that.»
Invisible fingers took her multi-camera controls away from her nerve endings, leaving them teasingly just out of reach. She sensed her life-support system starting and stopping as Chaumel played with it, using his TK. She felt a rush of adrenaline as he upset the balance of her chemical input, and was unable to access the endorphins to counteract them. Then the waste tube began to back up toward the nutrient vat. She felt her delicate nervous system react against pollution by becoming drowsy and logy.
«Stop!» she begged. «You'll kill me!»
«I won't kill you, strange woman in a box,» Chaumel said, his voice light and airy, «but I will not risk having you break away from my control again as you did when the magic dropped. What a chase you led us! Right around Ozran and back again. You made a worthy quarry, but one grows tired of games.»
«Keff!»
«I'm here, Carialle,» the brawns voice came, weak but furious. Carialle could have sung her relief. She heard the shuffling of feet, and a crash. Keff spoke again through soughing pain. «Chaumel, we'll cooperate, but you have to let her alone. You don't understand what you're doing to her.»
«Why? She breathes, she eats—she even hears and speaks. I just control what she sees and does.»
For a brief flash, Carialle had a glimpse of the control room. Keff and the silver magiman faced one another, the Ozran very much in command. Keff was clutching his side as if cradling bruised ribs. Plenna stood behind Keff, erect and very pale. Brannel, disoriented, huddled in a corner beside Keff's weight bench. Then the image was gone, and she was left with the enveloping darkness. She couldn't restrain a wail of despair.
It was as if she were reliving the memory of her accident again for Inspector Maxwell-Corey. All over again! The helplessness she hoped never again to experience: sensory deprivation, her chemicals systems awry, her controls out of reach or disabled. This time, the results would be worse, because this time when she went mad, her brawn would be within arms reach, listening.
Swallowing against the pain in his ribs, Keff threw himself at Chaumel again. With a casual flick of his hand, Chaumel once more sent him flying against the bulkhead. Plennafrey ran to his side and hooked her arm in his to help him stand.
«You might as well stop that, stranger,» Chaumel advised him. «The result will be the same any time you try to lay hands on me. You will tire before I do.»
«You don't know what you're doing to her!» Keff said, dragging himself upright. He dashed a hand against the side of his mouth. It came away streaked with blood from a split lip.
«Ah, yes, but I do. I see pictures,» Chaumel said, with a smile playing about his lips as his eyes followed invisible images. «No, not pictures, sounds that haunt her mind, distinct, never far from her conscious thoughts- tapping.» The speakers hammered out a distant, slow, sinister cadence.
Carialle screamed, deafeningly. Keff knew what Chaumel was doing, exercising the same power of image- making he had used on Keff to intrude on his consciousness. Against this particular illusion Carialle had no mental defenses. To dredge up the long-gone memories of her accident coupled with Chaumel's ability to keep her bound in place and deprive her of normal function might rob her of her sanity.
«Please,» Keff begged. «I will cooperate. I'll do anything you want. Don't toy with her like that. You're harming her more than you could understand. Release her.»
Chaumel sat down in Keff's crash couch, hands folded lightly together. Swathed in his gleaming robes, he looked like the master of ceremonies at some demonic ritual.
«Before I lift a finger and free my prisoner'—he leveled his very long first digit at Keff—'I want to know who you are and why you are here. You didn't make the entire overlordship of this planet fly circuits for amusement. Now, what is your purpose?»
Keff, knowing he had to be quick to save Carialle's sanity, abandoned discretion and started talking. Leaving out names and distances, he gave Chaumel a precis of how they had chosen Ozran, and how they traveled there.
». . . We came here to study you just as I told you before. That's the truth. In the midst of our investigations we've discovered imbalances in the power grid all of you use,» Keff said. «Those imbalances are proving dangerous directly to you, and indirectly to your planet.»
«You mean the absences that occur in the ley lines?» Chaumel said, raising his arched eyebrows. «Yes, I noticed how you took advantage of that last lapse. Very, very clever.»
«Keff! They're crawling over my skin,» Carialle moaned. «Tearing away my nerve endings. Stop them!»
«Chaumel . . .»
«All in good time. She is not at risk.»
«You're wrong about that,» Keff said sincerely, praying the magiman would listen. «She suffered a long time ago, and you are making her live it over.»
«And so loudly, too!» Chaumel flicked his fingers, and Carialle's voice faded. Keff had the urge to run to her pillar, throw himself against it to feel whether she was still alive in there. He wanted to reassure her that he was still out there. She wasn't alone! But he had to fight this battle sitting still, without fists, without epee, hoping his anxiety didn't show on his face, to convince this languid tyrant to free her before she went mad.
«I've discovered something else that I think you should know,» Keff said, speaking quickly. «Your people are not native to Ozran.»
«Oh, that I knew already,» Chaumel said, with his small smile. «I am a historian, the son of historians, as I told you when you . . . visited me. Our legends tell us we came from the stars. As soon as I saw you, I knew that your people are our brothers. What do you call our race?»
«Humans,» Keff said quickly, anxious to get the magiman back on track of letting go of Carialle's mind. «The old term for it was 'Homo sapiens' meaning the 'wise man.' Now, about Carialle . . .»
«And you also wish to tell me that our power comes from a mechanical source, not drawn mystically from the air as some superstitious mages may believe. That I also knew already.» He looked at Plennafrey. «When I was your age, I followed my power to its source. I know more than the High Mages of the Points about whence our connection comes to the Core, but I kept my knowledge to myself and my eyes low, having no wish to become a target.» Modestly, he dropped his gaze to the ground.
If he was looking for applause, he was performing for the wrong audience. Keff lunged toward Chaumel and pinned his shoulders against the chair back.
«While you're sitting here so calmly bragging about yourself,» Keff said in a clear, dangerous voice, «my partner is suffering unnecessary and possibly permanent psychic trauma.»
«Oh, very well,» Chaumel said, imperturbably, closing his hand around the shaft of his wand as Keff let him go. «What you are saying is more amusing. You will tell me more, of course, or I will pen her up again.»
Sight and sensation flooded in all at once. Carialle almost sobbed with relief, but managed to regain her composure within seconds. To Keff, whose sympathetic face was close to her pillar camera, she said, «Thank you, sir knight. I'm all right. I promise,» but she sensed that her voice quavered. Keff looked skeptical as he caressed her pillar and then resumed his seat.
«Keff says that our power was supposed to be used to make it rain,» Plenna said. «Is this why the crops fail? Because we use it for other things?»
«That's right,» Keff said. «If you're using the weather technology as you have been, no wonder the system is overloading. Whenever a new mage rises to power, it puts that much more of a strain on the system.»
«You have some proof of this?» Chaumel asked, narrowing his eyes.
«We have evidence from your earliest ancestors,» Keff said.
«Ah, yes,» Chaumel said, raising the notebooks from his lap. «These. I have been perusing them while waiting for you to wake up. Except for a picture of the inside of an odd stronghold and an image of the Old Ones, I cannot understand it.»
«I can only read portions of it without my equipment,» Keff said. «The language in it is very old. Things have changed since your ancestors and mine parted company.»
«It's a datafile from the original landing party,» Carialle said. «That much we can confirm. Humans came to Ozran on a starship called the TMS Bigelow over nine hundred years ago.»
«And where did you get this . . . datafile?»
