Razorscale let the unicorns think they won the debate about the door, when really he’d decided it wasn’t worth the time to convince them. And since they were the ones doing the magic, it would again be their fault if they somehow set off an alert.
He almost hoped they would. But as he stood by with his apprentice and the four idiots — yes, there they were — the two unicorns touched horns to the various power points in the door, and it swung open silently. The stronghold of the human magician was theirs to ransack.
“This way,” Razorscale said as he pushed past them. They would know as well as he did which direction the scent of magic and bad decisions was coming from, but it brought him joy to go first.
The unicorns didn’t object out loud. He knew they were swishing sparkly tails in irritation behind him. He didn’t look.
Motion down the hallway proved to be an enchanted statue, carrying linens and ignoring the intruders because it hadn’t been told not to. The place was silent, with no voices of living servants to be heard. Razorscale shook his head and followed the magic.
While the human who lived here surely thought the route to his workroom was hidden in a most clever way, he was wrong. “Clever” to a human who’d been practicing magic for a few decades was laughable to a dragon who had been a master for much longer, and to however old those unicorns were. Razorscale didn’t care. He led the procession through secret passageways and illuminated tunnels and one extremely pretentious tube in the middle of a pond. The water was full of magically-enhanced fish that glowed. They probably tasted terrible.
Razorscale was thinking stray thoughts about the humiliating way humans caught fish — letting the creatures feel like real predators catching a wriggly mouthful of prey, only to be hauled painfully out of their world to die slowly; such a disgraceful practice compared to catching them like prey and being done with it — then the final doorway opened into a room that stank of magic. He focused.
=This child needs filters,= said the lead unicorn.
“Among other things,” Razorscale agreed. The room was smaller than he’d expected, given the excessive size of the house. Bookshelves lined the walls, surrounding one table covered in writing materials and another littered with vials, jars, and various tools for mixing spell components. A cabinet with a stasis field held those components, next to a wash station equipped with both a water faucet and an antimagic field. It was too close to the cabinet. Idiot human.
The other door to the room was open, with a view of a stone-lined room that sported more than one blast mark on the walls. A testing chamber. With the door left open. Idiot human.
But then, if the man had been in the habit of thinking things through, Razorscale wouldn’t be here now, searching for records of an illegal spell and with no inclination to be gentle about it.
The unicorns were already at the writing table, staring at the books that flipped open obediently. They weren’t even bothering to ask the pixies to turn the pages for them. Razorscale expected to hear pages tear any second now with the way they were throwing their magic around.
The pixies were skimming the bookshelves, but they probably didn’t know what to look for. Razorscale started to cast a comprehension spell, then stopped when he was reminded yet again of his limited capacity at the moment.
“Apprentice,” he said. “Cast a knowledge seek for unicorns, shape changing, and dragons, in that order.”
“Yes, Mentor.” The youngster did as instructed while the unicorns tore through the contents of the table, and the hangers-on wandered around. “You four, don’t touch anything,” Razorscale said. “You won’t see any traps until it’s too late.”
They agreed readily enough. While the apprentice’s spell canvassed the room, Razorscale checked the contents of the cabinet. Unimpressive; mostly herbs and minerals. Not even an enchanted fish for taste-testing.
“Results, Mentor,” the apprentice announced. “Would you like me to stack them?”
“Just point them out. We don’t have to be careful.”
So the apprentice indicated which books held references to the select topics, and Razorscale threw them into piles on the floor. Pixies looked them over. Razorscale didn’t snap at them to get out of his way, but then he also didn’t take care where he threw the books, either. It was their job to dodge.
In the end, both the unicorns and the dragons turned up useful things. Most of the human’s current notes were out on the table, though a notebook of “Masterwork Spells” was in a place of honor on a bookshelf. In the spirit of grudging cooperativity, the unicorns shared what they had discovered, while Razorscale and his apprentice did the same.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
There was no doubt that this human mage was one of the five who had cast the spell. He’d targeted Stomp, and had apparently focused on minotaurs from the start.
=The original spell core required something of the person that you wished to contact,= the lead unicorn said. An invisible gust of power disdainfully scattered the stack of drawings to the floor. =Clearly this was his best attempt.= They were hand-drawn pictures of minotaurs, some sketchy and others lovingly rendered. It was clear that the human had a thing for muscles.
Stomp stood by the door, scowling. She picked up one picture that had drifted toward her, an exaggerated portrait of an overmuscled bull. She crushed it with a snort. Windmane put a hand on her shoulder.
