At his accusation, Magiere’s misplaced anger at Leesil and Chap faded. In fairness, back on the isle, Brot’an had told her something of what made the rift between him and Most Aged Father widen to an extreme. She hadn’t offered anything in turn, but it wasn’t as simple as just telling him.
How could she? She’d only recently been able to look back on any of it. There were some parts she could remember barely, if at all.
“What do you want to know,” she asked Brot’an, “to really know? And don’t just ask me what happened up in the Wastes. There was too much.”
He appeared thoughtful, as if considering what specific information he wanted most.
“You found the first orb in a castle,” he began, “and in the journal Wynn sent to me, she alluded to an ancient guardian. What of the second orb, where you found it? Was it guarded as well? If we face the same possibility in seeking another orb, I need to know.”
Magiere wavered. He hadn’t asked about the hardest part she’d have to tell. It wasn’t the worst for her, Leesil, and Chap, but that part she wouldn’t ever share.
At her hesitation, Brot’an pressed further. “I have tried to answer your questions. I have come here to protect you from my caste. When you found the second orb in the north, was there a guardian?”
Damn Wynn for her relentless scribbling! That was the only way Brot’an could know or guess this much. Magiere looked out over the rail at the water smashing against the ship’s hull only to roll away in broken foam, all white.
“Yes,” she whispered. “There was a guardian.”
Quietly she began to speak....
Magiere didn’t even remember pulling her falchion as she led the way across the last stretch of the white plain.
Her jaws ached under the change in her teeth, and her eyes burned worse than ever before in the glare. All she saw was a low, dark opening in the brilliant white crags ahead of her. It was all she needed to find her way. When she stepped into the mouth of darkness, the tunnel beyond was as bright as a normal day to her—a relief compared to the blinding glare outside.
Only then did she hear the soft echo of feet and paws following behind her. Only then did she become half-aware of Leesil and Chap still with her.
Fierce hunger burned up her throat and into the back of her mouth with the urge to hunt. She couldn’t stop—didn’t want to—as she stalked onward, watching for any movement, listening for any new sound ... sniffing the air for something not quite alive.
Down the broad ice passage, a shimmer of light played upon the glistening walls around her and out ahead. She slowed, peering about, until her eyes fixed on Leesil’s amulet, which was exposed atop his coat.
Its amber glow burned her sight as though she’d looked too long into a lantern, and she flinched away from it. He stepped past her down the tunnel, and she made to follow him as the shimmering light upon the walls caught on dimmer spots.
There was something locked in the ice of the walls.
Magiere stared through misted ice at the twisted face of a Wastelander native. Only his head, mouth still gaping and eyes stretched open in the moment of his death, was frozen inside the wall.
A shuddering, keening whine echoed in the tunnel.
Magiere spun, her grip tightening on the falchion’s hilt before she spotted Chap behind her. He was looking beyond her, up the passage, and she turned the other way.
Leesil stood farther ahead, close to the tunnel’s left wall and staring at it. He held his amulet closer to the ice and curled his other hand to catch his coat’s cuff and wipe a patch of wall with his sleeve.
The light from Leesil’s amulet revealed a shadow in the ice before his face.
Magiere took only two steps before she made out another head ... and then another. There were more, frozen inside the walls along the passage. Open, dead eyes stared out at her. Much later she would wonder how long they had been there, and about Ti’kwäg’s stories.
Natives of the Wastes had gone in search of their lost ones, and shadows had moved within the blizzards upon the white plains.
“Seven hells,” Leesil whispered, and he turned up the tunnel, as if not wanting to meet those eyes staring out of the walls.
The heads should have horrified Magiere as well, but they didn’t. They sparked only a dull awareness, some faraway memory.
These frozen heads meant even less to her now than when she’d seen human and inhuman skeletons curled in hollows all along the tunnel down into the great cavern below the six-towered castle. With their skulls down, foreheads pressed to the floor in submission, they spent eternity cowering in death before the emissary of their god.
There was a name for that thing: Li’kän.
That naked, near-white, and deceptively frail woman had been left alone there for a thousand years to watch over the first orb. She was one of the first that the world had ever known among the Noble Dead. The ones the world forgot.
And there was another like her somewhere in here. Magiere felt it. She should’ve felt the anger-driven fear in Leesil’s eyes, heard it in Chap’s noise, but there was only hunger now burrowed into her bones, until ...
She wanted something to tear apart.
Between that drive and the pain of Leesil’s blinding amulet, Magiere was vaguely aware that they could be reliving something similar to what they’d encountered in the Pock Peaks. Leesil stood ahead, his back to her, and it was all she could do not to rush past him. Finally he stepped onward, and, hearing Chap’s claws coming nearer, she closed on Leesil from behind.
Leesil stepped into an intersection before she caught up.
Instinct—a warning—surged through Magiere.
He stopped amid the openings on all four sides of him. He was too far out of reach to grab, and she shouted at him. All that came out was an echoing screech that smothered Chap’s sharp, sudden snarl.
Leesil spun at Magiere’s shout, and a dark blur dropped out of—from—the ice ceiling above him.
Magiere charged, her boots slipping on the frozen tunnel floor. Leesil didn’t even look up and ... he ducked and rolled aside.
Before the shadow landed in the intersection, Magiere saw it as a man dressed in fur garb. Leesil pulled both of his winged blades as Magiere rushed the figure from behind and raised her falchion with one hand.
Another—and one more again—came out of the side tunnels.
Leesil came off one knee to swing at their nearest attacker rushing in from the left. The one in the intersection went straight at him. Magiere lost sight of all else as Chap’s howl echoed loudly, as if from everywhere, and the one going at Leesil stalled and turned.
The assailant’s face caught in the swinging light of Leesil’s amulet.
This time instinct made Magiere falter; a sliver of reason slipped in.
He was shorter than she was, and had the black hair and rounded features and slit-like eyes of the nomadic Wastelanders. But his skin looked bleached compared to their dark tones, as if half his color had been bled away. Dressed in only pants and a makeshift cloak, both of fur, his torso was as pallid as his face, but he didn’t shiver in the frigid air. No vapor escaped his mouth with his breath, and his lips opened slightly, exposing elongated fangs.
There was no madness of hunger to match her own in his eyes—not as she’d seen in the feral vampires she’d faced in the Pock Peaks before Li’kän had appeared.
He carried no weapon at all.
When Magiere’s blade came down, he twisted his head aside and slapped the steel away. Her balance faltered as the falchion’s tip cracked the icy floor. All she could do was claw for his throat with her free hand. When her grip closed on his neck, she tried to grind her hardened fingernails through skin and muscle.