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Nammoi brought a couple of pillows from Senqai's bedroom and set them on the dining table, with a couple of tunics for sheets. Senqai and I would have beds, food, and (in the form of a small saucer with a chip in the glazing) chamber pot all in easy reach while she was gone. I settled down to rest, but couldn't sleep much with the noise the giants were making and my worry about the shrunken (or less hugely grown) people they might be trampling underfoot. I finally fell asleep, though.

The noise of Nammoi's footsteps approaching the table woke me some time later.

"We finally found Saikun," she boomed. "He's all right. He was in the part of the house that wasn't much damaged, but he's so tiny I could barely see him."

"What are the bigger giants doing?" I asked. Senqai was still asleep on his pillow, larger for his current size than his luxurious bed was for him normally.

"They've gotten out of town," Nammoi said. "Did you realize Nysuna is the biggest one? She must be two hundred feet tall if she's an inch. She got the smaller giants organized to walk carefully out of town and into the fields without doing any more damage than they could avoid. Poor thing, it must be awful to be so big you can't find clothes or shelter. She was shivering so, and with everyone seeing her naked as she walked!"

I must confess I was disloyal enough to Nammoi to wish I had seen Nysuna in daylight. Even several streets away and by moonlight, she had been an impressive enough sight.

Nammoi scooped me up in her hand and brought me back to our bedroom. "Hmm," she said, surveying the damage she'd done when she grew. "Senqai's bed is also too small for me, but if I curl up, I'll fit. And he's not using it."

So we returned to Senqai's bedroom, where she set me down on the bed, unpinned her toga, laid down, and pulled the sheet up to cover most of her.

"Is this all right?" she asked. "I want you near me, but I worry now that I might roll over in the night and crush you."

"Let's put a pillow on the bedside table," I suggested. "Then if I fall asleep first, you can set me on the pillow, and if you fall asleep first, I'll climb onto it." I put my arms around her neck as far as they would go, which wasn't anywhere near all the way. She wrapped a hand protectively around me and we tried to sleep.


A few hours later, we got up and helped Senqai with the moonset spell, which involved lighting the candles (five of them this time) around another spell circle, moving the tiara into it, and so on. After that, we took another tour around the town, I riding in Nammoi's hand and Senqai in my lap. In daylight, the damage to the houses the larger giants had grown out of was far more obvious and horrifying. Some of those who had grown or shrunk only slightly, ranging from around five times taller than me to half again Nammoi's height, were searching the ruins for shrunken people, and had found several survivors, most of them injured, and several bodies. Many were still missing, perhaps shrunken too small to be seen by the eyes of those who were large enough to efficiently search.

It was the worst eruption in over a century, people were saying. None in recent decades had done so much property damage, or killed so many. Those wizards who could spare the time were working full time at healing and casting searching spells, but many, like Senqai, were working on long series of spells that could not be safely interrupted.

When we weren't helping Senqai with the spell, or sleeping in short snatches, we helped with search and rescue. My small ears, and Senqai's, could hear the tiny cries of the smallest people that were too soft and high-pitched for most of the searchers to hear. Nammoi would bring us to a demolished house where the broken pieces of roof had been removed, and set us down carefully in the bedroom area to call out and listen for responses, and to search on foot. We found several more survivors, some of them injured, and two dead bodies. After almost everyone living in the demolished or badly damaged houses had been accounted for, we started searching the houses where no one had answered the door -- where everyone had shrunk so far they couldn't reach a doorknob, or even safely descend from their bed.

Senqai's prediction came true in spades. Over the course of the next couple of days, at least five month-long or year-long spells went bad and released their pent-up magic, producing strange effects on the people in the vicinity. One of them went off quite near us, in a house two doors down, which set our emotions on a wild, careening course. We were flat and unemotional during the day, while at night we were hot-tempered or weepy or hilariously amused at the slightest incongruity. Fortunately, that dissipated on its own over the course of three or four days without needing wizardly help to reverse.

