by Mage Quest
"If you stole this ring from Kaz-alrhun," I tried again, "do you know when he acquired it?"
Maffi gave me a mischievous look. He was enjoying this. But for a change he gave me a straight answer. "He acquired it yesterday morning, about an hour before I met you at the church of the Holy Wisdom."
I wondered if this could possibly be true. "Yet when you took me to buy the ring, you didn't tell me that I'd be buying it from Kaz-alrhun . . ." But I didn't have time to pursue the issue of how thoroughly Maffi had deceived me. Apparently I was not alone. "Who did he acquire the ring from?"
"I don't know his name," said the boy, taking another pull of water and looking troubled for the first time. "I'd never seen him before. He was richly dressed in the western style, even though he wore a dark cloak that he probably thought would mislead thieves. He had iron gray hair and a look about him that somehow, well, suggested a mage. Not like you, my master!" he added brightly.
I didn't have time to wonder if this last comment was meant as an insult. "King Warin," I said.
"You can't mean that!" said King Haimeric unhappily. "That would mean he really did set those bandits on us."
But this was not news to any of the rest of us, even if Warin did feel more comfortable preserving some of his prestige among his fellow kings by hiring out his dirty work. "So Arnulf did send a ring with us to buy the magic horse," said Ascelin, "and King Warin, wanting the horse himself and knowing the price was the ring, stole it from us. This seems to be a ring destined to be stolen, if this boy stole it from Kaz-alrhun after Warin gave it to the mage."
"Then if the mage was still in Xantium when he lost the ring last night," I said, "it could not have been him, leaving Xantium on a flying horse, that I thought I saw yesterday afternoon in the sandstorm. It must have been Warin."
"But how would Warin have heard about the flying horse?" asked Dominic.
"That wouldn't be difficult," said Hugo. "If Arnulf's agents here heard about it, then King Warin's agents must have as well."
"Why would Warin have agents in Xantium?" protested the king, but no one was listening.
"Did Arnulf's agents tell Warin's agents to steal the ring from us?" suggested Dominic darkly.
"So Warin followed us east," said Ascelin, "and arrived just after we did. Does he have the flying horse now, boy?"
"Kaz-alrhun does not have it any more," said Maffi cryptically and gave another grin. "How about some food? When I realized Kaz-alrhun wasn't going to take the loss of his ring with his usual good humor, I had to come to your inn so quickly I didn't have time for dinner—or for breakfast!"
Dominic gave him bread and dried fruit. "Does King Warin have the ebony horse?" Ascelin demanded again.
"I already told you he did," said Maffi ingenuously.
I hoped briefly but improbably that Kaz-alrhun had not told Warin the secret of the different pins and that the king had been unable to work it out for himself. Instead I tried to concentrate on the question of how King Warin had learned there was a flying horse for sale, and that the price was a magic ring from Yurt—or, at least, a ring carved with the kingdom's name. The onyx ring was heavy in my hand.
"I think I understand," said Dominic suddenly. "Arnulf had somehow heard about my ruby snake ring, and because he knew he had no way of getting it, he had this ring made by a goldsmith and hoped to pass it off to the mage instead of mine."
"But the onyx ring can't have the same magic properties yours does," objected Hugo.
"Perhaps you all are right," the chaplain said slowly, "and my brother did send that ring with me, by way of his wife, because he was ashamed to tell me openly what he wanted. I shall forgive him the deception, but I now find myself less eager to stop and visit him again on the journey home."
"Wait," said Ascelin, flicking his eyes sideways toward Maffi, who was peacefully finishing off his dried fruit. "Are you sure we should be discussing this, when . . ."
But Dominic shrugged. "It doesn't matter what the boy hears or what he guesses, because he's going with us. He won't dare go back to Xantium after his latest theft, and we need to keep him under our eyes ourselves."
Ascelin immediately objected, but I did not listen. I was rather thinking about the chaplain's brother Arnulf.
