Changer's Daughter (24 page)

When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me?

—Montaigne

O
nce again, the filthy cell is dark. By now, however, Katsuhiro’s eyes have become so well adjusted to the poor light that he hardly notices. His thoughts are on Adam.

They have talked only a little since Adam requested that Katsuhiro kill him. At first the Japanese had interpreted the African’s silence as expressing fear or regret. Later, when the guard refilled his bucket, he had offered Adam more water.

Adam had almost refused to drink. That was when Katsuhiro had realized that Adam’s silence was one of waiting. He would not press Katsuhiro further, but he was ready to die.

And what other choice does he have? Alive, he is a hostage against his wife’s actions. Only by a miracle can he hope to escape Regis’s prison and even if he did, only by another miracle would he recover from his injuries. Faced with the choice of an ignominious death or one with its own peculiar heroism, Adam has made his choice.

As Katsuhiro now perceives the situation, he himself has no more choice than does a sword in the hands of a skilled swordsman. He is the weapon by which Adam will meet the death he has already chosen.

He says nothing to Adam of his decision, only offers him water, listens when he wishes to talk, and waits for night to fall. From his experience during the preceding three days, he knows that the guards grow lazy once the prisoners have been fed their dinner.

Of course, neither he nor Adam is accorded this privilege, but the more base of the guards delight in teasing them with elaborate verbal descriptions of the delights that await their fellow prisoners. One guard, whose cruelty is a crude mimicry of Regis’s own, even goes so far as to push a bowl of some delicious-smelling concoction just through the slot in the cell door.

Knowing that the bowl will be withdrawn as soon as he moves toward it, Katsuhiro refuses to even acknowledge its presence. Infuriated, the guard takes the bowl away, then sits outside the door sucking up the contents with elaborate moans of delight.

But when darkness falls, the guards grow tired of such games. They retire to an anteroom at the end of the hallway, near the base of the stairs. There they play cards or
ayo
or brag about their exploits. Hearing a particularly heated argument developing, Katsuhiro acts.

Rising to his feet in a single graceful movement, he pads noiselessly across the cell to where Adam lies. The African’s snores, loud because of damage to his bruised—possibly broken—nose, reassure Katsuhiro that he is sound asleep.

After folding his suit jacket into a rectangular pad, Katsuhiro kneels next to the sleeping man and presses the fabric against his mouth and nose, holding it firmly but lightly so that Adam will not awaken before he suffocates.

This is not as noble a death as
seppuku
, but to Katsuhiro’s way of seeing things, it is much the same. Adam, by making his choice to die rather than permit continued dishonor in his name, has already slashed his sword through his bowels. Katsuhiro with his folded jacket has assumed the role of the second whose quick follow-through with his own sword severs the dying man’s head to permit him to die with ease and dignity.

In a minute or so, it is over. When Katsuhiro removes his jacket, Adam is dead. The fabric is slightly damp, probably soiled beyond recovery, so Katsuhiro lifts Adam’s head and rests it on the folded jacket as on a pillow. The guards are fools. They will not look closely at the circumstances.

Then he rocks back on his heels and bows his head as if in prayer, though long ago he had lost the belief that there was anyone to pray to beyond himself.

In this attitude, he does not see the large spider that lowers itself by an invisible thread to examine the body. Nor does he notice the spider’s tears.

Morning in southwestern Colorado: A florid man with a bulbous nose and thick, scraggly brows sits in the passenger seat of a four-wheel-drive pickup truck. In the driver’s seat is a man wearing the neat jeans and button-down shirt of a government employee dressed for a day in the field.

“This is the parcel, Wayne,” the government man says. “It hasn’t been grazed for years. There’s water and not much traffic. You should be able to set your herds out without any of those environmental busybodies knowing a thing.”

Wayne Watkins nods sagely, chewing on the inside of his lip. He’s only half-listening to what the man is saying. The days of easy access to government lands, days he remembers so fondly, are over now. That is, the ease is over, but not the access, not for a man who knows which palms to grease.

“It isn’t great,” he mutters, turning his head slightly so that he can watch the government man without the man being able to read his expression—a task made easier by the tinted sunglasses he always wears, “and I suppose I’ll have to deal with interlopers.”

“Well, it is public land,” the government man says defensively, “so there may be the occasional hiker or camper, but this isn’t exactly prime territory. There aren’t any facilities for miles. The closest private landowner is a horse rancher named Frank MacDonald.”

“I remember reading about him,” Wayne says, “in your report. Quarter horses, right? He’s the one who had the permit for this land before I got it. God knows why. It certainly isn’t prime horse land.”

Wayne unfolds the map where the lands covered by his grazing permit are outlined in red. MacDonald’s holdings are indicated by a wash of yellow highlighter.

“Yep. Hell of a lot of land for a horse ranch,” he comments.

“I think MacDonald does some subsistence farming,” the government man adds helpfully. “Mostly he keeps to himself.”

“He likely to give me much trouble?” Wayne asks. “Like I just said, he
was
my competition for the permit.”

“I doubt it. His associates speak of him as a mild-tempered man. If he protests, it will be through the bureaucracy.”

“Not much good that’ll do him,” Wayne chuckles. “Right?”

The government man, remembering an unexpected bonus in his paycheck, smiles conspiratorially. “Right.”

