Through Stone and Sea

by Barb Hendee

  “Here!” she called.

  Chane jogged around them, his hand dropping to his sword as he looked down the next passage. There in the side wall was an archway with deep-set iron doors surrounded by frame stones. He saw no other opening along the corridor, up to where it ended in a left turn a ways down.

  Wynn rushed blindly on, skidding to a halt before the arch. She leaned her staff against the frame stones and ran her hand over the metal as Shade sniffed the portal’s base.

  “Here’s the separation,” she whispered.

  Shade backed up and sat at the passage’s other side as Wynn traced the seam with her index finger.

  Chane came up behind her, studying the flat panels. He saw no handles or latches, not even a lock or empty brackets for a bar. Wynn fingered her way around the left door’s outer edge, inch by inch along the groove where it disappeared into stone.

  “What are you looking for?” he asked.

  “Trip mechanisms, catches . . . anything,” she answered. “I can’t reach the top, so you start there. Feel every spot carefully for anything abnormal.”

  Frowning, Chane stepped in beside her. He probed slowly along the top but found only smooth iron all the way to where the door slipped deep into a groove in the stone. He worked toward the other side, but Wynn finished more quickly.

  Chane wished there were something to be found, but he had doubted it from the start. When he finished, he saw no resignation in Wynn’s expression. She continued to study the doors, undaunted.

  “All right, we start on the walls,” she said. “Last night, Shade heard a grinding sound from beyond the doors. Someone opened them from inside, and Cinder-Shard wasn’t in the passage. So there has to be a way through, some hidden access he used.”

  Chane shook his head. “Why not take the others the same way? Why bother opening the doors at all?”

  “Maybe the other access was too small for the litter, and these main doors aren’t used unless necessary.”

  “Then would not the access be blocked as well?” he countered.

  Wynn ignored him and sidestepped left along the passage, inspecting the stone wall beyond the arch.

  Chane found her stubborn certainty unsettling. He finally turned to inspect the wall on the arch’s other side. Together, they went over every speck of stone, going farther down the passage than Chane thought reasonable. Only then did Wynn’s certainty begin fracturing.

  “It has to be here!” she insisted, her words rolling along the stone passage. “How else could Cinder-Shard get inside?”

  At Wynn’s too-loud voice, Shade lifted her head where she lay. Wynn did not even notice as she stared at the seam between the doors.

  “Get out your sword.”

  Chane shook his head in disbelief. “You cannot be ser—”

  “I’m not walking away. Not when we’re this close. Seven hells, Chane! You’re undead. Put your strength to use.”

  Wynn’s recent penchant for cursing was another sign that much had changed in her.

  “This doorway was built by dwarves,” he argued. “Rationally, it can withstand them. So why do you think I would fare any better?”

  “Try to pry it open,” she urged, “at least enough to peek inside. I know I heard grinding in Shade’s memory after the doors were closed. We need to know what caused it.”

  Chane looked at the narrow seam. He wanted to agree with her, especially for as little as they had uncovered. But as he drew his long sword and set its point to the seam, he had no confidence in the effort.

  “This will leave marks on the doors,” he said.

  “I don’t care.”

  Chane gripped the hilt with one hand, keeping the blade in place, and stepped back as far as his reach allowed. He lunged sharply forward with all his mass, slamming his free hand’s palm against the cross guard.

  The sword’s tip pierced the seam with a metallic shriek that echoed along the passage.

  He peered closer. The point had sunk two fingers’ width, more than expected, but the seam had widened only to the blade’s thickness. It was not enough to peek through.

  “Step back,” he ordered. “Have your crystal ready. If the doors part, I do not know how long I can hold them.”

  Wynn backed up, joining Shade, and Chane shifted to the right of his embedded sword. He pulled up his cloak’s hem and wrapped the fabric around the blade. With one hand gripping near the hilt, and the other nearer the tip, he began to push.

  The blade flexed slightly, but the doors did not budge.

