Daughter of Magic

by C. Dale Brittain

  And I couldn’t do that and keep my binding spells going at the same time. I needed help.

  “Do we have enough chains to chain them up?” I asked King Paul. Brute force might supplement magic in the short term. He took some of the knights to look while I hurried up and down the rows between the creatures, renewing spells and blinking in the lamplight as exhaustion pricked the backs of my eyes. But I could not let up my concentration for even a second. Warriors with swords in their unliving hands could have slashed me in two before I even realized my spells were weakening.

  The king managed to persuade everyone but the knights to go back inside once they realized the immediate excitement was over. The chaplain, showing a calm authority I had not expected in him, took away the body of the watchman for last rites. By the time we had the warriors all chained together—and twice a knight of Yurt just missed being badly wounded while he tried to fasten links around a creature that had almost managed to wiggle free of my binding spell—dawn had streaked the eastern sky pink. Not too early, I thought, to make a phone call.

  There was only one person worth calling. I gave the glass telephone the magical coordinates of Elerius’s castle.

  It took several minutes before the wizards’ school’s best graduate appeared in the phone’s glass base. While I waited for him I tried to think how to frame my request for help so it wouldn’t sound as desperate as I felt. Elerius, though school-trained, had years ago also learned enough of the old magic from a renegade magician who had been hiding out high in the eastern mountains that he himself could give dead bones the semblance of life. I probably could have too, given enough time, but Elerius’s skills were so unusual that he had even been invited to give a series of lectures on the topic at the school.

  He came to the phone at last and looked at me quizzically, his eyebrows making triangular peaks over tawny hazel eyes. His look always made me feel disconcerted but his tone was friendly. “What is it, Daimbert? It is good to hear from you after, what has it been, several years at least, but I assume you must have a serious problem to call me at such a time!”

  “Well,” I said with assumed joviality, “sorry to awaken you at this hour and all, but we do have a little problem—” I gave it up; after all, I was desperate. “Please, Elerius,” I said, not caring how pathetically I begged. “You’ve got to come to Yurt. We’ve been invaded by scores of warriors who move without life. I’ve got them in binding spells for the moment, but I can’t dismantle them by myself. Please!”

  He did not hesitate. “Of course,” he said soberly, with an expression that was probably supposed to convey reassurance. It was going to take more than an expression to reassure me. “I shall leave within minutes and be there in two hours—maybe less.”

  “Wizard!” I heard a shout from outside. I slammed down the receiver and darted back out, nerving myself to face the entire horde come back to life and motion.

  But none of the creatures were moving. Instead, as the dawn light touched them …

  At first I did not dare believe it, but it was real. For a few seconds the sunlight showed them clearly, human in no more than shape, faces unfeatured except for their eyes, and then they began to disintegrate. As though melting in the sun, their hands shriveled away from their hilts, their eyes lost their glow and fell back into their sockets, and their struggles against my spells ceased abruptly. Their armor and swords rusted away as I watched until they were no more than fragments, like something dug up from an ancient burial mound. Their limbs collapsed, with a rattle of chain, into piles of scrap.

  I closed and opened my eyes, saying a prayer of thanks to whatever saint might listen to wizards. Where a few minutes ago the grass had been spread with warriors who had very nearly killed us all in our sleep, it was now scattered with acrid heaps of bone and hair.

  The knights of Yurt sent up a triumphant whoop. King and knights were haggard with exhaustion, and I was trembling all over, hardly able to stand in the weakness of relief. I still wore what had once been my best yellow pajamas, now ripped and filthy rags. High up in the courtyard wall I could see a light burning in the window of the chapel where they had laid out the body of the watchman. “That,” I said to myself, “was too easy.”

  Elerius had already left for Yurt by the time I telephoned his castle again. Well, maybe he could help me determine where these warriors had come from, I thought, putting one set of bones aside for later magical analysis. The knights threw the rest onto a bonfire they built in front of the castle. The smoke rolled into the dawn sky, dense and black.

