Thirty-six

The dragon let go and hissed at Lottir.

Grey had pushed himself up a bit to take a look at whoever was speaking English here. Seeing a tall woman with brightly dyed hair and fairly normal clothes, he let himself fall back again, completely missing the commotion at the table. She fits in here about as well as a bird in a fish tank. He had to laugh, there was no helping it.

---

"But how do you know where to apply force to get a certain effect?"

He looked surprised and thought for a second, wondering where they were getting confused. "Aside from healers again, nobody I know can work at so fine a level of detail. For, oh, picking up a tree trunk or something, that isn't a problem: you just find where its weight balances. The rest, I suppose, is limited by the senses and one's level of control."

---

Lotsi shook his hand, muttering oaths, glared at the dragon and then inspected the injury.

"A tree trunk? Like that?" Sylvie pointed at a convenient healthy tree trunk she might be able to span with her arms.

"Hopefully not one that's trying to grow, but... yes." He looked back at her, trying to work out whether he'd said something wrong.

"You're not kidding?" She didn't seem very suspicious. Just a bit.

"About what?"

"Well, that's more weight than any mage I ever heard of could shift alone."

"Oh." Iceheart was taken aback. "I think - well, not everyone back home can move that much, and, er, it takes practice." He was glad he hadn't chosen "launching a ship" as his example; he'd been thinking of Sylvie's apparent lifting of that branch.

"It seems very remakable to me, especially if you work only by sight. I mean..." She pondered an example. "Do you know star pattern baskets? They consist of more holes than strands. If you spread your fingers, close your eyes and try to lift it, your fingers will more likely than not go through the holes and you can't lift it as well as you could if you opened your eyes and looked and placed your fingers were the strands cross."
She realised it was far from perfect, but it was the best she could come up with in a hurry. "Working magic by sight, the way I learned it, wastes a lot of energy."

He turned that model over in his imagination. "I understand, I think." Whether large scale or fine scale, it always helped to find the most effective place to push (or pull or twist or crush or expand or...) But he could only estimate that by examining the thing the old-fashioned way -- or just levitating it and shifting his 'grip' around until he found the centre of mass.

"This is all fascinating." He didn't want her to think he was bored or anything. Ahem.

"I guess either you have greater reserves or in some other way work more efficiently." Sylvie shrugged. Lifting heavy loads was in a way impressive, but if there was no fine control, what's the point?
"It seems less versatile than what I am used to, though."

"Possibly we are." He seemed to take her last suggestion seriously and thoughtfully, although, oddly, there was no hint of insecurity or competitiveness.

Different, in Suitov Iceheart's opinion, was brilliant.

"Combining both traits in some way would certainly be... interesting. Not that I'd be much of a help." Sylvie shrugged.

"It would be. Of course, I'd want to know a lot more about what you can do - and, likewise, explain or demonstrate more clearly how my side goes about things. Maybe I can even convince you we aren't a planetful of chest-beating savages after all."

His tone was jovial, even... mischievous. It was obvious he didn't really think Sylvie would view him thus, even if she seemed a little set in her ways.

That made her flinch and start "Sorry, I didn't -" before catching his expression and breaking off with and embarrassed little smile.

"Of course. If you have the time. I'm afraid I'm not good at explaining processes, though."

Pay a bit more attention to the conversation than to your speculations, darnit!

"Much better than I am, I'm sure. You seem to have the patience for it."

Not comfortable with banter then. Shame. And there he'd been trying not to be intimidating...

Caught off guard by banter in a serious conversation, and terrified of the thought she might have offended the owner of a place where she'd been more or less freeloading for days now, more like.

Now she chuckled nervously. "Actually I preferred feeding the chickens to tutoring younger students."

Suitov as a whole threw her off balance. Someone rich enough to buy an inn and have someone else manage it, so certainly someone with influence, concerned about the well-being of a strange animal. And so bloody friendly. In Sylvie's experience people of influence were not that friendly without ulterior motives.

Or maybe she just needed a break.

Serpentine looked between Jaina and the kid, trying to remember if she was familiar to him, as his patchy memory suggested. Finally he just shrugged and walked the teeniest bit closer to Grey. He took his eyes off Grey only long enough to give the dragon a hesitant, curious look.

People who tried to distinguish between 'situation where banter is appropriate' and 'serious conversation' did amuse Suitov. It wasn't that he was anything like Sebastian; he'd just talked to too many politicians and decided life was too short. (Besides, if you couldn't gently tease your friends, you'd have to do it to your enemies.) In any case, he wasn't trying to read her thoughts, so none of this was actually passing through his mind at that moment.

"So that's how you knew how to get it to sleep?" Actually, I hear student-handling techniques are much the same... no, better not say that. Might confuse her further. "If it's crazy enough to come back, at least someone will be able to feed it. Oh, if you'll be staying around, that is."

Of course he was friendly. He liked Sylvie. People he had to negotiate, shout at or impress? Twopence a dozen. Fellow mage of drastically different background he could talk shop with? Gold dust!

"Sorry, Polly, I have no biscuits." Grey looked in the winged one's direction, but his eyes were glassy. A rather cramped, unhealthy grin had settled on his face.

