He had caught his attention wandering for a moment and had redoubled his vigilance when a trembling of the shields alerted him to changes within the Vale.
LIGHT!
He fell back onto his couch with a cry of pain, squeezing his watering eyes shut, holding his ears, in a futile reaction to the blinding wall of 'light' and 'sound' that assaulted his Sight and Hearing.
If he had not been watching the Vale and the emanations of the Stone within it, he might have missed the death of the Stone itself. If he had been concentrating on something in the material world, he would never have noticed what had happened, for the only effect was in the nonmaterial plane. But since he was, and looking right at it with all of his powers-For a moment it blinded his inner eye when it exploded in light and sound. A lesser mage would have been struck unconscious and possibly come away with his Senses damaged.
It did send him graying-out for a moment, and fighting his way back to consciousness. That was all that was possible; to hold tightly to reality and claw his way back-he couldn't think, couldn't do anything else.
When he came back to himself, the Stone was gone.
He could only sit and blink in dumbfounded shock.
At first he simply could not believe what had happened. It made no sense, it was simply not in the Tayledras to have done such a thing. He
thought for a moment that he had been Headblinded; that his Senses had failed him.
Then shock gave way to anger. All his plans-destroyed in a single moment! How could he have so completely misjudged them? They should have tried to save their Stone, not destroy it! This was something those suicidal Shin'a'in might have tried, but never the Tayledras!
He shook his head, growling in bafflement and increasing rage. His head pounded with reaction-pain; his temples throbbed, and a sharp, hot jabbing at the base of his skull warned him that he was overstressing himself. The pain only increased his anger. How could they have done something so completely unexpected, so entirely out of character? More than that, how had they accomplished it, without destroying the Vale as he had intended to do?
His inner eyes were still dazzled, his outer eyes streamed burning tears in reaction, but he strained his Sight toward the Vale anyway, hoping for a glimpse of something that might give him a clue as to how this unknown Adept had worked the impossible.
Then, as the dazzle cleared under the pressure of his will, he got more than a clue. Far more.
Hanging in the between-world where Gates and ley-lines were born, was a lenticular form of pure, shining Power. It occupied the same notspace that the Stone had taken-or rather, that the Power the Stone contained had taken. For a long, stunned moment, he simply stared at it, wondering where it had come from and what it was. It didn't resemble anything that had been in or near the Vale before. It didn't resemble anything he had ever seen before, for that matter. And how had it gotten where the Power-form of the Stone had been? How had those two leylines gotten attached to it? He had never seen lines running to anything but nodes or Stones before.
He realized at that moment that it was the Stone-or rather, it was what had taken the place of the Stone. Whatever that Adept had done to the Stone, destroying it had purified the Power and allowed him to give it a new shape. There were only the two lines leading into it, and it was no longer anything he could use or control-or even touch, directly.
It had become something that answered to one hand only, an that hand was not his. Power with monofocused purpose, and linked t a particular personality.
In fact, it was very like a Gate. Except that there could not be more than a handful of Adepts great enough to create a Gate with power tha was not their own.
He nearly rejected that identification out of hand; even the Bird-Fool would not be so foolhardy as to make a Gate within a node, much les within a Stone! And why create a Gate with so much power in the firs place? You couldn't use it; anything passing through a Gate like tha stood a better-than-even chance of winding up annihilated.
But this was not a Gate, exactly. It was something like a Gate; something that could become a Gate with more shaping. But it was not, in and of itself, a Gate. In fact, the more he examined it, the less like a Gate it became. There was no terminus; it was entirely self-contained There was no structure that it was linked to; it was linked to the half world, a kind of Gate doubled back upon itself. That, in fact, was what gave it all the stability it had.
It was more like one of the little seeking tendrils of power a Gate would spin out, trying to reach its terminus.
As he thought that, he Saw it move, a little; watched it as it swung slightly to the west and north, seeking something-Then he understood. It was seeking something, and that was why it had been made along the pattern of a Gate.
It was seeking the empty vessel that should have held it, the physical container that had been made by the same hands that had shaped its old vessel. The new Stone in the new Vale.
Unbelievable. Incredible. Something he would never have thought of doing, had he been in the same position.
For a moment, he could only blink at the astonishing audacity of it all. Bold, reckless-not only brilliant, but innovative.
A worthy foe. Not another Urtho, of course, but he was no longer Ma'ar. If he were going to be honest with himself-which he tried to avoid-he would have to admit that another Urtho would not find him much of a challenge these days. Or would he? They would both find themselves dealing with limited power... with magic that followed another set of laws, twisted by the end of their own warring.
Pah, I am woolgathering! No wonder the infant stole a march on me!
Infant? No-young, but no infant. Old in cunning and in skill-youthful only in years. I wonder... is he as beautiful as the rest of the Bird Lovers I have seen?
For another moment, he was overcome by a feeling of complete and overpowering lust. And not just for the
