by Mage Quest
"I should have realized this from the beginning," he said with surprisingly good humor. "Now I know why I've been having to fight against spiritual dissatisfaction this entire journey. I'd assumed it was only the temptings of the devil, and of course in part it was, but I now realize it also came from my own misdirected attentions."
It was no use asking him to explain what he meant. I wouldn't understand even if he did.
"I had thought that to come on pilgrimage to the Holy Land would be the culminating experience of my life, the opportunity for my soul to rise above mundane concerns at last and reach toward God. In part it certainly has been, but I was constantly irritated in finding myself still on and of the earth, worried by earthly things.
"Now you've made it evident, with your clear insight, that I'd been missing the point all along. 'The kingdom of God cometh not with observation, neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! For behold, the kingdom of God is within you.' It is not my body that needed to go where Jesus lived nearly two millennia ago, but my spirit that needed to rise to meet the living Christ." He gave me a quick glance. "God can use even a wizard for His purposes."
"Glad to be of service," I mumbled.
Ascelin and Dominic found the Wadi Harhammi on an old, yellowed map they came across in the bottom of the map drawer of a dark bookstore in the oldest part of the city. None of the newer maps, even the most detailed, included it.
It seemed from the rather confused symbols the mapmaker had used to be up in the stony hills a few days' journey south of the emirate of Bahdroc. But the map showed no road leading to the Wadi.
"Do you still want to go there?" asked Ascelin. We all sat on the floor, crowded into the king's room in the pilgrims' hospice. "That mage certainly knew about the Wadi. I'm afraid we don't have much hope of being the first there—even if no one else had reached there already in the last fifty years."
"We may have to face the mage wherever we go," said Dominic. "I'm beginning to wonder if he's been toying with us, to let us travel all the way unmolested from Xantium to the Holy City."
"And don't forget King Warin," said Hugo. "He stole Arnulf's onyx ring from us on purpose to buy the flying horse, which by now has certainly taken him to the Wadi if that's where he was going."
"That is," I put in, "unless Arnulf's agents somehow managed to get the horse away from Kaz-alrhun first—after all, when I last saw them they seemed to think the horse was now legally Arnulf's."
"We should go south in any event," said the king, "because that is the direction Sir Hugo's party took. As the mage mentioned the Wadi Harhammi to us, he may also have mentioned it to them. We can ask after them in the oases along the way, and if we reach the emir's city without word perhaps we can enlist his aid."
Maffi sat in the corner, following the discussion with bright eyes but saying nothing. I wondered uneasily if he was acting as Kaz-alrhun's agent. If so, I couldn't see how even a mage could get information from him while he stayed as close to us as Ascelin made sure he did.
Dominic looked at his hands, where the ruby of his ring shone in the candle light. "I shall travel to the Wadi, whether the rest of you wish to accompany me past the emir's city or not. My father died with it in his thoughts. We were too foolish for fifty years to realize there was a message hidden in this ring, but even if I'm far too late I must get there at last."
Dominic glanced toward the king for confirmation as he finished, but the rest of us were already slowly nodding. This had been King Haimeric's pilgrimage, but we had now completed that aspect of the journey. Somewhere between Dominic's father's grave and the Holy City, his quest and the search for Sir Hugo had become fused.
"I agree with you, Dominic," said King Haimeric. "We should carry out my brother's last wishes and at least try to find whatever he and his wizard thought was hidden in there. Tomorrow morning we can send a message to the queen, by those pilgrims who said they were heading straight back to the City, so that she'll know we've been delayed."
"Whether we find anything in the Wadi or not," said Hugo, "the emir's city will be the best place to look for my father's tracks."
"It should also be the best place to find the blue rose," commented the king, brightening.
Ascelin rose to his feet and stretched, his hands brushing the ceiling. "Then tomorrow we'd better buy provisions," he said, "including more waterskins. It's going to be a dry journey."
