The spellbook ofEnchantment

The harbor clerk of Tartessos had already refused the magician's papers twice. Hanno sighed, caught the man's eye across the crowded customs hall, and murmured something under the noise. The clerk blinked, and his whole face changed. Why, he said warmly, Hanno was an old friend, practically family, and of course the cargo could go through, and would he like to come to dinner? He came to dinner. He was still a devoted friend the next morning, and the one after. On the fourth morning the clerk woke up with a frown, and Hanno was already at sea.

Three cutpurses had followed Neferet into the Park of Monuments after dark, and they closed on her beneath the statue of some forgotten Pharaoh. The magician flicked her fingers. A circle of blazing white light burst open around the three men, bright as noon, and every patrolling guard in that corner of the park turned to look. The cutpurses stood blinking, lit up like actors on a stage. Then, very sensibly, they stepped out of the light and ran in three directions. The circle glowed on, empty, long after they had gone.

The thief had snatched a jade pendant from a stall in the East Market of Tang and was sprinting for the alleys when the young magician Li Wen pointed after him. The dust of the market lifted, a shimmering gray stream of it, and hissed after the thief like a flight of angry wasps. It struck him across the shoulders and he went down yelping, his back peppered with welts. He scrambled up and kept going, but he had dropped the pendant. The stallholder bowed to Li Wen three times, and then, practically, charged him for the dust.

The fight in the House of the Black Hawk was turning ugly, and the knives had come out. The charlatan Dario backed toward the hearth, reached into it with one hand and gathered the fire's breath. A dense gray cloud rolled out of the fireplace and filled that end of the tavern until nobody could see their own nose. Men coughed, cursed and swung at each other blindly. When the smoke finally thinned ten minutes later, the brawlers found themselves glaring at one another in confusion. Dario was long gone, and so was the tavern's strongbox.

The Sheban merchant opened his chest with a flourish, and the lamplight fell on a heap of gold coins. The magician Yasmin, who had been hired by the buyer to watch, murmured a word and looked again. The gold wavered like a reflection in a pond and faded, and beneath it lay what was really there: lead slugs, dull gray, with a single thin layer of true coins on top. She leaned over and whispered to her employer. The merchant watched her lips move, and the smile slowly slid off his face.

The shopkeeper of Atlantean Magical and Alchemical Supply swore the silver ring had belonged to a First Age prince. Xanthe, a thaumaturge who bought for the Institute of Knowledge, held it cupped in her palm and let the spell open her eyes. For one minute she saw what the shop was really made of: a faint green glow on a shelf of sealed jars, a sullen red shimmer from a locked case behind the counter, and nothing at all from the ring. She set it down gently. Then she asked what was in the locked case.

The amulet was a bit of brass wire and blue glass, and Rodrigo the charlatan had bought it for a copper in Tartessos. Now he held it up in a tavern full of hopeful mercenaries while his spell lent it the unmistakable shimmer of true magic. One buyer, a hedge-sorcerer, cast Identify on it and nodded, impressed. The price went up. It was only at the third table that a quiet, gray-bearded wizard muttered a spell of his own, studied the amulet and began to laugh. Rodrigo left quickly after that, and was out of town long before the false glow faded.

In the Sorcerers' Market of Acheron, the peddler swore the knobbly black root came from the hidden gardens of Hsuan Island. Merit, a thaumaturge with a great deal of experience of peddlers, took it in her hand and spoke the spell. The knowledge settled in her mind like a bird landing: ordinary mandrake, old and dried, good for a sleeping draught and not much else. She put it back. The peddler offered her a stoppered bottle of glowing elixir instead. She held that too, cast again, and learned nothing whatever; the spell has no power over alchemy.

The sea cave on the cliffs below Mehedra had been carved into a smugglers' store, and the only way in was an opening eighty feet up a sheer rock face. Tariq, a magician from Ophir, stood on the shingle at low tide, spoke a word and rose. He drifted straight up, past gulls' nests and dripping weed, slowly and steadily, until he was level with the cave mouth, and stepped inside. A few minutes later he stepped out again and floated back down, a heavy sack in his arms, careful not to carry more than the spell could lift.

