"What are we doing here?" Melvine asked in a whiny voice. The big baby was bundled neck to heels in a pale-gray garment that only looked like a romper. The bottoms of the feet had very solid, ridged soles, and I realized there were multiple openings for pockets. He wore a cute little cap on his nearly bald head. "I hate sleeping outside. Can't we go back to the inn?"
"No," I said. "I wanted to get out in the field. It'll be more of a challenge this way."
I'd told my students to get ready for camping outdoors, but gave no other details. The Pervects had dressed for the occasion in form-fitting t-shirt and short sets: Freezia in melon, Pologne in pale green, and Jinetta in what my fashion expert Bunny had defined for me as lemon sorbet.' Their talons, both finger and toe, had been freshly pedicured, and their polish matched their outfits. They also carried color-coordinated backpacks.
Bee, dressed in his Possiltum army uniform, leather skirt and breastplate over a long tunic, puffed up the hill behind us, hauling a huge pack that must have weighed about the same as he did.
"What's that?" I asked.
"Well, sir," Bee began, stopping to gulp for breath, "the army always taught us to be prepared. Sgt. Swatter also impressed it on me pretty persuasively. I don't want to end up without something I'm gonna need to fulfill any task you set me."
"This is intended to test your magikal solutions," Jinetta said with a sneer.
"With respect, ma'am, my magik is a lot more basic than I'd like it to be," Bee replied, his freckled cheeks red from exertion or embarrassment, or both. "I've got to find a physical answer sometimes. I just thought you oughtta know that, since you may end up counting on me one day."
"Thanks," the tallest Pervect said coldly, "but I doubt it."
"That's your first wrong answer of the day," I stated calmly. Jinetta looked shocked. "You're all going to work together. None of you succeed unless all of you do. That's one of the most practical things I ever learned, working with M.Y.T.H., Inc., and I'd be remiss if I didn't pass it along to you."
By contrast, Tolk had his possessions in a paper bag that had a rip down one side. The Pervects regarded him with the same distaste they would have given a stain on their immaculate outfits. Tolk took no notice as he gazed at his surroundings.
"Where are the trees?" he asked forlornly.
"Oh, I think there are some out there someplace," I said nonchalantly. "We'll find plenty of firewood for our camp tonight. If not, we can always burn dried animal dung."
"And smell up my outfit?" Freezia asked. "Not a chance. This is haute couture? "If it's not hot haute" I said, "you might welcome the warmth when the sun goes down. You're here for lessons in practical survival, right? It doesn't get much more basic than Sear. Nothing fancy, but you can find what you need."
"But what are we doing here?" Melvine asked in his perpetual whine.
"Today's lesson is finding simple solutions to problems," I informed them. "You're going on a scavenger hunt. I came here last night and hid a bunch of items on the landscape. By the end of tomorrow I want all of the items assembled at land's end." I pointed downhill toward the silver sparkle of the distant sea that hugged this continent. "You'll find all the objects on this little shopping list. Oops!" I let go of the parchment, which I had conveniently torn into six pieces before we left Klah. The students leaped after them, jumping in front of one another, nearly racing up one another's backs to get at the swirling squares of paper. I groaned. They weren't thinking. They had all responded out of instinct, not intelligence.
"Hold it!" I said. The students all stopped and turned back to stare at me.
"What?" Pologne demanded. "They're going to get lost!"
"Not if you're smart. One of you, get all those pieces. Now!"
Tolk, quick as a wyvern, leaped into the air and snatched one with his mouth as the wind carried the fragment by. He jumped for another. The first one fluttered out of his mouth. Tolk snapped at the first one and lost the second. He turned this way and that, trying to decide which one to go for. One fluttered close. He leaped for it, but Freezia reached for it at the same time. They collided. Freezia jumped back with a shriek. Tolk landed on his back, and scrambled up.
"Gosh, I'm sorry!" he yelped. "Sorry sorry sorry!"
"Stop it!" she said, brushing hairs off her outfit. "I'm all right. Gack, you smell like dog!"
"That's good, right?" Tolk asked, puzzled.
The slip of parchment whirled up and away, untouched.
