Chapter Fifteen

After leaving the kitchen, Wynn steeled her resolve as she made her way toward Jausiff’s study. In recent years she’d managed to face down premins, nobles, Stonewalkers, and the undead. So what was it about Nikolas’s father that left her feeling like a stuttering little guild initiate? She wasn’t going to let that happen again, and she stroked between Shade’s ears as they climbed the stairs to the keep’s second level.

“Jausiff’s a guarded one, but try to catch anything that slips out of his memories.”

Shade huffed once for yes.

Upon reaching the second floor, they stepped off down the passage, but Wynn faltered at the master sage’s door and paused for a deep breath.

“Ready?” she whispered.

Shade huffed again, and Wynn knocked on the door—and she waited longer than expected.

For some reason Jausiff hadn’t come down to breakfast, and so Wynn assumed he would be in his chamber, but that might have been a mistake. She knocked again, harder, and this time heard a faint rustling or movement beyond the door. A moment later it opened.

Jausiff’s gray robe was rumpled, as if he’d slept in it. His eyes were mere slits behind strands of uncombed silver-white hair, but at the sight of Wynn, his eyes opened fully.

“How may I help you?” he asked.

All of Wynn’s confidence drained away.

• • •

A cloudy sky and drizzling rain met Osha as he reached the keep’s courtyard and looked around. Straight ahead, three standard guards were on watch at the large gate. To his left was a stable and to the right the barracks. There were no Suman guards in sight.

Neither did Osha see Aupsha, and the courtyard was not large. As he stepped onward, movement near the stable caught his attention.

Aupsha came around its far corner toward the courtyard’s front and stopped upon spotting him. He nodded politely in turning toward her.

He had never before seen a human like her, with such very dark skin and eyes like stained walnut wood. Her tightly curling hair was even darker. With long and slender limbs, she was easily as tall as the average human male—perhaps taller. She wore no cloak and seemed unaware of the falling rain, but she watched Osha without moving as he closed the distance.

“May we . . . speak?” he asked in Numanese.

During the past moon he had worked hard on his Numanese and had become slightly better with it than he was at Belaskian, but he could not remember the word for “privately.” Instead he swept a hand toward the stable, and by that she should take his meaning. He hoped the structure was empty of anyone but horses.

Only Aupsha’s dark eyes shifted once toward the stable’s open central bay doors. The barest crease of her brow signaled suspicion.

That gave Osha a strong suspicion of his own. If she had been the one with the elder sage in the passage last night, it was possible she had seen him as well. She turned for the stable, as if he was no concern to her, and he followed.

Something more caught Osha’s attention—something he should have heard but did not.

He dropped his gaze down the back of her wool tunic and down the low, full skirt. He saw the back of one boot push up against the skirt’s hem. There was no extra layer at the heel and the sole was flat, thick leather worn smooth over time. When that foot moved forward in another step . . .

It did not make enough sound in landing as her other heel-less boot came up.

The packed-dirt courtyard was drenched by rain. There were puddles of water everywhere, even along her path. He should have heard at least the soft smack of footfalls, but no. She walked with more silence than the average person would, almost . . . like an anmaglâhk.

Once inside the stable, alone and out of sight of the gate guards, she turned as he stepped in, three paces behind her.

“What do you want?” she asked clearly, with only the trace of an accent he had never heard before.

Her bluntness, and that walk, and the look she had given him when he had first spotted her called for a change in approach . . . as Sgäilsheilleache would have done.

“I saw you and the old counselor in the passage last night. You were there and then not. How?”

Her expression flickered with sudden wariness, as he knew it would, and he remained silent in waiting for her answer. She would not answer his actual question, but she would say something to change directions.

“There are secrets . . . within secrets in this place,” she said. “They are not mine to share, and none of your concern.”

That brief falter—catch—after that third word told him she perhaps lied in a quick second thought. He had learned of such the hard way as he had waded through all of the much better lies of Brot’ân’duivé. That she had not given him a direct lie as to how they had left that passage said something more.

