"What are you doing in here?" Chane awoke with a flinch. He was curled in a ball against the door frame of the monastery's library; for some reason, he kept coming back to this place.

Welstiel stood inside the entrance with a lantern in his hand.

"Get up!" he ordered. "We leave tonight… after the final feeding." The thought of leaving this place sparked relief in Chane, but that starving beast inside him perked at the mention of "feeding." Gripping the small library's door frame, he climbed to his feet.

Chane numbly stepped past Welstiel, through the work area, and into the monastery's front entry room. All the way, his back muscles clenched at each of Welstiel's heavy footfalls behind him.

"We will feed them one last time-but no more than before," Welstiel admonished. "Then you will gather what supplies this place has to offer. We leave tonight."

Chane crested the stairs and stared down the passage. The blood that Welstiel had disgorged upon the stone floor had dried up. Moans and whimpers of mad undead grew louder now that dusk had come and gone. But the corridor's right side was silent, as if the occupants there did not wish to make a sound.

Only one of the right-side doors was still barred. Welstiel slipped around Chane and opened it.

Two shriveled corpses lay inside. Still garbed in pale blue tabards over dusky robes, it was difficult to tell if either had been male or female, though one was lighter of frame. The sight was nothing more than Chane expected, but knowing how similar the monastery's inhabitants were to the sages, and the world he dreamed of, made him stiffen.

And worse, the cell's last living occupant huddled in a ball on the bed. Its face was half-buried in the corner, with one arm wrapped over its head as if to hide. Then it turned its cowled head just enough to peer toward the door.

Chane's twinge of excitement at the prospect of feeding wavered.

The occupant was a man in his late twenties, haggard with thirst, hunger, and lack of sleep. Welstiel strode in without hesitation and grabbed the shoulder of his robe.

The young monk heaved a sharp breath but didn't have time to release a cry. Welstiel struck him down with a fist, and he flopped across the bed's edge, unconscious.

Chane just stood silent beyond the cell's doorway.

"What is wrong?" Welstiel asked.

Chane lifted his gaze. He saw only cold resolution in Welstiel's face- not bloodlust or even longing.

"I will finish here," Welstiel said, when Chane did not answer. "Search the storerooms. Gather what is of use. And look for clean robes or spare clothing for our new companions. I do not want their present state to attract undue attention if we are seen."

Chane turned away down the stairs, stopping only to light a lantern at the hearth's dwindling fire.

What else could he do? Fight Welstiel for the life of one monk by strength or conjury? Either was pointless. He had already been outmatched in the former, and as for the latter…

Conjuring fire and light, or making familiars, was of little advantage. Welstiel preferred artifice rather than the ritual or spellcraft that Chane leaned on for his own conjury. But even Chane resorted to artificing at times, so it stood to reason that Welstiel could resort to the speed of spellcraft in place of the slower but more powerful effect of a ritual. And the older undead had decades of experience.

Also, Welstiel would be guarded by his new children, waiting to feed and then serve their maker.

Chane reached the first storage room in the front passage and pulled on the door latch, and the screaming up above began.

A pathetic sound, it echoed through the monastery. The young monk's cries were little more than a raw voice driven by exhales of terror, as the teeth and cold fingers of Welstiel's children roused him with pain. Every cry made the beast within Chane thrash more wildly-until the voice suddenly stopped.

Chane stepped into the storage room and set down his lantern. He mindlessly rummaged through clothing, blankets, and what canvas he could find for tarps and tents and makeshift packs. When he uncovered a stack of dusky robes, he halted.

Memories of an old barracks in Bela swam in his head. The garments under his fingers felt… looked so much like those of young sages in gray robes.

So much like those Wynn had worn.

She had no power or authority, unlike those born to it by chance. No illusory position of influence that set her above the rest of humanity. No, Wynn elevated herself in more meaningful ways.

Chane closed his fingers tightly on one dark wool robe stacked in the storage room. And he tried to crush the longing of false hunger as well. He jerked a pile of robes out and tossed them into the passage.

He gathered whatever supplies might be useful and stacked them in the entry room. Canvas, thick wool blankets to reinforce tents, lanterns, kindling and flint, knives and other weaponlike tools, plus a pot, tea leaves, and several water flasks from the kitchen. He had learned from Welstiel that even undeads needed moisture when they had little or no blood to consume. Finally, he returned to the stairs, and when he crested the last step, he nearly retreated again.

All the left-side cell doors were open. Welstiel stood in the passage with his six minions shifting about him.

Chane had no revulsion to strong scents, but the stench of feces and urine disgusted him. A corpse soon released all its wastes, and these newly risen ones had not bathed since they'd awakened on their first night. Their soiled robes were shredded from assaulting each other in a frenzy of hunger. They were covered in the dried remains of each other's black fluids, but their faces and hands were smeared red with the blood of their last living comrade.

Two were young men not much older than twenty, but they crouched like animals, grunting and sniffing. One drooled heavily, his saliva stained pink.

An older woman straightened up behind Welstiel. She swayed and whispered something as her eyes wandered, but her words made no sense. A tall beardless man with silvery hair hunkered near her like a lost puppy-the same who had torn apart his younger female companion in the first cell.

And that young woman, the one Chane had insisted was worth saving…

A mass of snarled brown-black hair hid half her face as she huddled against the wall. Once she might have been pretty, but now Chane couldn't tell. Her face and throat, wrists and exposed chest, were a mass of half-closed wounds set starkly against pallid flesh. She had not fed enough to heal fully. When she looked at him, nearly all color gone from her eyes, her features twitched from either terror or hunger.

The sixth stood with his back against the wall. He was stocky and muscular, and his fingers hooked like claws where his hands pressed against the stone. He had curly dark hair and a square jaw, and he sniffed the air like a wolf-sniffed at Welstiel, intently watching his maker's back.

Chane felt their glittering eyes shift toward him, one by one. Their yearning to feed roused an echo in him, but Welstiel seemed unaffected.

"I made sure they left something for your trouble," he said.

His cloak was brushed free of most of the dried mud stains and other debris of the wilderness. His hair was carefully groomed, exposing the white patches at his temples. Welstiel looked wholly the gentleman Chane had first met outside of Bela, though perhaps a little more traveled. And he stood there like a noble among his fetid servants, fully composed.

But his eyes were cold, devoid of even hunger's passion. He had no concept of what he had done here-what he had forced Chane to do.

Welstiel cocked his head toward the last door on the passage's right.