by Barb Hendee
Chane brought her quill with the white metal tip, an ink bottle, and a blank sheet, and set them on the floor beside the scroll. He also prepared to steady her hand, if need be.
“From the stanzas so far, the rest will likely be just as veiled,” Hawes said, “and there may not be more concerning locations. In the main ascendancy dialects of Sumanese, look for rúhk for ‘spirit’ and shàjár or sagár for ‘tree.’ ‘Life’ would likely be hkâ’ät. ‘Air’ is háwa or hká’a, which are also used for ‘wind,’ though sometimes that is hawä. Since your time in this state is limited, scan quickly for any words you can sound out as similar to these.”
Wynn nodded. Shade sat off on her left, and neither Shade nor Chane approved of what she was about to do. Both were silent nonetheless, knowing this was the only way to gain what they needed—they hoped.
Ore-Locks had never seen this, but he watched intently from out of the way.
“Are you prepared?” Hawes asked.
“I guess . . . I mean, yes,” Wynn answered.
She lost sight of the premin as the woman stepped around behind her. Then Wynn heard a whisper close to her ear.
“Begin.”
Extending her index finger, Wynn traced a sign for Spirit on the floor and encircled it, and she heard Hawes whispering something more, something unintelligible behind her.
At each gesture, Wynn focused hard to keep the lines alive in her mind’s eye, as if they were actually drawn upon the floor. She scooted forward, settling inside the circle, and traced a wider circumference around herself and the first pattern. It was a simple construct, but through it, she shut out the world as she closed her eyes.
Wynn felt for that thin trace of elemental Spirit in all things, starting with herself.
As a living being, in which Spirit was always strongest, she imagined breathing it in from the air. She imagined it flowing upward from the wood of the floorboards . . . from the earth below the inn. In the darkness behind her eyelids, she held on to the first simple pattern traced upon the floor. When that held steady, she called upon the last image she needed.
Amid that pattern before her mind’s eye, she saw Chap.
As she’d once seen him long ago in her mantic sight, his silver-gray fur shimmered like a million silk threads caught in the glare of a blue-white light. All of him was enveloped in white vapors that rose from his body like slow-moving flames.
Moments stretched, and mantic sight still didn’t come. The ache in her knees threatened her focus.
Wynn clung to Chap—to the memory of him—burning bright behind the envisioned circle around the symbol of Spirit. Vertigo suddenly threatened to send her falling into the darkness behind her eyelids.
“Wynn?” Chane rasped.
She braced her hands on the floor. As she opened her eyes, nausea lurched from her stomach, up her throat, and seemingly into her head.
Translucent white, just shy of blue, dimly permeated the wood planks beneath her hands and knees. She raised her head slowly, carefully, and the first thing she saw was Shade. Wynn knew what to expect, but foreknowledge didn’t help much.
For the first instant, Shade was as black as a void. But beneath her fur, a powerful glimmer of blue-white permeated her body—more so than anything else in the room. Traces of Spirit ran in every strand of Shade’s charcoal fur. Her eyes were aglow, burning with her father’s Fay ancestry.
Wynn had to look away.
“Chane!” she called through gritted teeth.
“I am here. Work quickly.”
Only then did she feel a hand resting lightly between her shoulder blades, but it wasn’t Chane’s. Through it all, she kept hearing those soft, indistinct whispers behind her from Premin Hawes.
Wynn half closed her eyes as she turned her head, looking for Chane as the only normal image in the room. For while Chane wore the brass ring, even her mantic sight couldn’t reveal him for what he was.
He appeared exactly the same, unchanged, as before Wynn had called her sight. He was her anchor.
Taking in a deep breath, she finally looked down at the scroll. Its surface was no longer completely black . . . to her.
The coating of old ink, spread nearly to the scroll’s edges, had lightened with a thin inner trace of blue-white. Whatever covered the words had been made from a natural substance, and even after ages, it still retained a trace of elemental Spirit.
Within that space, pure black marks appeared, devoid of all Spirit.
