They appear in midair, visible out of a few thirtieth-floor apartments.
One starts to fall. The other catches her by the arm, flings out - wing-shapes of light - and slows her, spiraling down until they're at street level.
They appear in midair, visible out of a few thirtieth-floor apartments.
One starts to fall. The other catches her by the arm, flings out - wing-shapes of light - and slows her, spiraling down until they're at street level.
"How well does information travel, will elementals in other places hear there was a mass breakout at the mage school -"
"Elementals are used as messengers and translators, so some will. They won't know anything about the intentions of who stole them though."
"And we can't tell them lest some relay it to the slaveowners. All right. Mage school first and then maybe some people rescued there will have information about where else might be tractable."
"Yeah. There might be some elementals checked out, so we won't be able to get all the ones the university owns in one strike. They have several of all the non-hybrids, though. You want Shadow for going to other planets and Air and Earth and Water and maybe Wood and Fire for making planets nice, but the other kinds can be useful too."
"And we're not going to leave anyone a slave because we don't have an immediate need for them ourselves."
"Yeah, I mean if for some reason all the Shadows are checked out when we go in you might want to abort and try again, or go looking for who has them, but if all the Adamants are missing you might not want to do that."
Kalana has a few more questions (if it's important that it be dark, how dark, what's the lighting on campus like? If someone is injured what are prospects for solving that with magic?) and Maurabel has answers (some torches, some magical lighting objects, but it's still dark enough for there to be lots of places suitable for shadow-walking at night, as long as they aren't stuck right under a light stone; magical healing is pretty good, Shine for healed-or-dead-in-the-next-five-minutes emergencies one per elemental in any reasonable amount of time, Lightning for that but you have to wait more than five minutes to get to a Shine and also one per elemental, Ice for that but you think you could fix it without Shine in particular, Earth for smallish patch jobs - Fire's for youth and infection and Water's for disease and not directly relevant.)
"Penumbra can but that's drawing on the same reserves she'd use to do shadow-walking, Shine healing is expensive. I have some Earth and I know how to use it - no humans have enough Shine or Lightning to use those for healing. Uh, same caveats as basically everything else, regarding elemental willingness, but probably at least some of them would."
"We would probably have enough leverage to put it to the use you intended if there were still prospects of planets. What happens to the elementals we rescue if you die -"
"You'd still need a mage to hold them but -" She tugs her necklace out of her shirt. "If you have these you can hang on to them till you find someone to do that, if you can, you just won't be able to let them do stuff on your own. Penumbra will still be about as free as she is now unless another mage gets this one, so will any elementals whose amulets I manage to touch, any you steal yourselves will have whatever their last constraints were stuck that way."
"Can't, some of them are built in. I used to comply with school minimums too, but Penumbra's looser than that."
"Okay. Worst-case we'll get the necklaces and scout for another mage who can unrestrict them."
"Yeah. Since the rainforest might be relevant either way, do you want to go to Cene first? Or afterwards?"
Anitam arranges with Cene a three-day trip for Maurabel to see Cene and the offered rainforest.
And she will go ahead and take a plane because that's interesting and Penumbra can save her magic.