A dark-haired, plump girl reached up and touched both his temples before he could say or do anything. “Got him, Quenten,” she said in satisfaction. “If you want to feed through me, I’m not much use for anything else right now.”

“What are you going to do?” Daren asked anxiously. “I mean, I don’t want you to go blasting at him and hit our people.”

“Not a chance. Kero likes things subtle. We figured out last night that we get the same effect by killing or wounding him physically—he‘H still lose his hold on the magic and on the minds he’s controlling.”

“So I’m going to give them the way to identify him,” Hadli said. “Quenten will bowl-cast a FarSeeing spell, and Gem and Myrqan will find a weapon to hit him with, while the rest distract him and keep his defenses all facing forward.”

Daren turned; Quenten was already kneeling on the ground with his bowl of water in front of him—but this time there was a picture forming in it that even he could see.

Hadli and two others knelt beside him, and Daren found that he could still see over their heads. What he saw was the backs of several people in robes, with coruscating colors and strange shapes appearing just beyond them. His eyes went to one in a dull blue robe, and he saw, faintly, the same overlay of black and scarlet auras he’d “seen” before.

“That’s him,” Hadli said. “The one in the blue, with the copper belt and the serpent-glyph on his sleeve.”

“Daren,” Quenten called, without taking his attention from the bowl, “When we strike him, you’ll feel it in the earth. There’s going to be a moment of recoil, and then a hesitation. That is when you need to concentrate on what, exactly, you want to happen. There’s a lot of power there; think of it as a flash flood about to roll down the river. Once you get it started, you won’t be able to get it to stop or even change directions. If you don’t know what to do—don’t think of anything.”

Daren refrained from making a sarcastic answer. In the bowl, a light, ornamental dagger was elevating from a table behind the mages. Before he had a chance to ask what that meant, the thing snapped forward as if it had been thrown, and buried itself to the hilt in Blue-robe’s back.

Daren had been in an earthquake, once. The feeling was similar. For a moment, the earth seemed to drop out beneath him, and he was left hanging in space, with a sense that something huge and ponderous was poised over him, like a wave, waiting to break.