  I went back across the bridge and into the castle. The people King Paul had sent to bed a few hours earlier had all reappeared, complaining about the horrible stench of the smoke. They should be glad, I thought, they had nothing worse to complain about, and decided to talk to the Lady Justinia before Elerius arrived.

  No time yet for exhaustion. First I stopped by my chambers to wash, change clothes, and check on Antonia. She was sound asleep, lying on her back with her mouth slightly open and her doll held tight to her chest. I touched her cheek lightly with a finger on my way back out the door. This was the reason I would have died quite cheerfully if my death had kept the warriors out of the castle.

  Justinia’s shiny automaton stood guard before her chambers, a sword at the end of each of its six arms. It stared at me from flat eyes, expressionless but implacable. I was not going to get by unless she wanted me to.

  I called, “You can open the door, my lady! The warriors are gone!” There was a long pause, during which I tried magically probing the spells that gave the automaton the semblance of life. It whirled its swords menacingly but did not move away from the door. As I expected, the spells were intensely strange and intensely complicated; it would have taken me weeks to duplicate them, even with a passive automaton before me. At least it did not dissolve in the sun’s rays. But then I would not have expected anything made by Kaz-alrhun to have that kind of flaw.

  The door swung open at last, and dark eyes glinted at me. I must have looked unthreatening, for Justinia said a quick word to her “servant” and motioned me inside.

  Her chambers had been transformed since the day before. She must be planning to stay a while, I thought, for she had unpacked, spreading the flagstone floor with mats and pillows and hanging the walls with silk curtains. The flying carpet lay placidly in front of the hearth. Oil lamps burned in the room’s corners.

  Justinia pushed the door quickly shut behind me. “Was it as I feared?” she asked, not succeeding at all this morning in sounding nonchalant about mortal danger. “Have my grandfather’s enemies found me already?”

  “I’m afraid so.” I told her about the undead warriors out of nightmare, shaped to advance and to kill but without enough knowledge or will to stop at the edge of a moat or to try to run from a wizard’s binding spells.

  But part way through the telling, I noticed she began to look first surprised, then disturbed. “But this cannot be!” she broke in. “There is no one in Xantium who would make such soldiers! These magical arts are forbidden!”

  I was sure there was a distinction to be drawn somewhere between making warriors of hair and bone and making metallic automatons, but I did not want to get into arcane comparative legal systems. “Are you saying, my lady,” I said in astonishment, “that these warriors, such as have never been seen in Yurt before, invaded the castle as soon as you arrived but have nothing to do with you?”

  “Most certainly,” she said, tossing her head imperiously. “Perhaps my uncle the mage chose poorly when he sent me to such a perilous kingdom.”

  Either she was lying to me, I thought, about the likelihood that her enemies had sent them, perhaps because she was so terrified that she did not dare admit the true extent of the danger even to herself, or else she, with her own unaided magic, had caused this attack.

  But there was nothing of magic about her, other than the automaton and its spells, and it seemed unusually counterproductive for someone to use mindless
warriors to attack a castle where one was staying oneself.

  “I shall try to see that you are not bothered further by such disturbances during your visit, my lady,” I said stiffly and rose to go. The automaton watched me all the way out.

  The courtyard was packed. I turned, highly surprised, to see expressions of delight on every side. Smiling at me were all the knights and ladies, the castle staff led by Gwennie and her mother, and Antonia, still in her nightgown and trailing her doll.

  “Here he is!” cried King Paul. “The hero of Yurt!”

  A shout rose from everyone there. But I saw now the forced edge to the smiles, the grim realization behind whatever triumph this was supposed to be, that the watchman’s death was the first time since long before anyone could remember that someone in the royal castle had been violently killed.