The garland had been woven for his wife on their wedding day in Tang, sixty years ago: white jasmine, red peony, a few sprigs of pine. Kaelis, an old Druas magician, had cast the preservation over it the same evening. She was gone now, but the garland still hung on the wall of his room, as fresh and fragrant as the morning it was made. Visitors sometimes asked whether it was painted silk. He would smile and invite them to touch it. The petals were cool and soft and smelled of that long-ago summer.

The Atlantean envoy had rehearsed his speech for weeks, but at the doors of the Palace of Harmony his nerve failed. His magician, a quiet woman named Callista, laid two fingers on his wrist and murmured. He drew a breath and, to his own astonishment, addressed the Khitan ministers in fluent, courtly Khitan, catching every nuance of their replies. The talks ran long. As the water clock neared the end of the hour, Callista leaned forward and touched his sleeve. He glanced at her, and quickly began to wrap up his remarks.

The Caliph's gate guards in Veddashud were not supposed to let anyone past, but the enchanter Zara only wanted a minute. She flicked her fingers, and the air before them filled with colored sparks, little turning stars and a paper bird that flew in slow circles. The guard dog sat down and stared, mouth open, entranced. So did the younger guard. The captain, a clever woman, shook her head after a moment, blinked, and swore. By then Zara was through the gate and gone, and the dog was still watching the paper bird.

The Suti had come to Madaan to rob the golden urns from the rock-cut tombs of the sultans. The magician Hamid, who kept watch over the tombs for the sultan's family, waited until they were at the cliff door and then showed them its guardian: a towering, bandaged corpse with burning eyes, rising out of the tomb's shadow with its arms outstretched. Four of the bandits froze where they stood, rigid with terror, swords dangling. The fifth dropped his torch, screamed, and ran. By the time the others could move again, the tomb guards were upon them.

The thief had worked for two nights to get into the jeweler's back room in Bersheba, and at last his fingers closed around the pearl box. The box spoke in a loud, cheerful voice: Put that down, thief. The Queen's guard is coming right now. He dropped it, bolted through the window and kept running until he was three streets away. The box sat on the floor, silent. The guard was not coming at all. The jeweler's magician had set the warning weeks ago, and it had just paid for itself many times over.

The wild boar came out of the Oggia undergrowth at a charge, and the Rom enchanter Luminita had nowhere to go. She flung a pinch of powdered chestnut bark on the ground at her feet and spoke. A full-grown chestnut tree erupted out of the loam, trunk and branches and all, and she scrambled up it as the boar thudded into the bark below. It circled and grunted. She waited. After ten minutes the tree began to fade beneath her, going thin as mist. Luminita dropped through it onto the grass. The boar, fortunately, had got bored and left.

The door to the Chancellor's private study in the Imperial Courts of Tang was locked, barred and guarded. Mei Lin, a magician in the service of a rival minister, touched her own breastbone and shrank. The corridor grew vast around her, the floorboards rolled out like a plain, and the guard's sandals loomed like beached boats. At the height of an inch she strolled beneath the door through the gap at the bottom. Inside, the Chancellor's papers were piled like cliffs. She had a good while before she would begin to grow again, and she meant to use every minute.

Foreign men may not walk the Amazon quarters of Merina, and the magician Aristo had business there. He touched his own chest and was gone. He walked the segregated streets unseen for hours, careful and patient, until he reached the counting-house he wanted and learned what he had come to learn. On the way out, an Amazon patrol seized his companion, an unlucky Tharshi guide who had followed him in. Aristo lost his temper and punched the nearest soldier. In that instant he was plainly visible to every Amazon in the street.

In the slave market at Aram on Raamah, the enchanter Sefton had been put in chains with the rest of the captured crew. He waited until the auctioneer's attention was elsewhere, then whispered to the lock on his manacles. It sprang open with a click. He whispered to the next lock, the one on the chain that bound him to his neighbor, and it opened too. Each lock took another casting, and there were a great many locks. He worked patiently down the line, one at a time, while the bidding went on above them.

