Mage Quest woy-3

by C. Dale Brittain

  “Warin? You know him?” The terror I had tried to dismiss by the doorway was back again in full strength.

  “I already told you I know a number of interesting things, including the answers to many questions I’m sure you’ve asked yourself.”

  “And what do you want in return for this information, Prince?” I asked, trying to make his eyes meet mine.

  “Very good, Daimbert,” he said as though pleased. “I knew you would not disappoint me. Of course I want something. What I want is knowledge from you.”

  “I don’t think I have any knowledge that you would want,” I said slowly.

  “Of course you do,” he said with another smile. I wondered briefly how many teeth he actually had. “You’re a school-trained wizard and know the wizards’ secret of perpetual youth. It’s obvious-you’ve got a white beard and hair, and yet you’re still youthful and vigorous. What age are you really? A hundred? A hundred and fifty?”

  “I’m not yet forty.” I had no intention of telling him about the incident that had turned my hair white overnight. “School magic has no secret of youth. Wizards in the west may live well past two hundred, but if we do it’s because of the same spells that wizards used for generations, even before the school was founded-the same spells, I expect, available to you.”

  His stone eyes managed to convey disappointment. He pursed his thin lips, then smiled again. “We’ll return to this in a moment. But you in the west know how to see and to hear someone over a great distance, I understand.”

  “Telephones,” I agreed. “But don’t ask me, Prince. I’ve never been any good at technical magic.” I was not going to explain that the far-seeing attachment, while my own invention, had been discovered essentially by accident. “The wizard you probably should ask is Elerius, who used to work for King Warin. By the way, does the king know that you consider his chancellor your friend?” I leaned forward and then wished I hadn’t, because the wizard’s white face up close was like a mask, and for a moment I felt irrationally convinced that beneath that mask was the face of a corpse. “You said you had information for me. The first information I want is how you knew we were coming.”

  “Warin’s chancellor sent me a message as soon as you left his kingdom.”

  I was about to interrupt and ask how that message was sent, since pigeon messages between the eastern and western kingdoms were notoriously unreliable, and this wizard had no telephone, but I reminded myself that there were certainly other ways-a fast-riding messenger, even a spell-captured eagle of the high peaks. My guess was that Warin, even if he were a sorcerer, had no idea that his trusted chancellor was also in this wizard’s pay-which thought made me wonder briefly if there had also been activities of Elerius’s which he had not known about.

  “My friend knew that I’d been waiting for a long time for visitors from Yurt,” Prince Vlad added.

  “I know who you are,” I said suddenly. The king’s younger brother might not be someone to produce terrifying stories, but this man certainly was. “You’re the wizard who was employed, fifty years ago, by Prince Dominic of Yurt.”

  “It was difficult tracking you across all those miles between the mountains and here,” Prince Vlad continued without denying my guess. “Someone in your party is extremely good.” I would have to tell Ascelin if I lived to see him again.

  He motioned toward a black marble table on the far side of the room. “That is how I knew where you were.” I went over to look. On the table was a three-dimensional map of what appeared to be this part of the eastern kingdoms. “Try the skull.”

  By the map was the face of a skull, with crystals set in the eye sockets. When I put it in front of my own face to look through the crystals, the model of the eastern kingdoms became enormous, as though I were an eagle flying over it. I could see armed men on the roads, houses tucked into clearings, castles at the river crossings. The tiniest movement of the head, even of the eyes, took one’s line of vision miles. It would be hard to find people who were deliberately hiding, even with this magic, but my hands trembled as I slowly set the skull down again.

  “It was only because so many of the other wizards of the eastern kingdoms owe me favors-either princes and counts in their own right or allied with kings-that I was able to keep track of you at all. Troop movements are a rather awkward way of easing people you can’t quite see in the direction you want, but it was eventually effective. After all, you’re here now.”

  “Wait,” I said, without enough time to wonder how many of the soldiers we had seen and hidden from were actually being moved for our benefit. “You died of wounds and the fever fifty years ago.”

  “There are many versions of death,” he said vaguely, pulling his translucent lids down over his eyes.

  “But you are that wizard?” I demanded, determined to find out at least one clear piece of information.

  “That’s what you want most to know?” he said, opening his eyes again. He seemed to be able to see with them, but I was more and more convinced they were something artificial. “Yes, I might as well tell you that I am. If you’re as young as you claim, you won’t have known Prince Dominic, but I never trusted him. He told me he could fight a dozen men at once, but it took only ten to overcome him when we were both struck down. Even after his manservant and I buried the prince, I feigned a much worse fever than I actually had.”

  “He didn’t trust you either,” I said. I paused, pushing back terror, and continued, “So you didn’t actually die?” More than anything else, at the moment I wanted reassurance that, whatever he might have done with his body, his dead soul had not been sent back to earth from hell.

  But he did not give me that reassurance. “Because I did not trust Prince Dominic, I didn’t tell him that part of the magic necessary to uncover the Wadi’s secret was an opening spell I attached to the ruby ring itself.”

  “What a shame,” I lied. “We left the ruby ring home in Yurt.”

