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reached down and picked up an ancient book. He mumbled a command and it creaked open; a bookmark suspiciously like a tongue flicked back into the binding.
    He fumbled down beside his cushion and produced a little leather bag of tobacco and a pipe the size of an incinerator. With all the skill of a terminal nicotine addict he rubbed a nut of tobacco between his hands and tamped it into the bowl. He snapped his fingers and fire flared. He sucked deep, sighed with satisfaction…
    …looked up.
    “Still here, Trymon?”
    “You summoned me, master,” said Trymon levelly. At least, that’s what his voice said. Deep in his gray eyes was the faintest glitter that said he had a list of every slight, every patronizing twinkle, every gentle reproof, every knowing glance, and for every single one Galder’s living brain was going to spend a year in acid.
    “Oh, yes, so I did. Humor the deficiencies of an old man,” said Galder pleasantly. He held up the book he had been reading.
    “I don’t hold with all this running about,” he said. “It’s all very dramatic, mucking about with magic carpets and the like, but it isn’t true magic to my mind. Take seven-league boots, now. If men were meant to walk twenty-one miles at a step I am sure God would have given us longer legs…Where was I?”
    “I am not sure,” said Trymon coldly.
    “Ah, yes. Strange that we could find nothing about the Pyramid of Tsort in the Library, you would have thought there’d be something, wouldn’t you?”
    “The librarian will be disciplined, of course.”
    Galder looked sideways at him. “Nothing drastic,” he said. “Withold his bananas, perhaps.”
    They looked at each other for a moment.
    Galder broke off first—looking hard at Trymon always bothered him. It had the same disconcerting effect as gazing into a mirror and seeing no one there.
    “Anyway,” he said, “strangely enough, I found assistance elsewhere. In my own modest bookshelves, in fact. The journal of Skrelt Changebasket, the founder of our order. You, my keen young man who would rush off so soon, do you know what happens when a wizard dies?”
    “Any spells he has memorized say themselves,” said Trymon. “It is one of the first things we learn.”
    “In fact it is not true of the original Eight Great Spells. By dint of close study Skrelt learned that a Great Spell will simply take refuge in the nearest mind open and ready to receive it. Just push the big mirror over here, will you?”
    Galder got to his feet and shuffled across to the forge, which was now cold. The strand of magic still writhed, though, at once present and not present, like a slit cut into another universe full of hot blue light. He picked it up easily, took a longbow from a rack, said a word of power, and watched with satisfaction as the magic grasped the ends of the bow and then tightened until the wood creaked. Then he selected an arrow.
    Trymon had tugged a heavy, full-length mirror into the middle of the floor. When I am head of the Order, he told himself, I certainly won’t shuffle around in carpet slippers.
    Trymon, as mentioned earlier, felt that a lot could be done by fresh blood if only the dead wood could be removed—but, just for the moment, he was genuinely interested in seeing what the old fool would do next.
    He may have derived some satisfaction if he had known that Galder and Skrelt Changebasket were both absolutely wrong.
    Galder made a few passes in front of the glass, which clouded over and then cleared to show an aerial view of the Forest of Skund. He looked at it intently while holding the bow with the arrow pointing vaguely at the ceiling. He muttered a few words like “allow for wind speed of, say, three knots” and “adjust for temperature” and then, with a rather disappointing movement, released the arrow.
    If the laws of action and reaction had anything to do with it, it should have flopped to the ground a few feet away. But no one was listening to them.
    With a sound