The Nethermen clan had cornered Iskra on a bridge over a gorge in Molodo, five warriors with axes and no patience. The magician smiled and spread her arms, and suddenly there were four of her, each one smiling, each one moving exactly as she moved. The warriors hesitated. Then the boldest swung at the nearest Iskra; his axe passed through and she burst like a soap bubble. The next swing took a second. Two left, and the Nethermen grinned. The real Iskra kept backing away, still smiling, and began to cast again.

The Black Skull is lit by torches, and on this night that was lucky for Kiya. When the necromancer's bodyguards came for her across the smoky room, the magician spoke a word and her whole outline smeared, like a figure seen through wavering water. The first man's club hit nothing. The second man's knife went wide. The third squinted, found her, and struck her on the shoulder, but only glancingly. Then someone knocked a torch off the wall, the room dimmed, and the blur around her faded. Kiya ran for the door.

Two monks in black came over the ridge of the tiled roof, and the magician Jia had nowhere left to run: behind her was a drop to a Tang alley, and the next rooftop lay across a gap of some eight feet, too far to leap. She fixed her eyes on one particular tile over there, a cracked green one beside the chimney, and spoke. For an instant the world went away. Then she was standing on the cracked tile, and the two monks were staring at the empty spot where she had been. Jia gave them a little bow and climbed on over the roof.

The clay tablet had been dug from a First Age ruin and sent to the Library at Acheron, where no living scholar could make sense of it. Senmut, a magician with a passion for dead tongues, laid it on the reading table, spoke the spell and bent over it. The wedge-shaped marks rearranged themselves in his mind into plain meaning: a ship's manifest, a list of cargo, a harbor master's complaint about a late payment. He read faster and faster. He was halfway through a line about a sealed crate from Attla when the words dissolved back into marks.

The Rom caravan had been attacked on the road through Oggia, and in the scramble someone had trodden on Nicu's lute. The enchanter sat by the fire that night turning the pieces over in his hands, the snapped neck, the split belly, the curl of gut strings. His cousins watched him in silence. He laid the pieces together on a blanket, murmured, and the wood flowed back into itself, the cracks closing like healing skin. When he lifted it, the lute was whole. He tuned it, played one bright chord, and the whole camp cheered.

The duel took place on the marble terrace of the Magical Institute of Dardanus, and everyone expected the wizard to win. He was already chanting his first Word of Power when the magician Anthea dropped a circle of silence over him. His lips kept moving; no sound came out. He stopped, astonished, and tried again, face reddening, while the audience of students began to laugh. At last he worked it out, took three long strides to the edge of the circle and stepped out of it. By then Anthea had finished her own spell.

The Turanian nomads had taken her horse and left her to die in the desert, three miles from the nearest well. Parisa, a magician from Sheba, took a pinch of ground camel hair from the pouch at her belt, sprinkled it on the sand and spoke. A camel coalesced out of the shimmering air, fully grown, saddled with nothing, chewing placidly. She clambered onto it and kicked it into a lope. It carried her for ten minutes, bless it, and then melted away beneath her like a mirage, and she walked the rest of the way.

The Ahl-at-Rab came thundering out of the dunes on their huge lizards, and the caravan's campfire was the only fire for miles. The sorcerer Bahram thrust his hand into it and drew out a long ribbon of flame, which he flung across the sand between the camp and the raiders. A wall of fire leapt up, taller than a man, crackling and roaring. The lead lizard ran straight into it, and it and its rider came out the other side screeching, scorched, the rider's saddle blanket alight. The others wheeled away along the wall's length.

Makara sea-devils swarmed up the side of the Ebony Dolphin trading ship and onto the deck, and the ship's magician, a Nubian named Kofi, snatched a cup of water from the cook's barrel. He hurled its contents at the boarders. The water grew in mid-air into a wall higher than a man, then burst, sweeping across the deck in a roaring green wave. Makara went flying over the rail and into the sea. Two fetched up against the mast, knocked flat but still aboard. The crew fell on them with boathooks.

