“Mother—?”

“Yes, I felt it,” Mim’s tone was guarded, ears straining for the taint of the all in his voice.

“The palace still stands then?”

She shook her head slowly. Surely he’d felt its direction? Surely the all stain would have known? Perhaps the earlier possession had been merely a whim of the all rather than a true possession? “Of course the palace stands,” she told him, voice level. “Whatever the surge of power was, it was far to the south of Elion. I’d look me to my own surroundings were I you.”

He nodded irritably, “Of course, Mother,” his voice grated. “As you say, so shall it be.”

She hesitated then, but she had to know. “How strong...?”

He laughed without humor. “Strong enough to knock me senseless from my horse. Strong enough that I couldn’t fathom direction when I’d regained my senses. Like the other times, it was there like a plummeting boulder crashing down upon my head and then it was gone, just like that,” and he snapped his fingers.

She nodded, “I’ll know it’s location within a span or two. Make ready a response party. We must have an end to this troublesome thing.

Shelador nodded and waved the portal closed from his end.

Mim remained in place, thinking. It had been strong, whatever it had been. Stronger than the previous manifestation by a goodly margin. It was learning the second world even as was she. And much more quickly it would seem. But what was it about?

How had it managed passage from the other realm? She knew how she’d gotten here, but she knew equally well that They hadn’t that means. Or that They shouldn’t have. And the method of arrival? The ogres weren’t altogether bright enough for many of the jobs the all set them to, but bright enough they were to describe a wild phase portal, at least when describing such to one who knew what they were.

Not even the chosen of the all could harness the wild portals, nor even save themselves when one manifested too near. They were a product of the core. Of the oldest places. Of those places long held by the chosen. The enemy shouldn’t even know they existed let alone be able to harness them.

Then, too, what had been the reasoning behind turning the master slaver and his lot to stone? And oh wasn’t she still scrambling to put down the rumors arising from that event! The court was still abuzz with speculation no matter how terrible her wrath at any caught spreading such rumors.

“It ends,” they blathered. “What ends? The world? Turalee? And who or what wanted whatever it was to end?”

Mim knew. Somehow the plan had been discovered and They, curse Their whole system to oblivion, had once again chosen to interfere. The message was a warning to her personally —and to the all by implication— that the destruction of this rock would not be allowed to proceed.

But even assuming the whole point was to warn her, (and why should such a tactical blunder be it’s first move?) How had it managed the trick? That had been power that none of them should have been able to wield without layer upon layer of technology, not one trace of which either she or the all could find within a dozen light years of this miserable rock. And why had it waited until now to move again?

And now this new thing. Another message? An attack? “Lord Chamberlain!” she thundered abruptly. “I’ll have those reports now if you please!”

* * *

The cutbank wasn’t anything much, really, just a widening of the ancient river course with a near vertical rise on the northwest. Any overhang had long since worn away with the winds and infrequent rains.

But a slim trickle of water ran along the center of the cut and the horses were able to drink if they were taken to it one at a time. Storm started doing this as soon as they’d been picketed. Corwyn set about unloading the beasts and Shadra began putting together a modicum of a camp. There would be no fire for obvious reasons.

Storm was bringing the fourth horse back to the meager shade of the cut wall when he finally mentioned the throwing about of things Shadra was engaged in. “Is it traditional for mages of your stature to be so... excitable?” he wondered.

Shadra froze and glared up at him through a curtain of auburn hair. “Traditional?” she rasped. “No, it is not. Nor is it traditional to be catapulted from death’s door to puberty in one bound, nor to see magic practiced by the beasts of the field.” She slammed the pan she’d been unpacking onto the ground and rummaged in the saddlebag for something else to throw.

“Unconventional times call for unconventional responses.”

He decided to exercise the better part of valor and continued with the horses.

The horses had been watered, their legs and hooves checked and camp, such as it was, laid. The sun was heeling over to the west with the approach of evening. Storm was grooming Sandahl, paying close attention to avoiding the burn, when he heard movement behind him and caught her scent. “I don’t suppose there’s anything you can do for him?” he asked.

