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12

Cashel duckwalked slowly down the spillway, keeping his eyes on the flat bottom so that he wouldn't miss anything unusual. The stones were slick with residue from the seawater that roared down them when the mill was in use, though that hadn't been for some days. The morning sun wasn't high enough to clear the walls of the trough, but there was plenty of light to see by.

If there'd been anything to see, that is.

"I think it was about there," Tenoctris called from the beside the millwheel, where she and Cashel had sheltered during the night to watch the drover.

He was in the right place: he could see the faint nicks Benlo's dagger had made on the stones. Had the drover picked up the object he drew the glamour from? Neither Tenoctris nor Cashel himself had seen him bend down to do that, but the only thing here—

"I found a pebble," Cashel called. "Could he have been using a pebble, mistress?"

"Yes!" she replied. "Very possibly he could."

Cashel climbed out of the spillway and walked toward the wizard. He wondered if Benlo would notice them going over the scene of his invocation of the previous night, though he didn't worry about the possibility. Despite the drover's denial and Tenoctris' doubt, Cashel was convinced that Benlo was behind the attack on Garric. If Benlo wanted to make a problem about what Cashel was doing, then he was welcome to try.

Terns skimmed the sea's surface and rose with small fish in their beaks. Their motion kept drawing Cashel's unwilling eyes to seaward. That was the direction Sharina had gone, and he was sure in his heart that she would never return.

Tenoctris took the pebble from his hand and held it to the sun to see its details. "Marble," she said. "Do you have marble around here, Cashel?"

He shook his head. "I thought it was a chip of quartz from the beach," he said. Now that he looked carefully he could see that what he'd taken for natural weathering on one side of the pebble was really carving. The piece was no larger than the end of his thumb.

"I can't do what Benlo did with it," Tenoctris said, eyeing the stone critically. "But I think I have sufficient power to learn what it came from."

She sat down, crossing her legs beneath her instead of squatting the way a villager would have done. She plucked a stalk of the coarse grass growing in the angle between the millhouse and the spillway.

"My athame," she told Cashel with a smile, holding up the blade of grass. "The tools Meder and Benlo use concentrate power wonderfully, but not power from a single source. Much better to use something neutral. Much safer at least."

Cashel squatted beside her, nodding understanding. He didn't know anything about wizardry, but he understood forces the way anyone who worked with his hands did. If you used a long bar to multiply your strength, you needed to be very careful where you set the tip and what you used for a fulcrum—especially if you were as strong as Cashel or-Kenset to begin with.

Tenoctris put the pebble on the ground, then frowned and turned it over so the side with carven braiding was up. She drew a circle in the air around it with the grassblade.

Mitir's little daughter peered at them from the back of her house, then tossed out the remainder of the grain she was feeding to their chickens and went back inside. Cashel was vaguely uneasy that they were in plain sight to anyone on the south side of the mill, but Tenoctris clearly didn't care whether or not people watched her working her magic.

Too bad there aren't more folk—let alone wizards—as willing to do their business in plain sight, he thought. The world would be a more honest place.

"Miuchthan salaam athiaskirtho," Tenoctris murmured as she tapped the grassblade to the ground, one station as she spoke each separate word. "Dabathaa zaas ouach kol—"

Movement caught Cashel's eye. He looked up, startled. Benlo's pretty daughter watched them from the corner of the millhouse.

"Semisilam bachaxichuch!" Tenoctris said, raising her voice as she struck the pebble with the tip of the grassblade.

"I'm sorry," the girl, Liane, said in embarrassment. "I didn't mean to intrude on—"

The form of a building in faint red light swelled from the pebble the way a puffer fish inflates. The ghostly structure had square sides, a low dome, and no opening except a single arched doorway. The corner moldings were ornamented with stone braid like that from which the pebble had come.

"Oh, that's—" Liane said.

Wizardry, Cashel's mind supplied for the next word.

"—the Countess Tera's tomb in Carcosa," Liane continued. "What a marvelous illusion, mistress!"

"Yes," Tenoctris said dryly. "I'm sometimes mistaken for a wizard. By those who haven't seen the real thing, of course."

The image vanished. Cashel realized he didn't know how large it had been. The size of a real building, he'd thought; but he and Tenoctris were only arm's length apart and it hadn't touched either one of them. Had the red form only existed in his mind?

"How do you come to recognize the tomb, mistress?" Tenoctris asked. She looked at the grassblade as if puzzled to find it in her hand, then dropped it on top of the chip of marble.

Liane's eyes narrowed slightly when she looked closely at Tenoctris. Even seated on the ground and wearing a patched tunic, the old woman's fine features marked her as something out of the ordinary for Barca's Hamlet.

"My father was interested in it," the girl said at last. "I suppose because it looks something like our family tomb in Erdin. He visited it several times while we were in Carcosa."

Cashel rose to his feet. Liane was a pretty enough girl, though he didn't see what all the fuss the village women were making was about. She had her father's jet black hair and pale complexion, here covered by a broad-brimmed hat of stiffened linen. Her face was triangular, not round, and her fine bone structure must also have come from her mother's side.

"Your father's a wizard," he said bluntly. Nothing in his stance was threatening, but he knew that whether he wanted to or not he loomed over the girl like an ox facing a kitten. "Did he bring that thing out of the sea to attack my friend last night?"

Liane blinked in shock, but she didn't flinch. "My father's a good man," she said in a clear voice. "He said he didn't bring the lich here. He's never lied, not to me, not to anyone."

Tenoctris got to her feet. Liane stooped and helped the older woman in a reflex that was controlling even now when she was angry and perhaps frightened.

Cashel cringed internally. She was a nice girl, whatever her father was. But—

"Tenoctris tells me I'm wrong too, mistress," he said. "I'm sorry. But your father is a wizard, because I watched him here last night."

Liane swallowed and closed her eyes. When she reopened them, they were focused on the sea and the far horizon. "When I was a little girl," she said, "the nurse would bring me in and put me on Mother's lap, and my father would sing to us. Beautiful songs, love songs from all the lands he'd visited in his travels."

She looked at Cashel with angry eyes on the verge of tears. "He's a good man," she said fiercely. She turned and strode off the way she'd come, around the millhouse, where Katchin's wife screamed at their infant and the infant screamed to the world.

"I shouldn't have said that," Cashel muttered. He felt his face redden with embarrassment as he thought of what he'd done under the goad of his slow smoldering anger.

"You're an honest man," Tenoctris said mildly. "I've always believed that an honest man can say anything he feels ought to be said. Besides that—"

She smiled up at him. If Liane was a kitten, Tenoctris was a bird, a bright-

eyed sparrow.

"—I found her answers interesting. Perhaps if I get enough pieces to the puzzle, I'll learn whether it was chance or something else that brought me here, now. The hermit would be amused."

"Mistress?" Cashel asked in a thick voice. "Is Benlo as powerful a wizard as you are?"

Tenoctris laughed and patted him on the arm. "Cashel," she said, "I'm not powerful at all. I've read and I see, those are both important. But the skill I have is that of a diamond cutter who knows where to tap to split a stone on the line of cleavage. If you want raw power—Benlo could crush diamonds if he knew how to use the strength he has."

Cashel opened his big, capable hands. "What good's a crushed diamond, mistress?" he asked.

Tenoctris laughed again. "You'd be amazed at how few people understand that, Master Cashel," she said. "The Hooded One certainly didn't."

She looked toward the sea, her face settling into lines of quiet determination. "Which still leaves the question of why the Hooded One did cast me here. Well, perhaps we'll learn that too."

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