The court of the Queen of Sheba was full of perfumed diplomats, and the court magician Sabra had a feeling. She let her eyes go soft and spoke the spell under the sound of the music. The room changed. There, between two pillars, stood a figure that no one else could see, a thin man with a dagger held low, edging toward the Queen's couch. Sabra did not shout. She simply walked across the room, smiled at nothing at all, and put her own knife into the empty air.

Radu had been screaming for a quarter of an hour, clawing at his arms and swearing they were covered in spiders. The magician Matthias knew exactly what had happened; the rival troupe's illusionist had been in the audience that night. He took the young acrobat by both wrists, laid a thumb on his brow and spoke. Radu stopped mid-scream, looked down at his clean, bare arms, and began to laugh and cry at once. Across the room, the rest of the company still stared in horror at the spiders crawling on the floorboards.

The black rhinoceros came out of the Kushite scrub at a full charge, head down, straight at the caravan's lead camel. The magician Asha flung out a hand and spoke. The great beast stumbled and went on coming, but now it came as if wading through honey, its thundering charge reduced to a heavy, bewildered trot. The camel drivers had plenty of time to haul their animals out of its path. The rhinoceros plowed past them, snorting, and blundered off into the thorn bushes at half its pace, looking puzzled.

The Tharshi archers on the walls of Tartuk saw the magician walk out of the olive grove below, bold as brass, and they emptied their quivers at him. Arrow after arrow passed through him without a flicker. He kept walking, calm and silent, arms folded, while the real Kerem lay flat behind a stone wall in the grove, concentrating so hard his jaw ached. Meanwhile his friends went over the far side of the wall with their ropes. One sharp-eyed archer squinted at the figure and frowned. Why did it make no sound on the gravel?

The smugglers of Atlantis used a drain tunnel under the Outer Ring to move goods into the city. So the magician Petra, who worked for the tolls office, made them an iron grate. It looked exactly like the real grates all over the city, rusty, solid, stained with river weed, and it blocked the tunnel neatly. The smugglers' boat nosed up to it and stopped short, and the crew swore and began to back water. All but one: the smallest of them leaned out to rattle the bars, felt nothing, and saw through it at once. He told the others. None of them had touched it, and none of them believed him, and they rowed back the way they had come.

The tumbler had missed her catch in the middle of the evening show and fallen onto the cobbles of a village square in Oggia. The troupe's enchanter, an old Rom named Tobar, knelt beside her while the crowd murmured and laid his hand on her scraped, bleeding knee. He spoke softly. The worst of the scrape closed over, pink and new. It was not much; his was a small healing, and her wrist was still swelling. But she got up and bowed, and the crowd, thinking it part of the act, applauded.

A pickpocket bolted along the wharf of the Seamen's Guild in Atlantis with a purse in his fist, and the magician Lysandra pointed at a coil of rope lying on the dock. It sprang up like a snake, whipped along the planks and wound itself around the boy's legs, arms and body until he fell, trussed like a parcel. He wriggled, shouted and could not move. By the time he stopped struggling the harbor guard had arrived. They had to wait for the rope to loosen itself before they could arrest him.

The longsword on the wall of The Guardian had hung above the bar for twenty years. When two Turanian bravos drew knives on the landlord, the wizard in the corner looked up from his wine and twitched a finger. The sword lifted from its hooks, spun once in the air and flew across the room, cutting at the first bravo's knife hand. He shrieked and dropped his blade. The sword turned on the second man, who backed into the wall with his hands up. It hung there, point at his throat, until the wizard finished his drink.

The Molodo herders were fleeing up the ravine with the raiders close behind, and the sorcerer Darius could hear hooves echoing off the rock. He took a handful of gravel from the path, flung it back down the ravine and spoke. A wall of stone rose from the ground with a grinding roar, taller than a mounted man and twice as long as a wagon, from one side of the ravine to the other. On the far side, horses reared and riders shouted. The wall would stand for an hour. By then the herders would be over the pass.

