Is This Apocalypse Necessary
Page 20
Nestling birds, all eyes and beaks and disordered pin-feathers, are always ugly. Newly-hatched rocs proved to be as much uglier than standard as their parents are bigger than standard. Squawking fiercely, they jostled each other and opened their beaks for a bite of sheep.
I turned myself invisible just in time. The parent roc opened its talons and dropped me toward those open mouths. With a quick spell, I kept myself from falling and darted over to the edge of the nest.
The baby birds screamed in frustration when the "sheep" vanished from in front of their beaks. The adult roc settled itself, sending the whole nest creaking and swaying, and looked around in surprise. Then it started examining its nest, a log at a time, turning over the branches and slicing at them with its great hooked beak. It appeared as if it were hunting me by feel and by smell.
In which case, invisibility wouldn't work for long. I waited until the roc's head was turned the other way and dropped my invisibility spell for a new illusory appearance. When the roc turned toward me again, there were not three but four baby rocs in its nest.
It was not the most realistic illusion I had ever done, but it was the best I could manage on a few seconds' notice. Someone had once told me birds can't count, and I prayed it was true. The roc's enormous yellow eye fixed me, and I tried waggling my immature wings to give an air of verisimilitude.
The monstrous orange head bent down, and for a horrified second, as the great hooked beak came closer, I thought my illusion hadn't worked at all. But the roc instead seemed to feel parental concern for me. I had been perched on the very edge of the nest, and it now used the side of its beak to jostle me back toward the center, where I would be safe from falling. Concentrating on keeping my illusion going, I let myself be jostled. As half-decayed—or possibly regurgitated?—meat smeared against me, I thought that at least I must now smell like everything else in the nest.
Since there seemed to be no sheep here and the three genuine baby birds were still protesting, the parent roc rose again. The backwash from its wings pressed all of us down. As it soared away, I scrambled through the tangle of branches in search of what I had seen glittering there. I had a few minutes to find whatever the Ifrit wanted before the roc came back.
It looked as though it had, like a magpie, picked up anything shiny that caught its eye. I ignored the swords and bits of armor that were scattered throughout the nest but filled my pockets with shiny rocks—hard to tell, crusted with birdlime as they were, if they were precious stones or just flecked with mica. I tossed scraps of colored cloth aside, rejected a collection of bronze amphoras, and then saw something that winked like gold.
It was under a heavy log. Letting my illusory nestling appearance dissolve from off my back, I applied a lifting spell to the log, just enough to use magic to snatch the object up. There was a squawk directly behind me. I whirled around to see the three young rocs glaring at me suspiciously. Each of them was appreciably bigger than I was. They might be too young to fly, but those beaks were sharp. Madly I tried to reassemble my disintegrating appearance of a newly-hatched bird. They did not seem impressed. The one in the lead lifted a foot where the baby talons were already sharp and pushed.
I lifted into the air just too late to keep my leg from being wrenched between branches of the nest. I gave a completely un-roc-like cry of pain, finding it impossible to keep my illusion going as I jerked the leg free and moved rapidly backwards. I was still trying with magic to hang onto whatever object I had just picked up, plus the theoretically valuable stones now starting to work their way out of my pockets.
The nestlings advanced again. Human or baby roc, they didn't want me in their nest.
My rather limited knowledge of the natural history of birds flashed through my mind. I had the vague memory that in many species the nestlings would drive from the nest any of their number that seemed small or weak. As a baby bird I must seem remarkably defective. All three aimed their beaks at me.
I sprang back again, just in time. "That's fine," I told them from a safe distance. "If you don't want me in your nest, I don't want to be here either." I took a quick glance over my shoulder and saw, off in the distance but quickly coming closer, the roc returning. It must have found one of its scattered sheep—and I fervently hoped not one of the black dogs.
