"Meaning if she summoned enough demons to protect two different places, she'd have to lie low for a few days and recover?"
"Definitely."
Which was more than likely why the second key hadn't yet been used. It wasn't just that they hadn't found the correct one yet, but one or both of them hadn't the strength to actually get onto the fields. And that meant how much time we had left very much depended on when they'd summoned the demons. Lucian had died three days ago, and Lauren had been packing before then. The days I'd spent trying to drown my sorrows might have given her all the time she needed to recover.
"Does that sort of rule apply when you're creating something like a protection circle?"
"Not really. It's a different type of magic to summon."
"But what if you're trying to protect and hide something large? Something like a gateway onto the gray fields powered by the ley-line intersection?"
"It's still the same magic, just a larger scale." Her expression was a little bemused. "As I've already told you, the amount of magic needed should produce a magical ‘hot spot' that would enable us to pinpoint its location."
And the sorcerer would know that, I suddenly realized. "And have you?"
"Well, no. But I did ask Kiandra about it —"
"And she said they haven't noticed any such hot spots," I cut in.
She frowned. "Yes. How did you guess?"
"Because it suddenly occurred to me that any sorcerer worth his salt is going to know just how trackable his magic is. So either the magic concealing and protecting the ley-line gateway is Aedh based and therefore untraceable via human means or —"
"Or," she cut in, "he's not using magic. Not to protect the intersection, anyway."
"Exactly." I began to pace. "There was a small protection circle around the cuneiform-etched stones Jak and I found in the tunnels under that warehouse near Stane's. Maybe we should be looking for something along those lines on or near the intersection."
There was also the other tunnel, Azriel commented. You did not examine that.