“Yes.”
“Enervants,” he murmured. “That explains why your planeswalk went so badly. You were weakened.”
“In part,” she snapped. “The other part is that I had to enter the ?ther just moments ahead of dozens of soldiers! They tortured me to find out where the scroll was, and they would have done it until I died because I didn’t know where it was!”
“Yes, I heard.” Gideon seemed lost in thought, his mind scarcely on the conversation as he said, “All things considered, you did well to survive. But it’s a pity you chose this place to end your walk.”
“So sorry you don’t like it,” Chandra said acidly. “But since you weren’t invited in the first place, why don’t you just leave?”
He looked at her. “You haven’t figured it out.”
His face was in shadows and his expression guarded, but something about his bland tone infuriated her.
“If you followed me to take me prisoner and drag me back to Kephalai, then you made a big mistake, Gideon!” She threw her hands out to encircle him with a ring of fire…
And nothing happened.
He stood there calmly, not moving a muscle, not reacting physically at all. His voice sounded faintly amused when he said, “Indeed.”
Chandra stared at her hands in bewildered shock, turning them over and studying her palms as if she could read the answer there to her sudden absence of power.
“But I feel much better now,” she muttered. “So what…”
“You may feel better,” Gideon said, “but surely there’s something you don’t feel?”
“I…” She frowned, realizing what he meant. “Mana.” Suddenly, her difficulty in feeling it earlier made sense.
He nodded. “Something’s blocking our access to mana.
She stared at him in surprise. “Blocking mana?”
“It’s not completely effective,” he said. “That’s why you feel something. But it’s effective enough to be a serious problem for us.”
“Us?” She realized the full import of what he was telling her. “You’re without power, too?”
“As much as you are,” he confirmed.
“I noticed it was hard to feel the flow,” she said, thinking back. “Hard to bond. But I thought that was because I was still weak.”
“No.” He shook his head. “If you concentrate long and hard, you can probably call on enough mana here to start a small cooking fire. But that’s about all, while it’s being blocked so well.”
Chandra had never heard of such a thing. “What could do this?”
“I’m not sure. Something very powerful, obviously.”
“Or someone?” She thought of the hungry prince.
Gideon shrugged. “It would take constant focus and a lot of strength. The effort would be enormous. A big drain on just one person.”
“So he probably has help,” she mused.
“He?” Gideon repeated.
“There’s a necromancer named Prince Velrav who rules here.”
“Of course,” Gideon said. “Black mana would be abundant here.”
“Is that why it’s always nighttime here?”
He looked at her sharply. “Always?”
She told him what she had learned from Jurl.
“A goblin,” Gideon mused. “I suppose you couldn’t get any sense from him of whether this phenomenon is recent or has been going on for centuries?”
“No.”
Jurl had been pretty typical of goblins, in Chandra’s experience: neither bright, nor articulate.
Gideon looked up at the night sky. “No clouds. But no stars.”
“I noticed that, too,” she said. “I’ve never seen that before.”
“I doubt that’s the normal night sky here.”
“You think Velrav pulled a…” Chandra shrugged. “A shroud over this plane?”
“That’s one way of putting it,” Gideon said.
“Is that what’s restricting the mana?”
“I don’t know. But I’ve never experienced anything like this, and I’ve never been anywhere where that had happened.” He jerked his chin skyward. “Perpetual night attributed to the local necromancer king…” “Prince.”
“My guess is, the two things are related. What else did your goblin friend tell you?”
“‘Friend’ would be an exaggeration.”
“He led you to water. He didn’t try to kill you. For a goblin, that sounds pretty friendly.”
“Yes,” she said pensively, reflecting on the encounter. Her first impression of Jurl, when she saw him eating his squealing prey alive, was that he was like all other goblins she had encountered-only more so. “He was surprisingly nice to me. I wonder why?”
“I don’t suppose you threatened to set fire to him?” Gideon said dryly.
“Oh, yeah. Maybe that’s why.”
“What else did he tell you about Velrav?”