II
The Holy City was at the southern end of David's Kingdom. Beyond the city, once we left behind the irrigated vineyards and olive trees, a land I had thought was already dry became even drier. The sky stretched for a thousand miles above us, cloudless and pale. The last remains of western civilization were left behind.
Ascelin had bought us all, including Maffi, densely-woven white robes to replace our badly worn pilgrimage cloaks. I examined mine critically and decided it was made of goat's hair. I had been afraid the long robes would make us even hotter, but instead they reflected away the sunlight. The deep folds of the head dresses shaded our eyes, and as long as we moved no more than necessary and stopped to rest in whatever shade we could find in the middle of the day, the dryness was more of a problem than the heat.
I had expected the desert to be completely barren, but even here plants grew, scrubby gray-green bushes spaced far apart, though the soil between them was bare and stony. The low, steady wind kept up a continuous murmur in the bushes. It sounded like someone speaking, just too softly to hear, a commentary in the background that we could not understand and never quite ignore. In the early morning and late afternoon lizards scampered across the open spots, but in the middle of the day the only living creature we saw, other than ourselves, was the occasional snake or high, soaring bird.
Fortunately the road we followed led from oasis to oasis, spaced a day's journey apart, so that we could drink deeply of the alkaline water and refill the containers for ourselves and our horses. Sometimes the water merely seeped into a shallow depression scraped out between the palm trees, but usually there was a round basin, surprisingly deep, in which the water looked black though it ran clear when we ladled it out. Ascelin warned us to be sure to shake out our boots every morning in case scorpions had crawled in during the night.
At the oases we exchanged a few words with other travelers, but there were not a lot of them, for the major trade routes between Xantium and the emir's city toward which we were heading did not detour through the Holy City. A line of jagged mountains, like teeth two thousand feet high, lay to our right, separating us from the main north-south roads.
For the most part the other travelers kept to their tents and we kept to ours. But always when Dominic was rubbing down Whirlwind at least one man wandered over, as though casually, to look the stallion over and remark on his size and strength. Whirlwind snorted both at them and at their own horses.
As the long, dry days succeeded each other, I kept looking for Kaz-alrhun, with or without the ebony horse, to swoop down on us from the sky, but he did not appear. I found myself hoping that if he did attack us he would do so soon, before we spent any more days crawling through this enormous and rocky landscape.
In the cool of the long desert evenings I tried without success to find the secret of the spell of the onyx ring. Maffi sat next to me, silent while I concentrated, his bony knees drawn up.
All I could be sure of was what I had discovered immediately, that it was a school spell, which meant technical and complicated. If it had indeed been cast by Elerius, the best wizard the school had ever produced, I was afraid that meant it was too powerful for my resources. Maybe I would have done better my whole career if I'd tried learning eastern magic.
I teased at the edges of the spell and suddenly thought I had caught a loose, revealing thread of its magic construction, but when I tried to follow it up I only discovered a large black spot before my eyes, as though I were somehow looking into the center of the onyx.
I put the ring back on my finger without learning any more of
its secrets and took out Melecherius on Eastern Magic. I still hoped that somewhere in its pages was something that I could use against an Ifrit, if we met one guarding the secret of the Wadi Harhammi.
Melecherius was no more helpful this evening than he had been the evening before. Ifriti, the book told me with what I was increasingly sure was not first-hand knowledge, were essentially immortal, as full of unchanneled magic as dragons, and as dangerous. "Have you ever seen an Ifrit?" I asked Maffi.
"No," he said thoughtfully, "but I know how to deal with them!"
"You do?" I asked in surprise.
"Of course. The tales tell all about it. Ifriti are cunning, but they're also stupid—a bad combination. If you accidentally let one out of a bottle where it's been imprisoned by some great spell in the past, you can always get it to go back in by taunting it. Tell it you can't believe it ever fit in a space so small, and when it crawls back in to show you quickly slap in the binding stopper!"
