III
That last, I thought as I numbly replaced the telephone's receiver, was not something the saint had suggested to him. A saint would have had too much wisdom to suggest that a single, mildly competent wizard was going to stop a war that might be breaking out at this very moment. That was Joachim being wildly convinced, on the basis of whatever Antonia had told him, that I had a plan.
I didn't have a plan. All I had was a flying beast, a couple of books of spells, the rightful heir to Elerius's kingdom, and an Ifrit who was planning to dismember me the moment I opened his bottle.
When I emerged from my bath, the door to the women's room was closed, and Maffi was snoring peacefully on the far side of the chamber the castellan had given us. I set the candle on the table and took a few bites of the cold meat on the tray. Maffi had eaten most of the roast beef but left me all the ham.
Then I pulled out the ancient book of magic that I had carried to the dragon's den, to the Ifrit's lair, and back to the Western Kingdoms. Someone who had mastered dragons must have an idea how to overcome a supremely capable wizard.
Or, I thought, also setting out the volume Basil had given me, maybe eastern magic, repellent as it seemed, might give me some ideas. I finished the ham and started reading.
I awoke with my face pressed against parchment pages, my neck stiff, and the candle guttering by my hand. I pinched out the flame and rolled into bed for a few hours' sleep. Basil's spells were written in letters that had taken some deciphering, and as far as I had gotten they appeared better designed for someone like Elerius, who was not too squeamish about processes, than for me. And the old wizard Naurag seemed to be entirely silent on the topic of overcoming superior wizards, because he himself had been superior. In his day, I feared, even though he had apparently reminded the old Master of me, he would have been one of the wizards assisting Elerius by setting up powerful protective spells against King Paul and me.
But when I awoke again, before dawn, it was with an idea. I scribbled a note, tiptoed past Maffi's bed, eased the window all the way open, and flew out over the river. A mist obscured the riverbank, and a soft splash could have been a muskrat or the swans.
I flew straight up, over the mist, climbing into the morning sunlight until the air in my lungs started to thin. Using a far-seeing spell, I scanned the countryside in all directions. It was as vivid as Vlad's map of the Eastern Kingdoms when seen through the skull, but this was no product of magic, only itself, a landscape just awakening from sleep. From this height I could see for scores of miles and pick out several castles and manor houses, but only one big enough to be this kingdom's royal seat.
It was just barely late enough that one could decently ask for admittance when I reached the castle gates. I tried to straighten up a bit so as not to look too disreputable and finally had to add a layer of illusion to hide my worn and travel-stained clothing. Illusion also made my beard look tidy and brushed, since my comb was back with the luggage. The drawbridge of the royal castle was just being lowered for the day. Plenty of knights here, I noticed; we must still be far enough away that this king saw no reason to lead his troops into battle, either against or in support of Elerius. I crossed into the castle courtyard and asked to see Levi, the Royal Wizard.
He was eating breakfast in his study, tea and cinnamon crullers, when the castle constable announced me. A wave of homesickness hit me. I had done the same in Yurt for thirty years.
He looked up, smiling, and for a second I hoped he was going to offer me a cruller. But instead he froze in the middle of lowering his cup, slopping tea onto his flagstone floor. "You're Daimbert! You've risen from the dead!" Slowly, he started inching his chair backwards across the floor.
"I never actually was dead," I said crossly, not having time for this. "And I'm not a ghost," I added when his eyes stayed wide and round. "I need your help." I brought out King Solomon's seal, where the words of power were written in symbols I could not read. "I gather these are the letters originally used by Moses?"
Levi recovered a little after a moment, when I did not burst into spectral manifestations, and put his teacup carefully down. "What do you have there?"
I hooked a chair with my foot and sat down at the opposite side of the table. It took a little explanation, and I was starting to feel a desperate urgency. We needed to get to Elerius's kingdom immediately, and I also started wondering uneasily what Maffi might be doing back at the little castle. I had left the Ifrit in his bottle there among my luggage, worried that if I could learn from Levi to read the words of power on Solomon's seal, I might accidentally release the Ifrit while practicing. I didn't entirely trust Maffi not to start experimenting with the bottle on his own.
