Magic Steps

by Tamora Pierce

  Kwaben and Oama, swords drawn, jumped over Wulfric’s body into the next room. Sandry heard the clang of metal on metal and lunged to her feet, running to the open door. A man and a woman, both strangers armed with curving swords, battled Sandry’s guards.

  “Mage, do something!” the woman shouted as she hacked at Kwaben. She was very quick. “Get us out of here!”

  Once their basic studies were complete, all mages learned a few spells they could trigger in a hurry at need. Sandry used two of hers now. One raised a web of naked power between her guards and the strangers. The other sent a rope of magic snapping down the stairs. It blew open the front door, twined around the guards outside, and dragged them into the building.

  Footsteps hammered up the stairs: her rope had worked, at least. Her web was not so effective. A hand with a sword in it darted through to slash at Oama; a hand with a dagger punched through next to the sword. The hands that clutched both weapons rippled with dark smears. Sandry could see a foot, a leg, a head as strangers attacked and retreated through her barrier. Riddled with the essence of nothingness as they were — as Wulfric had told Sandry their blood was — the strangers were able in part to reach through her power as if it did not exist. Kwaben and Oama could not cross her web at all, but they could and did battle the pieces of the enemy that got through.

  Something, a rising force of unmagic, surged on the far side of Sandry’s barrier. She thrust her web to one side. It yanked the strangers out of the way by pulling the real parts not yet consumed by unmagic. Oama and Kwaben shifted with them, to keep fighting and to place their bodies between the enemy and Sandry.

  Now the girl could see the rest of the room. Someone was against the far wall. He knelt — no, that wasn’t right — he was on the floor, sitting, though she couldn’t see his legs. The darkness pooled with him at its heart, unmagic streaming from his eyes and mouth to puddle around him.

  “Come,” he said. “Come away.” He giggled. “Dihanurs, come now!”

  Sandry tightened her web on the enemy, but they yanked free. They ran to the giggling man and sank in the dark pool before him. It was just like her dream, except they didn’t fight the unmagic. With it marbling so much of their flesh already, they simply melted into the shadowy depths.

  Their mage looked at Sandry. “They have the salt,” he whispered, blackness rising around him. He toppled forward, into the pool. Some force — the hunger of unmagic for true magic — dragged Sandry across the floor, toward that empty gap. She screamed.

  A hard arm wrapped around her waist and held on. The darkness sucked at her, trying to draw her into the pool. It was shrinking rapidly.

  “Kwaben, help!” shrieked Oama as she clung to Sandry. They slid for an inch more; Kwaben stopped them. The unmagic vanished, leaving only a faint scum on the floorboards where it had been. Its grip on Sandry broke. She and Oama sagged onto the floor, panting.

  “It was them, wasn’t it?” Sandry heard Kwaben whisper. “The Rokat killers.”

  Sandry nodded. “Their mage called them Dihanurs, did you hear?” she said, when she could talk again. “They figured no one would search for them in a place where they’d already done murder, I bet.” Then she remembered. “Wulfric!” Turning over, she broke out of Oama’s hold and crawled over to the provost’s mage. He lay in a pool of blood.

  “Musta cut his th’oat as he coom in the doar,” muttered one of the guards Sandry had dragged inside to help take the killers. They hadn’t been able to get by Oama and Kwaben as they fought. “Bled ’im oat afore he knowed it.”

  “Gorry, they’s fast,” someone else whispered. “T’nail the ol’ wolf like that. I seen him turn a spell on a copper bit, he were that quick.”

  Sandry rolled Wulfric over as tears streamed down her cheeks. She tugged her handkerchief from her pocket and tried to wipe the blood from his face. “Now you don’t have to tell Uncle any bad news,” she whispered.

  A warm hand rested on her shoulder. It was Kwaben’s; blood ran over it in a thin trickle. “Lady,” he whispered sadly.

  “I liked him.” Sandry let her handkerchief settle over Wulfric’s open and staring eyes. She wiped her own eyes on her sleeve and struggled to her feet. “Let me see that arm,” she told Kwaben.

