DARK MOON LIGHT

by L. Shelby

I guess I should of figured this was a bad plan before I got myself clinging to the outside of one of the university buildings and watching the dark circle of the moon crawl up the sky, while beside me Werin the Weasel twisted, squirmed and muttered. He was trying to do magic on a window-ledge. And that's when I finally got past my starry giddiness at being picked out as his prentice, and wondered if stealing from the Head of the College for Sorcerous Studies was so good a chance after all.

I don't got schooling, but I can count to two. Werin wanted me because I was small and skinny, and he hadn't even looked close enough to notice I wasn't a boy. By the time I wiggled through the window and let him inside, I didn't feel special no more, and only my breath catching in my chest and the thought of the warning leaves of fall kept me from scampering there and then. Which I should of done, because next I know there's alarm bells going off, and the university police are chasing me and Werin over the campus rooftops, and what folks say happens in the College of Justice's basement ain't no better from freezing.

Werin's long legs got him ahead, and he didn't have weak lungs neither, but I caught up when he reached a roof that weren't so tilted, and pulled out a medallion made of nine gold rings all hooked together, and placed it carefully on the tiles. The thing reeked of magic. It had little rainbow colored flares of the stuff leaping off of it, and it made me nervous. But Werin couldn't see magic. I knew that from when he walked right into those blue thready things that activated the alarm, earlier. But I couldn't take another step nohow, so I collapsed over the ridgepole, and lay their gasping and watching.

“Said use as a last resort,” Werin muttered, and he shot a peek toward the approaching police, and gulped. His pointy nose twitched, and he fastened his eyes once more on the medallion in frowning concentration. He traced a figure in the air, and then knelt on the roof and touched his forehead to the medallion nine times. The eighth time he hit it a bit too hard and it slipped down the roof a ways, so that when he touched it the last time he had to overreach himself and fell sprawling, almost slipping over the edge. He had to clutch desperately at the gutters, and scrabble about before he could right himself, and I would have laughed but for not having my breath yet, and I was too scared anyway.

Then a great beam of magic streamed from the medallion right up towards the sky like a beacon. It rose higher and higher, shooting up towards the black circle of the moon like a fountain lit by the glow of a hundred colored lights. And as it stretched up into the sky, the moon lit up. It glowed as shiny as a silver bit and as smooth as white satin, and I stood gaping like a gobby until I had to blink and look away, and I finally figured it was lighting up everything like a giant lamp, and if I could see the angles of the roofs and the police and the wall around the campus and everything, then they could see me too.

I began crawling away from my idiot master.