Someone—the mage, King Warin, perhaps Arnulf himself—had started the search for a magic ring from Yurt by looking among the disordered bones in Dominic's father's tomb. But when it became clear that the real magic-imbued ring was not readily available, Arnulf had had the nearest wizard cast the spells for a substitute magic ring.
He and his family had never kept a wizard. Therefore, when Arnulf heard that an ebony flying horse was for sale, one that would allow him to fly to wherever the Black Pearl was concealed and get away again, and that the price was a magic ring, he had had to go in search of a wizard—perhaps the same wizard he had already hired a decade earlier to install his magical telephone system.
The wizard he found was the royal wizard of a kingdom not very far away, a kingdom located in the foothills of the eastern mountains. Arnulf had had the onyx ring made for him by Elerius.
I stared at the ring in my hand, not liking this at all. There was nothing unusual in a royal wizard performing such a task for someone without a wizard in his service, as long as it did not interfere with his own responsibilities. It had been a piece of luck for Arnulf that the nearest wizard just happened to be the one who was probably the finest graduate the school had ever produced. Arnulf must have offered him something quite extraordinary in return. I wondered uneasily what.
And Elerius would certainly have told his master, King Warin, what he had done. At the time, the king might not have found it significant. By the time he realized he wanted a magic ring himself, Elerius had moved on. So Warin had waited, knowing that sooner or later the onyx ring would make its way toward the east. He had, I remembered, written to King Haimeric about the blue rose and urged the king to stop and visit him on his trip. He had known there was something special about Yurt, and that it had something to do with the ring Arnulf had requested from his wizard. It must have seemed an answer to a prayer when we stopped by directly from Arnulf's house.
Or perhaps not a prayer, I said to myself, remembering Evrard's veiled warning that he had seen the king engaged in the black arts, but something much more ominous.
I mentally shook off this thought. Elerius had taken the same oaths to help mankind as did all wizards, and the best pupil the school had ever had was not going to dabble with demons or assist his master in crime. After all, I reminded myself, he had been off to a new post many kingdoms away by the time Warin set his bandits on us. I did not feel as reassured by this as I would have liked.
Ascelin stood up, breaking my train of thought. "Then if the boy's coming with us, we'd better start on our way again."
"First," said Dominic, "I want to show you something I found, just a little way down the road."
We followed him for a half mile, then he pulled up his stallion and pointed. Cut deeply into the stone by the side of the road was a sign, that could have been an X and could have been a cross.
"This then must be where my brother's caravan disappeared!" said Joachim.
"And look at this," said Dominic, pointing. Cut below the cross, rather shakily, was something much smaller, that might have been the letter Y. "Is this for Yurt?"
Ascelin stood with his hands on his hips, looking back toward Xantium. "Whatever it is, we'd better move on quickly. Kaz-alrhun will soon guess what happened to his ring if he doesn't already know. Hugo, take the boy up behind you on your horse."
"I'm sure if the mage pursues us," said the king, "our wizard will be able to protect us, but it would be better not to give him the trouble."
"Of course, of course, good thinking," I said, sliding the onyx ring onto my finger and glancing back toward the city. I very much doubted I could protect anyone from Kaz-alrhun.
PART SIX - HOLY CITY AND EMIR'S CITY
I
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nbsp; "The Church of the Sepulchre is the most holy spot in Christendom," read Joachim from his guidebook. "Every year on Good Friday all the lamps and candles here, and indeed in all the Christian churches of the Holy City, are extinguished. On Easter morning fire from heaven kindles the lamps. Then all the bells in the churches of the city are rung, and the holy flame is used to relight the lamps in all those churches."
I looked around, impressed in spite of myself. Normally I would have doubted a story of fire from heaven, as a tale for the credulous or else the work of an unacknowledged wizard. But in this small circular church, whose porter had waited to let our group in until the previous group of pilgrims had gone, it was impossible to doubt. Between the columns that ringed the church were mosaic depictions of the crucifixion and resurrection, and written all the way around at the top of the wall, in the old imperial language, was the message, "Grave, where is thy victory? Death, where is thy sting? For as in Adam all shall die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive."
