Mercedes Lackey - Fairy Godmother

The good part was that with so much magic hanging about, a little more wouldn't be noticed. So she eased out a tiny trace, a thread of the stuff, spun it out from her wand, and concentrated on it.

"Clever, cunning, silent, wary;

Come to me and do not tarry.

Anyone who's wise

knows that Nothing will escape a cat's eyes."

The thread of magic formed into a tiny sphere and shot off at floor-level. She closed the door most of the way, sat back on her heels, and waited.

She did not have to wait long, fortunately for her patience. Within a few minutes, a long, slender, black shape oozed through the crack she had left open, and stood looking expectantly up at her.

"Godmother," she said.

Elena was not surprised that the cat identified her immediately. Cats, even the commonest barn and kitchen cats, had an affinity for magic.

"Daughter of Bast," she replied, with a little bow. Cats liked to be reminded that they had once been worshiped. They pretended that they didn't, that they were above flattery, but of course, that only meant that they were all the more susceptible to it. "I am looking for something. It will be strange. It is very precious to the Bad Pack Leader of the Bad Pack that has taken over this castle, and he will have hidden it." She used the word "pack leader," not because cats had a hierarchy anything like a pack, but because they very well understood how dogs operated, and tended to think of humans and other two-legged creatures in those terms.

"Strange.... " the cat pondered this. "There is hard shiny no-scent stuff, but it is precious to all of them, and like the hard shiny stuff that was here already. Will it be — " and here the cat used a word that didn't translate into human terms. This was because it was the complicated, multilayered feline term, incorporating scent, sound, sight, magic-sight, and a sense that only cats seemed to have that somehow involved magic at a level completely alien to humans. It meant "something that is physical but is also extremely magical" with a modifier specifying "bad magic."

"Yes, it will!" Elena whispered, grateful beyond measure that she had somehow managed to attract one of the castle matriarchs, and not a kitchen-cat, a kitten, or a pampered lady's cat.

"Hmm, the size of a six-week kitten ? Hard shiny stuff on the outside, but alive inside?" the cat persisted.

Now that could only be the heart, as Sergei had described it! He'll probably encase it in diamond or something, and put the diamond in a box and you'll have to figure out how to get it out...

"That's it exactly, wisest of the wise!" she exclaimed. "Can you take me to it?"

"Can you walk-through-walls?" the cat asked.

Now, Elena had never been entirely certain what that meant. Cats used the term all the time. Sometimes, it seemed to mean only that the cat could ooze through small cracks and holes that seemed too small for it. Sometimes it seemed to mean merely that it could find a way wherever it wanted to go. But sometimes it seemed to mean just that, literally — as if there were cats who could, indeed, walk through walls.

Mind, knowing cats, she didn't entirely doubt it, though that didn't help her at the moment.

"No," she said with regret. "I am not so clever."

"Clever," in feline, meant a number of things that included being powerful, intelligent, cunning, and very, very magical.

"Can you walk unseen?" the cat persisted. "We must pass many dogs of the Bad Pack. They are roused by the Good Pack at the gate and the two Pack Leaders fighting, but there are still some along the way who are not distracted."

Elena felt her throat tighten; so Alexander was in combat! She had to move, and move quickly, for he could not battle so powerful a magician for very long....

"I can," she said, electing to spend a great deal of her magic to make herself invisible. She hadn't planned on doing so — it would leave her very little to work with —

But now it was a matter of time, and they had none to waste.

"Do, " the cat said, and sat on her haunches, expectantly.

Elena gathered the magic and smoothed it over herself with her wand like a second skin. Then, holding it in place, she concentrated with all of her will, and gave it the direction she wanted it to take —

"Fool all eyes that look on me; fool each mind that wants to see. Make me clear as purest air; I'm the one who isn't there."

She had never done this before, although she had read about it, and it was most unnerving to watch herself, for she just — faded away, growing more and more transparent, until there was nothing where she was, at all. She'd taken pains to form the spell so that it not only worked on the eyes but on the mind — so that even if one of the Sorcerer's creatures could ordinarily see things that were invisible, such as spirits, it still would not see her unless it worked a counter-spell, because its mind would refuse to acknowledge that she was there.

The cat's mouth opened in a feline grin. "Well done, Godmother. I see you not. Come. "

That was proof enough that the spell was properly set, for cats, as everyone knew, were perfectly capable of seeing spirits. The cat oozed around the door again, and Elena pulled off her boots and followed.

The hallway was quite short, and probably represented the point where the tower connected to the castle itself. It led straight into a larger room — much, much larger — that could only have been Stancia's Great Hall where everyone had been at dinner when the Sorcerer came. The bodies had been taken away, but the tables and benches were pretty much still where they'd been when the fight was over. Crockery shards and broken wooden trenchers were scattered everywhere, there were sticky pools of what might have been blood and what might have been drink, mostly dried now. There was no sign of anything edible. Some of the tables and benches were broken or hacked up, the tapestries had been torn off the walls and shredded or were lying in heaps against the walls. There was a foul stench in the air that made both Elena and the cat wrinkle their noses in distaste.

The foul aroma probably came from the creatures still here.

Elena could not put a name to what they were; they were outside her expertise, and now she could understand why Stancia's men were calling them "demons." The things that they looked most like were spiders, except that they had a hard armoring skin, and only four legs. All four had nasty cutting pincers on them, though, and they had a manlike torso with two "arms" each as well, with appendages that served as hands. They had oval, hairless heads with masklike faces and large, slanting, glittering eyes. They were all, from the top of the head to the tip of the pincers, a shiny black in color.

There were fifteen of them, and they were simply — immobile. They might have been statues, except that Elena was perfectly certain that they were watching everything that passed around them.

No wonder the cat had asked her if she could be invisible.

They paid no attention to the cat, however. Perhaps they were unconcerned about anything below a certain size. The cat wove her way across the hall, tail in the air, sauntering as if she hadn't a care in the world, and Elena followed in her wake. Elena did note, however, that the path that the cat took was the one that enabled her to keep as far away from each of the things as possible, even though that actually meant that she was weaving her way among them rather than going in a straight line.

Well, that suited Elena. She made herself as small as she could, and was glad that she had thought to take her boots off first. She clutched them to her chest, and walked as silently as stockinged feet would permit. That cat moved slowly as well; perhaps rapid movement would also trigger their interest. That suited Elena just fine as it made it easy to keep right on the cat's heels.