“Wynn?” Hawes asked.
“I see the words now,” she whispered.
Those swirling, elaborately stroked characters weren’t written as in the other texts. Short lines began evenly along a wide right-side margin. Written from right to left, they ended erratically shy of the page’s left side. The lines of text were broken into stanzas of differing length.
“But the dialect is so . . .” she whispered.
“Sound out what is possible by the characters you recognize,” Hawes instructed. “Find anything similar to what you heard me speak.”
Wynn’s dinner threatened to come up as she tried to reach for her elven quill.
Chane grabbed her wrist and guided her hand as she dipped the quill and dropped its point to the blank sheet. Then something halfway down the scroll caught her eyes.
“. . . and the breath of wind . . . sands . . . were born . . .” she said aloud, but she couldn’t follow most of the writing.
Wynn stopped reading aloud and quickly began copying as much as she could by rote. She had scrawled only a few lines when a sharp wave of vertigo rose inside her.
“Wynn!” Chane rasped.
Almost instantly, she felt the premin’s hand press between her shoulder blades, as if Hawes had felt that wave. Wynn’s vertigo decreased as the premin’s unintelligible whispering stopped.
“That is enough,” Hawes ordered.
“No!” Wynn tried to say, still choking. “I need . . . more.”
The quill was suddenly snatched from her grip. A narrow hand flattened over her eyes, blocking out everything, as she heard another whisper, shorter and sharper than the last. The nausea vanished as Hawes pulled her hand away from Wynn’s eyes.
“Try sitting up,” the premin said.
Wynn straightened on her knees, opened her eyes, and turned on Hawes in outrage.
“I barely wrote anything!”
Chane, still crouched close, grabbed her upper arm. “Wynn, that is enough for—”
“No!” she snapped, still glaring at the premin. “Why did you stop me?”
Hawes reached around her for the sheet upon which Wynn had written. “You collected something, but you were growing too unstable. You need instruction before another attempt.”
Wynn only glared, wondering what the premin was up to. She finally calmed enough to ask, “Anything of use?”
Hawes reached out for the elven quill, not even appearing interested in its white metal tip, and began scanning what was on the page. She scrawled and stroked as Wynn waited, unable to see exactly what Hawes wrote.
“‘The Wind was banished to the waters within the sands where we were born,’” the premin read aloud and then paused. “The ‘we’ may be a reference to the Children.”
“How are we to know where any of the Children were born?” Chane asked.
“The war is believed to have begun in the south,” Hawes answered. “Somewhere in the region of what is now the Suman Empire. And likely the ‘empire’ was only separate nations at that time. This line may hint at some place near where the Children were first born, or created as servants of the Enemy. But . . .”
Hawes fell silent, frowning slightly as she stared at the page—until Wynn grabbed it from the premin’s hand to look at it. Hawes had scrawled the exact words she’d read in Numanese, using the Begaine syllabary.
“And ‘Wind’ more likely refers to the orb of Air,” Wynn replied. “But the rest makes no sense. The only known desert of ‘sand’ is south of the Sky-Cutter Range. But ther
e are no waters in that region. How could there be, since it’s a desert?”
“You are still missing the full context,” Hawes admonished.
Wynn thought about that for a moment. “You mean time?”
“Yes. What is in this scroll was written a thousand or more years ago . . . at an educated guess. What we call the Forgotten History may be even older than that. And how much can a world, or any one region, change in that much time?”
Wynn glanced back at il’Sänke’s translation of the first stanza.
The middling one, taking the Wind like a last breath,
Sank to sulk in the shallows that still can drown.
It clearly referred to the orb of Air, but it offered no help in connecting it to the new phrase she had just copied. And neither phrase explained how to find water, let alone a body of such with shallows, in the middle of sand, or any other type of desert.
“How do we . . . ?” she began, not even sure what to ask.
Premin Hawes no longer looked at anyone or anything. She appeared to be focused across the room on the blank wall. More disturbing was another rare betrayal of emotion on her narrow face. Her eyes closed to slits exposing slivers of cold gray irises around black pupils. Her features twisted in a blink of revulsion as she spoke.
