Below the Wizards' Tower (The Royal Wizard of Yurt Book 8)

by C. Dale Brittain

  I turned back to the harbor as he hurried away. No time to wonder about the cathedral close or the chancellor. Right now I was looking for a rooming house out near the ship-breakers. At least I knew where to start looking.

  When ships were old and leaky and needed more repairs than they were worth, they were sold to the ship-breakers, who dismantled them, throwing away all the rotted wood and cracked planks but saving any timbers that were still sound and melting down the metal fittings. Some timbers, the longest or strongest, were resold to the boat builders, but many ended up in houses in town. The ship-breakers were a long way from the harbor, past the most disreputable parts of the City.

  As a boy, I had been forbidden to come out here, and I did have to approve of parental concern about my safety. I stayed on the beach, walking on the hard-packed damp sand past swirls of wrack, ignoring the distant sounds of drunken arguments and the crumbling buildings that lined the shore here. There were distinct advantages to being a wizard, I thought; if danger threatened, I could fly away or paralyze an attacker or just blast him with illusory flames.

  The ship-breakers didn’t have much in today, just a few small fishing vessels, covered with barnacles. I left the beach and went in search of a rooming house. I tried probing mentally for Marcus, but since I didn’t know him, he could have been any of the many male minds I touched.

  There did indeed seem to be a rooming house nearby, a two story unpainted structure with a cockeyed roof. It appeared to be built entirely of salvaged planking, cracked and salt-stained. A sour-faced woman stood on the front porch, watching me approach.

  “You’re looking for Marcus too?” she asked, wrinkling her nose to suggest that it was me, not her rooming house, that smelled bad. “Well, he’s not here.”

  Looking for Marcus too? “I’m a friend,” I lied, pulling out a coin. She was the first woman who knew Marcus who hadn’t mistaken me for him. “I’ve got something for him.”

  “Not sure why he suddenly has all these well-dressed friends,” she commented.

  Who else was looking for him?

  “Are you sure he’s not just upstairs sleeping?” I asked, tossing her the coin, which she caught deftly in a dirty fist. I was having serious doubts about the girl at the tavern’s theory of how Marcus had paid for his room.

  She shrugged. “Look for yourself if you don’t believe me. Second on the left.”

  If I hesitated I wouldn’t go into that foul interior at all. My grandmother in my head was telling me to head home at once.

  I did my best to smile and brushed past the woman and up some alarmingly creaky stairs. Second on the left. The door was open, showing a rumpled bed, but nothing else in the room. No clothes, no table, no chest, nothing.

  I stepped inside, looking around cautiously for any indication that Marcus really had been here. Just for a second, I caught the fluttering touch of the presence of another mind.

  Someone else here? The room was empty! But sunlight was coming in the small window, and something was casting a shadow….

  Too late I reached for all the magical defenses I had contemplated so smugly down on the beach. A paralysis spell wrapped around me. For a moment I staggered, trying to fight it, but whoever was casting the spell was a lot better wizard than I was. I toppled slowly, unable to move arms or legs, unable even to call out.

  But just before I hit the filthy floor, a lifting spell stopped me. I hung in the air while the person casting the shadow swung open the window, then I was lifted up and through, feet first. I just barely fit. The window opened at the back of the house, and no one seemed to notice or remark as what must look like a dead white-haired man shot out, then settled to the street.

  My vocal chords were paralyzed along with everything else. Desperately I tried to reach the mind of whoever had captured me, to argue, to threaten, to plead, but he clearly had his thoughts well protected.

  For several moments I lay in the street. A gull landed next to me, decided I wasn’t dead enough to be interesting, and flew away again.

  No one was around, and the only sounds were those of the waves and the distant hammers of the ship-breakers. Was I going to lie here until the street-sweepers decided one day to get out this far, found me, and buried me in the potter’s field?

  Magic’s four dimensions shifted around me, and when I glanced at myself I saw that I was no longer an old dead man but a worn wooden plank. Illusion.

