The next morning, Penrys and Vladzan huddled at one end of the hall over a long table with loose power-stones and bits of wood. Vladzan kept two of his students running back and forth for example devices.
Zandaril guided ever larger groups of wizards into binding their efforts together smoothly, while keeping an eye on the serious discussion between the two device experts. Penrys and Vladzan looked like any two specialists, meeting by accident and sharing notes. They could have been merchants, or craftsmen—the same intense focus, abbreviated speech, and appreciation for new concepts, spiced with arguments about which methods were better.
Finally, he set his best students to practicing with each other, and sauntered over to see what he could learn.
Penrys looked up as he walked over. “Good timing,” she called. “We’ve just about settled the basic differences between our schools.”
“What have you learned?” he asked. “What can we use?”
“Well, it boils down to just a few things. The Collegium seems to have better sensors and better movers for people, but Vladzan’s been showing me some great triggers and some clever ways of, I guess you would say, leveraging the applied force. Oh, and they’ve got some very important insights into what holds substances together. You know, the way I described how their trap works, by breaking the bond that holds a substance together.”
She looked over at Vladzan. “That a fair summary?”
He nodded, and Zandaril noted the excitement in his posture. “Seems to me like our native abilities are pretty similar. What she calls ‘moving,’ ‘binding,’ and ‘destruction’—those are our fundamentals, too. Seems like the Ellech are better with the physical magic, and maybe the Zannib with the mental, while we, and Penrys here, do both. Not all of us can manage the physical stuff, mind you, but most of us.”
“They charge power-stones like they do in Ellech,” Penrys continued, “But they’ve got a method of storing the power in a group of stones and using them at once.”
Vladzan cleared his throat. “We’ve sketched out some notions of how we can combine our knowledge.” He gestured at several sheets of paper, with hasty notes scrawled on them, and a few sketches. “But we need weapons, and we need them in a hurry. We don’t have time for experiments.”
That last was accompanied by a pointed look at Penrys.
“Look,” she told him, “I’ve already explained I can charge all the power-stones you can get me. The problem’s going to be some sort of tactical plan and, I’ll admit, that’s not my area of expertise.”
Zandaril said, “So what’s the next step? What can our enemy do, and how does all this help?”
He didn’t like the look of uncertainty that crossed both their faces. Vladzan pulled out one of the pieces of paper, with two short columns on it and put it in front of her.
Penrys hesitated, then explained to Zandaril. “That’s a list of what we know, and it’s not much. That first column is me. How am I different from, say, Vladzan? First, I’m much stronger with the mental skills. Same skills he has, but much stronger. Second, I can charge power-stones using my chain. Oh, and by the way, he can’t see power in it the way we can in the stones. Remember I wondered about that, since I couldn’t see the chain m’self?
“Third, the wings. I showed him. We need to do some more tests, but he agrees with me that they’re probably something made, like a device, even if they bleed, and neither of us have any idea how that was done or where they go, or much of anything else.
“Finally, there’s the healing, the speed of it and the absence of scars. We don’t know how that works, either—might be built in, but we don’t know how.”
She looked down at the paper. “That’s it, that’s all that’s special.”
Zandaril shook his head. “Your lack of memory.”
“Might just be an accident of whatever happened. It’s hardly a skill.”
“Maybe, but I think it’s a clue of some kind. And don’t forget the obvious,” he said.
She looked at him, puzzled.
“Who are your people? I didn’t get a long look at him, before we… jumped, but I don’t think he looked a lot like you. Not your, um, tribe. Where do you belong? And do they all have ears like yours?”
Her hand rose involuntarily to the side of her face, and Vladzan raised an eyebrow. “Oh. I forgot to tell you about that,” she told him. She pulled her hair back and gave him a good look, and he sighed and extended the list on the sheet of paper.
Then he proceeded to read from it. “In the other column, for this Surdo, it’s a different list. Problem is, we don’t know if he has wings or not, if his ears are furry, if he has physical magic—we know very little.”
Penrys interrupted. “But we do know he’s much stronger than I am. Is that native, or is that assisted, by something like power-stones? Can he draw on his chain directly? Or is he drawing on those wizards? That’s my theory.”
Vladzan looked at Zandaril. “She wants to test that.”
“How?” Zandaril asked her.
Penrys looked down. “It would take two things. I’d need to have a couple of wizards who are high level, that I’d try to draw on and add their strength to my own, without their cooperation. Then I’d need a test like the one yesterday, where we line up enough wizards to overpower me and see if I really am effectively stronger.”
She glanced up at Zandaril. “I don’t know what that would do to them. And if it hurt them, I don’t know if the damage would be permanent or not. And if this is what he’s doing, I’d have to look for the weaknesses in it—can he keep it up for a long time, what happens when he sleeps, does he burn out his wizards stealing their power, can they resist…
“These are horrible things, and I don’t see how it can be tested without doing harm. Especially since we know his captives haven’t been able to bond together to overpower him. Why is that? Don’t they know how to? Have they been broken somehow? I don’t want to break someone to find out.”