  To my surprise, he seemed to believe me. The living map of the eastern kingdoms, I realized, would not give him enough detail to be able to see for himself. I presumed he didn’t trust King Warin’s chancellor either and had therefore not questioned him closely about the jewelry worn by the visitors from Yurt. I spread out my own hand ostentatiously, to show my eagle ring set with a tiny diamond.

  “It’s probably gone from the Wadi by now anyway,” he said regretfully. “When that servant left for Yurt, he took the ring with him, and I was-well, too weak to stop him or follow him. And I certainly have never liked the idea of wandering the western kingdoms, threatened by school-trained wizards. So I have waited a long time for someone from Yurt to come east, and have never even bothered going to the Wadi.”

  “What was hidden there?”

  My question came out much louder than I expected and hung in the air between us. The wizard half turned away, then smiled slowly. “Maybe I don’t trust you, either, Daimbert. If you want to know that, you’ll have to teach me much more of the magic of glass and steel.”

  “Glass and steel?” I said cautiously.

  “That’s what we call school magic here in the eastern kingdoms, your technical magic that can keep working even without an active mind saying the spells. Our magic is a magic of bone and blood.”

  I had assumed that the wizards of the eastern kingdoms, without anything comparable to the organization of the wizards’ school in the west, would be hard-pressed to restrain warfare. Instead, it sounded as though war and death were their normal occupations.

  “What did you give King Warin’s chancellor in return for the information that we were coming?”

  “You have so many questions, Daimbert!” he said, showing his teeth again. “And you’ve given me no information at all yet. Before I tell you anything else, I want to know that spell of yours that allows western wizards to live well past two hundred.”

  I considered this for a moment, keeping my eyes on my companion’s black satin suit because I didn’t want to look at his face. The powerfu
l spell that would slow down-though never reverse-natural aging was not taught until near the end of the eight-year program, and the teachers always impressed on us that our oaths to help humanity did not include meddling with nature’s cycle to give all our friends an extra century or two of life

  But a wizard, even one here, surely knew that spell anyway. By showing him the spell I might be able to convince him that I had no secret knowledge he wanted. “Give me some paper,” I said. “I’ll write it out.”

  It was a long spell and took a while. While I wrote, I thought over what little information I had from him so far. If King Warin, via his chancellor, had some sort of connection with the wizards of the eastern kingdoms, then that might explain why Evrard had called him a sorcerer. The strange form of magic that had shaped this castle and maybe even the physical being of the man across from me might look like the black arts, at least to someone like Evrard who had never actually met a demon.

  This would mean that Elerius had not lived for twelve years in the castle of a man who had sold his soul to the devil, which was a relief, though I continued to suspect he might have picked up some form of magic he would prefer not to share with the masters of the school.

  I still didn’t know what connection there might be, if any, between Joachim’s brother on the one hand, with his talk of King Solomon’s Pearl, disappearing caravans, and the very real present his wife had tried to send with us, and, on the other, the mysterious object of which Prince Dominic had learned shortly before his death. The only person who might understand the connection was King Warin. And I doubted Warin would trust this wizard either.

  I passed the pieces of paper across to Prince Vlad. “Here it is, but I’m sure you already know this spell.”

  He seized the paper avidly, but I thought I could again see disappointment in his features as he scanned the spell. “But this will do nothing to make someone younger!”

  “That’s what I told you.” I hesitated, then pushed on. “For that you need the supernatural.”

  He shot me a sudden glance from his stone eyes. “Or to know something that apparently even you don’t know.”

  How to give motion to inanimate objects, I thought, how to prop up a sagging and decaying body with the dead flesh and blood of others, or even with wood and stone. If he had had to rebuild a badly wounded body with incredibly complex magic, no wonder he had not been able to restrain Prince Dominic’s servant from returning to Yurt. “I don’t know anything about it,” I agreed.

  “Then it may prove less useful stopping you than I thought,” he said slowly, “unless- Unless you actually did bring the ruby ring with you from Yurt.”

  Caught in my lie, I tried to brazen my way out. “We had no idea there was anything magical about that ring itself,” I said, which was true. “You must know that we stopped at Prince Dominic’s tomb to see if it might have any secrets to yield, which we wouldn’t have bothered doing if we’d known the secret was back in the treasury of Yurt.” I paused, then tried to give him an intimidating glare. “If you say you have information for me, why not prove it by telling me who opened that tomb? Was it you?”

  This surprised him. “Why would anyone open Dominic’s tomb?”

  “You’re lying,” I said, to conceal the fact that I had been myself. “You said we would exchange knowledge, but you opened the prince’s tomb to get something you hid there when he was buried.”

  He didn’t take the bait. Instead he shook his head. “Maybe that servant-he always was a fool-let some information drop on his way home. Or our source of information on the Wadi Harhammi may have regretted letting that information out-and, before you ask, I’m not going to tell you what that source was.”

  “But you know the opening spell,” I said suddenly, not admitting that we had the ring with us but not bothering to deny it any more either. “That must be more than anyone else has-except, possibly, this ‘source’ of yours. At least one other person is searching desperately for that information but doesn’t have it. Maybe what Prince Dominic called something wonderful, something marvelous, is still there! Do you want to come with us to the East to look for it?”

