Elvenbane

though.'

'Either bondling clothing or blankets will do fine,' Denelor said with satisfaction. 'If it's blankets they can be cut and sewn into warm over-tunics. That's enough, Lanet; well done, and thank you.'

'It had better be enough,' came the muffled response, 'because that's all you're getting from me today.'

Now that Shana had seen what was to be done...use whatever form of distance-seeing worked for you, then use the transportation-spell to bring the sought-after objects to Denelor's room...she thought she could probably do her share. But it would be noisy...which meant that if she was going to escape detection by the elven lords, she'd better steal something that was well away from one of the powerful magicians. And that might be a little hard to do.

'I'll take the flour,' Denelor was saying, handing the list to Mindi. 'It's the bulkiest, so it would be the hardest for you youngsters. That leaves some easier foodstuffs for you youngsters.'

'Butter,' said Mindi after a quick look at the list. 'And cheese. My mother worked in the dairy at Altar's estate; the dairy is half the estate away from the Great House. I know where everything is stored, and I should be able to filch some of both from there without making too big a show.'

'I don't know,' Kyle mumbled doubtfully, while Shana took a peek over his shoulder at the list. When she saw the fourth item, she suddenly had an idea.

'Master Denelor, would anyone object to fork-horn...I mean, deer...for the meat?' she asked the master wizard.

'I don't think so,' he replied, though he looked confused. 'Why? What did you have in mind?'

'I know how to find animals, how to scry them out,' she said confidently. 'I used to scry them for my foster brother.' And that was no lie; she used to find Keman the creatures for his kills all the time. She didn't know how to scry then, either. She didn't see why she shouldn't be able to find about any kind of animal now. 'I know right now I can't try to manifest anything living and have it survive the trip, but that wouldn't matter if all I was after was meat. I could find a live fork-horn and bring it in ready to clean and skin.'

'And that neatly gets around your problems with being so noisy,' Denelor said with warm approval. 'Excellent notion, Shana. Although, I do think trying to manifest an entire grown deer might be a little beyond your strength. Are you sure you wouldn't care to settle for a flock of ducks or a few rabbits? You could take them one at a time.'

She didn't say anything; she simply let him think she agreed with him. Then she sent her mind ranging, looking for a fork-horn. The larger, the better.

She found what she was looking for right away; a buck just out of his prime, a buck that was hanging around the fringes of a herd, with fresh battle-scars on his hide. That meant he had lost his herd to a younger, stronger male. In the way of nature, he was redundant now, as he would pine away over the winter and die in the spring.

Unless she interfered.

She raised her hands, closed her eyes, and began the manifestation.

She was so lost in the spell that she really didn't hear what was going on in the room; all she knew was the moment of trigger, when the (now dead) buck was fully materialized and she could release the spell. She sagged, her chin down on her chest, as the wave of exhaustion hit her.

There was nothing but dead silence in the room.

She looked up finally, when no one even took an audible breath...and met six pairs of round, shocked eyes.

She glanced over at the buck taking up most of the free floorspace; a nice one, if a little bigger than the fork-horns she was used to. He ought to supply enough meat for the entire Citadel for the next week or so.

She looked back at Denelor; he looked positively speechless. He blinked and cleared his throat. In fact, he cleared it three times before he managed to get a word out.

'Th-thank you, Shana,' he said carefully. 'I think you can take the rest of the week off. You have quite exceeded your...ah...quota.'

When Shana wasn't doing chores or having lessons, she liked to explore the unused corridors and tunnels behind the Citadel. Ever since she had learned to make light, she had spent as much time as she could back there. It felt a little like 'home,' the tunnels of the Lair, except that these tunnels were so regular. Still, as long as she was in the deserted sections, she could dim the light and imagine herself back with Keman, playing hide-and-seek among the caves.

From time to time, it seemed to her that dragons might have had a hand in the building of the Citadel, particularly in the tunnel complex. There were many things that were familiar in the way the tunnels were carved and organized that reminded her of the Lair, most particularly the careful layering, and the multiple entrances and exits. The use of a building to mark the beginning of the tunnels themselves might be coincidence, but that, too, was typical of Kin work.

When Denelor dismissed her, she didn't even go back to her room. Aside from a moment of exhaustion, she felt fine...even though she had moved as much material as Lanet, and Lanet had to be helped to his bed.

But she was never really tired, she thought, watching as one of Rennis's 'prentices came to help Lanet up to his room. Not the way the others were, anyway. Was that what Rennis meant when he said she had a lot of power? Or was it just that Lanet spent a lot more energy in keeping quiet than she did? Did that mean that when she learned how to be really quiet that she would be as worn out as he got when she did magic?

That hardly seemed worth the price of 'silence.'...

Whatever the cause, she simply wasn't ready to rest when Denelor let her go. So instead of returning to her room, she turned down the corridor into the unused sections, created a light-ball to follow her, and headed for the last place she had been in her explorations.

After a bit of retracing of her steps in the dust, she found the place she had marked with an X of chalk on the wall. She rubbed the mark out, and prepared to explore new territory. This was definitely the oldest part of the Citadel; undisturbed dust lay thick on the floors, and the rock walls were not quite as perfectly finished as in the living quarters. The rooms here also had the look of storage areas; every door she peeked into opened into a place lined with shelves, although whatever had once adorned those shelves was gone.

The room she had last visited, like several others along this corridor, had a name carved into the door: SUPPLIES. She had run out of time when she'd last been here, and had to turn back.

Today she ventured farther along the corridor, only to discover that it made an abrupt right-angle turn when she went beyond that last door and could see farther. She turned that corner, expecting to find only another tunnel, and instead, came to a dead end. The corridor ended, disappointingly, in another heavy wooden door, with a word carved into it.

But she kept going rather than turning back, and she found herself staring at an entirely different word. It had been carved into a thicker door than the others, and was partially worn away by the touch of many hands.

RECORDS, it said.

She felt a tingle of excitement; she unlatched it and pushed the door open. Like all the rest, this room was unlocked, but unlike all the rest, this room contained something. Quite a bit, in fact. And her skin tingled with the unmistakable feel of magic...

A magic that must have been used to preserve the contents of this room.

Records, indeed. Books, scrolls, and piles of loose paper. Thin metal plates with words etched into them, vellum black with age, and yellowed parchment. Row after row, shelf after shelf, an entire roomful of writings. It took her a moment to realize what it was she had stumbled upon.

The...the records of the old halfbloods, the ones that started the Wizard War! Fire and Rain...nobody had ever come looking for them, they'd told her that all the records had been destroyed, but they hadn't been, they were here all along!

Her first impulse was to run back to the inhabited section and fetch her teacher, Denelor. But a second thought stopped her before she even turned around.

She didn't know what was stored here yet. It could be the records everyone claimed they wanted to find. It could just be copies of things they already had. And it could be a worthless lot of junk. She had better see what was here, first, before she got too excited about it.

She chose something at random; a massive, handwritten book that looked