"Only he made a mistake. There's something about moving between planes that lowers the resistance to conditioning. Some of our people can take five or six trips, but Apalon was one of those who was so conditioning-prone that he had the habit fixed after the first trip. The next time she did the rigamarole, back he popped. He had to dig up gold for her, hypnotize a local baron into marrying her, and generally keep on the constant qui vive, until she got sloppy and forgot the pentagram she thought protected her and which he was conditioned to. But after he disintegrated her, he found she'd passed on the word to a couple of other witches. And he knew somebody at the Institute was bound to find what a fool he'd made of himself.
"So he began taking members aside and telling them about the tric
