Mulberry Wands (14 page)

“Greetings, fellow Sunward,” the translator
said, in a surprisingly deep voice.

“Hello, senpai.” Hooray for his scant magic
ability. He could tell she was his senpai, and he could tell she
was female, and he could tell she was bossy. Oh, that last one was
a freebie. They were always bossy.

“Tell us where the mage Susan Stillwater
lives.”

“Why?” Paul asked. He stubbed out his
cigarette and dropped the butt into the can.

“It is not for you to question those who came
into the light before you.”

“I don’t want you to hurt her. She’s
innocent.”

There was a two second lag, while the
translator did whatever he did to communicate with the owl, and
then Paul was touching his bloody face where the owl had slashed
him with her claws.

“We need to resolve the situation with this
mage. She no longer lives in her old nest. We need to know where
the new one is. You will show us.”

“I won’t,” Paul said.

He tried to be ready for the next gash, but
the owl moved much faster than a normal, mortal owl would have. He
didn’t even see her wings flutter.

“Damn you!” Paul touched the slash on the
other cheek, and hissed in pain. The first one was stinging now.
Blood tickled down the line of his chin, dripping of the end of his
beard to stain the tiny metal bench. He wiped it on the sleeve of
his jacket. “I told her we weren’t going to hurt her. I’m not going
to betray her to you.”

“Whether we hurt her or not is not your
concern.”

The translator’s voice had grown emotionless,
as though he were trying to distance himself from the conversation.
Paul could hardly blame him; he himself still bore scars from the
last time he’d had an argument with an owl. He took comfort from
the knowledge that they weren’t allowed to kill a fellow Sunward.
All they could do was hurt him. He could take a few scratches to
keep Susan safe.

“You gain nothing with your silence,” the owl
told him. “We will find her and continue our investigation. The
parliament will decide her fate.”

He stood up. This time he’d be ready to hit
her so she couldn’t scratch him again. “I won’t tell you where she
lives,” he said.

His shirt flapped open as four parallel claw
marks extended from collarbone to nipple.

The owl hadn’t even moved, at least, not from
what he could see. She lifted each claw in succession and tapped it
against the metal railing, a menacing tattoo. A bead of his blood
swelled at the end of her sharp talons, then fell off, splattering
against the tile on the balcony.

“You are disobedient, chick. Prove to me that
you can be obedient to your senpai or I will take your…” the
translator paused, aghast as though he wasn’t sure he’d heard
correctly. He swallowed. “Or I will take your eye.”

Owls didn’t bluff. They were terrible liars,
not like foxes and humans.

He swallowed.

Sorry, Susan. He didn’t have that much
courage.

“I’ll show you.”

The owl flapped, and suddenly she was perched
on his shoulder. He hissed as her claws stuck straight through the
leather of his jacket into the flesh above his collarbone. She
extended her wings and dug in further, trying to get her balance,
and then settled in.

“I suppose you have to come too,” Paul said.
He reached out for the translator. He was furiously angry, but it
wasn’t the little guy’s fault. It wasn’t like they had a choice
about all this. Owls could claw and maim him. They could eat a
translator. “You mind riding in my pocket? It will be easier.”

“Thank you,” the translator said. He could
tell the translator was speaking on his own behalf and not for the
owl. Owls didn’t thank humans.

Paul had plenty of time to rethink his
decision to betray Susan on the walk to her house. He felt sick
with guilt, but he didn’t change his mind. Every man had his
weakness, and for Paul, it was his eyes.

***

Susan’s spell to summon translators worked
quickly, because before she’d even unpacked all her stuff, two of
them appeared in the backyard of the new house. She saw them climb
under the back gate, a man and a woman, nude and holding hands. She
slid open the door to go out and greet them, but Sphinx was faster.
The slinky black shape dashed outside. Susan was right after her,
but Sphinx had a head start, snatching the tiny woman in her jaws
and leaping to the top of the wall in two bounds. She disappeared
over the top of the wall, with a twitch of black tail and the faint
screams of a woman in pain. Susan heard the man shriek in horror,
and it was worse than the woman, because she’d heard women
screaming so many times on horror movies that it had lost its power
to terrify her, but she’d never heard a man scream like that.

“Sphinx!” she shouted. “Come back here!”