Senqai recommended that while it lasted, we do as little as possible at night, except for helping him with the moonrise and sunrise spells, and that we all go to bed in separate rooms immediately after working the sunset spell. "I fear for our lives if Nammoi should become angry or frustrated with us at night," he said, "and as for you two, if her lust for you is amplified by this effect, it could kill you just as easily." Sleeping in a separate room from Nammoi was hard; until then I had been too tired from my disrupted sleep schedule and the search and rescue work to think of lovemaking, but now the slightest thought of her made me impulsively want to climb down from the bed, trek through the hallways, somehow open the door of Senqai's bedroom and climb the sheets to the bed where Nammoi lay... but a moment later, the terror of what she might do to me in her unbridled passion, if I aroused her, had me curled up deep under the blanket, hiding from imaginary enemies that my amplified fear conjured up. Then the ridiculousness of one of those imagined terrors would strike me, and I would laugh hysterically until my sides hurt and I finally lapsed into exhausted sleep.

With great effort, we mostly managed to keep a handle on our emotions while working together on the moonrise and sunrise spells. But there was one terrifying incident on the fourth night after the eruption, the second night after the unfinished spells unraveled and caused additional chaos. We had descended to the basement lab for the moonrise spell and I had conveyed Senqai's orders to Nammoi -- which spell ingredients to get down from the shelf and where to set us down. She set us down carefully enough, then went toward the shelf to get the powdered copperhead teeth and other things we would need. She didn't crouch low enough and banged her head on one of the rafters. She swore profusely, words I'd never heard her use before, and whirled back toward the circle where I was walking widdershins with Senqai in my arms. "This is your fault, Senqai!" she boomed. "Qisum, put him down and back away. I'll put an end to him quick enough." She stomped toward us furiously and banged her head on another rafter, then curled up on the floor in pain, her hands rubbing the top of her head, and began weeping what seemed like gallons of tears from my perspective. "I'm sorry," she said in a much quieter rumble. "Can you forgive me?"

"Just get the ingredients, please, if you can," I called out, still briskly walking widdershins around the circle. If we didn't complete this part of the spell now, would the mana bound up in the tiara erupt right away, or would we have time to evacuate the area first? I was near being paralyzed with terror, but I forced myself to keep putting one foot in front of another. I wondered why Senqai hadn't said anything or asked me to translate Nammoi's rumbles, but I realized then that he, too, was terrified, and had curled up in a fetal position in my arms. He'd stopped his chanting! Had the spell already been fatally interrupted?

"Senqai, keep chanting," I urged him, shaking him a little. He uncurled a little, looked around, and resumed chanting. Nammoi, meanwhile, got up into a crouch and waddled across the room, still holding a hand over her head to shield herself from the rafters, then selected the ingredients we would need and brought them to us.

Apparently the spells had enough wiggle room that the brief interruptions weren't fatal. We managed to complete the sprinkling of powders into the candle flames without further incident, though I trembled in fear as Nammoi held me in her fingers, thinking of how she could crush me on a momentary impulse if she lost her temper again. Fortunately, all I had to do was hold Senqai steady in my arms as Nammoi lowered us into the open jars and then held us over each candle in turn.

When the spell was finished, Nammoi held me (and Senqai) up to her face and said again, "Can you please forgive me? I didn't -- I'm so sorry," and burst into tears again.

I reached out and stroked her cheek, drenching my arm in her tears, melted with love and compassion. "Of course, my sweet. Always."


We were lucky; one of the other houses within range of the emotion-amplifying effect was the site of a tragic murder-suicide, where a servant who had shrunk by a factor of five crushed his master, who had shrunk nearly a hundredfold, and then cut his wrists in remorse.

Once the injured were healed, at least enough that they were unlikely to die in the next few days, the wizards who weren't tied up with long-cast spells turned their attention to shrinking the giants who were huddled together for warmth in a pasture outside of town. Their thirst threatened to drain the lake dry in a matter of days, and keeping them fed would be impossible -- an entire herd of sheep had already been butchered and devoured, and the larger giants were still in danger of starvation. And the less said about the waste they produced, even in their starving condition, the better; when the wind blew toward the town, it smelled worse than the tannery district back in the capital.

