“Merritt didn’t answer. He stood with his back straight and let the other councilmen similarly denounce his ideas. By the things they were saying, I’m not sure that the council even understood Merritt’s concepts. The things he was talking about were well over my head, yet I was able to grasp sparks of his brilliance in the things he said. But I don’t know enough to judge the accuracy of Merritt’s claims. The council certainly didn’t seem to think highly of them.

“The elder asked if he was correct about the danger to the subject. Merritt was silent for a time and then quietly said that while he was confident that he could do it, he had always been honest about the lethal risks involved. But, he asked them, how many would die without his weapon. They sat back in their chairs, unable, or unwilling, to say.

“The elder finally leaned forward again and said that there was nothing they could do to help him because they didn’t know if such seventh-level rift calculations even existed, but if they did, the council didn’t possess them. Merritt then said that since the council wasn’t able to provide him with the zenith formulas he needed, he would have go to the First Wizard himself. Several councilmen laughed and said that he could try.”

Magda now knew why she had recalled the name Merritt when she had heard it back in the passages on the way to see the spiritist. She remembered Baraccus coming home after a private meeting that had unsettled him. Magda had asked what troubled him. He had stood at the window looking out at the moon for a long time before he finally said that a brilliant wizard had come to him seeking some valuable and rare rift calculations for creating a seventh-level breach. Magda hadn’t known what that meant, but there was no doubt in her mind as to the seriousness of the issue. She asked if Baraccus had given the man what he needed.

Baraccus had said, “I couldn’t give Merritt the formulas he needs. I wish I could, but all the breach calculations are locked away in the Temple of the Winds, out of reach in the underworld.”

Magda knew, in Isidore’s story, that Merritt was not destined to get what he needed by visiting the First Wizard.

“Finally,” Isidore went on, “the elder suggested to Merritt that he go back to work on lesser tasks until he could come up with something worthwhile, something not outside the realm of possibility.

“When Merritt passed me on his way out, I could see that his jaw was set and his teeth were clenched. His fist was tightly gripped around the wire-wound hilt of his sword. I felt sorry for him because I heard something in his voice that I liked.”