Floods of it, torrents of it. She sent it rushing down the passageway to the guard-chamber, filling the entire passageway with her conjured flood, creating a river of water that she sent pouring down on the heads of the unsuspecting guards. Who would, of course, assume that the upper chamber had flooded again, and abandon their posts for the length of time it usually took for the water to drain.
When she thought she had conjured enough water to fill the lower chamber completely, she stopped. Then, steeling herself, she took the glowstone in one hand and edged over to the passageway, sat down on the edge, and pushed off.
She slid, as if the sides had been greased. This was as exciting as the trip through the outer passage had been harrowing. The smooth walls of the water-tunnel slid by her; as Ware had instructed, she put out her feet now and again to brake her speed, but for the most part, she simply thrilled in the feeling of near-flight. As a small child she had slid down mud-slick banks on the family estate; this was to that feeling as her first primitive conjurations were to what she could do now!
Finally, and without warning, the slide ended. She had just enough time to gulp in a breath, before she plunged feet-first into her own conjured water. In a single heartbeat, she was several feet under the surface, glowstone in one hand, the other flailing away at nothing.
In the next moment, she had banished it, and she stood, completely dry, in the midst of the guard-chamber. She was alone.
Now there remained only the crystal.
She was almost disappointed when she spied it. The thing looked just like a piece of glass. But of course that was what it was: a glassy fragment of a much larger crystal. A shard.The shard. It was set into a holder in the wall, and she wondered why. But then it occurred to her that the guards would want to see it to know it was still there; if it had been locked into a box, it could have been stolen and no one would know until some later routine check.
Her immediate inclination was to take the crystal from its setting, and flee. But that would set off traps. Surely these people had traps. If she had been guarding this stone,she would have set traps!
She did not think that she would be able to conjure a copy of the crystal, either-at least not in time to get it into the holder without setting off the traps. Without a doubt, these people had planned for a Mazonite conjuror to attempt to take the shard, and would have acted accordingly.
Ware had not been able to give her any advice here. He had not been able to get near enough the chamber holding the crystal to see how it was held. The attempt would have caused him harm.
Xylina came close to the wall and stared at the holder, taking a good look at it. How could she remove the shard without setting off traps and alarms? As transparent as the shard was, it was fairly easy to see the rods set into the holder, pressed against the crystal itself. And it was easy to see how the slightest movement of the shard would move the rods. No, these people had planned very carefully for a Mazonite conjuror-
But suddenly she saw her solution, and smiled. For they had planned for the kind of conjuror that Adria was: one who concentrated on major effects. Adria would have either snatched the crystal and attempted to insert a duplicate, or smashed the holder.
There was another way. For as she stared at the shard, she felt its magic ambience. It reached out to her, touching her mind, making it more clever, and it touched her heart, making her desire it with a passion as strong as she had ever desired a man. It touched her power, and suddenly she knew what she could do. And the crystal itself would help her.
Lightly she touched one finger to the shard, closed her eyes, and concentrated. Creating-vapor. Water vapor. Forcing water into every tiny crack and crevice of the holder until it was completely saturated. And then, with a twist of thought unlike any she had done before-
She turned it to ice.
Water, she had learned in her lessons from Marcus, expanded when it was frozen. Everything else contracted. In a moment, she had chilled the area down to where her breath made clouds in the air; the ice itself was as hard as steel.
In the past she had been able to conjure many substances, but they were normally of ambient temperature. Metal would not be hot or cold, water would seem cool but be the temperature of the surrounding air. One exception was ice: that was by its nature cold, so conjured that way. Otherwise it would have appeared as a puddle of water. But to actually, magically, change the temperature of an existing object or substance-that was a power hitherto reserved to the demons. Now, by virtue of the shard, it was hers. So she could heat water-or freeze it. She could do what no other Mazonite could, and what therefore the defenders of the shard had not anticipated. It had outsmarted them.
The frozen ice held the rods in place while she carefully extracted the shard from the holder, and continued to hold them while she conjured a perfect replica in its place.
Tucking the shard inside her tunic, she returned to the outer chamber, conjured a ladder of stone to the hole in the ceiling, then continued conjuring and dissipating stone steps before and behind her, until she had reached the chamber above.
Then it was another squeeze through the passageway to the outer world-and a joyful, but silent reunion with Faro and Thesius, before the three of them made their escape into the mountains and the rally-point with Ware.
Only one thing disappointed her: she did not know how long that conjured replica would last. It had, after all, been produced with the aid of the shard itself. It might last only the day; it might last for weeks, months, or even years.
But eventually, it would dissipate on its own. And she truly regretted the fact that she would not be there to see what happened when it did!
"Xylina, why are you stopping?" Faro asked, as Xylina reined in her horse at the edge of the Pacha realm. Their trek across it had been a near mirror of their original trip, although with fewer people, and instead of the Pacha visiting their camps, they had traded conjured wine and feasts for Pacha hospitality. The Pacha had been thrilled with the bargain, and nearly every chieftain that had hosted them had begged them to stay.
She did not answer at once; instead, she stared at the bleak, and yet beautiful landscape. Finally, she spoke.
"Gentlemen-do you still like the Pacha? Do you think you could live here?" Perhaps it was the effect of the shard, which she now wore in a conjured gold locket, so that it enhanced her while not harming Ware or the men. But perhaps it was instead the time she'd had to think on the way back-to reflect on exactly where her loyalty should lie, and the effect on the Mazonites when the shard came into Adria's hands.
Ware urged his mount to take the few steps needed to bring it beside hers. "You are not going to take the crystal to Adria, are you," he said quietly, making it more of a statement than a question.
She shook her head. "No matter what I do, if the shard goes to the Queen, it will change my realm and my people, and for the worse. Adria will become a terrible tyrant, and no one will be able to stop her. Eventually, the shard will force Adria to bring it to the main stone, and that will be the end of everything I have known."
Faro's brow wrinkled for a moment. "You did make a vow-" he reminded her.
She smiled. "I am learning to think like a demon, my friend. I made a vow to retrieve the shard. I did not vow to give it to Adria."
Thesius shook his head as she turned to see his reaction. "You can't take it back to where it was. That would be stupid and suicidal!"
She sighed, and her horse stirred restively under her. "No. I can't take it back, I can't simply 'lose' it, for some poor fool will be drawn to it and in her ignorance take it to the main stone. I must keep it, and attempt to use it as little as possible. And if I am going to keep it-I must stay out of Mazonia." She looked searchingly at all of them. "This is an exile, you know-"