Daughter of Magic - Wizard of Yurt - 5 by C. Dale Brittain, Brittain Page A

dissolved, but it had revealed the sorts of spels that held it together, a mix of spels I had never seen together before: the old western magic of earth and herbs that long predated the school; the eastern magic of blood and bone; and, quite unmistakeable, a twist of school magic.
    The rising sun lifted itself over the horizon at last, flooding the creature with pale light. It showed no sign whatsoever of dissolving.
    “So some school-trained wizard has gone renegade,” I said to myself, “and has trained with Vlad—and may be here as his agent.” I would have to telephone the school at once—if I could only stop this creature first.
    It had been reaching for me, but now it lowered its arms. Keeping its round yelow eyes on me, it opened its mouth and spoke. “This is a hard spel to keep going from a distance, Daimbert,” it said conversationaly. “But I am very pleased to see it works.”
    And with that the creature colapsed. limbs fel off, the head tipped over, lost al the inteligence in the eyes, then dropped and roled away, and last of al the torso subsided to the earth.
    My heart pounding harder than ever, I cautiously approached. The body parts were no longer those of a ten-foot creature. Most were bits of wood and leaf, but lying among them, inanimate and clearly recognizable, was the dead body of the night watchman.
    And I had recognized the creatures voice. It was the voice of Elerius.
    Back at the castle half an hour later, I dragged him out of my chambers and up on top of the tal northern tower, where I could curse him in privacy.
    “Damnation, Elerius,” I said, low and furious, “what could you have been thinking in digging up the watchman’s body?! I’ve just had to rebury him, fast before anyone noticed.”
    “I needed a body for my experiment,” he said mildly. “Your predecessor used old bones back when he made an unliving creature, as I recal, but it didn’t work as wel as it should have. I found his ledgers at the back of your shelves last night, and in reading over his notes, and putting together what I found with what we discovered yesterday from the remains of the warriors, and what I once learned myself from an old renegade magician up in the mountains, I decided that the fresher the body, the better. It isn’t as though I was hurting the watchman in any way; after al, he was already dead.” I fumed in silence until he paused, apparently feeling he had answered my objections. “I hope you’re pleased that you terrified me with your creature as wel as disgusted me with your methods,” I said angrily. “This does not seem like something the school’s best graduate should do—or would want widely known.”
    He shrugged. “I feel confident you wil not tel the school about this. After al, if you did I could mention to them the curious fact that a man without brothers or sisters has somehow produced a niece. . . . And I see no reason why a wizard should let conventional squeamishness influence him. Since it was becoming clear last night that we would not get any answers at once as to who attacked the castle, I thought I might use the time profitably to see if I could make an animate creature and, at least temporarily, put my mind into it. That eastern magic has a great deal of potential, but it was a real chalenge to find a way to overcome its susceptibility to sunlight!”
    Stil furious but without any good answers to what he clearly thought were convincing arguments, I said, “You always have felt the ends justify the means, haven’t you. I don’t want a grave-robber in my kingdom. Get out.”
    He smiled indulgently. “I must apologize, Daimbert, for apparently frightening you even more than I intended! I couldn’t tel you what I was doing, of course, because I wanted to observe what my creature’s effect would be on the unsuspecting, but I counted on a wizard being hard to frighten. And of course I was interested to see what sort of response you might improvise. You know you