Then light burst from the stone and quickly encased me in a cylinder of glaring white. Azriel disappeared from sight, and Valdis's fierce blue flames were little more than a shadowed flicker.
"Father, are you out there?" My voice echoed slightly in the odd silence of the white void.
For several seconds, there was no reply; then his voice—a harsher, more masculine version of mine—said, "I'm here. Why are you using this cube?"
"You gave it to me to communicate. I'm communicating."
"So you have found the next key?"
"Not yet."
"Then why are you using this cube?"
Impatience—and perhaps a touch of anger—swirled through the whiteness around me. My stomach tightened. I'd felt my father's anger once before. I did not want a repeat of the bruises that had ensued.
And yet I couldn't quite help snapping, "Because if you want the damn keys, then you're going to have to do a bit more than provide indecipherable clues."
"I cannot give you what I do not have. The Raziq who hid the keys are dead. I cannot call them back from whatever hell they may have gone to, so I am at a loss as to the point of this request."
"The request isn't more information." Which he'd know if he was reading my mind. The fact that he obviously wasn't meant either he was some distance away or something else was going on. Aedh could usually read the minds of anyone nearby, and my father had implied he could read mine anytime he desired. "I want to know if you can create a ward or something like that to keep both the Raziq and the black sorcerer who stole the first key out of whatever building I happen to be searching. It would need to be reusable."
He was silent for a moment, then said, voice cool, "When would you need such an item?"
"As soon as possible. I don't want to start looking for the key before we have some means of protecting ourselves from outside forces."
And that outside force included him.
If he heard that particular thought, he thankfully didn't react to it. "It could be done. It would not, however, keep anything flesh based out."