He was shaven, washed, and tidily, if casually, attired. So why had the driver been able to pick him out as a resident of the streets? No matter how he puzzled over it, he could find no loophole, no crevice in his protective armor. He should have been immune to such hassles. He stooped to retie his bootlaces and to force himself to calmness. He refused to heed a little voice that warned of impending disaster. No doubt the driver had simply had a rough night of his own and had unerringly assumed that Wizard was a safe target. No matter He would not let it ruffle him. He sat up straight. A wave of illness swept over him.
Perhaps he had straightened up too fast, driving the blood from his brain. He closed his eyes to let it pass. A blacker darkness closed on him and Mir laughed. His mind was flooded with images, stark, terrifying, and disgusting. Like a series of slides, the women appeared and disappeared before him.
Knowing came, filled with sadness. They were real. Each slashed face, each savaged body had led a life and been part of a whole.
Mothers, sisters, friends, and lovers. Their deaths went on forever in the gaping holes left by their passing. Each a precious gear snatched from the clockwork of a family. Wizard forced his bile back down and tried to study them. The backdrops were not western Washington. He saw the red banks of a wide muddy river and trees he had no names for. Wizard lost count of how many faces passed before him. He wondered desperately what was happening to him. Had Mir trapped him forever in this dreadful Seeing? Would his comatose body be taken from me bus and placed on a narrow bed somewhere, so his mind could sink into the nightmares and never return? He set his teeth stubbornly as his magic took him deeper into horror.
No. The knife. He was suddenly aware of the knife. He jerked his eyes open to the daily reality of the bus, to men in overcoats and women chatting together. But the knife did not go away. This knife was a thing to be felt, not seen. The women had felt it with their bodies; he touched its cutting edge with his mind, felt with horror the traces of blood and skin worn into its wooden handle. Someone on the bus had it and was dreaming of using it again. Wizard started to rise, then forced himself to sit still and feel. He groped about in the swaying bus, and finally focused on a man, three seats in front of him.
He was a swarthy, heavyset man who flinched suddenly as if a pin had Jabbed him. As the bus eased into its next stop, Wizard located the knife. It was suspended by a leather thong around his neck. Beneath me man’s faded shirt, it nestled by his heart.
At the stop the man rose hastily, glancing about. Wizard suppressed a groan and stood up to follow him. What now? he asked of his magic, but, having shown him, it was silent. It was not. Wizard reflected, me same as a stranger pouring out his heart and the magic giving him the words of comfort to speak. The swarthy man hit the sidewalk and strode off with Wizard a timid shadow.
For two blocks he followed, debating a course of action.
The man glanced back once and Wizard cringed, but he was only checking a street sign. He sensed how secure the killer was, content in his invulnerability. A new territory and unalerted victims by the score. He slowed to watch a high school girl hurry past and Wizard felt ill.
Anger flared suddenly in him, searing him to determination.
The hot pain of it felt good. The knife. It had been given to him for a reason; he was suddenly sure the magic had shown it to him for a purpose. In some far place, Mir chuckled gleefully, but Wizard blocked him. He zoomed in on the knife, feeling the oiled grain of the hickory handle and the sleek steel of the blade. Steel. He felt deeper, sensing molecules in sleepy motion- He lost them when, in his concentration, he walked into a parking meter. The swarthy man glanced back again at his involuntary exclamation. Wizard felt himself noticed. Well, mere was no help for it. He thatched the man’s increased stride and went back to the knife. Little tiny molecules, drifting like particles of sand in lake water. Wizard stirred them. Faster they swirled. The temperature of the steel crept up a fraction of a degree. Wizard’s face hardened in a tight smile. So that was how. He set his mind on the metal and stirred frantically.
Sweat sprang out on his face and back. A headache crept up from the base of his skull and spread like a net over his head. He followed me dark killer through a red mist. Never had he felt such a strain as this magic demanded. He fueled it with his anger. The killer increased his pace and Wizard stumbled after him, narrowly dodging other pedestrians and always focused on the knife, the knife. He imagined it molten hot, dripping and scalding the man’s chest. His breath was coming dry in his throat and now the man was definitely fleeing. He glanced back frequently at Wizard’s set face. but was unwilling as yet to break into a full run.
Wizard felt a sudden drop in ability. He groped after the magic like a receiver seeking after a fading FM signal. Everything dimmed and slowed. He found it again, but thinner. He locked himself into it and fed it to the molecules in the knife.
Just a little more now and the killer would become aware of the knife’s heat against his skin. His own blade would sear his chest, the hot metal eating through his skin.
But the knife was cooling. The thread of the magic was too finely spun and Wizard was suddenly weary- Mir laughed. He would have to get closer to once again hasten the perpetual dance of me molecules in the steel. Wizard stepped up his pace. Hot and blind as a hound on me scent, he trailed the man into the deadend alley. The man and the magic stopped at the same instant. Wizard stood alone.
“Are you following me?” The man’s voice was low, almost melodic. His smile was ethereal as a blessing.
“Yes. I am.” Wizard spoke distractedly.‘He could see the swarthy man edging closer to him in the narrow alley, but he felt blinded. Bereft of his magic, the edges of the world dimmed and the colors all ran together in muddiness. He groped after the magic and me knife, but it was like trying to reach without arms. There was only an emptiness he scrabbled in, as gut wrenching as a missing step on a dark staircase. “The Knife!”
Wizard suddenly cried aloud, imploring the magic’s return. But it was deaf to him, the abandonment total. He sensed the loss fully in that instant, and it was so tearing a thing he could not focus on the more immediate problem of the smiling man lifting the loop of leather over his head.
As the man reached inside his shirt for the knife. Wizard moved. A training older than the magic took over, lessons learned more harshly and thoroughly. The man stepped into it.
Three fast kicks while Wizard’s upper body leaned away, beyond the knife’s leap. The first kick went to me man’s knee cap, the second two to his torso as he staggered in pain. His duck hands never ceased tearing at his shirt, trying to bring free the knife that would solidify his courage. Wizard gave him no time. His boot connected with the man’s floating ribs, pushing them in solidly against softer organs and wringing a gasping grunt from me man. “Never hit a man when he’s down; it’s always easier to kick him.” Was the quote Mir’s? There was no time to wonder.
“Drop it!” Wizard commanded in the same voice he might tell a dog to sit. “Drop it!”
But me swarthy man believed in the knife too strongly to surrender it. He gripped its hilt firmly, the blade pointed toward Wizard as he began a desperate roll that would take him back to his feet. But Wizard did not cringe from that shining point as all his other victims had. Nor did he try to fight the blade as a few desperate ones had. His attention was focused on me man behind the weapon. He stepped into me man’s range and shot out a kick that smashed into his shoulder, numbing his arm and sending me knife clattering onto the worn paving stones.
With an incoherent roar halfway between outrage and terror, me man staggered to his feet. Cold-eyed and gaunt as Dead, Wizard stepped over the knife, ready to close with him again.