Michael Stackpole - When Dragons Rage

He smeared the last of it on his thighs, then stood in a tiny cloud of dust. There was no doubt about it; he definitely felt dirty and in dire need of a cleansing. He twisted his feet, burying them to the ankles just to make sure they were covered, then stepped from the box and moved to the next station.

Ahead of him lay a steaming pool of water, which had stepping-stones arranged in a spiral pattern. Four trails, each beginning from a spot designed with a rune for an element, curled out, the stones getting larger as they went.

A central stone stood a step away from the final stone on each spiral. Steam licked up in vaporous tongues and Kerrigan could easily feel the heat as he approached.

Steam: air, fire, and water. With the stones, we get earth, too . He started on the fire spiral just because he’d not walked it before. With each of the eight steps he took a deep breath and called to mind a specific thought. On the first stone he was supposed to recall his last meal, which he did with great ease, though it was not pleasing. Caledo had already begun to ration food, so he’d not been given much.

Once he recalled it, he sought to put it out of his mind. When he accomplished that, he moved to the next step, and the next, remembering things that went from the mundane to the exotic, physical to emotional to philosophical. Each time he put something out of his mind and moved forward, he shed concerns and let his mind become quiet.

At the penultimate stone, the largest on the fire path, he lowered himself to his knees. The stone was not soft, but as he sank back onto his heels and settled in, it did not feel all that hard on his knees and shins. He let his arms hang limply at his sides and closed his eyes. As he shut out the visual world, he could feel wisps of steam caressing and teasing him. In their wake came cooler air, which sent a chill through him, but soon the heat and steam coaxed a sweat from him.

When he knelt on the fire stone, Kerrigan’s overwhelming sensation was that of being filthy. He wanted to be clean. He wanted his skin to stop itching. As he broke into a sweat and as the moisture began to ooze out of him, it eroded the dust and dirt. He could feel it dripping down him, dropping from his chin to his chest, running down his neck and collecting beneath the fold of fat that covered his lap. Sweat stung his eyes and tasted salty on his lips. It flowed into his ears and burned in the abrasions he’d created by scouring himself with the sand.

As the sweat ran, Kerrigan saw influences and evils, toxic thoughts and attitudes, the taint of the DragonCrown, flowing out with it. In wanting to be clean physically, he created linkages with things he wanted to rid himself of mentally. He just let them pour out of him with the sweat. Not all of them made it all the way, but enough did that he felt a growing relief.

Then, at some point, when he felt he had progressed far enough, he rose and stepped onto the central stone. It was the stone that Prince Murfin had called the birthstone. When Kerrigan had first stepped on it, the prince had told him to brace himself and Kerrigan wondered what for.

Now he knew.

He readied himself and raised his face toward the ceiling.

The icy water began as a slow trickle that played over his face as softly as a spring rain. Kerrigan moved his face, letting it wash sweat and dust from his eyes, then brought his jaw down and hunched his shoulders defensively, for what had begun as a trickle became a torrent. Frigid water splashed down over him in breathtaking sheets. One after another, they washed away all traces of dirt and sweat, puckering his flesh and leaving him sputtering. His skin burned and tingled. A huge shiver shook him, and water droplets sprayed from his hair over the pool.

Letting air hiss in through his teeth, he moved off along the earth spiral and reached another alcove, where he found a blanket that he wrapped around himself. Murfin had explained that the water used on the birthstone was cut as ice from Lake Calessa, then was melted by sunlight, so that Father Sun and Mother Lake would be the ones to welcome the newly cleansed back into life.

He let his hair drip and seated himself. The symbology was not lost on him, but just seemed overkill. He felt clean, and the cold water had certainly revitalized him. In the wake of the ritual he also found some peace and, better yet, was able to identify some of the elements of taint the DragonCrown fragment had left on him. They were certainly less than they had been when he had started the rituals, as if each cleansing eroded a bit more of it.

Examining the taint, however, had started him thinking on ways to detect the presence of a DragonCrown fragment. If what Rym had suggested was true, then anyone attempting to hide a fragment would be looking to cancel or fool spells sent out to detect the fragment. The defending spell would either have to conceal the fragment from the seeking spell, or would have to overpower the seeking spell and report back negative results.

The key thing to either of those approaches on the defensive side was that they had to recognize the seeking spell before they could defeat it. In his discussion with Rym, he had come up with all manner of dimensions to spells that would make them identifiable. The easiest one for a seeking spell would be its very nature. Seeking spells sought targets, then reported back with results. How long that took, and how good the results were, depended on a lot of factors. Often it took time, and the resulting information was less than useful.

Kerrigan had hoped that detection spells taught by the Caledo Academy would be significantly different from those on Vilwan., but they were almost identical. The spell created a general template that used information the caster put into it, then went out in the world and looked for something that matched. If Kerrigan wanted to find a cat, for example, he’d imagine a cat and would cast the spell. The more details he filled in, like age, name, hair color, scars, gender, and such, the more likely he’d get a perfect match.

Casting that spell, though, would overwhelm him with cat reports, and even if the specific cat he wanted was located, the time it took to report back could well mean that the cat had moved away and could never be found without more spells and a lot of searching.

Kerrigan noted an inherent flaw with detection spells and was pretty certain someone else must have noticed it before. If they had, however, they’d not fashioned a spell to take care of that problem. The flaw was this: the spells were slow and clumsy because they sought every object and checked it against the template, then evaluated how closely the thing matched. If it matched on enough of the parameters, the spell would report back that it had found the target. Thus, a statue of a black cat might fulfill the parameters of a search for a black cat, especially if the wizard forgot to include “alive” as an aspect he was searching for.

What Kerrigan had in mind to develop was a search spell that moved more quickly. What he would do was order the parameters he was looking for, and reject items immediately when they failed to match a parameter. For a DragonCrown fragment he would start with rejecting anything that was not magickal in nature, then anything that did not include a gemstone, anything that was of insufficient weight, and anything that was less than seven centuries old. In effect he would be turning search spells inside out and he hoped that would allow him to find the hidden fragments because concealment spells would not recognize the nature of his spell and react to it.

Even better than that, though, he decided to make the reporting back more exact. Once the spell had a match, it would trigger a secondary spell. The spell would shoot out two—Kerrigan wasn’t totally sure what to call them and wished Will was around because he’d have a good word for them—two heralds . Each herald would go a half mile north or south of the target, then vector in at him. Because they would travel at a known rate of speed, and each would include vector and time information when it reported back, Kerrigan would be able to calculate how far away the item was and the exact location. Best yet, since the heralds would not contain information about the target per se, any spells cast to prevent such information from getting out—such as a spell that overwhelmed the detection spells and made them report back a lack of detection—would be powerless to stop them.