"I'll get 'em," Bee said, dumping his pack. A section of the list had settled for a moment in one of the thornbushes about a dozen yards from us. Bee pelted down the hill, just in time for a wisp of wind to flick it out of reach. He stretched out a hand, and the paper edged toward him. The next gust took it away. I realized he didn't have much of a command of basic magik. That'd have to be handled over the coming weeks.
Ignoring him, the three Pervects went into a poised huddle.
"What do you think, Jinetta?" Pologne asked, her finger to her lips. "Should we try Morton's Retrieval Spell?"
"This is too small a volume of matter for that," Freezia said severely. "The fragments might be crushed out of existence.
"I think Obadiah's Reassembly Spell is the best way," Jinetta said.
"Come on! Obadiah's is soo-oooo last week!" Pologne scoffed.
"Don't you think that's what Professor Maguffin would have suggested?"
The name seemed to stop the other two, and they adopted a respectful air.
"I don't know," Freezia said thoughtfully. "I never heard him say that Obadiah's was for outdoor use."
"But he didn't say it wasn't—"
Pologne raised her finger. "We could use Petronius's Beard Charm—"
"We'd get a backlash. Think of the third law of Sorcerodynamics!"
"Not the third law, the second!"
"That wouldn't address the ambient power sources," Freezia chided her friends.
"Obadiah's it is, then." Jinetta took out a small alembic and a bright red stick from her backpack. Pologne uncorked a small bottle and poured a few drops of thick liquid into the container. Jinetta stirred it with the stick, and the volume increased to fill the alembic. Scarlet steam started to pour out of the narrow spout. A thread of it shot upward, tilted and began to turn in a circle as if looking around, then headed off toward the nearest shred. A gust of wind caught the red smoke and wound it upward in a spiral. It tried to break loose from the wind, darting almost desperately at the invisible sides of the eddy, until it simply dissipated. The Pervects stared in dismay.
"It didn't work!" Pologne said. "What went wrong?"
"Oh, forget it!" Melvine grumbled impatiently, pushing them all aside. "I'll do it!" He clapped his hands and held them out.
The light whirlwind reconstituted and grew from a cute little dust-devil into an inverted cone thirty feet high. The wind picked up mightily, screaming around us like a hurricane. A gale picked up my hair and started to twist it into a tight spiral on top of my head. Markie had warned me about Melvine's success in Elemental School, and it appeared it had been well earned. I braced myself. The three Pervects clutched one another, hanging onto their bags and each other.
As the cyclone grew, it picked up every loose object on the ground. The closer to the source, the more powerful it was. Yelping, Tolk flew into the air and tumbled helplessly to Melvine's feet. Even Bee and his immense pack were dragged up the hillside, along with loose stones, dust, dry plants and a few small animals. Melvine flattened his hands, and the wind died away. The debris formed a raised ring about three feet high around us. A leg, a foot and an ear were all that showed where Tolk and Bee were half-buried by the dust.
Triumphantly, Melvine picked up the pieces of parchment.
"There!" he said, waving them at me in his pudgy little hand. "That wasn't so hard! What's next, Teach?"
"That was like drowning someone who only wanted a glass of water!" Jinetta snarled. She and the others dusted themselves off resentfully.
"
Sour grapes," Melvine sneered back. "You don't know how to do anything with style."
"But it's exactly what I was going to say," I put in. "Melvine, look around you."
Tolk scratched his way out of the pile of dirt and shook himself vigorously. Bee stood up and brushed himself off. Both of them glared at Melvine.
The Cupy regarded me with a hurt stare. "What about it? Didn't I do what you asked?"
"And you ignored what I said about keeping it simple. How many lines of force do you see?"
He peered around. I knew what he was seeing, or rather not seeing. It was one of the reasons I had chosen Sear as a testing ground. The only other place I'd ever been that was almost as magik-bereft was Blut, but I had had a quick chat with Vilhelm, the vampire Dispatcher of Nightmares. He had suggested it would frighten the locals too much if I brought my off-dimension students there for a test. Since Blut didn't get many visitors, they might cause a riot. I agreed that it wasn't worth risking a lynching just for academic experimentation. On the other hand, the Sear natives were very friendly. I could feel them watching us now.
