Even as he was rolling, Zedd was casting webs to tangle the man in a snare of magic. The man, in turn, lunged to tangle Zedd in meaty arms.

In desperation, despite the close range, Zedd pulled enough heat from the surrounding air to unleash a thunderous blast of lightning and cast it directly into the man. The blinding flash burned a lacing line through the stone block wall beyond him.

Only too late did Zedd realize that the discharge of deadly power had lanced through the man without effect. The hall filled with shards of stone whistling about, ricocheting from walls and ceiling, skipping along the floor.

The man landed on Zedd, driving the wind from him. Desperately yelling for help, the man wrestled Zedd on the slippery floor. Zedd concocted a weak and fumbling defense, to give the man a false sense of confidence, until he was able to suddenly land a knee sharply at the point of his attacker's sternum. The man cried out in surprise as much as in pain as he flipped backward off Zedd, gasping to get his wind back.

Having sucked so much heat from the air had left it as frigid as a winter night. Clouds of their breath filled the cold air as both men panted with the effort of the struggle. The man again cried out for help, hoping to bring comrades to his aid.

Zedd would assume that anyone would fear to attack a wizard by muscle alone. This man, though, had no need to fear magic. Even if he hadn't known that before, certainly the evidence was now all too clear. Yet, despite the man being at least twice the size of his opponent, less than a third his age, and having immunity from the conjuring being thrown at him, Zedd thought that he fought rather… squeamishly.

However timid the man was, he was determined. He scrambled to attack again. If he broke Zedd's neck, it wouldn't matter that he did so timidly.

As the man regained his feet and lunged, Zedd drew back his arms, elbows cocked, fingers spread, and cast more of the lightning, but this time he knew better than to waste his effort trying to cut down a man not touched by magic. Instead, Zedd sought to rake the floor with the conjured bolts of power. It slammed into the stone with unrestrained violence, ripping and splintering whole sections, throwing sharp jagged shards streaking through the air.

A fist-sized block of stone hurtling at tremendous speed crashed into the man's shoulder. Above the boom of thunderous power, Zedd heard bones snap. The impact spun the man around and knocked him back against the wall.

Since Zedd now knew that this intruder could not directly be harmed by magic, he instead filled the hall with a deafening storm of magic designed not to assail the man directly but to tear the place apart into a cloud of deadly flying fragments.

The man, as he recoiled from striking the wall, again threw himself at Zedd. He was met by a shower of deadly shards whistling through the air toward him. Blood splattered across the wall beyond as the man was ripped to shreds. In a blink, he was killed and dropped heavily to the floor.

From beyond the smoke and dust filling the hall, two more men suddenly flew at Zedd. His gifted sense told him that, like the first man, these men were not there, either.

Zedd threw yet more lightning to rip up the floor and unleash flying stone at the men, but they were already through the flares of power, diving onto him. He crashed to his back, the men atop him. They seized his arms.

Zedd struggled frantically to let loose a blast to bring down the ceiling. He began to whirl the air above the men to tear the hall to pieces, and them with it.

A beefy hand with a filthy white rag clamped down over Zedd's face. He gasped, only to inhale a powerful smell that made his throat want to clench shut, but too late.

With the cloth and the big hand covering his whole face, Zedd couldn't see. The world spun sickeningly.

Soft, silent blackness pressed in around him as he fought to resist it, until he lost consciousness.

CHAPTER 18

Zedd woke, his head spinning, his stomach heaving with rippling waves of nausea. He didn't think that in his entire life he had ever felt so sick.

He hadn't known it was possible to feel so intense an urge to vomit, without actually throwing up. He couldn't lift his head. If he could just die right then, it would be a welcome release from such dizzying agony.

He started to put his hands over the light hurting his eyes, but found his wrists were tied behind his back.

"I think he's waking," a man said in a subservient voice.

Despite his nausea, Zedd instinctively tried to use his gift to sense how many people were around him. For some reason, his gift that ordinarily flowed as easily as thought, as simply as using his eyes to see, his ears to hear, felt thick and slow, as if mired in molasses. He reasoned that it was probably the result of whatever vile substance it was they had soaked the rag in to cause him to pass out when held over his face. Still, he managed to sense that there was only one person around him.

Powerful hands seized his robes and yanked him to his feet. Zedd gave himself permission to vomit. Against all expectation, it didn't happen. The dark night swam before his blurred vision. He could make out trees against the sky, stars, and the looming black shape of the Keep.

Suddenly, a tongue of flame ignited in midair. Zedd blinked at the unexpected brightness. The small flame, wavering with a lazy motion, floated above the upturned palm of a woman with wiry gray hair. Zedd saw other people in the shadows; his gifted sense was wrong. Like the man who had attacked him, these, too, had to be people not affected by magic.

The woman standing before him peered at him intently. Her expression twisted with satisfied loathing.

"Well, well, well," she said with patronizing delight. "The great wizard himself awakes."

Zedd said nothing. It seemed to amuse her. Her fearsome scowl and humped nose, lit from the side by the flame she held above her palm, floated closer.

"You are ours, now," she hissed.

Zedd, having waited patiently to gather his resolve, abruptly initiated the required mental twist to the gift all the way down to his soul in order to simultaneously call down lightning, focus air to slice this woman in two, and gather every stone and pebble from all around to crush her under an avalanche of rock. He expected the night to light with such power as he unlocked and sent forth.

Nothing happened.

Not waiting to waste the time to analyze what could be the difficulty, he was forced to abandon attempts at satisfying his emotional preferences, and to ignite wizard's fire itself to consume her.

Nothing happened.

Not only did nothing happen, but it felt as if the attempt itself were but a pebble falling endlessly into a vast, dark well. The expectation withered in the face of what he found within himself: a kind of dreadful emptiness.

Zedd felt as if he couldn't light a tongue of flame to match hers if his life depended on it. He was somehow cut off from forming his ability into much of anything useful other than to use it for a bit of dim awareness. Probably a lingering result of the foul-smelling substance they had pressed over his face to make him lose consciousness.

Since Zedd couldn't muster any power, he did the only thing he could:

he spit in her face.

With lightning speed, she backhanded him, knocking him from the arms of the men holding him. Unable to use his hands to break his fall, he hit the ground unexpectedly hard. He lay in the dirt for a time, his ears ringing in the aftereffect of the hit he'd taken, waiting for someone to lean over and kill him.

Instead, they hauled him to his feet again. One of the men seized his hair and pulled his head up, forcing him to look into the woman's face. The scowl he saw there looked like it spent a great deal of time on her face.