The Ifrit was just going to have to be satisfied with what I'd already collected. I shot away from the nest and hid among the cedar trees until the roc's great shadow had passed overhead. I tried moving my leg experimentally to find out if it was broken or just strained, but it hurt too much to tell. Then, the squawks of the now-satisfied baby rocs ringing in my ears, I flew as fast as I could back toward the ruined temple where I had left the Ifrit.
But what was this I was holding? I looked down as I flew at the golden object, the last thing I had picked out of the nest. Alone of everything I had grabbed, it was clean of filth. It seemed to be a circular plate, about six inches across, carved with symbols I didn't recognize, and attached at the back to a sturdy handle. It looked like nothing so much as an oversize signet, for impressing a seal in wax.
The Ifrit was seated cross-legged on the grass when I returned, seemingly absorbed in two tiny creatures. As I landed on my good leg a short distance away I realized they only appeared tiny in contrast to his size. It was the black dogs.
"Now roll over," the Ifrit was saying. "Sit up! And beg! Good girl. Speak! Roll over again." Gwennie and Hadwidis were rolling and sitting for their lives.
I shuffled the contents of my pockets quickly and flew forward. "I brought back everything of yours from the roc's nest," I said loudly and confidently. I sat down in front of him as casually as I could, not about to let him see I was injured. "You may want to clean these up a little, but here they are." I spread the stones I had gathered out on the grass by the Ifrit's foot, retaining only the gold signet.
He turned toward me, irritated. "These dogs are much more amusing than you are, little mage," he said accusingly. "They're very smart and understand everything I say."
They were also going to kill me for leaving them as dogs for so long, even though I had a very good reason. They flopped down, panting, in the shadow of the Ifrit's knee.
"You are also filthy," added the Ifrit. But he bent, interested, over the stones and stirred them with a stick. After a minute he gave a disgusted snort. "Diamonds and rubies and emeralds. Is this all you could find?"
"The roc had some brightly-colored cloth," I offered. "And there were weapons and armor, some of it pretty rusty."
"Nothing of mine," said the Ifrit dismissively. "Are you sure I have to keep you safe? I told you to work the simplest magic, and you wouldn't, and now you have tried to keep me from getting back my rightful property from the roc. I ought to just crush you, Yurt or no Yurt."
II
The sound of barking interrupted us before I could find out whether the Ifrit was just threatening or was deadly serious. Real sheepdogs tore up the hill toward us, furious. I was just thinking that if they were supposed to be guarding the sheep they had been doing a remarkably poor job, when they launched themselves at Gwennie and Hadwidis.
Hadwidis, the dog with the nearly bare scalp, was totally unprepared. The sheepdogs' rush knocked her from her feet, and one sprang for her throat. But Gwennie recognized the danger and reacted at once. With a great growl she leaped in front of Hadwidis, barking defiance. For one moment, surprised by her fierceness, the sheepdogs fell back, then they growled and went for her.
It was impossible to sort out the snarling tangle of fur and fangs. The only way to stop the fighting was to stop them all. In a second I had paralyzed all the dogs. The Ifrit cocked his head, as though deciding that this might prove amusing after all.
Madly I started disentangling their inert forms. Paralyzed, they could move no muscles other than to breathe. There were six sheepdogs to my two; Gwennie's brave defense couldn't have held up more than a few seconds longer. She and Hadwidis both had cuts, but hers looked more serious.
They stopped dead on seeing the Ifrit—as well they might. Their swarthy faces became paler, and they staggered as though their legs would scarcely support them. But the Ifrit ignored them. He instead picked up the two black dogs in his hand and held them close to his face, making soothing sounds. If he thought he was making the dogs feel less distressed, I could have told him it wouldn't help.
But with them out of the way I could safely free the sheepdogs from my spell. In a moment they bounded up, looked around for the missing enemy, and seemed to focus on the Ifrit for the first time. They gave startled yelps then, and, spotting the men, raced to them, barking frantically. One dog was limping where Gwennie had gotten his foot between her jaws.