  She was no healer, but it was easy enough to lay silk threads from her belt-purse across the shallow gash over his bicep and use them like stitches to pull the wound shut. With that done, the bleeding slowed. Oama wrapped the arm in linen, and it stopped completely.

  Sandry couldn’t leave. There was the provost to be notified, and investigators to talk to. Waiting for them, she sat on a stool that bore no taint of the killers, and looked at the room. The Dihanurs had left their packs. That would give the Provost’s Guards more information about them, maybe. Sandry doubted that any of it could be used for tracking, if their very blood was so corrupted by unmagic that traditional spells didn’t work.

  Of course these people would slaughter two children. The nothingness they used to slip by watchers and hunters was eating the Dihanurs, just as it had almost devoured the mage whose power came from it. It had taken enough of their life force away that Sandry’s magical web could not capture and hold them. Next time her magic would probably be able to grip still less. Even if she could hold a small part of their bodies captive, how long would that last? And how on earth could that mage be captured?

  The Dihanurs had to be stopped. Otherwise they would penetrate even the layered spells on the inner keep, where four families were hiding.

  How to deal with that mage. How to deal with a mage and two killers who could reach through Sandry’s magical barrier as if it were a net with large holes.…

  There was a scrap of shadow inches from where she sat. It could be worked like magic, or the killers would not be able to wear it as a cloak. She could work her own magic like thread, and the magics belonging to others. Could she do that with unmagic?

  Steeling herself, she reached into the dark smear and pinched at it with her fingers. As she pulled her hand away, it followed in a long strand like a fine grade of fiber. Goosebumps rippled over her skin — the almost-greasy, almost-sticky, whisper-sense of it on her fingers was very unpleasant — but she did not let go. Instead she twirled the strand as she might a tuft of wool, testing to see how easily it would spin. The strand turned as her twist traveled through it, thickening, just as wool might.

  She got to her feet. “Everyone out of this room, right now,” she said loudly. She turned, and held the eyes of the Provost’s Guards with her own. She had to convince them that she was a senior mage and in total control, or they would never let her do this. “You can’t see it, but the magic that lets those people get about unseen is smeared everywhere in here. It must be got up. That’s what Master Snaptrap and I came here to do. If you don’t want to track it all over Summersea, spreading gods only know what kind of ill power, then I’ve got to clean it up.”

  “But there’s the investigators,” objected the most senior of the guards present. He bore a corporal’s yellow arrowhead on his sleeves. “They need statements from you and from your guards. That’s how murder is looked into. There’s the mages, who will try to see what happened.”

  “We know what happened,” Oama informed the corporal. “We were right here.” She looked anxiously at Sandry, who was digging in one of the packs Wulfric had brought. “You’d best do as she says, Corporal.” She drew the man’s ear down to her mouth, and whispered to him urgently.

  From the pack, Sandry produced a bolt of spelled white silk. It had already been rubbed with the oil of attraction, so much so that it was already pulling the dark smears from her hands, arms, and the front of her gown onto itself. She marched out through the guards and into the hall with it. As she’d thought, the killers had kept to this part of the building — the marks they had left were confined to a small area. The hall that stretched toward the back of Rokat House and the stair that led to the third story were clean of unmagic.

  Sandry threw
the bolt of cloth into the long hallway, shoving it with her power. It unrolled to its full length, giving off a heavy, flowery scent. “Walk or sit on that, and nowhere else,” she ordered the Guards. Returning to the packs, she found another such bolt, and spread it in the hall that led from the stair to the office. It moved as it settled over the smears of nothingness, pulling them from wood and carpet.

  “I’ll be in here,” she told the Guards. They watched her with dismay. “Make sure the people who arrive know what I’m doing, and don’t bother me.”

  Kwaben and Oama stood in front of the Rokat office, their faces mulish. “We are not going to leave you,” Oama told Sandry. “What if they come back?”

  “Then keep out of my way,” Sandry advised them. “I have a lot of work to do in a hurry before you can so much as use these benches.” Oama nodded and made shooing motions at the Guards.