  Paul, still streaked with black from the bonfire and leaning on his sword, had put on the heavy gold crown of Yurt. “He destroyed the invading demons! The wizard has saved us all!” There was another great shout, then an expectant pause as though I was supposed to make a speech.

  I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say. Paul had something large and shiny in one hand—some sort of medal or award, I thought wildly, which I most certainly did not deserve. “Well, thank you, thank you all,” I managed to say, which produced another shout. “But they weren’t demons. And I didn’t really destroy them. That is—”

  Whatever I might have added next was drowned out in more hurrahs. “Step forward, Wizard,” said Paul in the formal tone that explained why he was wearing his crown, “and receive the accolades of a kingdom.” I could see now that he held a golden medal at the end of a loop of blue ribbon.

  It was at this point that Elerius arrived.

  “It’s all right!” I cried as the knights reached for their swords. A castle that has just been invaded by creatures considered demonic does not react calmly to someone shooting down from the sky and landing in the courtyard. “This wizard has come to help me!”

  “Came a little late, didn’t he?” shouted one knight with a relieved laugh, and, “Didn’t notice you needing much help, Wizard!” shouted another.

  “He’s just in time,” said Paul with a determined grin, “to see his fellow wizard honored.” He wiped soot from his forehead with an arm and became formal again. “The Golden Yurt award is given but rarely, at most once a generation. Although I have been your king only six years, I need not hesitate or wonder if someone more deserving may aid the kingdom in years to come. Our Royal Wizard has protected Yurt since before I was born, and now that he has destroyed a host of demons it is clear that this award is long overdue. Step forward, Wizard, and receive the praise of a grateful kingdom!”

  It was much too late to explain that I had had nothing to do with the warriors’ dissolution in sunlight, or that if anyone was honored it ought to be the dead watchman. To his credit, Elerius restricted himself to only the faintest ironic smile as I stepped resignedly before Paul and let him slide the ribbon around my neck.

  The medal itself was engraved with an image of the royal castle and had the heavy feel of solid gold. I turned it over and saw the names of all those to whom it had been awarded in the past. My name was at the bottom; the goldsmith must have worked fast. The last name before mine was the king’s cousin Dominic, with a small cross to indicate the Golden Yurt had been awarded to him posthumously.

  To the repeated hurrahs of everyone, knights, ladies, and staff, I scooped up Antonia, nodded to Elerius to follow me, and retreated rapidly to my chambers, just escaping having to give a speech.

  V

  Antonia, telling me loftily that she could dress herself, retreated into my bedroom. Elerius asked me nothing about her; he might guess she was my daughter but I did not intend to confirm his guess.

  He and I sat in the outer room while I told him about the warriors. He listened in silence, stroking his black beard and following me with intent eyes. At least, I thought, with my white beard and the Golden Yurt award now hanging by an attachment spell on the wall next to my diploma from the school, I looked more wise and venerable than he did.

  “When I called you I needed to know how to dismantle them,” I finished, “but now that they’ve dissolved in sunlight all by themselves I’ve realized they probably aren’t the worst threat to Yurt: that will be whatever comes next.”

  “Your success against them,” said Elerius, nodding slowly, “was supposed to give you a false sense of security, so you would be unprepared for whatever does come.” He smiled then. “And of course whoever sent these warriors must have hoped he might win with a single unexpected attack. I am glad you called me, Daimbert. This looks like the exact sort of case for which institutionalized magic was designed: renegade spells which must be opposed by wizards acting together.”

  Elerius and I had disagreed strongly in the past on the purposes and goals of organized wizardry, but I certainly agreed with him here. It struck me that he might be acting so helpful in part to put me into his debt. But the difficulty with mistrusting Elerius’s motives was that he really did believe he always acted for the best—even if I often thought he didn’t. Besides, I needed him.

  “Our best approach,” he said, “is to find out who wants to harm Yurt and why. Otherwise we could end up dealing with a long stream of different magical onslaughts.”