I flew to meet the shepherds and tried to land casually on both feet, though it required magic to keep me vertical. Compared to seeing the Ifrit, meeting a wizard didn't seem to bother these men at all. "You'd better get out of here," I said quietly, looking back over my shoulder. "The Ifrit's totally unpredictable. And there's a roc that comes to this hill to take sheep. No telling when it will be here again."
One of the men recovered from his shock enough to frown at me—or maybe at my filthy clothes. "Of course. It is our roc."
"Your roc?" I felt hopelessly inadequate. These men were not magic-workers, yet they could speak proprietarily of a bird the size of a whale. I noticed that, for shepherds, they wore very expensive clothing—far nicer than mine had been even before I was dragged through the roc's nest.
"Well," said another shepherd, keeping a wary eye on the Ifrit, "not ours the way these dogs are ours." That was a relief to hear. "But we make sure there are always sheep on this hillside—we bring out the dogs periodically to keep the sheep from straying, and to keep anyone else from pasturing their flocks here. That way we can be sure that the roc does not site its nest anywhere else. And that means that in the winter, when the roc abandons its nest for warmer climates, we can freely climb up its peak and search it for treasure."
"The Ifrit brought me and my dogs here," I said apologetically. "I had no intention of interfering with your flocks. I'm afraid that when your dogs attacked mine, mine fought back."
"Flea-bitten old thing," said the first man dismissively, aiming a kick. He was, I thought, so thoroughly frightened of the Ifrit that he was taking out his fear on his wounded dog.
The small pile of precious stones by the Ifrit's foot might, in these men's eyes, belong to them. "I got carried up to the roc's nest," I continued, still apologetic. "That's what I took, those stones over there. I thought they might mollify the Ifrit but they didn't. Do you want them?"
But fear of approaching the Ifrit was far stronger than any greed. "No, no, anything you gathered, you can keep. We'll be back some other day." And, whistling the dogs to them, the men hastened away back over the hill.
I should have asked them if we were anywhere near Xantium, I realized. All the landmarks were unfamiliar—no telling how far the Ifrit had brought us. Somehow I was going to have to either evade the Ifrit and get back to Xantium, or else persuade him that keeping people from Yurt safe meant following me back to the West to oppose Elerius.
In the meantime, what did I have in my pocket? Down at the bottom I still had the diamond ring Paul had tried to offer both Gwennie and the Princess Margareta, but on top of it was the strange oversized signet I had found in the roc's nest. Heartlessly I turned my back on the Ifrit and the dogs, whom he was still stroking with a massive fingertip, to give the thing a better look.
It was a signet all right, carved with letters and symbols that I could not read. But something about it teased at my memory. I was sure I had seen a bottle somewhere, sealed in lead, with this exact imprint in it. It had been—
It was a bottle in which this Ifrit was once imprisoned. I was holding the dread seal of Solomon, son of David.
* * * *
"I'll threaten the Ifrit with this, and he'll have to obey me," was my first triumphant thought. I might not have been able to get the Dragons' Sceptre, but if I could command the Ifrit with this the effect would be the same. The certainty that this seal was exactly what the Ifrit was hoping to find in the roc's nest made my triumph all the sweeter.
But in the next minute I began to have doubts that it could be this easy. If the seal of Solomon itself conferred authority over Ifriti, then the royal Sons of David wouldn't have had nearly as many problems, what with the Great Captivity, the Empire, and the followers of the Prophet, over the last few millennia. It might well have been stolen from them at some point and been wandering around the East ever since, but if anybody had been able to use it to command Ifriti, I should have heard about it.
King Solomon had, it was true, imbued his Black Pearl with some of his greatest powers many, many centuries ago, but the Pearl was now lost beyond recovery in the Outer Sea. Solomon was unlikely to have imbued two different artifacts with his magic. The seal might have the power to keep an Ifrit closed up in a bottle, but to get the effect one would have to capture an Ifrit and imprison it in the first place.
