Fairy Godmother

seemed too small for it. Sometimes it seemed to mean merely that it could find a way wherever it wanted to go. But sometimes it seemed to mean just that, literally — as if there were cats who could, indeed, walk through walls.

Mind, knowing cats, she didn't entirely doubt it, though that didn't help her at the moment.

'No,' she said with regret. 'I am not so clever.'

'Clever,' in feline, meant a number of things that included being powerful, intelligent, cunning, and very, very magical.

'Can you walk unseen?' the cat persisted. 'We must pass many dogs of the Bad Pack. They are roused by the Good Pack at the gate and the two Pack Leaders fighting, but there are still some along the way who are not distracted.'

Elena felt her throat tighten; so Alexander was in combat! She had to move, and move quickly, for he could not battle so powerful a magician for very long....

'I can,' she said, electing to spend a great deal of her magic to make herself invisible. She hadn't planned on doing so — it would leave her very little to work with —

But now it was a matter of time, and they had none to waste.

'Do,' the cat said, and sat on her haunches, expectantly.

Elena gathered the magic and smoothed it over herself with her wand like a second skin. Then, holding it in place, she concentrated with all of her will, and gave it the direction she wanted it to take —

'Fool all eyes that look on me; fool each mind that wants to see. Make me clear as purest air; I'm the one who isn't there.'

She had never done this before, although she had read about it, and it was most unnerving to watch herself, for she just — faded away, growing more and more transparent, until there was nothing where she was, at all. She'd taken pains to form the spell so that it not only worked on the eyes but on the mind — so that even if one of the Sorcerer's creatures could ordinarily see things that were invisible, such as spirits, it still would not see her unless it worked a counter-spell, because its mind would refuse to acknowledge that she was there.

The cat's mouth opened in a feline grin. 'Well done, Godmother. I see you not. Come.'

That was proof enough that the spell was properly set, for cats, as everyone knew, were perfectly capable of seeing spirits. The cat oozed around the door again, and Elena pulled off her boots and followed.

The hallway was quite short, and probably represented the point where the tower connected to the castle itself. It led straight into a larger room — much, much larger — that could only have been Stancia's Great Hall where everyone had been at dinner when the Sorcerer came. The bodies had been taken away, but the tables and benches were pretty much still where they'd been when the fight was over. Crockery shards and broken wooden trenchers were scattered everywhere, there were sticky pools of what might have been blood and what might have been drink, mostly dried now. There was no sign of anything edible. Some of the tables and benches were broken or hacked up, the tapestries had been torn off the walls and shredded or were lying in heaps against the walls. There was a foul stench in the air that made both Elena and the cat wrinkle their noses in distaste.

The foul aroma probably came from the creatures still here.

Elena could not put a name to what they were; they were outside her expertise, and now she could understand why Stancia's men were calling them 'demons.' The things that they looked most like were spiders, except that they had a hard armoring skin, and only four legs. All four had nasty cutting pincers on them, though, and they had a manlike torso with two 'arms' each as well, with appendages that served as hands. They had oval, hairless heads with masklike faces and large, slanting, glittering eyes. They were all, from the top of the head to the tip of the pincers, a shiny black in color.

There were fifteen of them, and they were simply — immobile. They might have been statues, except that Elena was perfectly certain that they were watching everything that passed around them.

No wonder the cat had asked her if she could be invisible.

They paid no attention to the cat, however. Perhaps they were unconcerned about anything below a certain size. The cat wove her way across the hall, tail in the air, sauntering as if she hadn't a care in the world, and Elena followed in her wake. Elena did note, however, that the path that the cat took was the one that enabled her to keep as far away from each of the things as possible, even though that actually meant that she was weaving her way among them rather than going in a straight line.

Well, that suited Elena. She made herself as small as she could, and was glad that she had thought to take her boots off first. She clutched them to her chest, and walked as silently as stockinged feet would permit. That cat moved slowly as well; perhaps rapid movement would also trigger their interest. That suited Elena just fine as it made it easy to keep right on the cat's heels.

When she was most of the way across the room, with none of those creatures between her and the doorway, something back behind her — fell. There was a tremendous bang and clatter; she froze.

The change in the monsters was instantaneous.

They came alive; they rose up on the tips of their feet, they all turned as swiftly as thought, and then — moved.

They swarmed on some spot near the other door, presumably where the noise came from. They moved like nothing Elena had ever seen before, with a clattering sound, and the ticking of claws on stone. The sight was terrifying, and Elena only gave one horrified glance behind her before turning tail and following the cat into the 'safety' of the doorway.

The cat said nothing, but her tail was a bottle-brush and her back humped as she scuttled on.

She led Elena through a succession of three rooms, all of which had been richly appointed, and all of which had been ransacked and not yet cleaned. There were more dried, dark stains here as well, and there was no mistaking that rusty color for anything but blood.

Then came the fourth room.