Winds Of Change v(mw-2 Read online

  In fact, it had probably happened so fast that the mage had no notion of what had gone wrong. But whether the tales were true or not, it was still a horrible way to die.

  Maybe all she needed was for it to be a female that taught her, he thought, watching as her grave eyes darkened and lightened according to her mood. Her weapons' teacher, the Tale'sedrin-kin that she worships so, is a female; and so is her oldest friend. And her Companion is female. Maybe she just responds better to female teachers.

  A reasonable thought-thwap!

  A mental "slap across the side of his head" woke him to the fact that he was supposed to be working, not woolgathering. Once again, Treyvan had taken advantage of the fact that his attention had wandered to deliver a stinging reminder of what he was supposed to be doing.

  Damn you, gryphon. that hurt.

  With his "ears" still ringing, he turned his attention back to his teacher, whose twitching tail betrayed his impatience.

  "If you do not pay heed, I ssshall do more than ssswat you, Darrrkwind," Treyvan warned him. "That isss the third time today your thoughtsss have gone drrrifting." He grunted an assent, without mentioning that each time Elspeth had been the cause of his wit-wandering. He needn't have bothered. Treyvan brought it up on his own.

  "Can you not worrrk about a young female without having yourrr mind drrift?" he asked acidly. "Humanss! Alwaysss in sseasson!" Darkwind felt his neck and ears heat up as he flushed. "That's not it," he protested. Treyvan cut his protests short.

  "It mattersss not," the gryphon growled. "Now watch thiss time. thisss is how the transsssmutation ssshould look to you. Crreate the texturrre sso, pussh it frrrom you asss if rrreleasssing a brreath. Halt it herrre frrom yourr body." Darkwind blotted everything out of his mind except the sense of the power-flows, and the magic that the gryphon manipulated. As Treyvan built the proper shield, step by slow, tiny step, Darkwind finally saw what he had forgotten.

  Treyvan had woven a complex texture into the shield, in one area directing power only in, and in another place filtering it out, giving him two power flows-one from himself, the other ready to take in energy directed at him by an enemy, and transmute it. That was the problem; he'd only allowed for the single power-flow from himself. The energy coming in from outside took over the field that was supposed to channel power from himself into the first shield. Back-pressure, as in a wellspring, with only the inevitable leaks to relieve that pressure. Once there, since it wasn't shield-energy, it eddied or stood idle-or worse, waited to react with another "color" of magic-in all cases, more than frustrating.

  Potentially deadly, in fact. It never reached the transmutational part of the Working; so it never channeled to the last shield.

  Mentally cursing himself, he rebuilt his shields; this time the transmutational shield worked correctly, giving him two shields for the personal-energy cost of one. At least for as long as the enemy chose to sling spellweapons at him.

  "Now, you know how thisss ssshield can be countered, yess?" Treyvan asked, when the shields had been tested and met with his approval.

  "Two ways-well, three, if you count just blasting away with more energy than the shunt can handle," Darkwind replied. "The first is to find the shunt-where he's grounded-and use it to drain energy out of the shield-hooking into it yourself, and taking the energy back. If that happens, the shield starts draining the mage that's holding it. If you do that fast enough, all his shields will collapse before he can react." Treyvan's crest-feathers rose with approval. "And?"

  "Attack where the mage isn't expecting it," he said. "That can be one of two things-attacking through the shunt, which is structurally the weakest part of the shield, or attacking with something else entirely.

  He thought for a moment. "At this point, if I were the attacker, I'd go for something completely unexpected. Like... a physical attack. Send Vree in to harass him. Toss an illusion at him. Demonsbane-throw a rock at him to make him lose his concentration!" Treyvan laughed. "Good. Now-could you have done what the sssword Need did? Could you now transssmute the energy of an attack and sssplit it?" He thought about that for a moment; thought about exactly what the sword had done. "Yes," he said finally. "But only by doing what she did-holding no shields at all between the attack and the transmutationlayer.

