I finished with mine and handed the third to Zahlfast. “How can they be drunk so early in the day? I didn’t think the taverns down in the City were even open yet.”

Zahlfast spoke the final words in the Hidden Language to break the spell. “Bottles in their rooms,” he said as the last dazed and frightened newt became a dazed and frightened wizardry student.

“We never had bottles in our rooms when I was a student here,” I said self-righteously.

Zahlfast looked at me sideways, a smile twitching the corner of his mouth. “As I recall, you had plenty of trouble at the transformations practical exam, even perfectly sober.”

I preferred not to recall all my embarrassment with those frogs, even twenty years afterwards, so I loftily ignored this comment. I had, after all, become a perfectly competent wizard in the meantime-or at least had managed to persuade the wizards’ school of my abilities enough that they had invited me back for a few months as an outside lecturer.

“Now,” said Zahlfast to the students. “Are you sober enough to listen to reason?”

“Spill a spell, spoil a spell,” blurted one and collapsed on his face. I was interested to see that they still excused themselves for magical mixups with the same catch-phrase we had used years ago.

At that moment one of the other young wizards came in. “Telephone call for you, sir,” he said to me. I excused myself and followed him out and down the hall.

I felt as I always did a stir of pride in using a telephone with a magical far-seeing attachment, allowing one to see as well as hear the person at the other end. Although I had invented the attachment essentially by accident, as my first and only success in technical wizardry, it had over the years become widely adopted.

The view-screen lit up, showing the face of the man waiting to talk to me: gaunt, with deep-set eyes over high cheekbones and a mouth that looked as though it rarely smiled. It was Joachim, dean of the cathedral of Caelrhon.