Spell Blind Read Online Free Page A

office. For a while I saw nothing, and I let out a loud sigh, glancing up at Namid, hoping he’d agree that this was pointless. But the runemyste sat as motionless as ice, his eyes closed. I turned my attention back to the mirror, trying once more to ignore the reflections and see only the glass itself.
    “Clear yourself,” Namid whispered.
    I nodded, and closed my eyes. Clearing was a technique the runemyste had taught me several years before, when he first started training me. It was a focusing mechanism that combined what many practitioners of magic call centering, with meditation, and we had worked on it enough that I could clear myself in mere moments. Once, early on, Namid had me visualize a time from my childhood when I remembered being happiest. I fixed on a camping trip with my parents in the Superstition Wilderness, east of the city. The runemyste made me describe for him every detail of the trip—what we ate, where we slept, what we did and saw. Gradually he steered me toward a single memory: a hike we took in the high country. My parents and I ate a late lunch on a crag that offered amazing views of the Sonoran Desert, stayed there for the sunset, and then returned to our campsite in the dim twilight, my father carrying me on his shoulders on the hike back down.
    I remembered watching an eagle from that overlook. It was the first I’d ever seen, and it circled above the desert in front of us, the late afternoon sun lighting the golden feathers on its neck, the tips of its enormous wings splayed, its tail twisting one way and another as it rode the warm desert air.
    “Whenever you need to clear yourself, I want you to summon the vision of that eagle,” Namid told me. “When you hold that image in your mind, it should remind you of that day, of that feeling of peace. It should drive away all distractions.”
    And it did. At first, as I was still learning what Namid meant when he spoke of being clear, it could take five or ten minutes. But by now I could call the eagle to mind, and within a minute or two I was centered, my mind focused. As impatient as Namid was with me—as impatient as I often was with myself—I couldn’t deny that I was learning.
    “When you are clear,” the runemyste whispered, “open your eyes again and tell me what you see in the mirror.”
    For a few seconds longer I kept my mind fixed on the vision of the great bird. Opening my eyes at last, I stared at the surface of the glass again. It felt as if I was alone with the mirror, that Namid had vanished, or rather, that I’d left him behind, along with my office, and Jessie Tyler, and everything else.
    The vision began as a thin gray swirl, like a wisp of smoke embedded in the glass. Another appeared, and a third. Soon there were a least a dozen of them chasing one another across the mirror, reminding me of children skating on a frozen pond. The center of the image began to glow, faintly at first, then brighter, until I could make out the oranges and blacks and pale yellows of embers in a dying fire. And then a hand emerged from the cinders. It might have been dark red, the color of blood, but it was silhouetted against that burning glow. It wasn’t taloned or deformed. It appeared to be a normal hand, long-fingered perhaps, but ordinary except for its color. Still, I knew immediately that it was . . . wrong; that it didn’t belong here. For one thing, those wisps of gray smoke acted as though they were afraid of it. They kept as far from the hand as possible; when it moved, they did as well, matching its motion so as to keep their distance.
    This continued for a while, the threads of smoke and the hand gliding over the embers, until suddenly the hand seized the strands of gray, capturing all of them in one lightning quick sweep across the mirror. The hand gripped them, the wisps of smoke appearing to writhe in its grasp. When at last the dark fingers opened again, what was left of the gray strands scattered like ash. And when