Is This Apocalypse Necessary

by C. Dale Brittain

  So in spite of all three riders on the flying carpet waving and pointing to indicate that we should stop and ask hospitality at the enormous castle that sprawled at the mountains' knees, I led us onward, to another cold camp but a safe one. Here at least the snow had not yet to begin to blow.

  "I have another idea to coax this skull into compliance," Maffi announced. I let him have it, along with the map of Yurt, not expecting him to have any more success than I had had up in the mountains.

  But the moment he had the crystals before his eyes, he gave a shout. "God be praised, it is working!"

  I snatched it from him without even a word of thanks and pressed the skull to my own face. He was right. Before me Yurt came to life.

  "We mages of Xantium have many abilities," said Maffi airily, trying to suggest without actually saying so that his magic had finally made it work.

  "I think," said Hadwidis loyally, "that Daimbert had done all the spells correctly, and you just triggered it."

  "No, no," I said absently, staring until my eyes hurt. "I think the skull just has a limited range, and can only show you the region where you are. It's a good thing, Maffi, that we didn't spoil its inherent spells trying to work on it." But even as I spoke my mind was far away.

  There was the white castle of Yurt, banners flying from the towers. There was the brick road that led down the hill into the woods. There was one village, and another. There was the nunnery of Yurt. If I shifted my gaze cautiously, I could see the limestone plateau into which the river which bubbled up by the Cranky Saint's shrine had cut its deep bed. It all looked very peaceful.

  I lowered the skull and looked toward Gwennie, sitting still and white-faced. "Nothing seems to be happening there," I said. "No marching armies, no volcanic craters, no fire-blackened woods."

  "Can I see?" she asked in a small voice.

  I had been about to raise the skull to my face again, but I nodded and handed it to her instead, hiding my surprise. Most people who are not trained as wizards prefer to watch from a safe distance, and Gwennie had never shown any inclination before to try a spell.

  Even now she hesitated, holding the skull with the very tips of her fingers. "If it will work here in the Western Kingdoms," she said, "why didn't Vlad bring it to Yurt when he came, rather than leaving it behind in his castle?" She was trying to speak casually, but she gave an involuntary shiver, both I guessed from holding something Vlad had made and from her memories of his magic. Hers must be as vivid as mine.

  "He didn't have a map of the West," I said. "Remember, he had trouble even finding Yurt." And I wished he'd had a whole lot more trouble. "And once he was there, it was easier just to look around than to try to create a map of what was right before his eyes."

  She nodded and took a deep breath, then lifted the skull to look through the crystals. She looked for several minutes, not speaking, and finally lowered it.

  "The king is not at home," she said at last, somewhat distantly.

  "He might be inside the castle," Hadwidis suggested. A glance indicated she was itching to try the skull herself. "So you couldn't see him."

  Gwennie shook her head, handing me back the skull and wiping her fingers on the grass. "His royal flag is not flying," she said. "Ever since I have been constable I have made sure always to fly his flag when he is in residence."

  I met her eyes. Both of us were wondering where he was— and if he had decided to try to find adventure in my absence by galloping off after Elerius.

  Hadwidis started to lift the skull from my lap, then stopped. "I really don't need to see what's going on in the nunnery of Yurt," she said. "I already have much too clear an idea. I'm going to draw my kingdom."

  The wind kept catching the paper, and the flickering firelight gave her little enough to see by, but she drew determinedly, tongue between her teeth. "I may not have been there for a few years," she said, "but I was born there. The nuns didn't make me forget."

  In fifteen minutes she had drawn a fairly detailed map, the area around the royal castle the most sharply-drawn, the villages and a seaport sketched more roughly, the rivers traced carefully, hills, valleys, and forests indicated with a tangle of pencil strokes. "Now, I'm going to see what my mother is doing. The nuns wouldn't let me go home even for my father's funeral, but they can't stop me now!"

  She took the skull mask gingerly, peered through the crystals, then gave a startled cry and dropped it. But she snatched it up again before I could react and raised it again, this time more slowly.

