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He was good at understanding foxes. Mammals were so
much easier than birds.
    “What’s up?” Paul asked. The grass was soggy
from irrigation so he crouched instead of sitting.
    Whenever he had a chance to talk to a fox or
a coyote, or rarer still, a dog that had been chosen as a Sunward,
he always found them friendly and conspiratorial, in a sort of ‘Us
against the owls’ kind of way.
    “I told the owls that I’ve already helped you
with your mission, and now I want you to help me with mine.”
    “You found out if Susan killed the
translator?” He felt disappointed that Fox had already finished the
parliament’s wishes. All the effort he put forth to fall back into
society, and now it might not even be necessary?
    The fox barked in laughter, but didn’t drop
the stick between her teeth. “No, but I sniffed around the mage’s
house just so I’d have plausible deniability.” Plausible
deniability was a phrase that sounded even more natural in
fox-speak than in English. If foxes took human form and got desk
jobs, they’d have the highest salary, never do any work, and steal
from petty cash without anyone the wiser. “I heard you took on
human form and I got to thinking, why were we both pulled back into
the darkness, when we’d barely been in the light for half a
lifetime? The parliament has got a burr in its fur about something,
and I think that we’re both looking at different sides of the same
situation.”
    “What have you been sent to work on?”
    Fox dropped the stick at Paul’s feet. He
picked it up. It was still warm and moist from her mouth.
    “Tell me about this. Human magic all smells
the same to me.”
    Paul held the wand and concentrated. He
wasn’t a mage, but being in the light had changed him enough to
give him sensitivity to things normal people didn’t have.
    His first ability as a newly turned Sunward
was that he could tell how recently sunlight fell on something. A
completely useless skill. This stick had been in the sunlight as
recently as sunset the previous night. He could tell that
automatically, just by brushing his fingertips along the bark. To
detect magics, he had to look a little closer. He peered at the
wand, letting his third eye tingle as though he were trying to see
hidden gnosti.
    He remembered a television show once where
the detective used magic-detecting powder to prove that the chief
of police was the one casting curses, and not the little old lady
that everyone suspected. He and Carlos had been terribly
disappointed to find out that there was no such thing as
magic-detecting powder, at least not like they showed it on
television. The one thing that the television show did get right
was that magical energy created faint traces, ridges, and these
lines solidified when the power got expended. Concentric lines
rippled along the surface of the wand, like a topographic map. The
lines were denser on one half of the wand.
    The last time he’d been called out of the
light to answer a question for the parliament, it was because
someone had put a twinge trap in a garden. A twinge trap was one of
the most basic kinds of spells. He and Carlos used to make them all
the time to keep people out of the secret clubhouse they’d made in
the abandoned lot near the school. You took two sticks and put your
curse into them. Then you tied thread to each of the sticks and
stretched it across the area you wanted to protect. When someone
tripped over the thread, the spell would release onto them. He and
Carlos knew diddly about magic. What usually happened is that
they’d have a faint line on the ankle when they broke their own
spell, and claim success.
    A real twinge trap, made by a skilled mage,
could cause flightlessness (in the case of the owls) or paralysis,
or even brain damage. The owls had called him to find out why
another Sunward had been grounded. He’d snooped around the mage’s
house at night until he found the remains of the twinge trap. Those
sticks had dark lines where the