Fire in the Mist (15 page)

Faia, eyes still closed, felt a jolt as her roommate's circle shattered, and the ungrounded energy that was released bounced around the room. At the same instant, she felt the sudden arrival of a presence—a curious, somehow dangerous presence. When it sensed her awareness of it, it vanished without a trace.

That was odd,
she thought, and opened her eyes. The bright blue glow that surrounded her startled her as much as it had Yaji. She sucked in her breath, and began to ground her energy.
I could have cooked her,
Faia realized.
I almost did. When they told me that I needed to learn control, I did not realize how very right they were.

Yaji sulked on her side of the room. Faia regretted the fight, but did not really want to talk to Yaji in order to resolve it. So she climbed into her own bed without a word, and forced relaxation upon herself until she fell asleep.

Medwind commandeered one of Rakell's chairs for herself. She removed a stack of texts and manuscripts, a globe of crystal the size of a morka egg, and Flynn, who fixed her with the feline version of the evil eye before he stalked over to Rakell's unoccupied chair and curled up in it. "We off duty?" she yelled toward the kitchen.

The Mottemage yelled back, "Do wingmounts fly?"

"Thank the gods." Medwind slid into the chair and put her boot-shod feet up on the table next to the gargoyle and the goldfish and leaned back. She wriggled more comfortably into the chair and closed her eyes. "What a
d'leffik
day!"

"I imagine that is the kindest thing that could be said about it." Rakell came out to the sitting room with two giant bowls of crisped corn and two huge tankards of tare-ale. She plunked one of each next to Medwind's feet on her end table, raised her eyebrows, but refrained from comment, and chased Flynn out of her chair. Flynn spat and swore creatively in the ancient tongue of cats and demanded to be let out. "Get the door yourself, you sorry beast," Rakell snarled. "That's why I gave you hands in the first place."

The cat glared at her, then stalked over to the door and jumped up, hung on the door, and twisted. With his hind legs, he pushed against the doorjamb. The door popped open, and the tawny cat dropped to the ground and exited.

Medwind shuddered. "It makes my skin crawl, watching him do that."

Rakell sighed. "Not mine. I just wish that he would close the damned door when he let himself out, and that he could let himself back in."

"He can't get back in?"

"He can work the latch well enough, but the little business with the hind legs only works for pushing. So he can only open doors that swing inward."

"So you still have to tend the door for him."

"Yah." Rakell took a sip of her ale, and chewed with meditative concentration on her crisped corn. "Even if the modifications had worked so well that he opened and closed it for himself every time, I still wouldn't give another cat hands."

Medwind laughed and took a swig of her ale. "Don't tell me the mighty Rakell admits she made an error."

Rakell laughed. "Never. My technique was flawless—my results were exactly what I intended. I simply never realized what firebugs cats were. I cannot keep Flynn out of my quicklights, no matter what I do. If there were more like him, the city would burn to the ground inside of a week."

"It's a stone city."

"I can't imagine that making the slightest difference, somehow." Rakell curled up in her brocaded chair and stretched—a movement Medwind found disconcertingly reminiscent of the absent cat.

The barbarian munched corn chips and asked, around a mouthful of them, "So, what did the Council say?"

"They'll 'look into it.' They say a few of the local junior hedge-wizards went missing last night—they aren't willing to speculate on a connection—but all the missing, including our two, are young, pretty, and magically adept." The Mottemage stared out her window at the brightening stars.

"How, exactly, are they going to 'look into it,' did they say?"

"They're sending over Council Regents tomorrow to interview everyone who knew Enlee or Amelenda. They want to see if they can establish any connections. They're voting on sending out patrols."

"In the meantime, we sit and stare at the four walls and hope for the best? That sounds about as useful as their usual ideas."

Rakell waved her tankard at Medwind. "You lack sufficient respect for the Council."

"The Council—yourself excluded, dear Rakell—is made up of a bunch of doddering, neutered ninnies who insist on sitting on their hands, blocking progress at every turn, and keeping the magic of this city locked into patterns four hundred years old, no matter how insufficient to our needs those patterns have become."

