Mage Quest woy-3

by C. Dale Brittain

  “This way,” said Joachim quietly. He led us out not the way we had come but to a door on the opposite side which opened onto a dark, cramped stairway cut into the rock. Dominic and Ascelin kept their heads well down as we eased ourselves around the spiral. We emerged into the cave I had expected to find in the church above, the Sepulchre itself.

  Candles burned at either end of a stone slab, two feet across and as long as a man. The slab, of course, was empty. It struck us, or at least me, even more powerfully than the decorations and the lamps of the church above. We did not speak but knelt by the slab until another porter came over and told Joachim in a low voice that the next group of pilgrims was waiting to enter.

  We left by a narrow door at the far end, not quite looking at each other. But I at any rate, and I thought the rest, felt that we had truly reached the goal of our pilgrimage.

  “The duchess and I should try to be here at Easter,” said Ascelin a little louder than necessary as we came up a flight of steps into bright daylight.

  “We haven’t been to the Mount of Olives yet,” said Joachim, his solemnity falling away in the sunshine. For the last week or more he had been as eager and enthusiastic as a boy, as all the towns we passed began to be places mentioned in the Bible.

  On the long overland trip from Xantium to the Holy Land, in spite of watching constantly for mages, for Ifriti, and for bandits, we had seen very little except an increasingly dense number of pilgrimage churches, all of which the chaplain insisted on visiting. Once we had entered David’s Kingdom, and especially the last few days here in the Holy City, we had done little besides visit churches.

  “And we still need to see Solomon’s Temple,” said King Haimeric, “although I understand it is not actually the temple Solomon built himself but one rebuilt after the return of the Children of Abraham from the captivity in Babylon.”

  “Of course,” said the chaplain. “It was to the Temple that the child Jesus was brought by his parents on the fortieth day after his birth.”

  “And while you’ve been looking at all these churches,” said Maffi unexpectedly, “you still haven’t gone to look at the Rock.”

  “The Rock?” asked the chaplain.

  “Of course. The rock on which God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.”

  Maffi stood next to Ascelin, the tall prince’s hand resting on his shoulder. Even though in the month since he had joined us the boy had shown no sign of trying to escape, Ascelin, Dominic, and Hugo had tacitly agreed to take turns in keeping close to him. Ascelin seemed to be growing oddly fond of him.

  “The Rock isn’t in my guidebook,” said Joachim, leafing through, “but it certainly sounds as though we should visit it. Maybe after we see the Mount of Olives.”

  I had already noticed this. For three days he had led us through the Holy City, a bustling, modern capital, much cleaner and better laid out than Xantium although also much smaller. The entire time it appeared that to him nothing built in the last fifteen hundred years, since the later days of the Empire when Christianity had become fully established, even existed. The city was sacred to three religions, but the chaplain had looked only glancingly at the sites holy to the Children of Abraham, taking us by the spired castle of the royal Son of David without a real look, and had not even slowed down when passing those sites holy to the People of the Prophet.

  I wondered briefly if Maffi too considered this a pilgrimage, then remembered Arnulf’s agents telling me that the true pilgrimage goal for those who followed the Prophet was somewhere deep in the desert, very far to the south. I was afraid I had not paid very close attention.

  “I realize what struck me as strange about this place,” said Hugo to me as we stood on the Mount of Olives, looking across the Valley of Josaphat at the tangle of city roofs on the steep slopes across from us. We had already seen the little church on the Mount which sheltered the stone from which Christ had ascended into heaven. “This city isn’t built on the water.”

  He was right. The City back home and Xantium were both major ports, and even the small cities that dotted the western kingdoms tended to be built on rivers. “It’s probably because it’s never been a trading center,” I suggested. “It’s been a place for kings and priests, but never for merchants.”