  That might work for a thing made of metal and magic, but it would be pretty foolhardy for a flesh-and-blood creature." Treyvan nodded. "Neverrrthelesss," he said, pointing a talon at Darkwind, "It did worrk. And ssso long asss Falconsssbane kept launching magical attackss against herr, it continued to worrrk. Only if he had ssseen what ssshe wass doing and launched a physical attack, or ssome otherr type of magic, would he have failed. He ssufferrred frrrom sshort sssight." Darkwind countered that statement with one of his own. "We were lucky," he said flatly. "Falconsbane was overconfident, and we were damned lucky. I have the feeling that if he'd had the time to plan and come in force, he could have taken us, all the Shin'a'in, and maybe even their Goddess on, and won." Treyvan hissed softly. "Your thoughtsss marrch with mine, featherlesss ssson," he said, after a pause. "And it isss in my mind that we ssshall not alwayss be ssso lucky."

  "In mine, too." Darkwind nodded toward Elspeth, and tried to lighten the mood. "For one thing, that woman seems to attract trouble." The gryphon's beak snapped shut, and he nodded. "Yesss, sshe doess.

  Sshe hass attracted you, forr one. Ssso, let usss sssee if you can conssstruct thossse ssshields corrrectly a ssecond time-and thisss time, hold them againssst me."

  Elspeth paid careful attention to every hissed word Hydona spoke, finding it unexpectedly easy to ignore the fact that her teacher was a creature larger than the biggest horse she had ever seen, with a beak powerful enough to snap her arm off at a single bite. Even with a motivation to pay attention such as that, the gryphon already made more sense than Darkwind did. Neither she nor the gryphons were native speakers of the Tayledras tongue; Hydona was being very careful about phrasing things in unambiguous terms that Darkwind likely thought were intuitively obvious.

  Another case for being careful about what you assume in translation. Interesting. that is a consideration I would expect of a Court-trained person, not a creature like Hydona.

  Hydona related everything she taught Elspeth to the mind-magic Elspeth already knew. that made a lot more sense than Darkwind's convoluted explanations of power-flows and energy-fluxes. They seemed clear to him, apparently, and seemed to make sense, except when he tried to fake; she had seen bluffs in enough Court functions to recognize the signs.

  Hydona clearly detailed making an anchor point and shielding, for instance; that was a lot like grounding and centering, and was done for many of the same reasons. When put that way, Elspeth stopped subconsciously resisting the idea of having to effectively double-shield, once against mental intrusions and once against magical attacks. The other thing that made sense was that Hydona had pointed out the sword Need had done all that for her; the sword was in itself a permanent anchor point, radiating a seemingly ungraspable power into the earth, forever acting as a ground for the bearer it was bonded to. Need had shields on it that Hydona doubted were under conscious control anymore-if they ever had been. She seemed to think that they hadn't been; that they were some part of the sword itself, before the spirit came to reside in it.

  So that was how Elspeth had managed to work magic without all the preparations the Hawkbrothers and their large friends deemed necessary.

  The precautions had been taken, they simply hadn't been taken by her.

  And now that Need was no longer in Elspeth's possession, Elspeth was going to have to learn how to do everything Need had done so that she could manage for herself. With an ironic smile, she thought how easily Need could have become less a sword and more a crutch.

  Oh, Need would have forced her to learn it all anyway. The only reason Need had aided her for as long as she had was because they had been in something of an emergency situation. In all probability, Need would have insisted on her learning to fend for
herself as soon as there had been some breathing room.

  Obediently, she "watched" as Hydona led her through the steps of anchoring and shielding, then practiced until they came easily. First, feeling the stable point in the power-flows about her and setting mental "hooks" into it, then erecting a shield against mage-energies that was remarkably similar to mental shields. Hydona drilled her over and over, and after a while the exercises stopped being something foreign and started feeling like second-nature. Best of all, they took about the same effort it took to stay on a galloping horse. She was a little surprised by how quickly it all came to her, but Hydona said nothing of it. She seemed to think it was only natural.

