Mage Quest woy-3

by C. Dale Brittain

  I handed it to Dominic. “I think this is for you.”

  III

  He read it out loud. “By the time you read this I will be dead.” Dominic stopped, looked at the king, cleared his throat, and continued reading. “The servant by whom you will have received this ring will also have given you a more open letter of farewell. I hope the Royal Wizard will quickly discover this ring’s secret, but if not, the snake I asked to have carved on my tombstone will be a clue for you.”

  “I was right,” said Hugo. Dominic ignored him.

  “The wizard I have taken into my employ, who will hide this message magically in the ring for me, is one I trust thoroughly, totally, and explicitly.”

  “That means he didn’t trust him at all,” interrupted the king.

  “What?” said Dominic and I together.

  “Didn’t I ever teach you that code, Dominic?” asked King Haimeric. “Your father and I worked it out when we were boys. Because normally you say that you trust someone implicitly, trust them completely without having to say anything, to say that you trust them explicitly is to say just the opposite, that you express your trust only with your lips.”

  I tried to remember any occasions when the king might have said he trusted me explicitly. Fortunately I couldn’t think of any.

  “Is it possible,” asked Ascelin, “if Prince Dominic employed a wizard after all, that he might have been the ‘magnificent warrior’ of the border guards’ story?”

  King Haimeric shook his head. “I don’t think so. He was certainly a magnificent knight, but there was nothing about him that should inspire frightening stories.”

  Dominic read another sentence. “My wizard and I are both gravely wounded and ill from the same fever.” He stopped again and looked up. “I thought my father was killed in battle.”

  “Wounded in battle,” said the king soberly, “so badly he might not have recovered anyway, but his servant said it was the fever that finished him.”

  I glanced at Joachim out of the corner of my eye and said nothing.

  “But we have learned of something wonderful,” Dominic continued, “something marvelous, so special that I dare not mention it even in this secret letter.”

  “So we’re still not getting any answers,” said Ascelin, half under his breath.

  “It is hidden far to the south of the Holy Land, in the Wadi Harhammi. I can’t even tell you how we found out, but you will know it when you find it.”

  Dominic lifted his eyes. “That’s the entire message.” He handed me the parchment. “Does it make any sense?”

  “What’s a wadi?” asked the king.

  “It’s a dry watercourse,” answered Ascelin.

  “The Wadi Harhammi,” said Hugo, “south of the Holy Land. This message is fifty years old. Other people must have learned about it by now. I’m sure it’s what my father was looking for when he disappeared.”

  “We have to go there,” said Dominic. He spoke slowly, with dignity and determination. “Wherever this Wadi Harhammi may be, whether or not the marvelous object is still there, we must go in search of it. I cannot ask the rest of you to accompany me against your wills, but I myself have no choice. My father wished me to go.”

  We all looked toward King Haimeric. This was still his quest, no matter what messages from the dead we might receive. The king nodded thoughtfully. “After fifty years, whatever he’d found or heard of is unlikely still to be there. But you’re quite right: we have to look. Besides, the stories of the blue rose say it’s being cultivated south of the Holy Land.”

  Dominic handed me the parchment. “Since this is a magical message, Wizard, you should carry it.”

  Ascelin stood up. “Whatever your brother had heard of, Haimeric, someone thought it important enough to break into the tomb to try to find the secret. If they’re looking for the snake ring, and they know we have it, we could be in constant danger.”

  King Haimeric smiled. “I appreciate your concern, Ascelin, but this enemy of which you speak must already know the secret’s not in the tomb, and will think we don’t have it either or we wouldn’t have come here to look for it.”

  “Could I have my ring back?” Dominic asked me.

  I had almost forgotten I was holding it. Even if all of us still seemed more willing to follow the king in search of his brother than Dominic in search of his father, the burly prince certainly had a right to his own ring. I reattached the ruby and reapplied the binding spell to keep it in place, and handed him the ring, but the piece of parchment I slipped inside my jacket.