  “It also seems,” continued Hugo in a low voice, “too, well, wholesome a city for you to expect someone to disappear. If there really were rumors here last year about Noah’s Ark-and no one seems to have heard anything about it-then that too should be exciting but not perilous. Yet the last message my mother had from my father was the one he sent from here back to the City by another pilgrim, that he would go south a little way and then start for home.”

  “Then we’ll go south as well,” I said, squinting into the distance. “The Wadi that Dominic’s looking for should be off in that direction somewhere.”

  “I’ve tried drawing that boy out,” added Hugo, “and he won’t say anything definite, but I keep getting the impression he met my father’s party when they came through Xantium last year.”

  “The mage Kaz-alrhun had also met Evrard,” I said, glancing toward Maffi. He stood beside Dominic now, quietly listening as the chaplain pointed out all the churches one could see from here, churches built on the sites of important events in the life of Christ and the apostles or of the martyrdoms of early saints, most of which we had already visited. “I don’t know about you, Hugo, but I keep feeling there are too many coincidences here. Everyone, except of course us, seems to know what’s been happening and what it has to do with Dominic’s ring and with your father.”

  “Are you ready for the Temple of Solomon?” called the chaplain to us happily.

  But that evening when we went to the room we shared in the pilgrims’ hospice, he seemed oddly subdued. The white-painted halls were full of other travelers with crosses sewn to their shoulders. The hospice itself was very austere, the rooms small and undecorated, the beds hard, and the dining room serving only flat bread stuffed with lentils and cucumbers.

  I tried to read more of Melecherius on Eastern Magic, but in the dim light of a single candle it was difficult to follow. More and more I had the feeling Melecherius had profoundly misunderstood what the mages had tried to teach him. I closed the book and glanced over at the chaplain. He sat on the opposite bed, leafing through his guidebook with even less light than I had, but then he did not seem to be reading.

  “So have we seen all the pilgrimage sites, Joachim?” I asked, kicking off my shoes and stretching out, hands behind my head. There were no chairs.

  “I’m not sure,” he said slowly. “I don’t like to admit this, but there are two or three churches in here, which I myself marked that we visited yesterday, but which I now have trouble remembering.”

  “They do all tend to run together after a while,” I agreed.

  “But they shouldn’t!” he said with a flash of his dark eyes. “I’ve longed to visit the Holy Land all my life, to walk with living feet on the streets where Christ trod. Now that I’m here at last I can’t have the holy sites all ‘run together’!”

  I pushed myself up on one elbow and looked at him. “Read the descriptions again,” I suggested. “I know you won’t have forgotten the Holy Sepulchre, so just concentrate on the smaller churches. Think about each one individually. It must say in your guidebook which ones have monks, and that will help differentiate them. You should be able to pick out the one where the porter didn’t want to admit Maffi, and the one where Dominic banged his head. If you can picture all of us standing inside and think about whatever we saw first-mosaics, altar, candelabra-you’ll then be able to get the rest of the details.”

  Joachim closed the book and flopped down. “I’m not an overly-ambitious tourist,” he replied gloomily, “getting different picturesque sites confused. I’m a priest who has visited the places where Christ lived and died to bring us salvation, and who yet who still finds himself thinking about supper at the end of the day, gets sore feet from walking and standing, and ne
eds to consult a guidebook when the experience should be burned into my soul.”

  I thought about this in silence for a moment, knowing better than to offer any more of the memory tricks that had allowed me to squeak through the wizards’ school without ever being properly studious. I had, just barely, managed to save the chaplain’s life, but it was going to be difficult if he now expected me to save his soul as well.

  “Maybe it’s the overall experience that’s important,” I offered, “not the details of the individual pilgrimage churches.”

  He turned to look toward me, a long, intense stare that suddenly turned into a smile. “Thank you, Daimbert,” he said, stretching out again. “You’re absolutely right.”

  “Right about what?” I said, startled.

  “I should have realized this from the beginning,” he said with surprisingly good humor. “Now I know why I’ve been having to fight against spiritual dissatisfaction this entire journey. I’d assumed it was only the temptings of the devil, and of course in part it was, but I now realize it also came from my own misdirected attentions.”