The church with its mosaics, altars dedicated by the various eastern and western groups of Christians, and silken hangings, was not the rough cave I had expected. In the center there was no roof, only a wide, circular opening through which the chaplain told us the fire from heaven descended. The hot air from the opening made the flames of the silver lamps sway, their light dancing on the precious stones of the altars.
"This way," said Joachim quietly. He led us out not the way we had come but to a door on the opposite side which opened onto a dark, cramped stairway cut into the rock. Dominic and Ascelin kept their heads well down as we eased ourselves around the spiral. We emerged into the cave I had expected to find in the church above, the Sepulchre itself.
Candles burned at either end of a stone slab, two feet across and as long as a man. The slab, of course, was empty. It struck us, or at least me, even more powerfully than the decorations and the lamps of the church above. We did not speak but knelt by the slab until another porter came over and told Joachim in a low voice that the next group of pilgrims was waiting to enter.
We left by a narrow door at the far end, not quite looking at each other. But I at any rate, and I thought the rest, felt that we had truly reached the goal of our pilgrimage.
"The duchess and I should try to be here at Easter," said Ascelin a little louder than necessary as we came up a flight of steps into bright daylight.
"We haven't been to the Mount of Olives yet," said Joachim, his solemnity falling away in the sunshine. For the last week or more he had been as eager and enthusiastic as a boy, as all the towns we passed began to be places mentioned in the Bible.
On the long overland trip from Xantium to the Holy Land, in spite of watching constantly for mages, for Ifriti, and for bandits, we had seen very little except an increasingly dense number of pilgrimage churches, all of which the chaplain insisted on visiting. Once we had entered David's Kingdom, and especially the last few days here in the Holy City, we had done little besides visit churches.
"And we still need to see Solomon's Temple," said King Haimeric, "although I understand it is not actually the temple Solomon built himself but one rebuilt after the return of the Children of Abraham from the captivity in Babylon."
"Of course," said the chaplain. "It was to the Temple that the child Jesus was brought by his parents on the fortieth day after his birth."
"And while you've been looking at all these churches," said Maffi unexpectedly, "you still haven't gone to look at the Rock."
"The Rock?" asked the chaplain.
"Of course. The rock on which God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac."
Maffi stood next to Ascelin, the tall prince's hand resting on his shoulder. Even though in the month since he had joined us the boy had shown no sign of trying to escape, Ascelin, Dominic, and Hugo had tacitly agreed to take turns in keeping close to him. Ascelin seemed to be growing oddly fond of him.
"The Rock isn't in my guidebook," said Joachim, leafing through, "but it certainly sounds as though we should visit it. Maybe after we see the Mount of Olives."
I had already noticed this. For three days he had led us through the Holy City, a bustling, modern capital, much cleaner and better laid out than Xantium although also much smaller. The entire time it appeared that to him nothing built in the last fifteen hundred years, since the later days of the Empire when Christianity had become fully established, even existed. The city was sacred to three religions, but the chaplain had looked only glancingly at the sites holy to the Children of Abraham, taking us by the spired castle of the royal Son of David without a real look, and had not even slowed down when passing those sites holy to the People of the Prophet.
I wondered briefly if Maffi too considered this a pilgrimage, then remembered Arnulf's agents telling me that the true pilgrimage goal for those who followed the Prophet was somewhere deep in the desert, very far to the south. I was afraid I had not paid very close attention.
"I realize what struck me as strange about this place," said Hugo to me as we stood on the Mount of Olives, looking across the Valley of Josaphat at the tangle of city roofs on the steep slopes across from us. We had already seen the little church on the Mount which sheltered the stone from which Christ had ascended into heaven. "This city isn't built on the water."