“I can think of only one person who might decipher such a location—if this new hint is that.”
Before Wynn could press for more, the premin looked at her.
“We have much to discuss,” Hawes said, “and much to do. You will need access to the guild and to me directly.”
Wynn saw little hope in that.
“If she goes back,” Ore-locks replied, “Premin Sykion and the council—your council—will lock her up again.”
“Perhaps not,” Hawes countered.
Chane crouched down beside them. “What do you mean?”
Hawes only looked at Wynn. “I have only one answer, and you may not like it.”
The premin half turned where she knelt, retrieved the parcel she’d left on the bed, and handed it to Wynn. Still lost, Wynn took it and pulled the tie string to unwrap the outer canvas.
Inside was a midnight blue sage’s robe.
Nearly half the night had passed, but neither Magiere nor the others with her had mentioned going to bed. They all waited to hear from Wynn. At the three bells of midnight, Brot’an finally got up to go find out what was keeping Wynn. Chap had immediately risen to follow him, as had Magiere and Osha, much to Leanâlhâm’s alarm. Before Magiere got far, Leesil grabbed her arm.
“Let Brot’an go alone,” he said.
As Magiere tried to pull free, Chap snarled at Leesil. Osha ignored him entirely, but Brot’an stood in his way. Leesil shook his head, hanging on to Magiere.
“Your going at Wynn again isn’t going to hurry her along. Everyone, sit down. And Brot’an . . . make it quick!”
Brot’an nodded, slipping out the door before Chap or Osha could follow.
Magiere had turned on Leesil, but he wouldn’t back down.
So now Magiere and the rest waited even longer for Brot’an’s return. Leesil tried to distract everyone with a sketch of the city’s districts that he and Brot’an had made during their scouting trips.
Osha merely sank down below the window as he asked, “Will work?”
“Depends on what Wynn has to say,” Leesil answered, “and who’s going where. But yes, the plan has a chance . . . and some flexibility.”
Magiere’s feelings toward Wynn were still too conflicted to agree with Leesil, even after he explained their options in the face of not knowing where to go once they left the city.
“If anmaglâhk split?” Osha asked. “If not to gather, then they—”
He was cut off by a light double knock on the door. Before anyone moved, it opened.
Brot’an stepped in with Wynn and Shade—and a cloaked dwarf carrying an iron staff.
Osha immediately rose and fixed on only Wynn.
Magiere had seen a few dwarves about the city, but none up close—as she had on their journey north into the Wastes. One in particular she had gotten to know a little. Much as this stranger caught her attention, her gaze quickly shifted to the open door as she reached for her falchion leaning against the bed.
Brot’an shut the door, but Magiere didn’t relax. Chane hadn’t come. It should’ve been a relief, but it wasn’t.
Last night, Wynn had been disheveled, wearing a wrinkled gray robe. Tonight, she was dressed in her old elven pants and tunic from their time among the an’Cróan, with an open cloak thrown over the top. She carried the long staff with the odd leather sheath covering its top. Her hair was pulled back into a tail. Chap’s daughter, the black majay-hì, pressed up against the sage, as if anxious at being among so many strangers.
Then Wynn looked at Osha, and her gaze lingered on him. As he seemed about to speak, she looked away, gesturing to the dwarf.
“This is Ore-Locks Iron-Braid,” she said. “He can be trusted.”
Leesil had mentioned the dwarf last night, but this one was nothing like the one Magiere had met in the earliest days of their journey to the northern wastes. Unlike that fierce and boisterous warrior, Wynn’s companion was clean-shaven and wore a simple orange vestment under his cloak. He was quiet, intently watchful, and simply nodded to all in place of any greeting. Not at all dwarfish by what little Magiere knew of these strange people.
“You learn . . . news?” Osha asked Wynn.
“Yes,” she nearly whispered without looking at him.
Magiere shook her head slightly over the trouble that remained for those two.