  I jumped to my feet as I spoke. This wizard with the artificial eyes was the last person I would normally have chosen for a traveling companion, but if he was with us, where I could watch him, I would not have to worry what he was doing behind our backs.

  “I do not leave my castle,” he said slowly. “I had hoped that, in return for the information you need, you would find it for me and bring it here.”

  Something that even such a powerful wizard could covet for fifty years must be marvelous indeed. “You clearly don’t have any knowledge I need or want,” I said. “You’ve been bluffing, Prince.”

  “I could tell you what’s concealed in the Wadi. I think you would prefer to know before rather than after you use that opening spell.”

  “Come with us, then, and tell us as we go,” I said, “or we’ll find out for ourselves anyway. I’m offering to take you along, but if you stay here you know I won’t be back.”

  “You won’t know what to do with it, even with the opening spell, even with the ruby. Swear to me by all the forces of magic that you will bring it back, and I will reveal its powers to you when you arrive.”

  “And, once you have it, you’ll get rid of us? Not likely, Prince.”

  His eyes came fully open as he pushed his face close to mine. “If you try to rush out of here now, even if your magic can fight past the powers that guard me, I think you’ll find that armies will pursue you all across the eastern kingdoms-until they catch you and kill you.”

  I grabbed his arm. It felt almost like a normal human arm. “Then our only safety is having you with us. I don’t care if you don’t want to leave this castle. You’re going to now!”

  With force and magic I dragged him from the room. He struggled against me, but I was stronger. The corridor, unlit by any candle, was completely black. I yelled out a spell, and for an instant it was lit up as bright as day, and I could see the corridor’s end and the studded nail doors, opening onto night.

  V

  I started to rush down the corridor, then heard a gasp from the wizard that sounded like genuine pain. I paused, unsure if this was a trap, and turned on the moon and stars on my belt buckle. They cast a pale glow, no brighter than a candle, but I could see his eyes squeezed shut and a strange, almost melting quality to one cheek.

  “Why did you shine that light?” he said in a low, nearly indistinct voice.

  “To see to get out of here and to scare back your ghouls!”

  “You will not escape from here. You think those doors are safety, but outside it’s midnight, and my wolves will meet you. Let me go, and I shall let you live.”

  My heart was pounding too hard to make any sort of rational decision possible. “I don’t know how long I’ve been in your castle, but it must still be sometime in the afternoon. Come with me, and I’ll let you live!”

  In the glow of my belt buckle, I hurried on, still dragging him with me. He was putting up very little resistance now.

  But as we reached the door I heard him chuckle. Just outside the door, wolves were howling.

  “It is not midnight,” I said between clenched teeth. A flash of lightning hit just below us on the hill, and for a second I could see the wolf pack, enormous furry beasts, nearly as tall at the shoulder as I, their eyes and teeth glowing phosphorescent.

  The natural world, I told myself, was much more powerful than any wizardry. Prince Vlad could make it appear night, but it would not actually be night until the earth had turned. Even his storm clouds, brought with the magic he called the magic of blood and bone, could be blown away by the wind.

  Especially if that wind was aided by weather spells. Standing just inside the door, still holding onto him, I shouted the spells that should drive a storm higher, further away, that will bring the sunshine back out over a threatened crop.

  And the sky split open. If I saw the Last J
udgment with living eyes, I thought irrelevantly, I would know what to expect.

  Black, tattered clouds pulled back, letting the late afternoon sun pour its light onto the wizard’s hill. The wolves, even bigger and closer than I had thought, gave me a startled look, then turned and trotted away.

  But everything else lay revealed with the sickening, partially decayed look of something rediscovered after long burial. Only the obsidian castle, with its window eyes and gaping mouth, stayed solid and untorn.

  The wizard shrieked. I released his arm involuntarily, then stared at him in horror. He had his face in his hands, but two round stones dropped from between his fingers and rolled away.

  I went down on my knees beside him. “My God! Have I killed you?”

  “Don’t — mention — God — to — a — wizard,” he said very slowly, as though having to force out each word. Several other parts of his body now seemed loose, only held in place by his clothes. He dropped his hands and turned his eyeless face toward me. One cheek was nearly gone. “I told you I never left my castle,” he said, slightly more strongly. “You haven’t killed me, you’ll be disappointed to discover. But it will take me years to rebuild this body. Curse you, Daimbert!”

  He tried to make it a resounding shout, but it came out as a half-stifled rattle. I didn’t wait to see what particular curses he might call down on me. I fled down the hill, pausing just once to look back and see him crawling in through the door of his obsidian castle.

  “He’s not dead,” I said, lying stretched out on the ground with my face on my arms, trembling all over. “But I don’t think he’ll be able to come after us.”

  Joachim put a hand on my shoulder, but no one said anything for a moment. “I think you should have killed him,” said Hugo. “After all, he wanted to kill you.”

  “That was a threat,” I said. “He didn’t want me dead so much as he wanted information-information which in fact does not exist.”