"But he didn't say it wasn't—"

Pologne raised her finger. "We could use Petronius's Beard Charm—"

"We'd get a backlash. Think of the third law of Sorcerodynamics!"

"Not the third law, the second!"

"That wouldn't address the ambient power sources," Freezia chided her friends.

"Obadiah's it is, then." Jinetta took out a small alembic and a bright red stick from her backpack. Pologne uncorked a small bottle and poured a few drops of thick liquid into the container. Jinetta stirred it with the stick, and the volume increased to fill the alembic. Scarlet steam started to pour out of the narrow spout. A thread of it shot upward, tilted and began to turn in a circle as if looking around, then headed off toward the nearest shred. A gust of wind caught the red smoke and wound it upward in a spiral. It tried to break loose from the wind, darting almost desperately at the invisible sides of the eddy, until it simply dissipated. The Pervects stared in dismay.

"It didn't work!" Pologne said. "What went wrong?"

"Oh, forget it!" Melvine grumbled impatiently, pushing them all aside. "I'll do it!" He clapped his hands and held them out.

The light whirlwind reconstituted and grew from a cute little dust-devil into an inverted cone thirty feet high. The wind picked up mightily, screaming around us like a hurricane. A gale picked up my hair and started to twist it into a tight spiral on top of my head. Markie had warned me about Melvine's success in Elemental School, and it appeared it had been well earned. I braced myself. The three Pervects clutched one another, hanging onto their bags and each other.

As the cyclone grew, it picked up every loose object on the ground. The closer to the source, the more powerful it was. Yelping, Tolk flew into the air and tumbled helplessly to Melvine's feet. Even Bee and his immense pack were dragged up the hillside, along with loose stones, dust, dry plants and a few small animals. Melvine flattened his hands, and the wind died away. The debris formed a raised ring about three feet high around us. A leg, a foot and an ear were all that showed where Tolk and Bee were half-buried by the dust.

Triumphantly, Melvine picked up the pieces of parchment.

"There!" he said, waving them at me in his pudgy little hand. "That wasn't so hard! What's next, Teach?"

"That was like drowning someone who only wanted a glass of water!" Jinetta snarled. She and the others dusted themselves off resentfully.

"Sour grapes," Melvine sneered back. "You don't know how to do anything with style."

"But it's exactly what I was going to say," I put in. "Melvine, look around you."

Tolk scratched his way out of the pile of dirt and shook himself vigorously. Bee stood up and brushed himself off. Both of them glared at Melvine.

The Cupy regarded me with a hurt stare. "What about it? Didn't I do what you asked?"

"And you ignored what I said about keeping it simple. How many lines of force do you see?"

He peered around. I knew what he was seeing, or rather not seeing. It was one of the reasons I had chosen Sear as a testing ground. The only other place I'd ever been that was almost as magik-bereft was Blut, but I had had a quick chat with Vilhelm, the vampire Dispatcher of Nightmares. He had suggested it would frighten the locals too much if I brought my off-dimension students there for a test. Since Blut didn't get many visitors, they might cause a riot. I agreed that it wasn't worth risking a lynching just for academic experimentation. On the other hand, the Sear natives were very friendly. I could feel them watching us now.

Melvine stared up at the sky then down at the ground, his pudgy face growing more and more distressed.

"Take a good long look," I said. At last he gave up. "I don't see any."

"Tech-no-nothing," Pologne snorted. From her tastefully appointed backpack she produced a palm-sized orb that glowed the same green as her ensemble. "There's only one to speak of. It's over there, a long way, about fifteen miles."

"Right," I said. "Good call. I'm sure you've all had plenty of experience in storing magikal energy so you don't have to go looking for a line of force when you want to do magik. Right?"

"Uh, no," Jinetta said at last.

"Didn't think so," I said. "It's why your spell didn't work. Why not?"

"Well, there have always been plenty of lines of force when we need them! Perv is full of them."

"It's full of something," Melvine said nastily.

"I'll do the sarcasm here," I said, glaring down at the Cupy. "That was a pretty comprehensive spell. I'll bet you're mostly tapped out now, too. Where are you going to get more magikal energy?"

"From that force line," Melvine said with a sigh as if I was too dumb to live. He stared in the direction of the line Pologne had detected, and concentrated. In a moment, his face contorted. He had discovered something else, I had done the first time I'd visited Sear: something in the natural landscape absorbed magikal energy. Unless you were in line of sight to the lines of force, you couldn't tap into them. "I can hop back to Klah, or Cupid, and stoke up."

"No way," I said, firmly. "Anyone who bounces out for a single moment is off the course for good. You have to play this one out right here according to the rules, and Rule One is 'KISS.' It stands for 'keep it simple, stupid.' If you had just concentrated on the fragments of paper, you could have collected them with an easy attraction spell, or caused them to reconstruct into their original form, which would have been heavy enough to fall to the ground. Since you used up all your stored magik, we're going to have to go to the nearest source to get more. For those of you who aren't used to carrying your own around, it's a good practice to get into. I know that my best teacher," and here I was thinking of Aahz, "told me the smartest thing I could do for myself was to be prepared for an emergency. It's like taking a breath before you jump into a lake. Once you're under water, it's too late to think about air."

"Store energy inside ourselves?" Pologne asked. "You don't use a peripheral device?"

I shrugged. "I hate to rely on anything that can be taken away from me. I'm a rotten swordsman, so anything I wield could end up in the hands of an opponent. I feel the same way about magikal gadgets. That's just my opinion, but you're paying for it."

The Pervects looked anxious and hugged their backpacks. I grinned. Perv was one of the dimensions that made use of magik and technology almost equally. I'd seen for myself how the mix of available power sources made relying on nonmagikal means almost irresistible. In my view it left the users vulnerable.

"That's not fair," Melvine whined. "It's a long way to that line."

"Then stay here and get through the rest of this test without magik," I said pleasantly. "Anyone else up for a walk?"

"Wow, he sounds so serious!" Freezia whispered as I stumped down the hill at the head of the file.

"Yeah, Jinetta, it looks like your aunt was right about him!" Pologne added.

"Not bad," Jinetta said. "It doesn't sound as if he adheres to academic methods, but he seems to have a good grasp of how to present his subject matter."

I kept my chin up and tried to look as if I wasn't listening. I was glad I looked impressive, but inside I knew I was faking it. I hoped they wouldn't find that out before I figured out what I was doing. I didn't want to let them or Aahz down. Though I'd hate to admit it, I had taken the idea from one of the views Bunny liked to watch in her PDA, a dramatic contest called "Sink or Swim," in which the green-skinned master of ceremonies made his contestants go through difficult ordeals in order to get basics they would need to complete other tasks. Usually I tried to ignore the entertainments she viewed while I was working on my magikal research. I couldn't get excited over a game I wasn't watching in the flesh. Once in a while, though, I found myself listening to the absurd and often ridiculously dangerous things the announcer had his contestants attempt. The differences were that I was using this challenge to make a point, and that nobody would get hurt if they used even a little sense. In my opinion, the techniques I wanted them to learn were vital whether they became high-powered executives or the local wizards of ten-house hamlets.