He was crying.
Stumbling out, he worked hard to control this human body. He fought to drag his own and heave it aboard the sled. Then he watched the breath, so shallow and weak, slowly escaping his body’s muzzle.
How long could he remain inside the guide’s flesh before it was too long?
Not knowing how to use hands, Chap had to wrestle at gripping the sled’s lines. Even if he had ever felt what it was like to speak with a mouth, he did not know the guide’s language to command the dogs. It took longer to return to the spot he’d chosen than it had to leave it behind. When he found the gray rise, a dome of granite with one side sheared off, he took out the shovel and pickax that Leesil had instructed the guide to bring.
Chap began to dig, fumbling, stumbling, and falling so many times in losing his balance on two legs instead of four.
This place was not as far as he would have preferred, but in the past two days he’d seen no signs of anyone coming or going this way. He had at least five days to survive in his return to the coast, and more to find Leesil and Magiere. Inside the guide’s body, he kept hacking and shoveling snow, and then ice, and then frozen ground at the base of the dome’s sheered side.
He kept going deeper. The day was almost gone by the time the hole was deep and wide enough for both orbs.
Chap returned to the sled and uncovered the second orb. It was so heavy that he fell twice, jarring his left knee the second time. When he finally dropped the orb in the hole, he limped back for the first one—the one in the chest.
He could not get the chest open and had to strip off his mittens. His fingers grew numb in the cold. When the latch was finally undone, he lifted the lid and brushed aside the covering to grab the orb with both hands.
A shriek echoed everywhere.
Chap didn’t realize it came from him, for it was Nawyat’s voice that tore out of him. He found himself sprawled on the snow beside the sled, shuddering from ... that one touch. It had been like ... when he touched someone’s rising memories, when he touched a part of that being.
Something had touched him.
His thoughts went numb for an instant, and he scuttled in retreat across the snow. When reason returned, he tried to deny what he had felt. In all the time since the first orb had been found, he’d never touched it. He couldn’t handle it in his own body, so there had never been reason to do so. But if he had felt ...
It was impossible. Leesil had helped rig the sling and poles by which Magiere and he carried the first orb from the six-towered castle. Leesil had touched the orb and would have instantly mentioned feeling anything—but he had not.
Chap crawled to the sled, pulled himself up, and stared into the chest. The orb lay there as moments before, dark and rough surfaced and inert. Even its spike was flush with its exterior, as if all of it were one piece. No thôrhk had lifted the spike free. Chap reached down, his—Nawyat’s—shivering fingertips hovering for an instant, and then he touched it.
Memories carried the presence of the one from whom they came—and the presence flushed through Chap.
Something was alive inside the orb.
That was the only way he could define it, and, at a loss for what it meant, he jerked his hand away. He looked back toward the base of the granite dome’s sheer side.
Chap staggered to the hole’s edge, dropped on his knees, and flattened on the snow to reach down into the hole. He hesitated again before touching the second orb, but with his bare hand this time.
And there it was again ... a presence.
Magiere had felt something, but only when she opened an orb with a thôrhk. So why did he feel something now? And the thought of her thôrhk, or the other one he had left behind with Leesil, lingered in Chap’s mind.
If he had kept it with him instead ...
Chap pushed up, away from the hole. There was no more time to linger, though he was now plagued with more burdens.
Although he got both orbs into the ground by nightfall, he’d barely finished filling in the hole when it became too dark to see. Assembling a shelter was easy in theory, for he’d seen it done many times. Doing so in this body in the dark was another matter. He managed it and threw food out for the dogs before dragging his true body into the shelter.
In the morning, he shoveled snow and ice across the filled-in hole and hoped for foul weather to soon obscure any evidence that someone had been digging there. Well after midday, he took down the shelter, returned to the dogs and sled, and then drove them back to the place where he’d taken Nawyat’s body.
When—if—the guide awoke, he would see no more than in the last moment he remembered.
Chap hesitated. He could already feel that something was wrong.
He was shaking and not from fatigue. There were moments when the world appeared hazy and dim. What if his return to his own flesh was worse than possessing that of another? He took time to assemble the shelter again and dragged his own body into it.
The breath from his muzzle was even weaker now as he watched.
Chap stripped off Nawyat’s gloves. Taking his own head in Nawyat’s hands, he pushed up the lids of those majay-hì eyes. The pupils were no more than black pinheads at the center of crystal-blue irises, but he looked into those eyes, trying to find Spirit again ... not his individual spirit but the elemental Spirit of flesh itself.
Everything went black before his—Nawyat’s—eyes.
Chap felt his head hit the hardened ground as he collapsed, and then he was struggling to breathe.
His chest burned. Cold air stung his dry throat. Every muscle ached as if he’d lain in illness too long without moving. He had to fight to open his eyes, and even then everything was so dark. It was more than a dozen breaths before he made out a mute form before him.
Everything in the shelter appeared turned sideways where Chap lay with his head against the ground. Beyond his nose was a dark-skinned hand ... and beyond that was Nawyat’s face.
The guide lay on his side, eyes half-open and unblinking in his slack-featured face.
Chap tried to get up—in his own body—and could not even lift his head. He tried to bark, to paw, to do anything to rouse some reaction from Nawyat. In desperation he reached for the guide’s memories, searching for anything that rose there now that he’d vacated the man’s body.
There was nothing.
He had gone too far, lingered too long in that man’s flesh.
Chap lay there through the night. By dawn he was able to roll onto his belly, though at first he couldn’t bring himself to look upon his victim. When he did so, the light outside was bright enough to filter through the shelter’s canvas.
Nawyat’s eyes were still half-open and empty. Though he breathed, it was no more than Chap had seen in his own body through the guide’s eyes. Was there anything left of the individual spirit Chap had pushed down so completely that he had taken the man’s flesh as well?
He tried again to find any memory in Nawyat, but the darkness in the guide’s mind was so complete ... and then something flickered in Chap’s awareness.
It was only one image, and it did not move like the memory of a past event. Chap—Nawyat—saw himself in the moment when he had fixed upon the guide and taken the man’s will so completely that he took his flesh as well.
The image of himself in Nawyat’s memory did not move. It lingered, frozen, capturing the moment of Chap’s sin.
When Chap had been born into flesh, he’d not known how much of his memory of being with his kin, the Fay, had been torn out of him by them. He had not even remembered that they had done this to him. Only later had he suspected, and even then he had difficulty fully fathoming any fragments of memories left inside him.