Night & Demons by David Drake Page B

was never a very good Maid—now I know what you want to say, I was very well trained. You taught me everything that could be taught; you were wonderfully patient. But I never had the Power; that can’t be learned.”
    “Yet she can’t even read Latin,” said Frank, sadly shaking his head.
    “No,” agreed Mab in a firm tone, “and perhaps she never will. Our Missy isn’t a scholar. But she has an understanding of things that you and I can hardly imagine.”
    She reached over to the table and rang a sharp ping from the bell.
    “Madam?”
    The girl in the doorway wore a maid’s uniform with a cap and apron. Dark hair and large eyes accented her triangular face.
    “Madam?” she repeated.
    “Missy, Mr. Birney and I—”
    “Oh, Mab,” cut in Frank, lifting his corpulence from the overstuffed chair, “perhaps I’ll leave you and Missy to discuss matters by yourselves.”
    “Frank, you’ll wait, won’t you?”
    “In the hallway.” Frank nodded to the two women and closed the hall door behind him.
    “Well, Missy,” Mab continued, “I—but do sit down, Dearest; this isn’t business.”
    She waved to the seat Frank had vacated, but the girl took a slat-back chair farther from her mistress.
    “You’ve been with me some time now, and you have gotten to know myself and the group of friends that meet here. We’d like you to join us tonight.”
    The girl fluttered her hands. “ Ma’am, that wouldn’t be right, not me. I’m not your sort.”
    “But you are our sort,” Mab insisted calmly. “The mirror in your room, for instance—”
    Panic flashed across Missy’s face and Mab quickly added, “Oh, don’t worry, Dearest, that’s why we put it there. It was an old glass and rather difficult to find, but we knew it was meant for you.”
    “I’ll not do wrong things,” the girl insisted sullenly.
    There was a light squalling outside the kitchen door, a scratch of claws and a dark-tipped Siamese cat slipped into the parlor. It curled silently under the girl’s chair but kept its eyes on Mab.
    “We wouldn’t have you do wrong,” Mab continued with a toss of her gray hair, “but everything proves that it’s right for you to join us. Even the way animals treat you—it isn’t only Kaimah, is it, Dearest?”
    The girl said nothing, only squirmed a little on her seat.
    “They aren’t like that with me,” Mab said, “but I don’t really have the Power. But you do, Missy. To an amazing degree.”
    “No, Ma’am,” Missy whispered. “I haven’t nothing. I shan’t have it.”
    Mab appeared not to have heard. “ Frank was disappointed when you ignored the books we left about, but I understand. Perhaps you’ll want them after you’ve been with us awhile.”
    “Ma’am, Ma’am,” breathed the girl, twisting her apron between narrow hands, “I don’t want to be with you, I want to go . . .”
    “Because we’re witches?” Mab questioned gently. “There’s nothing wrong in being a witch, Darling.”
    “I don’t want to be a witch,” cried Missy, slipping from her chair and moving behind it as if the wooden back were a shield. The cat retreated between her legs, not hissing, but stiff-legged and its backbone edged with a high comb of fur.
    “But Dearest,” pressed Mab inexorably, “you’re already a witch—”
    “Oh, no!”
    “—the most powerful witch I have ever met.”
    “NO!” the girl screamed, and a gabbling cry burst from the older woman as the first blast of searing heat struck her. Mab half-rose from her chair, cocooned in white flame that melted flesh and shrank her very bones in its hissing roar.
    “Mab! Mab!” Frank shouted, bursting into the room.
    There was no answer. The room was empty save for a shrunken mummy fallen back on the scorched upholstery of the chair. That, and the thick layer of soot that covered everything.
    The open door to the kitchen quivered in the draft.

DENKIRCH

    This is where I started. Everybody has to start somewhere, but I’ve got to