“Shemder Parl’s son,” the man said. “This is very interesting— it seems the structure in your brain that makes you a warlock is still there in your new form, though greatly reduced in size, but it’s completely inert.”
Shemder squeaked furiously and bared his teeth. A rat’s vocabulary was, he found, rather limited.
“Now,” the wizard said, “what would happen if you were restored to human form? Would it remain inert?”
Shemder squeaked again.
“We’ll have to try the experiment on someone, but I’m afraid that it won’t be you,” the wizard said. “You’re too dangerous. I would never have thought you could kill a respectable wizard so quickly, despite a handful of protections and wards! I’m going to have a ghastly time explaining his death to his family, and to the Guild!”
As he spoke he drew a dagger, and Shemder began backing away.
He was just turning to flee when the wizard spoke aword, and flung the dagger.
The blade impaled the rat that had been the man called Shemder Parl’s son, pinning him to the earth; the rat twisted, trying to escape the blade, trying to see some way to remove it, but succeeding only in injuring himself further. He squirmed in agony, and in his extremity forgot who he was, forgot that he had ever been anything more than a rat. He writhed, and the world around him dimmed, and he knew it was not because the sun was down.
And then the rat was dead, and Kaligir of the New Quarter stood looking down at it.
It remained a rat; sometimes, when Asherel’s Transformation was done quickly from a distance like this, death broke the spell. Kaligir had thought that the rat might turn back into Shemder.
That it hadn’t simplified matters; disposing of a dead rat was much easier than disposing of a dead person.
Of course, Shemder had apparently had the morals of a rat all along. Kaligir had chosen him because Fendel’s Divination had named him as the warlock who had killed more innocents than any other in the World. His death was no loss.
The death of poor Lopin, on the other hand, was a tragedy. Kaligir frowned.
There was no longer any question-the warlocks were dangerous. Shemder had reached through Lopin’s protective spells as if they were hardly there.
This was not reassuring news that he would be bringing back to the rest of the Guild.
Kaligir kicked the dead rat into the gutter, then turned to go.
Chapter Twenty-nine
As Lord Manner trotted through the night, back along High Street through the New City, his heart was light and his features were brightened with a smile-until he neared the mansion now known as Warlock House.
Although there had been some uneasy moments when he and Mavi left and walked past the waiting, watching people gathered out front, a few shouts of “We were just visiting! We aren’t warlocks!” had gotten them safely to the corner. No one had followed them, and once they were out of sight of the house the city had seemed almost normal.
Oh, there were still a few burned-out buildings, and more guardsmen on the streets than usual, but in general things were back to what they should be. He and Mavi had strolled to Newmarket without incident, where he had had a delightful supper with Mavi’s family. Much of the time he had been able to forget all about warlocks and exile orders and all the other unpleasantness of the past few days. Even when Mavi’s parents had asked about his uncle’s collection of warlocks, and had spoken with horror of the depredations that befell their neighbors on the Night of Madness, he had been able to remain happily detached, as if none of it concerned him.
The mob in front of his uncle’s house, though, reminded him that it concerned him very much.
There were more of them than before, and they had torches. Torches were hardly unreasonable, since full night had fallen, but there seemed to be more of them than any reasonable need for light would justify.
And they were no longer standing out in the street, just watching; now they were pressed up against the fence, leaning through it, just a few feet from the front door and several windows.
Hanner’s smile vanished.
“Where did you take them?” someone shouted.
“Give me back my son!”
Hanner stopped where he was, a block away, and decided that he was not going to walk in the front door. He would see if there was a rear gate-he didn’t remember seeing one, but surely there was a servants’ entrance somewhere. If he couldn’t find one, he would climb the garden wall.
Or, perhaps, fly over it, though he had yet to attempt to fly under his own power.
Instead of continuing on High Street he turned right on West Second Street, then left on Lower Street and left again on Coronet, and walked up the block.
There was no torch-bearing mob on this side of the house. Light spilled from the corner, burying the garden wall and the mansion’s west face in shadow.
He didn’t see any doors or gates, any more than he had two nights before. The garden wall was solid brick. He looked up at the top, a foot or two over his head.
He couldn’t climb that. The brick was smooth and solidly mortared; he couldn’t find toeholds or fingerholds in the dark. He could call for help and hope a warlock heard him and helped him over the wall before that mob out front heard him and came to investigate.
Or maybe he could fly over it. Hewas a warlock, and the power was there inside him, eager to be used.
Just thinking about it made it surge up, ready and waiting; he couldfeel it, could almost see it.
But how did one fly? He had seen Rudhira and the others do it often enough, but he hadn’t really observed it.
Thinking that, he became consciously aware for the first time that he could perceive things he hadn’t before, that he could use his magic to sense things-it wasn’t seeing, and it wasn’t feeling, but it was almost both. He realized this must be what Sheila had meant when she talked about studying Thellesh’s injuries with something that wasn’t witch sight.
He could feel/see the bricks that made up the wall, the mortar that held them together, the grainy texture of the mortar, the smooth glaze on the bricks...
But it was dark, and he wasn’t touching the wall; his hands were at his sides.
He blinked, and the perception faded slightly.
He didn’t need to know how the wall was put together, he just needed to get over it. He still couldn’t sense any toeholds, even with this new ability.
He turned his attention to himself, to see whether he could figure out how to fly. It should be easy-just lift himself off the ground. He had experimented with his magic a little in secret, earlier in the day, and he could move small objects around, but he hadn’t tried lifting himself.
It wasn’t as easy.
It wasn’t so much the weight, although he had never tried lifting anything even close to his own size; instead, he realized, it was because he couldn’t sense a relationship between himself and the object he was trying to move.
That was how a warlock moved things. He had done it without understanding it before, without being aware of how he was doing it, but now he saw it clearly. His new sense showed him the relationship in space between himself and the object he wanted to affect, and then he manipulated that relationship-warlockry was all a matter of using this new sense to find the magical connections between himself and the rest of the World, and then forcing them to change. He had caught that cruet by blocking its connection to the floor.
But finding the magical connections between himself and himself didn’t seem to work.
Rudhira and the others had done it, though. There had to be a way. He studied himself with his newly recognized warlock sight, and finally figured out what he would have to do. In order to fly, Hanner saw, a warlock didn’t move himself; he moved the rest of the World.
Hanner reached out and tried to do that, to move the street and wall away-and caught himself just before he fell over backward.
