you done to me?" the beggar man cried, reaching for the stranger in his body. Every movement seemed to drag; his arms had little strength to convey his fury.
Ghost snapped his fingers, and the black and white gloves disappeared, leaving his newly acquired hands half exposed in the fingerless gloves. Half-heartedly, he pushed the weakling back. How useful that lax body had proven to Ghost. How benign and unthreatening, a body that even a young boy could defeat. With an almost resigned shrug, he advanced on the whimpering and sorely confused wretch and wrapped his dirty hands about the skinny neck.
Nameless fought desperately, as desperately as Ghost's puny form had ever battled, but there was no strength in his arms, no power to loosen the larger attacker's hold. Soon he stopped struggling, and Ghost knew the beggar's resignation was founded in grief for those he would leave behind.
The wicked man contemplated the change with amusement, thinking it curious, even humorous, that one as obviously wretched as this leprous beggar would lament the end of his life.
There was no mercy in Ghost, though. He had killed this body a hundred times, perhaps, and had killed his previous body a like number, and the body he had used before that as well.
The corpse slumped to the ground. Ghost immediately brought back his magical device and called upon its powers to watch the beggar man's spirit step out of the slab form. Ghost quickly pulled off the fine black glove and placed it on his unoccupied body. He closed his eyes and stiffened his resolve against the ensuing pain, for the simple act had transferred a part of his own spirit back into the corpse.
It was a necessary step for two reasons. The body would heal - Ghost had a powerful magical item concealed in one boot to see to that - and if the receptacle remained open, then the beggar man's spirit would find its way back in. Also, if Ghost allowed the body to die, if he allowed the item in his boot to call back a spirit, the item's regenerative powers would partially consume the form. Considering how many times Ghost had made this switch, the item would have burned up the puny form long ago.
But that wouldn't happen. Ghost knew how to use the items in conjunction; the Ghearufu, the glove-and-mirror device, had long ago shown him the way, and he had spent three lifetimes perfecting the act.
Ghost looked both ways along the empty road, then pulled the slender body far from the trail, into some covering brush. He felt the disease in this new form that he had taken. It was an unpleasant sensation, but Ghost took heart that he would not wear this disguise for long - just long enough to meet this young Cadderly for himself.
He hopped back out to the road and wandered along, wondering how much of the day he would have to watch pass him by before young Cadderly returned down the road.
After the thief in the beggar's body had departed, Name-less's spirit stood beside the puny corpse, confused and helpless. If Cadderly, with his new insight, had gazed upon the spirit then, he would have seen the shadows of Jhanine, Toby, and Millinea scattering to the four winds, fading like the images of hope that Nameless had never dared to sustain.
The Maze adderly approached the steep-sided, round hil-lock and the tower of Belisarius tentatively, fully expecting that the wizard, as knowledge-able as he was, would offer him little insight in-to the strange things that had been happening to him. Actually, Cadderly had no idea if the wizard would grant him an audience. He had done some valuable penning for Belisarius on several occasions, but he couldn't really call the man a friend. Furthermore, Cadderly wasn't sure that Belisarius would be home.
The young scholar relaxed a bit when a wide line up the nearly seventy-degree incline transformed from unremarkable grass to a stone stairway with flat and even steps. The wizard was home and apparently had seen Cadderly coming.
Seventy-five steps brought Cadderly to the hillock's flat top and the cobblestone walkway that encircled the tower. Cadderly had to walk nearly halfway around the base, for Belisarius had placed his steps far to the side of the entrance this day. The steps never appeared on the same spot on the hillock, and Cadderly hadn't yet figured out if the wizard created new steps each time, had some way of rotating the grassy knoll under