Child of a Dead God (37 page)
A cold breeze gusted into the shelter under the rustle of canvas. Chap shifted, and Wynn’s head rolled off his shoulder.
“No,” she groaned, “it cannot be morning. Just lie still. Sgäile will tell us when it is time to get up.”
But Chap did not settle. Maybe he needed to go outside and relieve himself. Wynn’s arm slid off his back as he rose, and she tried pulling part of Osha’s cloak over herself.
Another cold gust reached her as she heard Chap slip out.
Gone! She has gone on without us!
Chap’s multitongued words shouted in Wynn’s half-awake mind. She flinched and lifted her head.
Who was gone?
Wynn looked blearily about. Everyone slept deeply and the sight only made her more weary. Leesil’s chest barely even moved, and just beyond him . . .
Magiere was not there.
Wynn blinked to clear her sight. She scrambled over Leesil’s legs for the canvas, and he barely stirred. When she stuck her head out into the harsh wind, snow stung her face, and she shielded her eyes with a hand.
The world was barren darkness above the dim gray of night-shrouded snow. Then a silver shadow bounded toward her.
Wake the others—Magiere is gone!
Chap’s words filled Wynn’s head an instant before he took full shape in the blizzard, ears flattened as he struggled across the snow.
“Magiere?” Wynn shouted. “Where are you?”
Get them up!
Wynn ripped aside the hanging canvas. “Leesil, come quickly!”
Leesil burst from the shelter but tripped on the tarp’s corner. He stumbled to one knee outside. Flakes pelted him at a slant in the hard wind, and snow began collecting on his coat and hair. A blizzard had built while he slept.
Sgäile flew out behind him, looking about with his face twisted in wary fright. Wynn and Osha came last, gripping Magiere’s coat. Leesil turned even colder inside at the sight of it.
Magiere was out in the storm wearing nothing but her hauberk and wool pullover.
Sgäile dashed farther out and peered toward the peaks.
“Can you see her?” Leesil shouted.
“No!”
Leesil turned to Wynn. “What did you see? Why would she run off?”
“Chap noticed first,” she answered, looking toward the dog. Her expression went blank as if she were listening. “He says he lost her trail across a rocky slope above and came back to get us.”
Leesil fastened his coat and took Magiere’s from Osha. He ran upslope along the rock face of their cave, following Chap’s tracks. He stopped where these faded to mere depressions in the deepening snow and looked down to the camp.
Leesil snarled under his breath. He should’ve had a grip on Magiere before he fell asleep. Her dreams had been worsening, coming more often the higher they climbed. He should’ve heard her or noticed when she stirred.
Sgäile came across the lower slope, back toward camp, and Leesil scrambled down as well. Wynn hastily relashed the blanket around Chap’s torso.
“Did you see anything?” Sgäile demanded.
“The tracks fade,” Leesil answered, knowing Sgäile would count this as another failure of his guardianship. “I don’t know if she has a path in mind or if she’s wandering half-asleep, but either way, it’s not the easiest path.”
“We must find her quickly,” Sgäile said and spun around, looking in every direction.
Leesil didn’t see many choices. Trudging blindly about in the dark was dangerous enough, but doing so in a blizzard was madness.
“Upward,” Wynn said, fastening her hood. “I know that is not much, but it is the way she would head.”
Leesil stepped farther out, surveying all upward paths, as Chap bounded upslope around stone outcrops rising through the snow. The dog came in and out of sight several times, and Leesil felt a small hand close on his arm.
Wynn clutched him, watching for Chap, and then pointed high above their camp.
“The path above our shelter leads to a rocky passage farther on,” she said, “where Chap lost her trail. But the way beyond it splits in several directions. He cannot tell which way she went.”
Osha peered curiously at Wynn and then at Chap.
Leesil had no time to explain how the sage knew what the dog had found. He studied the rock-face slope above, still uncertain if Magiere would take such a difficult route. He scanned the open slope for an easier way to scale to the same heights. Too many choices, and no sign of Magiere’s passage.
The terrain broke and twisted everywhere in white paths between jagged stone crags and ridges rising in the dark. Chap came hopping back downslope, chunks of snow tumbling along in his path. He whined once, as if he, too, had no answer.
Leesil turned to Sgäile. “Take Osha up above our camp. Chap and I will try the open slope. Hopefully he can track her. We can cover more ground if we split up.”
“I am coming with you,” Wynn said.
“No!” Leesil snapped too harshly, and then calmed himself. “Someone has to stay in camp . . . in case Magiere comes to her senses and makes it back on her own.”
This mountainside’s maze of small ravines and gullies would slow him enough, and he had to move fast. Without waiting for Wynn’s agreement, Leesil clambered upslope through shin-deep snow. Chap passed him, lunging up the white hillside.
“Chap!” Wynn called. “Leesil!”
She stood where they left her, watching them fade in the thickening snowfall. When she looked back toward the cave, Osha and Sgäile had already headed up along the rock face above it.
“Go back inside the shelter,” Sgäile called.
His voice barely reached her above the blizzard, but she squinted into the storm after Leesil and Chap.
“No!” she shouted back, and headed upslope. “I am going with Leesil.”
“Wynn!” Osha called out.
She ignored him, pushing on, though she sank knee-deep with each step. She finally glanced over her shoulder.
Osha was bounding toward her. Sgäile passed him with a growl.
“Valhachkasej’â!”
Wynn stepped away. “Go on—both of you—and stop wasting time! I am more use helping Leesil than sitting about.”
She turned, trying to run as Osha shouted after her.
