by Barb Hendee
As she curled up in that tiny shelter, breathing became so difficult that even her inner nature couldn’t keep her from passing out again.
Once night fell, and that other half receded, she awoke weakened and drained. The water began to taste salty. The figs had burst sometime during the day, and all of their inner moisture was gone. She rose, packed up, and went on as before, though at times she no longer knew why.
Something inside of her felt . . . pulled. This made her remember she hadn’t checked the device’s pull before she’d started out. When she stopped and did so, she was already heading where it pulled her. She tried to remember why she was doing this. Fragmented memories came, many of them in Wynn’s voice.
More than a thousand years earlier—perhaps more—something of many names, an ancient enemy, had made the first of the undead: thirteen vampires. Wynn had said they were called the Children. Toward the end of a great war, the Children left into five groups, each group carrying off an orb to faraway places . . . and they no longer needed to feed. The power of the orbs fed them.
The orbs of Earth and Spirit had been moved from wherever they’d been originally taken, so Magiere didn’t know where those Children—those guardians—had gone. The orb of Water, the first found, had been guarded by three—Volyno, Häs’saun, and Li’kän—in the ever frigid heights of the Pock Peaks on the eastern continent south of where Magiere had been born. As the centuries passed, Häs’saun and Volyno had somehow perished, leaving only Li’kän, and then she had slowly gone mad, forgetting how to speak.
Magiere had locked Li’kän forever in the cavern beneath the castle where the orb of Water had sat for centuries. Back then, she’d thought this better than exposing her companions to battle with something insane and so powerful that it had lasted so long.
The orb of Fire had been taken to the icy wastes at the top of this continent by at least three of the Children. And again, only one had survived the long wait: Qahhar. And like the first orb, that one had been placed on a pedestal like a sacred object.
Magiere never learned the names of Qahhar’s two companions, only that he’d killed them to keep the orb for himself. His madness wasn’t the same as Li’kän’s, and he’d proved far more dangerous. The only way she’d finished him was by giving in utterly to her dhampir half.
That had started other changes in her, after she’d torn him apart and swallowed his black blood.
She didn’t regret killing him, only what it had done to her . . . sometimes. She became stronger but with less control. It was easier to call up her other self but harder to drive it down again. And more than once, if it hadn’t been for Leesil, let alone Chap, there were things she might have done that she couldn’t live with later.
And now she was once again getting close to . . .
According to the clues Wynn had uncovered, the orb of Air would still be where it had been taken. There would be another guardian, perhaps more than one. What would it cost Magiere this time to gain the final orb?
She didn’t slow, and nothing could turn her back, as she struggled to put one foot in front of the other. As night ended and the horizon began growing lighter, she pressed on, determined to walk for as long as she could. When the sun crested she saw something glittering ahead that was far different from the shards in the hardened sand. It was vast and shone like a mirror.
It seared her eyes, reflecting the rising sun.
Magiere shielded her eyes. For an instant, she thought she was looking out across water. The sun had risen fully above the horizon when she reached the lip of an even deeper depression in the desert . . . and it went on as far as she dared to look. She was at the edge of what had once been a great salt lake.
The device lurched in her hand.
The heat made it hard to breathe, but she let the device pull her onward. Along the edge of that deeper depression loomed the outline of a building . . . or did she only imagine it?
Ghassan had warned her of illusions in the desert.
Magiere closed in on that structure, and it grew even larger in her sight. She stopped to stare blankly at an enormous dwelling, constructed of tan stone, on the shore of the cracked and glassy plain.
Wynn had said the poem suggested the orb lay in the water—or the shallows of such. Yet this dwelling stood on the edge—the shore—of the deeper depression. And if this was another place where ancient undeads guarded another orb, why hadn’t she felt them yet? In her two previous encounters, she had long before she was near enough to see them.
Almost immediately, a twinge of hunger was followed by rage that grew with the light and heat of this third day. Yet it was different from her dhampir half trying to strengthen and shield her.
There was something undead here.
She dropped the staff and drew her falchion. There were no surrounding walls, no sign that anything living had ever existed here. She walked straight to the heavy doors in the square entry, but there was no lock that she could see. Cradling the sword rather than setting it down, she put a shoulder against one door and shoved.
It grated inward across a stone floor.
Magiere stepped in, and before she even looked about, she heard the door closing on its own. She tried to grab its edge but was too late, for it moved faster than when she had pushed it open. Everything went dark as the searing light was shut out.
She couldn’t see anything, even as her hunger increased to widen her sight. With the device lashed to free her hand, she again cradled the sword with that same arm long enough to get the cold crystal out and ignite it. The entrance was at the head of an empty corridor that stank of dust and age.
Magiere knew better. It couldn’t be deserted for what she felt. Her fingernails hardened and her teeth shifted as canines lengthened. They always did when an undead was near enough.
Maybe exhaustion kept her in control or maybe it was something else.
In finding the orbs of Water and Fire, getting near one had somewhat kept her hunger in check and kept her mind clearer. She lifted her left hand, holding the cold-lamp crystal between her thumb and forefinger, and let the device lead her down the corridor.
