“But you promised,” the mirror said soundlessly.
That stopped him. To these people promises were something important. You kept your promises here because they had a force more binding than contracts on his home world.
People were so much more sincere, so much more real here. Surrounded by magic and the stuff of fantasy the people were more intensely human than the people he had known at home.
Or was it just that he cared more about them? He did, he realized. Not just Moira, but Shiara and Ugo, too. Even the tiny unseen folk of the forest.
He’d hurt them by betraying their trust and that, in turn, had hurt him. He was unhappy here so he’d tried to do what he always did—take refuge in technical things, to bury himself in not-people. Only this time it had only involved him more closely with the people around him.
Slowly, slowly, William Irving Zumwalt began to think about what it meant to consider other people’s feelings.
Perhaps he was right about the magic language. But that didn’t make what he had done right. Magic wasn’t a computer system where he had the expertise to follow up his idea.
What was it one of his professors used to say? Always use the right tool for the job. The right tool to repair a television set is a television repairman. The right tool for this job was a wizard. He should have talked to Bal-Simba or one of the other Mighty and let them follow through. But he had wanted to be somebody here so he had charged ahead like some damn user with a bright idea. And very predictably he had screwed things up and caused a lot of people trouble.
Let’s face it. I’m not a magician and I never will be. I can’t be anything special here. I’m just me and I have to live with that and make the best of it.
Bal-Simba had said that too. The black giant was wise in ways more than magic.
So no more magic, Wiz resolved firmly. I’ll explain my idea and that will be the end of it. Then I’ll chop the wood and learn to live as best I can. Perhaps some day they’ll forgive me for what I did. In the meantime. . . .
He grinned. In the meantime I accept being a sparrow and quit trying to be an eagle.
He looked at the mirror. But all he saw was the dim reflection of a moonlit window and he heard nothing at all.
Wiz rose from his chair, drained, exhausted and his knees aching from sitting in one place too long. Time for bed, he thought. Way past time. You’ve got a life to build tomorrow.
There was a “whoosh” overhead followed by several bumps on the roof.
A confused bat?
He hesitated, then picked his cloak off the chair and went into the hall. It was doubtful anyone else had heard and he wanted to see what the noise was.
His shoes padded lightly on the stone corridor. All the castle was deathly still. He heard no more thumps. At the end of the corridor was a short flight of stone steps to the roof door. Wiz put his foot on the first step up.
The door burst inward with a crash and black-clad warriors poured down on him. Too stunned to shout, Wiz flinched back from the black apparitions.
He found himself staring into merciless dark eyes and felt the prick of a dagger at his throat. He was forced back roughly against the wall and held as the rest of the storming party rushed by, but otherwise he was unharmed.
The Shadow Warriors’ orders were explicit: seize the magicians and burn the castle. Whether the other inhabitants lived or died was not in their orders and was thus of little concern to them. Wiz was subdued and silent, so he lived.
The Shadow Captain spared a long searching glance for the prisoner as he went by. The man so expertly pinned against the wall was peculiar, but he was clearly not a magician. There was neither trace nor taint of magic about him.
It never occurred to the Shadow Captain that someone might be working magic second hand or that there was no more reason to expect a magic sign on such a one than to expect machine oil on the clothes of a programmer who wrote control software for industrial robots. The notion was so utterly alien that Toth-Set-Ra himself had not considered it. The captain’s orders covered only magicians.