However she and Jausiff had vanished last night, it had nothing to do with the secrets of the keep. It had to do with her. When she said no more, he knew further silence on his part would not induce her.

“What object did Counselor Jausiff hold?” he asked. “What did he do with it?”

Aupsha glanced beyond him toward the stable’s bay doors or somewhere outside.

“Where are the female sage . . . and her wolf?” she asked.

Osha realized his mistake. Except for Nikolas, Wynn was the only other visitor who had been in the kitchen with him. And Osha had come alone in looking for Aupsha, one of two people seen in the passage last night.

He should not have focused so suddenly on the elderly sage. When he did not answer, Aupsha’s eyelids drooped, half closed as she watched him.

She leaped backward.

Before Osha could charge, Aupsha ducked around a support post laden with gear and straps for wagons and horses. A sudden breeze rushed into his face and blew his hair upward. An instant later a foot struck his lower back.

Osha lashed back to grab a booted ankle, and pain exploded in his left temple as his head whipped under a blow.

He lost consciousness before he hit the stable floor.

• • •

As Jausiff pulled the door wider, Wynn walked into the master sage’s chamber and tried to regain her composure. There was too much at stake for her to be rattled so quickly. She couldn’t let him put her on the defensive this time.

A few steps into the room, she stopped with Shade close by her side. As she heard the door close, she buried her fingers in the fur of Shade’s neck.

“Would you like some tea brought up?” Jausiff asked, as he rounded her toward his cluttered desk.

“No, thank you.”

His bed in the corner was unmade, and he slipped around the desk to where four of the texts she’d brought him lay open. She watched as he closed them one by one. Had she awakened him by knocking, or had he been delving into what Premin Hawes had sent him?

“I heard two of your companions had an outing last night,” he said casually, not even looking up.

Wynn stiffened and then shook off that reaction; that was his mistake, not hers, and it gave her an opening.

“They said the same thing about you.”

Jausiff raised only his eyes, not quite closing the last book, and Wynn rushed on before he had a chance to think.

“What was the device you were carrying? What were you and Aupsha looking for in that back passage?”

She didn’t really expect an answer, and she didn’t need one. As Shade’s neck muscles tightened beneath her hand, an image appeared in her head.

Wynn—Jausiff—stood in a passage so dark that a nearby pale light barely revealed a ruddy metal object in her hand. Her—his—hand obscured the object too much, though its ends stuck out beyond his closed grip. Something about the metal itself seemed familiar. Were there markings on it?

She—he—was bent over it and staring at the passage’s stone floor and creeping along in small steps. He then leaned even more, lowering the object, and . . .

The memory vanished.

Wynn was careful not to flinch, as either Shade lost that memory or Jausiff dismissed it.

“Why hold the object so near the floor?” she asked.

Still he stalled. Perhaps he wondered or worried how much had been seen by her companions but did not know that he had just shown her and Shade even more.

Jausiff recovered, flipping the last book closed. “That object is just an old keepsake, gifted by a metaologer I once knew at the guild. It locates other objects made of metal, and the duchess recently lost a favored ring.”

“In a back passage with only a padlocked side door?” Wynn asked dryly. “Maybe she dropped it on her way down below the keep?”

Wynn heard the door’s handle ratchet behind her. Shade twisted backward out of her grip as the door slammed open against the wall, and Wynn started to turn.

A yelp broke Shade’s snarl as Jausiff shouted, “No, wait!”

Before Wynn could finish turning, someone’s hand clamped over her mouth, jerked her head up and back, and she felt an edge of cold steel press suddenly against her throat.

• • •

Osha groggily pushed up off the straw-strewn stable floor. When he touched the side of his head, it only made the pain worse, and he struggled to his feet.

Aupsha was nowhere to be seen.