She harrumphed. “I don’t even know what he is! Even had I the equipment and materials needed, I wouldn’t know how to go about putting him right.”

Storm rested his head against the stud’s back for a moment before answering. “You really mean that, don’t you? You really think he’s some sort of mystical creature?” He shook his head. “He’s a horse. Okay, he’s a damned fine horse, and he’s been through some... life altering experiences.

"But under all that he’s a horse, and he’s hurt. And more than that,” he turned to regard her levelly, “he got hurt because he came back for me when I’d screwed up and was by way of getting killed. And I don’t count those things lightly.”

“Look at the beast,” she insisted. “With the wizard’s sight, look at him. Then look at any one of the other mounts and tell me he’s a horse.”

“Look at me,” he countered. “Or yourself, if such a thing is possible. Do either of us look the same as what you’d call normal people? How about Corwyn? He burns pretty bright for a kid unless I miss my guess.”

She considered that, running possibilities through her mind. It was a difficult procedure, for she was still angry and very, very frightened. The truth was that she was as lost beside the big man as any peasant wench would be beside a paladin. To be near him caused her fear and frustration and confusion. And more than a little longing.

To look up at him was to behold power of a sort she barely comprehended, encompassed in a casual competence that bordered on humility. At once, she felt the beginnings of a maiden’s crush and the frustrated rage of a centuries old practitioner of art cast adrift by the notion that no scrap of the centuries of costly knowledge she’d struggled so hard for meant anything at all in the face of a bungling prodigy.

“Look,” he broke her introspection. “He was running along beneath a reasonably loathsome Turaleean cavalry officer when I acquired him and his saddle. We’ve been to see the elephant together since then and he got hurt on the trip.” He laid his forehead against Sandahl’s and rubbed gently back and forth. “Can you help him or not?

She moved past him to look again at the burn, running her hand gently through the air just above the damaged skin. “If I had my tools and materials, perhaps. ‘Tis not something I’ve ever done before, but I see how it could be made to work.”

“But you don’t have your tools....”

“As I’ve said before.”

He slapped the horse gently on the shoulder and moved to confront the girl. “Perhaps I could—”

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“NO!” she shouted. “We’ve seen where that road leads! Perhaps I’ll be able to gather enough as we journey to attempt the task. T’won’t be easily done, but it may well be possible.”

“Could you teach me?”

“Teach you what? What I do? For that I’d need to be able to do it myself, and you’d need the same equipment I’d need. What you do? I could no more teach you to work your sort of magic than you could teach me how to menstruate!”

The sky was ink-black between the stars, like it always was on these frontier worlds before the cities and industries came. Storm lay on his back along the edge of the bank, feeling the warm grass against his body and wondering if any of those unfamiliar constellations might contain familiar stars, with ships or stations orbiting them, or if all were as this one, powered and circumscribed by magic. Was he in a parallel plane of existence or just wildly displaced in the space of his own?

Hell, was that old world really even his anymore? Keeping a watch for dragons and wondering how to master his magical abilities seemed pretty far removed from anything he’d ever known before, and yet it seemed to fit pretty well into his psyche.

And then there were the little birds to think of. Always them to think of, and maybe someday again to hold? They were his family now, the centers of his new universe, and they were here. That was the thing then, wasn’t it? His world was whichever one had them in it. He rolled the thought over in his conscious mind for the first time, tasting it, testing it for faults.

Duty had been his master for how many years? And that duty remained “back home” with his men, assuming any had survived, didn’t it? With the Corps? But for the first time, that duty seemed small and distant, like the stars overhead.

He’d been stolen from his first life. His parents, in turn, had been stolen from him shortly thereafter. Then the same authorities who’d taken his first family had taken him from The Grandfather — him and Sylvan both. Then they’d sent them, eventually, to the Adair Quarries where Sylvan had gone over and he’d been alone again.

