by Mage Quest
"We weren't in the Wadi then," Evrard continued, clearly enjoying having a new audience after a year of only Sir Hugo and the same two knights. "We were still north of Bahdroc. Imagine our surprise when we came over a rise and found an Ifrit asleep in the sun, and a human woman with him who claimed to be his wife!"
I suddenly felt sure of where four of the Ifrit's wife's rings had come from, but I didn't say anything.
"Unfortunately, he woke up before we could get away," Evrard continued, then paused to prolong the suspense. "First he asked if we were from Yurt! I took a chance and said we were, and it's a good thing I did, because otherwise he might have crushed us at once in his enormous hands. But he still threatened us and said that even Solomon had feared his power so much that he'd had to imprison him. That's when I thought of taunting him, of showing him the bronze bottle and telling him I didn't believe he'd ever fit inside. He went back into it to show me, and I was able to slap the stopper in!"
"But the Ifrit is out now," said the king.
"I'm afraid my plan didn't work as well as I'd hoped," said Evrard ruefully. "When I first gave the emir the bottle, he treated us very hospitably and fed us bread and salt. I told him too that we were from Yurt. But his manner changed as soon as I asked directions to the Wadi Harhammi.
"We stayed in Bahdroc a week, but the atmosphere was tense the entire time, and we had gone only a few miles out of the city when the Ifrit captured us. We've decided that as soon as we left the emir must have freed the Ifrit again, in return for a promise to take us prisoner. For some reason the Ifrit still hasn't killed us." But with a wild Ifrit roaring after Sir Hugo's party, no wonder the slave girl had told us the desert had eaten them.
"Both the emir and the slave girls remembered you," I said.
Evrard smiled reminiscently. "One of the girls was really delightful—I wished we could have taken her along."
The emir's second wish in return for freeing the Ifrit, I thought, had been a request to transport the garden of the blue rose into hiding. Already constrained by a command to guard the Wadi against people from Yurt, it was no wonder the Ifrit had decided to bring the rose garden here. By promising to guard the valley, the Ifrit must have felt trapped here. It must have been extremely tiresome for a creature who could easily pass from the highest mountains to the uttermost depths of the sea in half an hour: little wonder he tried to make us amuse him.
"I've been expecting you for months," continued Evrard, ready to chat indefinitely. "Didn't you get my message that we were held prisoner by the Ifrit?"
"You mean the sign of the cross cut into the rock where the silk caravan disappeared?" I said as several things fell into place.
"The Ifrit's wife wanted a bolt of silk, and originally I was going to make the Ifrit leave a message for people from Yurt—but then it turned out he didn't trust my messages and couldn't read or write himself! So I hoped that a sign of the cross would do as well, as an indication that an Ifrit had Christian captives."
Dominic had stopped listening and was peering again through the latticework into the cave. "We'll catch up on our stories later," he said. "This, I believe, is where what I seek is hidden."
"What is in there, Evrard?" I asked quietly.
He looked troubled for the first time. "I have no idea. All I know is that as long as I'm here, within about fifty yards of this cave—making sure not to touch the lattice, of course—I can work spells that will intimidate an Ifrit. Not make him do anything, apparently, but scare him into thinking I will in another minute. I've been able to use the power that's in there to make the Ifrit feed us and to promise not to kill anyone else from Yurt, but we haven't dared leave the Wadi, and I've spent the last year not being able to learn anything more about it."
Could Evrard, with his combination of improvised spells and pure bluff, be the danger that the mage had warned me against? Kaz-alrhun had said nothing since Evrard had appeared, but all his attention, like Dominic's, seemed turned toward the cave.
"This is where we find out at last," I said. Dominic again reached out his hand so that the ruby, now flashing rapidly, was in contact with the marble gate over the cave entrance. With the strange clarity of vision whatever was in this cave had given me, I found the right spell to bring the magic in the ring to full potential. The words of the Hidden Language rumbled through the rift like the sound of rocks falling.