The sorceress Yewande lived on an estate above Kuru, and she did not like visitors who came over the wall at night. She took a pinch of powdered hellebore from a jar on her windowsill, blew it into the air and spoke. The powder billowed into a yellowish cloud, head-high and wide as a room, which rolled down the garden path toward the intruders. The first man choked, then doubled over retching. The second held his breath and ran. The cloud followed him to the wall, then drifted slowly back across her roses.

The ogres of the Tu-Holo came across the dunes toward the camp, and their human slaves ran ahead of them with spears. Wang, a Khitan magician, filled his lungs and blew. A column of wind rose from the sand where his breath touched it, spinning up and up to the height of a temple, and marched slowly toward the attackers. Spearmen went flying like leaves, thrown high into the air and crashing down on the dunes. The ogres merely leaned into the wind, grunting. They were far too heavy to lift, and they kept on coming.

The fire had started in the Gryphon Warehouse by accident, and by the time the magician Timon realized he was trapped, the whole loft was blazing. He picked a spot on the canal quay outside, a mooring post he could picture exactly, and spoke. The world went gray and soundless. He found himself standing in a featureless nothing, cool and still, the roar of the fire gone. He took a long breath, coughed out the smoke, and made himself count. Then he stepped out onto the quay beside the mooring post, soot-black and alive.

A Makara spear had torn through Aelis's left wing, and the Zephyr could not fly home to her eyrie on the cliffs of Curracurrang. Her friend Marra, a magician, laid a hand on her shoulder and spoke the charm. Aelis lifted off the beach as if pulled up by a string, rose past the cliff face faster than she had ever flown, even whole, and landed on her ledge laughing. She would fly for an hour or more yet. Marra had warned her not to carry anything heavier than her bow, and for once she listened.

The raiders from Marhashi reached the copper-plated walls of Zimba at dawn, and then stopped. A giant stood on the walls: a one-eyed cyclops as tall as the gatehouse, bellowing threats in the raiders' own tongue and swinging a club like a tree trunk. On the gatehouse roof, the magician Chidi stood motionless with his eyes fixed on it, sweat running down his face. The raiders argued. Then one of them fired an arrow, which flew straight through the giant's knee. Chidi groaned. The giant roared louder.

The alley in Mohenjo-Daro was narrow and dark, and the thug with the knife was very sure of himself until the magician's shadow detached itself from the wall. It slid across the ground and rose up behind him, a flat black silhouette of Deepa herself, and wrapped its hands around his throat. He choked and flailed. His friend slashed at it with a sword, and the blade bit into the shadow as it would into flesh, but the shadow held on. Deepa, standing well back, kept her mind on it and did not let go.

The slavers had sprung their ambush in a narrow lane behind the Grand Marketplace of Acheron, eight men closing in from both ends. Nailah, a magician, said one word to her companions: Eyes. They shut them tight and turned their faces to the wall. Then the air around her exploded into a storm of color, crimson and violet and blinding white. The slavers reeled back, shrieking, hands over their faces. Most of them could not see at all; the two who had looked away in time stumbled about half-blind. Nailah's friends opened their eyes and drew their swords.

A Tharshi customs officer searched the enchanter Belit from head to foot at the gate of Tartessos and found nothing but a slim leather purse holding a few coins. He waved her through. She walked briskly to the harbor, sat down on a bollard and began counting under her breath. Inside that purse, out of sight and weightless, lay several hundred pounds of smuggled silver ingots. The spell would hold for hours yet. But if the purse were torn, or she dawdled past the deadline, the silver would be gone forever.

The Tharshi fleet came around the headland of Ogleostra looking for the Sardana harbor its captains had been promised. They found no harbor at all. Where the charts showed a sheltered bay, there was only a line of jagged reefs, a crashing surf and sheer cliffs beneath a ruined nuraghe tower. The admiral cursed his navigators. On the headland, the magician Nuraxi sat among the goats and watched the Tharshi sails turn away. The harbor, full of Sardana fishing boats, lay placid and invisible behind the illusion for the rest of the day.