She passed rooms glimpsed through doorless openings on both sides with little or nothing in any of them. None of those pulled at the device. At the corridor’s end were stone stairs leading downward, and she hesitated, raising the crystal high.
Its light couldn’t reveal the bottom, as if the steps descended forever into the dark.
Who had built this place and excavated so far beneath it? Where were they? They had to be here, at least one of them.
Magiere stepped through onto the first stair and descended quickly, step by step, and she noticed the walls of the stairwell were no longer straight. They curved to the right. She continued down that subtle spiral, moving faster, anxious and eager to know what awaited her at the bottom.
The crystal’s light exposed an opening below, and she slowed to a stop a half dozen steps above. Beyond the exit was a wide space of darkness. She paused again at the last step and peered into a large, plain room.
As she took in the sight of the few objects awaiting her, she became only more confused.
The first thing she saw was an orb like all the others, with its tapered spike intact, but this one rested inside a hole cut into the top of a simple, flat wooden table. With no battle and no blood spilled, she stood within sight of her final goal.
It felt wrong. Nothing here was like the last resting places of the other two orbs she’d recovered. No tripod pedestal, as if it were an object of worship. No preserved bodies of ancient dead creatures as slaves. No chasm or vast cavern with narrow bridges of stone over fire or ice in the depths.
A simple old table supported an orb in silent darkness within a bare room.
Magiere stepped in, looking left and right along the room’s front. At first there was nothing to see, but closer to the table she spotted something on the floor beyond its far side. An orb key lay with a curved sword atop faded but careful
ly folded cloth, perhaps clothing.
Stepping around the table’s left side, she became almost certain the decayed cloth was one if not two separate pieces of attire, perhaps robes or something similar. For as old as this place had to be, the decayed cloth wasn’t that old. And even standing so close to an orb . . .
Her jaws still ached under elongated teeth, her fingernails still felt as hard as talons, and she knew her irises were still black. There was at least one undead here—somewhere—and yet her thoughts were clear.
Why had she been allowed to get this far without being attacked or even engaged?
Magiere wasn’t going to try for the orb until she found whatever was here. She realized that she needn’t worry about the device or reactivating it, so she slit its lashing with the base edge of her falchion. As the lashings fell away, she closed her hand and shoved the device into her belt. In these depths, even her eyes needed light, so she brushed the dimming crystal once down her vestment. As it brightened, something more at the room’s rear caught her eye.
A number of paintings on unframed canvases hung in a row down the far wall, and she stepped closer.
Now faded, the paintings might’ve once been brightly colored. They appeared to be a sequence, from right to left, like a story. Each one was about half her height and their bottoms were at waist level.
The first depicted a collection of small dwellings, possibly a village.
Magiere sniffed it, touched one of the dwellings, and licked her finger. In the six-towered castle of the Pock Peaks, she and Leesil had found some walls covered in words and symbols written in the fluids of an undead. The tip of her tongue tasted nothing like that.
The next painting was of a long oval in various shades of tan that showed sand blowing in the wind: the desert.
The image after that was clearly a painting of the sandstone dwelling she now stood beneath, but there were flowers and palm trees around the exterior. On the far side of this, she made out a group of small people, on their knees, bowing down.
Next came a painting of two tall pale figures, a man and a woman with long black hair, wearing muslin robes. They stood beside a small boat.
The final painting was a large blue oval with gentle waves: a sea or a great lake.
Magiere knew nothing of such things, but the paintings looked rather crude to her. And like the robes on the floor, though old and decaying, they couldn’t have lasted since whenever this place had been built. They might be old, but were far newer than the dwelling. She shifted left again to look at the image of the two pale figures.
“Baseem’a!”
Magiere twisted around with the falchion raised.
In the opening to the stairs stood a slender girl about eleven or twelve years old. Her perfect skin was dusky. Silky dark brown hair fell over the shoulders of her undyed muslin dress. Her almond-shaped eyes were wide, almost eager and longing. She did not look at the sword and only stared at Magiere.
“Na Baseem’a?”
Magiere lost some of her hunger in confusion. This girl couldn’t have survived in this place if she was alive, but she didn’t look ancient. In the long search for the orbs, Magiere had faced two of the Children, and this girl didn’t feel like one of them.
The girl didn’t charge or flee. She didn’t display elongated teeth, nor did her irises lose color and turn crystalline. There was only a longing hope in her small face where there should’ve been rage, fear, or hunger.
“Na Baseem’a,” she said, this time with a frantic edge and a shake of her head.
More of Magiere’s own burning, hunger, and fury faded. What was happening?
The girl inched closer, still not afraid. Instead, her eyes held disbelief that matched Magiere’s.
“Min’a illy?” she said.
Magiere should’ve taken off the girl’s head, but the thought somehow revolted her. She back-stepped when the girl tried to come even closer, until only the space of the table’s width remained between them.