  At the same time the wizard who had captured me emerged into visibility next to me. He was a fairly young man, no one I recognized.

  I had been convinced beyond question that it had to be Elerius. But this man, beardless, dressed as a workman with a cap, was clearly not he. He picked me up effortlessly, as though I really were a half-rotten plank, and walked jauntily down toward the beach.

  Who was he? If Elerius, had he somehow transformed himself into someone else? Or found a way with illusion to make himself look totally different? Not just my body was paralyzed—my brain did not seem to be functioning very well either.

  I was carried even further down the beach, the towers of the City receding. Here cliffs came down close to the water’s edge. Worn into them were sea-caves, where even at low tide there were always pools of mud and water. I glanced at myself and saw that I was again human, not a plank. With no one to witness, there was no reason to renew the illusion that had covered me.

  The tide was coming in, I thought worriedly as the man carrying me sloshed unhesitatingly toward a cave. And I had no good idea how high it rose here.

  Inside several rocks lay tumbled, as though they had broken from the cave ceiling and walls. At least they were dry on top. The man propped me up on top of one and turned to go.

  Different. He looked different. He was essentially the same, but something had altered. As he splashed back out of the cave, without a backward glance, I realized. When he had picked me up in the street behind the rooming house, his jacket had been dark blue. Now it was dark red.

  The clothes then were illusion, I thought, trying frantically to make at least something make sense. And if the clothes, then probably the face. It could be Elerius after all.

  “Elerius!” I shouted mentally. “Come back! What are you doing? Do you want me to drown?”

  If he heard he made no response. The sound of his splashing footsteps quickly receded. It was very quiet and dim now in the cave, back from the sunlit entrance. The only sound was the lapping of the waves, slowly, inexorably, coming in.

  Those waves had carved out the sea-caves in the first place. In the winter, I tried to reassure myself. At a time of particularly high tides and storm. Not on a summer day. I was not reassured.

  Would a paralysis spell wear off after a while? Maybe. I tried to think, worried that this particular one seemed to be growing stronger. Paralysis was not a branch of magic I had studied very much myself.

  I could breathe and move my eyes and not much else. The waves were entering the cave now, rippling in across the muddy floor and then shyly retreating, before coming in even further the next time.

  Who could the wizard be who had left me here to drown? Probably not Elerius after all, I concluded reluctantly. I had only thought of him because I always distrusted him. He was bound by the same enormously powerful oaths as the rest of the school’s graduates, to help and not harm humanity, and he had no motive for killing me. Just last night he had been friendly—even if patronizing.

  Would anyone from the school come looking for me? It must be well past the time I was supposed to meet the Master. He would be annoyed, make some comment about how I was just as irresponsible as I’d been as a student, and go back to whatever else he was doing.

  And even if someone tried to find me, where would they look for me? Certainly not out here. I gave a great mental shout in case there was a wizard within range but got no answer. The water below my rock was now half a foot deep.

  Time passed. The water grew deeper. But the rock on which I lay was dry, I told myself, suggesting the la
st high tide had not come all the way up. If I had known about these sea-caves as a boy, I thought irrelevantly, I would have come and played pirates in them.

  I listened in case I heard the sound of oars, of pirates bringing their ill-gotten gold to hide in the mud at the back of the cave. But they would not be coming in broad daylight. They would wait until darkness, then come to find the prisoner their renegade wizard had captured for them, the one they intended to hold for ransom….

  I hoped no one imagined the kingdom of Yurt had great wealth to spend on ransoming its Royal Wizard. But then I thought—of course! Whoever had captured me had not intended to capture Daimbert of Yurt. He had intended to capture Marcus.

  For several minutes I pondered all the enemies Marcus must have, from affronted lovers to people to whom he owed money, but at last I had to give up the idea. Whoever had put the paralysis spell on me might be only half-trained, might be anyone from a wizardry student concocting a prank, to a magician who had flunked out of the school, to someone whose magic was learned in a long-ago apprenticeship up in the mountains, to some dark mage whose enmity I had earned on our trip to the East, but he would certainly have recognized me as a wizard.