He remembered that she had somehow gotten behind him, though it should not have been possible. He should have spotted her coming around either side of the tackle and post, but he had not. He had felt only the strikes that came at him from behind, but before that . . .

There had been a sharp breeze, like in the passage last night.

Even so, he had no doubt of where she had gone.

Stumbling out of the stable, Osha made it halfway across the courtyard before finding his feet enough to run. He slowed only long enough to open one of the keep’s front doors and then bolted toward the main hall. But once there, he stalled at a voice.

“I don’t know what to do.” The duchess stood near the burning hearth with Nikolas nearby as she went on. “He has always been difficult, but at least I understood him. Now he is a stranger.”

“I’m so sorry,” Nikolas breathed, “but I don’t know what—”

“Duchess!” Osha shouted as he ran for the stairs. “Nikolas! To your father’s room—now!”

• • •

Wynn took shallow breaths and tried not to move, feeling a hand over her mouth and a blade against her throat. Someone tall was pressed up against her back, but she hadn’t seen who it was.

Shade was snarling, her claws raking the stone floor as she came around into Wynn’s view.

Jausiff stumbled around his desk as he shouted in a language Wynn didn’t know. The words sounded somewhat close to modern Sumanese.

A memory rose in Wynn’s mind as she found Shade’s eyes fixed on her. She recalled the first time she had seen a tall, deeply dark-skinned woman come out of the keep into the courtyard. Shade’s gaze shifted slightly, and Wynn knew it was Aupsha behind her.

Aupsha shouted in the same tongue the master sage had used.

It wasn’t hard to guess that Jausiff ordered her to stop what she was doing, but nothing came of it. Instead, Wynn stumbled, trying to keep her feet and avoid being cut as Aupsha sidestepped, perhaps to get her back away from the open door.

Shade mirrored their movements, and Wynn raised a hand to hold Shade off.

“Stop this—it accomplishes nothing!” Jausiff commanded, this time in Numanese.

“Lock the door,” Aupsha answered likewise.

“And then you will release her?”

No answer came, and Jausiff finally headed for the open door. Aupsha turned, forcing Wynn to do so as the master sage passed. Jausiff gripped the door to push it closed . . . and it bucked out of his grip as he stumbled back.

Osha lunged into the room with a dagger in his hand. He halted at the sight of Wynn’s situation, and his gaze shifted up above her head.

“Let her go!” he ordered.

Shade’s snarling grew louder, and the blade at Wynn’s throat pressed until it made her skin sting. Jausiff stepped between Wynn and Osha, though he flinched when Shade snapped at him.

“Put your weapons away, both of you!” the old sage commanded.

Neither Osha nor Aupsha moved.

Wynn wasn’t exactly afraid—though she knew she should be. In her searches for the orbs, she had been in worse positions than this.

Osha was positioned squarely before the door, and he’d left it open without even looking back. The sounds of fast footsteps and voices carried in from the passage outside. Sherie and then Nikolas, followed by Captain Holland and two standard guards in gray tabards, rushed in as Osha shifted around the room to stand beside Shade’s left hip.

The cluttered chamber became quite crowded.

Osha held his dagger out as all of Shade’s hackles rose.

Wynn hoped no one would be stupid enough start something now.

The duchess looked at Osha and then Aupsha and finally at Wynn with her mouth still covered by Aupsha’s free hand.

“They are treacherous, my lady,” Aupsha said. “The Lhoin’na cornered me with questions he should not know to ask, and this sage”—she jerked sharply on Wynn’s face—“did the same with your counselor.”

Sherie’s normally pale face went white, and she turned toward Nikolas. “Is that why . . . why you were being so kind? To separate us so your companions could go at my staff one by one?”

“No!” Nikolas answered, shaking his head so hard that his streaked hair swung.

“Then what are they really doing here?” Sherie demanded. “Why did you bring them?”

“Everyone stop!” Jausiff called in a booming voice that belied his age.

Even Shade ceased snarling and settled to a rumble as Jausiff followed up with a labored sigh.