  Chane released his pressure and turned sideways, facing the doors. He reached out his right foot, braced it against the arch’s inner stones, and pushed again. This time, he let hunger come.

  It flooded his dead flesh, and all his senses came alive as they opened fully. The crystal’s light upon the iron was brighter to his eyes, almost uncomfortable. A faint sound rose from somewhere inside the walls.

  Like a pinch of sand spilled upon stone.

  He would not have heard it without his senses heightened. Then he felt a slight vibration through his sword. He redoubled his efforts.

  “Keep going,” Wynn urged.

  Chane began trying to shift the sword’s point deeper as he levered it, and the seam began to part.

  “Now!” he rasped.

  Wynn rushed in beneath the blade.

  Before she even raised the crystal to the seam, Chane saw it was futile, and he heard Wynn sigh in frustration. Through the space parted by the sword, they both saw another set of iron doors tightly shut behind the first.

  Chane closed his eyes in resignation. He could not possibly keep the first pair open and lever the second. The instant he released any pressure to move the sword’s point to the inner doors’ seam, the first set would slam closed around the blade. And he could not lever both sets at once.

  Wynn slumped, leaning her forehead upon the iron.

  A soft clank reached Chane’s heightened hearing. He felt a dull and muted vibration shiver through the doors and into his sword.

  “Get back!” he ordered.

  Wynn shoved off, retreating with a stumble, as Chane pulled his foot off the arch’s side. A thunderous crack shuddered through the whole passage, as if coming from inside its walls.

  The doors snapped closed.

  A ping of steel pierced Chane’s ears. All resistance in his sword failed.

  His blade tore free as something sharp and cold grazed his neck, but he was already tumbling along the doors. He hit the archway’s far side, spun off, and fell into the passage as a clatter of steel rang in his ears. Wynn came to him before he could sit up.

  “Chane?” she asked in alarm, touching his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  He sat up, staring at the soundly shut doors. Something had forced them closed again.

  “What happened?” she asked, following his gaze.

  Chane shook his head, uncertain. “Some latent countermeasure,” he answered.

  “You’re . . . cut.”

  Only then did he feel a trickle of wetness at the side of his shirt collar. He reached up, touching his throat just above the old scar around his neck, and his fingertips came away stained.

  Not red with the blood of the living but viscous black.

  “It is nothing,” he said. “The wound will shortly close on its own. The sword must have grazed me when forced out.”

  The sword was still in his hands, still wrapped in the cloak, though the fabric had slid down across its tip. Chane got up, frustrated by that one moment of false hope when the doors had parted. He swept back his cloak, lifting the blade to sheathe it.

  A hand’s length of the tip was gone.

  Chane just stared at it.

  Shade huffed once, and he saw the dog nosing the missing piece on the passage’s floor.

  “Odsúdýnjè!” he swore, slipping into his native Belaskian.

  Wynn sighed. “We’ll get it fixed or replace it.”

  “How?” he snarled. “A sword is not
some idle purchase of a pittance. I do not have that much coin. Do you?”

  “No.”

  Wynn dropped to her haunches, hands over her face, and began muttering, “Think, think, think,” over and over. Chane closed his eyes, willing himself to remain calm.

  He sheathed the broken sword and gathered up its severed end. The blade was still usable, in part, and he had little choice. It was the only worthwhile weapon he possessed. Their efforts were pointless, and now costly.

  Still, Wynn would not relent. If she did not do so, and soon, he would force her, no matter any complications with Shade.

  “Perhaps Cinder-Shard had another method,” he suggested. “Some tool needed for the doors that Shade could not see.”

  He meant to imply that they had no more options and should give up for now. When Wynn lowered her hands, he could almost see her mind turning in a different direction.

  “What about my mantic sight?” she asked.

  He opened his mouth to protest, but she rushed on.

  “Perhaps I could find traces of where someone’s spiritual presence has passed through? If I find the exact spot, we may see something we’ve missed.”

  She took a few breaths, slowly rose, and focused on the iron doors.

  Chane stood watching her, about to drag her off.