  I hadn’t needed Elerius to tell me that. And it crossed my mind that, even assuming he himself had had nothing to do with the warriors, he was certainly acting quickly to position himself to take advantage of their attack. But it was hard to resent a faint patronizing tone from someone whom I had begged so desperately for help. “Let’s start with these bones,” I said and lifted them onto the table with magic, not caring to handle them again.

  Outside in the courtyard were the sounds of a castle resuming its daily routine, when everyone believes disaster has just been averted and is wondering whether to be worried or grimly glad. I swung my casement windows shut.

  Most of the spells that had held the warriors together had disappeared, along with their human shape, in the morning light. But enough of a hint remained that Elerius and I could probe magically, stepping into magic’s four dimensions together and communicating mind to mind. Here was a fragment of a spell I thought I recognized from years ago, here a familiar spell given a very unusual twist—

  Elerius broke contact and raised peaked eyebrows. “It’s not school magic. It does not even seem like the magic previous generations of wizards used to teach their apprentices, although at first I thought it must be.”

  “I think,” I said slowly, with an irrational but deadly cold conviction that I knew exactly what it was, “it’s what they call the magic of blood and bone over in the Eastern Kingdoms.”

  The kingdoms east of the mountains had never had a wizards’ school, had never even had the peace that the western wizards had established in their kingdoms after the Black Wars. There the conflicts among wizards which still persisted even here, even between wizards who had gone to school together, had become part of the constant ongoing wars of the region.

  “This will be an important project for the wizards’ school in years to come, Daimbert,” said Elerius. “The school has functioned very well in the past to coordinate magic in the Western Kingdoms, but we will need next to turn our attention to the wizards east of the mountains.”

  But I was not interested in Elerius’s plans for when he eventually became Master of the school. “What this attack must mean,” I said, “is that the Thieves’ Guild of Xantium has overcome their aversion to the forbidden arts enough to hire a very powerful eastern wizard to pursue a princess.” I told Elerius briefly about Justinia’s arrival. “If these warriors were made by her enemies,” I added, “they must be very good and very fast to have found her within twenty-four hours of her arrival in Yurt. I’ll have to get her out of here before the next attack.”

  But Elerius was shaking his head. “I cannot believe that Xantium’s greatest
mage would have been so sloppy as to let the princess’s enemies know where she was going even before she left. For they would have had to know she was heading for Yurt to be able to start making unliving warriors even before she arrived.”

  I nodded without speaking, wanting desperately to persuade myself that this had nothing to do with the East. From years of experience I knew that I often leaped to unwarranted conclusions, but I also knew that I had a tendency to try to disbelieve things I did not dare face.

  “If the Lady Justinia is not the target here,” Elerius continued, “then her best safety will lie in staying quietly where she is. And if the warriors were indeed made by the magic of blood and bone, I would not be so quick to assume any mage in Xantium would embrace it.”

  “I was in Xantium once,” I said in exasperation, “but I don’t understand their morality and laws at all. I would have considered thieves outlaws myself, but there they are an organized guild, with whom the governor negotiates. Who knows? Maybe they really would be fastidious about any magic different from their native magery. But if those warriors had nothing to do with Justinia, where can they have come from?”

  Antonia came out of the bedroom at this point, wearing her blue dress, her shoes neatly laced and tied but her hair thoroughly tangled. “Who’s going to braid my hair, Wizard?” she asked me accusingly.

  Elerius smiled and held out a hand. “I’ll do it. There’s a little princess in my kingdom who’s about your age. Would you like your hair styled like a princess’s?”

  Antonia stayed put, looking at him in silent suspicion. Undaunted, Elerius said a few quick words in the Hidden Language. “Here, catch.”

  An illusory golden ball arched through the air. Startled, Antonia reached up to catch it. But just before reaching her, the ball changed into a golden bird and flew, flapping wildly, up toward the ceiling where it disappeared with a pop. A single golden feather drifted down and dissolved back into air.