Between Their Worlds_A Novel of the Noble Dead Read online

  BY BARB AND J. C. HENDEE

  THE NOBLE DEAD SAGA—SERIES ONE

  DHAMPIR

  THIEF OF LIVES

  SISTER OF THE DEAD

  TRAITOR TO THE BLOOD

  REBEL FAY

  CHILD OF A DEAD GOD

  THE NOBLE DEAD SAGA—SERIES TWO

  IN SHADE AND SHADOW

  THROUGH STONE AND SEA

  OF TRUTH AND BEASTS

  ALSO BY BARB HENDEE

  THE VAMPIRE MEMORIES SERIES

  BLOOD MEMORIES

  HUNTING MEMORIES

  MEMORIES OF ENVY

  IN MEMORIES WE FEAR

  ROC

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

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  First published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, January 2012

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © Barb and J. C. Hendee, 2012

  All rights reserved

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  By Barb and J. C. Hendee

  Copyright

  Map

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  PROLOGUE

  NIGHT HAD SETTLED over the city of Calm Seatt, where a silent figure lay flat atop a darkened, closed shop. Hidden beneath a voluminous, dusky wool cloak with a full hood, his attention was fixed on the mist-hazed, erratic shapes of the city’s rooftops. The watcher raised his head and stiffened at a sight in the distance.

  A black silhouette dashed down the sharp slope of a shake roof. Upon reaching the eaves, where the lamplight below showed its tunic as forest gray, it leaped, seeming to hang in the air for an instant. It arced across the gap of a narrow street and landed without a sound upon another building’s top. As it raced onward, it was not alone.

  The watcher spotted other figures here and there across the night landscape of city rooftops. One and then another appeared below on the only street visible from his vantage point. They darted out of cutways and alleys, only to vanish from sight on the street’s far side. The watcher’s sagging hood turned in the direction where all those figures raced.

  Amid a gap in the cityscape sat a bulky and squat four-towered castle shaped like a block with a hollow center for its inner courtyard. When he looked again for those other figures in the night, all were gone but for one. It dashed up an alley parallel to that one visible street. As with the others, the last figure turned out of sight toward the castle.

  The watcher rose, towering over the clay and tile chimney behind him.

  He would have been nearly a head taller than an average male, should he have been seen among such. When a soft whistle came from somewhere below, it did not startle him. He walked to the roof’s edge, crouched, and looked down.

  Below, in the alley behind the shop, two cloaked figures raised their hooded heads to him, but the mist’s shroud and the alley’s shadows hid their faces. Even so, he knew their clothing, which had been chosen to blend in with the local population.

  One was clearly male, though not quite as overly tall as the watcher, and wore a tawny brown, hooded cloak, its wool turned fuzzy by age and wear. He carried a long and narrow canvas bundle on his back, lashed over his right shoulder and across his chocolate-colored felt vestment by a length of the bundle’s binding cord. A quiver protruded above his right shoulder, its arrows’ fletchings made from crow feathers, and in his right hand he carried a strung and readied bow with subtle curves.

  The second figure was shorter, less than average in height, and female. A soiled wool skirt of dark green showed below the hem of a faded burgundy cloak. She carried nothing but a shuttered lantern, and the narrow fingers of her gloved hand clutched its handle too tightly. Perhaps she shivered, though there was little chill in the air, and she tried to close her cloak more tightly with her other hand.

  The watcher, prepared to drop over the roof’s edge, paused and looked up, as if sensing something nearby. He looked back in the direction opposite from where those flitting silhouettes had gone. At first he saw nothing he could pinpoint.

  What had seemed a crudely shaped, overly tall smokestack in the distance suddenly shifted position. Another figure moved across that other roof two blocks away, barely visible in the night mist.

  It was a puzzle, for this could not be one of the others who had gone ahead. And what had at first looked like a broad tin rain shield atop the false smokestack now appeared to be a wide-brimmed hat, dark in color to match the lone figure’s midlength cloak. The figure drifted in the mist and then suddenly dropped, plummeting from sight between the buildings.

  The watcher hesitated, uncertain.

  Looking back to where the first silhouettes had vanished, he saw no sign of them anymore. They were the ones he had been waiting for, and his attention could not be divided. He dropped over the roof’s edge, landing lightly in the alley with no more sound than a boot’s toe tapped upon the damp cobble.

  “They have found her for us,” he whispered, passing his companions without pause. “She has finally reappeared.”

  Barely glancing both ways as he stepped out of the alley’s mouth, he moved quickly across the mainway with his followers close behind. Not a sound rose from his footfalls, though not so for the other two. Though the tall male moved with care, the smaller female’s feet clapped carelessly on the street stones in her rush to keep up.

  The watcher never paused at their noise. There was no one near enough to hear them, nor to see his face when a street lantern’s light briefly touched him.

