In total, there were five Adepts in the camp, as for the rest of the members of the expedition, the researchers and porters were either fledgling warriors or Initiates, because their talents were too low to push them to the level of Acolytes.
I may not be extremely sure of what I was speaking about, but I think I hit the nail close enough to the target that Adept Torvin straightened, and he looked at me with surprise and curiosity.
The other researchers near the instrument tables were looking up from their brass dials and calibration arrays. I had made no effort to lower my voice, and they heard what I said.
Good, it was time to shake things up.
"The ambient Essence density in this camp," I said, "must have been dropping since the day we arrived. Slowly. A fraction of a percent each day. Not enough to notice if you weren’t looking for it. But you were looking for it, weren’t you, Adept Torvin? That’s why you’ve been recalibrating every morning. Your instruments kept telling you something was wrong, and you kept telling yourself it was one of the unknown and unique functions of the pyramid. Did you perhaps think you may have discovered something new about the pyramid and became a bit excited?"
I coughed, "Not that there is anything wrong with trying to gain academic accolades, but..."
My words trailed away as I saw the look on Adept Torvin’s face, and I wanted to pin my mouth shut in embarrassment.
I had long noticed that when I was feeling tension or facing an unknown situation, my mouth worked faster than my head.
Torvin’s hand tightened on his resonance meter. "Voss, I don’t know where you heard such..."
"I didn’t hear it," I said, trying to bring the topic back on track. "I felt it. The Essence is being drained by something in this camp and not the pyramid, as you first thought. It is small but hidden in plain sight."
I turned and pointed at the surveyor’s stake at the eastern edge of the instrument line. "That stake. The one you hammered in on the first day. Have you looked at it closely?"
At this time, my words were causing enough commotion that Adept Varis and Adept Fenara had left Scholar Orath behind and walked up to the instrument tables to hear my words.
It helped that Adept Torvin had gestured for them to come listen to me, and now they were looking at me, a bit amused and maybe more than a bit irritated.
I could see my friends alongside Rex slowly coming over to my position, and I could practically feel Bari’s eyes digging into my back, but I did not acknowledge him.
Knowing him, he was thinking of a crazy excuse to rescue me from the trouble he thought I was putting myself into; no doubt, he would claim that he spiked my food or slammed my head a bit too much with his Surge cast.
Adept Torvin followed my gaze towards the surveyor’s stake. So did the other two Adepts.
"That’s a standard surveyor’s stake," Adept Varis said. "They’re all the same."
"They’re not," I said. "Feel it. With your Anima. Not your eyes."
Adept Fenara was getting annoyed and wanted to lash out at me, but Adept Torvin raised a hand and stopped her. He hesitated, but then he extended his hand toward the stake, palm open, and sent a thread of his Anima across the distance.
For a beat, it did not seem like he felt anything, and a trace of annoyance was beginning to emerge on his face before that annoyance morphed into confusion.
After a moment, he opened his eyes, and they were filled with astonishment,
"That’s... that’s not possible," he whispered. "It’s absorbing. The stake is absorbing ambient Essence. Not much, but if it’s been doing it since we left for the expedition, then there will not be much..."
His words trailed away as he looked at the other stakes, before he began to extend his senses, checking them one by one, and it was not long before he identified all of the stakes that had been tampered with that were spaced around the camp, all of them identical, all of them placed on the first day by the same hands.
"Orath," Adept Torvin said. "He placed these. He said they were for the survey grid."
Adept Fenara moved to the nearest stake. She knelt, touched it, and released a wave of frost that spread across the metal surface, then retreated. "There’s a configuration inside. Etched into the metal. It’s not a surveyor’s stake. It’s a focus. Part of a larger array."
"An Essence Dampener," I said. "The whole camp is the array. The stakes are the nodes. These stakes are removing the essence in the air for now, but soon its true purpose would be activated, and all of your abilities would be suppressed, and your spells would hardly be stronger than those of an Acolyte. It makes you all easy pickings."
The Adepts looked at each other. Confusion. Fear. The first stirrings of anger.
Commander Rel appeared at the edge of the instrument tables. Her staff was in her hand. Her face was the cold mask I had seen in every loop, but her eyes were scanning the stakes, the Adepts, me.
"Voss," she said. "Step away from the researchers. You are interfering with expedition protocols."
"I’m saving their lives," I said. "Something you were never going to do."
Rel’s mask cracked. Just a fraction. "You will stand down, Acolyte, or I will..."
"You will what?" I took a step toward her. "Kill me? You’ve tried, but it didn’t take."
She looked at me with puzzlement, anger, and clear confusion, but these expressions made the Adepts that were watching us more wary. They might not believe what I was saying in full, but they knew that something in the camp was not normal, and even the other researchers were backing away, uncertain.
Orath was still at the pyramid’s base, his instrument pressed to the black surface. He had not turned, and had not spoken, almost as if he did not care what was happening here... I mean, why would he? The eruption was happening in the next ten minutes; however, I think I saw his shoulder tense.
"The stakes," I said, loud enough for everyone to hear. "Pull them up. Break the array. The Essence will return to normal, and you’ll have your full power back when it matters."
"Don’t," Rel said. "Those stakes are essential to the survey. Removing them will compromise..."
"They’ll compromise the Conclave’s ability to kill you," I interrupted. "That’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it? Not the survey. Not the expedition. The Harvest."
These words were enough for Rel’s eyes to lose the confusion, and she focused on me like a snake, and her aura instantly changed.
Adept Torvin’s head snapped toward Rel. "Commander. What is the boy talking about?"