Lupi 09 - Mortal Ties

they can’t make it work longer
     than…what was it, thirty minutes?”
    “Thirty max,” Cullen agreed. “Theory suggests that no substance can shield well against
     raw magic for long because matter is, by definition, not magically inert.”
    Lily’s eyebrows went up. “By definition? No, wait—don’t explain that.” Once Cullen
     got going on theory it was hard to shut him up.
    His grin flashed. “I’ll spare you. Mind, not everyone agrees with that theory, but
     most do, which is why most everyone is looking to combine some type of natural shielding
     with shaped magic. Charms, in other words. I won’t go into all the reasons that’s
     so hard to do, but one big problem is that tech isn’t very useful if it lacks input
     and output. You can build an underground bunker and shield the hell out of it and
     be pretty sure the computer inside is protected, but as soon as you hook that computer
     up to somethingelse—even if it’s a wireless connection—you’ve breached the shield.”
    “But you’re not going to go into that.” Her hand moved automatically, jotting down
     notes that would help her remember later:
even wireless = shield breach.
    “Right. Because the real drawback to creating a shield isn’t the difficulty, though
     that’s huge. It’s that even if you succeed, all you’ve done is deflect the magic.
     Say you’re Delta Airlines and the shielding on your big 747 deflected the hell out
     of a magic surge, but that deflected power hit the cell tower you were flying over
     and now the phone company’s suing you. Or maybe it hit a small plane that couldn’t
     afford fancy shielding, and that plane crashed.” He shook his head. “Shields are not
     the answer.”
    “You found another answer.”
Shields = deflected magic = collateral damage.
    “Damn straight. Based on you and dragons.”
    Her forehead wrinkled. Dragons were magical sponges. So was she, to a much lesser
     degree. “You want to soak up the magic instead of deflecting it?”
    “Soak it up and store it…that’s the way to go. We do know something about storing
     magic. Not as much as the sidhe, but something. Enough to get me started, but I wasn’t
     making much headway until I started playing around with truth charms. You know that
     Arjenie burns them out?”
    “That’s what you said, yeah. Something about her Gift overloads them.” Benedict’s
     new Chosen had a rare Gift, a variant of the sidhe ability to cast illusions that
     let her go undetected. It wasn’t true invisibility. It was better, because it also
     baffled hearing, scent, and most wards.
    “I was curious about that, and so was she, so we experimented a bit. We figured it
     out, too. Her Gift is essentially the ability to lie to the mind. Even when she isn’t
     actively lying, the kind of magic she uses overloads any truth charm touching her.”
    “That makes sense.”
Arj. magic mental lie—overloads trth charms,
her pen noted. She snuck a glance at Rule. He was on the last page, but she wasn’t
     sure he was reading it.He seemed to be off in some private world, staring at the words without seeing them.
    “But the cool part is what that meant. It meant the charms were soaking up some of
     her magic. They had to be, or they wouldn’t burn out. Only a teensy trace, sure, but
     when I looked into it, I found that truth charms sample a trace of whatever magic
     is around—including raw magic.”
    Trth charms sampl magic.
“No one knew this?”
    He shrugged. “No reason to. They’re designed to work on nulls as well as Gifted, so
     why would they sample magic? Plus the amount of power they sample is so tiny…it took
     a lot of tinkering with my magnify spell before I could see it, but I did see it.
     That was the first time I’d seen any formed magic work at all the way your Gift does—by
     sampling a smidge of magic—so I knew I was onto something. After a godawful amount
     of trial and error, I made a charm that does more than sample. It acts as a funnel,
     sending all the magic it comes in contact with into an array of lemon quartz crystals.”
    “Why lemon quartz?”
    “Trees are too big and diamonds cost too damn much.”
    “Okaaaay.”
    “If I explained about trees, you’d yell at me for getting sidetracked. As for diamonds,
     they are the best portable way to store raw magic, no question about it. But they
     don’t provide a great matrix for elemental magic, and the power the charm funnels
     is…you might say it’s