  We waited, holding our breaths, for her to speak. Her eyes, distorted by the crystals, flicked up and down, back and forth. Then abruptly she hurled the skull aside and threw herself into my arms.

  "It's horrible, Wizard!" she cried, on the edge of tears. "Why did the Cranky Saint want me to leave the nunnery? Why couldn't I just stay there? Does he expect me to deal with this?"

  Gently I eased her out of my lap and took up the skull myself. I had wanted to know what was happening in the Western Kingdoms, and now I was going to find out. An old saying flashed through my mind, about not asking a question if you don't want to learn the answer.

  As I put the mask to my face, Hadwidis's penciled map came alive, lit from within. It was night in her kingdom as it was night here, but as I looked through the skull light seemed to follow my gaze. There was the great castle where Elerius was Royal Wizard, where Hadwidis and her half-brother, Elerius's son, had grown up. The courtyard was packed with tents; an army appeared bivouacked there. Up in the towers magic lanterns burned, and through the windows I could see tiny figures passing back and forth against the light.

  Cautiously, reluctantly, I moved my eyes from an examination of the dark towers to the surrounding territory. Here again were encamped armies, watchfires burning.

  Armies! Tents and fires seemed to stretch to the horizon. Thousands of soldiers were there, tens of thousands. They were settling down for the night now, but sentries walked between the tents, and horses stamped and shook their manes. Shields hung from the tent posts. I doubted so many armed men had been assembled in one spot since the Black Wars. Feeling ill, I identified among the flags the royal insignia of Yurt. While I had been gone, Elerius must have retreated to his kingdom, protected by warriors and powerful spells, and much of the rest of the Western Kingdoms were assembling on his doorstep.

  That they had not yet overpowered Elerius with their superior numbers suggested that his protective spells were holding. Either that, or human armies were reluctant to march into battle against undead creatures of hair and bone. And how many wizards might have joined him, to add their magic to his?

  "They're attacking my mother and my little brother," Hadwidis said brokenly, and Gwennie tried unsuccessfully to comfort her.

  It would take months, I thought, to starve Elerius out, much too long to keep an attacking army the size of that one calm and quiet. The kings of the West, delighted to have an excuse for war after generations of peace, must be eagerly anticipating an open battle. All too soon, one of the kings would charge, then all would charge, and it would be impossible to restore peace out of the resulting carnage.

  For several minutes, Maffi had been trying to get my attention. At last I handed him the skull and closed my eyes, trying unsuccessfully to get the image from my mind. I had been thinking I needed to find a way to keep Elerius from becoming head of the wizards' school. That would have been hard enough, but now I was also going to have to find a way to keep thousands of eager warriors from killing each other.

  II

  All of us now were eager for speed, but Naurag didn't like to fly at night, and even Maffi was reluctant to pilot the flying carpet through darkness across kingdoms he didn't know. We were still nowhere near either Yurt or Elerius's kingdom when I decided late the following evening that we had to stop for the night.

  I had recognized a castle. It was a small castle, built on a bridge arching across a placid river, where a family of swans swam and sheep grazed by the riverbank. The castle
had a very distinctive roof: bright blue tiles, and gold leaf reflecting the last rays of sun from the peak of each tower. We had stopped there twenty years ago on our way to Xantium; the castellan, I recalled, had had a mother who was fourth cousin or something to King Paul's father, the old king of Yurt, and he had been delighted then to put us up.

  The same castellan was still there, grayer but still hospitable. He didn't remember me, but he did remember old King Haimeric. "So how did that quest of his ever turn out?" he asked, while his servants bustled around to prepare rooms for us. We had left Naurag and the flying carpet over the next hill, but we must still have appeared a rather ill-assorted and scruffy bunch, standing inside the front doors on his blue-veined marble floor.

  "It was exciting and dangerous," I said truthfully, "but in the end I think we all found our hearts' desire."

