“More women’s work,” I grumbled. “How long do you think that will take to burn out?”

  “We used to have Polycarp light our midsummer bonfire each year,” Isabeau said. “Sometimes it burned for two weeks. But our pyre was never as big as that dead dragon.”

  “I don’t fancy waiting here all week—or longer—to collect the merchant’s bag of gold from beyond the fire. If it exists,” I said.

  “If, indeed,” Isabeau said. “The wind’s blowing away from us. I think we can come out—so long as we stay to this side of the pyre.”

  “Come to think of it,” I said, “Quemard was traveling from this side of the pass when the dragon swooped down. If he never got past the dragon, there’s no way a purse he dropped should be on the far side of it. He made that up so we’d work for him. It would serve that scoundrel right if we came back looking for him with a fire-breathing dragon on call.” Laetitia was starting to look better to me already. In fact, once I got used to her, I had to admit the subtle shades of color in her scales were elegant, like Isabeau’s embroidery.

  “If I should chance upon an awkward meeting with my family,” Isabeau said thoughtfully, “it would be good to have a bigger dragon on my side than they have on theirs.”

  “We’d better feed her up, then,” I said. “Where to next, Isabeau? Where shall we bring up the baby?”

  Authority Figures

  Michael H. Payne

  Cluny is now in her sophomore year at Huxley, and very few people have figured out that she’s the wizard and Crocker is a familiar. She works hard to keep it that way, because humans are supposed to be the wizards, and nobody can possibly miss the fact that Crocker is human and she’s a squirrel. And then, of course, there’s Shtasith.

  Celebrating the 10th Cluny the Sorceress Squirrel story here in Sword and Sorceress, Michael H. Payne continues to clerk at the local library, to cantor and play guitar at the local Catholic church, to host his Sunday afternoon radio program at the local university, and to crank out 11 pages of webcomics each week even though he doesn't draw very well. He's still writing and curating My Little Pony fanfiction for the Equestria Daily and Royal Canterlot Library websites, has begun collating the monthly Round-Ups for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association, and is bound and determined to get the first eight Cluny stories put together into a novel before the heat death of the universe. Check http://hyniof.com for further details—on the stories and stuff, that is, not on the heat death of the universe....

  A hissing cry startled Cluny’s attention up from the page of the musty old grimoire she was sprawled across taking notes. Her tail frizzing, she watched Shtasith keel over backwards off the edge of Crocker’s desk. “Brain freeze!” the little dragon shrieked, his flailing wings doing nothing to stop his tumble. “Brain freeze!”

  Cluny sighed. “What have I told you about stealing sips from Crocker’s milkshakes?”

  “But the flavor!” Thudding to the carpet, Shtasith become a wriggling pile of black and gold scales. “It’s incomparable!”

  Crocker gave a chuckle. “Face it, Teakettle.” He plucked the straw from the glass at his elbow, crumpled it in one hand, and tossed it in the general direction of the trashcan on the other side of his desk. “Ice cream and fire-based beasties just don’t mix.”

  “But—!” Shtasith began.

  “No.” Sitting up, Cluny folded her forelegs across her chest. She hated being the authority figure, but, well, sometimes even a wizard who was just starting her sophomore year at college had no choice but to lay down the law for her familiars. “Stick to hot chocolate, Shtasith. You’re not built to handle the frozen stuff.” Shifting her gaze to where Crocker was smirking sideways at the slowly unfolding firedrake, she crooked a claw at the straw on the floor. “And you know a perfectly good teleportation spell now, Crocker. Throwing trash all over the place like that is nothing but lazy.”

  The smirk going sheepish on his round human face, Crocker aimed a finger at the straw, and it popped like a kernel of corn from the carpet over the lip into the can. “Sorry,” he said.

  With a nod, Cluny picked up her pigeon feather quill again, but Shtasith rising from his heap and fixing his fiery gaze on Crocker’s glass made her set it down. “Shtasith...”

  “Behold!” he announced, leaping into a hover. “Thus do I defy destiny!” Shooting to the ceiling, he tucked, rolled, and dove for the glass.