  Next, Sandry found canvas bags stuffed with spelled cloth squares in the packs. Placing one bag on the floor near Wulfric’s body, she forced apart the stitches that held it together. A second unvoiced command, and squares flew through the room in a blizzard of white silk. They raced to cover every spot where Sandry could see unmagic. Taking the second canvas bag into the outer office, she did the same thing there. One canvas bag remained; she ordered its contents into the hall, where they draped themselves over benches and windowsill, sopping up darkness.

  Walking back past Kwaben and Oama, Sandry noticed shadow smears on them. Getting a few extra squares of silk, she rubbed them briskly over her guards, collecting all of the nothingness she could find. Once she had it, she called one of the linen bags in the packs to her. It came, unfolding itself as it did. It blazed with signs for protection and enclosure written onto the fabric in the same powerful oils that filled every fiber. Sandry let it hang in front of her as she dumped the cloths she’d used on her bodyguards into the bag. Oama shifted; when Sandry looked at her, she realized that both dark-skinned guards were pale. They were staring at her.

  “What’s the matter?” Sandry demanded. “Why are you looking at me that way?”

  To her surprise it was silent Kwaben who spoke. He said, “Lady, we knew you were a mage, but … Mostly you’re like a cat with it. You never let it show any more than you can help, I think because you know it makes folk nervous.”

  “You only throw it around when you’re upset,” Oama added.

  “I am upset,” whispered Sandry. She plucked the linen bag from the air and went back to the inner office to collect the silk in there. She had to keep after the squares, to make sure they gathered everything.

  Wulfric had brought plenty of those cloths, and plenty of bags to hold all they collected. Sandry blessed him as she cleaned, and tried not to look at him. That was hard, particularly when she had to slip a magical weaving underneath him, as she had first done at the castle infirmary, to gather the unmagic hidden by his blood and his body.

  When all her silk was used up, she had to stop for a few minutes and think. She knew there was more nothingness in the building from the killers’ earlier visit. She couldn’t bear the thought of it lying about. Holding on to her last bag, the one in which she’d placed the two bolts of silk, she began to tremble. How would she get it all?

  “Lady Sandry?” Oama whispered. She drew close to the girl, but didn’t touch her. Summersea residents knew very well that it was a bad idea to bother a mage in the middle of a working. “Colonel Snaptrap’s assistants came. They’re gathering all the — the unmagic, they called it — on the stairwell, and on the ground floor. They said you should know.”

  Relief. Sandry rolled the top of her linen bag to close it. An order to the fibers in the cloth sent them weaving through one another. At last the bag was sealed as well as if she had sewn it shut with fine, tight stitches. Once that was done, she put the bag next to its mates, and found a chair for herself.

  What next? she wondered, resting her head on her hands.

  “Lady Sandry?” It was Oama again. She offered her water flask. “Captain Qais and his investigators are here. They got statements from the others and from Kwaben and me. You’re all that’s left.”

  She’d forgotten the Provost’s Guards. “Tell them to make it quick,” Sandry whispered. She accepted the water flask and drank deeply. If she hadn’t thought it would be disagreeable, she might have poured water down her nose in the hope of rinsing away the stink of blood and death.

  It wasn’t the captain who questioned her, but the tiny woman with the seamed face and the old eyes. A scribe took notes as the investigator got Sandry to tell her story, from Wulfric’s arrival at the Bountiful Inn to that very moment. Once done, she took Sandry over it again, making changes as Sandry added things she had forgotten or barely spoken of.

  When she was done, the woman laid a hand on her arm. “You’ve been a very brave girl, my lady,” she told Sandry warmly. “Captain Behazin and Lieutenant Ulrina said you were true to the heart and would never falter, and they were right.”

  Sandry blinked. “Oh. Thank you.”

  “My lady.” Captain Qais had come in; he bowed to her. “All done?” he asked the investigator who had questioned Sandry. She nodded. He jerked his head toward the door. The woman bowed to Sandry and left, taking the scribe with her.

  “Well,” the captain said, his dark face wooden. “I must say, my lady, it would have been better if you had left this — unmagic — to Master Wulfric’s assistants.” The captain tucked his thumbs in his belt. “I am sure his grace will be most displeased when he learns of your involvement here.”