This didn't sound as though it would work unless Ifriti were even stupider than he suggested.
"Do you think I could learn to be a mage?" Maffi asked.
I looked over at his smile and bright eyes. "You probably could. I'm sure you're intelligent enough. But I don't know where you'd go to learn magic here in the East. I assume you'll have to apprentice yourself to someone—do you think you'll ever dare face Kaz-alrhun again?"
He laughed at that. "How about teaching me some of your school magic?"
"Well," I said slowly, "magic is really the same force throughout the world. What makes western magic distinctive is its organization and some of its technical discoveries—like telephones."
"I've heard about telephones," said Maffi, who never admitted not to have heard of something. "But when we in the East need to communicate long distances, we find a deep, dark pool, say certain secret words, and then we see the face we've been looking for!"
"Well, I don't know any communications spells that involve deep pools, but I could try teaching you something else. How about an illusion?"
There were surprisingly few people in Yurt interested in magic, beyond asking me to produce whatever effect they needed at the moment. Even the king's brief interest in learning to fly was years in the past. I taught Maffi the elementary spell that would allow him to put an illusory spot of color on his arm or leg. He couldn't get the words to work for the full range of colors, and the illusion faded of course after a few moments. But for most of the rest of our trip to the emir's city he had a pink or purple spot on him somewhere.
"This land has been civilized for ten thousand years," Joachim said to me. "There were cities and temples and emperors and trade here while the men and women of what are now the western kingdoms were all still dressed in skins and grubbing around in the woods after roots."
"Then it must not have always been as dry as it is now," I replied.
"The heat of summer may not be the best time to judge," he said, "but I do think the climate must be drier now." Among the broken stones that littered the side of the road were some that had clearly once been carved, as well as shards of pottery, the same tawny color as the stone but painted with dark concentric circles. Once I pulled up my mare to dismount and scoop up a silver coin from among the shards, its inscription so worn as to be illegible.
In the center of the day, when we sought out the narrow shadows of boulders and the heat beat on us like something solid, we sometimes saw mirages in the distance. A city, white-spired, lay just a few more miles down the road, flickering in welcome, though it always disappeared before we reached the place where it seemed to lie. It seemed as though the voice of that unreal city must be the voice in the wind talking to us.
"But it is a real city," said Maffi. He had been experimenting with the spell I had taught him, and today had pink spots with purple centers on both hands. "Some people say that an Ifrit captured an entire city centuries ago, in the days of Solomon, and moves it around from place to place. But others say that cities are reflected from the desert sky as though from a mirror and appear and disappear before travelers. I think it's all right to see a city. It's when you start seeing lakes that you know you will soon die of thirst."
I wasn't sure whether to worry more about thirst, Ifriti, or bandits. The other travelers on the road, all of whom moved more swiftly than we did on their lithe, sure-footed horses, often gave us long looks from within the shadows of their headdresses, but none so far attempted to attack us, either by day or at night at the oases, under the dry and ominously rattling fronds of the palms. None of them seemed to be Kaz-alrhun or King Warin.
One morning Ascelin, whose watch it was, woke me shortly before dawn. "Could you watch for me, Wizard?" he asked quietly. "I'll be back very soon."
I crawled out under a sky brightening from gray to pink; he was gone before I could ask where. I relit our fire and started the water boiling for tea. As the sun's orange rim slid up over the horizon, he reappeared, looking pleased.
"It was a desert fox," he said, getting out the tin cups. "I saw her just at the edge of the oasis. I think she'd slipped down for a drink and had hoped to get away without being spotted. But I managed to track her—and it's hard tracking, too, on this rocky soil! I'd show you, but I don't want to frighten her. She's got a den with three kits a half mile from here."
The others were now stirring and coming to join us. "A desert fox has wonderful ears, very long," Ascelin added. "She must need them to listen for mice—or for men trying to follow her!"
