Wynn listened carefully as Chane closed the door after her. She heard no footsteps in the passage outside, so both guards had remained at their posts. Apparently they didn’t care about the guests’ movements so long as no one left the upper floor without an escort. With a sigh, she turned to Chane and Osha, and noted that the small room was much the same as her own.
“How was ... meeting with old sage?” Osha asked.
“A disaster,” she answered honestly. “Jausiff came at me with questions about my new order that I couldn’t answer. That ended everything, when I was exposed as some type of fraud in this robe.”
Chane frowned. “You learned nothing?”
“Well ... he’s not ill or infirm from age, and I do think he’s genuinely concerned about Karl. His loyalty to the family isn’t in question, or he would’ve left this place years ago. But something else is going on here.” She mulled over the rest of the encounter. “It appears Jausiff called Nikolas back to help with issues concerning the duke. Even that didn’t seem to be all there was to it. Once I was alone with Nikolas, I suggested that he speak to the duchess ... to see if Sherie knows any more about how the messages were sent.”
Chane stepped closer. “Will he ... or, rather, can he?”
Obviously Wynn wasn’t the only one doubtful of Nikolas’s usefulness. “I think he’d do anything so he can leave here. He told me he’d try tomorrow.”
“Good,” Osha said, nodding to her.
She deserved no such praise after being so poorly prepared to deal with Jausiff.
“I hate to use Nikolas like this,” she said, “but I couldn’t see any other way. The duchess is unlikely to talk to me, let alone either of you. She might not even know anything of use. We need to know if the messenger was sent from here, as that’s our only hope of learning if that person and the would-be thief are one and the same. And how Jausiff is connected, if at all.”
“As you say, and it’s more than we had upon our arrival,” Chane replied. He moved around her to the door; Osha sidestepped away as he grabbed the latch. “There is nothing more we can do tonight, so you should sleep now.”
His abrupt manner—almost as if he wanted her to leave—caught her off guard. Perhaps he was right on both issues. Feeling somewhat off center and frustrated by failures, she headed for the door as he opened it.
“All right,” Wynn agreed, still puzzled by Chane’s eagerness to see her off. “Osha, I will see you in the morning.”
Did Chane really want to spend the night alone, watching Osha sleep?
Chapter Twelve
Not long past nightfall, a figure garbed in a full-length hooded black robe and cloak materialized in one small room of the keep’s underground chambers and passages. Inside a voluminous, sagging hood—where there should have been a face—was only darkness. Though the chamber’s air was still and stale, both robe and cloak shifted subtly, as if upon a breeze.
Sau’ilahk awakened from dormancy, fully aware and alone, for the man who usually awaited him was late.
It did not matter yet.
He raised one arm, and his sleeve slid downward. For an instant he stared at his own thin arm, hand, and fingers all wrapped in strips of black cloth. Even to him, his arm looked so real, so corporeal, but it was not. Anything might pass through it, as if it were a mirage upon the great deserts of his homeland. Focusing with intent, he turned his hand solid as he drifted across the chamber without the sound of a single step. He paused at the one small table, worn and bleached with age, and looked down upon the single object lying there.... A circlet, broken by design, made of ruddy metal.
It was thick and heavy, slightly larger in circumference than a great helm, and about a fourth of it was missing. From its open ends, protruding knobs pointed straight across the gap at each other.
Some might call it a thôrhk, a neck adornment worn by few honored dwarves, but it would more correctly be called a key.
Sau’ilahk picked it up with his willfully solidified hand and turned slowly away from the table. This chamber, carved from solid rock, was not large, but it was private, secure, and suited to his needs. It had perhaps once been a storage room or a cell for prisoners. One solid but aged wooden door behind him would open into a main subterranean chamber lined with similar doors that could also be locked.
To the right of the door was an iron tripod stand.
Three legs supported a like iron ring, which held the only other object in this locked room.
The globe resting in the stand was slightly larger around than the object he held, but it was not made of the same ruddy metal. Rather, the globe appeared fashioned from some unknown material, neither metal nor stone, and it was dark as char, with a surface faintly rough like evenly chiseled basalt. A spike of matching material pierced down through the globe’s center; its broad tapered top was wider from side to side than a clenched fist. The spike’s pointed tip also protruded through the globe’s bottom between the stand’s legs. But both spike and globe appeared formed from a single piece.
The very sight of it still caused Sau’ilahk to quiver with elation after a thousand fleshless years of yearning. Oh, how long had he suffered in his search for ...
The orb—“anchor”—of Spirit.
His impatience growing, Sau’ilahk glanced at the door and then raised the thôrhk before the hollow of his dark hood. This object had been his salvation—once he’d finally realized it could serve a purpose beyond opening an orb ... an anchor.
Earlier this year, he had been led by Wynn Hygeorht on a futile chase all the way to Bäalâle Seatt, a vast, forgotten, and long-fallen mountain stronghold of the dwarves in ancient times. He had hoped to find this very orb in that place, but the one hidden in the deepest depths was not the one he had sought for a thousand years.
Desperation had almost broken him in that moment and nearly pushed him into eternal grief and madness. That orb beneath a forgotten seatt was useless for his need to regain the flesh—his physical form—cheated from him by his god, who had promised him eternal youth.
Immortality—eternal life—was not the same as eternal youth.
One served the spirit while the other served the body, though the mind could cling to and go on with either. If only he had known then ...
His spirit, that essence of self and a shadow of life, had gone on, but his body had aged and withered and died just the same. It had been even longer until his dead flesh decayed to dust, and he rose from his mountain tomb as only a spirit, an undead.
How he had screamed in horror and then raged that first night.
Nearly a thousand years later, in Bäalâle, in a dead-end tunnel far beneath the dwarven seatt, all that had been left to him was spite and the need to flee his pursuers. Before they caught up and found the false orb that meant nothing to him, he took the thôrhk—the key—he had found as well and hid it within the cave’s stone wall. He fled that place in the same anguish and betrayal that he had felt upon the first night he arose in death—but also in a growing hatred for his god.
How many days had followed in which he’d writhed in the grip of Beloved during his dormancy? How many following nights had he awoken, until one night came with a whispered hint from his god....
Back to Bäalâle ... back to the key ... That is your hope of salvation.
This made no sense. It was the wrong key ... for the wrong orb. Both were worthless, and he believed this urging to be another of a thousand lies from his god. He ignored that whisper, but in the nights that followed, Beloved teased him and beat him down in the dark.