In Shade and Shadow

such remote places. And unlike vampires or yâksasath, or even the unknown undead hunting the folios, ghüls ate flesh. That would certainly leave a mark on a corpse.

She reached the last stack in the second sheaf, and it was written in Dwarvish. Wynn skimmed the text as she dipped her elven quill into the small ink bottle. She read Dwarvish better than she spoke it, giving her time to work out any older characters. Still, the text was archaic and the syntax difficult to follow, until…

Hassäg'kreigi.

Wynn's gaze locked on that one term. She scanned it twice more to be sure she'd read the characters correctly. When those black-armored dwarven warriors had secretly visited High-Tower, and vanished shortly after, the domin had called them by this title.

Stonewalkers.

She jerked the quill back to her journal—and heard something rattle on the tabletop.

Wynn sucked a frantic breath. The little ink bottle teetered and spun amid all the loose sheets. She dropped the quill and grabbed it with both hands, bringing it to sudden stillness. A few black droplets spattered over her thumb.

Wynn broke out in a sweat.

If she blemished even one sheet, Domin Tärpodious might drop dead in his tracks—but not before he took her with him. She slowly released the bottle and carefully lifted her ink-spattered hand away. Ripping a blank page from the journal, she did her best to clean her thumb. Wynn gazed hurriedly across the page of dwarven letters.

There was only one brief mention in a passage about the death of a dwarven female, a thänæ of unknown skills named Tunbûllé—Wave-Striker. That was an odd name, considering dwarves didn't like traveling by sea. Wave-Striker had been «honored» and 'taken into stone' by the Hassäg'kreigi, the Stonewalkers.

Wynn had no idea what this meant. Her thoughts rushed back to what she'd overheard in High-Tower's study.

The two vanishing dwarves were dressed like no others she'd ever seen. It seemed very unlikely that they were masons or sculptors, who carved likenesses of their people's «honored» dead. Nothing more in the text helped her, so she took notes for later use and turned to the book selected along with the two wood-sandwiched sheaves.

Wynn was instantly relieved, for it was written in late-era Numanese. The book's spine was worn beyond reading, but an inner page carried its title.

Gydes Färleôvan—Tales of Misbelief—was a collection of folktales traced from the various peoples who predated the nations of the Numan Lands. She turned the pages, trying to catch and decipher strange terms.

…pochel… mischievous nature guardians, prone to pranks upon farmers…

…géasbäna… frail little «demons» who stole people's life essences, turning them into will-less slaves…

…wihte… creatures or beings created rather than naturally birthed…

Wynn sat upright at that last term. The coastal country south of Malourné was called Witeny, and its people the Witenon. The similar sound was probably just a coincidence. Then she noticed that the light in the antechamber had grown dim.

Her cold lamp crystal had waned to half strength. How long had she been down here? She took the crystal out, rubbed it back to brilliance, and replaced it.

Wynn lowered her chin on her hands folded atop the open book. She closed her tired eyes for a moment. Her head ached and she'd made no true discoveries. She took a weary breath, straightened up, and read…

…that blâch-cheargéa gripped the young minstrel by the throat…

Wynn pulled her hands back and read onward.

Try as he might, the minstrel's fists passed through his tormentor as through smoke. He turned pale and dangled dead before the entire village in the grip of Âthkyensmyotnes…

Wynn's thoughts grew still.

Two words in the short tale were unclear, and not part of the narrative's dialect. Blâch- cheargéa meant something like 'black terror-spirit,' but how could a spirit be black, let alone hold up a man in its grip? And the other term didn't make sense.

Âthkyen was a compound word no longer used in Numanese, one that she'd read in accounts of the pre-nation clans that had inhabited this land. It meant ruler by divine or innate right, rather than by bloodline or selection, but the term's latter half wasn't Numanese—not by any dialect that Wynn knew of. She did know a word that sounded similar.

The elven root word smiot'an referred to 'spirit,' as in that of a person and not the element. The Lhoin'na, the elves of her continent, were the longest-standing culture here—long enough that some of their root words, classified by the guild under the grouping of New Elvish, had been absorbed and transformed in human tongues as pure nouns.

She pulled the book closer, rushing through the text in search of more, but the tale was only half a page long.

A black terror-ghost… sovereign of spirits?

It could touch—physically touch. This had to be another superstition. Even if this tale was an account of a true undead, it wouldn't be the first bit of nonsense concerning such.

Leesil and Magiere had tracked and impaled a vampire named Sapphire, only to have the creature vanish when they turned their backs for an instant. Staking a vampire through the heart turned out to be superstition, one that even some vampires believed in. But the tale in the book still left her wondering about Master Shilwise's scribe shop.

Someone had gotten in, without forcing entry, but then had to break out.

Perhaps the creature in this tale was a mage—like Chane or Welstiel—maybe a thaumaturge, working magic of the physical realm. Yes, a vampire mage would have many years to become highly skilled. At a guess, it might learn how to transmute its solid form into a gaseous state at will, and slip through the cracks of a door.

All right, so it was a silly notion for children's ghost tales, but she'd seen stranger things in the last two years. And there was still the puzzle of why whoever had slipped in had to break out.

Wynn took up her quill and turned a fresh page in her journal. She recorded the entire short tale in the Begaine script. For now, her best path was to search Numanese writings for any further mention of the blâch-cheargéa and Âthkyensmyotnes. Second, she should search any elven works in the archives, considering the strange hybrid title. She stood up, ready to seek out whatever she could.

'Young Hygeorht!'

Wynn jumped in surprise. Domin Tärpodious stood at the antechamber's entrance, his milky eyes wide in horror. At first she wasn't certain why. He shuffled in, disapproval coloring his pale face.

'Surely you didn't need all of these at once for Tilswith's research?'

Wynn glanced about.

Disheveled piles covered the whole table, and a few sheets had slipped off to scatter about the floor.

'Oh… oops,' she said. 'I must've… I didn't realize…'

With the old master archivist already displeased, she knew better than to offer help in straightening up. She