Wizard (The Key to Magic) Read Free

to the first cross street, he slowed, but detected nothing untoward, either with magic or with his normal senses, and dashed through it quickly. He passed the second, this one little more than an alley, also without incident, but as he approached the third, a wide, main thoroughfare, he felt a strong shock pass through the background ether. Responding by reflex, he darted into the first cover he saw, a door deeply inset into a blank brick facade to his left. Pressed hard into the leading corner so that he could only be seen by someone standing directly in front of the opening, he studied the complex sound-colors that had caused the shock. The residues of the spells faded in a few seconds, but he sensed enough of them to know that they were not natural occurrences.
    A skitter of a stone on pavement drew his attention back to the physical realm. Peeking one eye around the lip of the frame, he saw three large things -- monstrosities not seen even in his nightmares -- sweep out from the right hand branch of the thoroughfare and take station to effectively block the intersection. Larger and bulkier than a Gaaelfharenii, but more or less man-shaped, each had shells of overlapping plates, angular protuberances on the torso and arms, and irregularly placed spikes on the rear of its head. None of the hulks gave off any sound and none could be seen clearly. By dint of some unidentified glamour, all mimicked the colors of the buildings and streets around them. A gentle delving showed that the plates were composed of metal and substances that were not metal, but it was not the entrails of beasts that he discovered underneath, but rather the familiar flesh and bone of men.
    For no more than a second or two, Mar envisioned himself bolting back along the street and dodging into the first opening that he ran across to find a way up to the rooftops. At an earlier point in his life, that was exactly what he would have done. Now, he just waited, continuing to delve the mechanisms -- the monstrosities were plainly artifice and not transformed flesh like the Bhrekxa that had attacked him above Mhajhkaei -- and began to work through combinations to adapt his lifting and driving spells. The metallic portions did not reflect the pure sound-colors of steel, iron, copper, or brass, but he did discover elements of some of those modulations and as far as he could tell the monstrosities' shells would respond to his enchantments.
    Sound emerged from the centermost monstrosity, echoed along the street, and registered belatedly to Mar's ears as a voice. Roughened and sounding slightly off , the voice was a man's, was insistent, and was clearly enunciating a command, but the words were in a language that Mar did not understand.
    As he considered how to react, devices mounted to the ends of the arms of the two adjacent monstrosities swung to point squarely at his hiding place, causing him to guess that the things had cast spells to locate him. The obvious implication was that the devices were weapons, perhaps flinging projectiles in a similar fashion to the Brotherhood's magic driven catapults.
    Making a flash decision, he dealt with the threat, casting flux modulations to imbue the mechanisms with lift and hurl all three backwards. The growling-carnelian smashed the monstrosities into and through the red brick wall of a building on the back corner of the intersection, sending up a great racket and a cloud of dust.
    Without waiting to see what became of them, he sprinted across the street, enchanted his brigandine again, and sailed in spits and spurts up two storeys of clapboard to the roof. When he landed, he took off at a dead run, making as little noise as possible. As the roofs changed level, he went up or down as necessary, and when he came to a street or boulevard, he vaulted across with the aid of magic.
    Disturbances in the background ether informed him immediately that a pursuit, a dozen or more of the monstrosities trailing in a semi-circle, had