Is This Apocalypse Necessary

by C. Dale Brittain

  * * * *

  Embarrassed, I thought that I did not need any further recognition for what had not been particularly unusual actions.

  "This person has both encouraged me with her words and guided me by her example, as I sought to find my true path."

  Her words and example? So Hadwidis didn't mean me after all. I felt unaccountably disappointed.

  "Gwendolyn of Yurt, please come forward."

  Gwennie, surprised as I was, stepped hesitantly out of the crowd, still wearing her travel-stained clothes.

  Hadwidis took her firmly by the arm. No longer shy, her voice rang out. "Gwennie befriended a confused and frightened girl who had left the nunnery but did not know yet where her duty lay. Her friendship made me realize the responsibilities from which I could not run, the joy that comes from doing what one must."

  Gwennie shot her a quizzical look, as though thinking, "I did? Really?"

  "I wish therefore to reward her, as best I can. I thought first to make her wealthy, but she is already wealthy, having brought home great treasures from the fabled East."

  This was news to almost everybody. The jewels I had taken from the roc's nest, I thought. I wasn't quite sure at what point they had become Gwennie's, but I certainly wasn't going to object. Several of the younger lords who had been disappointed by Hadwidis's announcement that she would never marry started looking at Gwennie with new interest.

  "Therefore I shall, as my first act as your new queen, perform an act that only a king or queen can perform. I grant to you, Gwennie, the status of nobility! Come forward, then, Countess Gwendolyn, and pledge your allegiance to the crown!"

  Gwennie, looking dismayed, did not at first move. But King Paul's head came up sharply, and his green eyes took on an intensity I had not seen in them even as he prepared for battle.

  I looked around for Hadwidis's mother, to see how she was taking this. But she was not there. The chair in which she had sat was empty.

  Now that I thought about it, it had been some time since I remembered seeing her, since before this kingdom's greatest lords began their oaths of allegiance. Feeling uneasy, I looked around, both with my eyes and with magic, without finding her.

  Gwennie had been persuaded to come forward now, but was trying to explain to Hadwidis that, as much as she appreciated the offer, she could not become a countess of another kingdom while she was still royal constable of Yurt.

  Where could the queen have gone? Did she, for example, know where Elerius was? As I started further magical probing, I was interrupted by Whitey and Chin hurrying up.

  I had not seen these two student wizards all morning. Maybe they could help me search for the queen, I thought, but they didn't give me a chance to ask.

  "Daimbert, Daimbert!" Chin panted. "We've just gotten a telephone call from the school!"

  "Yes? You did call last night, didn't you, to tell them we'd gotten Elerius out of his castle?"

  "Yes, yes, but we didn't know then where he'd gone!"

  I suddenly felt cold all the way down to my toes. "Where has he gone?"

  "That call, Zahlfast said he thought it was the last call they'd be able to get out. Elerius has seized the wizards' school!"

  Part Ten:

  Dragons

  I

  "Now stay calm!" I ordered, completely panic-stricken. "Tell me exactly what happened!"

  "Elerius has seized the school," Chin repeated dully. "The old Master wouldn't like this at all."

  "But how?" I demanded wildly when the two student wizards just stared at me in mute despair. "Didn't anyone try to stop him? When did this happen? Why didn't you tell me before?"

  I got it out of them at last. They had spoken last night with some of the teachers, who had been encouraged to hear that the rift in wizardry might soon be mended. Then this morning the jerry-rigged telephone here in the camp had rung with a message from Zahlfast.

  "You knew he'd been sick," said Whitey. "Well, he was in the infirmary, separate from the rest of the wizards, and when they spoke to him mind-to-mind, to warn him what was happening, he just had enough time to get a call out on the infirmary phone."

  "Elerius himself redid most of the school's protective spells over the last few years," provided Chin. "He said he would strengthen them against all enemies. He let us work on just one little part, as a class exercise, and those spells were impressive! Well, apparently he left some sort of magical back-door for himself, that he never told us about, because there was no warning he had arrived at the school until the teachers and students found the protective spells turning the other way around. From what Zahlfast said, all their own magic was disintegrating, and all their doors were locked. So they're all in the school with him, but they're trapped!"

  Leaving me outside the school, with my only possible helpers a group of young wizards who had never learned the modern technical spells any better than I had. Elerius would grow to be as old as the Master had been before we worked out a way to break his defenses down.

  "At least while he's in there he can't do anything," said Whitey more cheerfully. "He's as much a captive of his own spells as the teachers are."

  Oh, he could do plenty, I thought. Starting with summoning a demon.

  I went over in my mind the appearance of the Cranky Saint to Elerius and me, as much as my thoughts shied away from the memories. The saint had been angry because Elerius had been ready to break the promise he had made, for a forty-eight hour truce before he threatened to use a demon again, and because Saint Eusebius did not want a demon in the castle he intended Hadwidis to inherit. Well, the forty-eight hours had been up last night, and Hadwidis and the men who had pledged themselves to her were preparing to ride over to her castle and take charge, starting by assessing the damage from the Ifrit and from war. The saint might still be amenable to desperate prayers, but I couldn't count on it.