During the second week of our journey south I began to worry about the king. He dismissed my concerns with a smile, but during the day I kept a surreptitious eye on him. He really was an old man, though he worked to make us forget that, and he was certainly the most frail of us in this searing and unforgiving land. He was very quiet, not talking even when Ascelin called a halt to rest and to water our horses, sometimes forgetting to take a drink himself unless Dominic reminded him.
Hugo, on the other hand, became as active in the heat as a lizard. He began strolling over to the black tents of the other travelers during our evenings in the oases and striking up conversations about his father. A small group of aristocratic western pilgrims and a red-headed mage should have been fairly conspicuous, but no one would acknowledge ever having seen them.
"We may have to appeal to the emir," Hugo said at last. "I can't tell if no one's really seen them, or if these people just distrust us. What they need is a command from an important political leader. I wonder if there's the slightest chance the emir would even be willing to see a band of westerners."
We came down out of the stony desert hills among which we had spent three weeks and saw before us a white-walled city, the city of the mirages. It was surrounded by irrigated fields colored a fresh green we had almost forgotten existed, and orchards where both fruit and flowers grew together. Palm trees rustled in the wind along the fringes of the fields. To our right we could see a broad road coiling away to the north-west, the main route to Xantium.
"This is the fabled emirate of Bahdroc," said Ascelin, unrolling the map to show us. "We're well out of the Holy Land here, into a place where few westerners ever go. The last of the caliphs had his capital here a millennium ago, and the current emir continues his rule, though on a much narrower scale."
I shaded my eyes to look at the city. In the center rose a sharp outcropping crowned with more white towers. On the far side of the city stretched a glassy lake or arm of the ocean, disappearing into the distance, the color of weathered jade.
"This city faces east, not west," Ascelin continued, "onto the land-locked Dark Sea, but if one crosses over the Sea one comes to the edges of the true outer ocean, and to the harbors where spices and tea come in from the far East."
"It's not a real trading center like Xantium," said Maffi somewhat smugly. "It's not much more than a way-station. Here pilgrims every year start the last stage of their journey to the most holy sites of the Prophet, and here the spices of the East are transferred fro
m ships to land transport."
"Do they also import silk?" I asked.
Ascelin shook his head. "Silk come overland from the northern part of the East, and spices by water from the far southern parts. I don't know of anyone who's actually been there, but the true East must be larger than all the western kingdoms put together."
"I know someone who'd been to the East," put in Maffi. "He said that the men there can grow no beards, even if they try their entire lives."
"That seems unlikely," Hugo began, as though feeling the boy was interfering with his monopoly on specious travelers' tales.
But he did not get a chance to finish. The king startled us all by speaking for the first time that day. "Rose bushes!"
He had his face turned up, testing the wind. We all sniffed as well and caught it, a scent completely unlike the sharp smell of desert sage that had accompanied us the last three weeks: it was the smell of roses.
King Haimeric kicked his mare forward, and the rest of us scrambled to catch up. We followed the steep stony track down to where it abruptly became a broad, smoothly-paved road, between fields where swarthy men worked. The king galloped another quarter mile, then pulled up abruptly by a low fence. Beyond was a tangle of rose bushes.
Ascelin grabbed the mare's reins as the king leaped off. Haimeric vaulted the fence in a show of energy I had not seen in him in years and plunged between the bushes. "They may have the blue ones here!" he called back over his shoulder. "I see maroon, and lavender, even a red darker than anything I've ever been able to grow, and—" He broke off as a man rose slowly from the middle of the bushes.
The man had Kaz-alrhun's bulk but was not as dark. It was not Kaz-alrhun himself, I told my wildly beating heart. He scowled down at the king, whose headdress had fallen back in his excitement. "Are you a westerner?"
"And a fellow rose-grower," said the king with enthusiasm. "I've never seen colors like some of yours. We've heard, in the west, that someone here has been able to breed a blue rose. Might it be you?"
