"Not exactly." Wencit's tone sounded almost absent, and his frown of concentration deepened. "A wizard can't use sorcery directly against a non-wizard except in direct self-defense. Nor can he use it against another sorcerer, except in direct self-defense or in a formal arcane duel. That's really about the best she could hope for in a direct confrontation. There are rules that apply to both sides in any duel, and one of them is that the weaker opponent-that's her, by the way-gets the first blow. The chance of her survival would still be remote, but at least it would exist. If, however, she were foolish enough to launch a direct arcane attack on you or Bahzell in my presence, then I would no longer be bound by the Strictures where she was concerned. I could attack her immediately, in any way I chose and with no restrictions on who gets the first strike. She wouldn't like that," he finished almost mildly.
Houghton started to ask another question, then closed his mouth with a click as the wizard's frown turned abruptly into something else.
"Ah!" he said with what sounded unreasonably like satisfaction. "So that's what she's up to. Quite clever, really."
"What's clever?" Houghton demanded.
"She's found a way to use the art without striking at any of us directly." He nodded to himself. "Very well, gentlemen. If you'll follow me?"
Houghton's jaw dropped as Wencit pushed past Bahzell and marched directly down the center of the passageway. The Marine looked up at the towering hradani, and Bahzell shrugged.
"I've no notion at all, at all, what maggots he's gotten into his brain this time," he said. "Still and all, I think you'd best remember just how long he's been after taking black wizards' heads."
"And this is supposed to make me feel better?" Houghton demanded. "Experience is a wonderful thing, Bahzell. But-correct me if I'm wrong here-isn't this the sort of thing you only get to screw up at once?"
"Ah, but I'm thinking that's what makes life so interesting," Bahzell replied, and followed the wizard down the tunnel.
Houghton glanced at Mashita, and the youthful corporal shrugged. Then the two of them followed their companions.
"Look out, Tremala! He's coming straight at-"
Tremala didn't need Garsalt's warning. Or, rather, it came much too late to do her any good. She looked up from her place on the far side of the intersection just in time to see a tall, flame-eyed old man step calmly out into it.
For just an instant, she felt a sudden, incredulous surge of hope. She couldn't believe that after all these centuries, Wencit of Rūm would step into such an absurdly simple trap. Yet there he was, and as he took one more step, the spell she'd buried in the stone ceiling above the intersection triggered.
It was uncomplicated, that spell. True, it had required a sorceress of remarkable skill to create it, especially on such short notice, but that was only because of the sheer power levels involved. As far as complexity went, it was about as subtle as a meat axe. When Wencit stepped fully into the intersection, the stone above him simply shattered. They were deep inside the hill, under well over two hundred feet of solid rock and earth, and Tremala's spell split that massive overburden like a sledgehammer splitting slate. It collapsed, countless tons of stone and dirt crashing down in a precisely shaped and controlled avalanche, and Wencit of Rūm stood at its very focus.
Tremala's lips drew back in a predatory snarl of triumph. Visions of Carnadosa's reaction, the power and rewards awaiting the person who finally killed Kontovar's most ancient and dangerous foe, flashed through her mind. But Wencit never even glanced up. His wildfire eyes never looked away from her, and the soaring exultation of her triumph became something else entirely as he showed her the difference between even the most powerful wand sorceress and a wild wizard.
The hundreds of tons hammering down upon him suddenly stopped. A sphere of light, blazing with the same rippling colors as his eyes, erupted from the very air about him. It wrapped itself around him, then roared up with volcanic power. It caught Tremala's avalanche, stopped it in midair, and then-effortlessly-exploded upward in an eruption of wild magic that dwarfed anything Tremala had ever imagined. The rock and soil she'd turned into her weapon vomited heavenward. He didn't simply stop the avalanche, didn't merely turn it aside. Tremala's spell had worked with the natural force of gravity; Wencit's spell made gravity irrelevant, and rock dust sifted down as he blasted a two-hundred-foot deep pit out of the shuddering hillside above them.
Tremala's jaw dropped as she abruptly found herself standing under the open sky at the bottom of a vast, cone-shaped shaft open to the stormy skies above. Whips of lightning scourged the heavens, solid sheets of rain pounded down, and thunder rumbled like the wrath of Tomanâk himself. The shaft walls were smooth as glass, fused and polished by the searing breath of the wild magic, and cold rain steamed gently as it sluiced down them. It was forty feet across at the base, and at least three times that at its top, and the sorceress' skin tingled and crackled with the echoes of Wencit's spell.
No, not his "spell," she realized numbly. That wasn't a spell at all. It was just raw, focused power, ripped straight from the magic field itself.
No wand wizard could have done it. Power levels like that required exquisitely careful manipulation, with every possible safeguard in place. But Wencit had used none of them. He'd simply reached out to the energy from which the entire universe had been woven, and channeled it through the power of his will. She'd always known that that ability to seize the magic field by the throat was what truly made a wild wizard, but she'd never actually seen it, and the knowledge which had always been theoretical had not prepared her for the actuality.
A few pebbles pattered to the tunnel floor, and the last drift of rock dust settled, sifting over Tremala's riding habit like flour and drifting about her ankles like sharp, dusty-smelling fog. Raindrops came tumbling down, splashing the dust on her riding habit with large, dark circles, and Wencit looked at her.
"That was a formidable spell, My Lady," he said quietly. Fresh thunder crashed overhead, but the sound was distant somehow, perfecting the intense, ringing silence rather than breaking it. "Not many wand wizards could have cast it that quickly and that well."
"Apparently," she heard her own voice say, "it wasn't cast quite quickly and well enough."
"Apparently," he agreed. She glanced over her shoulder at the tunnel where she'd left her armsmen, but the tunnel wasn't there anymore. She saw only a smooth surface of stone, as solid as if the tunnel had never existed, and she looked back at Wencit.
"Doesn't that constitute a rather severe breach of your precious Strictures?" she asked.
"By no means." Wencit smiled. "I could have allowed just enough of your avalanche to rebound up the tunnel to crush them all to death. After all, I wasn't the one who created it, was I? But I didn't. They're all just fine on the other side of that wall. Of course," his smiled turned colder, "that also means they're on the same side of it as your friend Garsalt and Cherdahn."
Tremala stiffened, her expression shocked, as he spoke those names.
"How-?" she began, but Wencit only shook his head.
"I'm afraid time is short, My Lady. Your curiosity will have to remain unsatisfied, I fear."
He raised his hand, and a spray of wildfire erupted upward from it. It reached up, then flowed outward to form an arching dome. The sides of that dome spilled back downward, falling like curtains woven of rainbows until they touched the stone floor, and Tremala of Kontovar found herself enclosed within a glorious canopy of light . . . with Wencit of Rūm.