Барб Хенди - First and Last Sorcerer

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.