Penrys hardly touched her breakfast, anticipating a stormy morning. After the meal, she stood aside with Zandaril and wiped her sweaty palms surreptitiously on her breeches.
“Watch m’back, will you?” she muttered to Zandaril, while they waited for the tables to be cleared away to the walls, and the benches arranged in rough rows.
She walked out and stood in front of three dozen wizards, waiting for them to arrange themselves and quiet down. The teachers, she saw, occupied the back rows. She couldn’t spot Dhumkedbhod. Has he absented himself from this? That’s not good.
Rather than shout, she looked over at Zandaril and mouthed “whistle” at him, and he obligingly set his fingers to his mouth and startled them into silence.
“All right, folks, we don’t have a lot of time so let’s take this seriously.” Penrys made sitting down gestures at the last of them.
“Here are the facts. Yes, I have a chain, and yes, it’s like the one your enemy has. My chain reacted to his chain when he saw me.” She held up her hand to cut off the buzz.
“Me, I have no memory more than three years old. I don’t know him, or any other chained wizard, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
One voice cried out, “That’s what they told us last night. How do we know that’s true?”
She closed her eyes. Clearly last night’s demonstration wasn’t going to be enough.
“Try and see, if you want,” Penrys said, and raised her shield. As she’d expected, he wasn’t the only one to make the attempt, but none of the half-dozen made it through her shields. They don’t know how to coordinate an attack like that.
“Enough,” she said, but left her shield up. “Zandaril could teach you something about combining to overpower a stronger wizard. We’ll add that to our list. I’m not going to let thirty-odd people in to paw through my mind, but I will, if necessary, show Zongchas whatever he needs to see. Good enough for now?”
The mood in the room was a little more respectful.
“Let me make a few observations first. I’ve spent the last three years trying to read my way through the Collegium library and experimenting with devices. That’s supposed to be the biggest wizardly library in the world, but I’ve never heard of Rasesni mages, and it took me quite a while to make sense of one of your devices. So, libraries will only take you so far.”
There were a few chuckles. They were listening to her now.
“I will tell you what I can do. Everything I can do. Maybe that’s similar to what your enemy can do—we’re guessing about that, because of the chain, and maybe we’re wrong. I’ll tell you everything I’ve learned and, more importantly, how I learn it, because I suspect he can do the same. He probably knows everything you do, from your captured colleagues, but he doesn’t know what I do, whatever’s unique to the Collegium.
“He’s strong, very strong, but he’s just one man, and there are limits to what he knows. I’m not at all as strong—I ran as fast as I could—but we can work together and we may know a lot of things he doesn’t.”
She turned to Zongchas. “Does he have anyone he delegates to, any wizard? Can he make more like himself?”
“Not that we’ve ever heard. He has fighters in his service, from rebellious hill tribes, from what you showed us in council, but if there are willing wizards, we don’t know about them.”
Vladzan looked away while Zongchas spoke, as if he disagree.
Penrys smiled broadly. “Good! Then we have a chance.”
She looked down a moment, to sort out what she wanted to focus on. There wasn’t enough time to take them back to the basics. She would have to use as many shortcuts as she could.
She raised her head and tried to include them all in her speech. “Our individual strength is inborn, more or less, but we can all develop better skills, starting now.”
She broadcast to everyone there. *If you can hear me, raise your right hand.*
Everyone, without exception, raised a hand.
“That’s a relief. There are places where mind-speech is not universal.”
She pursed her lips. “I’ll begin by showing you how I mind-shield, and if you do it differently, I’ll learn from you. You shield to keep out a serious intrusion, but we’ll use simple mind-speech as the test. If I’m shielded, you can’t hear my mind-speech, you can’t sense my mind at all.”
“Zandaril, there, will show you how to gang up and coordinate your ability to penetrate or sustain a shield, using a sort of resonance. We’ll take you three at a time, each of us, and I want anyone not participating to try and monitor what we’re doing while they wait.”
She pointed at the three nearest and beckoned them over to her.