  We traveled southeast through the eastern kingdoms while summer advanced rapidly around us. The king had been right, back in the mountains, that we soon wouldn’t need our heavy clothes. Ascelin kept us to back roads and away from the cities. If we were being followed, neither his hunter’s instincts nor my magic could find anyone behind us. But we became lost ourselves on the narrow roads at least once a day, so someone else might have had even more trouble.

  Although the border guards of the first kingdom beneath the mountains had said their kingdom was not at war, the other countries apparently all were. We became lost most commonly when trying to dodge the lines of soldiers we saw approaching in the distance, or to get away from the main road when a long line of carts, carrying heavily-guarded supplies, appeared before us.

  “I wouldn’t have wanted to miss the eastern kingdoms for anything,” said Hugo in my ear, as he and I lay in the underbrush near the main road, watching horses pass by, waiting until the road was clear so we could get the others and follow it ourselves. Harnesses jingled, and dust rose from hundreds of shod feet. Spear points glinted in the sun, but the faces of the riders were hidden by their helmets. “It’s like the hiding games I used to play when I was little, but it’s deadly earnest,” he added cheerfully.

  Hugo might think it an exciting game, and Joachim might think there would be great merit in dying on this pilgrimage. But if we ended up as six fresh heads on poles, like the ones we had seen last night, I doubted we would appreciate it.

  I felt a new respect for the wizards of the eastern kingdoms, who I kept hoping to meet at some point, although about the only people we had met so far were frightened farmers from whom we bought food. Ending war in the western kingdoms, it appeared, had not made the western aristocracy any less interested in fighting, only more likely to go help the wars continue east of the mountains.

  “That’s the end of the troops,” I said, rising cautiously to my feet. “Let’s get the others.”

  We followed the main road a short distance, back in the direction from which the troops had come, and were just looking for a good place to leave the road again when Hugo, in the lead, reined in abruptly. “Look at this! They aren’t- They’re not real, are they?”

  “I’m afraid they are,” said Ascelin grimly.

  Before us rose a pyramid made entirely of human skulls. An inscription carved in stone at the base told us proudly that these were the enemies that the local king had had killed within a single year. Amazed, I tried to calculate how many skulls might be in the pyramid and gave up. It towered at least twenty feet above the road. The skulls, all clean of flesh and hair or any identifying mark, were very neatly arranged to stare at us.

  Hugo made no more comments about games; indeed, he said nothing more for the rest of the day. For that matter, the rest of us scarcely spoke either. We hurried on, but the shadow of that pyramid seemed still to fall between us and the sun.

  “I have to apologize, Haimeric,” said Ascelin as we sat around our fire that evening. We had taken lately to making very small fires. “I had no idea the eastern kingdoms would be this dangerous. Even though the main pilgrimage route is at least half again as long, we should have stayed with it. Although I’d never been east of the mountains myself, I know a number of men who have. They’ve spoken of battles, of course, but nothing this widespread. I don’t know if it’s the season of the year-I realize that they’ve mostly been here in the fall and wint
er-or if whatever ‘strange’ stories are coming out of the East are stirring up trouble here.”

  “The Bible tells us,” commented the chaplain, “that in spring kings ride to war.”

  “Sir Hugo and his party came this way in the spring a year ago,” said Ascelin, “and I’m sure they didn’t have anyone with them as good as I am in finding the way and hiding tracks. And yet, from everything we know, they had no problems until they left the Holy Land. If I didn’t know better, I’d think something we ourselves had done was responsible for all this.”

  In the next few days, however, we saw fewer troops, and slowly we began to hope that we had put the worst of the wars behind us. Ascelin still spoke darkly of how everything from the bandits to these wars seemed to be managed for our maximum peril, but he couldn’t decide if Arnulf was behind it, King Warin, or perhaps someone else we did not even know.

