Chapter 14

I spent the rest of the day working on mundane problems that had a bad habit of coming up, no matter how much I wished that they would stay inactive. Oh, well, it had to be done, so I took care of them with as much good grace as I could muster.

I was working away at my desk when everything suddenly vanished in an impenetrable darkness. My first thought was that this was an attack from that wizard who was reputed to be so powerful. Well, my first thought appeared to be the correct one.

I was totally unaware of my surroundings because of the darkness, but that was easy to fix. I used the spell that Granny Eltman had used to provide light to the nether regions of Waterfall Keep. That did not help very much since I now perceived myself to be inside a featureless sphere. I was floating inside the sphere and not touching the wall with any part of my body. I reached out to touch the wall to try to determine what it was made of. OUCH! I received an electrical shock that jarred my whole body.

That's when I heard a maniacal laugh that was so loud that it hurt my ears. I quickly conjured some ear plugs to protect my ears. "So you think that you are such a powerful wizard, do you, Sirrah Geoffery? Well, I do not think that self disillusionment will last much longer once you have felt the full effects of my little chamber of isolation. I could tell that you already felt the electrical field that resides all along the wall. Let us see how you react when you cannot escape touching the wall."

The chamber began to shrink, and it would not be long before it touched some part of my body. I had to stop it, but I could not think of anything but a mechanical brace to hold back the shrinking wall. I immediately conjured such a brace with multiple arms that contacted the wall of the sphere in a multitude of places. This emergency action did stop the wall of the sphere from collapsing around me, but it did not do anything to get me out of here.

"Aha! So you did find a way to foil a simple charm; therefore, you will be more of a challenge than I expected. Tell me, how do you react to heat?"

The temperature quickly began to rise within the sphere, and I was sweating very soon. I decided to counter the initial heat by chilling my robe. That helped for a little bit, but I was forced to breathe hot air. The temperature rose so high that my throat seemed to burn as I breathed. Okay, this was getting serious!

I was not able to counteract the hot air directly because I was not yet familiar enough with spells affecting the air. However, I was very good with water spells, so I made it start to snow inside the sphere. Of course, the snow flashed to water and much of it to steam as it reacted with the heat, but I had the spell set up to remove the steam as soon as it formed and to convert it back into snow.

We were at something of a stalemate for a few minutes as my capturer tried to find a way to counter my move. I was busy working, too, and I was looking for a way to breach the wall of the sphere. Since my captor had used electricity as the first torment aimed at me, I guessed that the sphere was somehow intimately related to electric spells.

Ah, suppose that the sphere was really nothing more than a swiftly rotating ring of electricity. How could I counteract that? Perhaps, if I could stop the rotation, then the sphere would collapse. I imagined a device with a sharpened spike projecting through a plate contoured to fit snugly against the inner wall of the sphere. Once I had the design of the device settled, I conjured it into existence and hurled it against the wall of the sphere as hard and as fast as I could move it in the limited space that I had available.

The sharpened point penetrated the wall, but I have no idea if it went all of the way through; however, that was not important. What I wanted was what happened so soon after the device struck the wall that I could not perceive any delay. The rod projecting into the interior of the sphere where I was confined struck one of the braces, and the whole system flew apart.

The sphere, my braces, and my device were all wiped out in something less than an instant, and I was suddenly suspended in space just over the floor of a wizard's workroom. I had been expecting something of this nature to happen, so I was able to grab hold of the situation more quickly than my opponent. I had a spell ready, and I teleported him into one of the rooms that Granny Eltman had prepared inside the depths of our mountain.

The wizard was nonplussed because he had never expected that such a simple device could destroy his sphere, and he had no idea where he was, so he could not escape. I asked Wizard Armon to keep an eye on him while I rested for a few minutes. That bit of mental and magical activity had been very tiring.