Winds of Change (21 page)

Unless, of course, Rris was very agile - or very clever. If the former, he could probably dodge the worst of their rough-and-tumble games, and if the latter, he could think of ways to keep them out of mischief without getting flattened.

“I hope this Rris has a great deal of patience, my friend,” was all he had said. “Your offspring are likely to think he’s some kind of living tumble-toy.”

Treyvan had only laughed. “Think on Torrl,” he had replied. “Young Rrisss isss asss clever asss hisss cousin, and verrry good, I am told, with younglingsss. All will be well.”

Then Darkwind had no more time to worry about the well-being of the brave young
kyree
who had taken on the task of tending Jerven and Lytha, for their father launched him straight into a course of practice aimed at bringing him up to full and functional Adept status in the shortest possible period of time. It was aggressive, and Treyvan proved to be a merciless teacher.

Interestingly enough, he proceeded very differently from the way that Darkwind had initially been taught. In his years of learning before, he had mastered the basics of manipulating energies and shielding, then learned the offensive magics,
then
the defensive. But the first thing that Treyvan drilled him in were the Master-level
defensive
skills.

As now; he was constructing a structure of shields, onionlike in their layering, while Treyvan watched for any sign of weakness in them and attacked at that point. The object was to produce as many different kinds of shields as possible, so that an enemy who might not know every kind of shield a Tayledras could produce would be defeated by one, perhaps the third, fourth, or fifth.

The outermost was not so much shield as misdirection; it bent the mental eye away from the wearer and refracted the distinct magical image of the mage into resembling his surroundings, as if there was no one there. Beneath that was a shield that deflected energy, and beneath that, one that countered it. Yet deeper was one that absorbed energy and transmuted it, passing it to the shield beneath
it,
which simply resisted, like a wall of stone, and reflected the incoming energy back out through the previous layer. It was the transmutational shield that was giving Darkwind trouble. It would absorb Treyvan’s attacks, right enough, but it wasn’t transmuting the energy-lances into anything he could use.

“Hold,” Treyvan said, finally, as Hydona lectured Elspeth on the need to establish a shield and a grounding point
first,
before reaching for node-energy. He had been trying to get that through her head for the past two days; finally, with someone else telling her exactly the same thing, it looked as if she was going to believe that he was right.

No, she’s going to believe the information was right,
he chided himself.
That’s what’s important, not the source of the information. If hearing it from Hydona is what it takes, then fine, so long as she learns it now and not the hard way
-

No one in k’Sheyna had ever learned that lesson “the hard way,” not within living memory, but there were tales of a mage of k’Vala who had seized a node without first establishing a grounding point, and discovered that the node was rogue. Nodes could go feral, flaring and dying unpre-dictably, without the stabilizing focus of a Heartstone. The node he seized had done just that; it flared, and with no ground point to hold him and shunt the excess away and no shield to shelter him, he had burned up on the spot, becoming a human torch that burned for days - or so the tales said.

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! Al-waysss 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 transmutation-layer. 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 heir, 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 cor-rrectly 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 leam 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 pow-errr; 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.