  Dressed in a dark dun cloak, he wore a jerkin that was common and weatherworn. A black wrap of cloth hid the lower half of his face. What skin was visible was darkly tanned, and the lantern’s light sparked in his large amber eyes, framed with the creases of age.

  The right eye stood out the most.

  Four ridges of straight, pa
le scars streaked at an angle through a feathery eyebrow, then skipped that eye and continued down across his cheekbone. The scars finally disappeared beneath the black face wrap. His right amber eye peered through those scars, like a furnace coal burning through caged bars, and out into the night.

  He paused before entering the alley across the way, ushering his companions ahead, and the other male made too much noise in clambering up the back eaves of a shop. The watcher held out a hand to stay the female, who uttered a frustrated sigh as she halted. Then he stared down the mainway called Old Procession Road to where it met the gate of an inner bailey—all that was left after the city had grown in around the old, small castle.

  The watcher crossed his arms and slipped his hands up opposing sleeves. When he withdrew them, each hand gripped the hilt of a long, silvery stiletto, pulled from their hidden sheaths.

  Brot’ân’duivé—the Dog in the Dark—Greimasg’äh, a Shadow-Gripper and master among the Anmaglâhk, glared intently toward the Guild of Sagecraft. He then slipped into an alley with both blade hilts settled in his hands—but lightly, always softly, for a kill.

  CHAPTER 1

  MAGIERE TRIED TO remain expressionless. She sat on a stool, amid her friends and loved ones, in an alcove within a catacomb below Wynn’s home—this Guild of Sagecraft in a land far from her own.

  The alcove was sparsely furnished, with only a faded oak table and a few stools, but broad archways nearly filled all four of its narrow walls. In one corner stood a tall staff with a leather sheath covering its top.

  Magiere barely glanced at her surroundings.

  She didn’t think of wanting to go home, to her own home, left behind for so long. She wasn’t even thinking of Wynn in her long gray sage’s robe, still crouched in one alcove archway, or whether Chap—a silver-gray dog like an oversized wolf—had answered the little sage’s last question.

  “What happened to you . . . all of you . . . in the Wastes?”

  Hopefully, Chap hadn’t yet answered her. Not that he could’ve in the brief moment that had just passed. Even using the mental “voice” by which he could speak only to Wynn wouldn’t have been enough. Too much had happened for a quick or easy response. But Wynn couldn’t know this. She’d simply asked what anyone might after being apart from her friends for a whole year and seeing the changes in them. Now that they were all reunited, it was just like Wynn to blurt out the first thing that popped into her head.

  But even this wasn’t what plagued Magiere. For as soon as Wynn asked her question, Leesil, Magiere’s husband, turned away from everyone and stared blankly into an empty corner of the alcove.

  Magiere watched him by the dim light of Wynn’s cold lamp upon the little table, its glowing crystal illuminating the books and papers strewn around it. With Leesil’s back turned and shoulders hunched, his head sagged forward. The tail of his white-blond hair and the ends of a tattered green scarf tied over the top of his head barely reached past the collar of his hauberk, which was covered with worn and scarred iron rings. He stood there with his back to her, his arms folded across his chest.

  Magiere couldn’t see his beautiful, half-elven amber eyes. She couldn’t see the old scars upon his wrist, from one frightening moment long ago when he had made her feed on him to save her life. And she couldn’t see the more recent scars that were now all along his forearms.

  Leesil wouldn’t look at her.

  Right then, Magiere almost did want to go home, to their little Sea Lion Tavern. Given time, he—she—might forget everything. She could have him, just him, and he could have her as he wanted her . . . as his partner and wife, with nothing else between them.

  Was that even possible?

  Almost one year ago, Magiere, along with Leesil and Chap, had parted from Wynn, leaving her here in the safety of the guild. They’d had to travel north to hide the first orb they’d found half a world away. It was an artifact, a dangerous device of some kind that had served an unknown purpose to the Ancient Enemy in a war waged upon the world a thousand years ago. But in Magiere’s time, numerous portents were now hinting that this Enemy would return. She’d been determined to place the orb she’d procured far, far from any harmful hands that might try to use it. But this attempt had brought her more than she’d bargained for . . . including her discovery of a second orb.

  Magiere wasn’t ready to talk or even think about the horrors that happened on that journey. But after all that occurred, she’d come looking for Wynn. Not just to tell the sage about the second orb, but in the hope that Wynn might have learned something more about these artifacts, about what was coming. There had to be something in all those old books and scrolls Wynn had forced them to carry off when they’d seized the first orb in a lost castle in the highest peaks of Magiere’s own continent.

