Tricks of the Trade - By Laura Anne Gilman Page 0,23
– pun intended – that if I picked that one up, all the walls in the world weren’t going to protect me from knowing Venec a bit more than I wanted to.
I didn’t want to know what he was up to, not that way.
And I really didn’t want him to know that I was checking what he was up to, or think that I cared enough to look.
It wasn’t logical, I knew it wasn’t logical, and that was probably why I hated what the Merge did to me so much. I was completely in touch with my hedonistic, sensual side, sure, but, I still thought rather than emoted, considered rather than reacted. It was how I was built, to bulldog through everything in as practical a manner as possible, and this... this threatened to overwhelm all that.
No, better to stick with the clear crystal, until I had a better balance going.
Coward, a little voice whispered in my ear, a rusking, rattling voice like dry leaves and empty husks, and then was gone. I acknowledged the charge, and ignored it, along with everything else I was ignoring.
Current required control, and being in control. Especially if you were going to open yourself up to scry.
The clear globe was heavier than I remembered, filling both my hands and forcing them down to the bed with its weight. I let my arms lower, relaxing my shoulders, letting the breath ease out of me on a slow exhale. The moment the back of my hand touched the files spread out in front of me, I felt the downward-upward spiral of current that meant something was stirring, and I had to scramble, mentally, to get into proper fugue-state before it hit me.
“Ten... nine... eight... ”
Too much, too fast, before I hit seven I was in it, caught up in a net of current-threads, sparkling deep green and blue around me. I pulled a breath in before I got dizzy, but it wasn’t enough. Sparks flickered like lightning strikes against the inside of my eyelids, leaving a shimmer of sparkles behind that made me want to throw up, the way you do when vertigo hits. It was almost a struggle to stay grounded, something I would die rather than admit to anyone. And then I found my ground like a click and a snap and I could soothe the current swirling in and around my core, taming it back into something useful, something controlled.
I opened my eyes, mage-sense firmly in place, and looked down at the globe.
Sparks were already flicking inside the stone, mimicking what I had seen with my eyes closed, running from my fingertips down to the imperfection in the crystal, where they fractured and bounced back to the surface. More blues and greens, but darker, emitting a faint but clear warning of danger.
Current was dangerous, and it could give off a definite sense of menace, if the signature was malign enough, but my own current? That made no sense.
“Ground and center,” I whispered. “Control what you see.”
There wasn’t any control at all in the actual scrying. That was one of the reasons why it wasn’t popular anymore: you opened yourself up and waited for something to show up. Like deer hunting, J said, although the thought of my oh-so-patrician mentor actually sitting in a blind, freezing his ass off...
Actually, he probably had done it, at least once. There was a wicked-looking crossbow hanging in his library that I’d always assumed was a gift from someone, but he’d be able to pull it, no problem. When he was younger, anyway.
Useless thought, Bonnie. Distractions. Clear the mind. Ground the core. Open your awareness, Bonnie, and see what waits.
Scrying requires trust as well as Talent, because that lack of control cuts both ways. You don’t ask for specifics, just open and wait, and brace yourself for what might or might not come.
There was no way I could brace myself for the scrying that hit.
I was wide open when the kenning came hard on its heels, the two of them twining into a braided rope that nearly knocked me off my magical ass. My vision – my entire awareness, was filled with a night-blue sky filled with electrical fire, tilting on dragons’ wings and shattered spires. Hissing, out-of-control cables: lashing and spitting like a serpent’s tongue. I tried to focus, to draw the vision in more closely, and was dropped into a long nauseating swoop down, like a bungee cord from hell, and then stark white filled that