yes it would stretch the credibility. Sonea can't be the only one figthing the war. There would have to be at least more then one or two black magician's. How many depend on how many sachakans their fighting. I do think mental communication will be a bit limited or at least they're be aware that the magician's in sachaka would be able to hear them.

If the Sachakan's used the same tactics as the Ichani she could do it but if they attack in force she'd need more black magicians

I can understand the need for... oh I can't remember the word I'm looking for... ... I can understand the guild wanting to keep black magic 'black' and evil but like it was said it some of the BMT books, it's made the guild weak... I don't understand how the guild would expect to keep the Sachakan's at bay with just one black magician and a whole lot of ... weaklings (for want of a better word :P)

no your right. I don't think they could keep the sackakan's at bay with just one black magician. Plus I'm not sure how powerful all the other magician's are. Granted they might train more magician's to be warriors or at least skilled in it but I'm not sure how far that would go. I didn't get the impression that there were to many magicians that had the strength that Sonea or Akkarin had. (without black magic)

Even with black magic, I doubt that some of the magicians would be able to match Sonea & Akkarin's strength (except maybe Lorlen) Remember, Regin and his 10 or 11 (i forget exactly how many because it kept changing) cronies took on Sonea, and essentially used, i guess, a 'form' of black magic by channelling all their power through Regin - and yet she was able to hold them off and escape It would take A LOT of storage of power for the other magicians in the guild to match the strength of Sonea and Akkarin I think - and even then, they were probably only slightly less of a match for the Ichani (because the Ichani were probably pretty strong naturally, and had increased their power through their slaves) *shrugs*

(funny Mirlya! Usually it's the other way around. People type in Lorlen instead of Lorlyn. I'm used to it by now :)) I think I'd have to agree that what Regin and his friends did would be a sort of black magic.

(I noticed that too. I almost typed Lorlyn once :-D)

I'm not sure about that. The combination of magic is an acknowledged technique amongst guild magicians (they do it at the opening scenes, where they are building to wall during the purge. It's just that Regin wasn't allowed to, and used it for negative purposes.

Well yes, it's not strictly prohibited magic like 'black magic' is, but the general idea behind the way they feed their energy in to Regin to make him 'stronger' is quite like the theory behind black magic. So that's not saying he did an illegal thing by using what Balkan had taught, but it is very similar to black magic (and they weren't able to defeat Sonea with it)

Black magic is better than that technique in that the energy can be stored whereas with that technique it fades as soon as your associetes stop feeding you their power. Personally I have my doubt that Akkarin before using Black magic was as strong as Sonea since naturals are supposed to be rare so much so that only one person in the Guild even knew about them and only a natural would be that powerful. I suspect Sonea may have been stronger than Akkarin ever was in THL what more after all these years learning the skill she lacked. Heck Takkan's probably serving her in place of Akkarin if anything.

I'm not sure if she would have been more powerful then Akkarin throughout the book. Remember Akkarin would be taking alittle power from Takan, and later Sonea, evernight, that would build up to be a hell of alot, even more then sonea, though maybe not by much.

What prevented us from guaging powerlevels was that unlike in Ao5 the characters were either trying to conceal the fact that they were fighting to begin with eg during battles with Sachakan spies or they used a finishing move which was rather lacklustre ie sucking power from a wound. There was no actual magical throwdowns and I doubt there ever will be seeing as magicians explode if they're killed without using up all their energy.

Yeah, that does make it hard to gauge thier strenght. Aprt from Sonea, we don't really know.

Well it seems to me the only differance between a weak magician and a strong one is stamina. So a weak magician can perform the same spell at the same level as a strong one but they'll have less magic left over afterwards. Making them easier to defeat. So Regin for example appeared weaker than Sonea because unlike her he had to pace himself

Although we know that some people had what were considered unusually high levels of strength (Akkarin and LOrlen while they were novices) but we don't really know how that would compare to Sonea, especially since skill can defeat power.