“My lady,” he added, turning to the duchess, “please dismiss the captain and his men . . . and lock the door. We have matters to discuss in private, and Aupsha may have misread the situation.”

Sherie fixed her regal glare on him, and Wynn watched as mixed confusion and doubt passed across the duchess’s face.

“Please, my lady,” Jausiff urged.

Sherie barely turned her head to speak over her shoulder. “Captain, take your men and wait outside.”

Holland hesitated with a glance at both Osha and Aupsha before he obeyed.

Without moving, Sherie commanded Nikolas next: “Lock the door.” Once he did so, she turned her scrutiny back on the master sage. Clearly she felt betrayed but was uncertain whom to hold responsible.

“And now?” she asked, though there was a slight tremor in her voice.

“Aupsha, release the journeyor,” Jausiff said. “And you, Master Elf, put that blade away. Both of you disarm—now!”

Osha’s eyes were moving in watching anyone present. He still hesitated when the hand came away from Wynn’s mouth, though he looked directly at her.

“Do it, Osha,” she said.

She watched his jaw clench as he lowered the dagger. The blade’s edge at Wynn’s throat released some of its pressure. Osha’s large amber eyes widened as some incensed fury twisted his long features.

“You . . . bleed!” he hissed.

Osha raised his blade again and took a step as Shade’s jaws clacked around a snarl.

Wynn and Sherie shouted in the same instant.

“Put it away!”

“That is enough!”

Osha froze and Shade stood her ground. Only when the blade’s edge fully left Wynn’s throat did Osha reluctantly put the dagger behind his back. It was a moment longer before he revealed an empty hand. Despite losing his Anmaglâhk stilettos, he had somehow rigged the dagger to be drawn and returned to concealment as needed.

Wynn touched her throat where it stung, making it worse. Her fingers came away with a smear of blood. Even then she could barely move in trying to catch her breath.

When Aupsha sidestepped toward the door, Sherie shouted, “Do not move!”

Aupsha froze, and to Wynn it appeared that Jausiff was not the only one whom Aupsha served. There was far more collusion here than she would have first guessed, but it appeared that not all of them knew everything about . . . whatever this was about.

“What is happening here?” the duchess demanded of the elder sage.

“A moment, my lady,” he answered, and his gaze hardened as he studied Wynn. “Before we proceed, you will prove to my satisfaction that you are who and what you claim to be, a true sage and a cathologer. Succeed . . . and we continue speaking in here. Fail, and the duchess will call the guards back in.”

Wynn had lost control and realized she would have to play Jausiff’s game. Worse, she and everyone but Chane were now trapped in this room. If she failed, someone would soon enough find Chane “dead” in the guest quarters. After that, being thrown out of the keep would be the best and least likely outcome for failure.

Before she could even agree or disagree with the terms, Jausiff shot the first question at her.

“Who is the assumed creator of the symbolic system used to catalogue and shelve texts in the guild’s libraries and archives?”

Wynn raised one eyebrow. The youngest apprentice of any of the five orders could answer this.

“Kärêm al-Räshìd Nisbah,” she answered. “It was his own system as an imperial scholar, and used in the libraries of the Suman Empire some six hundred years ago.”

Jausiff said nothing, and then, “If I needed to search the archives for Spirit by Air, what symbols would I seek and what texts would I find?”

This was a more complex question, suited to a journeyor, for even apprentices were not generally allowed in the archives. The guild’s emphases of orders were often represented by geometric symbols associated with the prime Elements of Existence: Spirit, Fire, Air, Water, and Earth. In turn, any works that fell into an order’s fields of endeavor were marked and shelved by those symbols. Columns of such symbols on casements, and even on some shelves and texts, were used to classify, subclassify, and cross-reference their subject matter.

“You would look for a square above a circle,” she answered, “where you would find material on myths and legends shelved by delineation of historical context.”

