Барб Хенди - First and Last Sorcerer

“See, nothing. It’s not the words but their intent, like when I ignite the sun crystal.” Her gaze shifted to Ghassan. “I don’t know their intent, but I hoped you might.”

He shook his head slightly, which made her panic in thinking he was as lost as her.

“You never cease to astonish me,” Ghassan said with a sigh. “The things you have asked me to make ... the objects that find their way into your possession ... and the places in which you end up. Do you realize how rare a thing you now hold?”

“Of course I do!” Wynn answered. “But it’s worthless if we can’t reactivate it. That’s half the reason I came all this way ... and you are just as much trouble as what you claim about me!”

Magiere still appeared disturbed that anyone would cut up an orb key. “We don’t need it. The keys—thôrhks, handles—can track orbs.”

“Not like this,” Wynn countered, holding up the device. “Wait until you see.”

But if she couldn’t make it work again, none of them would see.

Ghassan held out his hand. “May I?”

Wynn hesitated, though this was what she’d come for. With no other option, she placed the device in his palm.

He took a deep breath and released it slowly, as if he’d just gained something by chance that he’d not known existed, or if, how to find it.

“The phrase you uttered,” he said, still gazing upon the device, “translates roughly to ‘By your bond, as anchor to the anchors of creation, show me the way . ’ So the intent must focus upon the device’s connection to the orbs in recognition of what they are, their purpose, and the nature of the one sought and its individuality. The words spoken must be based on this. Whether such knowledge must be firsthand or general, we shall see.”

Wynn’s heart sank at first but beat faster with hope. She hadn’t been certain even Ghassan would understand a dialect that might be a thousand or more years old. But he’d easily translated it, and that was more than Wynn had hoped to gain.

She reached out. “Let me try again.”

Instead, he stepped back, closed his eyes, raised the device out level, and spoke with force.

“Nä-yavít, a’bak li-bâhk wihkadyâ, vakhan li’suul.”

His arm instantly straightened and leveled with his shoulder. Seemingly of its own accord, his fist—holding the device—lurched toward the bedchamber’s opening.

Wayfarer almost jumped out of the way. Osha quickly crossed to stand before her and eyed Ghassan and the device in a less than friendly manner. The room went silent as everyone stared, for the device had directed Ghassan toward the orb.

After Wynn’s own failures with that object, the solution had come so easily that she wasn’t sure how she felt. Of course she was elated, but she hadn’t expected him to take matters—or the device itself—out of her hands. Glancing up and back at Chane, she found him watching Ghassan.

“How do you turn it off?” Magiere asked, breaking the silence.

“Loss of contact,” Wynn answered. “Just let go and it goes dormant.” And as she finished, she stepped to Ghassan and held out her hand.

Was that a hesitation—a slight frown—before he dropped it into her palm?

Wynn slipped the device into her short-robe’s pocket, though it was heavy enough to make her robe sag. Ghassan eyed her carefully as Chane watched him.

“Yes, that’s ... impressive,” Leesil said, though he didn’t sound impressed. “But I don’t see what good it is if it always goes for the nearest orb.”

Wynn took a slow, calming breath. He sounded more like the old Leesil, always free with a sarcastic, unhelpful comment, and she wasn’t in the mood.

You do not fully trust this domin.

Chap’s words took Wynn by surprise, and she looked into his crystal-blue eyes.

And neither do I, but your urging back in Calm Seatt is what brought us here. Tell the domin about the new clue from the poem, as there is nothing else for us to try. We—I—shall see what he makes of it, perhaps even what he does not say in words.

Wynn doubted Chap could catch a single rising memory in someone like Ghassan. Several years before, Chane had taken a scroll from the library of a six-towered castle guarded by a minion of the Ancient Enemy. It was the same place in which Magiere, Leesil, and Chap—and Wynn—had found the first orb.

Inside the scroll was a poem in a dead Sumanese dialect. The words had been scribed with the black fluids of a long-gone Noble Dead, likely a vampire, and then blackened over with a full coating of ink. Only through Wynn’s curse of mantic sight, in seeing the words devoid of elemental Spirit, had the poem been uncovered. Metaphors and similes in the verses hinted at the last resting places of the orbs.

Wynn’s mantic sight had certain drawbacks. It made her ill, so she could maintain it for only short time periods. As a result, full translation of the poem had been slow and sporadic. Ghassan already knew about the poem, as he had helped to translate the first section.

The “Children” referred to the first thirteen vampires to walk the world, likely the true origin of Noble Dead and perhaps created by the Ancient Enemy to guard the orbs, some of which had been moved from their original locations. The poem had not been helpful in those cases, but Wynn remained hopeful that the orb of Air hadn’t moved from where it had been hidden a thousand years ago. Her mind turned over one verse in particular.

Back in Calm Seatt, she’d uncovered another clue with the help of Premin Hawes, head of Metaology in the guild’s Numan branch.

Wynn looked to Ghassan. “Premin Hawes helped translate another line that might assist our search.”

One way or another, they’d all come seeking the domin, and there was nothing left to try.

Ghassan raised one eyebrow. “And?”

Wynn closed her eyes, reciting what Premin Hawes had uncovered.

“The Wind was banished to the waters within the sands where we were born.” Opening her eyes, she launched into suppositions that she, Chane, and the premin had drawn. “The ‘we’ most likely refers to the Children, since one of them wrote the poem. We know they were created somewhere in what are now called the Suman territories, though the empire didn’t exist then. There were separate nations and not the ones of today.”

She paused for a breath.

“So that line must hint at someplace near where the Children were first created as servants of the Enemy. But there is nothing but desert between here and the Sky-Cutter Range, and it stretches from coast to coast across this continent. The only ‘waters’ are at the coasts, but that goes against ‘ within the sands.’ Premin Hawes said that much more than nations and people could have changed in a thousand years. Perhaps there was once a body of water in what is now desert?”