He nodded at all of them, and left as well.
Darkwind snorted. "A self-renewing shield-spell that takes power from a node without an Adept. At least he was only asking the impossible!"
But Elspeth wasn't so certain. "Don't Tayledras Heartstones do self-renewing spells, like the Veil? And they don't need an Adept around to make them work."
Darkwind started to object, then got a thoughtful look on his face. Tashiketh rested his beak on his foreclaws, looking expectant. "They do," Darkwind replied slowly. "And I was about to say that nodes aren't Heartstones, but Heartstones are a kind of node. Let me think about this one for a moment."
Father Janas simply shrugged. "I haven't the least idea of what you're all talking about," he said cheerfully. "Tremane asked me to sit through this because I know how the earth-binding and earth-magic works. Other than that, my friends, I'm fairly useless. But it does seem to me that for your controlling factor, you could use earth-energy, the very slow and subtle energies that underlie everything, the ones even hedge-wizards and earth-witches use. Those are fundamentally unaffected by the Storms."
Tashiketh raised his head and nodded eagerly; Darkwind looked at Father Janas as if he had unwittingly uttered something profound.
Elspeth had come late to magic and thus undergone a forced-growth process like a hothouse plant. She had never actually worked with such primitive energies as Janas described. But the theory seemed reasonable to her, and both Tashiketh and Father Janas obviously were familiar in detail with how those magics operated. "Well, why don't we just pursue that particular hare until we either catch it or it goes to cover?" she asked decisively.
"It is these energies with which Vykaendys created the Shield-Wall," Tashiketh said thoughtfully. "This is why there is less magical energy to spare within Iftel itself than there is in other lands. It is constantly going to renew the Shield-Wall. If this works, there will be little energy to spare in any of the lands when the Final Storm has passed."
"And the alternative?" Elspeth replied. "I don't think any of us want to contemplate that. Most of us have been doing without a great deal of magic ever since the Storms started, and I doubt that it is going to be too much of a hardship."
"Except for the Vales," Darkwind sighed. "But as you said, the alternative is a great deal less pleasant." He regarded the three of them with an expression so mournful that it almost made Elspeth want to laugh. "I will need your help in asking me very stupid questions, for we will somehow have to unravel the processes by which Tayledras make Heartstones and link them into spells like the Veil. I am so used to being able to do such things that I cannot tell you how I do them. This," he concluded with resignation, "is going to be a very great deal of difficult work, all of it mental."
He was right; it was. They were still only in the earliest stages when Solaris and Tremane returned, and Darkwind remarked via Mindspeech to Elspeth that since there were neither knife wounds nor signs of violence on either of them, the talk must have gone well. Neither of them said anything, and both of them acted as if they did not particularly wish to discuss what had occurred.
The group was not able to get beyond the most basic of understandings that day, nor for several more days, although they all worked feverishly to put together their solution. Only Tremane did not spend every waking hour of the day deep in research and testing; Solaris remarked cryptically that he didn't need to, since his presence was only necessary when they had a solution ready to try. Whatever had passed between them had cleared the air considerably, for Solaris had stopped making her acidic comments and was even distantly friendly to him at times.
Perhaps, not so ironically, it was the discipline and methodology they had learned from Master Levy and the other Master Artificers that enabled them to dissect magic logically, apply the laws they had learned, and find the fundamentals that allowed the magic to work in the first place. Finally, they had all the pieces of a solution; thanks to Darkwind, they all knew how to make a node behave like a very weak Heartstone and how to tie one into a self-sustaining spell. Unlike a Tayledras Heartstone, nodes could only support one such spell, but one was all they would need. They knew how to use earth-energy to power the second spell that would control the first, triggering the spawning of a new shield when the outermost collapsed. Now came the question to which they had no answer, unless Solaris and Tremane already knew it—how to reach every node at the same time.
Then, at last, Tremane rejoined the group.
"Earth-binding," he said succinctly. "Every Tayledras Vale will be able to control the nodes in the territory of that Vale; Solaris will be able to reach the nodes in Karse, the King in Rethwellan the nodes in his land, and so forth. Those leaders will have to undergo the ritual, but the gods know it's simple enough, and once they do, they can immediately protect their nodes."
Elspeth looked askance at him, but Father Janas nodded. "I thought so," he said with satisfaction. "This is one of those few times when the King can affect the land, rather than vice versa."
"I am not looking forward to this," Tremane added bitterly. "When we take this to the next level and involve the entire country, it is going to be extremely unpleasant. But it isn't going to kill me, and I would rather spend a week recovering from the aftereffects of this than have my people face a single node gone rogue. So, let us test our theory on the nearest node to Shonar, and if it works, we will then make all of Hardorn into our second test."
Something about his tone made Elspeth think that the effects of the full-country test were going to be something worse than merely "extremely unpleasant;" she had the feeling that this was going to require every bit of courage Tremane possessed. But there was nothing she could do about it, and she knew very well that her mother would have willingly sacrificed herself in the same cause, as would Solaris, or any other good ruler.
The test on the single node was far less difficult than Elspeth had envisioned; first the controlling-spell was set in place, then the node itself was altered to allow for the linkage of a shield-spell directly to it. This was the part that only an Adept could do, so it was up to Darkwind as the most practiced of all of them in this particular kind of magic, while Solaris "watched" with single-minded intensity.
Then, when everything was in readiness, Darkwind triggered the spell, just before the next Storm came through.
If Elspeth had not been "watching" at the time, she would never have believed that it was possible, for between one moment and the next, the node disappeared, and in its place was a shielded spot into which ley-lines fed but nothing came out. Then the Storm swept in, and they all waited out the effects.
When they had recovered and were able to "look" again, the node was exactly as it had been before the Storm, shielded and safe.
Tremane looked very much like a man who has received both incredibly good news and incredibly bad news at the same time. "Well, he said, "we know it works."