Rook

there, unperturbed, as Grantchester listed the modifications that had been performed on him. Myfanwy shuddered and turned back to the Bishop.
    “You have to take care of them, of course. They’re very delicate. Norman here doesn’t eat actual food anymore, do you, Norman?” Grantchester didn’t wait for an answer. “He just sleeps with seven intravenous drips plugged into him, trickling in various nutrients, hormones, and chemicals to make sure his system remains in balance. It’s a great deal of work.
    “The result, however, is a soldier with highly specialized abilities. Not telepathy, unfortunately,” he said with a sigh, “but once he establishes physical contact, Norman gains a certain amount of control over the brain. It’s only very basic, of course—knocking people out, preventing them from activating their powers, that sort of thing. Once he has more intimate contact, however, he can work with a great deal more finesse. At that point, he can begin to affect memories.”
    Myfanwy fidgeted uncomfortably in her seat at the thought of Norman’s probative members gaining intimate contact with her.
    “Yes, Norman’s tricks have proven very useful in our little endeavor,”said Grantchester. “We would have been revealed several times if some selective editing had not taken place. Rarely anything on your scale, of course. If people had started popping up with amnesia all over the place, well, questions would have been asked. But sometimes a person sees or hears something they shouldn’t, and you can’t just kill them. That’s when Norman steps in and erases a few incriminating memories. It’s a pity that the process of creating this sort of operative is so difficult or we could have had several instead of just the one. But Norman’s work has proven quite sufficient for our needs—with one notable exception.” Grantchester stopped, and looked at her piercingly.
    “That evening, Norman was going about his duty—with relative ease, correct, Norman?” The gangly boy nodded his head. “He’d canceled your powers and was wiping out your personality. We felt that you’d be much less likely to strike out at anybody if you had no memories. He finished, and you were laid out on the sofa, with your eyes fluttering away (as they do in these circumstances), and we were tending to the shattered Retainers and getting ready to transport you to a laboratory facility when the most extraordinary thing happened.
    “You sat up, shrieking.
    “Generally, Myfanwy, those who have been subject to Norman’s manipulations are unable to do anything afterward. Especially in the case of complete erasure. The mind is too busy reacting to its forcible deletion to muster up an actual response. The personality is dissolving and continues to do so for an hour before a new, more pliable person emerges. So we were shocked at your actions. That screaming was, well, uncanny. But not so uncanny as the psychic assault that slammed down upon us. It was like a hammer smashing my head. When Norman and I roused ourselves, several minutes had passed, and you were gone—presumably shambling around the halls of the Rookery.
    “Obviously, this would not do. The odds of your being able to communicate what you knew before you lost it were slim, but still unacceptable. We could not take the risk that you would encounter any members of the Checquy, so I dispatched my team of loyal Retainers to the passages within the Rookery.
    “As it turned out, none of them ever came back,” said Grantchester tightly. “Several were found dead in a park in Pinner, and I was obliged to send a cleanup crew after them. Oh, we have your car, by the way. Several other operatives simply never reported in, and I assumed that you had eliminated them as well.” Myfanwy thought of the rotting corpses down in the tunnel that led to the garage but said nothing. “And then there was the disastrous incident in the bank. Those poor souls have had to undergo extensive therapy—both physiological and psychological—as a result of your attack on them. It was a pity too, as they were the most able infiltration team in my possession. They had tracked you to the hotel after, in a stroke of brilliance, you used your card in the hotel’s ATM to check your bank balance. They listened in on your driver’s radio in order to get to the bank before you, after you took a bewilderingly convoluted route.”
    “I happened to be taking in some of the sights,” said