Melvine stared up at the sky then down at the ground, his pudgy face growing more and more distressed.
"Take a good long look," I said. At last he gave up. "I don't see any."
"Tech-no-nothing," Pologne snorted. From her tastefully appointed backpack she produced a palm-sized orb that glowed the same green as her ensemble. "There's only one to speak of. It's over there, a long way, about fifteen miles."
"Right," I said. "Good call. I'm sure you've all had plenty of experience in storing magikal energy so you don't have to go looking for a line of force when you want to do magik. Right?"
"Uh, no," Jinetta said at last.
"Didn't think so," I said. "It's why your spell didn't work. Why not?"
"Well, there have always been plenty of lines of force when we need them! Perv is full of them."
"It's full of something," Melvine said nastily.
"I'll do the sarcasm here," I said, glaring down at the Cupy. "That was a pretty comprehensive spell. I'll bet you're mostly tapped out now, too. Where are you going to get more magikal energy?"
"From that force line," Melvine said with a sigh as if I was too dumb to live. He stared in the direction of the line Pologne had detected, and concentrated. In a moment, his face contorted. He had discovered something else, I had done the first time I'd visited Sear: something in the natural landscape absorbed magikal energy. Unless you were in line of sight to the lines of force, you couldn't tap into them. "I can hop back to Klah, or Cupid, and stoke up."
"No way," I said, firmly. "Anyone who bounces out for a single moment is off the course for good. You have to play this one out right here according to the rules, and Rule One is 'KISS.' It stands for 'keep it simple, stupid.' If you had just concentrated on the fragments of paper, you could have collected them with an easy attraction spell, or caused them to reconstruct into their original form, which would have been heavy enough to fall to the ground. Since you used up all your stored magik, we're going to have to go to the nearest source to get more. For those of you who aren't used to carrying your own around, it's a good practice to get into. I know that my best teacher," and here I was thinking of Aahz, "told me the smartest thing I could do for myself was to be prepared for an emergency. It's like taking a breath before you jump into a lake. Once you're under water, it's too late to think about air."
"Store energy inside ourselves?" Pologne asked. "You don't use a peripheral device?"
I shrugged. "I hate to rely on anything that can be taken away from me. I'm a rotten swordsman, so anything I wield could end up in the hands of an opponent. I feel the same way about magikal gadgets. That's just my opinion, but you're paying for it."
The Pervects looked anxious and hugged their backpacks. I grinned. Perv was one of the dimensions that made use of magik and technology almost equally. I'd seen for myself how the mix of available power sources made relying on nonmagikal means almost irresistible. In my view it left the users vulnerable.
"That's not fair," Melvine whined. "It's a long way to that line."
"Then stay here and get through the rest of this test without magik," I said pleasantly. "Anyone else up for a walk?"
"Wow, he sounds so serious!" Freezia whispered as I stumped down the hill at the head of the file.
"Yeah, Jinetta, it looks like your aunt was right about him!" Pologne added.
"Not bad," Jinetta said. "It doesn't sound as if he adheres to academic methods, but he seems to have a good grasp of how to present his subject matter."
I kept my chin up and tried to look as if I wasn't listening. I was glad I looked impressive, but inside I knew I was faking it. I hoped they wouldn't find that out before I figured out what I was doing. I didn't want to let them or Aahz down. Though I'd hate to admit it, I had taken the idea from one of the views Bunny liked to watch in her PDA, a dramatic contest called "Sink or Swim," in which the green-skinned master of ceremonies made his contestants go through difficult ordeals in order to get basics they would need to complete other tasks. Usually I tried to ignore the entertainments she viewed while I was working on my magikal research. I couldn't get excited over a game I wasn't watching in the flesh. Once in a while, though, I found myself listening to the absurd and often ridiculously dangerous things the announcer had his contestants attempt. The differences were that I was using this challenge to make a point, and that nobody would get hurt if they used even a little sense. In my opinion, the techniques I wanted them to learn were vital whether they became high-powered executives or the local wizards of ten-house hamlets.