  One afternoon, tired from weeks of travel and from a long day’s ride under a sun which had grown more and more intense, we came around a corner and found our path barred by a wall of flame.

  Whirlwind reared up, but the rest of our horses, as tired as we, only stopped. I dismounted and approached cautiously. This was magic, but I wasn’t yet sure what kind.

  But just as I started probing with magic, the flames disappeared. The ground was not scorched, not even warm. Illusion, then, but those illusory flames had had a solidity my best dragons always lacked.

  A powerful eastern wizard would notice immediately that another wizard had tried to probe his spells. In this war-torn land, where safety was always transitory, I did not view meeting him with eager anticipation, but it was better to face him than to have him at our backs. I squared my shoulders. “There’s a wizard up ahead. He means for us to stop, so it’s no use trying to dodge around. I’m going to go talk to him.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Hugo.

  “Not you, Hugo,” said Ascelin at once. “It had better be me.”

  I shook my head at both. “Courage and swordsmanship won’t be any use against magic.” I hurried forward without giving Hugo a chance to say he wasn’t concerned about his personal safety-or myself a chance to start contemplating whatever dangers lay ahead.

  A few yards past where the wall of flames had burned, a paved track turned off from the road. The stones were cracked and uneven, heavily worn in the center as though from a millennium of feet. I had somehow not noticed the track before. I paused for a minute, wondering what else might appear that had, a moment ago, been invisible. But then I turned to follow the track, for dancing twenty yards ahead of me along it were pale, inhuman shapes that still somehow suggested something human.

  The ground began almost immediately to rise, and the sky darkened overhead. I seemed to have stepped out of the visible world I had been in and into a world lying just beyond.

  I stopped and looked back. My five companions were only thirty yards behind me, and I could see them clearly as they all dismounted and sat down in the shade of a tree, but they were separated from me as if by a wall of glass. The sun still shone brightly on them, though storm clouds now hovered a short distance above my head. I wondered if they could even see the clouds from where they were-or, for that matter, if I really was on a hillside, for a minute earlier I would have sworn the land beyond the wall of flames continued level and smooth.

  The air, hot all day, now became sultry as well from the lowering clouds as the track twisted and crept between jagged boulders. I gave up walking and lifted myself six inches above the ground to fly on up the hill. Before me, although I had oddly not seen it until this minute, was the massive bulk of a castle. The sky beyond it darkened rapidly toward night. There were no windows or even slits looking out from the lower levels of the castle, but near the top were two large windows, lit from within by reddish light, that could have been eyes.

  Beyond the castle I could hear wolves howling, and I was briefly reminded of the wolf skin King Warin wore across his shoulder. A bolt of lightning, then another, struck the top of the castle before me, with a sharp crack and a lingering acrid smell but no following thunder. The sky was virtually black, and I could no longer see the bottom of the hill behind me. I stopped and probed for the supernatural. It was one thing to go to meet a wizard, another to walk into a demon’s lair.

  But I found no evidence of black magic. I tried to reassure myself that school magic, even my own occasionally less than perfect grasp of it, should be at least as strong as the magic the wizards of the eastern kingdom learned under their apprenticeship system, but this thought did nothing to dispel the cold prickles moving up and down my back.

  I crossed a bridge, glancing over the side to see a deep ditch disappear beyond sight, and reached the entrance to the castle. The broad, nail-studded doors were thirty feet high. They could have been a mouth to go with the glowing eyes of the windows, and the portcullis suspended above them the teeth. The castle was built, I could now see, of obsidian, dead black, as smooth as glass and with the edges of the stones as sharp as knives. Another bolt of lightning struck just as I raised my hand to knock.

  With an ominous, high-pitched shriek, the double doors swung open. I looked in, not wanting to enter until I knew what was there, but saw no one. Then, far down the black corridor, I saw a flicker of movement, disappearing away. It was not quite substantial, a ghoul or a ghost, and gone before I could probe with magic to see if it was illusion or real.

