Between Their Worlds

by Barb; J. C. Hendee

  Wynn worried about how much the guild had gleaned from the ancient texts.

  “And every metaphor describes the destruction of an Element,” Hawes murmured.

  Wynn had thought so, as well. Much as she agreed, something more now seemed missing by the way Hawes stared at the translated parts of the poem.

  The first orb Magiere had carelessly opened, and Leesil and Chap had described all of the underground cavern’s clinging moisture raining inward into the orb’s light. The memories of Deep-Root in ancient Bäalâle Seatt that Wynn gained from the dragons had hinted that the orb of Earth was used to tunnel in under that seatt.

  “I’ve suspected they were five tools for such use,” Wynn said. “I’d imagined they could be used as weapons, each of the five.”

  “No, not weapons,” Hawes whispered. “Not five . . . but one . . . altogether.”

  Wynn was immediately lost, even as the premin looked up at her.

  “Reason it through,” Hawes instructed. “What would happen to any target as the focus of all five orbs, as each one obliterated an elemental component?”

  Wynn realized the answer but couldn’t speak it.

  “The target would cease to exist,” Chane whispered for her.

  “A’ye!” Ore-Locks added in shock.

  “In theory,” Hawes confirmed, lowering her gaze to the paper once more. “Think of what power was required to create them. It is . . . unimaginable.”

  Wynn heard Shade begin to rumble, but she didn’t need that warning. She watched Hawes as the premin rambled on, seemingly lost in thought.

  “Among the oldest fragments that the guild has recovered concerning the war, there is no record of these ‘anchors,’ let alone such a use for them. If this was their intended purpose, and they were not put to that unknown use, then the question remains: what was the intended target?”

  Wynn’s burdens, ones she would now heap upon all others in the search, grew tenfold.

  “The target does not matter,” Chane rasped.

  Wynn took a quick glance and found him watching Hawes.

  “All that matters is that they are never used,” he added.

  Hawes didn’t respond, and Wynn felt more trapped than ever in having asked for the premin’s assistance.

  “Do you have any idea what the other two stanzas mean?” Wynn asked. “Any notion about locations or areas to look? Or if I call up mantic sight and try to copy more from the scroll, can you help decipher it?”

  Hawes tightened her mouth. “I should do so myself. You have no training for this, regardless that you’ve toyed with some ability you should not have.”

  “No,” Wynn said. “This isn’t the only way the sight has served me.”

  “Wynn!” Chane whispered in warning.

  “I don’t care what the sight costs me,” she continued. “I’m not giving it up! I need to see those words for myself.”

  Hawes pierced her with those hazel eyes. “You do not trust me?”

  Wynn bit her tongue as she heard Ore-Locks inhale and hold it. There was no safe answer to that question. She wasn’t certain she trusted Hawes at all—not now—and there was nothing to do about it.

  “Will you help me?” Wynn asked, and a moment of silence followed.

  “These anchors . . . these orbs you’ve found,” Hawes finally said. “Are they well hidden, so that nothing of the Enemy might find them?”

  “Yes,” Wynn answered.

  Chap had hidden Water and Fire himself, and Ore-Locks had hidden Earth with the Stonewalkers. The orbs were as far beyond the reach of the Enemy’s minions—and the reach of anyone else—as they could be.

  “Oh, troublesome girl!” Hawes breathed in resignation. “Yes, I will help you.”

  A day passed, night came again, and not one of Rodian’s men had caught a glimpse of the tall and black wolfish dog, let alone one missing sage. Wynn and Shade were nowhere to be found. Now at his desk, having turned over guild security to Branwell, Rodian stared at a map of the city’s districts.

  He had only three more days.

  In all honesty, he wasn’t certain Prince Leäfrich could make good on his threat, but even an attempt would prove beyond embarrassing. Rodian didn’t know what he would do if he actually found Wynn. But he had to find her at any cost now that the prince had blindsided him with this ridiculous abduction story.

  The abrupt change was likely Sykion’s doing, incited by his insistence that she either make a formal charge or drop all notions of incarcerating the young sage. No doubt Sykion would spread word that he’d allowed a young female sage to be “stolen from her bed.”

  The whole situation made Rodian’s stomach ache.

  But still, for more than one reason, he had to locate Wynn. If he had a chance to speak with her, no doubt she could at least refute the premin’s story. There was no knowing what would happen after that, for it all depended on what, and how much, Wynn was willing to say.

  An expected knock sounded on his office door, and he immediately called out, “Come.”

  The door cracked and Lúcan stuck his head in, steel gray hair dangling into his eyes.

  “Anything?” Rodian asked.

  “No, sir,” Lúcan answered too quietly, perhaps wishing he had better news. “I’ve placed a man up the block from the Upright Quill, and two are sweeping all ways near the guild. A score are out searching the streets, but it’s as if the sage is gone . . . perhaps already fled the city.”

  “No.” Rodian shook his head. “She put up with a lot to remain on guild grounds for as long as she did. Whatever she needs is in there, and she’s not the kind to walk away.”

  Lúcan swallowed hard. “So far, we’ve had no cause to enter any buildings.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “Well . . . perhaps a general search order from the High Advocate. We could start knocking on doors and going through inns tomorrow.”

  Rodian stood up. Permission for invasive searches without evidential cause was rare. It had been granted only twice in his memory: once for a missing foreign dignitary, and the second time for the assassin who had later killed the same. But if his men could search every inn in Calm Seatt, they might find something to help. Or, at least, when rumors spread, it might flush Wynn out. She had to be holed up somewhere.

  And since Rodian had been ordered by a prince of the realm to find a sage kidnapped from her bed, amid the outrage of the guild and the royalty, the High Advocate might be swayed.

  “First thing in the morning,” he said with a slight smile. “A very wise . . . cunning . . . suggestion, Corporal.”

  Lúcan matched that smile as he nodded and stepped out, closing the door.

  Rodian sank into his chair. Chances were still slim, but perhaps he might still find the journeyor within three days.

  Wynn sat cross-legged on the floor with the blackened scroll before her, as she prepared to call up her mantic sight. She never looked forward to this sickening process, and it was difficult to stop once it started.

  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 there 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.”