"So you see," I concluded, "to an ordinary learned person, even one who recognized the symbols, these words are unreadable, just as someone who had never learned the Hidden Language couldn't pick up a book of our western magic and start reading out spells. So I need someone who both understands the ancient writing of the Children of Abraham and is trained in magic. That is, I need you."
Levi still wouldn't touch the seal. The idea that it had belonged to King Solomon impressed him more than any spells that might be inherent in it. But he let me put it on the table and looked at it thoughtfully. Rather belatedly, he offered me tea and a cruller. Not enough cinnamon, I thought, biting hungrily into it. I noticed he was watching me out of the corner of his eye, to assure himself my spectral body really was eating.
At last he took a piece of paper, leaned closer to the gold seal, and started drawing. I was interested to note that he worked from right to left in reproducing the seal's symbols. His drawing was very careful and meticulous—just what you'd expect, I thought, of a wizard fresh from his training in the school's technical division. "The forms have changed over the centuries," he muttered, more to himself than to me, "but I am unlikely to mistake this one, or this one. And if this is indeed a vowel mark, and not just a scratch—"
"The signet is unscratched," I said. "Look at it. As smooth and clean as the day it was made. The spell's a binding spell, designed to hold fast whatever is sealed with the signet, if that's any help. I assume it's related to the binding spell they teach us at school, but this one will hold even against wild creatures of primordial magic."
But he was still drawing. I waited for several minutes, watching him try several different transcriptions. At last he looked up with an expression of triumph. "I think now I understand the words inscribed here, but I hesitate to speak them. After all, Solomon was the only man who ever filled all three functions, of king, of priest, of magic—" He broke off in the middle of a sentence, staring. "Daimbert, you are dead!"
My chair crashed to the floor as I jumped up and swung around, prepared to see Elerius. But the room was empty except for Levi and myself. "I'm as alive as I ever was," I said in irritation, turning back.
"The illusion of life is falling away," he mumbled with an expression of horror.
I looked down at myself and snorted. "Not the illusion of life, but the illusion of clean clothes. Take my hand. Feel me. Why are you so convinced that I'm a ghost?"
"You were eaten by a dragon at the instigation of Elerius," he said faintly.
"Then where are the teeth marks?" I demanded. The voice in the back of my mind wondered if the Cranky Saint, who had been eaten by a dragon, had identified with me because of the way I faked my death.
Levi took several minutes more of persuasion, but finally he returned to the seal. Young wizards, I thought in disgust. We teach them enormous earthly power, but any whiff of the supernatural still gives them the willies.
"I hesitate to speak the words," he finally continued, "both out of respect for Solomon son of David, and for fear of what might be bound by them."
"Good point," I said. "It would be nice, for example, to be able to get the door open again during our lifetimes. The crullers wouldn't last us nearly that long."
He gave me a dubious look, then seemed to decide if I was capab
le of joking I really wasn't a ghost after all. "But I believe the words, transcribed into the characters of the Hidden Language, would read like this."
I studied his piece of paper, stopping myself just in time from murmuring the words to myself. It wasn't any spell I recognized, though it suggested a much more powerful version of the magic lock we used in the west, and it had certain affinities to the spell I had twice heard Kaz-alrhun use. With this, if I ever got Elerius cornered, I might be able to bind him.
A test would have been useful, but I didn't dare try it any more than Levi did. "Thank you," I said, standing up. "You have helped me enormously." I thought of asking him not to tell anyone I was still alive, but it didn't seem worth it. I doubted a junior wizard at an out-of-the-way kingdom was spying for Elerius, and if he was, well, Elerius would know the truth very soon anyway.
Levi frowned. "Tell me again how you knew that I could help you read this spell."
"I'm acquainted with one of the castellans in this kingdom— the one for whom you installed a telephone this summer."