  "Well, I was very glad to welcome your group then," he said cordially, "and I'm happy to welcome all of you for Haimeric's sake. I'm afraid we've already had dinner—would you mind if we brought trays to your rooms? We do want to hear in the morning about your adventures, however. We see very few travelers, since we're well off the main routes. And you say you're coming from the Eastern Kingdoms? It must be quite a journey on foot!"

  Hadwidis, at least with a scarf on, now looked more like someone who had had a disastrous haircut than a runaway nun, but I still would have had trouble explaining why a wizard and a man with the olive skin of the East were wandering westward, without any apparent means of transportation, accompanied by two young women. Fortunately he didn't ask. His servants showed us to small but gracious guest rooms where we could hear the river rippling below and told us that our baths would be ready in just a few minutes.

  "Let me show you something, Wizard," said the castellan proudly as the other were getting settled. "I've recently had a telephone installed!"

  I made polite sounds; magic telephones had been common in the Western Kingdoms for over fifty years, but a remote castle like this, which didn't have its own wizard, might be well behind the times.

  "I had the Royal Wizard come out from my king's court this summer to install it," he continued, showing me a very ordinary glass telephone sitting on a red velvet cushion. "I believe he had just graduated from that wizards' school of yours. A very serious young man he is. His name, I believe, is Levi."

  The name was familiar. I didn't know very many of the younger wizards—other than Whitey and Chin, and I wouldn't say we had ever been properly introduced. But the name Levi teased my memory— Then I remembered. Levi was one of the few of the Children of Abraham ever to study western wizardry.

  Most of the teachers at the school had probably been brought up as nominal Christians, but since they made a point of being above issues of the Church, Levi's religious background would not have concerned them in the slightest. I wondered without much curiosity whether it still concerned him.

  "I made sure," the castellan continued, "that he put the Daimbert-attachment on my telephone."

  "Daimbert-attachment? Oh, yes, yes!" With difficulty I managed to turn the surprise of hearing my own name into a burst of approval. Most telephones these days had a far-seeing attachment, such as I had invented when first out of school, but I had not before realized it was named after me. The time when my major concern about the school was whether they were going to let me graduate—or retroactively take my diploma back—seemed impossibly distant.

  "Do you happen to know," the castellan asked with a frown, "if it's named for the same wizard Daimbert as the one they're all talking about these days?"

  All talking about these days? I made a noncommital murmur, doubtless confirming his opinion that I was mostly inarticulate. Who was talking about me, and what were they saying? Clearly in the time I had been gone more had been happening than a skull and an ensorcelled map were likely to tell me.

  I excused myself and started toward the guest rooms, hoping that a hot bath would restore some rationality. Behind me I could hear the glass telephone ringing.

  The castellan caught up to me at the door to my room. "I'm afraid I didn't catch your name—is it Daimbert too? It's a more popular name among wizards than I realized!"

  Elerius had found me, I thought. Well, too late to wonder how he knew where I was or to try to evade him again. Nothing to do but face him. I licked my dry lips and squared my shoulders. "Yes, I'm Daimbert."

  "You have a telephone call."

  * * * *

  But the base of the glass telephone showed not the black-bearded wizard but rather Joachim. The bishop of Caelrhon was smiling as I had seldom seen him smile as I gasped out, "Hello?"

  "Welcome back to the living, Daimbert." It would have been gratifying to see how extremely pleased he was to be talking to me, if I hadn't been so startled.

  "Um, well, I've never actually been gone," I mumbled.

  "So I gather."

  "But how did you know?" I burst out. "How did you find me? I hadn't know myself that we would be stopping here until an hour ago." If the bishop could find me, Elerius surely would be next.

  "Your daughter told me."

  "Antonia!" She had seen me alive and well before I left Yurt for the East, but I had never expected her to start telling everybody.

