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You can feel it in your feet
sometimes. I didn’t feel anything around that one. It’s dead. Too dead.”
    The mild nausea that blossomed in her belly
when she finally translated the entity’s words threatened to boil
up toward her throat. She took a bracing swallow of tea, wishing
for once that it was something stronger like the tongue-scorching
Peleta’s Fire Silhara stored on a nearby shelf.
    “ Martise?” Silhara’s raspy voice
lowered another octave, and his black eyes glittered. “What is it?”
His hand was gentle on her shoulder, a contrast to his dour
expression.
    “ If I’m right in my research, and
I believe I am, I translated what the demon said.”
    Silhara’s eyebrows rose. “And?”
    She pushed her bowl away, all appetite gone.
“It’s ancient Makkadian and means ‘Witch, open the gate for me.’”
The way his lips flattened against his teeth and his eyes narrowed
made her heart beat harder. When Silhara showed concern, it was
wise to be afraid.
    “ Are you certain?”
    “ As certain as I can be with the
knowledge available to me. ‘Kul’ is Makkadian for ‘hunter.’ A
‘kash’ is a vulgar term for a prostitute, but its original meaning
is ‘witch.’ The Makkadians call magefinders ‘kashkuli.’ Witch
hunters.” She shivered and pressed against Silhara’s side for
warmth. “I traced the language back to its roots. ‘Kashaptu’ is an
early feminine form for ‘witch.’ Whoever appeared in the temple,
spoke a form of Makkadian not heard in a long time.”
    Gurn sketched rapid patterns in the air,
almost too fast for Martise to follow. Silhara read them with ease.
He wore a menacing expression sure to scare the blood thin in any
who didn’t call him friend.
    “ I won’t just tear it down,” he
almost snarled at Gurn. “I’ll burn it down and salt the earth.
Whatever that thing is, it has no business here and certainly none
with my wife.” He stroked Martise’s braid before taking up his
spoon to stir his stew. “You might as well eat,” he told her.
“You’ll be sharing the library with me, and we’ve a long day and
evening ahead of us.”
    He joined her in the library after lunch,
leaving instructions with Gurn to keep the teapot full and send up
the bottle of Dragon Piss just in case. Once in the privacy of the
library, Martise threw her arms around Silhara and hugged him
hard.
    “ I’m afraid,” she whispered into
his neck.
    “ Only fools and dead men have no
fear, Martise. And the former often become the latter because of
the lack.” He tilted her face up to his with the touch of a
fingertip under her chin. Her candle had guttered, and the winter
light through the frosted windows washed the color from the library
and Silhara’s stern features. “I will do all in my power to protect
you.”
    She offered him an anemic smile. “I know. I’m
a fortunate wife to have a god-smiter for a husband.”
    “ Looks like a demon slayer as well
now.”
    Her hands twisted the fabric of his wool
tunic. “Do you think it’s a demon?”
    He shrugged. “That’s my first thought. It
asked you to open a gate. Gates between worlds maybe. Such things
seek travel that way. The temple might have been such a gate once.
The demon sensed your magic and saw it as a means to break the
lock.”
    Martise shuddered in his arms, recalling the
image of a tall man with inhuman eyes and swathed in a living cloak
of black smoke that writhed and tumbled into miasmic faces twisted
with agony. “Demon or no,” she said. “He wasn’t human.”
    A stray thought made her pause. “He spoke
Makkadian, Silhara. What demon speaks Makkadian?”
    Silhara hugged her close before setting her
from him. “I don’t give a flying pig’s arse if he recited poetry in
magefinder,” he said over his shoulder as he made his way to a
ladder leaning against one of the floor-to-ceiling bookcases. “I’m
only interested in killing him, not taking language lessons from
him.”
    Martise burst out laughing.