  "Now," the gryphon said, after she'd repeated the patterns until she was weary of them, and thought she could do them in her sleep. "Here isss when you rrreach for powerrr; when you arrre ssafe in yourrr protectionsss, and anchored against fluxesss. Now, there isss a ley-line to the eassst of you; a young one, eassily tamed-but you do not know that.

  Ssso. Assssume you know nothing. Searrch for it. When you find it, rrreach forr it, asss Need ssshowed you, and ssample it. Sssee if you can usse it, orrr if it isss too ssstrong forr you." She closed her eyes, found the line Hydona spoke of, and reached for it, dipping the fingers of an invisible hand into it, as if it were a kind of stream, and she wanted to drink of it.

  She "tasted" it; tested the textures, the strength of the flow and the complexity. It was very tame, and bland. Not terribly strong. Kind of boring, in fact, compared with the rush of power she had gotten when she'd tapped into the node under the gryphons' ruins for the first time.

  I can't do much with this, she thought, and began to trace it out to whatever node it was linked into, without thinking twice about doing SO.

  She felt her skull resound with a hard, mental thwap! Her eyes snapped open, and she rocked back on her heels for a moment, staring at the female gryphon, aghast.

  "What did you do that for?" she cried, angrily. "I was just-"

  "You were jussst about to find yourrr way to the Hearrtssstone," Hydona interrupted. "And that, little child, would have eaten you whole, and ssspit out the piecessss. A trrrained and warry Adept can stand againssst it, but not you." She licked her lips and blinked. "I thought the Heartstone was shielded. I thought nobody but Adepts could reach it now. Isn't that what all the mages have been working on since we got rid of Falconsbane?"

  " And ssso it isss," Hydona nodded, "But you arrre within the prrotectionsss of the Practice Ground. The ssshieldsss do not extend herrre, so that those who arrre trrrying to Heal the Ssstone can rrreach it without dissrrupting thossse sssame ssshieldsss."

  "So the Adepts healing, the Stone come here to work?" she asked.

  Hydona nodded. Her voice rose with alarm; if the shields didn't extend here- "Isn't it dangerous for us to be here, then? I mean, what if we interfere with what's going on?"

  "Therrre isss no one herrre at the moment," Hydona said calmly.

  "Arrre you afrrraid?" Reluctantly, she nodded. After all she'd heard about the Heartstone and how dangerous it was in its current, shattered state, she wasn't very happy being somewhere that had no protections against it. The idea made her skin crawl a little with uneasiness.

  "Good," Hydona said, with satisfaction. "You ssshould be afrrraid.

  Verrry afrrraid. It isss nothing to disssregarrd, thisss Ssstone. It isss lightning harrnesssed, but barrrely, in itsss perfect sstate." She refolded

  her wings, and settled her tail about her forelegs. "Now, why werrre you wanderrring off like that?" She shuffled her feet, uncomfortable beneath the gryphon's dark, penetrating gaze. "I-there wasn't much power there," she stammered. "I wanted more than that. I mean, there was hardly enough there to do anything with." ~ "Morrre than you think," Hydona scolded gently. "Tcha. You arrre a child who hasss alwaysss had a forrrtune at herrr beck, and hasss never learrrned how to make do with less." The gryphon shook her massive head, and the scent of cinnamon and musk wafted over Elspeth. "You musst learrrn to budget yourrrssself " She cocked her head sideways and watched Elspeth with a knowing eye. "The mossst effective mage I know neverr rrossse above journeyman-classss. He wasss effective becaussse he knew exactly what hisss limitsss werrre, and he did everrrything possible inssside thossse limitssss. He neverrr perrrmitted lack of powerrr to thwart him; he sssimply found waysss for lesss powerrr to accomplisssh the tasssk." That was the harshest speech she'd ever gotten from Hydona, the closest the gryphon had ever come to giving her a scolding.

  Although the thwap a few moments ago was a great deal like one of Kero's "love-taps." She rubbed her temple, and considered the similarities between the two teachers. "Delivered for your own good," Kero used to say. Well, this is another kind of weapons' work I suppose. And what was it Kero always says? "On the practice ground, the weaponsmaster is the one true God." And this is the same as the practice ground, I guess. She nodded meekly, and Hydona seemed satisfied, at least for the moment.