  “Hey!” Crocker flailed his arms at the darting and dodging little dragon. “It’s my milkshake! Mine!”

  Sighing, Cluny let her eyes roll closed. It wasn’t enough, apparently, that she was the only squirrel on campus who didn’t work for the groundskeeping department; it wasn’t enough that she was the first animal ever to manifest the power to become a wizard rather than a familiar; it wasn’t enough that wizards like her who attracted two familiars historically went crazy and tried to take over the world; it wasn’t enough that Huxley’s headmaster and everything she’d seen her frosh year kept telling her that she had to keep all this secret from most everyone else in the world.

  No, she also had to have a couple familiars who would’ve done every bit as well on the music hall stage. With an effort, she managed to send just a gentle poke along the connection between her and the two of them rather than something stabbier.

  To their credit, they both froze in place at the nudge, Crocker snapping his head over and Shtasith pulling into another hover. And as much as a part of her wanted to glare or yell or give them her wide-eyed, quivery-lipped ‘poor woodland creature’ face, a much larger part recognized what was going on. “All right.” She heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Let’s take a break.”

  With a speed that made Cluny’s ears fold, Crocker was standing by the door to their dorm room, his off-white sophomore robes over his yellow-and-black flannel shirt and Shtasith settling into place along his shoulders. She swallowed. “Am I really driving you guys that hard?”

  Shtasith snorted. “Fear not, my Cluny. Your quest to delve into the very deepest roots of mortal magic serves to inspire those of us whom fate has marked out to be your assistants and familiars. However, we, uhh...” The little spikes along his neck wilted, and he drew back behind Crocker’s head.

  Crocker blew out a breath. “We kinda need a breather every day or three.” He waved a hand at her. “And you do, too! I mean, you look like a feather duster!”

  Blinking, Cluny glanced down at herself, her fur even grayer than usual, she realized, because of the dust and cobwebs coating her. “Eww,” she said, suddenly feeling itchy.

  “Exactly.” Crocker clapped his hands. “So, we head over to the Admin Plaza fountain, you take a swim, Shtasith flies you around till you’re nice and blow dried, then we stop at the Pizzita for an early supper.” He gave a single nod. “Everybody wins.”

  Warmth trickling through her, Cluny grinned up at her familiars, activated her ‘flying squirrel’ spell, and sailed across Crocker’s bed to land in the large pocket she’d sewn for herself along the front of his robe. “You guys’re the best.”

  The tip of Shtasith’s tail patted her ears. “This should surprise no one,” he said.

  Crocker chuckled above her, grabbed the doorknob, and carried them all into the hall.

  A lovely late October afternoon draped blue and crisp over the campus, Cluny’s whiskers tingling the moment Crocker stepped out the front door of Huahuo House. The first breath she took whooshed through her like floodwater, and muscles she hadn’t even realized she’d been clenching relaxed all at once to slump her with a sigh against Crocker’s chest. And yes, classes had only been in session for two weeks, but with everything that had happened in that time—

  She pushed the memories away before they could start. If there’d ever been a moment designed for living strictly in the present, this was it.

  The short path from the dorm emptied onto Ring Road, the main walkway that surrounded the odd and unruly woodland of Eldritch Park at the center of the Huxley campus. Crocker took a left, and Cluny couldn’t help but cringe a little inside at every student—and even some of the faculty members and staff—who got all wide eyed and stumble footed when they saw Crocker approaching. Not that she could blame them; they all believed the cover story that Crocker was an enormously powerful wizardry student whose familiar was Shtasith but whose unbalanced mind had become so fixated on Cluny that he could never be safely parted from her.

  A lie, yes, but Cluny had come to accept the necessity of it. Better that than the chaos the truth would cause....

  A quarter turn around Ring Road brought them to the steel, glass, and sandstone of the Admin Plaza, the spire of the Admin Tower itself spiraling upward in the center. It surprised Cluny a little that Crocker was heading for it—they didn’t have their regular weekly meeting with Magister Gollantz till Friday—but when he stopped at the large, burbling pool and fountain beside the building, she remembered the itinerary he’d outlined back in the room.