Wynn knew she could not outdistance them, but Sgäile’s anger at her would be quickly outweighed by his fear of losing Magiere. Soon their angry voices fell behind, and Wynn knew she was right. Leesil and Chap needed her, and she followed the muted depressions of their tracks.
The slope sharpened, and the pain in Wynn’s right foot forced her to slow. She looked up, trying to spot where they had gone. But she had to turn away as snow peppered her face and caught in her eyelashes. Digging into her coat pocket, she pulled out the cold lamp crystal and tried to warm it with her hands.
“Chap!” she shouted. “Wait!”
The crystal glowed dully in her cold fingers, so she put it in her mouth as she trudged on. The incline decreased over a knoll’s crest, and she parted her lips. A glimmer of light leaked out through her teeth. Wynn spit the crystal into her gloved hand and held it up.
It glowed at half-strength, and its light turned the falling snow into a white gauze curtain shifting all around her. But it was enough to navigate by, and she thought she glimpsed movement higher up to her right.
“Leesil?”
No answer, and the ache in Wynn’s right foot seemed to spread to her left calf as well. She took a step, but when she looked down at the snow, Leesil and Chap’s tracks had faded altogether.
Wynn turned about, looking down the long slope for the way back to camp.
Between black crags and snow turned pale gray in the dark, she saw at least three separate ways. But which one was correct? Even her own tracks were quickly filling with snowfall. Anger crept in, pushing back Wynn’s fear.
She was always the one to fall behind. But it was safer to go on than get lost on the way back to camp. Leesil and Chap could not be far ahead, and she was more likely to meet someone if she pressed on.
“Leesil!” she called out, but the wind drowned his name.
Wynn stumbled on over another crest, into the next chute between high stone, and then around three bends as the broken mountainside forced her to weave in the dark. But still she found no tracks for Leesil or Chap.
She clambered through a saddle between two massive outcrops, jutting high like miniature peaks. When she looked back, only her last six steps showed clearly through the blizzard.
“Chap!” she shouted,
Only the moans and half-whistles of wind over stone answered her. Fear crept back in, eating away resolute anger.
She was alone—as lost as Magiere.
But if Magiere indeed wandered in some half-conscious state, she would travel upward, as she had done for so long. Leesil would continue his climb until he found her. And everyone else would be searching the heights.
The ache in Wynn’s legs and feet dwindled. This was no relief—it was a bad sign. Cold seeped deeper through her clothing, and she pulled the coat closer, tugging the hood forward. At least she had her gloves, but she had forgotten her face wrap. If only she had eyes like Leesil or Osha, or even Magiere—some way to see clearly in the dark.
Or did she?
One night in the elven forest, Chap had bolted off after a pack of majay-hì. Wynn had tried to follow, but the forest toyed with her mind and left her lost. In desperation, she had willfully raised her sickening mantic sight, left from the taint of wild magic in her flesh. Chap became her beacon, glowing more brightly than any other life in the forest.
These frigid mountains were barren—and lifeless. If she raised her mantic sight once more, and saw the world’s elemental Spirit layer, she could not miss him in this place.
But the notion was easier than the act.
She had only succeeded in the forest by sinking into memories of Chap. As if he were some mage’s familiar who lived in her mind. And she had not been able to end the nauseating sight until she found him, a Fay in hound’s flesh who could drive down the taint within her.
If she succeeded but could not find Chap . . .
Wynn dropped, her knees sinking into the snow, and closed her eyes.
She forced calm and quiet within herself, shutting out the cold and wind. She recalled all the sensations she had ever experienced in Chap’s presence, from the feel of his musky fur to his breath on her face and the sound of his multitongued voice in her head. She conjured his presence in her mind’s eye with images of him in her mantic sight . . .
Glistening as if he alone were the only “whole” thing she saw . . .
Or wrapped in white vaporous fire as he assaulted his own kin to save her. . . .
Wynn sank into inner visions, until they blocked all else from her senses. Then her mind slipped into one past moment.
Chap sat before her in a room at Byrd’s Inn, staring into her eyes. At the feel of his thick fur in her fingers, with her thoughts working upon what he was, her mantic sight overwhelmed her. The room had turned shadowy beneath an off-white mist just shy of blue.
It permeated everything, like ghosts overlaying her normal sight. These showed where the element of Spirit was strong or weak. Only Chap remained whole.
In her mantic sight, his fur glistened like a million threads of bristling white silk. And his eyes scintillated like crystals held before the sun.
Wynn clung to that memory as she opened her eyes.
Cold, wind, and snow assaulted her, and the world looked exactly as it had when she had closed them.
Perhaps she was too exhausted, too cold, too weak. As much as Wynn feared what the sight did to her, its absence toppled her into despair. And still, she struggled to her feet.
Leesil and Chap were out here, somewhere, and she had to find them.
Chap fought through the drifts, trying to track Magiere, but no odor lingered on the snow. His nose was useless unless Magiere stumbled directly into his path, upwind and close. He searched by sight between the crags, but the blizzard had covered any trace of her footsteps—if she had come this way at all.
“Magiere!” Leesil shouted.
Chap slowed, reaching out with his awareness to pick up Magiere by any rising memories. It was a worthless act of desperation, for he knew he needed a direct line of sight.
“Magiere!” Leesil shouted again.
Under the blanket across Chap’s torso, his body heat was fading. Leesil would be suffering the same, but they had to keep trying.
Chap lunged onward—and a whiff of sweat stung his nose.
He halted, looking about, but the swirling wind twisted so much that the scent vanished before he could draw it deeper.
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