The half-blood and the dhampir both looked drawn and weary as they stepped to the table, but they didn’t yet sit.
“Yes,” Wynn said, “and there’s no turning back.”
She began fussing about for a ladle to dip water from one of the large jugs. The sage would likely be making tea, though no one had asked for such, and it was rather late. Brot’an was the first to settle in a chair, and he sat waiting.
With three people and both majay-hì removed, the main room looked far less overcrowded. Not that Khalidah planned to join them at the moment.
“I must go out,” he said in Ghassan’s voice, and at that he felt the domin squirming in his—their—mind. “I need to report to the prince ... to the new emperor that I will be leaving soon.”
Wynn’s brow wrinkled as she turned. “You haven’t told him yet?”
“No, and I thought to wait until the journey was imminent. You should all rest while you can, and I will let myself back in.”
He left and pulled the door closed before that annoying little sage pestered him even more. The false window overlooking the alley reappeared.
Khalidah strode down the passage, down the stairs, and out into the night streets. Of course he was not going to report to the new emperor. That was simply the most believable excuse for what he must now do.
A different meeting had been arranged.
While he walked the night streets, his thoughts lingered upon one left behind in the sanctuary, the only one who truly troubled him.
Try as he might, not once had he penetrated the thoughts and memories of the scarred greimasg’äh.
That both majay-hì minds had been impervious as well was no surprise, but the elder elf was another matter. Each time he had tried to slip into Brot’an’s mind, he found his efforts obscured by shadows.
It was like knowing there was movement somewhere within a maze of black gauze curtains. Each time he sensed movement therein, and swatted aside another drape of night fabric, he faced only more of the same.
Khalidah was suddenly aware of how quiet and still Ghassan il’Sänke had become.
“Oh, tsk-tsk, my domin,” he whispered inwardly and aloud. “Do you truly think there is some hope in the scarred one? Quite the opposite.”
Walking deeper into the city, he navigated toward a less-populated area composed mainly of shops long closed. There, he slipped into a cutway between an eatery and a perfume shop and stepped out in the back alley for a strange gathering.
Khalidah’s gaze fixed first on a man standing apart, as if pretending he had no connection to the others. He was tall and well formed, and his face was so pale that it appeared to glimmer even in the dark. Except for his head, nothing more of him was exposed, from his black gloves and leather-laced tunic to his dark pants and high riding boots. Oh, and then there was a wide leather collar of triple straps buckled around his neck, as if he needed that extra support to keep his head erect.
Sau’ilahk eyed Khalidah in turn without a word, both of them hiding in stolen flesh, though at least Khalidah’s own was still alive. Fallen Sau’ilahk had once been first and highest of the Reverent, priests of il’Samar, Beloved, during the Great War. Actually, he and his had been simple conjurers, though he too had been betrayed by Beloved.
Khalidah knew the story, or at least the important parts, which were all that mattered.
Sau’ilahk had begged his god for eternal life; he should have asked for eternal youth instead. Only one would have given him true immortality and kept his beauty unmarred by age. Forced to watch his own body decay and die, he still gained his eternal life, of a sort, as an undead spirit. The wraith, Sau’ilahk, had only regained flesh most recently.
Poor, poor priest, high or not, undone by boundless vanity and assumed synonyms.
Khalidah was careful not to smile. The ex-priest was not to be trusted any more than when they had hated each other in their living days. Now a mutual hate for their god was greater than that, and Sau’ilahk’s hate could be useful.
As to the other one who had come for the gathering, Khalidah’s gaze shifted as a small, semitransparent, and glimmering girl-child in a tattered and bloodied nightshift stepped toward him out of the alley’s darkness.
Light from a streetlamp at the alley’s end both illuminated and penetrated her. Her visage was that of the moment of her death, including her severed throat. She stopped beyond arm’s reach and peered up as if he were an undesirable necessity.
Behind her came a litter with two large side wheels rolled by a pair of muscled men—both animated corpses. At the sight of Khalidah, the men rocked the litter forward until its front end clacked on the cobble. Lashed to the litter was a preserved corpse held erect by straps.
His hands, folded and bound across his chest, were bare, exposing bony fingers and nails elongated by withered, shrinking skin. He was dressed in a long black robe, and where his face should have been there was a mask of aged leather that ended above a bony jaw supporting a withered mouth, likely more withered in death than in his last moment of life.
There were no eye slits in his mask.
Somewhat like that of the ex-priest in stolen flesh, the corpse’s neck was wrapped in hardened leather to keep its head upright. Unlike Sau’ilahk, this creature was from the current era though still pretending to serve Beloved.
Ubâd, a filthy necromancer, could not move and had trapped himself somewhere between life and death. The only way he could speak was through his conjured slave, the ghost girl.
Khalidah knew little more, but he needed to know only that Ubâd had also been betrayed by Beloved. How unfortunate not to see the hate in his face, as in Sau’ilahk’s.
“You are late,” the girl said too articulately for her apparent age. “Do not keep me waiting again.”
Khalidah sighed. “My time is limited.” Raising his gaze to the corpse, he added, “So do not waste it with petulant complaints.”
Slowly, Sau’ilahk stepped nearer. “Why are we here, mad one?”
“To see the end of our beloved affair, of course,” Khalidah answered. “Which has become stale and tasteless ... no, moldy. I guess—I know—it has for you.”
Sau’ilahk remained silent a moment, and then said, “Get to the point.”
Khalidah’s self-satisfaction remained. “I have the dhampir. And even now those who follow her are gathering the anchors of creation.”
He let those words hang to savor his triumph, his superiority.
Sau’ilahk’s expression filled first with shock, and then a shadow of doubt. “Is this true?”
“The vampire and gray majay-hì sailed tonight,” he related. “They travel north to the white wastes of this continent for two orbs. Upon return, they stop at the last seatt of the Rughìr, the dwarves, for the third in hiding. They claim they know the route from the north side of the Sky-Cutter Range that emerges on the south side through—”
“Through Bäalâle,” Sau’ilahk whispered.
Khalidah smiled. “Oh, yes, a great loss in the war that was ... more for me than you. I convinced the dhampir there are reports of undead heading eastward in the great desert. She and those remaining behind will travel there with me, bringing the orbs of Spirit and Air as we ‘scout’ to verify these reports.” He paused for effect. “When the vampire and the elder majay-hì rejoin us, all five orbs will be in my possession.”
Sau’ilahk’s expression hardened. “This vampire ... Is he called Chane Andraso?”
Khalidah shrugged. “Yes.”
Taking a few quick steps closer, Sau’ilahk nearly walked through the ghost girl. “He is mine to kill, as is the small sage!”
“And I take the gray majay-hì!” the ghost girl added, sounding bitter and unhinged.