There was now only the hunt, and Chap had only one prey.
Sau’ilahk wove through the battle in a tangent toward where three majay-hì were headed. He had already lost two of his ground-level servitors along the way. Then his watchful one above showed him the large gray dog bolting in a fixed direction. The other two majay-hì fell behind in trying to keep up.
The battleground was thinning as more combatants fell, not all of them dead for a first or second time as they crawled and clawed across the parched ground. In a cluster ahead, one fought amid others all attempting to get at her. When she twisted to strike out at an opponent with hooked fingers, and follow with a wide and long single-edged blade, in the dark he saw her too-pale face curtained in flailing black hair.
Even among the other undead, he felt her most of all.
The urge to go at her with his bare hands was immediate.
Sau’ilahk restrained himself, fighting for self-control. Why did he feel driven with hunger? Something more was wrong about her, and then he sensed her life.
That was impossible for an undead.
Was that why the others went at her with such insane hunger? Her eyes were like nothing living, pure black without pupils, and yet she saw everything.
She had to be the source of whatever had happened to the horde. If so, was this somehow Beloved’s own doing? Who else could have done this, controlled this woman?
She nearly cleaved a ghul in half with her broad blade.
Planned or not, if this was Beloved’s doing, then that was enough for him. Betrayed again and again, if he could not strike down his tormentor of a thousand years, then he would end any of its tools. And by the way he took her life, Beloved would know who had taken her.
The gray majay-hì broke into sight and charged at the woman.
Sau’ilahk stalled again. Was it enough to simply watch Beloved’s tool be destroyed?
No, it was not.
Chap saw only the undead woman; he ignored all others. He broke through a tangle of those killing and those dying and fixed on the one that he hunted.
White face and black eyes were all that he saw. His hackles stiffened upright, his ears flattened, and his jowls pulled back. The need to hunt compelled him. This need fixed upon that one greatest hunger he sensed, even as the tiniest, deepest part within him shriveled in fright of himself.
And still he could not stop.
Some gray thing of slit nostrils and eyes as black as hers split slantwise under the strike of her sword. As its halves fell, he leaped through its spattering fluids and hit her straight on before she recovered from her swing.
In that scant moment, he saw only a tall woman’s pale, feral face, her fangs and distended teeth, and her eyes as fully black as darkness. Everything in the night tumbled as they both slammed down on the parched earth. He righted himself as she came at him on all fours.
Her hand clamped on his throat, choking off his breath.
With a twist of his head, he bit down on her forearm, grinding on flesh.
When that white face came at him with jaws opened wide, he raked it aside with his foreclaws and then tore at her abdomen, trying to rip through studded armor.
Something else slammed into both of them. He heard snarls, snapping teeth, howls, and screeches that were not his own as he tumbled. His head and body pounded on the hard ground again and again under the weight of others.
Chap smelled—tasted—something that cut through the hunger.
Blood?
Sau’ilahk barely evaded one ghul long enough for his servitors to assault it. When he spun around that tangle, he stumbled into a break in the battle to a sight that froze him.
The woman in studded leather armor rolled across the ground under the assault of two majay-hì, while a third such animal shook itself in trying to rise.
He was close enough to see her more clearly now.
She had the face of an undead—a vampire—lost in a bloodlust madness. But that face was also marred with scratches and claw marks that bled ... red, not black.
All around her lay dismembered bodies of ghul, other white-skinned men and women, as well as once-living things and other humans. The ground itself was soaked dark with blood and other fluids that stained her and the majay-hì as they thrashed and tore at each other.
She was a living woman who acted like an undead caught in maddened hunger.
That thing—she—had to be the one he sought. Given that she was unnatural in both life and death, nothing natural could have made her that way by birth, so she could have only one maker.
And that was the one who had made—tricked—him a thousand years ago with a wish for eternal life.
He saw in her some little part of what Beloved should have given him, instead of eternity as a fleshless spirit. This woman was the tool of his tormentor, his betrayer. But there were still those majay-hì in his way. He could not face all those at once and alone.
Anguish, hate, envy, and spite became one.
He dropped to his knees, slammed his hands down, and ground his fingers into the hardpack. As he bled away what he had left for a last conjury, Sau’ilahk, once the highest of Beloved’s followers, screamed out ...
“You—you caused all of this!”
That shriek of hate cut through Chap’s agony, and he pushed up to all fours with his head aching. He saw a white-skinned woman trying to grab two majay-hì that attacked her over and over. Still he was not certain what he saw. His skull pounded inside, he tasted blood in his mouth, and the scent of it made his head ache even more.
“If not Beloved, then I finish you—tool—to strike our maker!”
This second scream pulled Chap’s full focus. What he saw froze him, and that instant stretched out in his returning awareness.
A young man with blue-black hair, tall and well formed, hunkered on the ground with his fingers grinding into the hard earth. His face had a gash in the right cheek, and a like one bled at his left shoulder.
Chap sensed something more as he stared.
Undead ... another undead.
A memory surged up in the voice of Wynn as his mind replayed something she had told him. That face had a name for a young duke, but someone else hid behind it. Wynn had claimed that Chane destroyed this one, yet here he was.
—Sau’ilahk—, whispered Wynn’s voice out of memory.
How could he still be alive and whole?
Chap saw things scurry in around the man. Small, with single glowing eyes like balls of crude glass, they were half the size of a dog. Spindly like insects, their gnarled limbs looked like darkly stained wood.
And Chap remembered ... the prey ... his prey ... Magiere.
He gagged on the taste of her blood still in his teeth.
“Before dying,” Sau’ilahk went on, “Beloved will suffer as I have, helpless when I take your life. And when you are dead flesh, I will take its precious anchors as well. Tell that to your master when it creeps into your head.”
He sounded as if the Enemy wanted the orbs brought to it.
Chap went still and cold. Over the last season and before, he and those with him had sought to recover the orbs—the anchors. Had they unwittingly served the Enemy’s own wishes? Had he been so easily manipulated?
“Beloved will never be free!” Sau’ilahk hissed.
This recalled the words of Chap’s kin in the Lhoin’na forest.
Leave the enslaved alone.
If the Enemy had called the orbs to itself, was it already bound in some way? Had it never left the mountain in all of these centuries? And how would the orbs free it?