Barb Hendee - Through Stone and Sea

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?