“Now,” Wayne says, dismissing MacDonald and getting to the point, “these are public lands. What are the limits of my use?”

The government man gets officious. “Well, no permanent construction, of course. You can build holding pens, truck in tanks for water, even set up a shelter, as long as it all can be removed when your lease is over.”

“Good. Anything else?”

“Try to keep impact on the environment to the minimum.”

“Shit, man! I’m grazing cattle here!”

The government man simpers. “Well, needless to say, the environmental impact will be assessed in light of the use for which you contracted the land.”

“Shit. You talk more than my mother-in-law. How about hunting?”

“Well, Wayne, try not to abuse the limits of the permit.”

“How about varmints bothering my cattle? Coyotes and suchlike.”

“I don’t see any problem with that.”

Wayne takes one more look out over the land. It isn’t as good as some of the land he’s used in the past, but it’ll do. The cattle get their final fattening in a feedlot, anyhow.

“Okay. I’ll sign the papers,” he says, his tone indicating that he considers that he is doing the government a great favor. “Let’s go where you can buy me lunch while I do it.”

“Sounds good to me, Wayne,” the government man says.

Wayne waves to the land as they bounce out over the rutted road. “I’ll be seeing you—me and my cattle.”

“
And,”
he subvocalizes,
“my rifle.”

It doesn’t look anything at all like a magic academy. There are no lofty towers, no white marble veined in gold, no pennants snapping in the wind. It doesn’t even look like the popular conception of a wizard’s cottage—no cobblestone walls or mossy paths or elf-haunted grots.

What it does look like is a cluster of squat adobe buildings set in a hollow at the end of a dirt road. The surrounding terrain is mostly covered with golden brown dry winter grass, accented by some tired-looking piñon and juniper. The scenery is lovely, though: views in one direction of the Jemez Mountains, in another of the Sangre de Cristos, both ranges topped with snow.

As he gets out of the Pendragon Productions’ van and stretches, Arthur can understand why the hippies who had first built this place had overlooked the inconvenience of the location and the likelihood that they would never be able to make a living from the dry, rocky land. It is beautiful.

More importantly, though, for the needs of the Academy, the buildings are made of old-fashioned mud-brick adobe, not the modern sham: frame stucco. Thus, there is almost no iron or steel in the superstructure. The pipes are copper—a metal that does not interfere with magic as iron does—and floors are pegged together, not nailed.

That the place had been melting back into the earth had been one of the reasons they had been able to buy it and twenty acres of the land surrounding it for a reasonable price. The other reason was that the well had gone dry some twenty years before, driving away the last of the hippies when they grew tired of trucking in their water.

Swansdown the yeti had managed to get the well working again. For appearances’ sake, however, they still truck in a few big plastic tanks of water every week. No need to raise the property taxes.

Arthur dismisses such everyday concerns when the front door of the largest building creaks open. A lean, handsome man walks out, his silver hair and beard tossed by the wind.

“Arthur! I’m so glad to see you.”

Ian Lovern, once known as Merlin, grasps Arthur’s hand in his own. As he returns the handclasp, Arthur notices that though the mage’s fingers are still as beringed as ever, the palm is rougher and more callused than it had been a month and a half before.

“And I’m glad to see you, Lovern. How are things?”

“Busy. Chaotic. Insane. Demanding. Maddening.” Lovern sighs, rubs his clear blue eyes with one bony fist. “Swansdown has most of our small circle working on an amulet. I bowed out so I could speak with you privately.”

“Is something wrong?”

“Come inside. It’s nippy out here.” Lovern leads the way through the ornately carved Mexican front door into a Talavera-tiled foyer lined with boots and overshoes in various sizes and a few odd shapes. From there he turns into a small room lined with bookshelves.

“My office,” Lovern explains. “It isn’t much, but at least most of my references are at hand.”

Looking about the cramped room, rubbing his hands against the chill, Arthur recalls the spacious suite Lovern occupies when at Pendragon Estates and silently agrees that this cubbyhole isn’t much.

He doesn’t want to sound depreciating, though, so he words his reply carefully. “You’ve certainly got it fixed up so everything is in reach. Now, tell me what’s bothering you.”

“Resources.”

“If you mean your last order,” Arthur says, “there are more supplies in the van. Chris notes where he made substitutions and for what reasons. Is that the problem?”

“No,” Lovern says. “My problem is—for lack of a better word—human resources. I simply don’t have enough people to carry out even half of the requests for magecraft you’ve forwarded. Swansdown is talented, but her skills are more geared toward healing and creative curses, not magecraft. The same is true of many of the others. Alice Chun came to help for a few weeks, but she says that she has other things to do and refuses to become a permanent part of the Academy. You’d think a former queen would have a greater sense of responsibility.”

Arthur nods. “You would think so, but she hasn’t been a queen for centuries. These days, she’s just a novelist.”

Lovern sighs.“You know, at first, the work we did here was kind of fun. We worked up a disguise amulet for Frank MacDonald to use on the unicorns. It was a simple enough illusion—hide the horn, bulk up the frame, fluff out the tail, fill in the hooves.

“Then we designed the shapeshift for Vera. That was more complicated, but I felt my students were learning something, and we were becoming a team. Now it seems that every day we get more requests for some amulet or other. Worst of all, everyone seems to think that I
owe
some service to them.”