She raced to the gate and tried to open it,
but it was stuck fast, and she wasn’t even sure if it pulled or
pushed open. The man screamed again, in horror and grief. Susan
hoisted herself over the wall with a strength she didn’t know she
had, scraping her shin and the inside of her upper arm. She dropped
to the other side and looked around for the cat. Sphinx was running
down the alley, still with the body of the tiny woman in her jaws.
She looked back, and at the sight of Susan, dropped her tail
between her legs and tried to find a way through the wall of
oleander lining the backyard of the house across the alley.
Fortunately for Susan, there was a chain link fence on the other
side that the cat couldn’t get through. Sphinx tried again, and it
slowed her down enough that Susan was able to grab the scruff of
her neck. Sphinx growled.

“Bad cat!” Susan scolded, and pried Sphinx’s
jaws open. The tiny woman fell limp to the oily gravel of the
alley. Susan picked her up as gently as possible and walked back to
the gate before remembering that it was stuck. She couldn’t climb
back over the wall without setting the woman down, and Sphinx was
looking up at her and meowing, evidently still interested in
disemboweling her prey.

“No, you can’t have her,” Susan told the cat.
“You’re a naughty girl.”

Susan walked down the alley, taking the long
way around to the street that led to her house. The woman was still
unconscious, cradled gently in Susan’s hand and forearm. She was
bleeding. Sphinx followed Susan most of the way, still meowing,
with her tail vertical in anticipation. Not only did Susan refuse
to give Sphinx her prey back, but she didn’t even let the cat come
back inside.

She carried the limp woman upstairs to her
room, laid her on the bed, and rooted around in her drawer until
she found a clean handkerchief to use as a blanket. It felt like
she was playing with a doll, in a way, except that this doll was
alive and badly hurt.

Susan jiggled the mouse and opened the file
containing her spellbook.

“Injuries, injuries, healing?” Surely she’d
had to heal someone at some point, right? Wasn’t that one of the
most common prayers? Maybe that was one of the few that the big guy
didn’t subcontract. No, wait. Hadn’t she healed a bird once? When
it fell out of a tree or something? She remembered keeping a
branchling sparrow in a shoebox when she was six or seven, but in
her reality, the bird had died. Maybe it had been different here,
in Hayden’s Ferry, where magic worked. Every little girl had the
desire to heal a hurt animal at one point or another.

“Yes!” She found it. Good news, it was quick.
Better news, it was easy, using only mental energy and a few words,
not hard-to-find ingredients. The only downside was that she had to
take the injury onto herself. It wasn’t proportional, was it? Was
she going to have cat-fang wounds going all the way through her
midsection and internal injuries? Or was she going to have tiny cat
bites and as much damage as would come from being hit by Sphinx’s
paw? She was pretty sure it was the latter.

Pretty sure. Hadn’t she done this before? She
tried to remember.

Susan looked at the bed. The woman wasn’t
moving, and there was a half-dollar sized red splotch spreading out
from where the handkerchief touched the woman’s midsection. She had
to hurry.

Susan cast the spell, and touched her pinky
to the tiny woman’s foot to activate it. She felt a stabbing pain
in her midsection. Susan lifted her shirt up to see how bad it was,
but there were only a pair of cat-bites right next to her navel. A
tiny drop of blood escaped, then turned black as it coagulated.
Well, that was a relief.

The woman sat up.

“How do you feel?” Susan asked.

“I’m alive,” she said, to Susan’s surprise,
in clear English. She touched her hands to her chest and pulled
them away, staring that the blood-free palms with an expression of
wonder. “You healed me.”

“Yeah. Sorry about the cat. I tried to keep
her inside, but she was too fast for me.”

“Why did you heal me?”

Susan blinked, not quite sure how to answer
that. “Um, because it was the right thing to do? I’m Susan. I’ve
been wanting to talk to you guys.”

“I am Felia,” the tiny woman answered. “You
wanted to talk to us? Coincidence, then, that we had intended to
come here anyway.”

“Yeah.” Susan was going to point out that her
spell to summon them probably made them decide to come, but she
decided not to mention it. People don’t like to learn that their
apparently free will has been compromised by someone else’s
spellwork.

“Why did you wish to talk to us?”