"So you were just passing through, and you just happened to stop there, and he just happened to mention that one of the few Children of Abraham trained as a wizard lived right down the road."
"That's right," I said, starting to feel uneasy. "Just a coincidence."
"Doesn't that seem to be ascribing a lot to coincidence?"
It did, now that I thought about it. "There's only one explanation," I said at last, not liking this at all. "The Cranky Saint. He's maneuvering me."
Levi rose to see me out. "You realize, of course, that we do not believe in the powers of saints."
It wasn't until I was half way back to the castle where I had left the others that it occurred to me to wonder whether by "we" he meant the wizards or the Children of Abraham.
* * * *
Back at the castle, the swans swam peacefully. This corner of the Western Kingdoms, I thought, might still escape destruction if war broke out, because the rest of us would have killed each other off long before the fighting spread this far. Now all I had to do was to make sure Yurt escaped as well.
The castellan and his family were plying my party with questions about our adventures. With Hadwidis worried about her mother and Gwennie thinking about King Paul, it was mostly left to Maffi to relate some of the marvels of Xantium.
I shot through the breakfast-room, tossing off an excuse, and gathered up our luggage for departure. The Ifrit's bottle was exactly where I had left it, sealed with lead inscribed with the words I now could read. Maffi hadn't touched it after all, and I felt guilty for having doubted him.
"It appears that I chose the best possible time to visit the West," he told me as we left at last, refusing the castellan's offer to lend us horses. We walked over the hill to where we had left the magic carpet and the flying beast. "Kaz-alrhun will regret having missed the excitement."
I could have missed the whole thing without regret myself. But I didn't seem to have much choice. We flew on west as fast as Naurag could fly.
We kept on as the sun sank, burning in front of us, casting the shadows of the hedgerow trees below far across the stubble of the fields. We kept flying as the sunset flared, then slowly faded, and the stars began to come out above us. And at last we saw the bulk of Elerius's castle, shimmering with spells, rising against the dark sky, with enemy watchfires burning all around.
An encampment of that many men will never be silent, but at this time of the evening it was fairly still, the clearest sounds being the occasional whinneys of the horses and the calls of the watchmen to each other. I flew Naurag directly next to the carpet and shaped an invisibility spell to cover all of us.
I had never tried to make so many different things invisible at the same time before, and the fringe of the carpet and the flying beast's wings kept emerging from the spell. But Maffi realized what I was doing and added his own magic to fill the gaps in mine. We didn't want to be shot full of arrows as we came in over the encampment.
The spell worked fine against the watchmen among the army's tents. We flew, unseen, over their heads, aiming toward the center where King Paul's standard flew. But if the armies didn't spot us, the wizards did.
IV
The carpet abruptly buckled, losing height rapidly. The women screamed—Maffi may have too. I abandoned the invisibility spell in preference for a lifting spell, in a wild effort to keep the carpet from crashing. My invisibility spell was being ripped from us anyway; only Maffi's spell on the carpet's fringe and on Naurag's wings remained.
Responding at last to my desperate magical commands, the carpet recovered itself ten feet from the ground and landed fairly gracefully, though Hadwidis's packages of new clothing tumbled off. Naurag folded his wings and came in smoothly, looking around with interest at the fire-lit camp, doubtless wondering if anyone had some melons.
I whirled, furious, to find the wizards who had come so close to getting Gwennie and Hadwidis killed. And there stood Whitey and Chin, the old Master's pet pupils, looking inordinately pleased with themselves.
"You didn't think you'd fool us twice with the same trick, did you, Daimbert?" asked Chin proudly. "Ever since you slipped away from us that time by making yourself invisible, we've been working on detecting invisibility spells in action and disabling them. Is that a real flying carpet?"
"You knew I was coming?" I demanded. Perhaps I had been wasting my time pretending to be dead.
"We found out just this morning," Whitey chimed in. "And nobody knows but us. Do you remember Levi, who graduated last summer? We've patched a phone connection through from the school to here, and he phoned us from his kingdom. Somehow, though he sounded rather incoherent when we talked to him, he'd found out you were alive—and all the time we'd thought you were dead!"