  But the bishop said, almost apologetically, "She did not feel she could lie to me when I asked her. I do not believe she has told anyone else—not even Theodora. You see, Daimbert," he went on when I did not respond, "I was worried about my god-daughter. Death is always particularly difficult for children to accept, yet if they do not accept it the healing cannot begin. And Antonia continued to act as though she thought you were coming back. She did not mourn, she did not seem distracted from her normal activities, she did not come to ask me why God had taken you or if I was sure you were in heaven—which, in fact," he added dryly, "I was, in case you were about to ask."

  I hadn't been about to ask him anything.

  "So I requested that she come to my office in the cathedral for a discussion today," Joachim continued.

  Today. That meant that Theodora and Antonia were still safely in Caelrhon, not with the armies besieging Elerius's castle.

  "She and Theodora have been living in the cathedral this last month, you see, at my invitation. I hope you don't mind, Daimbert. But I thought that even Elerius would not attack them there. They have gone out only for errands and for Antonia's schooling. It was when I talked to her today that she informed me that you were hiding from Elerius but had a secret plan.

  "I am sorry to tell you, Daimbert, that at first I did not believe her. This is not because I have ever suspected your daughter of being less than truthful, but rather because the force of my own sorrow seemed so strong against the faith of a child. As a bishop, I should have known better. This evening I prayed to Saint Eusebius, prayed between sorrow and hope that I might know the truth. And I must have slept, exhausted with uncertainty, for the saint appeared to me in a vision."

  For a moment a shadow passed across his image in the glass telephone. I had never seen the Cranky Saint face to face, and I could only be glad that it had happened to the bishop, not to me. A feeling like tiny footsteps went down my spine. What plan could the saint have, and why did he persist in being so interested in me?

  "He told me where I might find you," said Joachim, smiling again. "I remember that little castle well from our quest with old King Haimeric. A pleasant resting spot on a dangerous trip. Are there still swans in the river outside the guest room windows?"

  I took a deep breath. "Yes, the swans are still here. But what's been happening in the West? I—I understand that armies are gathering in Elerius's kingdom," not wanting to get into long explanations about the magic skull. "How many wizards does he have on his side? Is it going to be open war? And what's this about everyone talking about me?"

  Joachim abruptly looked more sober, though he still kept smiling as though he couldn't help himself, every time our eyes met. "Your information is correct. Half the kings of the Wes
t have declared war on Elerius, including King Paul of Yurt. Because you served him, he is in fact considered the leader. I understand that at least one of the principal teachers of your school is opposing him, but Elerius also has wizards who support him. It all began at your funeral—were you really there, Daimbert, as Antonia says you were? If I had known you were listening, I might have tried to say something laudatory about you."

  Years ago I had decided Joachim had no sense of humor. More recently I had concluded he had one after all, but I could never predict what he might find amusing. "What's this about Paul being the leader?"

  "Well, once it became clear at your funeral to that old teacher of yours—Zahlfast, is that right?—that the school's late Master had designated you as his successor, and we thought Saint Eusebius was telling us that Elerius had killed you, it was decided that all opposition to Elerius would be carried out in your name. I might," looking somewhere over my head, "have had something to do with the decision. So Paul, as the king most closely associated with the martyr Daimbert, has rallied the other kings. Oh, you'll also be pleased to hear that any differences between Paul and King Lucas of Caelrhon have been healed, now that Lucas realizes that the enemy is not wizardry in general but one wizard. And I'm sure you'll also be pleased to hear that the new bishop of the great City has realized his association with Elerius has stained him, and he has already resigned."

  Since I really didn't care who was bishop of the City and had never had much use for King Lucas, I wasn't as pleased as he seemed to think I should be. Especially I didn't like the idea that the grim army I had seen gathered around Elerius's castle was preparing to make war in my name. "It can't be allowed to come to fighting, Joachim," I said quietly. "First the warriors will kill each other, then the wizards will start, and no one anywhere in the West will be safe. The war must be stopped before it begins."

  He nodded, his enormous dark eyes holding mine. "That is part of the reason I am so happy to see you, Daimbert, even aside from my joy in knowing that our years of friendship have not ended after all. Because I know that you will be able to stop Elerius without bloodshed."