"That's exactly why Magister Halathyn's been working on it for several years now," Kelbryan agreed. "In fact, the whole reason I let him come out here in the first place?" somehow, Jasak felt confident, her choice of the verb "let" was probably painfully accurate "?was still let him field test the spellware."

"And is that the reason you're out here, if I may ask?" Jasak inquired.

"Well, for that … and to keep an eye on Magister Halathyn," she admitted with a slight smile.

"Which suggests to my keen intelligence that you were, indeed, being overly modest about your contribution to the project," Jasak said. "Somehow I don't see the Institute letting both of its top magisters wander around three or four months' travel from home if they weren't both needed."

"I suppose there might be some truth to that," she conceded after a moment. "Although, to be completely honest, and without trying to undervalue my own contributions to the R amp;D, the real reason I insisted on coming was to keep him from wandering around out here to handle any field modifications the spellware might require. Besides," she smiled infectiously, "it's the first 'vacation' I've taken in over five years!"

"But why all the secrecy?" Jasak asked. She looked at him, and he shrugged. "The UTTTA must the champing at the bit to get this deployed, so why was Magister Halathyn so busy insisting that he wasn't really up to anything?"

"I didn't have anything to do with UTTTA, or any other official part of the Union," she replied. It seemed evident from her toad and her expression that she really would have preferred to leave it at that, but after glancing at him consideringly for a second or two, she shrugged.

"You may have heard that magisters can be just a little … paranoid about their research." She smiled briefly, and Jasak managed to turn a laugh into a not particularly convincing cough. "A little paranoid," in this case, was rather like saying that White Mist Lake was "a little damp."

"Well, all right, maybe it goes a bit further than that," she said with a reluctant grin. But the grin faded quickly, and she shook her head. "In fact, it goes a lot further than that where Magister Halathyn is concerned. Especially for something like this. There's no way he was going to let even a whisper about this project out where the Mythalans might hear about it before he was ready to publish."

Jasak nodded in suddenly sober understanding of his own.

"While I'd never like to suggest that Magister Halathyn doesn't hold you in the highest respect, Hundred Olderhan," she continued, "the real reason we're out here? It's the farthest away from the Mythal Falls Academy he could get for his field test. And?"

She paused, looking at him with the sort of measuring, considering look he was unused to receiving. After a moment, she seemed to reach some inner decision and leaned closer to him, lowering her voice slightly.

"Actually," she said quietly, "we've done a bit of refining on his original theoretical work, as well. The sort which requires absolute validation before anyone publishes. I have to admit that I didn't really expect to be able to test all of the features in a single trip, but take a look at this."

She tapped the unit with her wand, and both waterfalls and the arrow disappeared instantly. A brief moment passed, and then they lit again … but this time, they were noticeably different.

She looked up at Jasak, one eyebrow crooked, and he frowned. Then, suddenly, his eyes widened and he gave her a very sharp glance indeed.

"Exactly," she said, even more quietly. "Magister Halathyn's original idea was to produce a unit which would detect the closest portal and home a survey team in on it. But once we got into the theory, we discovered that we could actually nest the spells."

"So that?" Jasak indicated the display, "?means there's a second gate out here?"

"If it's working properly. And?"

She tapped the display again. And again. And a fourth time. With each tap, the process repeated, producing new directional arrows and new distance and strength displays, and Jasak swallowed.

"Is that why Magister Halathyn's been talking in terms of a cluster?" he asked, and she nodded.

"Either the thing's completely screwed up?which is always possible, however little we might want to admit it?or else there are at least a total of five portals associated with this one." A jerk of her head indicated the swamp portal. "Or, more precisely, this one is one of at least five associated with this one," she amended, bringing up the original display on the strongest and nearest of the other portals.

"You said 'at least,'" Jasak observed intently, and she nodded again.

"We never expected to hit anything like this on our first field test, Sir Jasak, so there are only a total of six 'slots' in the spellware. In theory, we could nest as many as fifteen or twenty?it just never occurred to us to do it. I suppose that was partly because the Zholhara Cluster only has six portals, and it seemed unlikely anyone might find one even bigger."

"Gods," Jasak breathed. He stared at the unit for several seconds, then shook himself. "I'm beginning to see why you were keeping this whole thing so quiet!"

"I thought you might. Still," her eyes brightened, "as happy as I am with how well it seems to be performing, I think you may still be missing something about this cluster as compared to Zholhara."

"What?" He moved his gaze from the unit to her face,

"The Zholhara portals are as much as three thousand miles apart. The maximum range on our detector?assuming we got our sums right?is only about nine hundred miles. In fact, according to the readouts, the farthest one we've detected is less than six hundred miles from this portal right here."

Jasak sucked in a deep, hard breath. A minimum of five virgin portals, all within a radius of only six hundred miles of one another? Gods! They could have five entirely new transit chains radiating from this single spot! It took him several seconds to wrap his mind around the implications, and then he smiled crookedly.

"So that's why Magister Halathyn's like a gryphon in a henhouse!"

"Oh, that's exactly what he's like," she agreed with a grin. "And it'd take a special act of God to get him out of here before every one of these portals is nailed down. Assuming, of course, that they're really there. Don't forget that this is our first field trial. It's going to be mighty embarrassing if it has us out here chasing some sort of wild goose!"

"Not very likely with both of you involved in chasing the goose in question, Magister Kelbryan," he told her with a grin. She waved one hand in an almost uncomfortable gesture, and he gave a tiny nod of acknowledgment and shifted conversational gears.

"Well, I guess we'll know one way or the other pretty soon," he said. "How far away from the nearest are we now?"

"Assuming Magister Halathyn and I got it right when we built this thing, it's about thirty miles that way," she replied, pointing almost due north, directly away from White Mist Lake.

"About fifteen hours hard hike, in this terrain," Jasak said thoughtfully. "Twice that with rest breaks, a bivouac, and the need to find the best trails. And that assumes basically decent going the entire way."

He glanced at the local time display, then craned his neck, looking up through a break in the autumnal canopy at the sun, and grimaced. The local days were getting short at this time of year, and there was absolutely no way they were going to make it before dusk, he decided, and raised his voice.

"Fifty Garlath!"

"Sir?" Shevan Garlath was a lean, lanky, dark-haired man, almost ten years older than Jasak, despite his junior rank. Although he'd been born in Yanko, his family had migrated from one of the smaller Hilmaran kingdoms barely fifty years earlier, and it showed in his strong nose and very dark eyes as he turned towards the hundred.