Mage Quest woy-3

by C. Dale Brittain

  “This church,” said Joachim, “is dedicated to Solomon’s Holy Wisdom.”

  The innkeeper had given us a map over which the chaplain and Ascelin bent their heads to find the best route. Without a map we would have been hopelessly lost in under ten minutes. The maze of streets was jammed with people who all, unlike us, seemed to know exactly where they were going. We spotted a few who also appeared to be pilgrims, but most were very different from anyone ever seen in the west. Dark-skinned men in striped robes and headdresses; women so heavily veiled that only their eyes were visible; men at whom Dominic frowned, whose cheeks were rouged and eyes outlined in black; long-legged warriors, some nearly as tall as Ascelin, wearing turbans and wide, curved swords; half-naked children; black-robed clerks talking seriously to each other; sumptuously dressed dandies who moved in the center of a group of bodyguards; and grumpy-looking women, dressed drably and carrying net bags full of vegetables, all jostled together in the streets.

  Once or twice I thought I thought I saw someone following us, but it was impossible to keep track of anyone behind us in such a crowd, even with magic.

  “I’d looked forward to seeing the East,” I said to the chaplain, “but it’s even more, well, different from Yurt than I’d expected.”

  “That’s why one travels,” he commented. “At home, you’re always looking in a mirror. Everything you see becomes so familiar it is almost an extension of the self. Elsewhere, you see everything except yourself.” He paused, then added thoughtfully, “I think we need them both: the contemplation of our inner souls, and the jostling out of ourselves, the reminder that we are not the entire world and shall meet even God face to face.”

  Most of the house fronts along the streets were blank, but whenever we passed one whose gate was open we caught a glimpse of a passage leading to a cool-looking courtyard, bright with flowers and often with a fountain.

  It was hot and steamy even if the mid-afternoon sun was blocked before it reached our level. For the two weeks we had coasted along the north edge of the Central Sea, the sea breezes had kept us cool, but it was now indubitably high summer, and a much hotter summer than anything known in Yurt.

  We moved with Joachim and the king in the center of a square formed by the rest of us, even if it meant that we sometimes jostled the people we met against the housefronts. Ascelin was as alert as I, and Hugo seemed wound up almost to the breaking point. When the chaplain stopped abruptly, we all stopped.

  We had come around a corner, and one side of this street was lined not with buildings but with a fence, and a shadowy courtyard lay beyond. A bell, with the same tone as the chapel’s bell in the royal castle of home, began to sound. Its note was sweet and restful, as though the noises of the street were a thousand miles rather than just a few feet away.

  Looking through the fence, we saw a group of men in dark vestments walk through the courtyard in procession, carrying candles and singing. Their expressions were rapt, and anything on our side of the fence might as well have not existed. For a moment I thought they were priests, but the shaved crowns of their heads made them unlike any priests I knew. They disappeared through an archway on the far side of the courtyard, and the bell’s ringing came to an end.

  Joachim turned and started walking again. “Monks,” he said to me. “We don’t have them in the west, and I’d never seen them before. They’re somewhat like hermits, except that they live together, under the fatherly direction of a leader.”

  “More like nuns?” I asked.

  Before the chaplain could answer, we heard another sound, a piercing, modulated wail coming from a minaret under which we were passing.

  “It’s the priests of the Prophet,” said Ascelin, “calling the faithful to afternoon prayer.”

  Considering that I was supposed to be a well-educated wizard, I didn’t seem to have had any idea all trip what we would see. Maybe when we met some eastern mages I’d have a chance to show off my own knowledge out of Melecherius on Eastern Magic.

  But we reached the church of Holy Wisdom without meeting any mages. There was a tiny square in front of the great doors where a peddler was selling little bottles of purportedly holy water. We pushed by him without listening to his pitch and went up the steps and inside.

  From the outside, it was impossible to tell the size of the church, but from the inside it was enormous. We all stopped in amazement to look around.

