Everyone else was present, as Wynn didn’t wish to explain more than once, and most likely they would all be involved in recovering the orb of Air. Of course, Chane, Osha, and Shade already knew about the device.
Leesil stood one step behind Magiere, glanced away, and didn’t look back again.
Chap eyed Wynn rather than the device, as did Brot’an.
Wayfarer remained near the sheet-curtained bedchamber.
Osha kept his distance as well, leaning against a cabinet at the room’s front, listening but not looking.
Chane hovered behind Wynn, as if she needed protection, and so did Shade on her left. With eight people and two large dogs, the place felt a tad small.
Considering all the varied reactions around her, Wynn remembered Shade’s earlier warning about waiting to tell everyone until Chane was up and awake. Perhaps that had been sound advice after all.
“How does it work?” Brot’an asked.
Of course he would be the one to get straight to the point.
“It is activated by a spoken phrase,” Wynn answered, “though in a long-dead language, something Shade heard the last time it was used. She passed the words precisely to me, but I’ve tried them with no success.”
On impulse, she thought it best to show them, so she closed her grip on the device and spoke the words aloud as best she could.
“Nä-yavít, a’bak li-bâhk wihkadyâ, vakhan li’suul.”
Nothing happened, of course. She even swung her arm in an arc away from the bedchamber, where everyone knew one orb was stored. She hoped the device might wrench itself back that way, but it didn’t.
“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.