“I wanted to ask you some questions. See, I
found a, one of your kind, in my old garden, except he was dead. I
wanted to find out who killed him.”

“You surely know, as you were the cause of
it.”

“No,” Susan said, affronted. “It wasn’t
me.”

“His name was Garaant. He was hired to speak
with you,” Felia said. “We knew you killed him. We were certain of
it.”

“If you were so sure I was a murderer, why
did you come back?”

“We came armed this time.” Felia looked
guilty. “We were sure you were a murderer.”

“Oh, is that so?” Susan asked archly, folding
her arms. They had come here to kill her? Eight inch tall naked
people who couldn’t even hold their own against a spoiled housecat
came here to mete out some kind of justice? Who the hell did they
think they were?

“We thought you had sent your beast to attack
Garaant to keep the Sunwards from discovering what magics you were
up to,” Felia continued. “Garaant was sent to find out if you were
the one slaying the rumblers.”

“Rumblers? You call them that too?”

“No,” she said, puzzled. “You call them that.
I am a translator. I speak to you in your language. Surely you know
this?”

“I don’t know anything about you. I don’t
know anything about rumblers either, except that they’re cute and
they look like hedgehogs and I haven’t ever killed one.”

“Nor your beast?”

“I don’t think so. Well, no, I take that
back. She got one. I try to save any animals she catches, but I’m
not always quick enough,” Susan said. “I don’t control her anyway.
She’s not even my cat. I didn’t know she’d killed Garaant either. I
didn’t know what he was doing there or what his name was. I was
trying to find out why he died because I didn’t like the idea of
him being unavenged if he was murdered. I couldn’t find out
anything though, so I buried him.”

“Why did you bury him?”

“That’s … that’s what we do with our
dead.”

“We were mistaken about you,” Felia said. She
turned, glancing past Susan at something in the room behind her.
“Hastuur, No!”

But Hastuur had already let fly with his
javelin. Susan tried to dodge, but she wasn’t quick enough, and the
tiny spear jabbed her in the bare calf. Whatever poison it was
laced with worked quickly. She had just enough time to glance down
and see the naked little man, his arm outstretched from his throw,
and his face full of murderous intent. Then the floor spun up to
greet her as she fell, impossibly far, landing on the icky blue
carpet with as much force as if she had jumped off the roof of the
shed.

Hastuur was on top of her before she even
caught her breath. He grabbed her wrist and yanked it up behind her
back. He snached a hank of her hair and pulled it back, wrenching
her neck. Susan screamed. She’d always had a sensitive scalp.

“Murderess!” he snarled into her ear.

“Hastuur, no!” Felia scrambled down the side
of the bed, using the sheet to rappel.

“Felia?” His voice broke with emotion. He
dropped Susan’s hair and arm and rushed across the carpet to
embrace his partner. “Felia?”

“Ow,” Susan said. Her hair hurt, and her
shoulder hurt from where Hastuur had wrenched it, and she still
felt a little pinprick on her calf where his javelin had stabbed
her, but what bothered her most of all was that she was now less
than eight inches tall.

And as soon as Felia and Hastuur grabbed her
again, she realized she’d completely blown her chance at
escape.

They tied what felt like a piece of broken
shoelace around her head so she couldn’t see, and led her down the
stairs, through the cat door, and out of the house. Her hands were
bound together with a piece of wire. She stumbled frequently, and
her legs were covered with scrapes. The only good thing about not
being able to see was that it made her less embarrassed about not
having any clothes on.

She walked for what felt like hours. Hastuur
and Felia spoke to each other in a language she’d never heard
before, and when she asked them where she was going, didn’t say.
She tried to get herself free, and when that didn’t work, she sat
down and refused to move, but Hastur just picked her up and carried
her over his shoulder, which was quite uncomfortable and made her
motion sick.

He must have climbed something, because when
he yanked the shoelace off her eyes and unwound the wire, she found
herself on the edge of a precipice. It was a cinderblock wall, only
five or six feet high, but it might as well have been the Grand
Canyon by how high it felt. On one side of the wall was the alley,
with an old mattress, a dumpster, and a branch of a grapefruit tree
dangling over a wall. On the other side was a dirt yard with an
abandoned doghouse and two ten-speeds chained up to the patio
supports. She kept looking, trying to find something familiar, but
it could have been anywhere.