"Med, you insist on thinking of gender-specific magic as aberrent. I assure you, it is highly efficient and functional. Your own distaste for celibacy is all that keeps you from admitting that."

The barbarian grinned around her ale. "My 'distaste for celibacy,' as you so lightly refer to it, is no minor detail. I'll give up men when you give up horses."

Rakell sputtered, "I don't like the parallel you've drawn there,
Frelle
Medwind."

"I was not implying any significant parallel,
Mottemage
." Medwind munched on her corn chips and smirked, though.

"Never mind. I won't let you draw me into one of your convoluted little sex talks. I want to know if you have any idea what happened with our students. With your outlander skills, I thought perhaps you would have some insights I don't have."

"I'm as lost in the fog as you are. That horrible business this morning was like nothing I experienced before—"

There was a burst of magic that screamed across both mages' nerve endings, cutting short whatever the barbarian had intended to say. Medwind pressed her hands to her temples; Rakell shut her eyes tightly and clenched her teeth. The effect was the magical equivalent of fingernails dragging across a slateboard. It brought both mages to their feet, ready to flay the perpetrators.

When it ceased, Medwind said, "You know who did that, don't you."

"My Senses work just fine—unfortunately. Apparently Faia and Yaji are having a fight."

"With that much energy flying around, they're going to blow each other up."

The Mottemage spoke through gritted teeth. "Faia and Yaji, who are quickly becoming everyone's two favorite students, might blow each other up. What a comforting idea. That will be a nice educational experience for them, too. Oh, dare I hope to be so lucky? Help me put up noise-shields so that I don't have to listen to them when they do it."

"You aren't seeing the seriousness of this," Medwind commented.

"I don't want to see the seriousness of two squabbling children. I have much larger problems worrying me right now, and I think those problems should take the precedence they deserve."

"Tell me that when Ariss is a melted puddle of slag in the middle of the bog," Medwind muttered. "And me roasted to a cinder with it, and nine healthy husbands out on the Hoos Plains that I haven't seen in ages—dead and gone and no one to give me a proper Hoos burial. You didn't see what was left of Bright. I did."

"Nonsense, Medwind. You're just terrified of the idea of dying in Ariss, Song."

"That's because you won't let me tell you what to do with my head if I die."

"It's going to be buried with your body, Song. That's the civilized thing to do."

"See!" Medwind said. "See! I have every right to worry about it, then. That's the wrong thing to do."

"I don't want to hear it."

Medwind hid her face in her hands and sighed. "I know. I know."

In the middle of deep sleep, in the middle of lonely night, the nightmare came for her.

Fear-pain-death. Fearpaindeath, closer and closer. Otherpain, ownpain, enveloping. Darkness/no eyes/no light/lost. Pain. Hot-cold-hot... no air, no air, I-cannot-breathe-Icannotbreathecannotbreathe...

:Come here!:

Pain. Skin pulling from bones—her skin, her bones. Liquid lead pouring down her throat.

:No!:

:COME HERE!:

Pain, pain, pain-pain-pain! Winter-cold, melting-hot, and hands all over her body, moving her arms, moving her legs, so that she walked through the blackness like a marionette in the market.

:L-l-leave—me—alone!:

:I want you.:

Icy, belly-freezing fear, and in the midst of the confusion, one thin tendril of rationality.

Shield!

Struggle to find the grounding line. Gods, where is it? Find-it-somewhere-down-here/I-know-it's-here.

:You cannot fight me.:

:Will—fight—you.:
The line, oh thank-the-gods-thank-the-Lady, the line, here it is.

Energy. Just a little.

Through the feet, into the belly. Gods-it-is-so-hard-to-hold-it—so-slippery—

And the angry black weight of the hating thing fought against her grip of the energy like a demon.

But suddenly she could breathe.

And when she could breathe, she could think.

With the little energy she'd pulled in, Faia cast up shields, and the pain lessened. She fed more energy into them, and the confusion decreased, and as it decreased, she was able to locate and draw in more energy. She fed the shields until once again they glowed blue.