The latticework shivered, then slowly started to dissolve into vapor, losing its solidity even while it still held its shape. The sound of rocks falling continued even when I finished speaking, and as we watched the small opening beyond the gate grew larger. Dominic kept his hand extended until the cascade of stone had stopped, leaving an opening four feet high, and the white wisps of latticework vapor dissipated in the desert air.
We all shivered ourselves, then peered into the cave's dim interior, blinking in an attempt to see. "Can you make a light, Wizard?" the king asked quietly.
Dominic didn't wait for a light. He ducked his head to step within. But he stopped short almost immediately and backed out, rubbing his forehead. "There's another barrier," he said. "Is it glass?"
I probed quickly. "Not glass, but more magic."
The ground beneath us rose and fell, as sharply and smoothly as a wave under a dinghy. A faint rumbling came from deep within the earth. We paused to stare at each other, but a minute stretched out, two minutes, and the tremor did not come a second time.
Dominic reached out his hand to touch the invisible barrier again and went straight through it, almost losing his balance. His head reemerged. "What are you doing, Wizard?"
"I'm not doing anything. It's your ring." I could see the spell clearly now, spread out like a highly-figured tapestry. "The latticework was just the first line of defense. The air itself is solid there, but your ruby ring is imbued with the power to pass through, apparently taking you with it."
"Then I'd better go through," said Dominic.
I glanced toward Kaz-alrhun, to see if he had any better ideas, but he stood a little way back, his thick arms folded, watching with interest.
I put a quick spell of light onto the ruby ring. Dominic stretched out his hand, and from the mouth of the cave we could see the ring's firefly glow move away down a dark tunnel and disappear.
Evrard pushed against the air turned glass and tried a few spells of his own, but it remained impervious. I found I could not sense Dominic beyond the glass barrier. If the ground shifted while he was in there, we would have no warning he was about to be crushed. In the distance I thought I could hear a low murmur, which could have been the emir's men, could have been the Ifrit, and could have been molten rock moving toward the earth's surface.
But in a moment, we heard Dominic's footsteps clearly again, and then the light of the ring reappeared. His head bent, he emerged from the cave carrying something awkwardly before him, and carefully put it down on the sandy floor of the Wadi.
It was a locked cabinet about a yard in height. The outside was enameled in geometric patterns, and the elaborate lock was iron. The magical clarity and the strange happiness intensified to the point that for a moment it was difficult even to think.
"It should be possible to open this lock with magic," I said then. It would also have been possible to break the enameled cabinet, but I didn't like to do that.
When Kaz-alrhun showed no sign of helping, I knelt beside the cabinet and began to twist and turn delicately at the lock. The iron was free of rust in spite of long being underground. I felt I could see the mechanism through its casing, and in a moment the lock gave a great click and came off in my hand.
I stepped back to let Dominic kneel down and open the cabinet door. He reached inside and took out a ceramic amphora, big enough to hold a gallon of wine, and sealed with lead.
Dominic tried the stopper, but it was set in very firmly, and his hand trembled. The amphora dropped to the ground and exploded into shards of pottery.
Lying on the ground amid the shards was a golden box,
the size of Dominic's two fists.
"No," whispered King Haimeric. "It cannot be. It was within a golden box, within a sealed amphora, within a locked cabinet, but the cabinet was inside a derelict ship sunk in the deepest rift of the Outer Sea."
There was no immediately obvious way to open the box, but when Dominic picked it up in his hand, the hand with the ring, a thin line appeared all the way around it. I tried the opening spell that had gotten us through the latticework without effect. But as Dominic held it, the thin line widened. With his other hand, he took hold of the top and carefully opened it.
Beyond expectation, beyond hope, lying in the box on a bed of black velvet was a black sphere. It was so dark that it appeared to absorb light, so smooth that when Dominic touched it with his finger it began slowly to spin: King Solomon's Pearl.
