Dana Stabenow - Powers of Detection

Or desire had colored someone else’s.

I looked more closely. Last time I had seen her, Audra’s hair had not been quite so luxuriant, nor so long. Nor was she usually this tall, and her angular face was far from being beautiful in the normal run of things. And, may I say, I am not in the habit of rating other women’s physical attractions, but in my opinion, she generally had none. At the moment, her bosom was very well endowed.

This was not Audra. This was someone’s idealization of Audra.

I knew of only one truly gifted illusionist who had also been in love with the red-haired witch. Apparently Morben was not dead after all. We had never had a chance to inspect his body, I suddenly remembered. We had assumed that the original death spell was what had caused the corpse to flare to ashes, but that had just been part and parcel of the overall illusion. There had been no body to examine because there was no body. Morben had projected the whole scene of assault and death, then caused the final image to vanish with a flick of his fingers. How could we have been so stupid?

I had just been so happy he was dead.

But if I didn’t show some ingenuity immediately, I would be the one dead, and Morben would be the one who was happy. I could feel him testing my wall of protection, flinging first one angry spell and then another against my magical shield. He was very good at mayhem; he would be able to find a way through it eventually. And then every single copy of Camalyn the Headmistress would fall to the stone floor, choking on death and fury.

I considered the situation, tilting my head to one side. All my reflections did likewise. I was maintaining two simultaneous sets of magic, the reflecting spell and the spell of protection. Morben, meanwhile, juggled two of his own, the illusion of Audra and the attack on me. That level of magical use had probably drained both of us to an approximately equal level.

But if I could reduce my expenditure of energy to one spell only, I should be stronger than my enemy. I would have to work very fast, of course. I would have to know exactly what I was doing before I made a single move.

Morben’s curses hammered at my shield. I concentrated on holding the wall in place while conjuring and dispersing other bits of magic. My mirrored images all raised their hands before them, as if to plead for mercy or feel for an unseen door. I murmured a word, and all my doppelgängers fell away.

The counterfeit Audra whipped around to face me, her beautiful mouth stretched into a disdainful smile. “One of you or a thousand of you, it does not matter,” Morben said in Audra’s voice. “I will slay you all.”

I had never gotten much pleasure out of bandying words with Morben, and I did not bother now. I merely extended my right hand and spoke a single word. “ Stone. ”

The other wizard turned to a statue with its mouth half-open and its hands lifted as if to strike. He did not move again.

I stood there a moment, smiling, then resumed my habitual reflecting spell. You could never tell where the next danger might come from, or when. It was not possible to be too careful.

–

To tell the truth, I had expected a more emotional reaction from the school board and my fellow wizards once it was discovered who the killer was and how I had vanquished him. Something along the lines of, “Oh, Camalyn, you’re so wise, we’re so grateful, you’ve saved us all” would have been entirely appropriate, I thought. Instead, the head of the school board merely said, “I suppose you’ll be wanting funds to hire some new instructors.” My remaining staff quarreled amongst themselves over who had been most delinquent in overlooking the obvious clues that pointed to the notion that Morben was not really dead.

I was not surprised when they ultimately decided I was most to blame. “Had Camalyn figured this out sooner,” Xander said, “Borrin would not be dead.”

I could not be entirely sorry that my deductions had been so slow.

The corollary event that probably made me happiest about the whole affair was how angry Audra was that the cautionary statuary on the promenade looked just like her, with a few enhancements. “You could have turned him back into Morben before you turned him into stone forever,” she said a few days after the incident was concluded.

“I could have, if I had wanted to risk dying for your vanity,” I agreed. “I only had time for one spell. I chose to incapacitate him, not de-beautify him.”

“What if he breaks free of enchantment?” Dernwerd asked in a fretful voice. “What if he comes back to life and kills us all?”

I shrugged. I wasn’t too worried about it. A wizard’s spell generally will last for that wizard’s lifetime, so I, at least, should be dead before Morben had any reasonable chance of resurrection. “Get out the sledgehammer and shatter him to bits,” I said. “Grind him into dust and let the wind blow him away. It’s all the same to me.”

“But are we just to leave him like that forever?” Xander asked. “It seems so indecent, somehow. What kind of lesson does that present for the students?”

“Not to try to kill the Headmistress,” I said over my shoulder, for I was bored with the conversation and already walking away. “I don’t know that they need to learn anything else while they’re here at Norwitch.”

And, come to think of it, I’m not sure any of them did.

The old man walked along the beach on his lifelong mission to collect trash and other cast-off stuff. In town the children called him the Beachcomber, or Old Man, or (not to his face) Creepazoid, but he had his own name, he thought, a name he would share if anyone asked. Hardly anyone did, and so only the beachcomber knew his true name.

Uncle, he thought of himself. I am Uncle.

Uncle walked the beach with steps firmer and longer than on the often icy streets of the town, an Alaska fishing town, hard on its luck and struggling to keep profit ahead of pride. On the beach he could walk as his true self, ancient and unbowed to time. Not whole, though. The beach had taken pieces of him and only rarely gave them back.

He used an old bamboo staff, crushed smooth at the end and split in parts, for balance and defense. Like almost everything about him, he found it on the beach-given to him by the beach, he liked to think. Uncle wore old tennis shoes with heavy socks, canvas duck pants cut off below the knees, red long johns, a wool shirt, a rumpled old dark green rain slicker, and a big floppy wool hat. His white beard hung to his chest, and his white hair poked out from under the hat.

Uncle carried a battered old canvas back slung around one shoulder, a plastic grocery bag inside for wet or disgusting items he found on the beach. He saw it as his own special mission to collect trash. Secretly, he looked for treasure, but he found that if he had it as his stated purpose to collect trash he would find treasure that much more easily. And he had to collect everything.

Yes, Uncle had his rules. He must pick up all plastic, anything of human manufacture, unless it was so heavy he couldn’t carry it; and then he flung it above the high-tide line so that someday someone else could pick it up. Glass bottles he broke and ground into the rocky sand, to be turned into beach glass.

Of beach glass he had some rules, too. Only worn beach glass could be picked up. No edge should be shiny, no surface unground. Pieces smaller than a fingernail should be left to return to sand. Intact glass floats, of which he had found only a dozen in all his life, he could take. Broken floats must be returned to the beach.

Paper that would rot away he could leave if he had no room to carry it, unless he found the paper offensive, as with most fast-food wrappers. Uncle did not see it as his mission to clean up trash near parking lots or trash left by teenagers at beach parties. He picked up the faraway trash and left other trash for good citizens or bad boys on community service to haul away. He would not pick up gross diapers or tampons, used bandages, or anything similarly disgusting.