Ayu-Asra glared back, and let go a triumphant bit of birdsong when Lotsi broke eye contact. Victory! Making himself big he looked around, in case anyone else wanted to challenge such a mighty dragon as himself.

---

"I... hm," said Sylvie. The problem bugging her now that she had arrived here by a spell that should have taken her somewhere else entirely. As long as she didn't know what had gone wrong, she might end up anywhere if she tried to leave, and she could come up with plenty possibilities how a random strange place could be worse than where she was now.

"I'd like to stay here, but what would I do?" Less than half-joking she added, "Does the Inn need a gardener?"

"Surely you jest? Have you seen the gardens?" In case she'd been thinking they were deliberately supposed to look like an overgrown wilderness, he added, "That is, yes, it most definitely does."

Walking at a fairly leisurely pace, they'd just now arrived back at the inn building.

"Apart from replacing the fountain and ordering some rose bushes because one of our clients requires them, I have no particular plans in mind. I'd welcome suggestions from someone more green-oriented."

Serpentine simply shrugged. He wasn't sure what to make of this person, so he feigned stupidity - which wasn't hard with his face and the fact that he didn't understand what the kid was saying. It was actually a little annoying, so he turned his attention to the tiny dragon. He couldn't help but smile.

"I just wondered if you already had someone under contract and expected them to show up any day now," Sylvie explained cheerfully. She was not a complete idiot, no matter what Suitov might think.

"I'd need a better idea of how big the garden should end up, and of what the area is like, and what kind of roses that client requires for what purpose..."

Gardening and landscaping were not exactly areas of expertise of hers, but she had had opportunity to pick up some basics.

"No, nobody hired yet. The gardens have been left for last for, well, all sorts of reasons. But I have the plans, at least, and the boundaries are well defined.

"The rose bushes, I have managed to track down. Though it was moderately difficult because the client cannot, in fact, speak or write." It had sprawled very eloquently, though.

Indoors...

"Come on, let's have a look, don't be silly." Wilmer grabbed Lottir's hand and checked it over. "It's hardly bleeding. Find a cloth or something."

"Bloody bastard bird," muttered Lotsi. Nico handed him a handkerchief.

The laughter startled Jaina. She promptly blushed without knowing why, then tried to see what was funny: pretty countryside, rustic inn, gleeful two-headed dragon ... woman with punk-coloured hair and and Terran jeans.

Oh.

Jaina smiled at Grey. "Well, you're not from around here anymore than I am. My name's Jaina."

She proffered a hand for shaking. "What brings you so far from home?"

Ayu-Asra watched Serpentine closely, not certain what to make of him.

Grey blinked up at Jaina, likewise confused, but didn't move from his position, sitting on the ground leaning to the wall.

Oh, the hell, why not. "Apparently I drew a hole into a wall." He spoke quickly, words running together into a single string of syllables. "Y'see, some Geewiz thugs wanted a chat, but I didn't, and they had me cornered, but I was at an outside wall on the ground floor, so I got that crazy idea to try to break through, and I thought for a moment it had worked, too, but it'd have led to the other side of the wall, not" - he took a deep breath and indicated the surrounding with a wave - "fairyland, so I must be hallucinating. Or dreaming. Knocked out, anyway."

He sighed. "I want to wake up." Some part of his brain supplied ideas of what might be waiting for him. "Or maybe I don't. Aw, shit!" Grey's head fell back, and there was an audible thud as it connected with the wall.

The noisiness had caught the dragon's interest; it had jumped over to the table next to Grey and watched him, keeping some distance.

Outside at the back, Suitov retrieved a book from the verandah. The cover read Boundary Mechanics for Geniuses - A boring, utterly confusing read for the rest of us - Sora Heigh, and there were notes on scraps of paper sticking out of various pages, written in one handwriting but two or three languages (Interworld plus what Shaded folks would recognise as Montuone trollish and Suitov's birth tongue).

He glanced down at the cover briefly. "Well, time to test the first version of these wards, I suppose. Would you like to see one? If I can get it going at all, that is."

He cupped his hands, called to mind the sequence of mental steps he'd committed to memory earlier, and cast. Something appeared. The ward v1.0 was palely visible to normal sight, obvious to someone who could sense magic. It had a middle and several tendril-like legs, looking something like a spider or octopus. Inert, it had a 'turned off' look about it.

"And there it is, if it all works. It's a pity I couldn't test the psychic components properly, but it's just beyond my capabilities. Have to trust that old Heigh knows what she's talking about."

The speed at which he worked again startled Sylvie, as did the fact that this ward was visible, no matter how faintly. While she could sense magic, she had to actively try; it was not like having an additional sense that was always receptive.

Suitov's last remark made her look up from the ward, clearly appalled. "You say you're casting this without understanding how it works?"

"Parts of it I only understand theoretically and can't duplicate by myself. I know precisely what it all does, so long as I built it right." Just give him the slightest excuse to explain the psychic components in detail...

In fact the thing was only visible now because he'd wanted it thus. Active, it would enter stealth mode and become unobvious even to mage sight.

Testing was going to be fun.

"Excuse me if I ask yet more stupid questions, but I'd like to understand this properly... Did you use a spell someone else stored in the book or some other artifact to create that ward, or did you create it using your own mind, following instructions?"