and hood. The clicking outside the wall came and went, again and again, as if someone paced in agitation.

Like paws on stone, claws catching in the cobble.

Wynn stared up wide-eyed to the wall's top. She gasped in a breath and ran for the gateway.

'Chap!' she cried. 'Are you there?'

The gates were open, and she raced out into the Old Bailey Road.

There was no one in sight, let alone a dog. She spun about, looking both ways, then ahead down the Old Procession Road. She raced down that main way, skidding into the intersection with Wall Shops Row.

'Chap!'

All around, people went about between the shops. Three finely dressed gentlemen stood talking before a poster board where the day's recent news was nailed up. A city guard atop a black horse leaned slightly aside as he checked in with two local constables. A dowdy woman in drab attire pushed through a small gathering to elbow her way into a confectionery.

A carriage midstreet came on a bit too fast.