From how Cormara’s eyes tightened and Binion’s smile wilted away, they understood, too.
“We must go,” Borl said, shoving himself all the way out the window. This involved some undignified stumbling, but he got himself upright and put together again before Cormara and Binion (who had wisely exited through the front door) made it around to the back of the cabin.
“How did they find us so fast?” Binion asked, staring past Borl at an exposed stretch of rock. His gaze had gone a bit unfocused, as it often did when he was confronted with the unexpected. Binion had perhaps been Borl’s brightest student, but he’d never been quite as gifted with practical matters.
“There aren’t any towns for at least eight miles,” Cormara insisted, glaring in the direction of the smoke. He seemed more offended that the dry landers had ruined his calculations than that they’d likely come to toss them all onto a bonfire. Borl didn’t know quite how the situation had degenerated during his five years of near isolation, but his few trips into dry towns had been enough to determine that it had not improved.
“Those are windsticks, yes?” he prompted, trying to call their attention back to the issues that mattered.
“Of course,” Cormara said. He thrust the stick out for closer observation as if he expected that Borl wouldn’t take his word for it.
Borl waved it away. “Did you see any signs that might indicate they already had a flank set up?”
“We didn’t see anyone,” said Binion. His voice was steady, but his eyes had gone big, as if it was finally settling in that this could be a very dangerous situation. “But we weren’t looking for dries. No one shot at us, though, and they would have if they’d been there, right?”
“Probably,” Borl allowed. “We’ll go high in case. Do you have enough energy left?”
The fact that they had evidently crash landed in his lovely pine tree was cause to worry, but at least they had both come out in one piece.
“Yes,” Binion said, though he didn’t look nearly as sure as he sounded.
Cormara had already kicked down his windstick’s foot bar and now he stepped on. The movement seemed to jerk Binion out of his daze, and he hurried to follow suit. In a startling display of synchrony, they rose together to hover a few feet off the ground and looked towards Borl, waiting.
Borl didn’t have a windstick. In the past, he had been skilled enough to maintain the complete array of flight spells without one, but he was years out of practice.
He traced the talisman symbols into the air with deliberate slowness and tried to exude a calm and collected aura to disguise the inner war he was waging with his brain, which was not doing a good job of remembering how this process went. The shapes came mostly as a matter of muscle memory, but keeping track of the precise quantity and quality of magic each one required proved a bit more difficult, and it only got worse, since he had to devote some of his concentration to maintaining each previous spell as he drew out the next.
When he finished, it was shaky. He rose much more slowly than he’d intended, but that could pass for poise. He had always been careful to keep his robes well in order in his disciples’ presence… which reminded him that he was still wearing that hideous, lumpy hat, wasn’t he? He swept it off and stuffed it deep into his sleeve pocket.
“Shall we?” said Cormara. He’d likely been going for a mocking tone, but it came out tense.
Borl inclined his now hatless head and together the three of them rose up and up until they were above the treetops and could see out across a broad stretch of the mountainside. Borl’s cabin was high on the north face, where only pines and shrubby grasses grew, stunted and far-spaced due to the thinness of the air. To the west, the smoke rising from the dry landers’ torches cast a haze across the sky; it was remarkably close. And, oh, blaze it! Borl had forgotten about the other poor sap on the mountain.
“You two go on,” Borl told his disciples, slowing his own ascent.
But evidently Borl had failed as a teacher because they ignored him completely and stopped dead in the air, peering back at him with two wildly different flavors of disbelief. Cormara was abjectly suspicious. Binion looked horrified.
“It was not my magic that the sensor detected,” Borl explained. “There is someone else. I will find them. You two report back to Arnis.”
Cormara had the audacity to say, “Arnis isn’t in charge of the Trace Watch anymore.”
“Only one of us needs to go back,” Binion insisted. “One of us should go with you!”
Borl would rather they didn’t, for multiple reasons, and luckily he didn’t have to look far to find an excuse. “You crash landed in my pine tree,” he said sedately. “Forgive me if my confidence in your abilities is somewhat diminished at the moment.”
Cormara glowered but stayed silent. Binion looked embarrassed. “We will get help as quickly as we can,” he said. And then, after a moment of hesitation, he added, “Don’t disappear again.”
“I may not have practiced in five years,” Borl said, “but I am still a formidable mage.”
Cormara, at least, would likely recognize it for the non-answer it was, but Cormara also probably didn’t much care if he disappeared. He shook his head and shot up higher. Binion stared for a second longer before following.
Borl again felt slightly guilty for having lied and left and lied again, but it was a matter of survival! He shouldn’t be wasting energy on guilt.
He waited until Cormara and Binion were just two specks in the sharp blue of the mountain sky before testing his arial maneuvering. Levitation was one thing, but maintaining it while precisely controlling the directional movement spells he’d set up, especially when accounting for wind and air pressure changes, was entirely another. It had, after all, been five years! Borl thought he should be forgiven some tilting and a few, nauseating drops. But he got along alright after several minutes, and then he chugged off towards the smoke.
The dry landers (the people who could not generate or control magical energy) had always had some sensors of their own (at least for as long as Borl could remember), but he hadn’t thought there would be enough on this remote mountainside to locate magical activity so quickly. A single sensor could only roughly gauge the potency of trace energy in the air around it, and thus, on its own, gave no clues as to the direction of the magical hotspot and few to its distance. To have any hope of accurately calculating where trace energy originated, you needed multiple sensors spread around an area, and it seemed odd that the dry landers would have so many in this region. Given the current conflict between magicians and dry landers, Borl thought it unlikely that any magician would sell them sensors, and he hadn’t thought the dry landers had the knowledge or resources to make their own.
However they’d managed it, they were likely closing in on the magical source now, which meant heading towards the smoke was Borl’s best bet at finding the unfortunate magician before they did... if they hadn’t already.
He didn’t have to go far.
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