“It was them, wasn’t it?” Sandry heard Kwaben whisper. “The Rokat killers.”

Sandry nodded. “Their mage called them Dihanurs, did you hear?” she said, when she could talk again. “They figured no one would search for them in a place where they’d already done murder, I bet.” Then she remembered. “Wulfric!”

Turning over, she broke out of Oama’s hold and crawled over to the provost’s mage. He lay in a pool of blood.

“Musta cut his throat as he came in the doar,” muttered one of the guards Sandry had dragged inside to help take the killers. They hadn’t been able to get by Oama and Kwaben as they fought. “Bled ‘im oat afore he knowed it.”

“Gorry, they’s fast,” someone else whispered. “T’nail the ol’wolf like that. I seen him turn a spell on a copper bit, he were that quick.”

Sandry rolled Wulfric over as tears streamed down her cheeks. She tugged her handkerchief from her pocket and tried to wipe the blood from his face. “Now you don’t have to tell Uncle any bad news,” she whispered.

A warm hand rested on her shoulder. It was Kwaben’s; blood ran over it in a thin trickle. “Lady,” he whispered sadly.

“I liked him.” Sandry let her handkerchief settle over Wulfric’s open and staring eyes. She wiped her own eyes on her sleeve and struggled to her feet.

“Let me see that arm,” she told Kwaben.

She was no healer, but it was easy enough to lay silk threads from her belt-purse across the shallow gash over his bicep and use them like stitches to pull the wound shut. With that done, the bleeding slowed. Oama wrapped the arm in linen, and it stopped completely.

Sandry couldn’t leave. There was the provost to be notified, and investigators to talk to. Waiting for them, she sat on a stool that bore no taint of the killers, and looked at the room. The Dihanurs had left their packs. That would give the Provost’s Guards more information about them, maybe. Sandry doubted that any of it could be used for tracking, if their very blood was so corrupted by unmagic that traditional spells didn’t work.

Of course these people would slaughter two children. The nothingness they used to slip by watchers and hunters was eating the Dihanurs, just as it had almost devoured the mage whose power came from it. It had taken enough of their life force away that Sandry’s magical web could, not capture and hold them. Next time her magic would probably be able to grip still less. Even, if she could, hold a.

small part of their bodies captive, how long would that last?’ And, how on earth could, that mage be captured?

The Dihanurs had to be stopped. Otherwise they would penetrate even the layered spells on the inner keep, where four families were hiding.

How to deal with that mage. How to deal with a mage and two killers who could reach through Sandry’s magical barrier as if it were a net with large holes

There was a scrap of shadow inches from where she sat. It could be worked like magic, or the killers would not be able to wear it as a cloak. She could work her own magic like thread, and the magics belonging to others. Could she do that with unmagic?

Steeling herself, she reached into the dark smear and pinched at it with her fingers. As she pulled her hand away, it followed in a long strand like a fine grade of fiber. Goosebumps rippled over her skin—the almost-greasy, almost-sticky, whisper-sense of it on her fingers was very unpleasant—but she did not let go. Instead she twirled the strand as she might a tuft of wool, testing to see how easily it would spin. The strand turned as her twist traveled through it, thickening, just as wool might.

She got to her feet. “Everyone out of this room, right now,” she said loudly.

She turned, and held the eyes of the Provost’s Guards with her own. She had to convince them that she was a senior mage and in total control, or they would never let her do this. “You can’t see it, but the that lets those people get about unseen is smeared everywhere in here. It must be got up. That’s what Master Snaptrap and I came here to do. If you don’t want to track it all over Summersea, spreading gods only know what kind of ill power, then I’ve got to clean it up.”

“But there’s the investigators,” objected the most senior of the guards present.

He bore a corporal’s yellow arrowhead on his sleeves. “They need statements from you and from your guards. That’s how murder is looked into. There’s the mages, who will try to see what happened.”

“We know what happened,”Oama informed the corporal. “We were right here.” She looked anxiously at Sandry, who was digging in one of the packs Wulfric had brought. “You’d best do as she says,’ Corporal.” She drew the man’s ear down to her mouth, and whispered to him urgently.

From the pack, Sandry produced a. bolt of spelled white silk. It had already been, rubbed with the oil of at traction, so much so that it was already pulling the dark smears, from, her hands, arms, and the front of her gown onto itself.

She marched, out through the guards and into the hall with it. As she’d thought, the killers had kept’ to this part of the building—the marks they had left were confined to a small area

The hall that stretched toward the back of Rokat House and the stair that led to the third story were clean of unmagic.

Sandry threw the bolt of cloth into the long hallway, shoving it with her power.

It unrolled to its full length, giving off a heavy, flowery scent. “Walk or sit on that, and nowhere else,” she ordered the Guards. Returning to the packs, she found another such bolt, and spread it in the hall that led from the stair to the office. It moved as it settled over the smears of nothingness, pulling them from wood and carpet.