by Myers, Karen
“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.
CHAPTER 42
Well, this is an improvement.
Penrys found the mood at lunch a very different affair from the meal the night before. The excited voices echoed off the walls as the wizards, in groups, argued about what they had been practicing during the morning sessions. She still couldn’t spot Dhumkedbhod.
Zongchas himself had participated—all of them had. “How do you think it went?” he asked.
“Fine. It was fine,” she said. “Um, where was Dhumkedbhod? Do I need to see him independently?”
“There were important matters he needed to address.” The embarrassment she felt belied Zongchas’s reply. So, he won’t participate. I hope they try to teach him separately—they’re going to need everyone. Mentally, she shrugged. There was nothing she could do about it.
“I’ve got one more big lesson for the mental skills this afternoon, and then we need to do some dull work. Calibration.”
At Zongchas’s puzzled look, she added. “Think of us as weapons. Don’t you want to know what we can do, so we can be deployed most effectively? Look, call your weakest student a “unit.” That’s the least amount a wizard can defend with a shield or attack against a shield. Or compel a shield—that’s for the afternoon session, too.
“We can only measure against each other. If a student can barely defend against two of the weakest, but not three, then he’s a ‘level two.’”
Zongchas was nodding along, and so was Zandaril just beyond him.
Penrys said, “We need to rate everyone, and then measure them in groups, too. First we need to confirm that the levels can be added, in other words, if I take a level two defender and a level four defender, they together can fend off a level five or six attacker. Understand?”
She raised her eyes to see Zandaril looking intrigued. “That’s how it works, but we never measured it precisely,” he confirmed.
“After that, we need to see what level I am, and make some guesses about your stronger enemy in comparison. Then you’ll know if you have enough absolute power, in principle, to stand against him.”
She turned to Vladzan, seated next to her, who was following the conversation.
“You, Grakkedo, might not think this matters for physical magic,” she said, “But why is it the devices aren’t working? Is one of the reasons that your wizards can’t get close enough to trigger them? What if they could get much closer, in high-level groups? That would make a difference, wouldn’t it?”
His expression changed from polite interest to active engagement.
“Right,” she said. “I thought so. We’ll be exploring your side of things starting tomorrow.”
“Try again. This isn’t easy.”
Zandaril watched Penrys coaching the whole group in a skill that few of them had realized was possible. Three of them stood before her, frustrated with yet another failure.
“Look, you know how to shield and you know how to break a shield. This isn’t very different. You’re taking your own shield and imposing it on someone else, and leaving yourself defenseless while you do it, so you must work at least in pairs, one to attack, and the other to defend you both. And remember, if you’re trying to shield yourself and someone else, you’re dividing your power with someone else, so you’re both weaker. Same for the attack.”
She stopped. “Maybe numbers will make this easier. Let’s say the target’s a level four defender. The first step is to overwhelm his shield, so the attacker must be greater than level four, so let’s say he’s a six.
Zandaril watched her students struggling to follow her.
“The attacker breaks the target’s shield. Easy, right?”
Heads nodded.
“Then he goes to impose a shield and he succeeds. That means he can’t shield himself, so his buddy, who’s also a level six, defends them both. But that means each of them is defended at a level three or so, not at level six. Right?”
Fewer heads nodded.
Penrys continued her scenario. “So, the target has had a shield imposed by the attacker, but if the attacker’s concentration slips for just a moment, the target can counterattack, at his own level four. But the attacker is still trying, so he’s only defended at a level three. What’s going to happen?”
One of
the younger boys, who’d been following closely, spoke up eagerly. “The attacker isn’t shielded well enough while he’s attacking, and the target rips through his buddy’s shared field and then his, one at a time, and thumps them both before they can react.”
Laughter rose from the group, and Penrys nodded.
“That’s right. That’s how two level six attackers get thumped by a level four defender. Y’understand?”