  Did it look as though the water had stopped growing deeper? From where I was lying it was hard to tell, and I didn’t dare hope. I tried another mental shout, on the off-chance someone, anyone, with magical training might be nearby and might have pity.

  Still there was no answer. Staring at the water did not make it recede. I tried closing my eyes, counting slowly to a hundred, and looking again. I could see no change, but then it did not seem to be rising anymore.

  More time passed. Outside the cave the light was becoming the gold of late afternoon, and the tide was certainly going out. Every now and then I tried another mental shout.

  And finally someone answered, faint, distant, just on the edge of mental communication. “Daimbert! Where are you?”

  Relief poured through me, as strong as the tide. “In the caves! I’ve been put under a paralysis spell!”

  I had time to suspect it might be Elerius come to gloat and then to reject the idea while the person came closer. At last I was able to sense someone right outside the cave. It was Titus, the master for instruction in magical creatures.

  He called to me in his normal voice. Touching another person’s mind is always very hard and profoundly strange, not something even the best wizard would want to do unless he had to. “I’m going to try to free you from the spell from out here.”

  Didn’t want to get his feet muddy? I thought in irritation, then realized, of course, it’s Titus, he hates caves, even shallow caves like this one.

  His shadow fell across the cave mouth. It looked like he was suspended in the air over the water, using a flying spell at the same time as he worked to break the spell on me. He really was a good wizard, I thought, between jealousy and irritation. If I had tried two difficult spells at the same time like that, I would have ended up wet, with the paralysis spell pulled tighter than ever.

  IV

  The paralysis spell trembled for a moment, then collapsed. So did I. All my muscles stiff from hours of rigidity, I slid off the rock, right into cold salt water.

  So I ended up wet even without trying to work magic at all. “Daimbert?” came a worried call at the splash.

  “I’m all right!” I rose, dripping, and waded through knee-deep water out of the cave. At last I found enough magic then to lift myself into the air, where I tried to wring some of the water out of my clothes and beard.

  Titus hovered a foot above the waves, looking concerned. “You’re sure you’re all right? You don’t look it. What happened to you?”

  “Thank you for finding me,” I said, trying to sound properly grateful in spite of feeling dull and extremely weary. “Some magic-worker captured me, and I have no idea why.”

  “Let’s get you back to dry land,” said Titus and flew off, away from the cliffs and back toward where the beach had emerged from the tide. I followed slowly after. “That was a school spell I just broke,” he called back over his shoulder. “There must be a renegade magician here in the City. I just hope it wasn’t one of the students—and I think I know which one I especially hope it wasn’t.”

  I was almost too tired to care. But when Titus dropped to the ground and I landed, a bit unsteadily, next to him, I asked, “How did you know where to find me?”

  “The Master asked me late this morning if I’d seen you since last night—he said you’d missed your appointment with him. And then a priest came around to the school, which was certainly something we don’t see every day, a priest seeking out a wizard. This one knows you, and I believe I’ve met him once myself, Father Joachim. He wanted to know if you were free for lunch. So it quickly became clear that you’d gone down to the harbor this morning and not come back.”

  “But how did you know where I’d gone?”

  The twist to Titus’s lips was half a smirk. “Well, I wasn’t going to say this either to the Master or to that priest, but it occurred to me you might have decided to meet that pretty waitress after all. But when I went to the restaurant, she was there busy waiting table, and when I asked after ‘Marcus’ she said she didn’t know where he was, but she gave me some places where he sometimes stays—one of which was out by the ship-breakers. It occurred to me that you might have been curious enough about him to try to meet him. I didn’t find you at the ship-breakers, but I did sense the trace of some powerful magic spell being worked nearby. So I immediately thought of the sea-caves.”