  She sighed. “No, Crocker. It’s against campus rules to swim in the fountain.”

  “Cluny?” Crocker bunched his features into what he called his ‘stern lecturer face’ and raised an index finger. “Rules exist to encourage proper behavior, do they not?”

  Folding her forearms across her chest, Cluny gave him a half-lidded look. “Where exactly are you going with this?”

  “No, no, no.” He shook his upraised finger. “It’s where you’re going that matters, and you’re going into the water. After all, with the rule against bathing in the fountain and the rule against looking like a rag mop coming into direct conflict, I feel that an extrajudicial representative plenipotentiary such as myself can have no choice but to intervene and—”

  “Fine!” Hitching herself over the edge of the pocket, Cluny sucked in a breath and sprang away from his chest with just enough of a push to carry her across the low marble railing that surrounded the fountain’s pool. If Crocker wanted to be a goofball, she’d show him how it was done!

  The temperature of the water when she hit shocked the breath right out of her. Late October! Swimming! Bad idea! Flailing, she managed to sputter back to the surface, somehow suck in air against the frozen vise squeezing her chest, and squeal, “Cold, cold, cold!”

  “Indeed,” she heard Shtasith remark. “Alas that I, as a fire-based creature, have been forbidden from engaging with the colder elements of the world.”

  She managed to aim a glare at him, hovering smugly above the pool, and she was just reaching for several of the more grabby spells in her arsenal when a laugh as sweet as crystal wind chimes tickled her ears. “Oh, you three,” came the unmistakable voice of Lady Hesper, the unicorn whose contested appointment as temporary head of Huxley’s Healing Arts Department—the first non-humanoid dean in the college’s two thousand year history—was one of the recent memories Cluny didn’t want to dwell on. “As a faculty member in good standing, I ought to report this flagrant breach of regulations.” A warm breeze wrapped around Cluny and lifted her from the figurative ice field. “Fortunately, my standing’s not that good, so...”

  The breeze settled Cluny onto the rim of the pool, but her teeth were still shivering too much for her to do more than nod her thanks to Hesper, standing dainty as a yearling gazelle beside the grinning Crocker. Behind them both, seeming big as a thundercloud even though the tips of his ears only reached to Crocker’s shoulder, sat Hesper’s new familiar, the barghest Jorvik, his red eyes glowing against the black smoke of his wolfish face. “Water,” he said in his rumbling brogue. “Can’t say as how I’ve ever seen the attraction.”

  Crocker’s magic pulsed against Cluny, and he sat down beside her with a large towel in his hands. “Mostly,” he said, wrapping her in the towel, tucking her to his chest, and starting to rub her dry, “I find water useful ’cause dropping people into it can be pretty funny.”

  Wanting to complain about being so roughly manhandled, Cluny instead found his massaging touch quite gentle and soothing....

  But she fought the feeling. Most wizards seemed to want obsequious toadies rather than familiars, Cluny had noticed with disgust and alarm, and she wanted nothing whatsoever to do with that mindset. Stoking up the guilt simmering between her ears, she sighed. “I’m sorry I’ve become such a wicked taskmistress lately, guys. I need to remember to get us out more often for mental health days like this.”

  Crocker poked her in the stomach. “Sun’s going down, Cluny. That’s more like a mental health hour, you ask me.”

  Shtasith, settling onto Crocker’s shoulders again, puffed steam from his snout. “Then we shan’t ask you, Simian.”

  “Still,” Hesper said with a nod that sent her golden mane swirling, “it’s a good idea to take time out now and again. In fact, Jorvik and I have just been talking to Magister Gollantz about starting a small salon every other Tuesday evening. Nothing too fancy or formal, but somewhere where students, faculty, and staff can all get together to chat.” She looked over her shoulder at the barghest. “These three would fit right in, don’t you think?”

  “Too right.” Jorvik’s dark muzzle split to reveal what Cluny always thought of as altogether too many teeth. “I’d been thinking I had a limited social circle during my days as a thug for hire. But the way you academic types cloister yourselves—”

  “Ha!” a damp, thick voice burst out behind them. “You’ll not fool some of us so easily!”