The rising sun did nothing to add to the beauty of the countryside. What dew had condensed overnight evaporated swiftly. The temperature ascended with the white-hot orb, until Tolk was panting out every breath.
"Water water water water water!"
"If you didn't carry on talking, you wouldn't be getting dried out!" Pologne snarled. The Pervect seemed to have less patience with Tolk than either of her companions.
"Take it easy on him, ma'am," Bee said. "If you offered him a drink, he wouldn't keep sayin' it, would he? Here, fella." He offered the doglike being a bulging water skin. Tolk beamed at him. He squeezed the skin so a spray of water leaped up, and lapped at it with his long, pink tongue. His enthusiastic method of drinking sprayed us all with drops, which felt good in the increasing heat.
"Thanks thanks thanks," Tolk said. "That was great!"
"Don't mention it."
Bee slung the skin over his shoulder.
"Hey!" he cried.
The water container seemed to throw itself onto the ground. Bee bent to retrieve it, but it scooted away from his grasp. He hustled after it.
"Hey, come back here!"
I smiled quietly to myself. The fun was beginning.
The lanky soldier opened up his stride to follow the fleeing bag, but it kept just out of his reach.
"Hey, I've heard of running water, but this is ridiculous!" Melvine chortled.
"Offer to share!" I shouted after Bee. The young man spun and snapped to attention.
"What, sir?"
"I said—oh, never mind." Behind him, the water skin seemed to melt into the ground. Bee turned around and searched. The skin, and the hole into which it had fallen, had both disappeared.
Bee turned back to me, his earnest face puzzled. "Where'd it go, sir?"
"I'm afraid you were just hit by one of the local hazards, Bee," I said apologetically. "The locals really know how to make merchandise move. You can probably tell that water's pretty scarce here. Your water bottle represented a good deal of wealth to someone who lives on Sear. They prize shade and water above anything else."
"What locals?" Jinetta asked. "I don't see any signs of habitation."
"They live beneath the surface," I said, tapping the ground with my foot.
"They could be dangerous!" Freezia exclaimed. "They could overpower us! They could," she lowered her voice, lookin
g around in fear, "kill us and eat us."
"I don't think so," I said reassuringly. "They're only about an inch high."
"What?" she shrieked.
"See," Melvine hooted. "You wet your pants for nothing."
"Shut up, you carnival prize!"
I marched onward. The students followed me, still sniping at one another. How was I going to get through six weeks of this?
I swatted at the back of my neck. A fly had been circling me for some time, evidently deciding where it would be best to plunge in its stinger. Gingerly I prodded the welt.
"Everybody with sensitive skin might use a little of their magik for pest repellent," I suggested. "This hurts a lot."
"I can fix it, Skeeve," Tolk said eagerly. He bounded over and touched the sore spot. The pain died away instantly.
"That's great, Tolk," I said. "I appreciate it. But don't forget to protect yourself."
He frowned and cocked his head to one side. "Not sure how how how."
"Picture a suit made of magikal force that fits your body closely but doesn't cut off your air supply," I said. "Don't use too much power."
"I don't think I can do that," Bee admitted. "I never tried anything like that before."
"What do you know how to do?" I asked.
"I only know a few spells," he admitted. "I'm not up there like these ladies," he indicated the Pervects, "who've had the benefit of advanced education."
The Pervects turned their noses up at him. Bee looked downtrodden.
"Well, we can build on what you have learned," I said encouragingly. "What are they?"
"Well, I can do Dispell," Bee began. A dust-devil spun in our direction. I recognized it as one of the Sear natives. It whisked up Pologne's leg, heading for her color-coordinated backpack.
"Aaagh!" she cried, batting at her tiny assailant. "Get it off me!"
"Bee, use it now!" I said.
Bee pointed at the miniature whirlwind. "Dispell!"
The gray cone died away, leaving a bright red node about the size of my thumbnail. The little creature dropped off Pologne's leg and promptly dug itself into the sand.
"Ugh!" she said, stomping on the place where the Sear disappeared. "Disgusting!"
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