Scholar of Magic (Art of the Adept #3) - Michael G. Manning Page 0,3

those thoughts away. They wouldn’t help. Instead he attached a source-link to her with barely a thought and began draining her turyn.

“What are you doing?” she asked, her eyes widening in alarm. “Stop!”

“Draw from your elemental. Together we can hold this,” Will explained.

Stephanie continued to struggle, but her strength faded quickly. She did draw some turyn from her elemental, so she wound up helping him inadvertently. As the seconds ticked by, Will saw Duncan join the laborers and begin working to reinforce the iron brace. From what he could see without joining them, the central beam had started to fold in an unusual manner, though whether that was because of a flaw in the material or unexpectedly high stresses he didn’t know.

The workers wrestled the heavy iron bars into place while Duncan took the unusual step of welding them directly with magic. Will knew it took a lot of turyn to do, and he worried about the cost to his teacher, but it wasn’t as though they had any better options at that point. “How much longer?” yelled Will. Stephanie and her elemental had run dry, and the turyn he was absorbing wouldn’t be enough to last much longer.

“Ten minutes. Can you hold it that long?” called the instructor.

Will nodded, closing his eyes as he released Stephanie’s hand. She slumped to the ground beside him, exhausted but still conscious, barely. She watched him with angry eyes.

Internally, Will tried not to panic, but he knew with certainty that he wouldn’t last another minute, much less ten. What do I do? What do I do? His thoughts ran in circles without providing solutions. I need to absorb turyn faster. He stretched outward, trying to make his outer shell, the boundary that he drew turyn in with, larger. He failed, but he kept pushing.

Something happened then, and it felt as though his body was slipping away. For a split second he was looking down on himself, as though he floated in the air. Unfortunately, his control also vanished. The energy stopped completely, until his perspective snapped back into its accustomed place, and then he had to work furiously to catch up. The brief loss of control had put him even further behind.

Sweat rolled down his forehead, and the world began to turn gray as he came to the end of his supply of turyn. Oddly, something occurred to him then, a memory of a lesson in alchemy. “The rate of diffusion of one solute into another is dependent on the difference in concentrations.” Who had said that? Arrogan, or perhaps Professor Karlovic, it hardly mattered. It worked for liquids and gases, surely it would be the same for turyn as well.

Desperate, he split his concentration as he tried something new. He pushed outward with his absorption shell, while at the same time pulling inward on the turyn that entered it, keeping the turyn compacted at the center to create an energy vacuum within most of the space around him. It had just been a vague notion in his mind, but it made sense, and somehow, it worked. His rate of turyn absorption increased, and as the seconds ticked by, he began to feel hopeful. It seemed he was absorbing close to the same amount of turyn he was using.

He wasn’t sure if it was slightly more, or slightly less, though. Time would tell. “Are you holding up?” asked the instructor worriedly. “This is taking longer than I thought.”

Will opened his eyes to stare at Duncan, but he didn’t dare speak. The world was spinning, and he felt as though the slightest disturbance might cause him to topple into disaster. He gave a faint nod, then closed his eyes again. Watching them didn’t help his state of mind. It just made it seem as though time was passing even more slowly.

I can do this, he reminded himself, trying to deny the panic bubbling up just beneath the surface of his conscious mind. Don’t think about the time. His breath came in short gasps as his strict turyn control left his body bereft of its normal energy for autonomic functions. He had to consciously remember to breathe. As if I don’t have enough to worry about.

An eternity ticked by with agonizing slowness. He