  “Why?” I said with only distant curiosity. We were walking along the beach now, and my damp clothes and the salt drying on my skin made me itchy all over. My teeth were also starting to chatter. And now that I thought about it I was extremely hungry.

  “Well, I wondered if you’d found this Marcus and decided to go somewhere secret with him. I must say I liked that idea, mistaken though it was, better than the idea that there’s some renegade loose, attacking wizards. Come on, let me carry you, we’ve got to get you back to the school and warmed up.”

  “But why the sea-caves?” I asked again as he lifted me with magic for a flight back to the school. He really was a better wizard than I was—I wouldn’t have tried flying and carrying another person with magic at the same time for fear of dropping him.

  The west over the sea was growing pink with the setting sun. “Remember,” said Titus, who apparently could talk at the same time as flying and lifting someone, “I too grew up in the City. Back before I fell into the sinkhole, back before I developed my entirely sensible dislike for caves, we used to go out there and play pirates.”

  A meal of leftover roast beef and beans from the school cafeteria and a long night’s sleep left me feeling much better, but also more concerned when I woke up: who could be out there attacking wizards, and why had they targeted me? My best guess was that someone wanted to make very sure that I did not meet Marcus, which made me even more determined to find him.

  Titus came in while I was washing my beard for the second time, to get the last of the salt out. As a boy I had often come home all salty and sandy from a day at the beach and never worried about it.

  “We’ve organized a search for the renegade magician,” Titus told me. “Fortunately it really doesn’t seem to have been any of the students. I doubt they could have overcome an experienced wizard like you anyway.”

  I nodded, gratified at the inherent compliment, and continued combing my beard and checking for barnacles.

  “Also fortunately, Elerius is in town, and he’s leading the search. So far, he says, he hasn’t found any trace of the magician and thinks he must have fled.”

  Elerius. I almost dropped my comb. “Have you found Marcus?” I managed to ask.

  “Remember, the waitress said she hadn’t seen him for over a year,” Titus replied without concern. “I doubt this has anything to do with him.” I had not mentioned the tavern down by the warehouses. “Oh, that priest came by
again early this morning. We’d sent word over to the cathedral last night that we’d found you, and he wanted to be sure you were all right. But he wouldn’t actually enter the school.”

  “Priests have always felt uneasy about magic-working,” I said. “Even Joachim, who’s been my friend for years.”

  “And we wizards feel uneasy about organized religion,” said Titus easily. “None of us in the school have been in a church for years, and the doorkeeper clearly didn’t want to let a priest in. If you’re ready, the Master would like to see you.”

  Although I had graduated a dozen years ago, no longer a student wondering if I were going to fail, I still found the Master intimidating. He had an enormous white beard below sharp, frost-blue eyes that seemed to look right into my thoughts. My one contribution to modern technical magic, the far-seeing attachment for magical telephones, always seemed to shrink to insignificance when those eyes looked at me—especially since that spell’s invention had been essentially an accident. Perhaps he realized how incompetent I felt around him, for he always sought to be friendly.

  With him in his office was Zahlfast, the head of the Transformations faculty, who had been willing to overlook a number of my shortcomings in magic. I would always be grateful that he had allowed me to graduate in spite of all that embarrassment with the frogs in his practical exam. “Glad to see you safely back, Daimbert,” he said with a smile.

  The leaders of organized wizardry would help me, I thought. Quick, before they started asking about last year’s trip. “There’s someone here in the City,” I said, “someone named Marcus. He apparently looks a lot like me. And I think I was captured because someone wants to be very sure I don’t meet him.”

  “Titus mentioned this Marcus,” said the Master, “although he said he’s not in town now. Do you think he’s a wizard?”

  “Elerius assures us there are no unaccounted for magic-workers in the City,” put in Zahlfast. “The renegade must have fled—we’re just glad you were found! Drowning while paralyzed would be a terrible way to die.” I had to agree with him there.