butcher it was for . . . blood sausage,” she whispered, then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’ll come back in a while,” she mumbled. “I have things to gather before we set out tonight.”
She quickly turned for the door and slipped out. Shade finally ceased barking.
Chane just stared at the urn.
Wynn must have realized his hunger had grown each night of their journey here, though he thought he had kept that much from her. He had come as her protector—or that was what they both professed. In truth, he would have sworn anything to remain close to her. Now she had requested—perhaps watched—a goat be slaughtered, so she could purchase its blood as fresh as possible.
It had sickened her, and worse . . . it was a wasted effort.
Blood was sweet and salty all at once, but it was not what fed him. Blood was good, but only for what laced it as it rushed from a thrashing victim’s flesh in the last moments.
It was only a medium of transference.
Chane had learned this too from Welstiel, another truth of the Noble Dead: Bloodletting was a method by which a victim’s life was released furiously enough to be consumed by a vampire’s inner hunger and close proximity. Aside from Welstiel’s cup, there was only one source of this to sustain Chane—the living.
This blood was as dead as the goat it had come from.
The urn grew heavy in Chane’s hands. Wynn’s naïve sacrifice, her attempt to “feed” him, left him only humiliated. He never felt self- loathing, but it now stretched between his need for her and what his true nature desired.
He could never tell her why her effort was useless. Better to let her think she had helped and be certain she never did so again. He would see to his own needs.
Chane placed the urn beyond the bed, out of sight, and left his room. He found Wynn’s door across the way cracked open. Her back was turned as she checked her belongings.
“Best pack up,” she whispered.
Only Shade watched him steadily from where she lay curled upon the bed.
“Where are we going?” Chane asked.
“Through the mountain.”
CHAPTER 3
Wynn trudged by tall pylons. Large raw crystals steamed in the night, casting pools of fuzzy orange radiance upon the street. She was silent the whole way, not saying a word to either Chane or Shade. As she approached Cheku’ûn “Bay-Side” way station, a cluster of fishmongers with emptied carts boarded the cargo lift headed back down the mountain. But that wasn’t the way she was taking.
Her thoughts churned over Mallet’s vague directions for finding the Iron-Braids. She’d always pictured Domin High-Tower coming from a family of rank, perhaps even with an elder clan relation in the conclave of the five tribes. Why had she imagined this—because of his pride, his arrogant demeanor? But High-Tower’s closest kin lived “underside,” well beneath the settlement’s surface community, or even its upper tunnels and halls. Wynn knew so little of her old teacher.
She quickened her pace.
Just behind the way station, she saw the cavernous archway in the mountainside. A dull glow flooded from that place over the round crank house’s backside along with a thrumming murmur, like a massive furnace mouth yawning in the dark.
“That’s the main entrance to Bay-Side’s underground,” she said.
Chane walked close on her right, but Shade trotted a little ahead, as if knowing where they headed.
“Have you been inside before?” he asked.
“No, but Domin Tilswith told me about the trams. They’re the quickest way between settlements, besides the lifts to the mountaintop and Seattâsh—Old-Seatt. But we’re going all the way through the mountain to reach Chemarré . . . Sea-Side.”
Chane stopped, forcing Wynn to pause.
“Even in a straight line, that will take days . . . nights,” he replied, watching the mountain’s glowing maw.
“No,” she countered, and patted her leg to call Shade back. “We’ll make Sea-Side before dawn.”
Chane glanced doubtfully at her. “It is fifteen, maybe twenty leagues away. Nothing moves that fast.”
Wynn wasn’t sure how to answer. All she had were Domin Tilswith’s brief descriptions, and his assurance that dwarven trams were the fastest way from one settlement to another.
“You’ll see,” she said. “It would take longer to stand in the cold and explain.”
An exaggeration, but she’d never actually seen the trams for herself.
Shade fidgeted in the street, ducking sideways whenever someone passed too near or cast a suspicious glance at a tall black wolf standing with two humans.
“Come on,” Wynn said. “I’m guessing scheduled departures