Even blind, she could "see" the blue of the shields—but once the shields were strongly in place and the evil, angry thing was confined outside of them, her sight came back. She became aware that she was slumped against the wall of her dorm nearest the door, and that her roommate, Yaji, was being dragged backwards toward that door, fighting silently against an invisible enemy.

Yaji was as surely in the thrall of that immense evil as she had been, but Yaji had neither the skill nor the strength to fight it.

Faia used every bit of her ability, and expanded the shield to include and enclose her hapless partner. The young apprentice promptly collapsed on the floor and began to scream. Faia dropped to her knees and, after a second's hesitation, wrapped her arms around her roommate.

"It's okay," she whispered. "You're safe now. Sh-h-h-h-h. Yaji, stop it.
Stop
it." She alternated between shaking the other girl and holding her, until finally Yaji quieted down to occasional skittish hiccups and a few stray sobs.

Yaji's glance ran from the bolted door to the tightly closed windows, and rested on Faia's face.

"What... what in the... hells was that?" she whispered.

"Something hungry," Faia answered. "It was trying to get me, too."

"I tried to stop it," Yaji said. "I couldn't."

"I
almost
could not. I do not know what it was, but it was strong."

Yaji wrapped her arms around her knees and rocked slowly from side to side. "I think I know why it came here, though. I broke my shield when we were fighting—didn't draw it in. I must have loosed an elemental when I did that... and... and it waited until we were asleep and our defenses were down before it came after us."

"I really do not think you did that, Yaji." Faia looked out the window into the darkness. "I do not see that thing being set loose just from you forgetting one of your hand-waves. It was probably..." she wrinkled her nose doubtfully, and paused, then shrugged, "... probably something that was already out there. I might have pulled it in when I set up such a... a
noisy
shield."

"Don't try to make me feel better, Faia. I was sloppy with my pentacle. That's just asking for trouble. You leave energy scattered around like I did, and it's like leaving food around for wild dogs." She shivered. "And what's really bad is that when the instructors find out, they'll drop me back a level. At least a level."

Faia sighed. "If it worries you that much, then we shall just make sure they do not find out."

"What?!"

"Why should they? Whatever it was, we ridded ourselves of it. We are both fine. We will clean up the energy in here, then see if we can track it back to wherever it came from. I do not see why the dear frelles need to know about it. Really, I do not."

Yaji looked relieved for almost a full minute. Then her brow wrinkled. "What if it comes back?"

Faia shivered. That did bear thinking about. She gave the possibility her complete attention. Finally, she sat down on the bed in front of Yaji. "I have an idea. You will clean up your shield energy. Then I shall set faeriefires to guard the room. Then we will sleep."

"I don't think I'll ever sleep again."

Faia shook her head slowly. "You will sleep."

Later, feeling secure within the faeriefire-guarded shields, and finally drowsy herself, Faia listened to the steady breathing on the other side of the room, and reflected that she could have made a pretty good prophet.

Faia woke long before first bell with a strong urge to stretch her legs and think, and to have another look at those giant otters in the lake. She went through her shields, but left them intact so Yaji could sleep, and headed out for the lake.

She returned to the giant rock where she had seen the otters. In the chill, damp pre-dawn fog, Faia found her rocky perch cold and slick. She shivered and pulled the warm wool
erda
close around her, and fished the rede-flute from her pocket. The giant otters were not on the rock.
In this fog
, she mused,
they could be right beside it, though, and I would never see them.
There was Seeing, of course. She didn't like it—not after her memories of the horrible Seeing in Bright—but she really wanted to get a closer look at those big beasts.

She closed her eyes and reached out over the lake.

There was the usual slight background glow of birds, fish, insects, and small furbearers. No people. Nothing big and familiar. And as for giant otters—nothing that could be mistaken for one or several of those, either.

Oh, well,
she thought, a little relieved,
I will just play the flute and hope they come to that.

She relaxed, and drew in energy, and focused on playing something she hoped would attract otters. She took a deep breath, and put her lips to the flute.

At that moment a hand gripped her shoulder, and a shrill voice in her ear demanded, "What in the names of the seven ugly gods do you think you are doing out in this fog at this time of the morning?!"