He'd seen Ulrich strike down something by magic once, and the powers gathering around An'desha's hands right now were twice, perhaps three times as bright.
He wanted to run. Every nerve in his body screamed at him to turn and flee. Every hair on his head felt as if it was standing straight on end from the power in this little space.
But instead of fleeing, he did the hardest thing he'd ever done in his life; harder than facing Celandine, harder than coming to this strange land in the first place.
He stepped back a pace, spread his hands, and sneered.
"Well?" he taunted. "I'm right, aren't I? I'm right, and you're too spineless even to admit it!"
And he waited for An'desha to strike, still holding that merciless sneer on his face....
The air hummed with power; he'd read of such things, but he'd never experienced it. Now every hair on his head did stand straight on end—
And An'desha's control finally exploded.
"Damn you!" An'desha screamed. "Damn you!"
There was a flash of orange and white, and the energy dissipated, draining away into the ground so quickly that in one breath it was completely gone.
An'desha collapsed down onto his pallet, folding up as if he was completely exhausted, his face pale and pained. "Damn you," he repeated dully, as Karal dropped down to his side in concern and a fear that he'd managed somehow to make An'desha burn himself out. "Damn you, Priest, you're right."
He looked up, as Karal tentatively touched his shoulder, eyes bleak. "You've been coddling me, and I've been unforgivably selfish."
Karal grinned, which obviously astonished him, for An'desha gaped at him. "I'm right twice," he pointed out. "I told you that you were underestimating yourself, believing that because you have the memories of a Falconsbane or a Ma'ar, you also have their ways. You thought that if you 'lost control' of an emotion, you'd lose control of everything. Well. You lost control of your temper, didn't you? You were afraid to learn everything that lay in your old memories, because you were afraid that if you got too angry with someone, you'd use it. You just got angry, and there you are, after doing nothing more than curse me—and here I am, unsinged, unflattened. Falconsbane would have sent me through a wall, or incinerated me. You are sitting there, back in control again, and your own man. Right?"
An'desha stared at him. "You mean—all that was just to prove to me that—" He reddened again. "Why, I should—I—"
Karal raised an eyebrow at him. "And?" he said impudently. "Why don't you, Adept?"
"Because you aren't worth the effort it would take to blow you through the wall, Priest," An'desha retorted, a ghost of a smile lurking around his eyes. "And because it's not worth taking on your vengeful god as an enemy just so I can get some satisfaction! Damn you! Why do you have to be so right?"
"It's not my fault!" Karal protested. "I can't help it!"
"Pah!" The young mage mock-hit his shoulder. "You revel in it, and you damn well know you do! One of these days you'll be wrong, and I'll be there to gloat!" The ghost of a smile had become a grin. "Just wait and see!"
"I'll be looking forward to it," Karal replied, and he meant every word. A moment later, Firesong looked in on them both, with a small but loving smile on his handsome face.
After all that, though, he felt an obligation to be there along with Firesong when An'desha worked up his own courage and took the plunge into those old, dangerous memories. It became something of a vigil for the two of them—An'desha lay in a self-imposed trance, looking much like a figure on a tomb, while the two of them watched, waited, and wondered if they might have been wrong in urging him to this. Firesong hadn't expected it to take more than a mark or two, but the afternoon crawled by, then most of the evening, and still the trance showed no signs of ending.
"Is this getting dangerous?" Karal asked in a whisper, as Firesong soberly lit mage-lights and returned to his seat beside An'desha's pallet.
"No—or not yet, anyway," the Adept replied, although he sounded uncertain to Karal. "I have been in trances longer; for two or three days, even."
But those were not trances in which you pursued the memories of power-hungry sadists, Karal added, but only to himself. Still, nothing had gone overtly wrong yet. There was no point in conjuring trouble.
He wished that Altra was here, though. The Firecat had waited just long enough to be sure that he had survived An'desha's anger, then had vanished without an explanation. He could have used Altra's view on this; if Solaris' behavior was anything to go by, a former Son of the Sun should be much more familiar with trances and their effects than he was.
A hint of movement riveted his attention back on An'desha. Had his eyelids moved? If the lights had been candles, he would have put it down to the flickering shadows, but mage-lights were as steady as sunlight. Yes! There it was again, the barest flutter of eyelids as the sleeper slowly, gently awakened.
A moment later, and An'desha opened his eyes and blinked in temporary confusion—Firesong poured the tea that had been steeping all this while, and helped him to sit up, then offered him the cup. An'desha took it, his hands shaking only slightly, and drank it down in a single swallow.
"How late is it?" he asked, as he gave the cup back to Karal, who poured more tea for him.
"Evening. Not quite midnight," Firesong told him.
An'desha nodded. Karal watched him covertly, and was relieved to see nothing in his expression or manner that was not entirely in keeping with the An'desha that he knew. "I discovered that we have been laboring under a misconception," he said, finally. "Before Ma'ar died, there was a time when he had to deal with the kind of situation we have now, although the initial destruction was of a single Gate and the spells of the area around it, and nowhere near so cataclysmic as what came later."
Firesong nodded with excitement in his eyes, and Karal leaned forward. "So what did he do?"
An'desha sipped his tea before replying. "It isn't so much what he did, as what his enemy did," he said. "He wasn't concerned with the effect of the waves outside his domain, so he simply built the sort of shield that I think we've been assuming we'd need all along." An'desha shook his head. "That would be a dreadful mistake," he continued. "A shield wall alone would simply reflect the waves again, and the reflected waves have the potential for causing more harm than the original waves!"
Karal sat back for a moment, and pictured the physical model that the engineers had constructed, a large basin filled with water, the bottom covered with a contour map of Valdemar and most of the surrounding area. He thought about the experiments that Master Levy had been making, dropping large stones into the basin over "Evendim" and "Dhorisha Plains" and watching the wave-patterns, seeing how those patterns interacted.
And when the waves reached the edge of the basin, the experiment was over, because they reflected from the edge and made new and different patterns that had nothing to do with the ones he was studying.