Had he anybody left alive at all back there? The grandfather? Perhaps the grandfather remained in some remote canyon in the Sierras, although it had been a long many years since they’d been inducted and the old man had been ancient even then....

“That sort of tickles, you know,” he said softly into the night.

Shadra of the Purest Light moved slowly out of the darkness, shaking her head ruefully. “You shouldn’t have been able to feel that, you know.” she countered.

“Didn’t, at first. But you got kind of pokey and proddy there at the end.” He craned his neck to look back and up at her. “You done being mad at me yet?”

“No,” she sort of half-giggled. “No, I’m going to be angry for a good many more years, I suspect. You’re quite the maddening puzzle.”

“So I’ve been told,” he grinned. “So, what’d you see?”

She settled to the grass beside him, not too close for propriety, but close enough. “Puzzles,” she sighed.

“Maddening ones I suppose?”

She chuckled softly, “oh yes, particularly those.” She stared off into the distance for a moment, scanning the horizon. “Is he out there somewhere, chasing maidens in the dark?”

He snorted, caught off guard. “He’s grazing about half a stad northeast there, see?”

She leaned in close to follow the trace of his outstretched arm before leaning back. “I can’t feel him from here, is he scrying?”

“Wouldn’t be surprised. Says he’s been learning to see better in that world than this one but switching back and forth makes his head hurt.”

“Oh, you learn to keep your mundane eyes–” her voice chopped short when she realized she was about to advise the horse as one might a young apprentice.

“He ran right into it’s jaws, did you know that?” his voice roused her back from her self-flagellation.

“Hmm?”

“It came up behind us on the first pass, but I sensed it somehow and hauled him over hard just as it flamed. That was when we got burned. It overshot us, kind of surprised, I think, that it had missed.

Then it wheeled in the sky, the size of a sub-orbital freighter, puking green flame that lit the freaking dirt on fire! It found us and those huge wings curled thunder and it came at us. Right at...” He paused momentarily to gather himself. “Right at us, head on.

"That club-headed clown out there, with his ass actually on fire, just tucked his head down and charged right at it. I think it must have figured us to break right or left, or that we’d balk in terror, and it didn’t want to waste another pass. But Sandahl just ran right at those jaws and tree trunk teeth, picking up speed.

"We went in under the jaw while it was still trying to figure out what we were up to, so close I could hear the scraping of the scales when it finally figured us out and tried to swallow us. And then we were dodging the tail and Sandahl just buckled down and outran it!”

She was eyeing him strangely, moved by his emotion, but confused by it. “Outran it? A dragon?”

He looked over at her, his eyes wet. “Not just like that, no,” he admitted. “It was me feeding him the power, like I fed the power to your spell. But he used it. I told him to run and he used everything I could reach and turned it into speed. He did it. His muscle, his heart, his will.”

He laughed low in his throat then. “You asked me before how I could call him a horse? Well lady, I know horses, and my question is, how could I not?”

She turned from him and gazed out at the stallion, calmly grazing beside the other mounts, trying to picture him as he must have been that night. “Where did this all happen?”

He leaned back on his elbows, shrugging his shoulders as he turned his gaze northward. “About midway between the Pelgen’s Cut Thieves’ Station and a place called Griffin’s Perch.”

“And where did it end?” her voice caught. “You told me you’d only been burned a couple of days before we met.”

He nodded. “A couple of days spent at a very uncomfortable plod. I don’t think it could have been more than thirty or forty stad west of where we found you. Why?”

She was staring open-mouthed at him, and then out at the horse, and then back at him. “You’re sure that the run was a single night?”

He thought about it awhile before answering. “Who’s to say? Time kind of lost meaning there for awhile. But we did it all in one go. Not much point in stopping if we weren’t clear, was there?”

“Do you know the distance, Man?” she wondered.

“Not exactly, no,” he admitted. “Farther than I’d have liked is all I’ve been able to figure out. I know we ran right out from under my very expensive maps.”