This time he nodded once. “How many lexicons are there at the Calm Seatt guild for the pre-Numanese dialect of Êdän?”

Wynn almost answered “two” but stopped herself.

Êdän was pre-Numanese, yes, but it was an elven dialect no longer spoken and not a precursor to modern Numanese. So old, in fact, that it predated the Lhoin’na tongue and even the old dialect of the an’Cróan, Osha’s people.

A trick within a trick that only an advanced journeyor of Cathology might know, but still Wynn wondered. . . .

Jausiff likely hadn’t visited the guild for many years, probably since before her time. Shortly after she achieved journeyor status, the Lhoin’na guild branch had gifted a second, updated Êdän lexicon to High Premin Sykion. Jausiff wouldn’t know this.

“One,” she answered.

He took a step back toward his desk. “It seems you are what you claim to be.”

“I told you,” Nikolas said irritably.

“Seems!” Jausiff repeated as he turned and snatched a book off his desk. “As to who you claim to be, through whom you serve . . .”

In his hand was one of the texts Wynn had brought to him; she knew it by its cover.

The Processes and Essence of Transmogrification.

Wynn grew nervous again, not knowing what Jausiff was up to now. She hadn’t even finished skimming that book, let alone studied it enough to answer any questions about its content.

“You said three questions,” she challenged.

He ignored her. “Where would I find this text—by its subject matter—shelved in the library?”

Wynn stalled, though she knew the answer. That text wouldn’t be found in any openly accessible library. He would know this as well, because of the person who had received his request for it . . . through whom you serve.

No, mentioning Premin Hawes wasn’t the real point.

Jausiff was apparently as paranoid as Wynn about sharing anything with anyone. No one in collusion with any minion of the Enemy would do all of this in sharing information. And that actually made Wynn trust him a little more.

“Well, where is it shelved . . . in the library?” he repeated.

“It isn’t,” she answered. “Such a text would only be in the archive under the control of a domin and master archivist . . . or in the private holdings of a domin—or premin—of Metaology.”

The old sage dropped the book on his desk with a thud and, with a scowl and snort, he nodded once to the duchess.

Lady Sherie was not so easily assured. “Someone explain what is happening here!”

“These interlopers are a danger,” Aupsha insisted.

Everyone else appeared to ignore her.

Wynn dropped—almost fell—to her knees beside Shade and rested her hand on the dog’s back. For all the talking going on in this room, few people seemed to be speaking to one another.

“You asked me your questions, Jausiff,” Wynn said clearly. “May I do the same?”

His eyes glittered. “By all means.”

“You called Nikolas here to help with the duke, but you didn’t want him to see the texts you’d requested. Why?”

Jausiff’s eyes narrowed once again. “How do you know that I . . .” He trailed off, perhaps realizing the answer before he finished the question. “Hawes showed you my letter. Who are you that a premin of Metaology would trust you this much . . . send you here?”

“Someone she felt was qualified to understand whatever is happening.”

Jausiff walked to a nearby cabinet and opened it quickly to remove something from inside. He returned holding a little cork-capped glass jar smaller than his palm. This he handed to Osha, who just stared at it.

“Put some on her throat,” Jausiff instructed, gesturing quickly to Wynn.

As Osha knelt by Wynn and fiddled to open the jar, the old sage glanced at the duchess and nodded, though he still ignored Aupsha, who watched everything warily. Wynn flinched when Osha applied the salve to her cut, but she felt a rush of hope. Would Jausiff finally be candid?

Nikolas could no longer contain himself. “Father? You called me home, telling me you were ill! Then you said you wished me to ‘help’ with Karl, but except for Sherie, I don’t see anyone trying to help him.”

“Maybe your father is trying to help in his own way,” Wynn interjected, and apparently having gained some cooperation, she turned to her own questions. “Why those specific texts? I know it has something to do with the duke’s behavior or with what’s happening in the villages and the surrounding land.”

