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device. There was no light in the room but the pale moonlight seeping in through one half-open shutter, and the dim glow of the torches down in the courtyard. It took her a while to make out the Phoenix in Flames, but when she did she bit her lip, then smiled again, and folded up the surcoat.
    Deeper down in the bag she found the book bound in red leather, the unsealed one, and drew it out carefully. The innkeeper’s daughter sat down on her heels and muttered something under her breath. A weak reddish light grew and glowed about her hands, clinging to the book’s pages as she turned them. For a few minutes she went through the book, turning the leaves over in cautious silence. Then suddenly she stopped, and across the room Herewiss could hear her take in breath sharply. He watched her as she traced down one page with a finger, moving her lips slowly as she read.
    That’s a bad habit, Herewiss thought. Let’s see if I can’t break you of it.
    The girl was holding the book closer to her eyes, and speaking softly. “Neskháired ól jomëire kal stói, arvéya khad—”
    Herewiss breathed out in irritation. I might have known. Doesn’t she know it’s all illusion-spells? She can’t know much about what real sorcery is, or what it does. And Goddess knows she would pick that one. She needs a lot more to be beautiful on the inside than she does on the outside. …It’s not going to work, of course. She’s not making the required gestures, and she’s set up no framework inside her head. Dark! I’ll teach her to mess with things she doesn’t understand—
    Herewiss cleared his mind and began to think of another incantation, on another page. He had long since ceased to need to draw diagrams or make passes while conjuring. Constant practice had taught him to build viable spell-structures in his head, without external aids. He built one now, a fairly simple one that he’d used many times to entertain Halwerd, an illusion-spell that required minimal energy and provided surprisingly sophisticated results. It went up quickly, in large chunks, taking form and bulking huge and restless—it was one of those sorceries that has to be used quickly before it goes stale. He completed the structure, checking once to make sure that it was complete, and thought the word that set it free to work.
    The girl, intent on her reading, did not notice the air behind her thickening and growing dark. Something darker and more tenacious than smoke curled and roiled within a huge man-shaped space in the air, until at last it stood complete behind her—tenuous at the edges, where its stuff wisped and drifted into the still air, but dark as starless midnight at its heart. The innkeeper’s daughter finished reading the spell and raised one hand to feel at her face. In that moment the great dark shape put out a hand and lightly brushed the back of her neck.
    She slapped absently at what she thought was an insect, and felt her hand go through something cold and damp. Her eyes went wide with startlement; she turned. She saw, and opened her mouth to scream. But Herewiss was ready. Since freeing the illusion, he had been readying another spell, and as she drew breath he said the word of control and struck her dumb and stiff. There she knelt, her mouth ridiculously open, head turned to look over her shoulder—probably a most uncomfortable position. Herewiss got up out of the bed, praying that the backlash would hold off for a few minutes.
    “Do you always go through your guests’ bags at one in the morning?” he said, bending down to take the book away from her and toss it onto the bed. “And do all the rooms come equipped with that charming little addition under the pillow?”
    She couldn’t even move her eyes to follow him as he went to open the window wide. “Would you excuse us?” he said to the smoke-creature. There had always been controversy over whether illusion-creatures were alive and thinking in any sense of the words, but Herewiss,