With focus came understanding.

The maze was a pattern. It was a giant sigul he walked, meant to focus his attention above and beyond the draining distraction of the magic that held him here.

This was magic, magic far outside anything he had ever imagined. As he floated to the surface then dived back down, each time he regained more sense of himself, and each time he took in a better understanding of what he’d been subsumed into.

They were captives, yes. He and Peyter and every other wizard prisoner here. But that alone made no sense. What was the point of holding them all? Why waste so much energy to trap them in their minds?

The answer was the maze.

It was power. Samir could feel the shape now as he walked and the buzzing pulse inside him. The entire trap that pointed his mind in a certain direction that made it so he was raising energy, drawing the power into himself and feeding it into…

That was the question. What was this magic doing?

That answer wasn’t to be found in the maze. That answer, he found in bits and pieces, snatches of words overheard in those brief moments when his head broke the surface of the spell in which he was drowning.

Wizards were governed by laws, some of those laws as old as the orders themselves. The central, most important of those laws was that magic was not to be used to influence the politics of the world. Wizards could not participate in government. Rulers could not utilize magic to hold, or increase, their power. This was the first, more fundamental stricture around which the wizard orders had been built.

It was a law that was policed more thoroughly than any other. The archwizards watched their people. The Council of Nine existed so that each archwizard had eight others making sure they toed the line. Beyond that, the Bladed Brotherhood was always watching, listening, policing.

Sidaine was breaking that law, and she’d found a way to do it so subtly, so well, that no one had seemed to notice.

All her captives, their magic was being fed into the maze that only existed in a dream, but that made it no less real. From that dream, Sidaine could touch other dreams—dreams of people outside her control. She could whisper to them, feed them ideas, bend them to her will without ever coming near them.

The power Samir and his fellow captives were giving her let her reach far and wide. The energy was diffuse, from so many sources that it would be hard to trace. Hard to find. Even if someone managed to walk in on the horror show that was this house where they were all captive—well, in the same way wizards could have no say in mundane politics, mundane authority had no power over wizards. Only an archwizard could discipline a member of their order.

Girald knew what she was doing. He had to know. He’d been in that room. He’d pointed Samir at Sidaine. If he didn’t know her purposes specifically, he knew that he was sending students to a place from which they never returned.

Samir would find no salvation from that direction.

He’d lost track of time. It didn’t seem to pass in the maze, and when he was on the surface, there were no clues to help him orient. He was starting to suspect, though, he’d been in here a long time. In that time, no one had come to rescue him. No one was coming to rescue him.

He had tried to reach out to his fellow captives. As his awareness and stability grew, he started to feel the presence of the other mazes. The other wizards walked close to him. If he could only cross through the wall, he might be able to wake them up as well. The more of them waking together, the more chance they had to escape.

He spent a long time trying to break through the wall. Or climb over it. Or go around it. Wasted time, it turned out.

Peyter, especially. Samir could feel Peyter. In this strange dream, the fact Samir had known Peyter in the waking world was its own power. It made Peyter’s maze a shape Samir could imagine. That imagined shape was a guide.

Instead of going to Peyter, Samir tried to bring Peyter to him. He tried to change the shape of his own maze, to take a different path. If he could match Peyter, the shapes would merge and they would be together.

None of it worked. Either his ideas were flawed or the magic holding him was simply too strong. After everything he tried, Samir remained alone.

If he was going to get out, it would have to be under his own power. No help was coming, not from outside or inside.

It was time.