Jausiff folded his hands behind his back. “Yes, in the villages, I saw things . . . unnatural. Not a simple sickness among the people, but . . . other things in the land around the keep.”

“Many dead, dying trees,” Osha interrupted. “Hare . . . with five leg.”

“When did you first notice?” Wynn asked Jausiff.

“About a moon ago.”

“And when did you first see changes in the duke?”

“Half a moon before . . . perhaps earlier,” Sherie answered this time, her noble sternness fading. “He went out one night, claiming to settle a fence line dispute in an outlying village and that he’d spend the night there. I thought nothing of it, but when he returned late the following day . . . the Suman guards came with him. He wouldn’t say why or from where, but it was eight more days—nights—when he took to wearing gloves. He looked exhausted, if and when he was up at all during the day. Later, when I went to his room past supper for some issue, I found it empty. I checked every night after that, and he was never there. I would guess that had begun long before I noticed.”

“Where he go?” Osha asked.

The duchess slowly shook her head. “Somewhere in the lower levels. All the stores below were moved to the main floor, though he never gave a reason. After the Suman guards appeared, no one was allowed down there but Karl and them.”

Jausiff took over from there. “Both the duke and the effects in the surrounding land are worsening.”

Wynn knew that the time frame between changes in the duke and the land was too close for coincidence. Obviously the others here shared this conclusion. Something else too disturbing for coincidence struck Wynn.

Last night Shade had gone berserk in claiming that a Fay had manifested somewhere near or inside the keep. Wynn looked to Jausiff, and without warning . . .

“What were you doing in the back passage last night?” she asked. “What was that device you were carrying?”

She knew this might cause confusion and worse, and she wasn’t wrong. Sherie and Nikolas both started in surprise and asked at the same time, “What is she talking about?”

Aupsha hissed and stepped in on Jausiff.

A string of words erupted from her in that unknown language, and Jausiff snapped back at her in kind.

Wynn didn’t know what they quarreled about and only guessed that Aupsha did not want the questions answered. However, Wynn knew enough to let the initial outburst pass, and even as Osha rose tensely, she placed her hand on Shade’s back.

“Shade,” Wynn whispered, and an image rose in her mind.

It was so intense that she clenched her eyes shut.

Wynn found herself running through a dim cave more swiftly than she could have. And her hands—the hands—pumping in rhythm with her strides had long, slender fingers with dark skin.

The memory Shade had caught was from Aupsha.

An agonized sound of pain escaped Wynn’s—Aupsha’s—mouth.

Dark-skinned, similarly dressed people—bodies—were strewn about the floor. Some had their throats torn open or their heads at severe angles from broken necks. All of their eyes stared blankly out between limp eyelids.

Wynn—Aupsha—cried out in pain again.

She slowed, looking to the cave’s rear, where a heavy door appeared to have been shattered outward from within. Just inside that smaller space was an empty pedestal with a round hole in the center.

Inside the memory, Aupsha screamed as she rushed through the door.

Someone lay beyond the pedestal inside the small chamber. At the elderly man’s moan, she rushed over, falling to her knees. His abdomen and light cotton shift had been torn open. He was covered in his own blood and would not live much longer.

Wynn—Aupsha—scooted closer to cradle the old man’s head. His features were Suman, as was his hair, but he was darker than any Suman she had seen. Perhaps he was of mixed heritage. His long and curly chin beard was fully gray. When he whispered in his own tongue, Wynn picked out meanings in the words through Aupsha’s remembrance . . . or perhaps it was something in the way Shade passed this memory.

“Father,” Aupsha sobbed.

“It is gone,” he whispered, looking up at her in panic, though he struggled to keep his dark eyes open. “After so many hundreds of years, the artifact has been taken from us. . . . We have failed our sect’s sacred duty to safeguard it.” When he coughed, blood seeped over his thick lips. “Get a compass piece and find it. . . . You must find it . . . and bring it back!”

“Who took it?” she asked, weeping openly. “Father, who did this?”