Zandaril realized that’s what she’d been doing the night she appeared during the attack from the mirror. She’d been dividing her shield among three others, until she reached the limit of what could withstand the attack. I wonder why she didn’t counter-attack instead of just waiting for Chang’s bluff and for someone to turn the mirror away. Maybe she couldn’t see what to attack, and maybe the attacker couldn’t see who was defending.
“Let’s take a break for a few minutes, and start again,” she said.
Before Zandaril could ask his question, Zongchas walked over to them. “This is fascinating, a whole area we’ve never considered. How did you find out about it?”
Penrys’s mouth quirked. “Recent knowledge, and it’s your doing.” At his raised eyebrow, she elaborated. “The attempt to control Chang’s command tent? Through the mirror?”
Zandaril watched, fascinated, as an expression of guilty knowledge flashed across Zongchas’s face.
“Ah,” she said. “Thought you might remember that. That was an imposed shield, so this can’t be entirely new to you.” She cleared her throat. “I happened to be the one defending.”
Zongchas sputtered a bit but didn’t elaborate.
Zandaril was struck by one conclusion. That Veneshjug must have been pretty high-level, at least as high as me. If he’s here, he should stand out. But what level was Penrys, that she could defend against him, even divided four ways? Four times stronger?
Suddenly three dozen wizards didn’t seem like very many against the enemy that had so casually imposed a shield upon them both, at a significant distance.
And was Veneshjug here? He hadn’t recognized him from the minds around him, but he had little confidence that he remembered his original impression well enough. Surely Penrys would have told him if she’d found him among their students.
It was time.
Penrys had delayed as long as she could, but as the late afternoon light slanted through the windows of the practice hall and lit the dust in the air, stirred up from all the activity, she knew there had to be one more test.
She raised her voice. “All right, everyone.”
The wizards wrapped up their current exercises and quieted down.
“All of you have been evaluated by your approximate level of strength. Don’t forget you’ll improve with practice, to some degree, though most of this is innate.”
She hesitated. “Now it’s time for the part that matters. Your enemy imposed a shield on both of us.” She waved at Zandaril. “He was at least a couple of miles away when he did it, and he had control, too.”
It was silent in the hall.
“How strong was he, that he could do that?” She cocked her head at the same young student who had spoken up before.
“Well,” he said, “He had to be stronger than the defenses you two could use, right?”
“That’s right. Now I want you to sort yourselves into groups by your strength. Weakest on the left, strongest on the right, and leave a little separation between levels.”
She waited while they shuffled into ten or twelve groups. There were only two in the weakest group, at level one. Most were clustered in the middle groups around level six or seven. Her first attacker, Dzangabtig was alone at the ninth position, and there were three on the far right, Zongchas among them.
“So, how strong is Zongchas, Zandaril?,” she asked.
Zandaril cleared his throat. “That group seems to be something like a level twelve,” he said. He himself stood with a trio of level tens.
“That’s quite a range.”
Dzangabtig called out from his solitary spot. “What level are you?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Penrys said, trying to keep the apprehension out of her voice. “And there’s only one way we know how to do that, right?”
Several of the students looked uneasy. No one had liked having a shield imposed upon them, and only the strongest of them had needed to face more than one simultaneous attacker trying to overwhelm them.
“Let’s start with the strongest. That’ll get us there faster,” she said. “A group of you got through my defenses this morning, remember, so you know it can be done. We’re testing a different skill, now, one that goes beyond that, and working on getting more precise results.”
She pulled a chair over and sat down as a precautionary measure. “Each person step up to the front and add his strength to the others. If it isn’t enough, the next one will come and join them. Y’understand?”
She leaned forward in the chair and braced her forearms on her thighs. “Stop when you succeed. Please.”
Then she bowed her head, raised her shield, and stared at the floor.
Though not from the strongest group, Zandaril stepped up first, just outside of her range of vision. She felt his attempt as a pressure against the sphere that was her mind’s boundary, but it didn’t trouble her concentration much. In a few moments, she heard footsteps approaching, and the pressure grew. Then another came, and another.