  “I’ve never seen trails . . . residue of passing,” she whispered, speculating aloud. “Only strength or weakness of Spirit in what is present. But it’s worth a try.”

  Renewed hope in her eyes made Chane weary.

  “It’s worth a try,” she repeated adamantly. “But I can’t turn it off once it comes.”

  That was the part he did not like. Her gift was a taint, not true art, the result of a dangerous mistake when she had once tampered with a mantic form of thaumaturgy.

  “Back at the guild,” Wynn went on, “it took half a day or more to fade on its own. You’ll need to get me back home to the temple.”

  Chane sighed, that leftover habit of living days. “I will always get you home,” he answered.

  Wynn tried to maintain her facade of confidence. Even a failed attempt to summon the sight by will could be overwhelming. Chane had seen this once, and he’d politely called her methods “undisciplined.”

  She knelt before the doors, afraid she might fall once mantic sight came. All Chane did—could do—was stand over her, watching. Extending her index finger, she traced a sign for Spirit on the floor and encircled it.

  At each gesture, she focused hard to keep the lines alive in her mind’s eye, as if they were actually drawn upon the stone. She scooted forward, settling inside the circle, and traced a wider circumference around herself and the first pattern.

  It was a simple construct, but it helped shut out the world for a moment, and she closed her eyes. She focused upon letting the world’s essence, rather than its presence, fill her. She tried to feel for the trace of elemental Spirit in all things. Starting first with herself, as a living thing in which Spirit was always strongest. She imagined breathing it in from the air.

  In the darkness behind Wynn’s eyelids, she held on to the simple pattern stroked upon the floor as she called up another image. She saw Shade’s father—Chap—in her mind’s eye and held on to him as well.

  Shade huffed somewhere nearby.

  Wynn’s concentration faltered. She pulled both pattern and Chap back into focus. Just as she’d once seen him in her mantic sight, his fur shimmered like a million silk threads caught under blue-white light. His whole form was encased in white vapors that rose like flame.

  Moments stretched on. Mantic sight still wouldn’t come.

  The ache in her knees threatened her focus. She clung to Chap—to memories of him burning bright behind her envisioned circle around the symbol of Spirit. She held on to him like some mage’s familiar that lived only in her memory.

  Vertigo came suddenly in the darkness behind her eyelids.

  “Wynn?” Chane whispered.

  She felt as if she were falling.

  Wynn threw out her hands. Instead of toppling onto the gritty floor, she felt her palms slap against cold, smooth iron. Startled, she opened her eyes—and nausea lurched upward as her stomach clenched.

  Wynn stared at—through—the iron doors.

  They seemed even thicker than the glimpse she’d had of both layers. Somewhere nearby, Shade’s whimper twisted into a low growl.

  A translucent white, just shy of blue, dimly permeated the iron. The doors’ physical presence still dominated her sight, but there was more, something beyond them. Pale shadows of a large chamber became visible.

  Shade whined so close that the noise was too loud in Wynn’s ears. She glanced aside, straight into the dog’s dark face—and gasped.

  For an instant, Shade was as black as a void.

  Wynn quickly realized this was only the darkness of her coat beneath the powerful glimmer of blue-white permeating her body—more so than anything else in sight. Traces of Spirit ran in every strand of Shade’s charcoal fur. She was aglow with her father’s Fay ancestry, and Wynn had to look away.

  “Are you all right?” Chane asked.

  She looked at him, using him as an anchor.

  He appeared exactly the same, unchanged, but only because of the ring he wore. So long as he wore Welstiel’s ring of nothing, he was impervious to anything that might sense or see him as undead.

  “Yes,” Wynn choked out, and quickly turned back to the doors.

  The chamber beyond was no more than inverse shadows, like looking into a dark room, its walls outlined by some inner glow. She scanned about before nausea crippled her and searched for a hint of entrances from other passages.

  There were none.

  Shade had seen the duchess and the Stonewalkers here. But when the white-clad elf turned, Shade had ducked into hiding. She hadn’t seen who had gone in or not. At first, Wynn assumed the duchess and her people had merely gone off another way. But if Duchess Reine had gone in . . .