  I waited. I was not entirely sure the castle itself was real, but if someone had created it for my benefit then he would certainly show himself. The air coming through the open doors was as cold as if it emerged from a hundred yards underground.

  Then, echoing down the dark corridor, I heard a sharp click of heels. In the distance I picked out a pinpoint of light that quickly grew larger. A man was approaching, carrying a candle. And not just a man, I realized at once, but a wizard. As he neared the door I could see that he was immaculately dressed in a suit of black satin, and that his face was as white as if it had been painted.

  “Good evening, Wizard,” he said with a smile that showed quite a few teeth but contained no good humor. “I’ve been expecting you.”

  I was about to protest that it was not evening, that it was only the middle of the afternoon, but an upward glance showed me that here, at any rate, it was night.

  “You’re from Yurt, aren’t you,” said the wizard before me. He had very strange eyes, expressionless even though they flicked constantly from side to side, almost as if they had been made of stone rather than living flesh.

  “What do you know of Yurt?” I demanded.

  “Princeps Yurtiae” it said on Dominic’s father’s tomb. But there were hundreds of other tombs in the church of the Holy Twins, and we were a great many miles from there. Yurt itself at the moment seemed a hundred thousand miles away, a place as peaceful and brightly lit as though it were Paradise.

  “Come in, and I shall tell you a number of interesting things,” the wizard said, again with the tooth-filled smile. “I do not, however, know your name.”

  “Daimbert,” I said cautiously.

  “Come in, Daimbert. My name is Vlad. You may call me Prince.”

  I had wanted to meet the wizards of the eastern kingdoms, I reminded myself. By offering to tell me interesting things, by knowing already that I was from Yurt, this wizard had tempted me to enter his castle in a way that offers of wealth and dancing girls never would have. I wrapped a protective spell around me, although I did not know what I was trying to protect myself from, and stepped inside.

  IV

  The corridor was lit only by the wizard’s candle. “Is this your principality?” I asked, standing between him and the doorway so that he could not close the doors before I was sure what I was getting into.

  “It certainly is,” he said with a slow blink. His eyelids, I noted, were translucent, like the eyelids of a snake, and did not hide the stone eyes behind them.

  “And yet you’re a wizard,” I said unevenly, h
olding onto the door frame. I was suddenly swept with a terror so profound that for a moment I wasn’t even sure I could stand unaided. This was either irrational fear of something outside my previous experience, or good sense telling me to escape while I was still alive.

  “Of course. I know over in the western kingdoms you wizards serve the kings and the aristocracy, but here we prefer to be our own masters.”

  In the shadows behind him I thought I saw-although it could have been the shadows from his candle-a viper moving slowly across the floor.

  And then I knew the source of my terror. It had nothing to do with this wizard, strange though he might be. It was memories of another long corridor down which I had groped nearly ten years ago, the closest I had ever been to death and damnation. And that corridor had been in Yurt. If I was going to find safety, I would have to create it for myself, wherever I was.

  I pushed myself forcibly away from the door. “I’m curious, Prince,” I said. “Is this castle real?” The door frame, at any rate, was solid under my hand.

  “It depends on what you mean by real,” he answered ambiguously and turned his back to me. He certainly seemed unafraid of me. “Come with me, and I think you’ll find out several things about which you’ve been wondering.”

  As soon as his back was turned, I tried another quick magic probe to reassure myself that he was human and no demon. But then I followed, watching the floor for snakes. The door stayed open behind me, but beyond it was only night and wolves.

  Candles held by invisible hands proceeded us down the corridor. Prince Vlad led me into a room off the corridor where I had hoped there would be more light, but it was windowless. Heavy hangings covered the wall, worked black on black, with brief shots of white in a design confused and disconcerting enough that I tried not to look.

  “I’ve been waiting for you ever since my old friend, King Warin’s chancellor, said you were coming this way,” he said, sitting down in one black leather chair and motioning me into another.