He’d heard nothing from the moment he’d opened the window to let some rain-cleaned air into the stuffy room. One of the things that had helped him become the Master Inquisitor, the Witch’s Hammer, was his ability to scent magic. It was how he detected witches—the real witches—and it was how he recognized men who had the Inquisitor’s Gift. He trained those men, honing them into weapons. The ignorant might call the Inquisitor’s Gift a kind of magic, but he wouldn’t permit such blasphemy to be spoken out loud. He didn’t like his Inquisitors wondering about magic, except as a thing to be destroyed.

“Master?”

“The rain stinks of magic,” Adolfo said heavily, half turning to watch the raindrops roll down the outside of the window. “Do you know what this rain will do, Ubel?”

“I—I’m not sure, Master Adolfo.”

Ubel wasn’t sure of much lately. His fault? Perhaps he should have been gentler when his Assistant Inquisitor had returned from the west, even though he had failed to destroy Baron Padrick’s family and had lost the other five Inquisitors who had gone with him. Yes, perhaps Ubel had heard too much of the reprimand in his voice.

“What does rain do, Ubel?” Adolfo asked gently.

Ubel watched him warily for a moment, then licked his dry lips. “It falls from the sky to the ground.”

Adolfo nodded encouragingly. “And then?” He sighed before Ubel could answer, not out of impatience but out of the dread that had begun filling him as soon as he realized what this storm could do. “It soaks into the ground, Ubel. It soaks deep into the soil, into the fields and forests. It fills the brooks and streams and rivers.”

“Yes, Master. I suppose it does.”

“This storm…this rain stinks of magic.”

Adolfo waited patiently, watching as understanding paled Ubel’s fair skin and filled the blue eyes with horror.

“Yes,” Adolfo said heavily.

“But—But the magic in Wolfram’s Old Places is dead. We destroyed it when we destroyed the witches.”

He shook his head. “As long as there is any left, magic never fully dies. You can bleed it out of a place so that the place feels dead, but it’s like creatures that bury themselves deep in the mud when a brook dries up. You think they’re gone, destroyed. Then the rain comes and renews the brook—and they come back with it to live and breed again.”

“No,” Ubel whispered.