The tiny non-wizards who had no larger family members or servants to care for them were gathered together in a single house, where a few servants who had not grown or shrunk very much -- only about double or half their original size -- took care of their needs. Most of the tinier wizards all moved into the home of Silinu, which had the best-stocked lab of any of the surviving houses, where they worked together on finding a way to reverse the shrinking and growth.

At last, the end of the month came. For the purposes of the month-long spell Senqai (and now we) had been casting, the month ended with moonrise on the first day of the following civil month, which would come just a few minutes after sunrise. The last moonrise spell would be more complex than usual, Senqai had warned us, the capstone of the whole spell sequence. In order to prepare for it, as soon as the previous evening's sunset and moonset spells had been cast, he set Nammoi to work clearing away the candles from the moonrise circle and scrubbing the paint so we could paint a new moonrise circle. He had Nammoi measure and paint the circle, much smaller than the previous one and only a little bigger than the tiara it had to contain, but still about fifteen feet wide from my perspective, while I painted the symbols around it at his direction. The previous day, we had spent some time with one of his books, as he showed me the symbols I would need to draw and watched me copy them onto a small slip of paper, now and then telling Nammoi to turn the page. (We had made a makeshift brush pen for me out of a truncated strand of Nammoi's hair.)

It took the better part of the night to repaint the new moonrise circle, surround it with twelve candles at carefully measured intervals, and set out all the ingredients we would need for the capstone spell. At sunrise, we hastily cast the last of the routine sunrise spells, and then immediately moved the tiara from the sunrise circle to the new moonrise circle and began casting the more elaborate spell.

This time I had to walk around the circle seven times widdershins, carrying Senqai in my arms as he chanted. Then Nammoi waddled around the circle, holding me holding Senqai, as he put a pinch of all twelve ingredients into the twelve candle flames. All the while, the tiara (which had taken on a persistent glow in the last few days) glowed brighter and brighter until it hurt to look directly at it.

As we visited the last few candles, there came a faint buzzing sound like a swarm of bees getting nearer and nearer, that finally drowned out Senqai's chants. It rose in pitch toward the end even as the light from the tiara got so bright I had to close my eyes. I don't know how Nammoi, who had to keep us moving from candle to candle, and Senqai, who had to put in the last pinch of bat guano in the last candle flame, managed to keep their eyes open to work.

Then there was sudden silence and darkness. I wondered if I'd gone blind and deaf, but then I remembered to open my eyes, and I saw the room illumined by the dim light of the lamps, which seemed far dimmer than usual because my eyes had adjusted to the bright light of the tiara, which was no longer even faintly glowing.

"It's done!" Senqai called out. "Tell Nammoi to blow out the candles, then take the tiara and put it on her head."

"I don't think it will fit her," I said, but I conveyed his orders. She nodded and started waddling around the circle, bending down and blowing out candles.

"It doesn't have to fit perfectly," Senqai said, "it just has to balance on top of her head for a few minutes while we do some tests. We're too small to wear it until I get us back to normal size, and I want to verify our success as soon as possible. It's just barely possible..."

"What?"

"Never mind. We'll see soon enough."

The tests he wanted Nammoi to do apparently involved putting the tiara on and then trying to cut herself with one of the knives from his workbench. She was reluctant, but he said she needn't injure herself severely, just make a slight cut to one of her fingertips. "And she probably won't be able to make the slightest cut, if the tiara works the way it's supposed to," he said. "It's a commission for the Governor of Simein, to protect her from assassination during her public appearances."

So Nammoi finally agreed to do the test, and found, as Senqai had predicted, that despite her best efforts she couldn't penetrate her skin while she had the tiara balanced on her head. But in her struggles, she somehow tipped the tiara off her head, and the knife suddenly sank in and gave her a more severe cut than she had intended. She hastily bandaged it while Senqai and I watched from the safety of the workbench.