It took us several minutes to be able to speak again. Instead we stood in silence, looking at it.
I don't know about the others, but to me it seemed to have a voice, a low calling just beyond the edge of full intelligibility, speaking of magic before Solomon, before humans had made any attempts to channel magical forces into comprehensible or repeatable channels. And yet it was still magic, magic that I with my school training and my somewhat patchy knowledge of herbs could understand. This went beyond either ambition or happiness, but I knew that with the Pearl I could become the greatest wizard the world had ever known.
I looked toward Kaz-alrhun and Evrard and saw solemn expressions that I thought must match my own. The mage's magical abilities, I felt suddenly certain, had returned to him.
In a few swift seconds a complete vision passed through my mind, of myself returning to the wizards' school with the Pearl, demonstrating magical abilities beyond anything even the best and oldest of the masters had ever imagined. With my powers, I would immediately bring the eastern kingdoms and their wizards under the control of the west; I would stop all wars between aristocrats and wrangling between wizards; I would make the Ifriti into my agents; I would reconform both weather and geology to make the earth more comfortable; I would rewrite all the textbooks at the school to make them match my own magical vision; I would enrich the soil so that the crops never failed; I would regulate all trade closely so that all dealings were fair to everyone and goods were always available where needed; I would bring even the dragons of the wild northern land of magic under the control of organized wizardry . . . Daimbert the Wise, they would call me, Daimbert the Just, Daimbert the God.
And the first thing that happened would be that I would have all the headaches and responsibilities of administration. The second would be that all the wizards and priests and aristocrats, as well as all the villagers and townsmen of the west, and probably even the dragons, would unite to overthrow me.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, then opened them again. And I had thought Warin's offer to be the Royal Wizard of a large and wealthy kingdom a temptation! Even with the Pearl, as I had always known and should always have remembered, no wizard can do more with magic than tug at the edges of the powers that had shaped the world. If this temptation to tug harder was what Kaz-alrhun had meant by unexpected and unimagined dangers, he had a point.
Dominic broke the silence at last. "This is what my father meant us to find," he said, then frowned, finding his remark somewhat inadequate. "It is indeed something wonderful and marvelous, something that makes those terms almost trite . . . This Pearl," he continued, quoting Arnulf, "gives power to the people who hold it, so that they will always prosper, that their setbacks will be only temporary, and they will in the end find their hearts' desire. But I still don't know how my father learned it was here."
"I do," said Kaz-alrhun unexpectedly. "I told him about it."
We all turned to stare at him. "If you know the history of the Black Pearl," said the mage, "then you know that it was last seen a thousand years ago when the last of the caliphs, may God reward him, gave up both its powers and its perils by having an Ifrit hide it."
"In the Outer Sea," said King Haimeric again.
"No, although he let that story be generally known. Instead he hid it here in the Wadi Harhammi, protected by Ifrit magic. As an additional precaution, although he kept this very secret, he put the opening spell that would allow one to reach the Pearl onto a ruby ring . . . Because the Ifriti have been controlled since the time of Solomon by the magic of his Black Pearl, not even all the Ifriti in the East together, and certainly no lesser power, could break through the combined magic of pearl and ruby to reveal its hiding place. A few true accounts were written and can still be found in the great library in Xantium, and doubtless also in the Holy City and in Bahdroc, and other accounts over the centuries hinted vaguely that there was something special in the Wadi.
"The caliph hoped to keep the Black Pearl hidden forever, even if he did hide it in a place from which he knew he could recover it again if he ever changed his mind. But he had ruled for over two hundred years, and his whole region had come to depend on him personally. When he died there was no one with the power and authority to take his place. In the civil war that followed, the ruby ring was lost, its importance forgotten. When I first learned in Xantium's library that the Pearl was here, I knew I had to find that ring."