The tunnel collapse at Targrim had trapped nine slaves behind a wall of fallen rock, and the Tharshi regent had already written them off. The magician Marcus, himself a slave, laid his palm against the rubble and pushed. A doorway opened in the rock like a mouth, as tall as a man and wider, and a tunnel ran straight back through the fall into the dark. At the far end he saw lamplight and startled faces. Come quickly, he said. The portal would not stand for more than an hour, and the mountain wanted its stone back.

The rock trolls were waiting at the top of the pass, and Sigrid's shield was old limewood, split twice and rebound. The magician traveling with the Vanir war party laid his hand on its boss and spoke. For an hour the battered shield would turn blows a little more surely than any limewood had a right to. Sigrid felt the difference with the first troll club that struck it, a jarring blow that slid off the rim and left her standing. She grinned through her teeth and raised it again. The magic would last just long enough.

The First Age ruin in Elassippea was falling around them, stones crashing through the roof, and Deucalion's apprentice lay bleeding on the floor with a broken leg. The archimage gathered the boy in his arms, held tight to his satchel of books, and pictured his study at the Institute of Knowledge in Atlantis, the desk, the window, the ink stain on the rug. He spoke. There was a jolt like missing a stair. Then the smell of ink and dust, the sound of gulls over the canals, and the boy crying out in astonishment on the rug beside the desk.

Gao, a thaumaturge in Tang, had lost too many rare ingredients to thieves. So he enchanted the lid of his medicine chest with one of his own spells, and set it to go off if anyone touched the chest without first saying the name of his grandmother's village. That night, a young burglar slipped in through the shutters and lifted the lid. A length of hemp rope lying in the corner leapt up and bound him hand and foot. In the morning, Gao found him lying on the floor, and made him tea.

The Tarakan Mountains had no bridges, and the chasm in front of the explorers was a hundred feet across. The magician Anaxis opened a small ivory box of powder, ground from the feathers of a griffon, and scattered it on the wind. Out of the swirling dust a griffon took shape, full-grown and gleaming, lion body and eagle head, and bent its neck to her. It carried them across two at a time. The last pair were barely over the far lip when the beast went thin and gray and blew away. The ten minutes had nearly run out.

Her brother had been dragged into the Nether Realms by a demon's bargain, and the archimage Theano meant to bring him back. She drew the two companions who had volunteered close, joined hands with them in a circle in her tower in Findias, and named the plane aloud. The room folded away. They stood on a shore of black sand beside a sluggish gray sea, under a sky the color of an old bruise. Somewhere out there, in the dark, a bell was ringing. Theano let go of their hands and began to walk.

The adventurers had fought their way up to the top floor of the Citadel of Tok, where one of the Twelve Masters was waiting for them. He did not raise a hand. He simply showed them something, conjured in the air of the chamber for no longer than a minute, and nobody who saw it has ever managed to describe it. Two of the adventurers turned away in time and kept their minds. The other three still wander the streets of Tartessos today, muttering about spirits in the walls and things with too many mouths.

The council of Ophirean merchants in Khaffir was halfway through its vote when the archimage stepped out of the air beside the speaker's chair. He was not there, not truly; when one merchant reached for his sleeve, her hand closed on nothing. But his voice was real enough, and so was the warning he carried from Atlantis. The merchants argued with him. He answered each in turn. Then someone at the back of the hall cast a spell of darkness, and the image blinked out, leaving only a faint, angry echo.

Their rowboat had brought them up the River Usk to Avalon, but the city allowed no foreign boats inside its walls. The magician Nimue smiled, pointed at the boat on the riverbank and spoke. It shrank, planks folding into planks, until a perfect little toy boat, oars and all, lay on the grass. She tucked it into her pocket for the day. The next morning, at the hour she had cast it, they were back on the riverbank, and she set it down in the reeds and stepped back quickly. It sprang up to full size again with a splash, soaking everyone.

