Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [47]
For all that Meer hated and feared mazrakir, the process by which a dweomerworker takes on animal form is really only an extension of the perfectly ordinary procedure of constructing a body of light, in which the magician makes a thought-form in human or elven shape as a vehicle for his or her consciousness out on the etheric plane. Although at first he has to imagine this form minutely every time he wishes to use it, eventually a fully realized body, identical to the last one, will appear whenever the dweomermaster summons it, out of no greater dweomer than “practice makes perfect.” This happens in exactly the same way as a normal memory image, such as the memory house a merchant uses to store information about his customers, becomes standardized after a long working with it. A shape-changer starts with the same process, substituting an animal form for the human, although, of course, the mazrak does take things a fair bit further.
That evening Jill followed her usual practice. First she took off all her clothes, because not even the mightiest dweomermaster can transform dead matter like cloth, and opened the wooden shutters at the window. She laid her hands far apart on the windowsill and stared up at the starry sky, letting her breathing slow and her mind clear as the cool night air swept over her. She felt power gather, invoked more, until it flowed through her mind like water. In her mind, as well, she formulated the image of a gray falcon, but many times life-size, and by a mental trick sent this picture out through her eyes until she saw it perching on the windowsill. Now, at this point the falcon image existed only in Jill’s imagination, though an imagination that had been highly trained and disciplined by years of mental work, and it was only in imagination that she transferred her consciousness over to the bird until she seemed to perch on the sill herself and look down at the ward below through the bird’s eyes.
Now came the first tricky step. Keeping her concentration firmly centered in the falcon, she transferred her consciousness up a level to the etheric plane. A rushy sound washed over her; she felt as if she were falling; then she heard a sharp click, like a sword striking the metal edge of a shield. When she looked round, she saw the chamber and the sky bathed in silvery blue light. Behind her on the floor her physical body lay slumped in trance, joined to the hawk form by the silver cord. At this point she could have used the falcon as an ordinary body of light to scry on the etheric or lower reaches of the astral. Instead she took that last step. The etheric double of a person is a matrix that forms and holds flesh. If the double and the trained will are strong enough, flesh will follow its lead. Jill began to chant and intone strange words of power that only a few masters know, until with one last convulsion of will, the etheric falcon drew the physical into its mold.
Jill the woman was gone from the chamber. Only the falcon stood on the windowsill, stretching its wings and ruffling its feathers in a last shudder against the cold.
With a soft cry she leapt and flew, flapping steadily till she cleared the dun, then gliding on the currents up, ever up, circling round the hills of Cengarn. Although the falcon form existed on the physical, Jill’s consciousness remained on the etheric plane, so that she saw the trees and fields glowing a dull brownish-red from their vegetable auras, spotted here and there with the yellow ovoid auras of cows or horses huddled together — The dun, the walls, the town itself—all