Noon seemed to take a very long time coming, even longer than what we went through would account for. The heat rose higher and higher, there was no knowing when we would spring the next trap, and some of the waits between attacks were worse than the attacks themselves.
By the time Rikkan Addis decided to call a rest stop, we al! fett as though we"d been traveling on that world for a week.
"I don"t think I have the strength to climb out of this saddle," Zail said when we stopped, voicing the thoughts of just about everybody. "If the afternoon turns out to be anything like the morning, we"ll be six piles of bones when we reach the gate."
"But we will reach it," Rikkan Addis said, eyeing the soap-bubble sphere I"d surrounded us with before beginning to dismount. "Once we get there we can take a decent rest, but there"s no sense in wasting whatever rest we can get out of this stop. And ! want everyone to eat first, as much as they can stuff down. You can"t keep going if your insides are empty."
Nothing but a few groans greeted those words of wis- dom; if I hadn"t been so wilted from the heat I would certainly have found some sort of comment to make, but I was too hot, and also too distracted by the experiment I was trying. The heat of a sun like the one above us was a good deal more substantial than most people realized, and substance was a major building block of magic. That world was draining us with its heat as well as with traps
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and ambushes; if things worked out right, it would now start giving some of that back.
It took a few minutes, but eventually all of us were on our feet and the horses were left alone to graze. We ignored the tall, waving gra.s.s outside the bubble and tried to make ourselves comfortable, all of us picking a solitary piece of ground to sit or lie on-all of us, that is, but Rik.
Fearless leader had been the first to notice that Dranna was sitting on the ground and crying quietly, a hopeless, strength- less sound to the thing, so he"d been the one to go over, crouch down, and put an arm around her. He spoke to her very softly, so softly that his words didn"t reach any of the rest of us, and after a short while they seemed to help. The small woman nodded, as though wearily agreeing to some- thing, then dabbed at her eyes before joining Rik in check- ing what the food baskets held. I lay back in the gra.s.s I"d shortened and closed my eyes, not yet up to having an interest in food.
I suppose the only one of us who didn"t fall asleep was InThig, who continued to prowl around outside the bubble and, for the most part, out of sight. I awoke to find that not much time had pa.s.sed, but I still felt alert and alive and as full of energy and strength as it was possible to be without needing to jump up and down, clapping hands and squealing in delight. That last wouldn"t have fit in well with the rest of my continuing mood, but I still felt a large measure of satisfaction over my experiment having proven a success. The bubble around us was converting the heat of the sun into energy human bodies could absorb, and even though I was expending strength in maintaining the complex spell, the return was greater than the expenditure.
I"d adapted the system plants use, hoping the modification would work with something I hadn"t Seen except in the unmodified state, and I"d been successful. I sat up and stretched comfortably, knowing I"d been taking a chance with the experiment, but there hadn"t been much choice, if we"d had to go on the way we were, we might not have made it to the next gate.
"The others seem to be deep in slumber yet," a voice said from my right, more of a whisper than a normal announcement. "We two alone appear to be awake."
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I looked over at Kadrim where he crouched beside me, seeing the restored vitality in his eyes-as well as some- thing more. Just as he"d said, we seemed to be the only two awake, and that fact pleased him-the way it was meant to.
"It won"t be long now before everyone"s awake," I said, keeping my voice just as low, but a good deal more neutral. "I"m going to get something to eat."
I rose to my feet without waiting for any sort of com- ment, which seemed to surprise him to some extent. I could feel that surprise following behind me as 1 walked to the nearest food basket and bent to see what I wanted, and then he was crouching beside me again.
"Are you perhaps disturbed by the disagreement in which I allowed myself to become involved last dark- ness?" he asked almost at once, a faint discomfort color- ing the question. "It was not my intention to cause you upset, yet did I feel that it was more than time I spoke of my true feelings. There will not be such heated words between Zail .and myself again till the quest has been completed, yet would I .have you know that I mean to press for your hand at mat time."
"Which hand did you intend pressing for?" I asked, glancing at him in innocent curiosity as I withdrew a roast chicken leg and a corn biscuit from the basket. "I tend to use my right hand more often in spells, but I can also use my left if I have to."
"Which hand?" he echoed, staring at me with the sort of confusion that made him seem as young as he looked.
"Perhaps I have failed to make myself sufficiently clear, girl. Though I speak of pressing for your hand, it is all of you I mean to have-in proper marriage. You will then be my queen, and I will conquer the world and lay it at your feet as a bride gift."
"I feel as though I"m repeating myself, but which world did you intend conquering?" I asked between bites of the still-warm chicken, giving him only a little more attention than I was giving to the food. "Some wizards claim there are an infinite number of worlds, and if that"s true, what"s just one world among them? Especially if it happens to be
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a world like this one. Ugh. Once this quest is over, I intend keeping it as far away from my feet as possible."
"I-ah-I, too, feel the same," he said, a strangely helpless look in those blue eyes, his hand on the food basket in what appeared to be an attempt to keep a grip on reality and normalcy. "It would, of course, be my own worid which I conquered for you. It would please you to be queen of so lovely a world, would it not?"
"Morgiana says being a queen is dull,*" I told him, looking into the basket again for the fried potatoes that should have been there. "Once, while she was still a sorceress at about my level of power, she made herself queen of some place or other. None of the natives were able to stand against her magic, of course, but she couldn"t take the boredom for more than a year before she gave the place back and left. Once sorcerers and sorceresses reach a certain level in their studies, they"re encouraged to do that sort of thing if they find the idea at all attractive. Some of them stay kings or queens and never go on to being wizards, but most prefer studying magic to ruling."
