And with that, Altra strolled underneath a table, and did not come out on the other side. Karal sat there with his pen still in his fingers for a long time.
But given his current luck, with every worry that he lost, four more rose to take its place.
A day later—and the half-expected second wave swamped them. It came exactly one day short of a fortnight, and at very nearly the same time of day as the first one.
This time the areas of disturbance were not as obvious until a few days had passed, and someone noticed that there were places where plants and insects had—changed. They weren't dead, but they certainly weren't the same anymore. The plants in particular had undergone a transformation that made them act like primitive animals. They reacted to the presence of other living creatures, some by shrinking away, but others by reaching toward whatever was near them. Some of the plants were observed trapping and presumably eating insects; others were growing strange new forms of defense; thorns and spikes, saps that had a terrible stench or were outright poisonous. And two days after the storm passed over, when a farmer found his child in a patch of the changed plants, crying hysterically, with hundreds of tiny thorns in her flesh that she swore the plants had flung at her, Selenay ordered that-samples be sent to the Palace and the parent plants be destroyed wherever they were found.
The mages studied the changed plants without learning much—except that Firesong noted a definite resemblance to some of the dangerous 'thinking plants' in the Uncleansed Lands of what Valdemarans called the Pelagir Hills.
One day short of a fortnight later, the third storm-wave arrived.
According to Firesong, this last wave was just a trifle weaker than the previous two. This time virtually no shields had gone down before the onslaught, and although even non-mages had experienced the disorienting effects of the wave, Firesong was positive that this mage-storm hadn't lasted as long as the previous two had. No one had reported in from the area outside Haven yet, but the mages were guardedly optimistic that the worst was over.
Such good news was more than compensation enough for a long slog through a driving rain, at least to Karal's mind. He couldn't wait until the others heard!
He opened the door of the tavern and stepped through into warmth and light, only to find virtually everyone clustered around a single table. They were ominously quiet, and when they all turned to see who had entered, there was not a single cheerful expression among them.
'I've got good news!' he said into the oppressive silence. 'Firesong says this last storm was weaker!'
Their expressions did not change, and he felt his own spirits dropping. 'It was weaker, wasn't it?' he faltered. 'Firesong said so. We didn't lose any shields this time—'
Master Levy shook his head slowly. 'I'm afraid your Firesong is mistaken,' he replied. 'Not only was it not weaker, it was actually a little stronger than before. The reason nothing magical was affected was because you've managed to build up good enough shields to protect everything magical that you still retain—and you've pared the number of magical things you need to protect that way to the absolute minimum. Come over here and look at this.'
He gestured to something in a wooden box with a grate over the top of it. Karal couldn't see clearly what was in it, but it sat on the table next to Master Levy and had been the object they had all been clustered around. His mouth suddenly dry with trepidation, Karal edged over to the group and looked down into the box itself.
It was an animal, but no animal he had ever seen or heard of before. Mad red eyes stared up at him, and long, hairless ears flattened against a viperish skull covered with a thin coat of gray hair. It snarled at him, and he inadvertently backed up a pace.
'Don't touch it,' someone warned. 'It just about took Semon's hand off.'
'What is it?' he asked, fascinated and repulsed at the same time. It looked vaguely familiar, somehow.
'Nearly as we can tell, it
