"How many mages did you say were missing?" Lieutenant Meniar asked, adding a medium-sized focus to the others.
"From Kole, twenty-two. Two verified as gone from Verisia. Another from Dunnesan, and that possible case from Fel Sparo. The numbers are rather complicated by false reports, the increasing panic, and those whose location is simply unknown. But these extras may be from the northern kingdoms—they rarely share information with Kole, particularly since the loss of certain of their mages would leave critical holes in regional defences."
"Or they could have been here a real long time," Kendall pointed out. "It’s not like this place is new-built."
She had paused in her poking her way along one of the channels, and flinched when she discovered a little root-hair had burrowed into the back of her hand. She picked the thing out, grimacing at the red dot left behind, but then forced herself to keep working. Next time she started thinking Rennyn was soft, she’d have to remember that she’d actually climbed back into the vines and let them stick her all over. Kendall wasn’t sure she’d have been able to do the same.
Kendall’s persistence was rewarded by another focus. She slid it out, drew her breath for a pleased exclamation, and then paused. Standing, she trotted over to where Captain Faille was patiently holding Rennyn by yet another wall, and held out not one but two smoky-dark focuses bound to the same leather cord.
Rennyn’s eyebrows lifted. "It seems my Wicked Uncle approves of my focus-summoning methods," she said, taking the cord. "And now we have a neat reversal of circumstances."
"Is he likely to come looking for it?" Lieutenant Meniar asked. He helped Rennyn work her focus free of the binding, and then pocketed the smaller focus and cord.
"He has invested far less time into that than I had in mine," Rennyn said, gripping her own focus tightly for a moment before slipping it into the little pocket on the front of her shirt. "Everything else being equal, he’s likely to simply start again."
Rennyn had gone into the Eferum nearly three hundred times to summon her focus—and at the moment wasn’t likely to survive a single transition. Getting that little black stone back was probably worth the entire trip.
"Now that you have your focus back, can we use it to remove the miscasting from you?" Kendall asked.
"It doesn’t quite fit, symbolically," Rennyn said, with a faint sigh. "If I had the false focus that caused the miscasting…but that was crushed in the aftermath of the Grand Summoning. This, at least, may mean a little less fainting when casting. Unless of course it leads me to be over-ambitious."
Rennyn looked up at the sky then, and they all copied her. Clear blue, but the shadows cast by the walls marked the progress of the afternoon.
"There’s a Sigillic divination I want to try," Rennyn said, after a moment. "While Fallon and Kendall mark it out for me, Lieutenant Meniar, perhaps you and the Dezart can make an examination of one of the trapped mages?"
Her voice sounded odd. Lieutenant Meniar frowned, then put a hand on Rennyn’s forehead. She shook him off impatiently.
"No fever that I can tell. But yes, my throat is a trifle sore. Which, at this juncture, is simply another reason not to delay."
Along with being straightforward disaster. In the best of conditions Lieutenant Meniar would be able to nurse Rennyn through a cold, but stuck out in the middle of nowhere trying to rescue a whole bunch of other people, and it would be just the thing to push Rennyn onto the downward spiral of illness and exhaustion that they’d been at such pains to avoid.
No-one argued the point. After the briefest discussion Lieutenant Meniar, Samarin, Sukata and Darian Faille went off to look at the nearest flowering mage, while Rennyn dictated an endless Sigillic which became a double ring of squiggles around the statue. Tesin continued to search out focuses, and Captain Faille succeeded in being stonier than the statue at the centre of it all.
They’d reached the point of making tiny corrections to individual sigils by the time the second group returned—and Rennyn’s voice had definitely gone croaky. Kendall could have kicked herself for not thinking to bring along something to drink.
"Any hope?" Rennyn asked, as Samarin paused to look over their chalk work.
He was still wearing the mask, so Kendall couldn’t see his face, but his voice was crisp and businesslike.
"Two options seem viable. The first will take at minimum two casters—one to remove the growth into the lungs, and the other to cauld the holes left behind. And then immediate, more substantive repair work would need to be carried out. With the resources at hand, this approach would allow us to get one or even two down by nightfall. If we chose healer-mages—and they survived and recovered with sufficient speed—they could in turn assist us tomorrow. In…between five to eight days we could have them all down, though given the conditions of operation, we’re likely to have a series of secondary issues. Infection. Blood clots. Collapsed lungs if the caulding doesn’t hold."
"I do hope you’re leading with the less desirable approach."
Samarin went on as if Rennyn hadn’t spoken. "The second option will greatly depend on what this vine is doing, and whether we are free to interfere with it. A Symbolic casting—with all the consequent risks of imprecise symbolism—could be used. Instead of removing the mages individually and repairing the damage, we could treat the separation as a natural process and…ripen them, if you will."
It wasn’t often that Herself looked startled by magic, but she gaped a little at that.
"I’d have to cast it," Lieutenant Meniar said, with the gloomiest expression Kendall had ever seen him wear as he looked down at a slate full of tiny Sigillic writing. "The survival chances of pulling these spikes out of them and patching the holes is not high. The…the possible results of option two scarcely bear thinking about, and it will require a very thorough knowledge of anatomy to manage."
"Anatomy or botany?" Rennyn said, and then offered an apologetic little grimace at Lieutenant Meniar’s pained response. "Well, we can’t make any decisions until we know more about the vine itself, and what all this power is being drawn off to do." She looked around at them, hesitated, then said: "And now we reach the point where we start hitting casting limits. I think this one is best left to you, Sukata. It’s not so power-hungry I think it will put you at risk, and I’ve structured it to allow you to cut it off at any time, but it will leave you very tired. Please don’t maintain it to the point of collapse."
Sukata, typically, went all very straight and upright, and keen to show that she would be responsible and reliable. Everyone else drew back to the archway they’d entered through, and watched her try.
The circle of sigils was so large Sukata had to walk around it—twice—to complete the casting, her attention never wavering from the chalk figures as they began to glow from the power she pushed into them. She staggered back a couple of steps as the thing completed and it began to draw on her in earnest. Kendall watched her worriedly, and then almost managed to forget her altogether as a bloom of green lifted from the circle like a curtain rising on a stage.
Instead of a paved stone courtyard they were standing on the lip of a pit—no, a whirlpool. A dim, distant sound, a muffled gale, made Kendall’s headache pound all the more. It came from the green light pouring into the room from four rivers where the root channels were marked: an endless flow that swirled and was sucked down and away.
The statue was still there, an island rising from the centre, and another tiny thin green trail of light dripped from its cupped palms. Chained to its legs was the outline of a woman who looked very much the same as the statue, except thin and insubstantial and worn. The chains were a bright white, and looked like they had to be painful, and even if they weren’t, there was a horrid, barbed mahogany-red thing—lichen with…with little mouths of champing teeth—that seemed to have grown out of the whirlpool, all up one of the trapped person’s legs and the right side of their body.