  It was no use asking him to explain what he meant. I wouldn’t understand even if he did.

  “I had thought that to come on pilgrimage to the Holy Land would be the culminating experience of my life, the opportunity for my soul to rise above mundane concerns at last and reach toward God. In part it certainly has been, but I was constantly irritated in finding myself still on and of the earth, worried by earthly things.

  “Now you’ve made it evident, with your clear insight, that I’d been missing the point all along. ‘The kingdom of God cometh not with observation, neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! For behold, the kingdom of God is within you.’ It is not my body that needed to go where Jesus lived nearly two millennia ago, but my spirit that needed to rise to meet the living Christ.” He gave me a quick glance. “God can use even a wizard for His purposes.”

  “Glad to be of service,” I mumbled.

  Ascelin and Dominic found the Wadi Harhammi on an old, yellowed map they came across in the bottom of the map drawer of a dark bookstore in the oldest part of the city. None of the newer maps, even the most detailed, included it.

  It seemed from the rather confused symbols the mapmaker had used to be up in the stony hills a few days’ journey south of the emirate of Bahdroc. But the map showed no road leading to the Wadi.

  “Do you still want to go there?” asked Ascelin. We all sat on the floor, crowded into the king’s room in the pilgrims’ hospice. “That mage certainly knew about the Wadi. I’m afraid we don’t have much hope of being the first there-even if no one else had reached there already in the last fifty years.”

  “We may have to face the mage wherever we go,” said Dominic. “I’m beginning to wonder if he’s been toying with us, to let us travel all the way unmolested from Xantium to the Holy City.”

  “And don’t forget King Warin,” said Hugo. “He stole Arnulf’s onyx ring from us on purpose to buy the flying horse, which by now has certainly taken him to the Wadi if that’s where he was going.”

  “That is,” I put in, “unless Arnulf’s agents somehow managed to get the horse away from Kaz-alrhun first-after all, when I last saw them they seemed to think the horse was now legally Arnulf’s.”

  “We should go south in any event,” said the king, “because that is the direction Sir Hugo’s party took. As the mage mentioned the Wadi Harhammi to us, he may also have mentioned it to them. We can ask after them in the oases along the way, and if we reach the emir’s city without word perhaps we can enlist his aid.”

  Maffi sat in the corner, following the discussion with bright eyes but saying nothing. I wondered uneasily if he was acting as Kaz-alrhun’s agent. If so, I couldn’t see how even a mage could get information from him while he stayed as close to us as Ascelin made sure he did.

  Dominic looked at his hands, where the ruby of his ring shone in the candle light. “I shall travel to the Wadi, whether the rest of you wish to accompany me past the emir’s city or not. My father died with it in his thoughts. We were too foolish for fifty years to realize there was a message hidden in this ring, but even if I’m far too late I must get there at last.”

  Dominic glanced toward the king for confirmation as he finished, but the rest of us were already slowly nodding. This had been King Haimeric’s pilgrimage, but we had now completed that aspect of the journey. Somewhere between Dominic’s father’s grave and the Holy City, his quest and the search for Sir Hugo had become fused.

  “I agree with you, Dominic,” said King Haimeric. “We should carry out my brother’s last wishes and at least try to find whatever he and his wizard thought was hidden in there. Tomorrow morning we can send a message to the queen, by those pilgrims who said they were heading straight back to the City, so that she’ll know we’ve been delayed.”

  “Whether we find anything in the Wadi or not,” said Hugo, “the emir’s city will be the best place to look for my father’s tracks.”

  “It should also be the best place to find the blue rose,” commented the king, brightening.

  Ascelin rose to his feet and stretched, his hands brushing the ceiling. “Then tomorrow we’d better buy provisions,” he said, “including more waterskins. It’s going to be a dry journey.”