  The only other fixture Wynn made out within the chamber was a huge circle of darkness upon the floor. The harder she focused, the more she saw the dim residue of Spirit in the stone where the floor ended around a large hole, about four yards wide.

  She turned her focus downward to penetrate the floor by whatever blue-white shadows lay beyond it. But stone and iron were dense. In them, Spirit was perhaps the weakest of the Elements. Either that, or perhaps looking through so many pale layers of Spirit outlines was just not possible. She couldn’t make out the shaft’s depths.

  Wynn pondered the rhythmic grinding in Shade’s memory. The only thing that could’ve made that sound was a mechanism—like a dwarven lift and tram. Without other fixtures in the chamber, even chains and gears, Wynn had doubts. Whatever the sound had been, the Stonewalkers were gone. If the duchess had entered, then she must have gone with them.

  Why?

  “What do you see?” Chane asked.

  “A dim chamber . . . a dark hole on the floor.”

  Saying even this made her gag against nausea. About to turn away, she noticed something strange to the left.

  At first it looked like a stack of rods, perhaps resting on a ledge beside the chamber door. When Wynn stared longer, focusing beyond the framestones’ physical shapes, she counted a three-by-four grid of what might be squared iron rods. Behind them were several small round shapes, possibly metal, and vertical struts inside the wall.

  This had to be some mechanism for opening the portal, but the wall’s outer side was at least a yard thick. Not even Chane could batter a hole to get at the switches. Whoever opened the portal had done so from the inside, but how had they gotten in?

  Wynn’s strength of will faltered and vertigo overwhelmed her. She shut her eyes and crumpled as strong arms wrapped around her. Shade began to growl.

  “Get back!” Chane hissed.

  At a clack of jaws, Wynn jerked sideways in Chane’s hold. She lifted her head, just barely opening her eyes.

  There was
Shade, a glistening dark form haloed in blue-white. Her irises burned with so much light they made Wynn’s head spin even worse. But the dog ceased snarling.

  Shade wasn’t looking at Chane; she looked straight into Wynn’s eyes.

  A sudden memory rose in Wynn’s head—not an image, but a sensation. A warm, wet tongue dragging repeatedly over her face, as if her eyes were still closed. They had been closed—at another time—when she’d used mantic sight to track Chap in the elven forest of the an’Cróan.

  “Put me down,” she whispered.

  She tried sinking to her knees, and Chane lowered her.

  Shade lunged in so quickly that Wynn grabbed the dog’s neck in panic. Shade lashed her tongue over Wynn’s face, and Wynn shut her eyes tight, feeling a wet warmth drag over her lids.

  Nausea faded as she clutched Shade’s neck.

  She didn’t know how Shade had learned Chap’s trick for smothering mantic sight, but when the vertigo finally subsided, despair remained.

  “Are you well?” Chane asked. “What was she doing?”

  Wynn quietly hugged Shade.

  “Wynn?” Chane urged. “Your sight?”

  “It’s gone,” she whispered.

  But the iron doors were still closed. There was no other way into that chamber.

  “After all this,” she went on, “going to Sea-Side, Hammer-Stag’s death, seeing the Stonewalkers . . . we’ve lost again.”

  She had hoped Shade’s lead might play out and keep her from a crueler plan. Wynn slumped against Shade.

  Chane crouched beside her.

  “It is not over,” he whispered. “I wager Welstiel and I breached as many doors as . . . Leesil. But we used a mix of intimidation and manipulation. You and I simply have to find another. . . .”

  He never finished, and Wynn sat up, still holding Shade. “What?”

  “Ore-Locks!” he rasped. “What a fool I am!”

  “What about him?”

  His eyes narrowed like those of a predator that had finally cornered its prey. Wynn didn’t care for the expression at all.

  “You said Sliver told you her brother used to come to the smithy,” he went on. “The smithy is on the mountain’s other side.”