“They look a lot the same to the rest of us,” she agreed, “but practitioners consider them quite different. A charm is the product of a spell, and not all practitioners can make them. I’m told the main difference is temporal, whatever that means. For me personally, charms and spells don’t feel the same. Charms are usually weaker, and their texture is, uh . . . more repetitive, maybe.” She shrugged. “Different, anyway. I thought you were going to say, ‘aw, shucks’ any minute there.”
He pulled a pack of gum from his jacket pocket. “I’m good.” He nodded, agreeing with himself. “You weren’t completely idiotic yourself. Picked up my pass right on time.”
“Better watch it with the compliments. I’ll get all fluttery.”
He unwrapped his gum slowly, looking as dour and dull as ever. “You going to have trouble working with me now that you’ve discovered my massive intellect, charm, and sex appeal?”
“My God. You’ve got a sense of humor.”
“All part of the package.” He put the gum in his mouth. “Have to fight you women off with a stick sometimes.”
SENATOR Bixton had a large staff. They talked to four of them before Lily had to leave to get checked out by the Leidolf Rhej.
She was thinking about appearances and first impressions as Cullen pulled into the garage behind the row house. Doug Mullins wasn’t the unthinking, self-important prick she’d thought. Oh, he was a bit of a prick, but he was not stupid, and he was self-aware enough to know that people underestimated him and use that. He was damn good in interview.
Was she making assumptions about Dennis Parrott the way she had Mullins, based on dislike?
“Tell me more about the difference between charms and spells,” she said to Cullen as she got out of the car. “It’s something to do with time, right?”
He shut his door. “A charm is a spell held in stasis.”
“Like a ward? Wards don’t do anything until they’re activated, either.”
“Not exactly. A ward doesn’t act until it’s triggered, but then the action is immediate and complete. With a charm, part of the spell remains suspended even when the charm is activated. If it didn’t, the charm would work only for a split second.” He glanced at her as they started for the house. “Spells act in the now. In the moment. Charms can act over a period of hours or days or weeks, depending on the skill and intent of their maker.”
“Weeks? The sleep charms you made last month lasted a couple hours.”
“I made those in a hurry, and they needed to knock someone out immediately. I’ve got sleep charms that would keep someone asleep for a week, but they’d doze off gradually, which was not what we needed at the time.”
True. “What’s the upper limit on how long a charm can work?”
“Theoretically there isn’t one. Practically, it depends on what kind of charm you’re making, how it’s powered, and how good you are. But for reasons we don’t understand, charms don’t last beyond a single moon cycle. You’d have to be an adept to make one that lasted longer, and then what you’d have would be called an artifact.”
Startled, she paused just short of the deck Rule had added at the back of the house before Lily met him. “So an artifact is like a charm on steroids?”
“Pretty much, yeah. Or so I think. Since no one knows how to make an artifact anymore, I can’t prove it.”
“You’ll get a peek at the dagger used on Bixton this afternoon. Will you be able to tell right away if it’s an artifact or a . . . I guess a charm, though that doesn’t sound right when its purpose was death.”
“A charm that kills or wounds is often called a curse, but that’s poor nomenclature. Curses can also be spoken spells. I prefer to call a cursed object a maluuni. That’s from Swahili, though the original derivation is Arabic, and it means—”
“Back to my question,” she said firmly, stepping onto the deck.
“One glance will tell me that much. If I don’t see the spell and can’t call it up into my vision, then it’s an artifact.”
“Wait a minute. What does that mean? If you don’t see it—”
“I’ve got a spell that brings up the details of other spells so I can see them.”
“Your magnifying spell, yeah.”
“It doesn’t work on artifacts. At least not the ones I’ve seen. I’ve seen five objects we’d call magical artifacts. With four