"Be quick about it, as it is the last chance you will have for a long while to sate your lust."

He snapped his fingers, which made the cowering young female cringe, and then pointed toward the stairs. Chane slipped aside to let them pass.

Only the curly-headed man paused to look him up and down with a sniff, checking to see if he was something to feed upon. When they were gone, Chane crept toward the last door on the passage's right. It had been left ajar. He reached out and pushed it wide with his fingertips.

The boy lying on the cell's floor had red hair and freckled pale skin. He was younger than any of the others Chane remembered locking in these rooms, but his memory of that first night was hazy. The neckline and sleeve ends of his wool robe were torn and smeared with blood, as were his throat and wrists. One slender hand had a slight callus on the index finger from holding a quill or stylus for long hours.

His eyelids flickered. Shallow breaths escaped his diminutive mouth.

Chane crouched over the boy and gripped the back of his skull. Longing-that false hunger-came again.

Left as he was, the boy would bleed to death-a wasted life. But that life had been gone the moment Chane came to this place. He leaned his face close to the boy's own as his canine teeth begin to ache and elongate. He hung there silently, close enough to feel the weak breaths rush over his face.

"What did you study here?" he asked.

No answer came but a brief flutter of the boy's drooping eyelids.

What might he have become? Perhaps something better than another head in the vast herd of human cattle.

Chane closed his other hand across the boy's jaw and pulled it upward. The wounds in that mangled slender throat leaked a fresh trail of blood. He gripped the small head tightly between both hands.

And wrenched it sharply to the side.

With a crack of vertebrae, the boy's rattling breaths ceased.

Chane dropped the body on the stone floor and turned away on his hands and knees.

He clawed up the door frame and lurched out. Halfway down the stairs, he pressed his face into the wall's cold stone, grinding his jaws shut against his elongated teeth.

The boy was lost… all here were lost, one way or another. Only what they had accomplished remained, and even that would fade, forgotten by the world in this hidden place.

Chane's fingernails grated down the wall.

An impatient Welstiel was waiting outside, but Chane's mind was elsewhere. He ran down the stairs and raced for the back study and its library. Then he froze in the doorway, panic overwhelming his senses.

His gaze ran along the shelves, over and over, and he shook his head. All the books and scrolls, volumes and sheaves-he could not just leave them. And he could not carry them all away. How could he choose what to take with so much to leave behind?

Time would not work in his favor.

He snatched one book, and then another. He chose texts he had seen before, their titles vaguely familiar, and some so thick with fine script that they seemed to hold the greatest content. He shoved as many as he could into a canvas sack scavenged from the outer study. Even when the sack was full, he looked wildly about at all that was left. He finally turned to run out of this lifeless place.

Outside, Welstiel stood watchfully over his six children as they scrubbed their naked bodies with snow. He then dressed them in fresh robes and armed them with utility and kitchen knives tucked in their belts. The curly-headed man took up an iron bar as a cudgel.

"Take the baggage," Welstiel ordered them, and like puppets jerked by their strings, the obedient ferals twitched into motion.

Chane winced at this, for he knew what it felt like. His own maker, Toret, had used such a voice on him when he grew reluctant to obey. When a Noble Dead created another of its kind, that newborn was forever doomed to abide by any willfull order from its maker.

Unless-until-that maker was destroyed.

Chane eyed Welstiel as the elderly undead headed for the switchback trail, glancing once at the sack bundled in Chane's arms.

"Soon enough, you will have all the books you could want," Welstiel said, and stepped down the first leg of the narrow path.

Chane waited as the ferals ambled after their master. About to follow, he looked back once more to the monastery carved from the gorge wall. The door was still open.

He grabbed the handle and pulled, making certain the door was soundly closed. If only he could so easily shut away all memories of this place-as if he had never come here.

"In time, you will have your own place among your beloved sages as well," Welstiel called out from below.

The beast inside of Chane lunged excitedly against its chains, as if clutching at some offered and coveted morsel.

"Fulfill your obligation," Welstiel added, his words seeming to rise from the dark, "and then I will fulfill mine."

At those last words, something snapped sharply inside of Chane.

The beast inside him backed warily into a corner. It saw no choice joint of meat in its master's hand. It smelled nothing for its longing hunger. It only heard a spoken promise.

That twinge made Chane whip about and stare at the top of the switchback path.

He had never felt this before. It left him startled, even panicked.

At dawn, half a moon into the voyage, Avranvard held back near the bow. She watched Sgailsheilleache standing with the dark-haired human woman.

He leaned on the port-side rail-wall and pointed ahead, speaking some ugly guttural language Avranvard could not understand. She did not need to in order to know what he was saying. They had reached the peninsula and would now turn south along the eastern coast.

Relief flooded the woman's pale features. Sgailsheilleache nodded, as if glad to offer her such welcome news.

His reputation among the an'Croan was so pure. Not as revered as Brot'an'duive or the great Eillean, he had still traveled foreign lands and faced humans to protect all the an'Croan. Now he stood with one of the savages, and Avranvard swallowed hard in revulsion.

Perhaps his attempt to appease this woman was pretense, for Sgailsheilleache must have a good reason. When Avranvard joined the Anmaglahk, then maybe she would understand.

Predawn's first yellow streaks glowed at the base of the horizon. Avranvard looked to the hkomas standing behind the helm, busy directing the crew to change sail for the southern run. She slipped quietly into the near stairwell beneath the forecastle, and climbed below to find a private place among the cargo. Her oversized boots caught once on the bottom rung, but she righted herself before stumbling.

Most of the crew was on deck, along with some of the "passengers." She hesitated in the passage, staring at the door where the humans and the half-blood lodged. But it was too risky to nose about in there, so she headed along the starboard passage toward the cargo bay. Once there, Avranvard crouched behind the barrels of drinking water and pressed her word-wood against the ship's hull.

"Are you there?" she whispered.

Report.

The voice in her head was cold, emotionless. She did not even know his name, only that he was a Greimasg'ah and deserved her obedience. Still, he treated her like a necessity and no more-not like a comrade.

"We have reached the peninsula and turn south. The crew changes sails as we speak."

When is your next stop?

"Four days at most-we exchange cargo at enwiroilhe."

What have you learned of this artifact the humans seek?

The question surprised her, as he had not asked this before. "I should be listening? I cannot speak their language."

Do not risk suspicion, but anything of use you overhear, report to me.

She hesitated. "Sgailsheilleache is too protective… it seems as if he cares for them."