  Sandry rubbed her hands over her face. “At least you had the sense not to interrupt me while I was working,” she informed the man, ignoring his indignant gasp. “And my uncle will understand why I involved myself. Pasco really is related to you? Because he’s not at all stiff.” She was being rude, as rude as her friend Tris. She would probably spend days writing a properly apologetic note after this was all over, but just now she didn’t care.

  “You are under a strain, lady.” Qais appeared more wooden than ever. “I have told you, violent scenes like this are no place for a gently reared young woman. And while our family is gratified by your interest in my scapegrace nephew, it does no good to encourage him in his odd imaginings. Dancing, even dancing magic, whatever that means, will not clothe him or feed his children when he is a man. It would be better for you to send him to Lightsbridge or Winding Circle for lessons, and for him to settle once and for all into the training he needs for real work.”

  Sandry got to her feet. This time she trembled with fury as she stared up into the captain’s eyes. “Until you know more of magic, you will not voice opinions about it.” Each word dropped from her lips like a chunk of ice. “For your information, I am proud and honored to be Pasco’s teacher. He will be a credit to me. If he’s a ‘scapegrace’ with ‘odd imaginings,’ perhaps it’s because no one gave him reason to think he had anything good to offer.” The captain came to a jarring halt against a windowsill. She had backed him out of the inner office and across the outer one. “He will settle for wherever his power takes him. And if the mages of Winding Circle temple can’t tell where that is, I really don’t think you should even hazard a guess. Am I done here?”

  The captain nodded, tight-lipped.

  “Then I have business that will not wait.” Sandry looked around to see if she had forgotten anything. “Good day to you, Captain Qais.” She strode out of the room and down the hall, ignoring the Provost’s Guards who were there.

  Wulfric’s assistants were on the ground floor. She stopped to tell them where she had left the unmagic she collected. Even in the dim lamplight on that floor Sandry could see that Ulrina’s eyes were red and swollen from weeping. Captain Behazin’s voice was hoarse. At Sandry’s request they agreed to hold on to the stores of recovered unmagic that Wulfric had kept, as well as what they had gathered that day, until they heard from her.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered to them. “I wasn’t quick enough
— we had no idea they were here—” She squeezed her hands so tightly that her nails bit into her palms.

  Both the captain and the lieutenant shook their heads. “It’s this curst magic they’ve got,” Behazin told her roughly. “We’ve no way to register it like we have other magics. He said he thought if anyone could think of a way to handle the unmagic, it would be you.”

  That was too much for Sandry. She bolted for the door, not even thanking Kwaben as he held it open. A Provost’s Guard was holding their horses; when Sandry mounted Russet, the Guard gently patted her hand. She managed a smile for the woman, then turned her horse east.

  “Shouldn’t we go to Duke’s Citadel?” demanded Oama, trotting her mount to catch up. “His grace will be fit to be tied if he hears of this—”

  “I know, and I can’t help that,” replied Sandry, wiping her eyes on her sleeve. “I need to talk to the mage council at Winding Circle.” She glanced over at Kwaben. “You must see a healer about that cut,” she said flatly. “Why don’t you take word back to the Citadel that I’m all right?”

  He shook his head. “There are healers at Winding Circle, aren’t there?” he asked. “We can send a messenger bird to his grace.”

  “You have to keep us with you, Lady Sandry,” Oama said. “Otherwise we could end up hanging over the inner gate by our ankles for letting you walk into a trap.”

  “I didn’t—” protested Sandry. “You couldn’t have — oh, never mind.” She kicked Russet into a trot. The sooner she got to Winding Circle, the sooner she would know if they’d found a way to handle a mage who dealt in unmagic, or if she would have to try something of her own.

  Please, gods, she thought fiercely, let them have a way to settle this. Please don’t make me do it.

  11

  There was no way Sandry could break the news gently to Duke Vedris. “I’m going to lay a trap for the Dihanurs. The mages at Winding Circle think I have a chance.”