  Chap had safely hidden the two orbs that Magiere had recovered—and only he knew their locations. Yet even this wasn’t enough for Magiere. What did the very existence of the orbs mean to the past and the future? Perhaps in all those dusty old books, taken from that icy castle, Wynn might have uncovered something more.

  Magiere knew she couldn’t go home until she was free of her burdens: to hinder the Ancient Enemy and avert another war, to never allow her dhampir heritage to turn her into a pawn, and to follow her own path. But the path she was on now seemed never ending, and it continued to drag her forward.

  The silence in the alcove—Leesil’s silence—grew more and more unbearable.

  Tonight, Wynn had just told them that in the year they’d been separated, she too had found an orb in some lost dwarven stronghold . . . and then she’d revealed that there were two more still to be found. This news had hit Magiere like a wall falling down. There were five altogether—five times the burden Magiere had thought she could be rid of when she’d left her home, again, to hide the first one.

  Magiere knew she could not walk away from this, that she and her companions had to find the last two before anyone else. But she closed her eyes in near despair. It was too much to take in—too much for Leesil—and now, after Wynn’s question, he wouldn’t look at anyone, even his wife.

  “Magiere?”

  She raised her head, though it wasn’t Leesil who’d whispered her name, and she looked to the alcove’s nearest archway.

  Wynn stood there, one small hand clutching the opening’s frame stones. Her cowl was tossed back, exposing soft brown hair hanging to her shoulders around an oval, olive-toned face. Those rich brown eyes of hers were too wide and fixed. Worry strained her features as she looked to Magiere, or maybe it was confusion.

  Wynn glanced once toward Leesil.

  Magiere didn’t follow that gaze. Instead, she noticed Chap watching her. He sat on his haunches beyond Wynn, where the outer passage’s deeper shadows made his fur look almost leaden instead of its true silvery blue-gray. The effect made him appear old and worn, but his crystal blue eyes caught the light of the cold lamp’s glowing crystal. Chap’s eyes burned with twin white sparks, too fierce as he watched Magiere.

  Did he want her to answer Wynn’s question?

  “What happened to you . . . all of you . . . in the Wastes?”

  No memories rose in Magiere’s mind. Over their journey north, that had become Chap’s most common way to express his intentions. When there wasn’t time for more cumbersome ways for him to communicate, he’d slip into her mind and call up her own memories to try to show her what he wanted to say . . . or command.

  Magiere suddenly couldn’t take her companions’ scrutiny anymore. Perhaps Wynn expected her to say something, and Chap wished her to stay silent. But she couldn’t tolerate Leesil ignoring everything, everyone . . . including her. She had to do something to end this lingering moment.

  Magiere reached beneath her cloak, toward the small of her back. She gripped something cold and metallic hooked onto her belt, jerked it out, and slammed it on the small table.

  Leesil flinched and spun around, but he looked at it, not her. Wynn stepped farther into the alco
ve, her gaze fixed on the object as her large brown eyes filled with more confusion.

  Magiere had heard Wynn once call such a thing a thôrhk, a word having something to do with the dwarves. It was shaped like a circlet of thick metal—about a fourth of the object was missing—but it had been made that way. Its open ends had knobs or studs that pointed directly across at each other rather than in line with the circlet’s curve.

  Wynn reached for it, hesitated, and raised her eyes to Magiere.

  “What happened to it?” she began. “It looks so …”

  “It’s not mine,” Magiere said quietly.

  Indeed, the one on the table was made of a ruddy metal, and the one Wynn referred to was something else. Magiere tugged open her hauberk’s collar, exposing another open-ended heavy circlet around her neck. But this one was made of a metal so silvery it was almost white.

  Wynn’s eyes widened, and her mouth hung open as she looked down at the second thôrhk on the table.

  A flurry of questions filled Wynn’s head so fast that the next blotted out the last. She’d always thought Magiere’s thôrhk, her orb “key” or handle, was the only one. In a deep cavern of severe heat, that object had been given to Magiere by the Chein’âs—the Burning Ones—one of the Úirishg, or five mythical races of the Elements. Yet here was another so different from the first. So worn with age it looked almost ancient, and it wasn’t made from the Chein’âs’s white metal.

  Where had it come from? What did it mean? Did each orb need its own key? If so, why had Magiere’s been able to open the orb of Water, if her thôrhk wasn’t designed specifically for that one?

  Or was Magiere’s thôrhk something special?

  In lost Bäalâle Seatt, two of Wynn’s other companions, Chane and Ore-Locks, had found the orb—the anchor—of Earth. Somehow they’d beaten a wraith named Sau’ilahk to it, which had seemed impossible, for that spirit form of an undead, a Noble Dead, had gotten ahead of all of them. Ore-Locks and Chane hadn’t come back with a thôrhk, a key for that orb. If one had been there, perhaps it had been overlooked. Or maybe . . .