What tomorrow brought was an early breakfast delivered by a silent slave. It was plain fare, but much better than I’d been getting on the slaver’s ship. I welcomed the glimpse of light offered by the open door. The continual darkness in the little room was beginning to get to me. I wished for the night vision to go with my cat eyes, but knew it was futile. My sight would never be any better then the human norm. How did Amelia stand it? She’d obviously been here for along time. I could only hope that the door would be left open frequently or else I might go mad. The door was open now, having been left open after delivery of our breakfast, and I began to consider the possibility of going out, but Amelia stopped me.

“You keep looking at the door. Don’t. If you go out you’ll be in trouble, and you don’t want to get Master Lucius mad at you.”

That stopped me. I already knew that I definitely didn’t want to earn Lord Morren’s ire. Still, the open door was itching at me. I didn’t like just sitting here. But when the door to Lord Morren’s workroom opened and he ordered me up and inside I wondered if I wouldn’t have been better off just sitting. With no small amount of trepidation I got to my feet and went into the workroom.

“Kneel down over there,” said Master Lucius, pointing to a circle drawn on the workroom floor. I hesitated for a moment, but what could I do? I went over to the circle and knelt. Amelia had said that the mage would use me for a power source, so I had some small idea of what might be coming. I’d never heard of a spell that could transfer any significant amount of power from one person to another without the willing consent and active participation of both. Memories of my school days came back to me, and I found I had a certain academic curiosity about how he would pull it off.

The spell he began to cast was almost totally unfamiliar, but I recognized the basic formula it was built on. It was based in sympathetic magic, the sort of magic where concrete objects figure largely. I couldn’t see how a transfer of power could be affected through such a spell. It would seem to require a literal and physical analogue, but how would Master Morren take something that was a part of me and make it part of him? I listened closely to the spell, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of what he was doing. I was listening so intently I almost didn’t notice his motion as he picked up a tiny dagger. It was hardly an inch long, but it was quite sharp. He spoke the words that would finish the main portion of the spell. Now would come whatever physical action would activate it. With a sudden suspicion I knew what that action would be, I watched the knife with horrified fascination. Still moving with the precision of ritual, the mage reached down and grabbed my wrist. His eyes locked on mine and I felt like a field mouse caught in the gaze of a snake. I was frozen, unable to move. He drew the razor-sharp blade lightly across my wrist. The blade was so sharp I hardly felt it. Lord Morren picked up a small bowl in his other hand and held it below my wrist. I felt a strange kind of tugging sensation as the blood flowed into the bowl. It was is if something inside of me was being pulled out through the wound. The flow of blood soon slowed. The wound hadn’t been large, only a spoonful or so of blood was in the little bowl.

Lord Morren at last released me from his serpent’s gaze. I clutched at my wrist. I was starting to feel the pain now. And that tugging sensation was still there. It was as if a thread had been pulled out of me through the wound. If my soul were a sweater, and a thread had frayed off and was being pulled out to unravel a little bit of it, it might have felt like that. I thought to myself, is that all? Was the spell finished? The tugging sensation showed that the spell had done something, but I could sense the magic still in the air. No, it wasn’t finished. No power had left me as yet; there was only a connection of some sort between myself and the blood that had been drawn from me. Lord Morren raised the bowl to his lips. It didn’t take a master’s in magic to guess that he would complete the spell by drinking the blood, thus taking my magic into him. But as I watched his slow motion, my mind suddenly raced ahead. This spell wasn’t intended to simply take magical energy; the way it felt told me that it went deeper.

The sweater metaphor was closer to the truth than I liked. As an unraveled thread actually diminished the sweater, and might eventually destroy it, so what he was doing would actually lessen my own life force. It hadn’t started yet, but as soon as that bowl touched his lips… and then it did and I was rendered incapable of thought.