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city behind him. And he’s never told me he wanted to leave.”
    I continued past them, folowing the path back down along the waterfal to where we had left the horses. They were grazing industriously, unbothered by entrepreneurs, saints or nymphs.
    I reached into my saddlebag and puled out the packet of lunch the count’s cook had prepared for us, not so much because I was hungry, as because eating would give me time to consider.
    There was more happening here, I could sense, than I had yet been told. Negotiating with a holy old hermit who, from his demeanor, might be declared a saint himself one day, and finding a way to deal with souvenir selers who might not be doing anything ilegal but who stil seemea scandalous, even to me, could turn out to be more serious responsibilities than I had originaly thought. Joachim might wel be right that the bishop was testing him to see if he was the sort of priest they wanted in the cathedral chapter.
    I didn’t like this any more than the chaplain did, although for different reasons, but right now I had responsibilities of my own which I’d been neglecting. To maintain the good name of wizardry, I should set about finding and coping with the strange magical creature the count and his men had seen.
    As I strapped up my saddlebag, I caught a glimpse of motion from the comer of my eye and turned slowly.
    And there were two of the creatures, the size of smal dogs but shaped like rabbits. My first hope was that they were some bizarre ilusion, but they were very real. They came hopping awkwardly along the edge of the stream, ignoring my presence. Rather than ears, they had long, pointed horns.
    I stepped back involuntarily. Instead of broad rabbits’ teeth, they had protruding fangs, and instead of wide, placid rabbit eyes, they had smal, red nasty eyes. And those horns looked sharp.
    One flicked its red eyes toward me and gave a much higher hop. At the same time, it emitted a cry—a low, hooting sound, almost like an owl. The other creature responded with the same cry. Both redoubled their speed, made a sharp turn and disappeared rapidly across the meadow toward the base of the cliff.
    I stood idioticaly, just watching them go. The count had only spoken of one great horned rabbit, not of two. They looked so ridiculous that I felt I ought to laugh. But that hooting, haunting cal had stifled any laugh within me.
    I shook my head hard. I should be trying to catch them, not staring after them. I hurried across the meadow, putting together a probing spel to help me find them.
    As soon as I opened myself to it, I found that the valey was thick with magic, making it virtualy impossible to probe for anything. Most of the magic seemed unfocused, which meant that it was wild, unchanneled by wizardry. And yet—Somewhere behind me, in the grove, I thought I could sense the presence of a powerful spel.
    I clenched my jaw. This was even worse than I had thought. If the rabbits were the product of that spel, then they were not magical creatures from the land of dragons, which would have been bad enough, but rather the creations of a renegade wizard. Since neither of the counts nor the duchess kept a wizard and my predecessor was retired, I was, I had thought, the only active wizard in Yurt.
    As I started back toward the grove, I hesitated again. This was not where I had seen the rabbits disappear. How many of them might there be?
    When I came back into the grove, the denseness of magical forces made me lose track of the spel that had seemed so strong a moment ago. I walked swiftly along the little paths between the springs, without seeing anything but trees. But then something caught my eye in the muddy earth.
    It was a footprint, about the size of a man’s foot, even roughly the right shape, but somehow wrong. I knelt down for a closer look, but I already knew. That print had been made by nothing human.

Part Two. The Young Wizard
    Back at the shrine, Joachim and the hermit were stil talking. I