Taniwha's Tear Read Online Free Page B

more?’
    ‘Not if it means being like you,’ Mat cried.
    ‘Ha! How noble. How deluded. Wake up, boy! Take a reality check! Why are no great virtuous wizards and tohunga rising to cast down the so-called “evil” ones, now that Puarata is dead, hmmm? Why? Because there is none! Virtue is weakness, boy! We all know that only the strong thrive. In magic, strength means using makutu. It’s that simple. The only true path to power and dominance is makutu. Every powerful ruanuku in this land is a tohunga makutu, boy! You have some potential, but you need to shed your petty prejudices of morality. This isn’t a fairy tale, boy. Only the strong thrive, in this world and the next.’
    Mat felt his throat constrict, with anger and frustration that he couldn’t find the words to counter this vile creature. ‘Who are you?’ he choked out eventually.
    The cat snickered. ‘That’s for you to find out, if you have the courage and the wit. Do you, perchance?’
    ‘Yeah, well try this!’ Mat snapped, and poured all the brilliance and heat he could into the light he held in his hands, and blasted it at the cat. It gave a sudden shriek, and then howled as its dead flesh ignited. It writhed as it burnt, screaming imprecations. This time lights did come on in the closest house across the road, and Mat and Fitzy ran. Mat could already see the headlines in the paper—‘Cat burnt alive on Marine Parade’. It wouldn’t pay to be caught nearby.
    ‘Nice work!’ Fitzy panted as they pelted across the road, heading for home. ‘Normal fire would have been too slow, but I’m thinking that would have hurt him a little before he disconnected. Did Pania teach you that?’
    ‘No,’ Mat gasped. ‘I made it up myself a few weeks ago.’ He was feeling suddenly giddy and drained, and slightly sick. ‘We did some chemistry this term, and created this really intense fire using lithium. I kind of measured up the effect, and duplicated it.’
    ‘He didn’t expect that,’ the turehu commented neutrally.
    ‘It was a “he” then?’ Mat asked.
    ‘Perhaps…or should I say “perchance”?’ Fitzy chuckled.
    ‘Should I tell Wiri?’ Mat wondered.
    ‘That depends on whether you want to tell him you’ve been taking secret magic lessons when you’d promised you’d leave all that alone until after a proper teacher showed up,’ Fitzy observed.
    ‘Yeah, good point.’
    They slunk into the backyard, and Mat leant against the fence, panting a little still from the exertion of the magic fire. It was just before five and the eastern horizon was turning pale violet.
    ‘That cat-thing was disgusting,’ he told Fitzy. ‘If that’s makutu, I want none of it.’
    ‘Good to hear it,’ Fitzy rumbled, and semi-stood, putting his paws up on the fence and looking Mat in the eye.
    ‘Is he right though?’ Mat asked. ‘Is makutu the strongest magic?’ It was an ugly thought.
    ‘That depends, Mat. The thing is, makutu is the magic of harm. It hurts those that it is cast upon. If you want to win a fight, you need to know how to harm someone. Otherwise, all you can do is defend.’
    Mat thought for a second. ‘So what I did to the dead cat creature was a kind of makutu, then?’
    Fitzy looked him in the eye. ‘Yes. Yes, it was.’
    Mat groaned, and buried his head.
    ‘So how did it feel?’ the turehu pressed.
    Mat thought about the dead creature, and the sibilant taunting voice, and the words that had goaded him. And about how it felt to strike back. ‘It felt good,’ he admitted. ‘It felt really good.’
    Fitzy nodded sagely. ‘That’s the problem.’

3
The storyteller
    L ater that day, the grass beside the Wairoa River was shrivelling in the heat. The tarseal of the road was liquefying, and the waters were like a ribbon of light. Mat stepped out of the cool fan-stroked air inside Osler’s Bakery with its ‘Best Pies in New Zealand, 2002’ certificates, and inhaled the sticky air. Inside, his father was arguing on his cellphone