Wynn pulled off her cloak and leaned her odd staff in the corner behind the door. As she stepped closer, standing before Leesil’s sketch on the floor, Shade followed her. She looked down at Magiere sitting on the floor with Leesil and Chap.
“Can we talk?” she asked bluntly. “Can we make plans?”
Magiere waited for Leesil to answer, but he didn’t, and apparently neither had Chap, in his own way. Magiere found herself stuck in the role of peacemaker, something she was never good at and was not in the mood for right now.
Nodding once, she gestured to the open paper map. “Don’t think we have a choice. You’re the only one who knows where to head next.”
And wasn’t that an annoying twist of fate?
Wynn settled on the floor, resting a hand on Shade’s back.
In a happier memory, in what seemed a lifetime ago, Magiere recalled waking in Leesil’s arms for the first time after they’d finished driving Welstiel out of the capital of her homeland. They were preparing for another journey, and Wynn had burst through the door of the little inn’s room, shouting, “I’m coming with you!”
She’d seemed almost a child back then, full of wonder, and nothing like the hardened young woman who now knelt on the floor. This woman solved mysteries and uncovered secrets that others wouldn’t admit existed.
Wynn half turned, looking back. “Ore-Locks, grab a stool and join us. And Osha . . .”
She never finished, but Magiere saw her swallow hard, perhaps breathing too quickly.
“So . . .” Leesil began awkwardly. “This premin came to you? You have a direction for us?”
Wynn studied him. “Yes.”
Wynn kept as calm as she could, but her heart pounded. It might’ve been the clear rift between herself and Magiere, Leesil, and Chap. Yes, that was most of it: knowing how much they opposed Chane having anything to do with what had to be accomplished. She’d expected them to be opposed but never thought it would fray and tear the ties they had to one another.
Yes, it was all that, but it was also Osha.
She felt him watching her, and she wanted to turn to him. This was not the moment or the place for that. She fought to shove aside memories of the time they’d spent together, up to that final instant on Bela’s crowded docks.
How different he looked now, and it was more than that he no longer dressed like the Anmaglâhk. She despera
tely wanted to know what had happened to him. Then there was poor Leanâlhâm, of all people, here with the others. Worse, the young girl looked as much changed as Osha in the past two years, perhaps a little taller, and not at all happy to see Wynn. They had at least been friendly in the Farlands, for as little as they’d gotten to know one another. What had made Brot’an bring Leanâlhâm here?
Shade was no help in easing the tension. She pressed in against Wynn, as if everyone here were an enemy.
This was not going to be easy. But with the possible exception of Leanâlhâm, everyone in this room had the skills needed to track and obtain the remaining two orbs. Wynn finally had some real help besides Chane and Shade. She wasn’t about to lose that now.
She steeled herself and looked Chap in the eyes.
“We didn’t decipher much,” she said. “We know the three recovered orbs are for Water, Earth, and Fire. So we’re searching for Air and Spirit.”
You are certain?
Chap glanced again at Shade, who continued to ignore him.
“Yes,” Wynn answered him, and then turned her attention to Magiere. “We were able to decipher that the orb of Air is somewhere in the south, possibly in the Suman Empire or the great desert just north of it.”
“On this continent?” Magiere asked, and all traces of stiffness vanished from her expression. “We’re that close?”
“Close?” Wynn repeated. “Have you seen a map of this continent? Do you know how long it will take to reach the Empire, how large it is, and the desert even more than that?”
“Hopefully you’ve got more to go on,” Leesil said.
Wynn shook her head. “Not exactly, but Premin Hawes has a suggestion. It is risky, but I can’t think of anything else, and we need to move quickly.”
“What is this suggestion?” Brot’an asked.
“I have an . . . acquaintance in the guild’s Suman branch, a domin of metaology named Ghassan il’Sänke. He helped in deciphering earlier parts of the scroll . . . and in combating the undead.”
The last part gained Magiere’s full attention, and Wynn gestured to her staff leaning in the corner.