"The one thing," Delva always told me, the mouse usually pointing a perfectly manicured claw at me as she did so, "you must remember is water. Without water, there can be no magic."

I would roll my eyes and touch a webbed forefoot to my chest. "I'm a frog," I'd tell her as if it weren't obvious to any observer. "I think I know a thing or two about water."

And yet? Here I am, flat on my back, bound in barbed wire, surrounded by dust, the sun merciless overhead, and Pelathorus Creasote, that foul old horned toad, laughing and laughing. "The great frog wizard!" he sneers. "Chirping 'bout all the bad guys he wants to haul in!"

"It's not too late," I say, not gritting my teeth against the pain because, well, frogs don't have much in the way of teeth. "Surrender now, and I'll go easy on you."

Creosote's laughter takes on a sharper edge—almost as sharp as the barbs jabbing into me, I'd say in fact. "How 'bout instead," he answers, his black eyes glinting, "I just kill you right here and right now, and we go on our separate ways after that?" He raises his canteen and shakes it at me, the splashing inside causing various reactions from me. Fear's one, for instance, and itchiness, and more than a touch of thirstiness.

He already put several bullets through my canteen, I should say, after he'd gotten what I believe the locals call "the drop" on me. That process engendered a fair amount of laughing from him as well, as you might imagine, and left things in their current sorry state.

"So let's see." He taps the base of the canteen with a stubby claw. "I oughtta have enough in here to conjure up a couple force knives, then I can slice strips from your hide while you lay there and watch." With a nod, he starts unscrewing the canteen's lid or whatever the proper term is. "Yeah, reckon that's what I'll do."

The lid pops slightly as it comes away from the neck, and Creosote tips his head back to take a snootful. And that's when I activate my secret spell.

Water, after all, can be a fleeting commodity. And while I certainly never thought I'd be in this particular predicament, I devised this spell for exactly such occasions.

The larger and more widespread a spell's intended effect, after all, the larger the amount of water one must have access to. That's why storms at sea are so dangerous, all that loose magic sloshing around. But a spell that summons a batch of bacteria? How much water could that possibly require?

Not a great deal, my experiments discovered some time ago. And when the targets aren't even bacteria at all but a similarly sized form of life known as archaea, beings so unknown that even the numenistic forces behind magic have scarcely heard of them, the amount of water required is almost too small to be measured.

But the particular strain of archaea that my spell targets has a number of interesting qualities other than general stinkiness and sliminess. They're some of the most ancient forms of life on the planet, you see, dating to a time when things like oxygen and nitrogen were in short supply. So when they process organic matter, they produce something just as gaseous but even more appropriately primitive.

Hydrogen it's called.

So by using a small amount of water from my own bloodstream—an [i]extremely[/i] dangerous practice, and one I'd not recommend to anyone—I'm able to summon enough of this obscure and non-bacterial substance to puff a fair whiff of pure hydrogen into the air around me. And loose hydrogen, it turns out, needs only the slightest of magical pokes to combine with atmospheric oxygen.

It forms a pleasant little watery spritz, in other words, and just as quickly as that, I have Creosote on [i]his[/i] back, the barbed wire doing the things to him that it was recently doing to me. The water from his canteen proves plenty to summon a bit of levitation, and I float him back to town to face what passes for justice.

Oh, and I transport the archaea back to whatever sulfurous stew I'd plucked them from. One must always take care of one's ingredients, after all.