He was right. The City back home and Xantium were both major ports, and even the small cities that dotted the western kingdoms tended to be built on rivers. "It's probably because it's never been a trading center," I suggested. "It's been a place for kings and priests, but never for merchants."
"It also seems," continued Hugo in a low voice, "too, well, wholesome a city for you to expect someone to disappear. If there really were rumors here last year about Noah's Ark—and no one seems to have heard anything about it—then that too should be exciting but not perilous. Yet the last message my mother had from my father was the one he sent from here back to the City by another pilgrim, that he would go south a little way and then start for home."
"Then we'll go south as well," I said, squinting into the distance. "The Wadi that Dominic's looking for should be off in that direction somewhere."
"I've tried drawing that boy out," added Hugo, "and he won't say anything definite, but I keep getting the impression he met my father's party when they came through Xantium last year."
"The mage Kaz-alrhun had also met Evrard," I said, glancing toward Maffi. He stood beside Dominic now, quietly listening as the chaplain pointed out all the churches one could see from here, churches built on the sites of important events in the life of Christ and the apostles or of the martyrdoms of early saints, most of which we had already visited. "I don't know about you, Hugo, but I keep feeling there are too many coincidences here. Everyone, except of course us, seems to know what's been happening and what it has to do with Dominic's ring and with your father."
"Are you ready for the Temple of Solomon?" called the chaplain to us happily.
But that evening when we went to the room we shared in the pilgrims' hospice, he seemed oddly subdued. The white-painted halls were full of other travelers with crosses sewn to their shoulders. The hospice itself was very austere, the rooms small and undecorated, the beds hard, and the dining room serving only flat bread stuffed with lentils and cucumbers.
I tried to read more of Melecherius on Eastern Magic, but in the dim light of a single candle it was difficult to follow. More and more I had the feeling Melecherius had profoundly misunderstood what the mages had tried to teach him. I closed the book and glanced over at the chaplain. He sat on the opposite bed, leafing through his guidebook with even less light than I had, but then he did not seem to be reading.
"So have we seen all the pilgrimage sites, Joachim?" I asked, kicking off my shoes and stretching out, hands behind my head. There were no chairs.
"I'm not sure," he said slowly. "I don't like to admit this, but there are two or three churches in here, which I myself marked that we visited yesterday, but which I now have trouble remembering."
"They do all tend to run together after a while," I agreed.
"But they shouldn't!" he said with a flash of his dark eyes. "I've longed to visit the Holy Land all my life, to walk with living feet on the streets where Christ trod. Now that I'm here at last I can't have the holy sites all 'run together'!"
I pushed myself up on one elbow and looked at him. "Read the descriptions again," I suggested. "I know you won't have forgotten the Holy Sepulchre, so just concentrate on the smaller churches. Think about each one individually. It must say in your guidebook which ones have monks, and that will help differentiate them. You should be able to pick out the one where the porter didn't want to admit Maffi, and the one where Dominic banged his head. If you can picture all of us standing inside and think about whatever we saw first—mosaics, altar, candelabra—you'll then be able to get the rest of the details."
Joachim closed the book and flopped down. "I'm not an overly-ambitious tourist," he replied gloomily, "getting different picturesque sites confused. I'm a priest who has visited the places where Christ lived and died to bring us salvation, and who yet who still finds himself thinking about supper at the end of the day, gets sore feet from walking and standing, and needs to consult a guidebook when the experience should be burned into my soul."
I thought about this in silence for a moment, knowing better than to offer any more of the memory tricks that had allowed me to squeak through the wizards' school without ever being properly studious. I had, just barely, managed to save the chaplain's life, but it was going to be difficult if he now expected me to save his soul as well.
"Maybe it's the overall experience that's important," I offered, "not the details of the individual pilgrimage churches."
He turned to look toward me, a long, intense stare that suddenly turned into a smile. "Thank you, Daimbert," he said, stretching out again. "You're absolutely right."
"Right about what?" I said, startled.
