Leesil remained still and quiet as he watched Chap. The dog had gone rigid, his crystal blue eyes fixed on nothing, and not once had Leesil heard the hissing voice in his head after that. But the more he watched, the more a soft glow began spreading over Chap’s body.
Leesil couldn’t hold off any longer. “Chap!”
His oldest friend didn’t answer. He took a step and then hesitated. What could he possibly do to stop whatever was happening? He glanced to Wynn, but she wouldn’t see any of this, so he turned to Chuillyon.
“What do I do?”
Chuillyon was staring wide-eyed at the dog. He started, as if suddenly awakening, and shook his head once.
“I do not know,” he whispered. “Whatever has taken the majay-hì must be broken.”
Wynn twisted toward Chuillyon’s voice. She took a sudden step and stumbled. Chane grabbed her arm to steady her.
“Do not open the orbs!” she cried. “That is what it wants. We cannot destroy it. It has to be trapped, once and for all, somehow. Even Chap would tell you that is more important than saving him.”
None of this was any help to Leesil in trying to help Chap. And even if he helped Chap, how could he or any of them trap something without a body that could reach across the world to anything unliving ... undead?
He was sick to death of death itself. Two had died here in this place, and how many more had died below the mountain?
“Untie the branch,” Chuillyon instructed.
Leesil’s mind went blank. He followed the elder elf’s eyes to the branch that Wynn had lashed to his forearm. Yes, of course it had been the way for the others to come here with Chuillyon, but what good was it for anything else?
It had been given to him by the long-dead ancestors of the an’Cróan when he’d gone for name-taking just to save Magiere. One of those ghosts had given it to him.
It came from Roise Chârmune in a land where no undead could walk.
“Plant it there!” Chuillyon whispered harshly, pointing toward the immense skeleton.
Leesil never had a chance to respond.
Chap collapsed upon the cavern floor, and Leesil had barely dropped down beside him when he heard the hissing.
—No! If you wish to end me, open the anchors!—
Leesil grabbed Chap’s head, trying to see whether the dog was all right.
Chap pulled his head free and, after one glance at the branch still lashed to Leesil’s arm, he looked up.
—Set that ... close to ... the bones—
The hiss rose again, this time without words, filling Leesil’s head and the cavern with a sound like a whirlwind.
Still Leesil hesitated. By his mother’s training as an anmaglâhk, he knew to act instantly. His human half warned caution. Would the branch trap or destroy the Enemy? Was he about to unmake Existence? Had those ghosts known anything when they’d given him the branch and put another name on him?
Leesil ... Léshil ... Léshiârelaohk ... “Sorrow-Tear’s Champion.”
None of this was enough. There was only one thing he could depend upon now without question—Chap.
Leesil dropped his blade and unlashed the branch. He sprang at a run toward the bones, not knowing how he could plant a branch in stone.
Wynn, unable to see anything, only heard fast footfalls amid the rushing like a wind from somewhere else, for the air around her felt still.
“Who has water?”
She knew that was Chuillyon, but before she could answer, another voice did.
“I do,” Ore-Locks called.
“Wynn, I need you to—,” Chuillyon began.
“I know,” she cut in, and then, “Chane, get out of here.”
“No, I am not leaving you,” he rasped, lightly gripping her arm. “And there is nowhere to go.”
“She is right,” said Ore-Locks, his voice now closer, “if I guess correctly at what the elf is up to with the half-blood. Get into the tunnel and stay out of sight of this cavern.”
Wynn waited, but Chane did not leave.
“Get out now,” she said, “or you will burn!”
“I’ll look after her,” Ore-Locks said, then added, “I swear.”
Wynn felt his large hand press gently against her upper arm, and yet Chane still had not released her other one.
“Go!” she insisted.
His hand was suddenly gone, and Ore-Locks’s hand slid around her back. His other arm swept up her legs as he lifted her.
“What are you doing?”
“No time for you to stumble about,” he answered.
“Come quickly!” Chuillyon shouted. Then Wynn was bouncing in Ore-Locks’s arms as the dwarf ran. All she could think of was whether she had the strength to ignite the staff once more. In answer to that, over the sound of the false wind and Ore-Locks’s heavy footfalls, she heard Chap in her head.
—I am with you, little one.—
With the branch in one hand and the cold-lamp crystal in the other, Leesil vaulted the skeleton’s arced tailbone. As he landed, he felt something like a low shudder building in the cavern’s floor, as if that hiss like a torrent of wind was carried within the stone instead of in the air.
He ran on, ducked in near the base of the great skull, and then hesitated. He had no idea what he was doing. He laid down the crystal, thrust the broken end of the branch into the stone floor with both hands, and stood watching it.
Nothing happened—except a crackle and sudden buck of the stone beneath him.
Chuillyon rolled over the tailbone in his long robe, which was not convenient at all. The last time Wynn had lit her staff, it had taken help from the young follower of the priestess to do so.
It was not enough to simply plant the branch.
He had placed similar sprouts more than once before at the great tree’s bidding. The branch might hold at bay whatever still lingered in this place, but it could not be held so forever: like its parent—or its grandparent, Chârmun—it had to live and take root.
As Ore-Locks leaped atop the tailbone, Chuillyon regained his feet and did not wait to ask. Spotting the waterskin tied at the back of the dwarf’s belt, he grabbed it and jerked it free.
This was only the first need.
Then he felt and heard a great crack of stone. He did not want to see from where that came and ran on, following Wynn as the dwarf dropped her on her feet beside the half-blood.
Chuillyon pulled the skin’s stopper as he came in behind Leesil.
Leesil looked up as the others came in around him, but Chane was missing. For some reason, that panicked him, and he looked back over his shoulder. Ore-Locks dropped Wynn on her feet, blocking his view, and then Chuillyon crouched beside him, a waterskin in his hands.
“You must want this,” the elder elf nearly shouted, for the noise in the cavern kept growing. “The branch is a living thing, and you are its caretaker. It will know what you feel for it.”
What in seven hells did that mean?
Chuillyon shoved the waterskin at him. “Take it, for you must do this! That sprout—that branch—was not bestowed upon me.”
Leesil didn’t hesitate, though he wasn’t fully certain what would happen. There was no soil here; only hard, dark stone beneath the branch’s bottom end.
Chap shoved his head in and looked up at him.
—Now!—
Leesil upended the waterskin, pouring its contents over the branch with his other hand.
Was that all it would take?
Small root tendrils sprouted from the branch’s base. They curled like animate limbs. The hissing rose to the sound of a hurricane, deafening in Leesil’s ears. A shudder in stone made him lose his footing. He dropped to his knees, holding the branch in place.