  Candles gleamed from golden candelabra, lighting up a forest of porphyry columns and green marble arches. The floor beneath our feet was onyx veined with gold. Windows through which the sunlight poured pierced the dome high above us. The air was thick with incense. Mosaics, made of a hundred thousand glittering tiles, illustrated Bible stories.

  As we walked slowly into the church we saw the biggest mosaic of all. The saved and the damned rose in alarm from their coffins to see the sky split open above them. I approved of the artist’s rendering of the scene. Christ in majesty, thirty feet high, dressed in brilliant blue and rimmed in gold, greeted us and them with a raised hand.

  There were a large number of other people in the church, pilgrims, men who appeared to be priests even though their vestments were purple instead of black, women who seemed to have stopped in for a quick prayer on their way home from the market, and even some of the tall, turbaned men we had noticed earlier. But the size of the church swallowed us all up without even seeming to notice.

  As we reached the main altar and Joachim went to his knees, I thought I saw a flicker of motion behind us, as though one of the other people in the church did not want us to see him.

  I probed quickly with magic. Someone was there, all right. I rose two inches above the floor to be able to move silently and darted around the base of a column. A black-haired boy squatted there, looking around the far side. He turned and saw me just too late.

  I had him by the back of the shirt as he jumped up to run. “I’m a mage,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt you, but if you try to get away you’re going to become a frog.”

  He was apparently willing to believe me, for he went limp. I pulled him from behind the column and to the others without letting down my guard.

  “Good work, Wizard,” said Ascelin. “Is this the person who’s been following us?”

  “I think so. He doesn’t seem armed.”

  “It’s a boy,” said the king. “Surely he can’t mean us any harm.”

  “What did you mean, boy?” asked Ascelin.

  He ducked his head, but he did not strike me as at all afraid of us, which I certainly would have been under the circumstances. His black eyes flashed and he gave me a grin before answering Ascelin.

  “In the name of God, the all-merciful,” he said, “I wish you peace. I only want to help you. Perhaps you need a guide through the city streets? Perhaps you need to hire someone to take you where you’re going? Perhaps you’d be willing to pay someone to take you safely to the Thieves’ Market?”

  Ascelin and King Haimeric looked at each other. “It’s certainly not shown on the city map,” said the king.

  “I trust this boy explicitly,” said Ascelin pointedly. “How does he know what we might be looking for?”

  “Many pilgrims who come to Xantium are looking for more than the route to the Holy Land,” said the boy.

  “What’s your name?” asked the king.

  “Maffi, revered lord,” said the boy, giving me another grin. At this rate I really would have to turn him into a frog just to prove that I was a wizard.

  “If we hired you as our guide,” said the king, bending down to the boy’s level and ignoring Ascelin’s warning glare, “we’d have to wait until you’d taken us where we were going before we paid you. With the streets so crowded, you do realize that we’d worry you’d just dart away with our money and leave us stranded.”

  “Of course, revered lord,” said Maffi. “And I’m so sure you’ll be pleased with me as a guide that I’ll be happy to take whatever you want to pay me, once we get there.”

/>   “That’s settled, then,” said the king. “Shall we go?”

  “As soon as we finish giving thanks for our safe voyage,” said Joachim.

  Maffi, in spite of starting his conversation with us by praising God, remained standing while the rest of us obediently knelt in front of the altar. I looked at him sideways and wondered if he followed the Prophet rather than being a Christian. I had never known any of the People of the Prophet before.

  II

  Back out in the streets Maffi took the lead, slipping easily through the crowds while we tried to keep up with him.

  “Do you think that wizard in the eastern kingdoms, the one who wanted to betray my father, has telephoned here?” Dominic asked me in a low voice. He seemed to have picked up Ascelin’s suspicions.

  “He didn’t have a telephone,” I said. “And even if he had access to one, I don’t think there are any telephones in Xantium. It’s school magic, and school-trained wizards tend to stay in the western kingdoms.”

  “But a renegade wizard might have installed one,” said Dominic darkly.

