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“What is your problem?”
Pritkin ignored me. “I don’t suppose ‘Rafe’ also had an address?”
“No. But you must have some idea—”
“Dark mages never stay in one place for long. If finding them was easy, we’d have destroyed them by now!”
“There must be rumors.”
“There always are. And by the time the Corps hears them and sends a team in, the dark have long since decamped—and often left us a nasty surprise.”
The “Corps” was the official term for the war mages, the enforcement arm of the Silver Circle, who tended to be a lot more fanatical about their jobs than human police. They really did have a license to kill, and they believed in exercising it. I didn’t want to deal with any group that regularly made the Corps look bad. But if they had the Codex, I didn’t have much choice.
“You’re not going to find them in dusty old books,” I pointed out. “What are you doing down here?”
The pixie flipped over a page in one of the larger volumes. She had to plant her feet and use both hands to manage it. “We’d explain,” she panted, “but it requires words of more than one syllable.”
“Trying to find another solution to that geis of yours,” Pritkin replied.
“By doing what?”
“By attempting to create a spell that can break it.” He wasn’t even looking at me as he said it, but had already gone back to scanning another arcane passage.
I reminded myself sternly that Pritkin was a friend. It was easier to think of him that way than to be constantly frustrated by the fact that I wasn’t allowed to murder him. “We already know where the counterspell is. It’s in the Codex!”
“The geis was doubled, if you recall,” Pritkin said curtly.
“Then we’ll cast it twice!”
“Magic doesn’t work like that. Do you recall what happened when you went back in time and met a Mircea who did not yet have the geis?”
“It jumped from me to him,” I said impatiently. Pritkin hardly needed to ask, considering that he’d been there at the time.
“Doubling the spell and setting up the feedback loop you now have.”
“Yes, but with the counterspell—”
“You act as if there are still two distinct spells, when that is by no means certain!” he snapped.
“I don’t understand.” I kept my temper because it was rare that I could get him to talk about this at all, and I wanted answers.
“The geis was designed to be adaptable. That was its chief strength, but the adaptability also made it too unstable for most uses. Often, it changed from the original spell to something new over time, adapting to meet the needs, or what it perceived as the needs, of the caster.”
“You sound like it can think.”
“No more than a computer program can. But like a sophisticated program, it does adapt to new input.”
“Like what?”
Pritkin’s green eyes met mine coolly. “The spell itself is logical. What its designer failed to take into consideration is that most people are not. They are often confused about what, exactly, they really want, and the spell does not differentiate between hidden thoughts, subconscious desires, and acknowledged ones.”
“What are you saying? That I’m trapped in this because I want to be?!”
“Not now, perhaps, but—”
“I don’t want Mircea to die!”
“Yes, but that was not the point of the spell, was it? It was designed to bind two people together.”
