when she had once tampered with a mantic form of thaumaturgy.
“Back at the guild,” Wynn went on, “it took half a day or more to fade on its own. You’ll need to get me back home to the temple.”
Chane sighed, that leftover habit of living days. “I will always get you home,” he answered.
Wynn tried to maintain her facade of confidence. Even a failed attempt to summon the sight by will could be overwhelming. Chane had seen this once, and he’d politely called her methods “undisciplined.”
She knelt before the doors, afraid she might fall once mantic sight came. All Chane did—could do—was stand over her, watching. Extending her index finger, she traced a sign for Spirit on the floor and encircled it.
At each gesture, she focused hard to keep the lines alive in her mind’s eye, as if they were actually drawn upon the stone. She scooted forward, settling inside the circle, and traced a wider circumference around herself and the first pattern.
It was a simple construct, but it helped shut out the world for a moment, and she closed her eyes. She focused upon letting the world’s essence, rather than its presence, fill her. She tried to feel for the trace of elemental Spirit in all things. Starting first with herself, as a living thing in which Spirit was always strongest. She imagined breathing it in from the air.
In the darkness behind Wynn’s eyelids, she held on to the simple pattern stroked upon the floor as she called up another image. She saw Shade’s father—Chap—in her mind’s eye and held on to him as well.
Shade huffed somewhere nearby.
Wynn’s concentration faltered. She pulled both pattern and Chap back into focus. Just as she’d once seen him in her mantic sight, his fur shimmered like a million silk threads caught under blue-white light. His whole form was encased in white vapors that rose like flame.
Moments stretched on. Mantic sight still wouldn’t come.
The ache in her knees threatened her focus. She clung to Chap—to memories of him burning bright behind her envisioned circle around the symbol of Spirit. She held on to him like some mage’s familiar that lived only in her memory.
Vertigo came suddenly in the darkness behind her eyelids.
“Wynn?” Chane whispered.
She felt as if she were falling.
Wynn threw out her hands. Instead of toppling onto the gritty floor, she felt her palms slap against cold, smooth iron. Startled, she opened her eyes—and nausea lurched upward as her stomach clenched.
Wynn stared at—through—the iron doors.
They seemed even thicker than the glimpse she’d had of both layers. Somewhere nearby, Shade’s whimper twisted into a low growl.
A translucent white, just shy of blue, dimly permeated the iron. The doors’ physical presence still dominated her sight, but there was more, something beyond them. Pale shadows of a large chamber became visible.
Shade whined so close that the noise was too loud in Wynn’s ears. She glanced aside, straight into the dog’s dark face—and gasped.
For an instant, Shade was as black as a void.
Wynn quickly realized this was only the darkness of her coat beneath the powerful glimmer of blue-white permeating her body—more so than anything else in sight. Traces of Spirit ran in every strand of Shade’s charcoal fur. She was aglow with her father’s Fay ancestry, and Wynn had to look away.
“Are you all right?” Chane asked.
She looked at him, using him as an anchor.
He appeared exactly the same, unchanged, but only because of the ring he wore. So long as he wore Welstiel’s ring of nothing, he was impervious to anything that might sense or see him as undead.
“Yes,” Wynn choked out, and quickly turned back to the doors.
The chamber beyond was no more than inverse shadows, like looking into a dark room, its walls outlined by some inner glow. She scanned about before nausea crippled her and searched for a hint of entrances from other passages.
There were none.
Shade had seen the duchess and the Stonewalkers here. But when the white-clad elf turned, Shade had ducked into hiding. She hadn’t seen who had gone in or not. At first, Wynn assumed the duchess and her people had merely gone off another way. But if Duchess Reine had gone in . . .
The only other fixture Wynn made out within the chamber was a huge circle of darkness upon the floor. The harder she focused, the more she saw the dim residue of Spirit in the stone where the floor ended around a large hole, about four yards wide.
She turned her focus downward to penetrate