Once Senqai had healed her finger, which was a much simpler spell that required no circle and only a minute or so of chanting, she carried us upstairs and left Senqai on his bed on the dining table, then took me to our bedroom. She curled up with me on her bosom and we soon fell into a deep, long sleep.


When I woke, late in the afternoon judging by the light from the window, I found Nammoi already awake and gazing at me affectionately.

"Good afternoon, sleepy," she teased. "I wanted to let you sleep as long as you could."

"Thank you."

"And there's things I'd like to do now that you're awake, and we're well-rested for the first time in days, but... I think I'd better go check on Senqai?"

"Yes," I said reluctantly, "we'd probably better do that."

She lifted me carefully and set me on the bedside table, where I put on my makeshift tunic, and watched her get dressed. Then she picked me up again and we went to the dining room, where Senqai was still sleeping soundly on his pillow. We went to the kitchen and ate quietly, then checked on Senqai again -- still sound asleep -- and returned to the bedroom.

It will be clear to the most unimaginative reader that we could not make love in our usual fashion. However, as I have told you and, I hope, shown you, Nammoi was clever; she soon found ways for us to satisfy one another without me coming to harm. After an hour or so, she said, "Perhaps we had better check on Senqai again."

"Yes, he's probably awake by now," I suggested. "He can't easily have slept through that."

A blush is a very different thing when it is the very ground beneath your feet that turns red. Nammoi said nothing, but picked me up and set me on the bedside table, then bathed quickly and dipped me into the ewer to wash off the sweat and other fluids before we got dressed and returned to the dining room.

We found Senqai eating. When Nammoi set me down on the table beside him, he said, "Now that the tiara is finished, I can begin working on reversing these shrinking and growing enchantments. Once I am finished eating, we will all go to Silinu's house."

It was late afternoon, not long before sunset, when we arrived at Silinu's house. Nammoi bent down and knocked at the door, then waited until another small giant -- a man merely eight feet high or so -- opened the door and bent down to peek out, then looked up.

"I have here my master Senqai," Nammoi boomed. "He wishes to consult with the other tiny wizards."

The man nodded, and said, "Come in." Nammoi bowed and sidled through the door, then started to stand up and realized in dismay that the ceilings weren't high enough for her. She knelt instead, filling most of the vestibule.

"I will take your master to the other tiny wizards," the man said, reaching out a cupped hand.

"Qisum," Nammoi said, "ask Senqai if he wants to go with this man by himself, or if he wants you to go with him, or what?"

I translated what the giants were saying for Senqai, and he said, "We will both go. I may need you to translate for me with the servants and some of the larger wizards. Tell her to return for us in a couple of hours."

So the man held his hand next to Nammoi's larger one, and I, still holding Senqai in my arms, stepped gingerly across and settled myself in the center of his palm. Nammoi contorted herself to get outside again, calling out a goodbye, and the man brought us deeper into the house, ducking under lintels and chandeliers.

He stopped on the threshold of a lab, much like Senqai's, but more richly appointed, with far more jars and bottles of spell ingredients, far more books, and a dozen or more spell circles painted on the floor -- most of them much smaller than those in Senqai's lab. One area of the floor was piled with pillows and fine linen washcloths, about the right size to be blankets for shrunken people, as well as several plates of food and saucers of drink. Small ladders made of twine or yarn led from the floor to the shelves and tables. And almost two dozen people ranging from twice my height to less than half of Senqai's were all around the room, sleeping on the pillows, eating, standing around in small groups on the floor or tables, standing on the pages of open books, casting spells, and talking.

"I will set you down here," the giant said, kneeling and placing his hand flat on the floor just across the threshold. "Servants of my size are not allowed to enter the lab. When you are ready to leave, ring the bell sitting on the floor there by the door."

I climbed down from his hand, looking at the bell about ten inches away. It was a little taller than me, and there were several small tools of different sizes and weights leaning against the wall nearby, presumably for different-sized people to more conveniently ring it.

"Bring me over to that group of people there," Senqai said, pointing to a group of wizards, most of them a little smaller than me, standing on the open pages of a large book and arguing vociferously. I did so.

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