Sianim 01 - Masques

men watched the coffeepot. But despite all of that, the next morning the pot was gone. The guard who was supposed to be following Kai around had actually been following Talor, who looked enough like his twin to be mistaken for him in the dark.” Aralorn smiled at her intent audience. Stories about the twins were always guaranteed attention holders.
    “Kai was not only good enough to get the pot, he also painted a white ‘X’ on the back of every one of the guards without their knowing it.”
    “I bet Stanis could do that,” said Tobin. “He’s sneaky.” Stanis, with his inability to get lost, was more often to be found running errands than hanging out with people his own age. It gave him even more cachet among his followers.
    “Aralorn.” Myr put his hand on her shoulder.
    He looked a bit pale. “What’s wrong?”
    “It’s Wolf. Stanis ran a message to him in the library for me and came running back a few minutes ago. He says there’s something up—I think perhaps you ought to go check.”

    The library was engulfed in shadows when she cautiously peered into it, and it felt warmer than usual. The only light came from the crystals in Wolf’s staff, which were glowing a dull orange. Wolf sat in his usual chair, motionless, his face in the shadows. He didn’t move when she came in, that and the scorched smell in the library suggested that the scene wasn’t as ordinary as it looked.
    Using her own magic, Aralorn lit the chamber. One of the bookcases was missing. Thoughtfully, Aralorn wandered over to where it had been and scuffed a toe in the ashes that had taken its place. The bookcase next to her burst into flames and was reduced to the same state before she even felt the heat. She winced at the destruction of the irreplaceable books.
    “Wolf,” she asked in calculatedly exasperated tones. “Isn’t this hard enough without losing your temper?” She turned to look at him. He wore his mask again.
    “I have it, Aralorn,” he murmured softly. “I have the power to do anything.” Another bookcase followed the first two. “Anything.”
    Her pulse picked up despite her confidence that he’d never hurt her.
    “If I didn’t have so much power,” he said, “I just might be able to do something with it. You see, I found it. I found the spell to remove the ability to use magic from a magician who is misusing his power. I can’t use it. I don’t have the skill or the control, and the spell uses too much raw power. If I tried it, we’d have another glass desert on our hands.” His eyes glittered with the flickering orange light of his staff.
    Aralorn went to him and sat on the floor beside him, resting her head against his knees. “If you had less power, there would be no way to take the ae’Magi at all. You would never have been able to free yourself from the binding spells that keep all of the other magicians bound to his will. There would be no one to resist him. Quit tearing yourself into pieces and winning the battle for the ae’Magi. You are who you are. No better certainly, but no worse.”It was quiet for a long time in the library. Aralorn let her light die down and sat in the darkness with Wolf. No more bookcases burned in magic fire. When Wolf’s hand touched her hair, Aralorn knew that it would be all right. This time.

    Aralorn trotted up the tunnels at a steady pace, walking now and again when she ran out of breath—which she felt was far too often. Slowly, though, her strength was coming back, and she had to stop less frequently than she had the day before. Morning and night for the past four days, she had run the tunnels from the library to the entrance, trying to rebuild the conditioning that she’d lost. Also, not incidentally, building up her understanding of how to get from one place to another.
    Her path was free of people for the most part. The library was quite a distance from the main caves, and most of the campers respected Wolf’s claims that the Old Man of the Mountain wanted to keep them out of the tunnels. Aralorn was of the opinion that Wolf didn’t want to spend his time searching for lost wanderers because she’d seen no sign that the Old Man objected to anyone’s presence. Although the path to the library was carefully marked out and considered part of the occupied caves, in practice it was seldom that anyone besides Aralorn, Wolf, or Stanis went there.
    Wolf said that they were waiting for the wrath of the Old Man to fall on them. Myr said that it was