"I think I'll keep these dogs," announced the Ifrit in his rumbling voice. "They remind me of my wife. The only problem with dogs," he added thoughtfully, "is that they die as easily and senselessly as you humans. I've seen it."
"They're really my dogs," I objected, stuffing the signet back in my pocket. "They would miss me if they stayed with you." I didn't know how much longer I could keep this up, distracting the Ifrit from killing me or demanding impossible things, while trying to keep an eye on him so he didn't accidentally crush the dogs he claimed to like so much. My leg was hurting worse than ever. And there was no telling when the baby rocs would become hungry again.
"You could stay here too," conceded the Ifrit, "though if you don't stop wiggling out of everything I ask I shall cease finding you amusing."
"I've heard," I said cunningly, "that you were once imprisoned in a bottle. Can this be true? Can a creature as large as you have ever fit in a bottle? I can't believe it. You'll have to show me."
"Nice try, little mage," growled the Ifrit. "That's one of the oldest tricks there is."
Something was flying toward us. The roc again? But this didn't look big enough to be the roc. And it was purple.
A trumpeting call reached me. I sprang up with delight, which brought a stab of pain to my leg. It was Naurag. But something was chasing him, something that resolved itself as it came closer into a flying carpet: dark red and carrying two people. Kaz-alrhun had decided to join us after all.
* * * *
I threw my arms around Naurag's neck as he landed, and the two black dogs, escaping the Ifrit while his attention was diverted, jumped around him, barking in welcome. Naurag didn't know what to make of the dogs.
No telling whether Naurag and the mage had come together or whether the flying beast had escaped from Kaz-alrhun's house and sought us out while hotly pursued. The flying carpet landed a short distance away, and Maffi and Kaz-alrhun stepped off, the first almost lazily, the second with a bounce.
The older mage was carrying a bottle: a bronze bottle shaped like a cucumber.
Unsealed, I saw. And I certainly didn't have any lead to heat to try to make an impression of the signet. I would have to improvise.
Kaz-alrhun and the Ifrit eyed each other, both giving massive frowns. "I kept our agreement and did not summon you," said the mage firmly, as fury seemed to be building in the Ifrit's green face.
"You humans always like to wiggle out of things," said the Ifrit darkly. "You sent this other mage instead."
Now was my chance, while neither one was paying attention to me. I snatched the bottle from Kaz-alrhun's hand before he could protest. Into it I tossed a pebble, then shook it so it rattled. "All right, Ifrit!" I shou
ted up to him. "It's time for me to confess. I found something else in the roc's nest, something you'd be very interested in. I've got it in here!"
The Ifrit turned his full attention from Kaz-alrhun to me, an evil glint in his enormous eyes. "This is a trick, little mage!" he announced—totally accurately, I could have told him. "You said you found nothing but those worthless jewels."
Maffi, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, had spotted the jewels and was picking them up, rubbing off the filth on his sleeve and eyeing them appreciatively.
"And this!" I said, shaking the bottle again. "If you don't believe me, have a look."
"You're just trying to trick me into there," said the Ifrit. Right again, I thought. "But the joke's on you, little mage! This bottle has no stopper—not that even a stopper would hinder me!"
I continued holding the bottle up toward him, trying not to tremble. With a shrug, the Ifrit suddenly started going misty around the edges. "I'll see what you have in there, and if this is all a trick, this time I really will slay you!" His face lit up in a fierce grin. "Painfully, too. Though perhaps you should thank me. This way you will not have to live the rest of your miserable human existence!"
His voice faded out as his enormous frame finished dissolving into smoke. The smoke, a dark green smudge in the clear air, shot into the bronze bottle. And I slapped the great seal of Solomon across the opening.
"What is this? This is just a pebble!" came the Ifrit's voice from inside, tiny now, not much more than an insect's whine. But he was rattling the seal, in spite of my best effort to hold it tight to the mouth of the bottle. "Do you think you can hold me inside? Well, prepare to die, for—"