'And I've got enough Mage-Gift to read some other things as well.
There's a new node that's being established just off my area, and a lot of ley-lines have been diverted to feed it. There's a new line going off that node, too-and it's feeding straight into Outland territory, into one of the places we know that Adept has made his own. It's bad, Darkwind, it's feeding him a lot of power, and anyone that can divert lines is damned good. He's pulled some of the lines away from us completely. And I've caught him trying to read the Vale for power, too. I think he might be planning to use one of the lines to tap into the Vale itself.' Darkwind frowned. 'This is a new tactic for him, isn't it? He's never stolen power before that I can recall.'
'Exactly,' Stormcloud said, and bit his lip. 'I don't like it, Darkwind.
And I like it even less that our own mages haven't sensed him doing anything. Unless that was what this meeting you had to attend was all about-?' Darkwind shook his head. 'No. At least, that wasn't on the agenda. So unless they're keeping it from me-and they could be, I'll admit-they haven't noticed either the new node or the diversion of the ley-lines.' Winterlight snorted his contempt. 'You could probably start a magewar out here and they'd never notice inside the Vale. They're lost in their own little dream of what-was-once. Even if they were alert, the Heartstone just blanks out everything that's not in there with them.' Darkwind's frown deepened a trifle; that was not the way it was supposed to be. The Heartstone was supposed to sensitize the mages to what was going on with energies outside the Vale, not destroy or bury their sensitivity. But he realized that Winterlight was right; that was another of the side effects he disliked about being inside the Vale. When he was within the shield-area, it was as if he had been cut off from the energy-flows outside.
No one had said anything about that, not even right after the Heartstone shattered-which meant either that the effect was new, another developing side effect of living next to the broken stone or it's been that way since the disaster, and nobody noticed. which is worse.
Dawnfire had been silent up until now; he turned toward her and raised an eyebrow.
'Well,' she said, with a frown that matched his own, 'Stormcloud is the one who knows energies, and winterlight's Huur is absolutely the best at spying. so I'll just say that I think the same things have been happening in my area, but I'd like someone to check to be sure. What I have that they don't is a network of allied species acting as my informants-hertasi, dyheli, tervardi, and a few humans who aren't fond of civilization. Most of the humans are a little crazy, but they're sharp enough when it comes to noticing what's going on around them.' Darkwind nodded; Dawnfire was the one who had suggested taking volunteers among the nonhumans in the first place, and she had proved the idea was viable by establishing a network outside the k'sheyna
boundaries.
'Well, some of my informants are missing,' she said, some of her distress coming through despite her best efforts to control it. 'And when I sent someone to try and find them, there was nothing. They haven't just disappeared, they've gone without a trace. That wouldn't be too hard to do with dyheli, but hertasi have real homes-they actually build furnishings for their caves and hollow trees-and tervardi build ekele, and even those are gone. It's as if they never existed at all.'
'gone? ' Darkwind repeated. 'How could anyone make a tree vanish?
Dawnfire shook her head. 'I don't know-though the trees themselves don't vanish, just the hollows and ekele. But the caves do vanish; there's solid earth and rock where the cave used to be. At least, that's what my bird tells me.' Winterlight frowned. 'Could that be illusion?'
'It could,' she acknowledged with a nod. 'Kyrr can't tell illusion from the real thing, and she's not particularly sensitive to magic. I wasn't about to ask her to test it. But my tervardi and hertasi aren't mages, either, so they wouldn't have used illusion to conceal their homes. Something took them, then covered its tracks by making it look as if there had never been anything living there.'
'Who, why, and how?' Stormcloud asked succinctly. 'There is an Adept out there-'
'But again, this isn't like anything he's ever done before,' said Winterlight.
That we know of,' Darkwind added. 'He might have decided to change his tactics. And it might not be him-or her-at all. It might be another Adept entirely.'Why' is another good question; why take them at all, and why try to make it look as if they never existed?'
'To confuse us?' Stormcloud asked facetiously. 'And make us think we're crazy?'
'Why not?' was Dawnfire's unexpected reply as she sat straight up, with a look of keen speculation on her face. 'He has to know how badly the Heartstone has been affecting us. If we were only in sporadic contact with those particular creatures, erasing their very existence might make us uneasy about our own sanity.' Winterlight nodded, slowly, as if what she had said had struck a note with him, too. 'A good point. But the question is, what are we going to do about it?'
'About losing neutral territory-there's not much we can do,' Darkwind sighed. 'We could make it uncomfortable for the things moving in, I suppose; uncomfortable enough that they might move back without our having to force a confrontation we haven't the manpower to meet.'
'Like some really nasty practical jokes?' For the first time in the meeting, Stormcloud's eyes lit up.' Krawn and I could take care of that.
Now that it's summer, there are a lot of things we can do to make them miserable, as long as we have your