  Ascelin kept track on the map as well as he could of where we were. Maffi led us first to an enormous plaza where an open-air market was being held, voices and odors rising from booths jammed close together. But this did not seem to be the market to which we were going, for he only cut through one corner and again hurried down narrow streets. He next led us through what seemed to be the city’s main governmental center. We had to step back abruptly as a curtained palanquin came straight toward us. Burly slaves carried the poles on their shoulders, and peacock feathers fluttered from the corners. The edge of the curtain lifted as the palanquin came even with us, but it dropped back into place before we could see the face within.

  Here the streets temporarily grew broad, and there were even open, sunny squares with fountains playing in the center. For a moment we caught a glimpse of a white, domed palace. But then we plunged back into narrow streets and started downhill. As near as I could tell, we were on the far side of the main city hill from the harbor.

  As we approached the outer walls, lower and looking less well maintained than those where we had first entered the city, the crowds became less dense. Some of the people we passed in doorways looked at us curiously, as though surprised to see pilgrims here.

  Maffi, who had stayed almost but not quite far enough ahead that we would lose him, darted around a corner and was lost to sight. When we turned the corner a few seconds later, we found two tall, turbaned men blocking our path.

  Hugo had his sword out in a second and elbowed the rest of us back behind him in the narrow street. “Come on!” he shouted. “Whichever one of you wants to attack first! But the other one had better run for a priest, because there won’t be any use going for a doctor!”

  But the men smiled and presented empty hands. “In the name of all-seeing God,” said one, “we do not intend to attack you. We have been waiting for you. We knew that sooner or later we’d see you at the Thieves’ Market, Arnulf.”

  Ascelin pulled Hugo back and frowned. “Arnulf?”

  The men looked past him to Joachim. “Even after all these years, and even disguised as a priest, you’re entirely recognizable, sir.”

  “I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” said the chaplain. “You’ve taken me for my brother. Are you his agents?”

  One of the men glanced around and lowered his voice. “You’re quite right, sir. It’s better to maintain the disguise. We’ll accompany you to the Market.”

  Joachim hesitated for a second, sliding a finger inside his collar and along the scar, but then stepped confidently forward, forcing the rest of us to follow. I looked again for Maffi and didn’t see him.

  The shortcoming of even the best magic is that it cannot tell you what someone else is planning. These men, whom Joachim seemed ready to trust, could be leading us to our deaths. But beyond freezing their curved swords into their sheaths, which I did at once, I could think of nothing else to do but stay very close to the chaplain.

  It had never been clear from Joachim’s account of his telephone conversation with Claudia-and it might not even have been clear to him-whether she had ever gotten the pigeon message he sent her from the mountains. If she had not heard until that phone call that whatever she had given him had been stolen, then Arnulf probably had not had time to get word to his agents here before we arrived. They should know, then, what it was King Warin’s bandits had stolen from us and expect us to have it.

  “We’ll have to hope it is still for sale,” said one of the men. “I assume you’ve brought what he wanted, Arnulf.”

  “I already told you,” said Joachim, too honest to maintain a deception that could have been very informative, “you’ve mistaken me for my brother.”

  “But you did bring it with you?” The turbaned men seemed disturbed for the first time. They stopped and looked at Joachim fully. Ascelin and I tried unsuccessfully to ease between them and the chaplain.

  “Bring what?” he asked.

  “The magic ring, of course,” said one of the men in an undertone, with a quick glance around. “Hidden in a bag of money, as you said you would bring it to us.”

  Dominic jammed his hand with the ruby ring into his pocket.

  “My brother’s wife gave me a gift before we left,” said Joachim, in a voice clear enough that the turbaned men tried to shush him. “I never saw what was in it. But it was stolen as we crossed the mountains into the eastern kingdoms. The captain of the ship we took here suggested-obliquely, it’s true-that something stolen from us might itself end up in the Thieves’ Market.”

