The barest hint of a smile spread across his mouth, and she instantly wanted to take his head. He took another step, and Leesil appeared on her right as Chap sidled in on her left. The tall, white ancient halted. He raised both empty hands outward, and then slowly pulled them in, gesturing to himself.
“Iàng qahhar’ur,” he said.
Magiere shook her head. He frowned, and then ...
“Man’äm qahhar-ís ... e ra’fi?”
At the last of this, he gestured to her. These words sounded different, almost musical in tone. Maybe some other language, though there was one word that seemed similar.
“I ... do not ... understand,” she struggled to get out in Numanese.
The tall undead tilted his head to one side and then straightened. He never even glanced at Chap or Leesil, and again he touched a hand to his chest.
“I ... am ... Qahhar,” he said, faltering over the words. “Well met ... lost ... grandchild.”
That cold place was deathly quiet for a long moment.
“We back out now,” Leesil whispered. “If we reach the tunnel’s mouth, we can keep them—”
Qahhar turned his eyes on Leesil, and all the pleading hope and the hint of a smile vanished from his face.
Magiere fought to keep her dhampir nature under control, though she wanted to let go, let instinct take her for the way this undead looked at her husband. Something inside her wouldn’t respond to that desire. Something held it down even as Leesil carefully swung out one forearm with its wing blade to block her way.
Qahhar looked at her again. A mournful sorrow flooded his features, as if he had begun to weep, though no tears rolled from his colorless eyes.
“My lost grandchild,” he said, taking another small, hesitant step. “Beloved ... guided you to me. I waited so long to be forgiven for my sin ... for my desire to stand alone.”
Magiere stiffened. What did he mean by his “beloved”?
Though, unlike Li’kän, he spoke and understood words, and he knew more than one language, what he said made no sense. Something hard and urgent flickered across his features.
“Alone,” he whispered. “I begged forgiveness for my pride ... for thinking only I was worthy.”
At a soft pressure on Magiere’s leg, she looked down to find Chap close against her. Another memory swelled in her thoughts when he glanced up once at her.
She saw the orb, the one they had brought, where it had sat upon a stone pedestal in the great cavern below the six-towered castle. What was he trying to tell her now?
“You are beautiful to my eyes,” Qahhar said. “And I have ... mourned my sins. In my regret, I thought to keep from being alone.”
He gestured weakly toward one of the three undead still standing in the shadows with their heads bowed, though he did not look at them.
“These did no good, and only now ... Beloved has forgiven me for thinking that only I am a fit guardian ... for destroying the others of the Children who were sent with me.”
Magiere stared at him. From what Wynn had learned about Li’kän, that undead had journeyed a long way to the Pock Peaks a thousand years ago with a horde of servants and two companions named Volyno and Häs’saun. Over the following centuries, somehow those other two had either perished or vanished, leaving Li’kän all alone in her endless silence.
Or had she destroyed them, as Qahhar just claimed he had done?
Had he then tried to make himself companions from Wastelanders who had wandered too near his prison, only to find later that these creations did not fill his need? Li’kän hadn’t tried that—either by choice or because no one was near enough by the time loneliness would have driven her to such an act. But, like her, Qahhar had survived in a place where there couldn’t have been enough life to sustain him.
And what had he meant by “fit guardian”? Magiere didn’t even want to guess.
The memory of the orb on its pedestal flashed again in her mind. This time she understood what Chap meant ... what had sustained Qahhar for all these centuries.
“Show me what you guard,” she ordered.
“No!” Leesil hissed.
Qahhar’s cold eyes appeared to brighten with relief. Without a word, he turned smoothly and headed back the way he’d come. All three servants remained where they were, with their heads bowed. Magiere desperately wished she had an instant to speak with Leesil and Chap alone.
“We have to follow,” she said. “I have to see.”
Leesil’s features twisted into panicked anger, but Chap stepped onward after Qahhar. Magiere could only look away from Leesil and follow as well.
How many times would she do this to him and grow fearfully sick inside until she heard his footsteps come after her? How many times before she didn’t hear those footfalls?
Walking near Chap’s right haunch, Magiere kept back from Qahhar as he led them up the far icy tunnel. It was a while before she noticed how the tunnel darkened even more, lit only by the glow of Leesil’s amulet as he came behind her. Then she felt more than saw the steadily increasing slant of the floor.
They were going upward rather than into the depths. She kept her eyes on the back of Qahhar’s fur cloak as she followed. By his words and what Chap had shown her, she had no doubt of what she’d find at the end of this tunnel. She could hardly let herself believe it was possible, and she didn’t want to believe.
Magiere saw faint shimmers along the walls ahead of Qahhar that couldn’t be coming from Leesil’s amulet. However, their group couldn’t be approaching the top of the mountain ridge; by the size of the peaks that she’d seen outside, they hadn’t gone far or high enough. But they must be somewhere near the surface if light now seeped in through the ice. Or shouldn’t there be layers of rock to block it out?
Soon she made out more heads frozen inside the walls. Their dead eyes were turned toward the passage—toward Qahhar as he passed them without a returned glance.
Leesil hadn’t said a word along the way.
The passage leveled off, and Magiere spotted stronger light ahead. Qahhar stepped out of the tunnel into a vast cavern, and Magiere followed. It was so wide that she couldn’t have thrown a stone to its far side. Looking all around, she found other features familiar and unsettling.
They stood upon a broad ice shelf that circled the entire cavern. Four narrow walkways stretched from the shelf in the form of a cross, joining at a middle platform over the center of a chasm. But unlike the stone cavern below Li’kän’s castle, everything here was made of ice.
Qahhar blocked Magiere’s view of the center platform as he stepped to where the ledge met the nearest walkway bridge. The path he trod was no wider than twice his shoulder width. When she went to follow, she paused and peered over the shelf’s lip.
The chasm was too deep to see the bottom. She looked into an endless fall from the light permeating the cavern into a pitch black far below. Along that descent was nothing but craggy walls of ice. She shut her eyes as vertigo made her dizzy.
When Magiere opened her eyes again to step onward, Chap had cut in front of her with a snarl as he stepped onto the bridge.
Qahhar stopped, turned about, and for the first time looked upon the dog.
Chap froze in place but didn’t retreat as Qahhar’s expression turned as blank and emotionless as his colorless eyes. The undead’s gaze lifted, and at the sight of Magiere, his mournful and grateful expression returned, and he moved on.
Magiere urged Chap onward, as there was no way to get around the dog on the narrow bridge. When Qahhar stepped onto the central platform and off to one side, Magiere was able to see what waited there, though she’d already imagined it.
Instead of stone like the last time, a four-legged stand of ice like a tall and narrow table rose from out of the platform’s frost-glazed surface. A perfectly round hole had been carved or had formed in the stand’s top.