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doors and windows of the building, I used the air as my tool and hammered it according to a design I had learned. In the end I was more tired than I would have been had I run from door to window and swung them open by hand.
    â€œBut the windows in rooms that were bolted you could not have touched at all without wizardry. Am I right?” The general sought in Damiano’s face some sign of subterfuge or evasion. Damiano met his glance.
    â€œAh, yes. But that is another element: the moral element, and that is a very real thing in magic, real and dangerous. If I open a door that you have locked against me, or cause it to open as you are walking by, with the intention of hitting you with it, then my deed is a wholly different thing than a mere opening of doors. Magic worked in malice will almost always spring back against the worker; that is why purity of heart is important in a witch.
    â€œYou may well laugh,” added Damiano, for Pardo was laughing, “but so it is. Being a channel of this power, I must be careful of my desires. If I grow angry with a tradesman and feel in my imagination my hands around his neck, then I will carry the seed of strangling around in my head and may well feel demon fingers at my own neck in the middle of the night.”
    â€œStill,” introjected the Roman, “curses are pronounced, so someone must dare to pronounce them.”
    Damiano shrugged. “A witch can be able without being wise. Notice how many with the power are poor and diseased, worse off than the unfortunates they have cursed. Some carry such hatred that they would rather do harm than remain well themselves. Some have learned the skill of putting off all their payment until some time in the future, trusting they will die before the bill falls due.”
    Damiano sighed deeply. “But I don’t think by dying one can escape that particular sort of debt.” Again he found himself thinking about his father. “Still, even if I could murder and escape unscathed, it would be a sorry sort of killing, because in the time it would take me to strangle one man through witchcraft—one man, I say, for I don’t have the power to destroy a regiment—I could be run through ten times by a simple soldier with neither mind nor magic.”
    Pardo’s gaze was eager and predatory. “This is interesting. Very. And convincing, since it is my intuition that nothing in this life is free. Yet, Signor Delstrego, you are not a military man, and therefore you don’t know what things can be valuable in war. You need not kill a regiment to destroy it; merely let them see their commander fall from his horse, gasping and turning purple. Let me tell you what things I have seen ruin an army: flux from bad water, the prophecy of a crazy old whore the night before a battle, three crows sitting on the corpse of a black heifer. Things as silly as this make the difference between loss and victory. And it will always be so, as long as armies are made of men. Think what it will mean to my men to have the wizard Delstrego riding with them into battle. Think what it will mean to the enemy!”
    In General Pardo’s gray eyes sparked enthusiasm, and Damiano was not immune to it. Certainly no man before had ever expressed exhilaration at the thought of having him at his side in battle. The wizard Delstrego….
    But even as he felt these things Damiano also felt his staff thrumming quietly in his hands, a private voice of warning. He reminded himself that he had come here to argue for his city, and that Pardo had refused him. And Pardo was a Roman, so obviously could not be trusted. Besides, he reminded Damiano of his father, and what could be less inviting than that?
    Suddenly he was aware of noises in the hall outside the audience chamber, and the room itself grew dimmer as bodies blocked the light from the door. Pardo was hedging his bet.
    Damiano smiled vaguely at the general, and his fingers tightened