Zandaril looked down at her impatiently while she toyed with the list, and thought about how to put it.
“If you bring these wizards,” he flung his arm out to include the rest of the people in the hall, “to a fight with the Voice without knowing the answers to some of these questions, you may all die, and hundreds after you. You have to make the tests. Even if it hurts people. What choice do we have?”
He turned to Vladzan for support, and the man nodded. “Your friend is right—it has to be done.”
Penrys looked haunted at the prospect.
“You’ll be careful,” Zandaril said. “I know you will, because I’m going to be your first test subject.”
They argued about it for most of an hour. Penrys refused to consider it.
She looked at Zandaril’s calm face while he tried to persuade her, and pictured him in the group of wizards, drawing water from the air on the Horn—broken, and hopeless.
“No,” she said. “You don’t learn medicine by starting to experiment on your… brother. Your partner.”
That made him pause, and Vladzan, pulled a scrap of paper from his pile of notes.
“I think you may be worrying about nothing,” he told Penrys. “I don’t think whatever Surdo is doing destroys his wizards, not directly. It doesn’t make sense.”
He pointed at some figures.
“Let’s say he can drain a wizard, like you suspect. Then either the wizard can recover, or he can’t. Right?”
She nodded, provisionally.
“If they don’t recover, then it’s a one-time event,” he said. “He uses them up, and that’s it.”
He steepled his fingers together and looked at her. “There aren’t that many wizards. It wouldn’t be enough power to be useful for long. If he had captured two hundred of them and drained them all, once, he would have gone through all of that power long since.”
Zandaril said, “But we saw his wizards using power to provide water. They were tired, it was hard, but it was also clearly something they did all the time.”
He turned to Penrys. “If it broke them, drained them permanently, he wouldn’t be so willing to spend it like that, and they wouldn’t have constant work to do like that.”
He’s right. But it’s not that simple.
“If I tested a new bow by shooting you with it to see what kind of damage it could do, you might not die, you might recover. But you would still be injured, and I would…” She couldn’t finish. I would still be the person who hurt my (my what?) my partner deliberately, to see if I could.
Vladzan looked at her. “We will do this thing. It is necessary.”
Zandaril cleared his throat. “We need to know if her theory is right, that it can be done at all. Then we need to know how much, for how long, and what the effect is, on both her and me.”
Vladzan organized it, and everyone in the hall stopped to gather around and eavesdrop on the process, some on Penrys, and some on Zandaril.
Penrys watched Zandaril take a chair next to her, with an assumed air of nonchalance. “I’m going to start with my shield up,” he said, “since surely no wizard would go to this willingly.”
She nodded, her mouth dry. The room was silent.
And it began.
She closed her eyes, not wanting to see his face, but changed her mind. If he has the courage to do this, I’ll do him the honor of watching the damage I do him.
The shield Zandaril raised was stronger than before. All this practice has helped him. But it’s not enough. Almost effortlessly, she stripped it away and heard his sudden indrawn breath.
She clenched her jaw and suppressed his efforts to raise the shield again. How would I find his power? She thought of the power-stones, and how they felt to her mind, then she looked within him for something similar, and found it. As if she were moving something with her mind, she called upon his own power instead of a power-stone, and lifted a mug from the table next to her with it.
Zandaril’s shock at feeling the physical magic performed struck her like a blow. It was something he couldn’t do by himself, and it seemed particularly nasty to him to be used like a puppet this way.
Penrys choked but held her grip on him. She dropped the mug and lifted his own hand, externally, using physical magic, while he fought unsuccessfully to pull it back down into his lap.
She stopped, then. One more test. She pulled at his power, like sucking on a straw, and swallowed it into herself, somehow. As gently as she could do it, she felt his horror at the sensation, and she stopped before she’d drained him completely, as best she could judge.
His face was white and strained, and she couldn’t look at it any more. She cast her eyes down and released him.
Her vision was blurred, but she reached for the mug with her mind one last time and spun it around as though she were using a power-stone. That part worked, anyway. But at what cost?
She sneaked a peek at Zandaril.
A ghastly smile flickered on his face. It hurt him, of course it did. She leaned in his direction, forgetting their audience, to put a hand on his arm, and he… flinched away. She snapped her hand back and turned her head away. He sees me as a monster now, and he’s right. She shuddered.
When she lifted her face and looked at the audience of wizards, no one would meet her eye, not even Vladzan.
“I’ll be fine,” Zandaril said to her. His voice was remote and flat, to her ears.
She stood up abruptly and turned her back to him. She motioned him away with her hands, and walked, almost ran, out of the hall.