The old man went still in her arms.

Wynn jerked her hand from Shade.

All of Aupsha’s grief and anger threatened to overwhelm her . . . and then came her own fears, her suspicions, and she grew sick inside.

“What was stolen from your people?” Wynn asked before she even opened her eyes. “What is this . . . compass . . . you used?”

The chamber had gone silent, and when Wynn’s eyes opened, everyone was looking at her.

The curved knife reappeared suddenly in Aupsha’s hand as she charged. Wynn cringed back as Shade lunged outward and Osha stepped in with his own dagger somehow in hand.

“Hold your place!” the duchess shouted.

Aupsha barely hesitated, but it was enough for Jausiff to step in and grab her arm.

“Stop this!” he shouted. “Remember that you came to me for help . . . not I to you!”

Aupsha turned on him, and Wynn reached out for Shade, but the dog wouldn’t retreat. Neither would Osha.

“You will keep your place,” Sherie ordered Aupsha. “Or you are gone! Now, what is happening here?”

Jausiff remained fixed on his tall, dark attendant, though he raised a hand to the duchess to hold her off. “I promised to help you,” he said to Aupsha, “and you trusted me once you learned who and what I was . . . a sage, a preserver of knowledge.” He pointed at Wynn. “So is this young woman. Though I had reason to doubt her at first, I believe she might be able to assist. Enough nonsense!”

Aupsha remained rigid, her face a mask of anger. Finally she stepped back, and Wynn waved Osha off as well.

“Master Columsarn!”

Wynn flinched at that sharp utterance, and the duchess stepped slowly and steadily up to the master sage.

“You will explain all of this immediately,” Sherie added, “including everything you have kept from me.”

Jausiff swallowed and glanced sidelong down at Wynn. “Able to assist or not, you are a good deal of trouble.”

“I’ve heard that before,” she answered, and even before she asked the next two questions, she feared she already knew the answer to the first. “Now, what was stolen from Aupsha’s people? And what is the compass and the device you held in the passage?”

Jausiff took a step away from Aupsha, though he kept his eyes on her.

“Aupsha is a member of an ancient sect . . . worshipers of a long-forgotten saint, for lack of a better term. They have been hidden away in the mountains above the great desert for countless years in protecting an artifact. Though she has not been completely forthcoming, she assured me her ancestors acquired this artifact to keep it from the wrong hands, and their only purpose is to guard it. It was stolen from them earlier this year, and she tracked it here.”

“How did she track it?” Wynn asked.

Jausiff paused. “The compass, as you say, and the device in my hand last night are one and the same. We were using it in trying to determine where below the keep this artifact has been hidden.”

“It’s here?” Wynn whispered.

Nikolas stood staring at everyone as he stepped in behind Sherie. “Father? What is going on?”

A brief scowl, or maybe a flinch of pain, crossed Sherie’s face at his closeness. “Continue,” she ordered the old sage.

With a frown of his own, Jausiff pulled a cord around his neck from out of his robe. Dangling from it was a small key. He rounded behind his desk to a heavy chest at the back wall and unlocked it. After digging inside, he turned back with something wrapped in an oilcloth.

Wynn rose quickly, stepping in to face him across the desk as he opened the cloth.

There inside the cloth, across his hand, lay a slightly curved piece of ruddy metal, though it looked sound for appearing so old. It was a little longer than the width of his palm, thicker than it was wide, and perhaps the width of two of Wynn’s fingers.

“Aupsha’s people cut up a secondary object said to have been found with the artifact,” Jausiff explained. “They did so to keep it from ever being a tool to use the artifact, but they discovered its pieces still had an affinity for that artifact. This is how she tracked what was stolen.”

That was all Wynn needed to jog her awareness and strip away all doubt. Judging from the slight curve of its length and the metal itself, she now knew where it had come from . . . what that other object had been.

Wynn began to tremble, for Jausiff was holding a piece of an orb handle . . . an orb key.

