“Give me the chest,” Cinder-Shard commanded.
Chane did so, along with the third lock and key.
What mattered most to Chap was that he had succeeded here—even though Chane’s presence had been both a help and a hindrance. And the other problems, such as passage, had been solved. There was one more minor relief as well.
Chap would not face another cursed lift or tram to leave this place.
Chapter Seven
Magiere trekked through another desert dawn and deeper into the foothills, which had grown higher the closer she traveled toward the main Sky-Cutter Range. She had only Ghassan and Brot’an for company. Wynn and Leesil had remained in camp with the orbs.
“We should turn back,” Ghassan said, glancing toward the eastern, lightening sky.
“A little farther,” Magiere countered, pressing on in the lead.
She felt torn at going back after having found nothing again. Finding anything to support Ghassan’s belief in the Enemy’s reawakening seemed slimmer and slimmer by the day.
She’d lost count of the nights since they’d found the bodies, or parts of the bodies, and there was no way of truly knowing what had happened to those people. The nights now repeated the same choice: who scouted and who stayed behind. Any who went out had to cover as much new ground as possible before returning at dawn ... to collapse in exhaustion. They had already moved camp, always eastward, numerous times to expand the search.
Along the way, more time was lost in finding wells and stealing water for both themselves and the camels. Food stores held up but were dwindling. Everyone was tired of jerked goat meat, cracked flatbread, and dried-up figs.
Magiere never said so aloud, but she wondered if any of this would amount to anything. Leesil said less and withdrew more each day, and she couldn’t offer him a word about when all this would end.
It couldn’t end yet. They had to continue eastward.
Magiere stopped and half turned.
Brot’an, like the rest of them, wore a long cloth tied over his head, stretching down his back and overhanging his eyes, even at night. The light-toned muslin made his tan face look even darker. They still often traveled in early daylight or even in the later afternoons to escape the worst heat. Sleeping midday was necessary to take cover from the burning sun.
“What do you think?” she asked.
No one fully trusted Brot’an, but she depended on his judgment in scouting. He seemed to know exactly how long it would take to return to camp, no matter where they went.
“A bit farther, if you wish,” he answered. “From here, we would make it back to camp well before midday.”
Nodding, she turned onward around another hill instead of over it. A warm breeze blew across her face ... and she froze.
She smelled blood—a thick scent—and turned her face into the breeze. Without thinking, she bolted upward for the top of the hill. Something more had been changing in her the farther east they went.
There had always been times when her senses sharpened. This had always come with the rise of her other half. But lately ...
When she gained a vantage point, she pulled her falchion and froze, looking downward.
“Magiere!”
She heard Brot’an’s sure steps racing upward behind her, followed by Ghassan’s. When both joined her, they too looked down at the remnants of a massacre.
Magiere had almost known before she saw it. There had been other moments like this, not foresight but, well, maybe fore-sense. If Chap had been here, and thankfully he wasn’t, he might have known. Leesil and the others didn’t know about her growing ability, and she kept it that way.
Now hunger did widen her sight.
Bodies were strewn about at the hill’s back base, most with limbs flayed out where they’d dropped. As to the blood scent, Magiere’s sight widened further at the sight of torn-out throats.
One boy was short of manhood. Three others were children.
Four people in faded and semitattered robes and head wraps moved through the bodies. They rarely paused. One veiled woman knelt and hunched with her head nearly on the chest of a small body. The other three were men, two young and one with a steel gray beard.
Magiere rushed down without thinking.
Four more people peeked out around and over lower boulders where they had hidden. These looked panicked. One shouted out to the searchers, and a young man among them pulled a long, curved knife.
“Sa’alaam!” Ghassan called from behind.
Magiere had picked up enough common Sumanese to know he’d shouted the word for “peace,” but it struck her as a poor choice. How could these people be at peace among their dead with strangers suddenly descending on them? She swung wide from the boulders before reaching the gulley’s floor.
Brot’an was only an instant behind her. He ignored the men and studied the scene without reaction. Ghassan skidded to a stop with both hands up as he faced the men.
“Desert nomads,” Ghassan whispered. “Let me deal with them.”
When he stepped away, something else struck Magiere. The one word Ghassan had spoken stalled most of the survivors, but all of them watched him carefully as a second man pulled out a curved knife almost long enough to be a short sword. He barked something like a question.
Magiere couldn’t follow the man’s words. Even Brot’an frowned slightly, and his Sumanese was better than hers.
“A different dialect?” he murmured.
Magiere looked back to the bodies and began to count—eleven.
Ghassan talked quickly with the survivors, always keeping his hands out and visible. The two young men did most of the talking or questioning, while the stern and haggard old man listened and watched. The three women—one still bent over a body, one peering from around a boulder, and another clutching tightly an elder boy—were all silent.
Ghassan continued speaking to the men.
“What are they saying?” Magiere demanded. “What happened here?”
When he glanced at her, every muscle in his face looked tight.
“They say they were attacked before dawn,” Ghassan began, “by madmen ... with the teeth of animals. They were too fast, too strong to fight, when they started to slaughter people and ... eat them.”
Magiere’s brow furrowed in confusion with one quick glance at the nearest body, a man, probably in his twenties, though dried blood obscured his face.
“I do not think they understood at first,” Ghassan added, “that it was blood, not flesh, their attackers were after.”
That made sense to anyone with sense.
Too often, those who knew of the undead thought that everyone else did as well, as if such things were commonly known. In truth, the undead were few, rare, and that was their advantage.
Yes, Magiere had seen otherwise, but that didn’t count.
Sometimes they came because of her and what she was. In a large world, there were unlimited new places to hunt, filled with unwitting prey. And the cunning ones kept it that way, even killing off the reckless among their own kind.
She closed her eyes and didn’t listen as Ghassan struggled to learn more from the survivors. This time, the monsters had come in numbers, disregarding secrecy. Frenzy marked their starvation, and no undead needing to feed on life would willingly come to such desolate, lifeless places.
Magiere no longer doubted Ghassan’s reports from the new emperor.
Opening her eyes, she called out, “How many attacked them?”
Ghassan glanced back at her but didn’t answer. He returned to conversing with the two young men as the old one watched and listened to everything. Ghassan’s tone grew sharp and fast, and a young one answered him in kind.