  Her ears springing straight up, Cluny struggled against the enveloping warmth of Crocker’s towel, saw Jorvik and Hesper step sideways and turn, and could only blink to see Esteemed Tadon standing there, the kappa’s turtle-like body tense and more angular than she remembered, his face clenched and glaring, steam bubbling from the water that filled the bowl-shaped depression on the top of his head.

  “Tadon?” Hesper was blinking her big dark eyes. “What—?”

  “Silence!” Esteemed Tadon stomped a stubby leg, the fringe of hair surrounding his head bowl flaring. “That you would sell your virtue so easily with regard to this matter, Hesper, tells me all that I need to know!” He raised his forelegs, purple lightning crackling between his little black claws. “You jeopardize the entire kingdom by succumbing to this madness, and I will not allow it!” The lightning crashed outward, slamming into Cluny before she could react. The shock of it spun her sideways, and she fell, the towel tangling her paws, the cold slap of the water striking her full in the face again.

  The squirrellier parts of her flew into an instant panic, the towel getting wetter and heavier and sinking her deeper into the icy pond. She could barely focus her thoughts long enough to cast the tiniest translocation spell, popping her maybe three inches to the side. It got her free of the cloth, at least, and without another thought, she struck out toward the light above, her snout breaking the surface with a squeaking gasp.

  “Oh, my!” came a similarly squeaking voice, and quivering hands closed around her, lifted her from the water, started dabbing at her with something small and thin and white: a pocket handkerchief, she thought. “I’m so sorry! I can’t imagine what’s gotten into Tadon!”

  Automatically reaching for her collection of heating and drying spells, Cluny stopped herself. The hands told her it was a human holding her, and the only human who knew the truth about her was Magister Gollantz. But the voice she was hearing—“Oh, my! This is just so perplexing!”—was nothing like the headmaster’s, and that meant she had to stick with the cover story, had to pretend that she was just a simple sapient squirrel without even a familiar’s limited magic.

  Brushing the soaked fur from her eyes, she blinked into a thin beige face topped by haphazardly-cut brown hair, glasses perched on a sharp nose, big dark eyes staring at her through them. “Are you all right?” the human asked, still brushing at her with his already-damp handkerchief. “I saw you tumble in when the others disappeared, and—”

  “Disappeared?” Cluny sat up in the palm of his hand and saw that the whole courtyard around the fountain was empty.

  With another squeak, the human pulled his handkerchief away, and Cluny winced. “I’m sorry,” she said, fishing for her ‘poor woodland creature’ face in an attempt to assure him that she didn’t bite. “I’m Cluny. I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know what’s happening.”

  The man holding her at arm’s length nodded convulsively. He seemed not much taller than Crocker though Cluny was sure he was many decades older. His tweed coat, yellow shirt, and brown bow tie all combined to give him an air of something even more than faded, like wallpaper that had been exposed to the sun for so long, it had sunk further into the background than intended. “I’m sorry as well,” he said, his voice rustling now rather than squeaking. “I’m Sanjat Histulari, adjutant professor of poetic construction in the Language Department. Tadon’s been acting so moody recently, but I’m at a loss—”

  “What?” Still rattled, Cluny couldn’t stop herself from blurting it out. “You’re Esteemed Tadon’s wizard?”

  Magister Histulari nodded not quite as spastically as before, and for all that Cluny tried not to stare, she knew she was failing. Supernatural familiars were extremely rare—including Shtasith, there were only a dozen on the entire Huxley campus. If this nondescript little man had somehow bound as slippery a creature as a kappa.... Cluny bowed her head. “Forgive me, Magister Histulari. I—”

  “Oh, no. No, no.” He waved the hand holding the handkerchief and gave another of his squeaks when several drops of water flew from it to speckle his face. “I’m no magister. Just a poetry professor trying to help budding wizards with their spell language.”

  Questions flooded Cluny—how someone who didn’t hold the rank of magister could be teaching at Pel Laugos’s finest magical university, for instance—but she forced herself to concentrate on what was going on here and now. “Professor, then. Please, can you tell me what happened?”