“I don’t wonder,” she laughed rather hauntedly. “You covered just under four thousand stad by my reckoning.”

Storm whistled softly. Okay, that was farther than he’d guessed. “You suppose that’s how he learned it? The running, I mean?”

Shadra shook her head slowly. “I’m still trying to fathom how he didn’t simply drop stone dead the instant you withdrew the power. Or the instant he’d been touched by dragonfire, come to that. Any normal horse should have.”

Storm lay back on the grass again. “Now, I never said he was normal, did I?”

“Earlier,” Storm’s voice broke the long silence, rousing Shadra from near slumber. “You accused me of talking to him.”

“Hmm?” she wondered sleepily.

“You acted like you hadn’t known we could speak. I thought I’d told you already.”

“Perhaps you told Corwyn?” she ventured. “Remember, I wasn’t really a full member of the party before this afternoon.”

He had forgotten. Looking over at her in the moonlight, it was hard to remember the ancient Shadra had ever existed. He squeezed his eyes tight and pictured the little birds, all light and warmth, reminding himself how married he was.

He wished he’d managed hardcopy pictures of them so he could show the mage and forestall the trouble he could see stirring on the event horizon.

“So, uhm... you didn’t know? You couldn’t hear us? Or sense us, or whatever?”

She pulled herself upright and curled a leg, leaning her chin on one knee, exposing a considerable expanse of leg and thigh in the process. He’d told her about the little birds, right?

“What do you mean,” she asked.

“When we communicate, Sandahl and I,” he searched for the words. “You can’t tell?”

“No, why should I?”

He rubbed his nose with an absent finger. “I’d been told that magic bleeds. That it can be tracked.”

“True enough, she admitted.”

“I was under the impression that some sort of magic was involved when we spoke.”

She arched an eyebrow and tilted her head. “It may be. I’ve not been looking for it, however, and that may be the reason I’ve not noticed.” She tilted her head the other way. “It may also be that you communicate in some other fashion — one that doesn’t involve magic in the traditional sense and cannot, therefore, be traced.”

He raised his eyebrows in expectation. Then, when she remained silent; “and you were about to explain, right?”

She giggled girlishly. “So soon as you’d asked, oh man. Firstly, though, you must invite me in.”

She was sounding more and more flirtatious, and it was making him nervous. “How so?”

“The wizard’s sight,” she clarified. “It’s both easier and more polite to see you if you allow it.”

“Ah. Alright, look away.”

Shadra closed her outer eyes and opened her inner. Willingly exposed, he was, were it possible, more confusing than ever. But he was also much more sharply defined. For the first time she observed the strand connecting him to the horse. That both explained a great deal and begged a great many more questions. Some of the larger ones concerned the other, thicker strands that stretched north-westward over the horizon.

She moved her regard closer, espying the coyote-shaped calling weird. She was both of sterner stuff and more prepared than Belius had been when finally she ascertained the nature of his magical roots, having been busily cataloging the hints the day long.

She was also far more learned than the journeyman and so she was able to note that, even for the old magic, that which shone out of the man was strange.

Moving closer still, she poked here, prodded there. “Call him,” she told the man, her voice echoing hollowly within her head.

Storm reached out for Sandahl, sharing the peacefulness of the moment only. The horse raised his head and sent contentment back, the thought marred only by the hint of pain at the edges that would be the burn on his rump.

Her regard in the ethereal, Shadra was able to see the strand connecting man and horse vibrate and increase its glow, but could detect no spatter.

She opened her outer eyes, face sterner than when she’d closed them. “I’ve no sphere, nor any sort of scrying tools, but I rather doubt anyone even of power would be capable of noticing the communication lest they be standing directly between you and the horse while you spoke.” She paused a moment longer eyes closed in thought. “Even then, I’d think they must needs be scrying for such specifically.”

Her eyes opened and she regarded him steadily, head tilted to one side. “That puzzle having been solved....”

But he was in no mood for stories. He had a secure line!