Coupling was always a big subject on the mind of a magician, like caravan drivers crossing the desert and their obsession with the location of the next watering hole. Magic took a lot of power, and most of it came out of the magician’s hide, out of their own life energy, or aura, or whatever they were calling it this year. This drain was usually through a loss of body mass, but not always. Part of being a magician was learning not only to produce spells, but how to cope with the aftermath.
Well, fine, walking takes energy too. The problem with magic was the quantity involved. Major-league conjuring - something like a duel, say - could take off fifty pounds of weight in a matter of minutes and leave you incapacitated for weeks, and that was if you won. You could create a spell ahead of time and store it, but that was only good when you knew in advance what you were going to need. Setting up the spell would still incapacitate you, but at least you were in a position where you could rest up afterward; that was some help, but not really enough. That’s why magicians were always looking for ways to store up power in other forms, and new ways to get the power in the first place.
That’s where coupling came in. Most things in the world were potential power sources. Living things were best, but theoretically you could use rocks, wind, water, just about anything. The amount of energy a thing had available was supposed to be related to the amount of order that had gone into making it and keeping it running, at least that’s what the texts said. Unfortunately there was a technical hitch. There was all this potential energy out there, but nobody could really get at it.
To get energy out of a rock, say, you had to couple your own energy field to the rock, do something to the rock that would release its energy, and siphon the energy into your own field or directly into your spell. In practice it turned out the efficiency of transfer was low. Real low. Draining your object all the way down to a husk might give you one percent of the energy you could calculate was there. Maybe one percent, if you were lucky and really knew what you were doing. There were all kinds of tricks and wrinkles, and different classes of objects give different types of energy, so magicians tend to specialize in order to at least learn one set of techniques really well. Necromancers, for example, got their energy from the dead; along the way they learned how to fiddle with the dead in other ways, too - it wasn’t all a question of energy. The bottom line, though, was that there was all this energy sitting around and nobody could figure out to make it work for them.
That much was common knowledge in magical circles. What I hadn’t known, and what I doubted anybody who wasn’t a god really comprehended, was that the gods had coupling problems too. Gods don’t like to discuss economics, it takes away from their image. According to this one, though, keeping up a god’s basic life-style took a lot of power. That’s why gods tried to diversify, storing up energy from as many different sources as they could, but they ran into efficiency tradeoffs the same as people. For some reason the rules didn’t work quite the same for gods - he said their efficiency curves were different, and they could tap other sources that weren’t open to regular mortals, like energy from prayers - but that didn’t get around the fact that the rules still laid down the law.
There was another related problem. Magicians wanted to store up as much power as they could, of course, but it turned out there the possible power you could store was limited, too. A single person or aura could only absorb a certain amount of energy at any one time – a person, an aura, or a god. Gods could hold more, a lot more in fact, but they normally chewed through it at a higher rate too. What they could do, though, was store the excess, ending up with a network of power reservoirs they could couple into and recharge from, even at a distance, like a high-altitude reservoir of water when you needed a drink, or a bank when you needed cash.
Also like banks, these energy stores could be robbed. A lot of a god’s time went into hiding, guarding, or booby-trapping his reservoirs, and especially trying to keep anyone else from finding out their locations in the first place.
“So let me see if I’ve got this straight,” I said, interrupting his exposition. “You’re in Roosing Oolvaya running an errand, away from your power reserves. When you try to leave you run into this barrier. Not only does it keep you from getting out of the city, but if you couple through it you reveal the location of the reservoir you’re coupling into.”
He eyed me thoughtfully. “Yes,” he said.
“Is this barrier thing some standard ploy, then?”
“I have seen barriers used before. This barrier is not typical. It seems optimized for neutralization of surveillance, and for quarantine.”
“You mean keeping magic users out of the city, and not letting any of them look in?”
“Essentially.”
“So why do you think this barrier person is after you?”
“This is not a very big city. Who else would they be after?”
This guy might have big power, but he also had an ego to match. Roosing Oolvaya wasn’t the largest city on the continent, but it still had its share of stories; who knew what else was going on out there today? He also had a certain weakness in logical arguments. “Maybe they don’t realize you’re here,” I said. “Maybe they don’t know the field has this effect on you. It sounds like this barrier’s aimed at mortals, regular magicians. Not gods at all. You could be caught up as a side effect.”
He was silent for a moment. “That could explain a certain detail. This barrier appears to be a first-level field.”
“First level?” I’d never heard that term before.
“Human magicians operate on the first quantum level. A god generally does not.”
“Whatever you say. So maybe it’s just some mortal slob out there who’s put up this barrier for reasons of his own, and accidentally trapped you.”
“That … is possible.”
“So maybe you could just blast this field and crush this guy and take off.”
He glanced at me. I thought I was starting to get better at picking up his moods, and this time I thought he was actually a bit amused. “A good try,” he said. “I have not tested the barrier yet, merely examined it. I wish to know exactly what I face before committing myself. I could potentially do what you are suggesting, but perhaps not. The drain would surely prove considerable.”
“Even if you wait, you still said you were running out of power pretty fast.”
“That is true. That is why you had best plan on working quickly.”
To hell with public-spirited high mindedness. I was in a jam, and I came first. “If you need to recharge in the meantime, why don’t you just sacrifice a few dozen people and chew up their souls?”
“That, unfortunately, is not an option.”
“Huh?” I said. “I thought all gods -”
“You thought wrongly,” he said, a little testily (I thought) this time. “Such energy would be tainted, would destabilize my matrix structure.” He looked at my desk plant, which wasn’t doing too well itself, but seemed to find enough inspiration from it to proceed. “I am not a Death.”
Suddenly, I was not only out of my depth, I was overboard in the middle of the ocean with a small rock quarry tied to my leg. “Uh,” I said, “who are you? What are you?”