  “We’re here now,” said one of the men cautiously. “Don’t you trust us either? At least we can find out if he’s sold it to anyone else.”

  Ascelin looked at me with raised eyebrows. Short of seizing the chaplain bodily and carrying him away, we didn’t have much choice but to follow. The narrow street we had followed debouched into a broad square, just inside the city’s outer walls.

  The sparse population of the last few streets was again replaced by noisy crowds. The square was full of booths, striped awnings protecting the people and goods from the harsh sun. Beneath the awnings was piled everything from clothing to weapons, and the spaces between were jammed with people. “I wonder if any of them sell rootstocks for roses,” said the king.

  For a second, as our street sloped down into the market, we could see the crowds from above, but then we were down among them. There was the same wild mix of people we had seen in the city streets. “Watch out for pickpockets,” said Ascelin in a low voice.

  But the turbaned men smiled. “In fact, the Thieves’ Market is probably one of the few places in Xantium where you don’t have to beware of pickpockets. The thieves patrol themselves. Of course, you do have to beware of everything else …”

  Including you, I thought. My mind raced, trying desperately but unsuccessfully to think why Claudia would have sent a magic ring with us, assuming that was indeed what had been in her package.

  We were now pushed on every side by sweating bodies so that it was hard to pick our way, and almost immediately I lost any sense of direction. The tiny alleys between the stalls were even more of a maze than the city streets. Voices on every side urged us to buy spices, armor, shoes only slightly used, silken robes, snacks, mirrors, and jeweled pendants. I caught glimpses of glittering brocade, of peacock feathers, of knives whose blades were inset with enamel, of tooled leather, and of bales of uncarded wool such as used to arrive in our ware house in the City. On the far side of the market, I thought I saw a carpet rising above the heads of the crowd with two men seated on it, but when I rubbed my eyes it was gone.

  I tried probing with magic and found layers and cross-layers of spells so dense and so strange that I immediately gave up any attempt to understand them. I doubted Melecherius had understood them either. Even aside from a carpet that could fly, the colors and the quality of much of the merchandise must be heightened by illusion.

&nbs
p; “Was everything here stolen?” Hugo asked Ascelin in an undertone.

  One of Arnulf’s agents answered for him. “Not necessarily. Some of the merchants here just prefer a more, well, informal setting than the government-regulated market. But a lot of the merchandise is stolen, and the market is run by the thieves’ guild.”

  “Why does the government allow it?” protested Hugo.

  “Do you think the governor has a choice? Didn’t you know what he had to offer the guild in return for the safety and integrity of the harbor?”

  I looked again for Maffi, but it was hopeless. The turbaned men found their way without hesitation through the dense crowd, taking advantage of every momentary gap in the press of humanity to move forward while we struggled behind them. Abruptly the crowd opened up, so unexpectedly I almost pitched onto my face.

  We had reached a final booth on the very edge of the market. Its awning was closed, but a chess puzzle was set out on a board next to it. Unlike every other booth, this one was surrounded by a clear space ten feet wide. It was as though no one wanted to come too near.

  One of the turbaned men let out his breath in a hiss. “I’d feared to hope, but it is still here. I can see the feet. Arnulf, or whoever you claim to be, you will remember, won’t you, all we have done to inform you and all we have done to bring you safely here?”

  The striped awning hung to the ground, but in a second I saw an eye through a slit, and with a sharp whirl the awning was wound up. We were abruptly confronted by an enormous black stallion.

  It was big enough even for Ascelin, and so still and so uniformly dark that it could have been ebony. After an amazed second, I realized it was ebony. It was a magnificent work of art, but it wasn’t real.

  And then my eye was caught by something far more fascinating. Standing behind the ebony stallion was a mage.

  Ascelin bit off a warning as I stepped forward into the space where no one else dared go. But I was too fascinated to care. A man bulging with fat, almost as dark as his horse, decked with odd bits of colored silk as though he made up for not being able to fit into ordinary clothes by wearing a lot of different small ones-all I saw was someone bristling with magic.