Was this undead child all that remained here, the only one to know how this place had come to be and why the orb was still here? Those answers might hold more that could help understand the dangers of the orbs . . . and the purpose they’d served.
“I don’t . . .” Magiere began, only then realizing her teeth had receded to normal. “I don’t understand you.”
“Numan?” the girl asked.
Magiere wasn’t Numan, but she’d tried that language first as it was the closest other culture to this region.
“Yes,” she lied. “You . . . speak it?”
The girl held her index finger and thumb parted slightly and then pointed to her ear as she nodded. Finally, she pointed to her mouth and shook her head.
“You understand,” Magiere ventured, pointing to her ear, “better than you speak it?” And she pointed to her own mouth.
“Na’am! Iy ayaw,” the girl exclaimed with a nod and a broad smile.
Magiere grew slightly ill. This felt too much like talking with an abandoned child, but this girl wasn’t living. There was only one way any undead could survive alone without feeding. Magiere glanced at the orb. It had sustained her.
“Ghazel!”
Magiere’s eyes shifted back.
“Ghazel,” she repeated softly, pointing at her chest.
“Your name is . . . Ghazel?”
The girl nodded again. Magiere turned halfway and tipped the falchion’s point toward the picture.
“You?” Magiere asked. “Are those yours?”
Ghazel’s browed wrinkled, and clearly she didn’t understand. When she stepped forward, Magiere backed around the table. The girl hesitated and then continued on to the back wall. She slowly swiped her hand up and down one painting after another and then pointed to herself. At the last painting toward the far corner, she crouched to pick up a small clay jar that Magiere hadn’t noticed before.
Ghazel turned the jar upside down and shook her head.
Magiere understood. The child had had paint at one time. When it ran out, there’d been no way to get or make more.
What Magiere didn’t understand was how the girl had ended up here.
Stepping cautiously to the painting of the two pale figures, she pointed and asked, “Who?”
Ghazel came closer along the wall, as if eager to please. She pointed to the male, and her smile vanished as she whispered, “Mas’ud.” She shuddered. Then she pointed to the female, and her voice filled with sadness. “Baseem’a.”
She looked up at Magiere with hope and mouthed the name again, not blinking.
It took another instant before that sank in.
Magiere realized the girl mistook her for the woman in the painting. This only confirmed her suspicion that the two figures portrayed were likely the ancient guardians of the orb. Where were they now?
“What happened?” she asked, pointing to the painting. “Where?”
Ghazel looked back and forth between Magiere and the painting with a slight frown.
Magiere pointed to the orb. “How did that . . . get here?” And she waved her left hand, with the crystal, all around the room.
Ghazel’s slight frown vanished. She pointed first to Mas’ud, but instead of pointing to Baseem’a next, she pointed to Magiere. The girl motioned to the orb and acted out carrying something heavy around the room.
She stopped at the painting of the desert and waved her hand across it. First, she patted the painting with the small group of kneeling figures. Then she pointed to the image of the sandstone dwelling. Briefly, she stepped away to act out pounding with hammers and lifting objects in the shapes of large squares.
Ghazel put her finger back on the image of Mas’ud, pointed at Magiere again, and then to the boat. She paused but soon continued, moving her finger to the painting of the lake, sliding it to the center of the waters. She returned to acting out carrying something heavy and heaved it toward the water in the picture.
Again, Magiere understood. Two ancients had carried the orb
across the desert, had this large dwelling constructed by slaves, and then took the orb out to sink it in the lake.
What more secure place to hide it? It all matched what Wynn had found in the scroll’s poem.
The middling one, taking the Wind like a last breath,
Sank to sulk in the shallows that still can drown.
But where had the boat come from? More than that, how had the orb ended up back in this room?
Ghazel held up both hands, churned them around each other, and said, “Ahyaan.”
This was one of the few Sumanese words Magiere had picked up in their travels. It meant “time,” and she assumed the girl was telling her that time had passed.
Ghazel pointed to the lake, turned her palm downward, and lowered it halfway to the floor.
“The lake began to dry up,” Magiere said, more to herself than to the girl. And how many centuries had that taken? If Ghazel knew about it, had she been here since then?
The girl appeared to grow frantic, and her face suddenly filled with fright. She pointed to Mas’ud, grabbed her head with her small hands, and began rocking wildly around. When she stopped, she seemed at a loss for what to say, do, or show next. She pointed at Baseem’a with one hand; with the other she pointed to Magiere.
Ghazel then ran trickling fingers down both of her cheeks, and her eyes filled with sadness.
Again, Magiere wasn’t certain what this meant at first. She looked to the painting of two pale figures and back at the girl, and she understood.
Mas’ud had begun to go mad, and Baseem’a had fallen into sorrow.
Ghazel pointed to Mas’ud again and slid her hand across the painting of the desert all the way to the painting of the village. Without warning, she grabbed the front of her dress and acted out being dragged. She slid her finger back across the desert and then pointed to the painting of the stone dwelling. Touching two fingers to her throat, she snapped her teeth.
Magiere went cold inside. “He stole you from your village, brought you here, and turned you. Why?”