From the corner of my eye, I thought I saw Ascelin's blond head looking over the edge of the rift, but I was too absorbed in Kaz-alrhun's story to do more than glance toward him.
The mage turned to Dominic. "Tracing the ruby's movements over the past millennium took me—a certain interval. But by God's decree I came upon it at last. Fifty years ago, I met your father. You look like him; I would have recognized you when you approached my stall in the Thieves' Market even without the ruby snake ring on your finger.
"This was in the time of the emir's warlike youth. As he now controls this whole part of the east, he must have learned the secret of the Wadi, but he was in no position to uncover the Pearl himself. I was traveling in what you in the west call the eastern kingdoms—the governor of Xantium and I had had a disagreement of sorts, and the climate of the city had become oppressive enough that it seemed better to leave town for a while. I thought that the combination of my magic and the force of a strong sword arm would carry us past both the emir's soldiers and the magery the emir would be able to command."
"And you gave him the ruby ring?" asked Dominic.
Kaz-alrhun's gold tooth flashed as he smiled. "That he had already found for himself, captured with a cache of other precious jewels whose origins were long forgotten. But he did not know its value until he met me. I told him the true story; I could not of course take the ring from him by force." I was surprised at this sudden fastidiousness in the mage, but he did not give me a chance to ask about it. "He agreed to accompany me to Bahdroc as soon as he had finished the campaign to which he was pledged. But what man wishes and God ordains often differ. The next thing I heard was that Prince Dominic was dead."
And the prince had died without daring to send open information to his family about the Black Pearl. Even his wizard, Vlad, had waited until recently to begin again his search for it, through his friend, King Warin's chancellor. This reminded me that we had not seen that king for a while . . .
"But why," asked Dominic, "did you wait for nearly fifty years to try again for the Pearl? And why did you take the onyx ring in return for your flying horse, when you knew it was not the right ring?" He still held the golden box open in his hands.
"When it became clear that I had lost that phase of the game," said the mage, "I returned to Xantium, to wait and see if Prince Dominic's mage—I never did trust him—or someone of the prince's family would make an attempt to find the Pearl. It seemed at first that time was on my side. But I am an old man now, even if I still am my city's greatest mage—fifty years was long enough to wait."
"But you still took the onyx ring from King Warin for your flying horse," Dominic persisted.
Kaz-alrhun smiled again. "When I saw the ruby on your hand in Xantium, and realized th
at you and it were heading this way, it was, shall we say, easier to let you continue than to try to take it from you, especially once I found your father's letter on your wizard and knew for a certainty that you were making for the Wadi. The flying horse was no longer needed to draw you out of Yurt. Since I sensed that the second player had made the onyx magical, I thought I would give him a little room, see how he would play his game if he thought he had fooled me."
That was the second time he had mentioned another "player" in what he persisted in calling a game. I had to ask him about it once I had some guesses of my own. "I hope," I now said, "that we are not going to start a quarrel over who should control the Pearl's powers."
The mage rolled his pitch-black eyes at me. "Do not fear, Daimbert, that I shall do ill by one who has done well by me."
"If Solomon's Pearl will make the holder always prosper," said Dominic quietly, "I think it has enough power for all of us to share. By finding out for certain what happened to my father, by fulfilling his last wish, I have already found my heart's desire."
"In fact," I said, "I think we'll have to share. Don't you think that's why the caliph finally decided it was so dangerous he had to renounce it? It's not like any magic they taught us at school, but I know it has one important similarity." I paused, then gave them the condensed form of the lesson I had learned in my seconds of imagining the reign of Daimbert the Wise. "If one tried to use it jealously or with evil purpose it would ultimately become one's destruction."
We had all been so intent on the Pearl, both with our normal senses and, for we three magic-workers, with our magic, that we did not hear a step or sense a presence we should have heard and sensed.
There was suddenly a knife at Dominic's neck and a hand on the golden box. "Thank you for getting this out of the cave for me," said King Warin. "This is mine."
