“Why do you ask?”
Wynn hesitated, wondering how far to take this. “Magiere has only opened the orb of Water, and not fully. I wasn’t with her, but I know what happened. All moisture in the area rushed into the orb in a storm. The potential destruction ...” She faltered, uncertain how much farther to go. “It barely started before the spike was slammed back into the orb, closing it. And I know something of how the orb of Earth was used to bring down Bäalâle Seatt.”
“And what are you suggesting?” Ghassan asked.
This was something she wouldn’t dare say to the others.
“We have the orbs of Air and Spirit in our possession,” she began again. “I don’t know what Spirit will do when it’s opened, but Air could create a similarly destructive storm to Water. If—if we trap the Enemy, and one of us gets close enough to open the orb of Air ...”
She couldn’t say it aloud. Knowing Ghassan, she didn’t have to. Yes, that suicidal move might be enough to either kill or trap the Enemy again ... along with whoever tried to use the orb of Air.
“I am surprised to hear such a notion from you,” Ghassan said.
His abrupt dismissal annoyed Wynn. She shifted where she sat near the dying coals of the fire to look right at him. She could not see him clearly, but she saw enough by the moon’s bright light. He was watching her intently but calmly.
“Why?” she asked.
His head tilted down, one of his hands moved slightly, and a whisper of some kind escaped his lips.
A faint glow caught Wynn’s eyes halfway between herself and him. A stone first appeared to have a glimmer around it, as if dust-mote fireflies began to swarm. The glow grew, softly at first and then brighter and brighter—from the stone itself.
Wynn inched back a little. How had he done this?
“Listen!” Ghassan commanded. “We do not go recklessly stumbling into the lair of the Enemy and attempt to open one orb. If one can cause cataclysmic destruction by itself, do not assume five would be fivefold worse. The Enemy created the five anchors for a reason. That is the answer we must uncover first, before any needless rush or wasted life—yours and others’.”
“And who will use all five, if we learn how? You?”
“Unless you would like to try.”
At the start of this journey, they had intended to gather the orbs as a last option, should the Enemy be proved to be reawakening. If that terrifying reality came, she had envisioned at least a few careful experiments to see how the devices might be used together. Now she wasn’t sure at all if anyone should know that secret ... and live to tell it.
And she hadn’t known how set Ghassan was on the original, final option.
“What if Chane and Chap fail?” she asked. “Or they don’t return at all?”
Ghassan lifted his head and fixed on her in the half dark under the moon. “Chap and Chane have not failed.”
Wynn balked for a moment. Ghassan appeared to close his eyes and bowed his head, and he remained that way for too long. This gave Wynn further pause before she asked anything more.
“How could you—?”
“The same way that I knew you were in the alley behind the sanctuary ... on the night I needed your help to persuade the others to hunt the specter.”
Wynn swallowed in confusion and almost challenged him again. Then she knew how he knew that Chane and Chap had succeeded. Relief flooded her in knowing they were safe.
“The pebble, the one you gave Chane.”
Ghassan raised his head again and nodded once.
“You could know this? From so far away?” she asked.
“Even now they are on a ship nearing Soráno. And they have the final orb and its stonewalker guardian as well.”
“Ore-Locks? He’s coming with them?”
Ghassan nodded again. “You understand my reason for checking on them?”
She did, yet he seemed different from the man she’d once known, and she looked again to that still-glowing rock between them.
Ghassan was a sorcerer, a practitioner of a reviled magic. His focus was upon that of the mind, its powers, and its manipulations, though he had employed guild thaumaturgical alchemists in Calm Seatt to make her sun-crystal staff. Causing a rock to produce light was psychokinetic at a physical level, or at least that was how she would describe it from studies in the sciences.
She had never seen him do so before. It left her wondering about the sun crystal. He had once used that to track her into Bäalâle Seatt?
Had sorcery been involved in what he had contributed to the sun crystal’s making?
“And now I need your help,” Ghassan said, almost tiredly.
Wynn was afraid to even ask. “What help?”
Ghassan lay in the dark of his own mind, his own flesh not his anymore. In one instant of pause during conversation with Wynn, the specter had turned inwardly upon him.
Though he had no flesh within that darkness, he now lay shuddering as if burned and beaten to his own last breath. And the specter—Khalidah—had found and taken what he needed.
... The same way that I knew you were in the alley behind the sanctuary ...
The specter had not been there in that moment; that had been Ghassan himself. Khalidah had taken that memory from him to once again deceive Wynn and to regain her trust in using hope against her. Khalidah wanted those orbs more than she knew, and yet ...
Ghassan’s false breath caught in realization as much as agony.
Khalidah was afraid to face the Enemy as yet.
He—the specter—did not yet know how to use the orbs.
How could that be possible? There were two nearby, and the specter could have even put Wynn into a natural slumber, so that he might delve those devices through sorcery. There was only one reason that had not happened.
Khalidah already knew his sorcery would not work on an orb.
Oh, yes, he might lift one by his art while in a chest, or perhaps even directly, but he could not examine and find the secrets of the orbs themselves through his art.
Were the orbs impervious to the other two magical arts as well?
If they were proof against thaumaturgy and conjuring, how had they even been made? Such defenses so ultimate could not have been applied to them during or after their making. As to during, for what they could already do, such work would have been almost impossible.
No one could truly know how they had been made, what they were—except perhaps the Enemy.
Ghassan’s mind blanked in trying to see how to use this. He stored it away as one other thing took hold of his awareness. The specter had to come at him to find something to convince Wynn that she still spoke to Ghassan himself. Khalidah had to come and tear that out of him forcibly.
The specter had not found that on his own, as he likely could have with past hosts.
Again, Ghassan did not see the use of this ... not yet.
Upon disembarking in Soráno, Chap found his relief at having solid ground under his paws wiped away everything else for a moment. The sea voyage was over, and now they would travel inland to a’Ghràihlôn’na to find Wayfarer, Osha, and Shade. At that thought, he found himself looking forward to company besides Ore-Locks’s and Chane’s.
The three of them walked the port city’s streets after obtaining a stout, strong mule on which to lash two of the chests. Ore-Locks carried the third, as three orbs might be too heavy, even for a mule.
Although Chap and Chane had stopped briefly here on the way north in dropping off the younger trio, Chap had remained on the docks that time, while Chane had gone in to make the caravan arrangements.
But now Chap walked through the evening streets of the port city, running necessary preparations for further travels through his mind. Reaching the Lhoin’na lands was not even half of the journey ahead. Being lost in such thoughts, he was halfway through the city when he slowed upon noticing a young woman in a long, saffron-colored wrap gown passing by. As he took in her olive-toned skin, light brown hair, and roundish face, he halted completely and looked about.