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“Lies, all lies, Your Highness!” she exclaimed tearfully but with a defiant toss of her head. “Never — never! — would I have wished Their Wisdoms harm — or dared consider doing them harm if I hadn’t been forced to what I did by the cruel threats of Bazim and Filish. They—”
It got her nowhere. The Daal pointed out quietly it was clear she hadn’t realized with whom she was dealing when she turned on Captain Aron and his niece. Malice and greed had motivated her. It was well known that her partners were fully under her sway. Justice could not be delayed by such arguments.
No mention was made by either side of the mysterious spacedrive Su
Su
“Since the criminal’s most serious offense was against the Young Wisdom,” he said, “it seems fitting that the Young Wisdom should now decide what her punishment should be.”
The Little Court became quiet. Goth remained seated for a moment, then stood up.
“It would be even more fitting, Sedmon,” somebody beside the captain said, “if the Young Wisdom herself administered the punishment…”
He started. The words had come from Goth — but that had not been Goth’s voice! Everybody in the Little Court was staring silently at her. Then the Daal nodded.
“It shall be as Your Wisdom said…”
Goth moved away from the captain, stopped a few yards from Su
“Look in the mirror, Su
It wasn’t her voice! What was happening? His skin shuddered and from moment to moment, now his vision seemed to blur, then clear again. The voice continued low, mellow, but somehow it was filling the room. Not Goth’s voice but he felt he’d heard it before somewhere, sometime, and should know it. And his mind strained to understand what it said but seemed constantly to miss the significance of each word by the fraction of a second, as the quiet sentences rolled on with a weight of silent thunder in them. Su
The voice rose on an admonitory note, ended abruptly in sharp command. It couldn’t, the captain realized, actually have been speaking for more than twenty seconds. But it had seemed much longer. There was silence for an instant now. Then Su
One couldn’t blame her, he thought. Staring into the mirror, Su
“Toll!” the captain told Goth, rather shakily. “You were talking in Toll’s voice! Your mother’s voice!”
“Well, not really,” Goth said. They were alone for the moment, in a small room of the House of Thunders, to which they had been conducted by a stu
“It’s pretty much like Toll’s voice,” she agreed. “That was my Toll pattern.”
“Your what?”
Goth rubbed her nose tip. “Guess I can tell you,” she decided. “You won’t get it all, though. I don’t either…”
Her Toll pattern was a klatha learning device. In fact, a nonmaterial partial replica of the personality of an adult witch whose basic individuality was similar to that of the witch child given the device. In this case, Toll’s. “It’s sort of with me in there,” Goth said, tapping the side of her head. “Don’t notice it much but it’s helping. Now here — Sedmon was checking on how good I was. Don’t know why exactly. I figured I ought to get fancy to show him but wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. So the Toll pattern took over. It knew what to do. See?”
“Hmm… not entirely.”
Goth pushed herself up on the edge of a gleaming, blue table and looked at him, dangling her legs. “Course you don’t,” she said. She considered. “Pattern can’t do just anything. It has to be something I can almost do already so it only has to show me. Else it’d get me messed up, like I told you.”
“Meaning you’re almost able to plant a pig’s head on somebody if you feel like it?” the captain asked.
“Wasn’t a pig’s head.”
“Pretty good imitation then!”
“Bend light, bend color.” Goth shrugged. “That’s all. They’ll stay that way as long as you want. When Su
“Can’t quite imagine you doing one of those incantations by yourself! That was impressive.”
“Incant… oh, that! You don’t need all that,” Goth told him. “Toll pattern did it to scare everybody. Especially Sedmon.”
“It worked, I think.” He studied her curiously. “So when will you start bending light?”
Goth’s face took on a bemused expression. There was a blur. Then a small round pig’s head squinted at him from above her jacket collar, smirking unpleasantly.
“Oink!” it said in Goth’s voice.
“Cut it out!” said the captain, startled.
The head blurred again, became Goth’s. She gri
“I believe you now. How long will Su
“Didn’t you hear what the pattern told her?”
He shook his head. “I heard it — it seemed to mean something. But somehow I wasn’t really understanding a word. And I don’t think anyone else there was.”
“Su
Goth turned her head. There’d been a knock at the door. She put her hand in her pocket, snapped off the spy-screen, slid down from the table. The captain went over to the door to let in the Daal of Uldune.
“There are matters of such grave potential significance,” the Daal said vaguely, “that it is difficult — extremely difficult — to decide to whom one may unburden oneself concerning them. I…”
His voice trailed off, not for the first time in this conversation. His gaze shifted across the shining blue table to the captain, to Goth — back to the captain. He shook his head again, bit at a knuckle with an expression of worried irritability.
The captain studied him with some puzzlement. Sedmon seemed itching to tell them something but unable to make up his mind to do it. What was the problem? He’d implied he had information of great importance to Karres. If so, they’d better get it.