He learned that they hid their faces by day, slipping out only at night to meet in the ballrooms and stableyards of the great lords who had also joined the conspiracy. There they would hear whatever news there was to hear, and practice their skills.
Each night, as the Hawks gathered to spar, Kethry would siphon off the incredibly dangerous energy of their anger and hate. Dangerous, because the energy generated by negative emotions was hard to control -- and attracted some very undesirable other-planar creatures. But it was a potent force, and one Kethry was not going to let go unused. She channeled what she accumulated each night into the dozen trap-spells she was building, one for each of Char's mages. She was beginning to think that she might well be able to carry this off -- for despite her brave words to Justin, she had no idea if what she planned was going to work, nor how well. She was just too new at being Adept to be certain exactly what her capabilities were.
'I wish you'd tell me what you're going to do,' Jadrek said plaintively. He'd been watching her as she traced through the last of the parchment diagrams, laying in the power she had acquired that night. There were times his patience astounded her still....
'I didn't realize you'd want to know,' she replied, sealing the new layer of power in place, and looking up at him with surprise as she finished. 'Come around here behind me and have a look, then.'
He rose, moved to her right shoulder, and bent over the table with his expression sharp with curiosity. 'Well, you know I'm not a mage, but I do know some of the mage-books -- and Keth, what you've been doing doesn't even look remotely familiar.'
'You know what a trap-spell is. That's this part.' She leaned over the parchment and pointed out the six tiny diagrams encircling the last mage's Name, as he looked over her shoulder with acute interest she could feel without even seeing his face.
'That's just the part that's like a trigger on a physical trap, right?'
'Exactly, except that what will activate the trigger won't be something the mage does, but something I do -- a kind of a mental twist to release the rest of it.'
He examined the elaborately inscribed sheet with care, leaning on the back of Kethry's chair, and not touching the page. 'That looks familiar enough from my reading -- but what's all the rest of this?'
'That's something new, something I put together. There's a mind-magic technique called a 'mirror-egg' that Roald told me about,' she said, sitting back. He responded to her movement by beginning to massage her neck as she talked. 'It involves surrounding someone with an egg-shaped shield that is absolutely reflective on the inside. It's something you do, he told me, when you've got a projective that refuses to lock his mind-Gift down, or is using it harmfully. Everything he projects after that gets flung straight back into his face -- Roald says it's a pretty effective way of teaching someone when admonishment fails.'
'I would think so,' Jadrek agreed.
'Ah -- ' his gentle hands hit a particularly tense spot, and Kethry fell silent until he'd gotten the muscles looser. 'I thought about it, and it occurred to me that there was no reason why the same kind of thing couldn't be applied to magical energy. So I found a spell to make a mirrored shield, and another to shape a shield into an egg shape, and combined them. That's this bit.' She traced the twisted patterns with her finger above the diagram. 'When Jiles got here, he agreed to let me throw one on him as a test.'
'It worked?'
'Better than either of us had guessed. Scared him white. You see, with most other trap-spells if you have the patience to work your way through it, you can find the keypoint and get yourself loose by cutting it. Not this one -- because everything you do reflects back at you. There're only two ways to break this one -- from the outside, or to build up such pressure inside that the spell can't contain it.'
Jadrek pondered that in silence for a moment, while Kethry let her head sag and reveled in the relaxation his hands were leaving in their wake.
'What's to keep the mages from building up that kind of pressure?' he asked at last.
'Nothing -- if they can. But if they try -- and they don't figure out that they're going to have to shield themselves within the shield -- they'll fry themselves before they free themselves.'
Jadrek spoke slowly, and very quietly. 'That -- is not a nice spell....'
'These aren't nice people,' Kethry replied, recalling all the soul-searching she'd done before deciding that this was the thing to do. 'Frankly, if I could call lightnings down on all of them, I would, and take the guilt on my soul. I agree, it isn't a thing one should use lightly, and just before I trigger the traps, I intend to burn the papers. I won't need them any more at that point, and I'd rather that the knowledge didn't get into too many hands just yet.'
'And later? How do you keep someone else from finding out how you did it? What if -- '
'Gods -- Jadrek, love, once a thing's been thought of -- it gets out, no matter what. So once this is all over
