Wasting no time, Sara asked their captive, “How? How do we get through the shield wall—all of us, not just one?”
Karn sat up with interest then. “And don’t lie,” he said grimly. “We’ll know if you do.”
Their captive gave Karn a dismissive glance and turned back to Sara.
“It’ll take a broad range of mage gifts and lots of energy,” he said, looking around at her sleeping comrades. “More than you have. Of both.”
Sara frowned. “What kind of energy? A release spell?”
“No, a siphoning. You need to drain the magic itself from the walls around you. No magic, no wall. Got it?”
“Just like that?” Karn said doubtfully.
“There is nothing simple about this,” their captive said in a voice that dripped in condescension. “Stripping someone’s magic by siphon is a big task; doing it through a shield wall from far enough way is nearly impossible. Because that is what it would take: you must attack the mage wielding the magic from afar to make the siphon work.”
Sara swallowed hard. Siphoning did not sound good…or easy.
She exchanged a glance with Ezekiel, and he stepped forward to assume the next round of questioning. Which was perfectly all right with Sara; she knew when she was far out of her league.
“Keep going, you have to know more,” Ezekiel said, an eager gleam in his eye. There was nothing that he liked more than an intellectual challenge. Or a mystical object. Preferably an item that was both a mystical object and a conundrum to crack.
“I know enough that this is a foolish proposition,” the Kade spat out.
At their glares and Sara’s step forward with a knife suddenly appearing in her hand, he hastily said, “But! I suppose, with enough focus, you could slip between the defenses of the mage who is keyed to this particular shield and disable his connection while siphoning the magic.”
Sara knelt in front of him and began slicing off the buttons on his shirt. With each pop, he grew paler, and more of his pallid belly was exposed.
“I’m telling you what you want to hear!” he cried, suddenly more afraid for his life than before.
Sara looked up at him and sliced off the last button. With a flick of her hand, she pushed the two sides of the previously buttoned shirt aside.
“Tell it faster,” Sara said.
He began to speak more rapidly. “You can do it with concentration. But the connection must be disabled before the magic is siphoned off, or you’ll just risk the mage in question repowering the shield.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Sara murmured as she slowed trailed the flat side of her knife down his chest in a loving manner.
He couldn’t get any paler this time. He just started sweating.
“There are at least twelve mages working this spell jointly. And maybe half that number in backups. Each shield is supposed to be linked to a separate mage.”
Sara frowned. “And how does that help us?”
“It’s just a rumor. I don’t have access to the true strategy of the mage cohorts, but I’ve heard that they link their powers together to strengthen their own gifts.”
He looked anxiously between Sara and Ezekiel.
Sara looked at Ezekiel. “What’s he talking about?”
Ezekiel’s eyes were wide in surprise. “I think he means an infinity circle?”
“Is that so?” Sara said with an edge on her voice as she turned back to the Kade.
“Never heard of it!” he said while trying to inch back. But he found that he had nowhere to go with a firm pole behind him and hands securely tied behind that.
“He wouldn’t have,” Ezekiel said. “But it could have ramifications for us in the future.”
For now, though, Sara was far more interested in the present and how to get them out from inside this bubble.
Slowly, she said to the captive, “You know, you’ve been very instructive so far.”
“Thank you,” he said weakly.
“However, you need to be useful now. Tell us something to get us out of here.”
“I’ve told you everything I know!” he snapped, apparently perturbed that they didn’t appreciate his forthcoming nature.
“And yet none of that explains exactly how to bring the walls down,” Sara said. “I’m a mage, one who deals more with physical manifestations of her magic than anything else, but even I know not to walk blindly into another mage’s construct.”
“I’ve told you everything I could—”
“But not everything there is to know, and I won’t be blindsided,” Sara interjected. “We need to be prepared with an idea of how to untangle it layer by layer, and you are not helping us with that. Just a lot of words about the end goal.” Then she turned the flat of her blade to the sharp edge just above his belly button.
“I swear to all the gods, I don’t know how!” he howled as she pressed the blade down hard enough to make his flesh pink around the blade.
Ezekiel said, “You know, I believe him. He’s not a mage after all.”