  II

  The Holy City was at the southern end of David’s Kingdom. Beyond the city, once we left behind the irrigated vineyards and olive trees, a land I had thought was already dry became even drier. The sky stretched for a thousand miles above us, cloudless and pale. The last remains of western civilization were left behind.

  Ascelin had bought us all, including Maffi, densely-woven white robes to replace our badly worn pilgrimage cloaks. I examined mine critically and decided it was made of goat’s hair. I had been afraid the long robes would make us even hotter, but instead they reflected away the sunlight. The deep folds of the head dresses shaded our eyes, and as long as we moved no more than necessary and stopped to rest in whatever shade we could find in the middle of the day, the dryness was more of a problem than the heat.

  I had expected the desert to be completely barren, but even here plants grew, scrubby gray-green bushes spaced far apart, though the soil between them was bare and stony. The low, steady wind kept up a continuous murmur in the bushes. It sounded like someone speaking, just too softly to hear, a commentary in the background that we could not understand and never quite ignore. In the early morning and late afternoon lizards scampered across the open spots, but in the middle of the day the only living creature we saw, other than ourselves, was the occasional snake or high, soaring bird.

  Fortunately the road we followed led from oasis to oasis, spaced a day’s journey apart, so that we could drink deeply of the alkaline water and refill the containers for ourselves and our horses. Sometimes the water merely seeped into a shallow depression scraped out between the palm trees, but usually there was a round basin, surprisingly deep, in which the water looked black though it ran clear when we ladled it out. Ascelin warned us to be sure to shake out our boots every morning in case scorpions had crawled in during the night.

  At the oases we exchanged a few words with other travelers, but there were not a lot of them, for the major trade routes between Xantium and the emir’s city toward which we were heading did not detour through the Holy City. A line of jagged mountains, like teeth two thousand feet high, lay to our right, separating us from the main north-south roads.

  For the most part the other travelers kept to their tents and we kept to ours. But always when Dominic was rubbing down Whirlwind at least one man wandered over, as though casually, to look the stallion over and remark on his size and strength. Whirlwind snorted both at them and at their own horses.

  As the long, dry days succeeded each other, I kept looking for Kaz-alrhun, with or without the ebony horse, to swoop down on us from the sky, but he did not appear. I found myself hoping that if he did attack us he would do so soon, before we spent any m
ore days crawling through this enormous and rocky landscape.

  In the cool of the long desert evenings I tried without success to find the secret of the spell of the onyx ring. Maffi sat next to me, silent while I concentrated, his bony knees drawn up.

  All I could be sure of was what I had discovered immediately, that it was a school spell, which meant technical and complicated. If it had indeed been cast by Elerius, the best wizard the school had ever produced, I was afraid that meant it was too powerful for my resources. Maybe I would have done better my whole career if I’d tried learning eastern magic.

  I teased at the edges of the spell and suddenly thought I had caught a loose, revealing thread of its magic construction, but when I tried to follow it up I only discovered a large black spot before my eyes, as though I were somehow looking into the center of the onyx.

  I put the ring back on my finger without learning any more of its secrets and took out Melecherius on Eastern Magic. I still hoped that somewhere in its pages was something that I could use against an Ifrit, if we met one guarding the secret of the Wadi Harhammi.

  Melecherius was no more helpful this evening than he had been the evening before. Ifriti, the book told me with what I was increasingly sure was not first-hand knowledge, were essentially immortal, as full of unchanneled magic as dragons, and as dangerous. “Have you ever seen an Ifrit?” I asked Maffi.

  “No,” he said thoughtfully, “but I know how to deal with them!”

  “You do?” I asked in surprise.

  “Of course. The tales tell all about it. Ifriti are cunning, but they’re also stupid-a bad combination. If you accidentally let one out of a bottle where it’s been imprisoned by some great spell in the past, you can always get it to go back in by taunting it. Tell it you can’t believe it ever fit in a space so small, and when it crawls back in to show you quickly slap in the binding stopper!”