Lin Vo laughed. 'Oh, Journeyer Timha. You're frightened, and I can see why. But that's no excuse to be rude. Besides, it's not about what I want from you, which is nothing, and all about what you need from me.'
'And what is it that we need from you?' asked Silverdun.
'Well, it seems to me that you need a couple of things. You need to get back to where you came from with our friend Timha in tow, and in order for that to happen, you're going to need Je Wen to lead you down to the border. Because if you try to make it on your own, you'll be dead in two days.'
'A premonition?' asked Ironfoot.
'Merely stating the obvious,' said Lin Vo. 'Folks from up in the sky who find their way down here have a tendency to wander into quakes or get eaten by wolves.'
'This is nonsense,' said Timha. 'Premonitive or not, this woman is lying. We're most likely going to be held for ransom, and this tale is simply to keep us docile in the meantime.'
'I can see you're not going to let me get any work done,' said Lin Vo to Timha. 'So let's get this over with now. Here's what you think is going to happen. You think you're going to waggle your fingers under your robe and do something nasty and I'm going to fall over dead and you and your friends are going to fight your way out of here.'
Timha glared at her but said nothing.
'What's really going to happen is that you're going to try that and fail, and then you're going to sit there and listen, and then when we're done you're all going to say `Thank you very much, Lin Vo,' and then I'm going to send you off with Je Wen at first light.'
Timha still said nothing. Lin Vo looked at Ironfoot and said, 'Watch closely, Ironfoot. You're going to like this.'
While her head was turned, Timha lifted his hands and drew a sigil of unbinding in the air. This was the call to some spell that he'd memorized previously and kept fully formed in his mind with a binding around it to keep it contained. The sigil was meaningless to Ironfoot, but when the re started condensing around him, he recognized immediately what Timha was doing. He was creating a space of Motion around Lin Vo, stopping the vibration of all matter in a sphere around her. This sphere would not only immobilize her, but it would also render her body and the air around her solid and freezing to the touch, killing her. Lin Vo sat looking at Timha, doing nothing, looking disappointed.
Ironfoot watched closely, his re sense having become heightened along with his strength and his other senses. What had Jedron done to him back on Whitemount? He could almost see the flow of essence from Timha, channeled as Motion, enveloping Lin Vo. She was going to die.
'Timha!' shouted Silverdun, who was probably seeing this as well as Ironfoot was. 'Stop!'
Ironfoot moved to rush Timha, but before he could get up, something strange happened. Lin Vo didn't move, but a warm pulse of re shot from her, filling the room. But it was like no re Ironfoot had ever seen. Somehow Lin Vo had used re without channeling it through one of the Gifts. It made no sense. It was like a colorless color, or an animal that wasn't of any species, or a sung note with no pitch. It was the reitic equivalent of division by zero. It was simply not possible.
But there it was. Ironfoot watched, enthralled, as Lin Vo's re encompassed Timha's Motion. It wasn't like a duel between battle mages; there was no confrontation, no conflict. The two essences combined, and where Timha's Motion had been, suddenly there was Elements, and the Elements swirled back toward Timha, and the air around him turned to water.
Suddenly soaking wet, Timha flinched backward, staring at Lin Vo in astonishment.
Lin Vo looked at Ironfoot. Only a second or two had passed since she'd last spoken. 'See what I mean? You liked it, didn't you?'
Ironfoot nodded, stymied. What he had just seen wasn't just impossible, it was ... paradoxical.
Lin Vo took a deep breath and settled herself on her cushion. 'There's a towel behind you,' she told Timha. 'I had a feeling something like this might happen.'
There was indeed a towel. It was monogrammed. Timha rubbed his hair with it, looking haunted. Lin Vo's display had not been lost on him, either.
'What did you just do?' asked Ironfoot.
'Me?' said Lin Vo. 'That was nothing. I just changed things around a bit.'
'You have the Thirteenth Gift,' said Silverdun. 'Change Magic.'
'There you go with your Gifts again,' said Lin Vo. 'Everything's a Gift with you people.'
She sighed. 'Now if we're done with the histrionics, I'd like to get the conversation going, because it's going to be light in a few hours, and that's when you need to leave.'