By mid-morning, Penrys felt like she’d made good progress with the basics of self-defense. All but one of the young students had successfully raised a shield and defended it to some degree, and she thought the one failure was just too nervous and would get there on his own if he kept trying.
As they came to her, she checked their own methods but found nothing new for herself. She expected that to change when they switched over to physical magic later, assuming there would be enough time for that.
Keeping a random group of them out of her shielded mind posed no difficulty at all initially, but as the older wizards returned from Zandaril’s session, that changed. What they learned from him about a coordinated attack was effective. She could feel the difference in the last group of three.
“Don’t go yet. Could you feel that you were more powerful, bonded together?”
Ichorrog was part of the trio, and he nodded, scarred face flushed with exertion. “It was better this time with all of us, instead of the first time when we tried it one by one.”
“Up until now,” Penrys said, “the defense has been stronger than the offense, in all cases. That’s going to change, and when it does, we may do each other damage.”
“We have to learn how to spar first, to do it safely,” Ichorrog suggested.
“Right, and then how to fight for real,” Penrys said.
She swallowed. “If I can hold off three of you, at your current level of practice, how many of you will it take to overwhelm my defense? I’m weaker than your enemy. If you can’t beat me, how will you beat him?”
Zandaril’s head turned as he listened to her. “This is dangerous.”
“Yes, but it has to be done. We need to gauge effectiveness somehow. How many does it usually take to overpower a wizard-tyrant?”
“Five or six is typically enough, rarely more.” He paused. “I never heard that the target liked the experience.” She could hear the disapproval in his voice.
“Yes, well, want to organize a fighting team from your pupils anyway?” she said.
Zandaril glared at her, but he assembled an uneven team, the three she had just held off, and a trio of youngsters. “They have to learn to work with whomever they find,” he explained.
The students looked ill at ease yoked with their elders, but they dutifully went through the linkage exercises Zandaril had shown them. Then Penrys felt Ichorrog lead his team into a bond with the prepared link, and he looked with his eyebrow raised.
She held her shield and nodded.
The attack was much stronger than she expected, but her shield held.
Zandaril pulled another set of three into the group, and then more. Finally, when the last ones joined the attack, her shield buckled and broke.
She found herself on the floor, straddled by Zandaril, with his hand on his belt-knife as if daring anyone to approach. Her head rang like a bell.
“It’s all right,” she told him, thickly, as she sat up. “It’s probably easier for them to just slit my throat, if they mean me harm.”
She hauled herself up with the aid of the bench she’d fallen off of, and sat down on it and waited for things to stop spinning.
“See, now we have some useful information,” she said. “The Voice kept us both immobilized and broke Zandaril’s shield. He was moments from breaking mine. So, either he’s as strong as several Rasesni wizards, all by himself, or he was able to draw upon the wizards he held in bondage.”
“The next step is to see if I’m stronger than most of you. If I’m not, them maybe he isn’t either, and it’s all the power of his captives.”
Ichorrog said, “I’ll volunteer. Only seems fair—we didn’t intend to hurt you.”
Yet. They didn’t intend to hurt me yet, wasn’t that what he really meant?
Penrys raised her hand. “Doesn’t matter, this is how we learn. I’ll try to be, um, gentle.”
She looked up at the standing Zandaril uncertainly. “I’ve never attacked anyone like this either.”
Ichorrog braced himself and, when he nodded, she probed his shield and then concentrated on a steady pressure. It blew apart almost immediately, but she thought she was able to hold her punch back from doing damage. Ichorrog paled and staggered, but remained standing.
“You all right?” she asked.
He half-smiled. “You have a lighter touch than I do.” He looked over his shoulder to his two teammates. “Let’s try it as a group.”
Penrys felt them form the link and when Ichorrog gave her the nod, she repeated her simple assault. The combined shield lasted a little longer, then tore apart. That’s disconcerting. How many would it take?
“Enough for now,” Zandaril said, before they could rig a larger combination. “All of you need to practice both attack and defense, or someone’s going to get hurt.”
Penrys gratefully let him organize groups of three to spar with each other while she waited for her head to stop throbbing.
