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.She took one folded canvas from him, and they set to work.He had nearly finished when she reached for a piece of rope in his grasp to lash it around a spike driven into the ground.He suddenly pointed to himself, his voice more rasping and hollow than usual.“Chane.I am Chane.”He did not expect a response.He was only desperate for some intelligible sound after another night of the ferals’ animal noises and Welstiel’s long silences.But she stopped struggling with the rope and looked up at him.Her hair was a disheveled tangle, and in the death-pale skin, he spotted hints of a smattering of freckles.She pointed at herself.“Sa.bel.”Those slow syllables, spoken with such difficulty, startled Chane.He crouched down, and she shifted away from him.“Sabel.,” he said, “that is your name?”A hundred questions filled Chane’s head, but he held them at bay.She sniffed the air around him, head tilted, then flicked a hand toward the eastern sky and went back to struggling with the rope.Chane did not need to look.Gray light grew behind him over the peaks.The other ferals were fidgeting.The curly-headed man began trying to crawl across the ground with muffled whimpers of frustration.At first, Chane thought they were agitated by the coming sun, but then he saw what the man was crawling toward—and froze in surprise.Welstiel’s pack sat propped against a spindly gray tree.The well-traveled undead sometimes set it down within sight, but he never left his belongings in any unsafe place.Even in Venjètz, when they had been locked out of the city and lost nearly everything, Welstiel had held on to his pack.The stocky feral struggled on the ground, watched closely by the others, but he made no more than an inch or two of headway.Exhaustion and starvation drove him against the power of Welstiel’s command, as he knew where the bottled life force was kept.In their time together, Chane and Welstiel had maintained the courtesies and formalities of two noblemen—now turned Noble Dead.Chane had once respected Welstiel’s privacy.But he had begun to see Welstiel’s pretense of cold-blooded intellect as nothing more than illusory posturing.And as for Chane.He might be nothing more than a beast beneath his own veneer, but he had never sunk to believing his own pretense.Not as Welstiel did.Chane had willingly served Welstiel’s madness in that monastery, but he could not stop seeing these ferals for who they had once been.Like the ghosts of lost scholars haunting dead flesh now filled with nothing but longing and hunger.A worthless concern just the same.They were lost.But Chane still did not care to watch Welstiel butcher another one.He jogged downslope, snatched up Welstiel’s pack, and turned away.A hand latched onto his ankle, closing tight enough to make him buckle in pain.Chane tried to pull free of the crawling monk, but the man would not let go.The feral lay on his stomach, muscles taut and shaking as he fought against his maker’s command, but his colorless eyes were locked on the pack in Chane’s arms.Chane stomped down on the man’s wrist with his free foot.The feral squealed, and Chane wrenched free of its grip.All the crystal-eyed ferals around the clearing watched him.When he headed up toward the lean-to tents, even Sabel’s gaze fixed on what he was carrying.Chane felt the bulge of hard objects in the pack, too many to be just the brown glass bottles.His curiosity turned once more to Welstiel’s long-hidden possessions.The closest Chane had come to uncovering their secrets was the night he first saw Welstiel’s extra bottles sitting beside the pack.He had not summoned the nerve to dig into it with Welstiel sitting vigil just up the monastery stairs.And the later night on this journey, when he had stolen one brown bottle, he was in too much hurry.He did not hesitate this time, and threw back the cover flap.Beneath two remaining bottles, wrapped in Welstiel’s spare clothing, Chane saw other items.The first three were already familiar.The walnut box held Welstiel’s feeding cup, along with the looped tripod rods and white ceramic bottle.Beside this rested the domed brass plate, which Welstiel used to scry for Magiere, and his frosted light-orb with its three glowing sparks like incandescent fireflies.Chane set these carefully aside.For the moment, he ignored the two books and a leather-wrapped journal.But the next item he gripped was cold metal, and he glanced nervously toward the glowing horizon.He pulled out a hoop of steel with etched markings.Its circumference was slightly smaller than a dinner plate.At a loss, he was about to set it down when he smelled an odor akin to charcoal [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]