In the Imperial Courts of Tang, the Minister of Taxation was meeting secretly with a Sheban envoy, and neither of them noticed that one of the shadows in the corner of the room was the wrong shape. Far away across the city, the magician Wen sat in a locked room with his eyes shut, seeing through the shadow's eyes and hearing through its ears. He heard every word. Then the Minister's own sorcerer entered the room, looked sharply at the corner, and conjured a globe of light. Wen's shadow burst like smoke, and his eyes flew open.

The Ophirean prince had drunk poison at a banquet in Khaffir, and no healer in the city could cure it. The archimage Mbeki laid a hand on the young man's forehead, and the prince went still, gray and cold as a corpse. His heart barely beat. He needed no food and no breath. They laid him in a cedar chest and put him on the fastest ship to Atlantis, to the healers of the Institute of Knowledge. He would wake in ten days, the archimage said, not a moment earlier, whatever happened on the voyage.

The Minister of Rites in Tang was ill, and the magician Huang needed him at the Emperor's reception, so he made another. With a lock of the Minister's hair he shaped a copy, perfect in face, voice and bearing, that bowed to him and asked its duties. It performed flawlessly all evening. Then the Minister's old steward came up to greet it, a man who had served him for thirty years, and the simulacrum looked at him blankly. Huang stepped in quickly and steered it away, sweating.

For three weeks the magician Dalia had perfected the illusion: a waterfall of silver light cascading down the wall of the Queen of Sheba's throne room, sparkling, singing, never quite the same. Tonight she would make it last forever. She began the ritual at sunset and did not pause for a full hour, voice steady, hands moving, while the court waited in silence. Then she spoke the final word and collapsed. The waterfall shimmered on. She lay in bed for two full days afterward, unable to cast so much as a spark.

The mercenaries in the tavern at Salawa had been hired to kill the magician, and they had all come at once. Aziza stood in the doorway with her arms spread and spoke. One after another, the hardened killers lowered their knives and smiled at her, their faces softening, as though an old friend had walked in. Five of them offered to buy her a drink. Two did not. Those two stared at their comrades in disbelief, then at her, and backed slowly toward the kitchen door. Aziza let them go. She had five new friends to defend her.

The Nubian mercenary charged up the stairs at the magician with his great sword raised, and Maat spoke one sharp word. He looked at his hands. The sword was gone. He could feel something in his grip, heavy, but when he looked again there was nothing there, and he let go of the thing he could not see; it clattered on the stairs. He stared at the floor where the sound had come from, and saw only the floor. Maat stepped over the sword he could not see and walked past him.

The Sheban corsair fleet came in sight of Diaprepea at dawn and found the harbor of Mehedra crammed with Atlantean warships. There were dozens of them: great triremes with bronze rams and orichalc-trimmed sterns, their oars rising and falling, drums throbbing across the water, cooking smoke drifting from the decks. The corsairs heard the shouted orders and smelled the tar. On the cliff above, the magician Rafiq, who had conjured that whole fleet out of nothing, watched the corsairs turn tail. It would stand until dawn tomorrow.

The Gorges of Chu Tang were too deep to climb, and this one was eighty feet across, and the imperial messenger had to reach the far side by nightfall. The magician Hua broke a length of bamboo from her flute case and laid it on the rock at the edge of the gorge. She spoke. The bamboo vanished. In its place stood a bridge, bamboo from end to end, anchored on both sides of the gorge and swaying gently in the wind. The messenger crossed at a gallop. By tomorrow the bridge would be gone.

The Sargo Tritons would speak only to their own kind, so the magician Nerissa became one of them. She stood in the surf off Antilla, spoke the spell and felt her body change: her skin turning pale green and smooth, her fingers webbing, gills opening along her neck like a second set of lungs. She dived, and the sea welcomed her. She swam down among the Tritons of the plateau as one of them, swimming as they swam and breathing their water. She had exactly one hour to learn what she had come for.