The pendulum came back down, as if it had never exhibited its bizarre behavior.
Snowstar moved it again, a little at a time, and once again came to a point where the pendulum repeated its action. The strange scene was repeated over and over, as Redoak kept marking places on the map and Snowstar moved the pendulum back.
It took uncounted drumbeats, and sweat was pouring down the faces of every mage around the table, when Snowstar finally dropped the pendulum and signaled to Rides-alone to stop drumming. There was an irregular area marked out in charcoal dots on the map, an area that the pendulum avoided, and which the youngsters’ flight would have bisected. Redoak connected the dots, outlining a weirdly-shaped blotch.
“I would lay odds that they are in there, somewhere,” Snowstar said wearily. “It’s an area in which there is no magic; no magic and no magical energy. Whatever is given off in the normal course of things by animals and plants is immediately lost, somehow, and I suspect magic brought into that area is drained away as well. I can only guess that is what happened to their basket when they flew over it.”
“So the basket became heavier, and they couldn’t fly with it?” Redoak hazarded, and whistled when Snowstar nodded. “That’s not good. But how did you know what to use to find all this?”
Snowstar shrugged modestly. “It was Gielle that gave me the idea to look for a negative, and I remembered shamanic dowsing; you can look for something that is there, like metal, or something that is not there, like water. Urtho taught it to me; we used to use it to make certain that we weren’t planting our outposts atop unstable ground.” He looked across the table at Skan, who was trying very hard to tell himself that it wasn’t likely for all the magic infused into the basket to drain off at once. He did not want to think about what that would have meant for poor Tadrith if the basket regained its normal weight in a single moment while aflight.
“Take that map with you, and tell Judeth what we’ve found,” the Adept told Skan. “I’ll work with the mages I’m sending out with the search teams. There’s probably something about the area itself that we can shield against. I doubt that a mage caused this. It might just be a freak of nature, and the Haighlei would never have seen it, because they were looking for magic, not for its absence.”
Skan nodded, and Redoak brushed a quick-drying varnish on the map to set the charcoal. The fumes warred unpleasantly with the lingering scent of the incense, but the moment the map was dry, the younger mage rolled it up and handed it to the Black Gryphon. Skan did not wait around to see what the rest of the mages were going to do; he took the map and fled out the door for the second time that evening.
This time he went straight to the planning room—which Judeth still referred to as the “War Room” out of habit. And it looked very much as if they were planning for a wartime situation. Judeth had a map spread out over the table, there were aides darting everywhere, Aubri was up on his hindquarters tracing out a line with one talon when Skan came in through the door.
“Snowstar thinks he has a general area,” Skan said, as silence descended and all heads but Judeth’s swiveled around at his entrance. “That’s what he wanted the map for. Here.”
He handed the map to the nearest aide, who spread it out on the table over the existing one at Judeth’s nod.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing at-the blobby outline on the map.
“It’s an area where there isn’t magic,” Skan replied. He repeated what Snowstar had told him, without the details about shamanic dowsing. “That would be why we can’t raise the teleson. Snowstar thinks that anything that’s magical gets all the mage-energy sucked out of it when it enters that area.”
“And if the spell making the basket into something Tad could tow lost its power—” Judeth sucked in her lower lip, as one of the aides coughed. “Well, no matter how they landed, they’re stuck now. No teleson, no magic—they’d have to hole up and hope for rescue.”
Aubri studied the map for a moment. “The only teams we’ve sent out there were gryphon pairs, with one exception,” he pointed out. “You and me, Judeth. We used a basket, and our flight path took us over that area. Nothing happened to us, so where did this come from?”
“Maybe it’s been growing,” offered one of the aides. “Maybe the more it eats, the bigger it grows.”
“Well, that’s certainly cheerful,” Judeth said dryly, and patted the girl on the shoulder when she flushed a painful red. “No, you have a point, and we’re going to have to find out what’s causing this if you’re right. If it’s growing, sooner or later it’s going to reach us. I did without working magic long enough and I’m not in the mood to do it again.”
“That’s a lot of area to cover,” Aubri pointed out. “They could be anywhere in there, depending on how far they got before they had to land.”
Land. Or crash. Skan’s imagination was all too clever at providing him with an image of the basket plummeting down out of the sky. . . .
“We can probably cover it with four teams including a base camp,” Judeth said, at last. “But I think we’re going to have to do a ground search, in a sweep pattern. Those trees are bigger than anything most of us here have ever seen before, and you could drop Urtho’s Tower in there and not see most of it. Gryphons may not do us a lot of good.”
“They can look for signal smoke,” Aubri objected.
Judeth did not say anything, but Skan knew what she was thinking, since it was something that he was already trying not to think about. The youngsters might be too badly hurt to put up a signal fire.
“Right, then the two already in the area can look for signal smoke,” she said. “I’ll fly in a mage here, to set up a match-Gate terminus, and I’ll call for volunteers for four teams who are willing to trust their hides to a Gate—”
“I shall go,” said a deep voice from the doorway.
Skan swiveled his head, as Ikala moved silently into the room. “With all respect, Commander, I must go. I know this forest; your people do not. Forget my rank and my breeding; my father would say that you should, in a case like this. These two are my friends and my sworn comrades, and it is my honor and duty to help them.”
“You are more than welcome, then. I’m going, you can count on it,” Skan said instantly. “Drake will probably want to go, too. Judeth, that’ll give you one mage and a field-Healer, along with a fighter.”
Judeth sighed, but made no objections, probably because she knew they would be futile. “All right, but these are going to be big teams. I don’t want tiny little patrols running around in unknown territory. I want two mages, so you have one for each night watch on each team, and I want at least as many fighters. Ikala, you go call for volunteers among the hunters and the Silvers. Skan, go back to Snowstar and explain the situation and what we need.” She glared at both of them. “Don’t just stand there, go!”
Skan went, but he was a fraction slower than Ikala and reached the door in second place. By the time he was outside, Ikala was nowhere in sight.
But he was overjoyed that Ikala was still willing to volunteer, even with the need to trust to a Gate for transport. The young Haighlei was precisely what they needed; someone who knew the ordinary hazards of such a forest, and how to meet them.