“No, he’s not,” Sara said, but didn’t lift her blade. She was beginning to enjoy this threatening routine. Maybe she had found her calling. Not as a diplomatic questioner, not quite torturer, but as something in between.
“What—what now?” the captive said while breathing slightly easier as she took away the blade over his gut.
Sara eyed him. “Well, now we test your theory.”
“How are you going to do that?” he asked while nervously twitching his hands.
“Trial and error,” said Sara with a shrug. “Because if you can’t tell us the exact way to dismantle it, then we have no choice but to go forward in stages.”
He dropped his head, sweaty, lanky locks drifting down over his forehead. “Okay, well then—that sounds good.”
He sounded as relieved as a pig who had received reprieve from slaughter.
Sara, however, wasn’t finished.
She snatched his head back up and bared her teeth at him. “And you will stand there and be personally bound to the mage who is working on unraveling your colleagues’ ingenious work.”
Ezekiel nodded. “It’s only fair—after all, you did give us this brilliant idea.”
“But—” their captive said weakly.
“No ‘buts,’” Sara said, waving her knife in his face. “No outs. That’s how it’s going to be.”
Then she turned and yelled over her shoulder at Karn’s lounging form. “Hey, Karn—you a mage?”
“Nope, but you knew that. Even that far-back drop on my grannie’s side can’t help you,” he replied lazily. “Try again.”
Sara shrugged and raised her eyebrows at Marx.
“Just enough to light some fires under some lazy butts,” he said. “I can distract your distant mages.”
Sara laughed. “Well, I’m sure that you’ll lead them on a merry chase.”
A stranger from the new recruits piped up, “I can help him. I may only have innate magic due to my heritage, but it’s strong. Strong enough to lure someone’s curiosity while the others do the real work involved.”
Sara nodded. “Sounds good to me.”
She then looked at Isabelle first who nodded and said, “I can do it with concentrated effort.”
Turning to the others with a smile, particularly the stragglers who’d ended up with them by mistake, Sara waited to hear from them.
Another volunteer spoke up—he’d had two years of magic at the famed imperial academy before dropping out—and it was then that the Kade leader could no longer keep silent.
“You can’t be serious!” he said as he strained forward. “You can’t use rookies for this sort of delicate unraveling, and certainly you can’t bind me to one. This is serious magic and takes talented practitioners.”
Ezekiel said with a smile, “We have to take what we’ve got—after all, we don’t have many.”
Their captive started sweating again. “You can’t do this,” he whined. “It’s against all known mage laws to lock an unwilling non-mage or mage to another person working powerful magic. That’s enslavement.”
They ignored him as Sara began sorting out who would be good for the mission and Ezekiel thought of the mechanics of what they needed to do.
“There isn’t a spell that will just allow us to travel between two points and defeat a mage across the distances you’re estimating—not one I know of,” Ezekiel said while he tapped his finger to his chin, half talking to their captive, half to himself.
Isabelle said from where she was sharpening her knives, “He’s right—we’ll have to go into the spell net itself. Each of us with magic will merge our minds to the shield wall and attack the creator from there.”
“This won’t work,” the captive said while struggling violently against his bonds. “You have no idea what you’re doing and you’ll get me mentally fried in the process. That’s inhumane!”
Sara scoffed. “Like you care about the humanity of the laws.”
“I’ll die if one of your idiot bumblers messes this up,” he cried.
Sara turned to him. “Just like our idiotic bumbler mage will. Are you sure that wasn’t what you were hoping for?”
He pinned his lips in a firm line and refused to meet her gaze.
Sara leaned back and said, “Last chance, Kade. Are you sure you just don’t have a key to unlock it yourself? Remember, don’t lie—we’ll know.”
The last sentence was said in a voice that dipped into darkness.
The Kade shuddered miserably. “I would have given it to you by now. Just to get you out of my face. Besides, all the final shields were keyed in a specific way for a very good reason. It’s an extra layer of security.”
“Go on,” Ezekiel said.
The Kade continued, “They’re projected from within our own forces, far enough away that you’d need some time or some big magic to reach them.”
“So where does that leave you?” Ezekiel asked. “Your forces would be stuck within this shield wall with us.”