  And in the meantime all the teachers and the school itself were hostage. Shortly Elerius might be telephoning me himself, to order me to cooperate and the young wizards to surrender, or he would start killing the teachers one by one, beginning with Zahlfast.

  Saint Eusebius had been right. One need not sell one's soul to the devil to damn it eternally.

  The only thing to do was to get out of here before he started telephoning with his demands. "Get the other wizards," I said grimly. "We're going to the City, now."

  "Yes, Master," they squeaked, impressed, and scurried off. I found Theodora to say good-bye, just a quick kiss because this time it really might be good-bye forever, and I couldn't stand it any more. Within ten minutes I was mounted on Naurag and soaring toward the City, the young wizards flying along in a ragged squadron behind. Several seemed intrigued at the idea of a living air cart, even in the middle of our desperate situation, and would have chatted with me about how I had tamed him if I had let them.

  The only bright spot, I thought during the short flight, was that Elerius might think I still had the Ifrit under my control. While he wasted time trying to create spells against an enormously powerful being who had already returned to the eastern deserts, I might be able to think of something.

  But my mind stayed discouragingly blank as the City's towers rose before us. I didn't see any way I could improvise a means to break down carefully forged technical spells; even in my student days, I had never properly understood them.

  On the surface, everything looked normal. Scudding clouds came off the sea to sail high over the harbor and sailors' and merchants' quarters to catch themselves on the highest white spires of the school. Ships bent before the wind, and faint came the sounds of people and commerce.

  But the school itself was silent, and no magic lights burned in its windows. No voices, no scraps of illusion floated up toward us. A quick probe revealed no escaping spells, and I could not reach the minds of any of the teachers inside. From the silence this could have been a nunnery instead of a school for wizardry. I tried a little more vigorous magical probing and still found nothing—for all my spells
could tell, the school no longer existed.

  We stayed well back. None of us knew what kind of defenses Elerius might have mounted. It might be a much more complicated version of the already horrendously-complicated spells against magic, which could result in all of us toppling out of the sky if we got too close. Or it might be sheets of fire that would burn our flesh down to charred bone in seconds.

  "He's got the whole library in there," said Evrard, as though I might not have thought of that myself. "With enough time, he'll work out whatever spells from the whole world he doesn't already know."

  "Let me try something," said another of the young wizards. He took something from his pocket—a bread crust, I thought—and sailed it toward the school's highest spire. With a small puff, it turned into white vapor, not fifteen feet from us.

  We all backed rapidly to a safer distance, then hung in the air again, swaying slightly in the breeze. Whitey and Chin, growing tired, took firm grips on Naurag's neck. I realized they were all waiting for me to think of something.

  "You were with him," I said to Evrard. "You know he always has a plan, and a fallback strategy. What was his fallback plan?"

  But neither Evrard nor any of the other wizards had been privy to his plans. "He just said he had a final strategy that he preferred not to use but that would ensure victory if all else failed," Evrard provided. That, I thought, would have been the demon.

  No whiff of the supernatural here, but then there was no whiff of anything. "Elerius!" I shouted, and even magically amplified my voice was carried away by the wind. "There's still time to surrender!" There was no answer, but then I had expected none.

  We set down in a little plaza halfway down the hill from the school to the harbor. Curtains twitched in windows facing onto it, and several people hurrying down the steep streets toward the plaza turned around abruptly and headed away again. The City was used to wizards, but not to purple flying beasts.

  "This is the time to show just how penitent you are," I told the young wizards sternly. Most of them had only graduated from the school a few years earlier and had been serving in the courts of castellans and lesser lords around the Western Kingdoms, until Elerius offered them a chance for what they considered much more spectacular power. Whitey and Chin, who had never aided Elerius, stood to one side being smug.

  "You all helped Elerius create and maintain the spells that kept school magic from working near his castle," I told my penitent assistants. "Whatever spells he's thrown up around the school must be based on similar principles. So I want you to start analyzing them and seeing if you can find a way to reverse them. And you," turning to Whitey and Chin with a frown that wiped away their smugness, "you worked more closely with the Master toward the end of his life than any other students. He had doubts about Elerius and may have had some sort of project of his own to counter him. You told me you were working on projects for him—now get to work!"

  "We left our notes in the library," Whitey started to protest, but I cut him off. I actually doubted this group could come up with anything, but one of them might stumble across the right spell by accident. After all, I had done so more than once myself in my early years as Royal Wizard.

