“You will sit, please,” Fang informed her from the hall. “Your guards will not speak to you unless they must give you instructions.” He left.
More thinking time? That would be good . . . if she could stay awake. She ought to be too terrified to doze off, but mostly she felt like sludge—slow, oozy, and miserable. She would have killed for a cup of coffee.
No coffee here. She mourned the loss, then prodded her reluctant brain to focus on what she did have. A fistful of secrets to keep, an exhausted but mostly intact body, no allies, no weapons . . . unless she considered her mindsense a weapon. Maybe it could be, but it wasn’t usable at the moment. How long would it take for it to recover?
Well, she’d depleted her magic once before by reaching too far with her mindsense. How long had it taken to refill that time? Her sludge-brain oozed through that memory, eventually delivering an answer: she wasn’t sure. She’d been pretty busy at the time, her ability still very new, and she hadn’t really noticed. But roughly two hours after almost passing out, she’d been able to mindspeak Mika.
So, two hours or so to refill enough to use mindspeech with a nearby dragon. But that was the easiest mindspeech of all. Plus there was more free magic available here, and how did that affect her refilling? She’d felt several sorcéri just traveling from the bathhouse to this place. Had she absorbed them entirely because she was depleted? Or had she gotten only the tiny sample her Gift automatically collected? She didn’t know—but even if she had soaked up every bit of every sorcéri she’d encountered, that wouldn’t be a lot of power. They were just wisps.
But mindspeech wasn’t the only thing she could do, was it? Twice she’d used her Gift to actively drain magic.
Both times had been extreme situations. Both times, she’d used it on living beings. The first time she’d drained the magic permanently from a Gifted woman who’d been trying to cause an earthquake. That had shaken her pretty badly. The ability to turn a Gifted person into a null . . . she wasn’t sure anyone ought to be able to do that. The second time, she’d been in a life-or-death battle with an immortal and only partly corporeal being. She’d nearly killed herself that time.
What would happen if she tried to drain a spawn?
The thought startled her into something like alertness. That would be a weapon, all right. But one that hurt the spawn, or her? The spawn must soak up magic the way dragons did. The way she did, too. How much was their magic like hers?
She’d never touched one of the spawn. She had shaken hands with another touch sensitive once, though. He’d fainted. No, that was wrong. Fagin had said later that he hadn’t lost consciousness. He’d looked unconscious, though. He’d looked like someone who’d been magically depleted, in fact, but that wasn’t what he thought had happened. He’d said that their Gifts had tried to sample each other, and when hers won, his had recoiled or snapped back—that he’d been knocked on his ass by his own Gift, not hers. Fagin knew a thousand times more about magical theory than she did, so she’d accepted his version.
What if he’d been wrong? What if she had partially drained him? She hadn’t asked at the time. She hadn’t known enough to ask. But if the spawns’ magic was like hers, just touching one of them might knock her out—either by her own Gift recoiling or by his magic draining hers. That assumed spawn were more powerful than she was, but it seemed a valid assumption. They were the offspring of dragons and dragons were vast.
Of course, that wasn’t what happened when she touched dragons. She didn’t pass out. They didn’t pass out. She felt the seethe of their magic just like she felt any other magic she touched. The question, then, was whether the spawns’ magic was like hers or like dragon magic. It seemed as if it must be more like dragon magic. They were dragons in human bodies, after all, so probably she could touch a spawn safely. But if they could drain magic the way she—
“Zhu Kongqi will see you now.” Fist Second Fang Ye Lì stood in the doorway, his square face grim.
This time they took the right-hand turn in the hall. It was easy to see where they were headed—a pair of guards stood on either side of a pair of doors. The guards saluted Fang with that chest-thump thing. Fang marched up to the doors, knocked, and spoke his name and title.
A faint scraping sound and the door opened all by itself.
Okay, that was weird. Telekinesis, she supposed, of the finicky, show-offy sort. A quick glance at Fang’s impassive face suggested he’d expected this response. Maybe Kongqi always opened doors in that look-Ma-no-hands way. Lily followed the Fist Second into the room.
And was hit by a massive wave of magic. A wave that came at her from every direction at once. Every inch of skin on her body vibrated, even the skin covered by cloth or hair. Toes to nose to scalp, her skin buzzed like she’d been plugged into an electrical socket.
Maybe she reacted the way she did because she’d just been thinking about it. Or because this felt like an attack, and years of martial arts training dictated a certain type of response. Or maybe it was as instinctive as hunger. For whatever reason, when that power wave hit, she pulled.
It lasted a second. Two seconds. Three. Then the magic shut off.
“Interesting,” said a cool voice.
Lily blinked, disoriented—by the attack, her response, and what she’d sensed in those three seconds. One thing was clear, though. The sense coiled in her gut felt plump with power again.
“Your defenses are as complete as I’d been told,” Kongqi said in English. “I was not told, however, that you can eat power.”
“No?” Lily looked around the room. She didn’t see any other spawn. Just Kongqi. Did that mean the one Cynna called Dick Boy wouldn’t be part of her interrogation?
The room itself was long, narrow, and utilitarian. Shelves and trunks lined the wall on her right. Opposite it, three large windows in the exterior wall were dark mirrors, bouncing back reflections of the myriad mage lights bobbing around the ceiling. Glass windows, then. Surely only the wealthy had those here. A long table in the center of the room had been built at counter height. It held a wide assortment of objects: tools and gadgets whose purpose she couldn’t guess; bowls and jars containing fluids, seeds, roots, and unguessable substances; a few scrolls; a small knife; three gray stones set one atop the other; a branch from some conifer; a candelabra with three unlit candles; wooden boxes of various sizes; and a small bamboo cage with a sleeping finch perched inside.