  "Ssso, do asss I told you in the firrssst place. Find the line, tesst it, and link with it." Hydona sat back on her haunches and gave her a steady, narrowed-eyed look that Elspeth interpreted as meaning she would not permit the slightest deviation from her orders.

  So, with a purely mental sigh, she found the tame, boring line of power again, and tapped into it. The amount of energy possible to get from a source so slight was hardly more than a trickle, compared to the sunlike fury that was the Heartstone. This time, she made the connection without even closing her eyes. The relationship between the inner world of power, unseen by physical eyes, and the outer world no longer confused her. Part of that was simply all the work she'd done with Farsight over the years; another instance of how working with mindmagic made work with real magic much easier.

  Ah, but as Hydona pointed out, less power does not mean less effective power. Mind-magic is still strong. If there are more Heralds with the Magegift, after this I should be able to teach them in a reasonable length of time-not like the six or eight years it takes Quenten's students to become journeymen. I could just work from their own mind-magic Gifts outward.

  When she finished her assigned task, sealing the connections with a bit of a flourish, Hydona nodded with satisfaction. "Good. Now, channel the powerrr to me." Her beak opened in a hint of amusement at Elspeth's dropped jaw. "What, you did not know sssuch a thing wasss posssible? Becaussse it isss not posssible in mind-magic? Ah, but it isss possible in Healing, isss it not? Asss there are ssssimilaritiesss, there are diferencesss asss well, and those differencesss might kill you. Trrrussst yourrr intuition, but neverrr asssume anything." What Hydona did not say-because she didn't need to-was that Elspeth needn't think she knew everything just because she was well-versed in the magic of her own people.

  All right, so I'm a bonehead. She reached a tentative "hand" to Hydona, and was relieved to find the gryphon's shields down, and Hydona waiting for her "touch." She had no idea how to proceed with someone who was uncooperative, or worse, unable to cooperate. It took several false starts before she was able to create a channel to Hydona without losing the first one to the ley-line, but once she had it set up, she was able to redirect the power without too much difficulty.

  She was tempted to set up a channel from Hydona to the line, directly, but she had a notion that Hydona would be able to tell the difference, and that the gryphon would not be amused.

  Hydona broke the contact, and Elspeth maintained the channel without drawing any more energy from it while she waited for the gryphon's next instructions.

  "Ssso, you can ssseek, sssample, channel, and sssend. Now we sssshall practice all of thossse," Hydona said genially. "We sssshall prrractice, and prrractice, until you can ssseek, sssample, channel and sssend underrr any circumssstancesss." Elspeth smothered a groan, and broke her contact with the ley-line neatly, letting its newly-freed power wisp away harmlessly. This was starting to get frustrating. Hydona sounded more and more like Kero with every passing moment. If she starts being any more like Kero,
the next thing she's going to do is quote a Shin'a'in proverb at me.

  "It isss sssaid that'whatever isss prreparred forr neverrr occurrrssss,"

  " Hydona quoted. "That isss an ancient Kaled'a'in sssaying.

  Ssso, let usss prrepare you for finding yourrrssself alone, sssick, wounded, exhaussted, ssssurrounded by enemiessss and needing powerrr, and it will neverrr occurrr. Yesss?"

  Elspeth could only sigh.

  Later, after the gryphons were gone, Darkwind rubbed eyes that ached and burned with the strain of Doublesight, and was mildly surprised to find Elspeth still there. She sat quietly on a stone bench, leaning against the curved marble wall of their corner of the Practice Ground with her eyes closed. He wondered if she was waiting for him to show her the way out-or just waiting for him.

  He walked up to her, and she stared up at him with eyes as tired as his own. "We should leave, Elspeth," he said carefully, uncertain of her temper, as weary as she looked. "The others will be here soon to work on the Heartstone, and we shall be in the way."