"!-see," he said very quietly, looking away with an expression that was worse than an open wound. "Perhaps this discussion had best wait till the quest is done with.
One need not be a king, nor go aconquering . . ,"
He straightened to standing without finishing his sen- tence and simply walked away, more hurt than I"d wanted him to be, but harmed less than my encouraging him would have done. When the quest was over he"d be free of the spell, and also free of the need to find all sorts of excuses as to why he wasn"t quite as interested in me as he"d thought he was. I stopped stuffing my face very briefly as I watched him go, feeling the emptiness beside me that the presence of a friend would have filled, then sneered at myself as I deliberately went back to eating.
Only me weak needed someone beside them to lean on, and I wasn"t weak. If I hadn"t yet teamed how much better being alone was, I"d be stupid beyond redemption.
I continued to eat everything that interested me, sipping now and then from a cup of ale, and then another male body materialized on my right, sitting down instead of crouching. A big hand slid across my back before coming
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to rest on my left arm, and two lips brushed my cheek with a kiss.
"You poor thing, you"re all wet from the heat of this place," Zail said, true commiseration and pity in his voice.
"*If this quest was any less important than it is, I"d insist that you be allowed to go back to a civilized world. Like the world I"ll be taking you to once this is all over, my own world. You"ll love it there, Laciel, and my family will be as crazy about you as I am. I was going to give the Living Flame to my father, to add to our collection, but I think 1*11 give it to you instead, as a wedding gift."
"The Living Flame," I mused, really having a hard time keeping myseif from reacting to his nearness and caresses. "That"s an old scepter, isn"t it? I"m not very interested in things like that, Zail. but you don"t have to worry about having only one of it to give away. I"ll make a second."
"You"ll-what?" he asked sitting very still and sound- ing as if he hadn"t heard right before laughing an abrupt, dismissive laugh. "Silly girl, you can"t make a copy of a work of an like that and expect it to be worth anything. A copy"s only a copy."
"But Zail, with magic it won"t be a copy," I protested, turning my head to look at him the same way I"d looked at Kadrim- "At my level of ability what you"ll have will be an exact duplicate, so exact that no one will ever be able to tell them apart. I could even make three or four if you liked, or maybe duplicate your entire collection. Then you and your father could each have your own collection."
"Three or four duplicates of a one-of-a-kind master- piece," he said woodenly, staring at me in veiled horror as he took his arm back. "Two or three or a dozen exact copies of a collection unmatched anywhere for a thousand years." His muttered words stopped as he shook his head, his face pale as though he were shaking off a nightmare, and then he tried really hard to give me a warm smile.
"Maybe we"d better wait a short while before discussing this again," he said, raising his fingertips to my cheek in a distracted sort of way. "I"m sure I can make you under- stand-but not now, not right now."
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He got to his feet and walked away more quickly than Kadnm had, but this time I didn"t watch. Instead I emptied my cup of ale quickly, then let it refill itself in accordance with my spell. Two down and none to go, and the second had hurt far worse than the first. If his interest had been real I probably couldn"t have done it, but if his interest had been real I wouldn"t have had to. Neither Kadrim nor Zail had known, deep down where it matters, that I was a sorceress; now they knew, and even the spell couldn"t keep them from having second thoughts.
1 doggedly continued eating as though nothing of partic- ular consequence had happened, and by the time I was through everyone was awake. Fearless leader and Dranna were the last to come out of it, and they"d had most of their meat before they"d slept. They each had a little something to add to it, Dranna smiling vaguely at Rik before taking hers over to Su before eating it, and then we were ready to go. Even the horses were well-rested and dancing in their eagerness to go on, but no one seemed to notice that they and we were no longer exhausted. They were apparently a.s.suming the naps had done the trick, and I was just as pleased; me last thing 1 was in the mood to give was another lecture on ma^ic.
InThig was back with us again as soon as we started off.
talking to its good friend Rik about what was ahead of us, but it needn"t have bothered. What was ahead of us was more attacks, which would have been boring and repeti- tious if they hadn"t been trying so hard for our blood.
Through it all we just kept going, and finally proved that perseverance pays; after a little more than two hours, Su raised her dripping sword and pointed to the left.
"Trail goes behind those trees," she panted, looking around to make sure there weren"t any more poison-birds diving at us. "Can"t see it coming out again anywhere, so maybe the gate"s there."
"It d.a.m.ned well better be," Rik said, but with more hope than the words would indicate. "If we have to go on until sundown on this world-" The sentence broke off as his jaw tightened, but he didn"t have to finish it No one had been hurt in the last couple of skirmishes, but it had
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been a near thing. "Let"s take a look before the next wave hits."
Our horses moved carefully through the bodies of the poison-birds on the ground all around us, some of them seared rather than slashed, and then we were able to pick up a little speed. The stand of trees wasn"t very far away, and once we got a bit closer I was able to See a glowing slit just beyond them.
"It"s there," I told the others, feeling their immediate excitement and relief, emotions I shared completely. "Now we can get out of here."
"Don"t anyone get sloppy!" Rikkan Addis growled, taking a brief moment out from searching all around to glance at us. "If there"s anything set to guard this gate, we won"t be able to scare it-"
"Behind you!" InThig shouted from up ahead, coming back again to rejoin us- "Run for the gate!"