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.
Chapter Sixteen