She lost track of the count. She had the advantage of controlling just one thing, a single shield, while the external pressures wavered and fluctuated, instead of consolidating into a single weapon. Here or there two were joined effectively, but most were not.
Her vision vanished after a bit, and she was conscious only of her internal struggle. She knew they would have to break her shield before they could impose an external one, and she tried not to flinch in anticipation. By concentrating on the roundness of her shield, she helped deflect some of the ill-aimed attacks, but there were too many of them, coming from multiple directions, and, finally, her shield was stripped away, and she felt her mind laid defenseless to the chaotic force pushing against it.
Nothing changed for several moments, and then, like a great muffling cloak, she felt something like the immobility she remembered when they’d hid beneath the hollow of the tree near the Horn. She tried to mind-speak and could not.
A voice that was not Zandaril’s cried out, “Enough!” and the pressure vanished in bits and pieces. Penrys blinked repeatedly, but it was a little while before her sight returned and she could feel someone grasping her shoulder and shaking her.
“Are you all right?”
Zandaril’s voice. Sounds worried.
“I’m fine,” she said, “Or, at least, I will be.”
She gathered her feet under her and tried to stand up. Her knees buckled, but Zandaril caught her upper arm and kept her from falling. She made a second attempt and succeeded.
The sweat on her scalp itched, and she turned away from her audience until she was sure she could master her expression.
“How many was it?” she asked Zandaril.
“Turn around and see for yourself.”
She turned back, and saw eight wizards standing at the front, including Dzangabtig. Her eyebrows climbed her face.
“What…”
“Adding me, that’s about ninety-eight, all our levels together. Took almost eighty to get through, and then another twenty to impose the shield.”
“How much do we need,” she said, hoarsely, looking up at his face.
“You and I are about a hundred and ten, together. How much stronger do you think he is?”
She sat back down in her chair and tried to calculate it. “Lots,” was all she could manage.
“But does that mean sheer power’s going to work?” Zongchas sat with a few of the senior wizards around the table in the main hall after the class finished and held an impromptu conference.
Penrys grimaced at Zongchas’s question,
but she had to answer it.
“A group of your mages defeated me, which is good news for us all,” she said. “But, altogether, all of your people only add up to about two hundred and fifty, counting levels, and that’s if they coordinate perfectly well together, which we know is unlikely. The fewer individuals trying to bond together, the better, if you want a focused attack. You felt how inefficient it was, yes?”
Zongchas nodded.
“We’re guessing I’m about a hundred,” she said. He looked at her, clearly missing her point, and she rolled her eyes.
“Look, it took your nine best to do it. What if I were trying to fight back? Who’s going to shield them? The other, what, twenty-eight weaker wizards? Remember my example about how a level four can ‘thump’ two level sixes? You can’t attack me and defend the attackers at the same time—you haven’t got enough strength to do it.
“Besides, there’s only one of me, and that’s actually an advantage—I can attack wizards like you one by one from a position of strength, if I’m not overwhelmed or distracted. I mean, I’ve never tried it, y’understand, but we’ll do the experiment and I’ve no doubt of the outcome.”
Zongchas’s face changed entirely as he worked through the problem.
Zandaril said, “It’s like fighting a bunch of small armies with a big one. You might have more people over all, but if the big one can attack your armies one at a time, it’s hopeless.”
Ichorrog had been part of the attack group, and he spoke into the silence. “I thought, we thought, you’d be fighting with us.” He looked at Zandaril, seated next to her. “Both of you.”
“I plan to,” she said, “and that’ll help, but…” She rubbed her face—it had been a long day. “He’s stronger than I am, much stronger. We still don’t know if it was him alone who overpowered us, or him somehow drawing on his captives. We’re probably better off trying for a physical assault instead.”
Vladzan glanced at Zongchas, and Penrys saw the small nod he received. He said, quietly, “I may have a way to help with this.”
“I’m listening,” she said.
“You and I need to pool our knowledge about devices and what they can do, before we do anything else. I assume you’ve been skimming my mind for it anyway…”