Suddenly, a tongue of flame ignited in midair. Zedd blinked at the unexpected brightness. The small flame, wavering with a lazy motion, floated above the upturned palm of a woman with wiry gray hair. Zedd saw other people in the shadows; his gifted sense was wrong. Like the man who had attacked him, these, too, had to be people not affected by magic.
The woman standing before him peered at him intently. Her expression twisted with satisfied loathing.
"Well, well, well," she said with patronizing delight. "The great wizard himself awakes."
Zedd said nothing. It seemed to amuse her. Her fearsome scowl and humped nose, lit from the side by the flame she held above her palm, floated closer.
"You are ours, now," she hissed.
Zedd, having waited patiently to gather his resolve, abruptly initiated the required mental twist to the gift all the way down to his soul in order to simultaneously call down lightning, focus air to slice this woman in two, and gather every stone and pebble from all around to crush her under an avalanche of rock. He expected the night to light with such power as he unlocked and sent forth.
Nothing happened.
Not waiting to waste the time to analyze what could be the difficulty, he was forced to abandon attempts at satisfying his emotional preferences, and to ignite wizard's fire itself to consume her.
Nothing happened.
Not only did nothing happen, but it felt as if the attempt itself were but a pebble falling endlessly into a vast, dark well. The expectation withered in the face of what he found within himself: a kind of dreadful emptiness.
Zedd felt as if he couldn't light a tongue of flame to match hers if his life depended on it. He was somehow cut off from forming his ability into much of anything useful other than to use it for a bit of dim awareness. Probably a lingering result of the foul-smelling substance they had pressed over his face to make him lose consciousness.
Since Zedd couldn't muster any power, he did the only thing he could:
he spit in her face.
With lightning speed, she backhanded him, knocking him from the arms of the men holding him. Unable to use his hands to break his fall, he hit the ground unexpectedly hard. He lay in the dirt for a time, his ears ringing in the aftereffect of the hit he'd taken, waiting for someone to lean over and kill him.
Instead, they hauled him to his feet again. One of the men seized his hair and pulled his head up, forcing him to look into the woman's face. The scowl he saw there looked like it spent a great deal of time on her face.
She spit in his face.
Zedd smiled. "So, here we have a spoiled child playing the game of tit for tat."
Zedd grunted with the sudden shock of a wallop of pain that twisted inside of his abdomen. Had the men not been holding him under his arms he would have doubled over and fallen to the ground. He wasn't quite sure how she had done it-probably with a fist of air delivered with all the power of her gift behind it. She had left the gathered air loosely formed, rather than focusing it to a sharp edge, or it would have torn him in two. As it was, he knew it would leave his middle black and blue.
It was a long and desperate wait before he was able to at last draw a breath.
The men who his gift said weren't there pulled him straight.
"I'm disappointed to discover I'm in the hands of a sorceress who can be no more inventive than that," Zedd mocked.
That brought a smile to her scowl. "Don't you worry, Wizard Zo-rander, His Excellency very much wants your scrawny hide. He will be playing a game of tit for tat that I believe you will find quite inventive. I have learned that when it comes to inventive cruelty, His Excellency is peerless. I'm sure he will not disappoint you."
"Then what are we standing around for? I can't wait to have a word with His Excellency."
As the men held his head back for her, she ran a fingernail down the side of his face and across his throat, not hard enough to draw blood, but enough to hint at her own restrained cruelty. She leaned in again. One eyebrow lifted in a way that ran a chill up Zedd's spine.
"I imagine you have grand ideas about such a visit, about what you think you will do or say." She reached out and hooked a finger around something at his neck. When she gave it a firm tug, he realized that he was wearing a collar of some sort. By the way it dug into the flesh at the back of his neck, it had to be metal.
"Guess what this is," she said. "Just guess."
Zedd sighed. "You really are a tedious woman. But I imagine you've heard that ofttimes before."
She ignored his gibe, eager to be the messenger of bad news. Her scowling smile widened. "It's a Rada'Han."
Zedd's sense of alarm rose, but he kept any trace of it from his face.
"Really." He paused for an extended, bored yawn. "Well, I'd not expect a woman of your limited intellect to think up something clever."
She slammed a knee into his groin. Zedd doubled over in pain, unable to contain his groan. He hadn't been expecting something so crude.