Their captive shook his head. “We thought of that, of course. That’s why we put so much energy in creating the portals—it’s how we got in and it’s how we relayed messages back. Once we’d overtaken your forces in each designated sector, we were ordered to send a messenger back through each portal to relay critical information to our leadership.”
“And then what?” Sara asked, her arms crossed.
“And then,” the Kade leader said with narrowed eyes, “we either sent our individual strike forces by portal to back up other strike forces that needed it in multiple sectors, or used the portal to be sent elsewhere in service of the Kades.”
“They move you like chess pieces to wherever there is greatest need,” Sara said.
The Kade smiled proudly. “And that is how we shall win this war. We are everywhere and nowhere. We can move like lightning and you will never see us coming.”
“I wouldn’t say never,” said Ezekiel. “With our best mages on it, we’ll figure out your tricks. We’ll stop you.”
The Kade laughed. “Like you stopped our strike on your people as they came up from Sandrin? We didn’t even have to send in troops for that.”
Sara’s fist balled before she relaxed it. She couldn’t let him bait her, and there was no way for him to know she’d been in that deployment. To their captive, it was just another in a long line of Kade victories.
Ezekiel, however, was incensed. “Good people died there. If you Kades would just stand and fight like real men, this skirmish would be over and done with. We wouldn’t be fighting like animals in the mud.”
“And your imperial forces would outnumber us ten to one,” the Kade said. “We’re not fools. We pick our battles. We pick when and where to fight. And little by little, we’re wearing you down.”
Sara looked at him in surprise. “Is that your tactic? A war of attrition?”
The Kade leader sat back, satisfied. “Better that than a death by starvation. You and your empire are so sure you’re right. But you don’t even know what you’re fighting for. Or why.”
Sara couldn’t really respond to that. He was right.
“Nevertheless,” Karn said, sitting up, “we know what we’re going to be fighting for as of right now. Our freedom, and you, my nervous little jitterbug, are going to help us.”
The Kade leader looked from face to face frantically, searching for an ally or, at the very least, someone who disagreed with the insane plan. When he found none, his shoulders slumped and Sara could have sworn he whispered, “I’m doomed.”
Shaking her head, she told Ezekiel, “Get the others ready, please. I need to discuss something with Reben.”
He raised a curious eyebrow but nodded and turned away to do what she’d asked.
Sara walked off a bit to the side then waved Reben over.
Lowering her chin, Sara said the words she’d been reluctant to voice: “Reben—I need you to do one more thing.”
Reben yawned and nodded. “What is it, Mercenary Fairchild?”
Reben put a lot more emphasis on the designation than Sara did, and it almost felt like a title rather than a rank, which made her equivalent or even lower-ranked than everyone here.
Still, Sara spoke with authority. “Right now, you’re the only one who can get in and out of this bubble without us. I know we might need you for what we’re about to do, but I want you to promise me something.”
Reben’s shoulders straightened at the seriousness in Sara’s tone.
Sara took a deep breath. “We may not survive this magical attack against the mages. Even if we do, we may drop the shield wall only to find a phalanx of Kade invaders waiting on the other side to kill us all.”
Reben stilled then said hesitantly, “I confirmed they were within their own shield walls. All of them.”
Sara nodded. “I know, but they may not stay there. We, you, need to be ready if that’s the case.”
“Tell me what to do,” Reben said.
“Before we go in, I want you to go out one more time, scout the perimeter, and find the best route to take you out of the encampment unseen,” Sara said.
“Then what?” Reben asked.
“Then you run like hell to the first outer fortress for the imperial armed forces that you can find if we’re overrun,” Sara said. “And you tell them what happened here. Tell them what the Kades did and tell them our entire force was wiped out. Because the only way the Kades will be waiting for us is if every other measure failed.”
“Yes, I understand,” said Reben miserably. “I’ll make sure it’s done.”
“I don’t want your promise,” Sara said. “I want your word, your bond. You may be the only one who can get this message out.”
“You’ve got it,” the woman with the weight of the world on her back said. Then she stood at attention and saluted.
Sara gave her a bitter smile and a salute back as the sun rose.
They were ready, no matter what came.