8

Cashel awoke, gasping and spluttering as though he'd been plunged into the depths of the winter sea. His skin was cold and it seemed as if iron bands around his chest released as he straightened on his straw mattress.

The millhouse kitchen was silent—too silent even for the dead of night. No cricket chirped, no dove cooed from the cote, and the still air was without a trace of the breeze that normally sighed across the hamlet. Through the window over the indoor oven, the sky had a faint blue haze that wasn't starlight.

Cashel rose and took his staff from beside the door. Ilna slept in one of the two rooms upstairs, but Cashel liked to be on the ground floor where he didn't risk stumbling if someone called him for a late-night emergency. He went outside. The sky was a net of fine blue that concealed all but the brightest stars.

He'd never known the world to be so quiet. Nothing at all moved.

Guided by instinct, Cashel walked around the front of the millhouse. He didn't think he made a sound but Tenoctris, standing in the shelter of the great cypress-wood millwheel, turned and beckoned him urgently to join her. He moved to her side, careful not to rap his quarterstaff against the projecting paddles.

"Don't alert him," Tenoctris whispered, speaking with exaggerated lip movements to make up for the near lack of sound. "I want to learn who he's interested in."

Cashel peered past the rim of the undershot wheel. The spillway feeding the wheel from the tidal impoundment was dry since the millstones weren't turning. The drover, Benlo or-Willet, knelt in the trough. The murmur of his chanting was the first real sound Cashel had heard since awakening on this ominous night.

The ancient stones around Benlo dripped a blue phosphorescence, like that of the sky but more intense. The drover held a knife with which he tapped a circle around some small object on the floor of the spillway. Every time the knifepoint touched stone, a fat blue spark flashed soundlessly.

"He's invoking an identification spell," Tenoctris mouthed to Cashel's ear. "He has an object—it could be hair, bone, anything—and he's summoning the glamour from it to lead him to its correspondent."

"But that's wizardry," Cashel said, trying to copy the old woman's technique of speaking without vocalizing.

"Yes," Tenoctris said with a dry smile. "It is. Benlo is a very powerful wizard."

Blue mist began to ooze from the thing over which the drover chanted. He continued to tap his dagger on the stone. The flashes grew brighter, flaring through the mist the way heat lightning silhouettes a summer cloud.

"The spell can be used on a single coin to find a missing purse," Tenoctris whispered. "But I don't think that's what's going on here."

The fog thickened above the object, then coalesced into the figure of a man. Cashel couldn't make out any distinguishing details, because the illumination was that of the glamour itself. There was no shadow detail as would normally mold the features.

The glamour lifted from the ground and drifted sideways at the rate of a man walking slowly. Its feet seemed to pass through the wall of the spillway. The drover clambered out to follow. He was awkward until he remembered to tuck the blade of his dagger under his belt. He didn't have a sheath for the weapon.

"It's his athame," Tenoctris explained. Her hand was raised, but Cashel didn't need the warning not to move yet. He hunted small game and knew that motionless patience was the greatest key to success. "Forged it himself, I shouldn't wonder, and from iron. I doubt it's coincidence that two wizards of such power would visit a hamlet like this."

The glamour's limbs didn't move: its motion was like that of the statues of the Lady and the Shepherd in the carts the priests from Carcosa pulled through the hamlet during the annual Tithe Procession. Benlo followed a few paces behind. His lips moved as though he was still chanting, but the words were inaudible. They passed the front of the millhouse and out of sight.

Tenoctris' hand was still raised. "Why is it so quiet?" Cashel asked. The sea smell was even stronger: salt and drying seaweed and the faint touch of death with an iodine sharpness that differed from that of a carcass on land.

"He put a spell of silence over the hamlet before he started his main enchantment," Tenoctris said. "Most people within the circuit of the spell will sleep until it's lifted. For a wizard, even a poor wizard like me, the spell has the effect of an alarm instead."

She lowered her hand and led Cashel carefully along the side of the millhouse to the corner where they could again watch Benlo and the thing he had raised. The glow saturating the stones of the spillway had dissipated. A bluish track, fading with time, marked the glamour's course the way slime gleams in the morning sun where a slug has passed.

Cashel's skin prickled as if he'd spent a day on a boat, where light burned both from the sky and in reflection from the water's surface. His quarterstaff felt like a wisp of straw. He imagined it would dance into the night if he let it go.

"I woke up too," he mouthed to Tenoctris, "and I'm not a wizard."

"Yes," she said. "You awakened too."

The glamour paused in front of the inn, turned and drifted through the open gates. The drover followed, disappearing into the courtyard.

Tenoctris started forward. Cashel touched her hand and led her to the side of the courtyard instead.

During the past winter Garric had cleared the ivy from the outside of the eight-foot wall and removed the bricks which the prying rootlets had loosened over a generation or more. The bricks were neatly stacked, waiting for Anan to burn lime for fresh mortar in the kiln where he also fired his pottery. Cashel pointed Tenoctris to one of the irregular gaps in the wall's fabric and positioned himself to look through a higher one. They had a perfect view across the courtyard, toward the stables on the opposite side of the inn building.

The glamour was motionless in the center of the courtyard, near the well. It rotated and extended its hand and arm toward the stables. One leaf of the stable door was ajar. Garric stepped out. His expression was blank and he moved like a sleepwalker.

Cashel tensed. Tenoctris touched his lips. "He's not in danger," she whispered. The front door of the inn banged open like a thunderclap. Garric staggered and cried out. The glamour dissolved into mist that flowed over him, merging with Garric's flesh and vanishing.

From the inn walked a creature with the shape of a man, carrying a cutlass dark with rust or blood. There were sounds again and the night stank of death and the sea.

Cashel shouted. He put his left hand on the wall coping and swung upward, using his quarterstaff to brace him. He balanced a moment in the air with his bare foot clawing to gain a toehold in the gap he'd been watching through.

When the blue glow vanished, Benlo toppled like a drunk walking into bright sunlight. The creature strode toward Garric, raising the cutlass to slash. The stars and the newly risen moon were visible.

Cashel found support for his foot and half-lunged, half-flopped onto the top of the wall. Garric twisted backward into the stable. Two of Benlo's guards ran out of the inn with swords bare in their hands. Liane's white face peered from an upstairs window.

Cashel rolled into the courtyard, landing heavily but on his feet. "Kill that thing!" he screamed to the drover's guards, knowing that he and his quarterstaff couldn't reach the stables in time.

Garric stepped out of the stable with an axletree that Cashel himself would have found a burden. "Haft and the Isles!" he shouted in a voice that waked echoes from all corners of the courtyard. He and the creature strode toward one another, each swinging his weapon.

The massive oaken axletree brushed the cutlass aside and crushed the creature itself with a squelch and a snapping of bones. The cutlass hilt flew toward the inn. The broken blade spun high and thunked point-down in the dirt at Cashel's feet.

Garric turned slightly, seemed to smile, and fell on his face beside the creature he had killed.