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His smile was a grimace of bared teeth. “Youare no Sanctuary mage.”
“Tonight I am.” Cassia focused all her thoughts on the ward, squeezing her hand. She didn’t feel any pain. More blood spilled out around the glyph shard, and tendrils of light spread under the surface of her skin.
“Using magic that isn’t your own is an acquired skill,” the Collector warned.
“She won’t last,” Skleros predicted.
“Let us take her for a few rounds.”
Skleros knotted a silk table napkin around his bleeding hand. “I am ready, Master.”
With an expression of savage exultation, the Collector lifted Eudias’s hands. Lightning lanced downward at Cassia’s Sanctuary ward.
WORST FEAR
Lio crashed through panesof glass. Slivers dug into his skin. He landed hard on sharp, jagged stones and caught himself on his hands and knees. A groan escaped him. The pain felt so real. Yet he knew better.
This was a mind game.
He stayed where he was and checked his mental protections from the inside out, racing through every self-defense exercise his uncle had taught him for just this kind of duel. He found no breach in his own mind. A superior mind mage could gain the upper hand against a lesser one, while still making the lesser mage believe his defenses were intact. Neither Lio nor the mage of dreams were lesser thelemancers.
Lio was made for this, but it could be the worst battle of his life.
He rolled onto his side with a wince, touching a hand to his bleeding knees. They weren’t healing. He reached for the nearest support. His hand met the lip of a fountain. He pulled himself to his feet, shaking off pieces of broken glass. His blood spattered the ground.
He looked around at a desolated version of the courtyard at Rose House. The fountain was dry, and potholes riddled the floor. There were only dead, frostbitten stalks where the Sanctuary roses had been. Everything lay in the grip of ice. When Lio took a step, the remains of the last glass roof panel came crashing down at his feet.
“You’ve already worn out this trick,” Lio said. “It won’t fool me twice.”
He was trapped in a waking dream. The only way to Cassia was to find his way out of this fortress the mage of dreams had built.
Lio would destroy it from the inside out.
He considered the fragments of his medium that surrounded him. He would perform a test upon the mage’s world. He listened, attuning his senses to the voice of each piece of glass. Just like playing with a project in his workshop, he applied his Will to the fragments and summoned them together.
They shattered into finer slivers. Lio coughed the glass dust out of his lungs.
“That confirms this world isn’t real,” he choked. “My own craft turns against me.”
Lio sniffed the air. He could smell ice and sea. The illusion around him was astonishingly complete. How had the mage constructed such a consuming experience without invading Lio’s mind to make him believe he was seeing, feeling, and smelling all of this?
Lio eyed the lightless sky. Light magic. He ran a hand over the back of a stone bench, and frost came off on his skin. A polar wind cut through the torpid air and blew the rime from his fingertips. Elemental magic.
“The novice studies my technique,” said the mage of dreams. “I am flattered.”
Mind magic, of course.
It should take a coordinated effort by several mages to construct an artificial environment such as this. Skleros, Chrysanthos, and Tychon could not account for the various affinities Lio saw at work here. He had enough faith that the rules of magic still applied to conclude that the Queens’ ward was still in place, and no other enemy mages could possibly be in Orthros.
Except the mage of dreams. How had he gotten in?
“Evil,” Lio said.
“Such a simplistic word.” The mage’s disdain filled the air.
“The truth is often simple. Did you forget I am the son of a mind healer and the devoted servant of her mentor, the Great Healer of the Empire? I am not ignorant of the particular necromancy Imperial theramancers keep at bay in their communities. Alas, Tenebra and Cordium have no such protection. The Order of Hypnos claims to guard against such violations, but we both know how corrupt they are. You must be able to run rampant in this part of the world.”
“The world is mine.”