"If you were just trying to spot me," I said, unmollified, "why did you almost make the flying carpet crash?"
"That wasn't us," said Whitey without concern. "Elerius and the wizards with him are blocking all spells from working, next to his castle walls, and I'd guess he is doing the same for anything in the air. He hasn't touched our magic, though."
"And," said Chin with badly-concealed pride, "we've been working on very special magic, something the old Master first gave us as a project last year—to make illusions that will last a very long time."
"Great," I muttered. "So we'll send illusory armies against Elerius's quite real warriors." Maffi was looking around, intrigued; Gwennie strained to spot anyone from Yurt; and Hadwidis became suddenly shy, discovering herself in the middle of a crowd of interested soldiers, including many emerging from their tents clad only in their long shirts, to find out what was happening.
"Um, while you were dead, Daimbert," added Chin, abruptly much more serious, "did you happen to hear that Elerius has defied the masters of the school and declared himself the true head of all wizardry? And indeed of the Western Kingdoms?"
"But you'll be able to stop him!" said Whitey enthusiastically, without giving me a chance to respond. "After all, the Master made you his heir. That's why we didn't go along with the rest of the younger wizards and join Elerius. When Zahlfast took ill we knew it was up to us. So we've been working on our spells, and we're going to be able to assist you. We'll stop him together." He really was, I thought with an inward groan, a very young wizard.
Before I could find a way to break it to him gently that just because the Master had wanted me to succeed him didn't mean I had the slightest idea of what to do, I was distracted by a murmur moving through the crowd. "Daimbert! Daimbert lives. Daimbert has come back from the dead. Daimbert lives!"
Shivers went through me at the sound of the voices, first a few, then many, first spoken in terms of surprised acknowledgment, but then within a few seconds turning into a triumphant chant. "Well, wait!" I tried to say. "You see, I wasn't really—"
It was no use. The chant almost immediately had nothing to do with me. Sleepy soldiers crawled from their tents and took it up. Several b
egan banging their swords on their shields in rhythm. Even without magically amplified hearing, I thought wildly, those with Elerius in the castle must surely hear and understand.
And then I saw King Paul, striding through the encampment with his helmet cradled under one arm and his breastplate flashing in the firelight. He seemed somehow taller and more mature than when I had last seen him—maybe it was the armor. He saw me, stopped short while a smile of disbelief and joy lit up his face, then tossed his helmet aside to crush me in his mailed arms.
"You're solid flesh and bone! You've come back from the dead to save us!" he cried, letting me go but continuing to grin. I cautiously checked my ribs for cracks. "I always knew that Yurt had the best Royal Wizard in the West, but now all the other kings will know it too!"
It was going to be difficult to get anyone to believe I hadn't really been dead. In fact I had returned from death once, years ago, something that very few people outside of Yurt had ever known; I seemed now to be getting the credit for it a generation too late. My ruse with the air cart appeared to have worked all too well.
King Paul looked past me to my companions. Naurag he seemed to take as an air cart in the flickering fire light. "This is Hadwidis," I said, pushing her forward, "a princess who is the rightful heir to this kingdom." I left out entirely her career as a nun, and the issue of her rightful inheritance seemed to pass Paul by. I could see him preparing to introduce himself and to welcome her to this encampment, on the assumption that if she were with me then she must be an excellent person.
Then he saw Gwennie.
The grin stayed on his face, but for a second it looked completely unnatural. She hesitated herself, half-hidden behind Hadwidis, an arm around Naurag's neck.
Then Paul's smile became altogether genuine again as he sprang toward her. "Spending some time with an old friend!" he said with a great laugh. "You might at least have told me it was the wizard we were all mourning!" He grabbed her in a bear-hug as he had grabbed me and whirled her around. Gwennie gave an undignified squawk as all the air was squeezed out of her, but she was smiling as widely as the king. The soldiers watched with approving interest.
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