Last night Shade had sensed the Fay, just as Chap had once when Magiere used her own thôrhk—key—to open the first orb of Water. Everyone in the guest quarters other than Chane and Shade, and perhaps more throughout the keep, had lost partial control of their bodies and their memories. In those few panic-driven moments Wynn had felt as if her awareness—her self—had been draining away.

And each night the duke vanished into the depths below the keep.

Another time, another way, Wynn might have been relieved at the realization. But not this way, here and now, for there was an orb below the keep.

“This is what you’ve been doing without telling me?”

Wynn flinched at Sherie’s sharp words and turned to find the duchess shaking her head at the aging sage.

“And you already knew!” Sherie accused Jausiff. “You . . . knew what was harming my brother.”

“Forgive me, my lady,” he answered. “I strive in my own way to save the duke, but I vowed to Aupsha and her people to keep silent on all of this . . . in exchange for her assistance.”

“A promise worth nothing!” Aupsha snarled at him.

“We have to get the artifact back,” Wynn interrupted. “At any cost.”

Aupsha turned on her. “We have already sought to do so but cannot penetrate the lower levels. The door is impassable, and only the duke and his foreign guards go below. And there is more to uncover.”

Aupsha closed on Wynn, which drew a warning growl from Shade.

“How was it found among my people at all?” Aupsha asked, as if suspicious of everyone now. “I have subtly engaged each Suman guard. None seem clever enough for what was done. It could not have been the duke himself, for he was here when my people were assaulted. Someone else stole our . . . charge.”

Wynn wondered about all of this as well. Who had the ability and knowledge to locate an orb, and more so one hidden for centuries by generational guardians? She was also curious about how this “sect” had procured an orb in the first place. But someone had located it among Aupsha’s people.

When Wynn had gone looking for lost Bäalâle Seatt, an ancient city of the dwarves from the time of the Forgotten History, Chane and Ore-Locks had been the ones to actually find the orb of Earth. But they’d found no thôrhk or key with it. Sau’ilahk had gotten ahead of them, and for some reason he hadn’t taken that orb.

Every orb uncovered so far had a handle—a key. Even the deceptively frail and ancient undead Li’kän had possessed one in guarding the first orb. Why hadn’t there been one in Bäalâle Seatt? Or perhaps there had been.

Had someone taken a key instead of the orb?

It made no sense until Wynn looked at the “compass” object in Jausiff’s hand. Could a key as a whole be used to track down an orb? If so, and if Sau’ilahk had gained a thôrhk left with the orb of Earth . . .

The bodies in Aupsha’s memory showed no signs of the way the wraith killed. None had been aged, left shriveled from devoured life, or even marked like young Nikolas with streaks of gray in his hair. Such details might not matter, though. Sau’ilahk might have arranged for human assistance.

“In your attempt to reach the underlevels,” she said to Aupsha, “how close did you get?”

Aupsha’s eyes shifted toward Osha. “To the door around the end of the passage where he saw us. We have not found a way through it.”

“The only key to that door was taken by my brother,” Sherie added.

Wynn turned. “I need to get to that door. I need time there undisturbed to . . . to study it. Can you arrange this for me?”

Sherie watched Wynn for another three breaths. “And if this artifact is recovered, what would you do with it?”

Wynn couldn’t tell if that was a threat hiding behind a suspicious question. “I will take it far from here to where no one, including your brother, will ever see it again.”

Aupsha spun toward Wynn again, but Wynn looked away to Shade and then Osha.

“I’ll need you and Shade as well,” she added.

Neither of them responded, though a worried frown marred Osha’s expression.

There was only one way Wynn could determine whether the orb was below the keep. As to Sau’ilahk, if he was here, she wouldn’t be able to find him yet . . . not until nightfall.

Shade wasn’t going to like what Wynn had in mind, but at least Chane was still dormant and wouldn’t be there to argue.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 726