Sianim 01 - Masques

vented on inanimate objects. That was good, he assured himself. Anger meant they had missed their prey.
    There was a small bone—chicken. Haris would be unhappy about that. Human bones were conspicuously absent, and he felt a faint sense of relief. Myr must have had enough warning to get the camp into the caves. As long as the Uriah hadn’t been within sight when the people entered the caves, the wards would keep the entrances hidden from them.
    Wolf had started once more for the caves when he saw something white in the drying mud: a horse’s skeleton. Too small to be Sheen.
    It was picked clean, with only a wisp of mane to distinguish it. The leg bones had been cracked so that all the marrow could be sucked out. It wasn’t until he noticed the distinctive patterns on the silver bit that lay nearby that he knew that Aralorn had been riding the horse.
    He found another pile of bones, also picked clean, fifteen or twenty paces away. They all had the peculiar twists of the Uriah. He found several skulls—she’d accounted for three of them. He had hoped that he would find her among the dead—something inside him howled with mocking laughter at the thought. But dead would be . . .
    He could have followed her there easily.
    He left his bedroll forgotten among the ruins of the camp and took wolf shape to run toward the caves because it was faster. On the way there he found the pitiful remains of a small child—a dirty battered doll lay nearby. Astrid—he remembered the doll. He knew then why Aralorn had confronted the Uriah.
    Rage sang in his blood. He restrained it with a pale sense of hope that Myr would know something to help his search. If he let the rage take him, there was no telling who would die. If everyone was dead, he reminded himself, no one could tell him if a search had been made. And Aralorn wouldn’t want him to kill her friends.
    He planned quickly as he ran so that he wouldn’t think too much about the wrong things. He was conscious of a numbness that crept over him, covering hot rage with a thin coating of ice.
    The furious arguments were audible even before he entered the darkness of the cave.
    “Silence!” Myr’s voice cracked with tiredness but its power was still enough that it stopped the bickering. “There is nothing that we can do. Aralorn and Astrid are gone. I will not send out parties to be picked off two at a time by the Uriah. We will wait here until I am satisfied that they are gone. Even if Aralorn and Astrid were still alive, even if our whole party went down to the camp and found them prisoners of the Uriah, it wouldn’t matter. We could not take them. A hundred, she said, and she didn’t strike me as a person who exaggerated.”
    Only in her stories, Wolf thought. Not when it mattered.
    He stopped in the shadows of the entrance to one of the great caverns. Myr stood in front of him, facing the main room so that Wolf had a clear view of his profile. The light from the torch revealed the tired lines of his face. “It wouldn’t matter because twenty Uriah could destroy all of us, however we were armed. They would kill us, and we’d be lucky if we killed ten of them. Aralorn knew that when she went out looking for Astrid. She stood a better chance than any of us because she has dealt with them before. Had I known what she was doing, I would have stopped her, but I didn’t. I will, however, stop any of you who try to leave now. When the sun comes up, I will look.”
    “Afraid of the dark, princeling?” A swarthy man stepped out of the crowd. His face was unfamiliar, so he must have arrived after Wolf left. He was an aristocrat, from his clothes—less impressed with the king than the peasants were.
    Wolf spoke then from the darkness of the entryway, almost not recognizing his own voice. “As you should be,” he said. “If I were he, I would send you out on your own to find out what happens to fools in the dark.”
    Wolf stepped to the left of Myr, clearly revealing himself in the light of Myr’s torch. When he was sure that all eyes were upon him, he took his human form with all the theatrics that even the ae’Magi could have used. Masked and cloaked, he stood with a hand on his glowing staff that made Myr’s torch look like a candle.
    “As it happens, though, it is unnecessary for anyone to go out. Astrid is dead.” Wolf pitched his voice so that it carried to everyone in the room without echoing. “I found her remains as well as those of the horse that Aralorn