“We can burn all these,” Razorscale said. He took the Masterwork notebook from his apprentice and flipped through it a second time. Pathetic. He tore out the page that named the other spellcasters and how they fit into the spell, then tossed the book onto the table. “And this.”
Windmane spoke up. “Won’t you need it for evidence? To prove they did it?”
=Prove it to whom?= the lead unicorn asked. She touched her horn to the table, and the entire surface burst into glittery blue flames. The group by the door let out various yelps, though Razorscale didn’t flinch. =We are the authorities. Human law-keepers are irrelevant.=
“Unless they’re complicit,” Razorscale pointed out. He scooped another book off the floor, the one with the unsettling uses for dragon scales and tossed it into the blaze. “Then they’re in trouble too.”
=Make no mistake,= the unicorn said. =We are here to wipe all traces of this spell from human knowledge, so that no one attempts it again. The perpetrators have already spread word that they succeeded, and witnesses saw you transform, so Plan A is out. We will have to settle for destroying the instructions and instilling the proper amount of fear about consequences for anyone who tries to reconstruct it from scratch.=
“First we catch them,” Razorscale said. “Then we reverse the spell. Then we’ll see who gets eaten first.”
The various prey species by the door seemed uneasy at that, but that wasn’t his problem.
The lead unicorn pulled her head back in the way that meant her compatriots had told her something unpleasant. =The minotaur is leaving court,= she reported. =But he isn’t coming here.=
When Razorscale pressed for details, he got a description of the very drunk human in the minotaur’s body laughing his way outside in the company of multiple human women. None were taking care to be quiet about the nobleman’s party they were headed for.
The other unicorns couldn’t follow without raising suspicion; they hadn’t been invited. Their pixies flitted about in the company of others, though they would be noticed if they strayed too far.
“We can cage him later,” Razorscale pointed out. “He’ll likely come back here by tomorrow. There’s no point in following, not when we can search out a different target now.” He held up the list.
=Show me that,= the unicorn demanded. Razorscale did, taking care to keep a good grip on it. The unicorn just read the page carefully, then nodded and turned away. =We’ll want to leave surveillance before we go.=
“Let my apprentice handle that,” Razorscale said in sudden inspiration. “Why don’t you and I work on something different.”
=What?= She sounded rightly suspicious.
“Something to hamstring this fool,” Razorscale told her. “We tie his place of power to someone else.”
=Oh, I like that.= Her smile was sharp. =Who did you have in mind?=
Razorscale called over his shoulder. “Twig, I need your blood.”
“What?” the pixie asked. “Uh, I need it more?”
“Not all of it, you dunce. Come here.”
Twig made his way hesitantly across the floor while Razorscale exchanged looks with the unicorn. Human magic took a lot of thinking to use. A lot of concentration, and focus, and one might even say intellect. Short of tying it to one of those fish, Twig was the best candidate for Least Likely To Actually Use This.
Before getting started, Razorscale made sure that the apprentice remembered the runes for distance charms. He needn’t have worried. The youngster had already decided which corner of the room would be the best spot. Razorscale directed Stomp to push the table that wasn’t still smoldering over so the apprentice could reach, then he returned the the task at hand.
He couldn’t do much magic directly right now, but the human form actually provided an advantage for once. Razorscale could function as the focus for the unicorns to work their magic through. They grasped the idea immediately, and nicked Twig’s arm for a targeting sample before he realized it was happening. Two waiting pixies smeared blood on a focusing crystal that they’d just washed at the antimagic station, and the spell began. In a gratifyingly short amount of time, the three magic-users were working in tandem, with Razorscale guiding and them ripping the lines of force away at the roots.
He hoped it hurt the distant human. If the fellow was drunk and distracted, he might not notice. But Razorscale hoped it hurt.
Twig was babbling, though he always did that, and as long as he was still standing there, Razorscale could ignore him. The connection settled into place against the anxious pixie’s aura as if it had been there from the start. Razorscale smiled fiercely.
“Oh,” Twig said, looking at his hands. “That feels … better, somehow? It’s not magic like I’m used to, I mean I still look like a dead thing without any glow — No offense!”
“You can stop talking now,” Razorscale told him. For once, Twig actually did it.
Razorscale disentangled his magic from the unicorns with mixed feelings. He opened his mouth to say something that would fix that when he heard faint rhythmic thumps approaching.
Like footsteps.
Heavy footsteps.
“You did miss one!” Razorscale snarled. He yanked Twig further into the room, then slammed the door to the workroom shut on the view of the statue clomping down the walkway. Razorscale pointed at the unicorns. “You fix it!”