Through Stone and Sea - By Barb Hendee & J. C. Hendee Page 0,4

fir trees planted in large black marble pots. She knew she had the right path, but Chane’s brow wrinkled as he glanced east.

“Almost there,” she said in a gasp, and hiked her robe as she climbed again.

Shade bounded ahead, reaching the street’s next switchback first. Wynn hoped at least one shirvêsh—a temple attendant—was up and about this early.

A deep tone echoed between the buildings.

Wynn pulled up short on the steps and held her breath.

“What?” Chane whispered.

She raised a hand for silence and waited, listening and hoping for more tones to come, but none did.

“Night-Winter is over!” she whispered in panic. “Day-Spring begins!”

“What does that mean?” Chane demanded.

This was no time to explain dwarven measures of night’s and day’s phases. She grabbed his sleeve, jerking him onward.

“Dawn is coming!”

“I do not need bells to know that,” he answered.

Wynn reached Shade at the main street’s next crossing. Across the way, before the next intersection pillar and its steaming crystal, was a massive structure emerging from the mountainside. Its double doors of white marble were set back beneath a high overhang supported by columns carved like living trees. But quick relief vanished.

Faint shadows from the columns began to appear upon the doors.

Wynn had to get Chane inside right now.

A dark column, like smoke thickening in shadow, grew in a small street- side terrace. It coalesced before an old fir tree nurtured in that place. And a heavy black cowl sagged across a cloak layered over a long black robe.

Sau’ilahk watched his trio of quarry scurry up the steps to the columned and roofed landing.

The sky grew light, and he could not remain for long nor risk going closer. The wolf might sense him. But he now knew these three better, having followed their nightly journey all the way from Calm Seatt.

Wynn Hygeorht, journeyor sage, kept company with a savage, tall wolf she had named Shade. But the pale one called Chane was more suspicious. He gave off no sense of presence at all. In Calm Seatt, both of Wynn’s companions had been difficult to deal with face-to-face, as neither succumbed to Sau’ilahk’s life-consuming touch. But Wynn frustrated and angered him most.

If not for her meddling, he might have acquired more translation folios—and perhaps a hint to the remedy of his long misery.

She did not know his name, never would, and instead referred to him as something out of her people’s quaint old folklore—a wraith. She even thought him destroyed by the staff’s crystal. Oh, she had injured him worse than he could remember and driven him into dark dormancy. The crystal’s flare had torn him up like sunlight. But she had no notion what he truly was, whom she had interfered with. In centuries of searching, he had never come close to what he sought until the ancient texts had appeared at the guild. And now . . .

Sau’ilahk slid back through the massive fir and into its deeper shadows, feeling the life in its branches pass through him as if he were nothing! That worthless tingle of life was too removed from his once living nature. It did not feed him and only made him ache for one precious thing lost an age ago.

Flesh.

By dear, deceitful Beloved, the one true deity, how he ached to have flesh once more. That singular desire might have been all that had kept him from fading into nothingness over more than a thousand years. And there was Beloved’s more recent promise, given one dusk upon the edge of Sau’ilahk’s dormancy.

Follow the sage . . . urge her, drive her. . . . She will lead you to your desire.

That temptation of hope ground against doubt- fueled rage. Could he ever trust his god again?

Sau’ilahk sighed, though his “voice” was nothing more than conjury-twisted air, allowing him to speak if needed. It was smothered like a weakened hiss in the mountain breeze.

Word of his supposed death—or second so—had spread through the sages’ guild and beyond. Yet their leaders still chose not to send folios out to scribe shops. And it had become too risky to search farther on guild’s grounds. Beloved’s whispered words and this sage were all he had left.

It would be so much more pleasing to just kill her.

She thought she knew so much. It was twice as galling that in part she was correct. She knew more than her confederates, though so little of the actual truth.

Sau’ilahk would make her efforts come to nothing, once she led him to what he wanted. He needed