  After a little confusion, the challenge of overcoming the spells of a wizard of whom they all stood in awe actually seemed to inspire the young wizards, who were soon busily consulting with each other, both verbally and mind-to-mind, and every now and then trying a phrase in the Hidden Language. Twice the flagstones that paved the plaza surged upwards with a grating wrench, then settled back into place, as two separate experimental spells were badly aimed. The young wizards grinned and shrugged.

  I thought of, tried, and rejected half a dozen approaches of my own while the sun, a lighter patch in the cloud-covered sky, slowly sank toward the sea. We were left alone in the plaza below the school until I heard hoof-beats moving determinedly toward us.

  This was a person who didn't care if a group of wizards and a flying beast had taken over the plaza. It was the queen, Hadwidis's mother.

  The dress that had been elegant the night before was now torn and stained with hard riding. She was heading straight up the narrow street that led to the front gates of the school. The plaza was no more for her than a widening in that street, and the presence of a group of wizards there irrelevant. Curtains twitched again at the queen's passage. Ignoring us, she projected fury in every angle. The horse she rode was lathered and stumbling, but she kicked it past us and steadily upward.

  "Keep on working," I said hastily to my supposed assistants and hurried after her. Elerius might choose to pretend I did not exist, but the queen was hard to overlook. If I had no success against him with magic, I might be able to reach him through her. His lover, the mother of his son, she was a proud woman who had now been unceremoniously stripped both of her grandiose hopes and even of her ruling status. And in her eyes it would all be Elerius's fault.

  We arrived at the main school door, with me flying so close to the queen's shoulder I might as well have been riding the same horse. The door was on the far side of a pleasant plaza, set about with fountains and fruit trees. Still the queen ignored me—either she didn't know or didn't care that the war her soldiers had just lost had been named for me. She reached for the great bell-pull; normally one of the younger wizards would be in attendance during the day, one of the older ones at night, to greet whoever climbed up the wizards' hill. I held my breath, wondering if Elerius would blast the queen into vapor with his magic.

  But she remained solid while, far-off, the bell sounded mournfully. When there was no immediate answer, she rapped impatiently at the door with her riding crop, then tugged at the bell-pull again.

  This time there was finally a response. The door began to glow a vivid red, as waves of heat suddenly beat out from it. I backed up hastily, but the queen's horse was too tired to move. A booming, disembodied voice said, "Get away from the door."

  I wasn't completely sure if that were Elerius or just some spell, voicing a warning to anyone who dared touch his magically-protected door. But the queen had no doubts that he was just inside. "I shall not leave!" she replied sharply. "Elerius, I order you to come out at once!"

  There was a brief pause. The door grew no cooler. "Daimbert, get away from the door," said the voice.

  Even the best talking magical door was unlikely to recognize all wizards by name. I was back beside the queen in a second. "Elerius!" I shouted. "Listen to me! I'm giving you a final chance. Release the teachers and come out, and I'll personally guarantee that—"

  But I didn't know what I could guarantee. That the teachers would forgive him? Not likely. That we wouldn't kill him? No wizard had killed another wizard since the Black Wars, and even for this I doubted we would do so again—and Elerius knew his history of wizardry much better than I did. That I would try to distract the queen from her entirely justified indignation?

  "—I'll guarantee that I won't turn the Ifrit on you!" I finished, much too tardily.

  The queen didn't give Elerius a chance to respond. Still paying me, her obvious inferior, no attention at all, she said from between clenched teeth, "You said you loved me. You said that nothing would give you more joy than for us and our son to rule the West. You told me that I was your ambassador, the only one you could trust to deal with the enemy. And yet at the first hint of real danger, you were gone! I will have you know that everyone in the West is now snickering about you and me, and my daughter has just been crowned queen in my place. I shall have explanations from you, and I shall have them now!"

  In Elerius's place, I would have doubled the protective spells on the door. But maybe, somewhere in his heart, he loved his queen as I loved Theodora. Because he answered her, and even through the boom of his voice's magnification he sounded wheedling.

  "Now, dearest lady, do not be so upset. I'm very sorry for how it turned out, but it's not as bad as you think. In fact—"

  "I do not," she said, icy now, "intend to discuss this while standing in t
he street like some spurned drab. Open this door now!"

  "Well," he said, in a tone that sought to suggest that he was always reasonable, "I can't very well let you in when there's a wizard with an Ifrit in his pocket standing beside you."

  She turned her haughty blue gaze on me. "Step aside, Wizard," she said dismissively.

  "Elerius, listen!" I cried. "I don't have an Ifrit any more! He's granted his wishes and he's gone!"

  Just for a second I felt a magical touch—Elerius probing for the bronze bottle. I threw up mental shields against him, but the touch was gone in a second. It wouldn't have taken him long to discover what he wanted to know.

  And if he had spotted Solomon's signet, he would not have known what to make of it—but it was most certainly not an Ifrit.

  "I am waiting, Elerius," announced the queen. Evening was setting in rapidly now. Normally someone would be coming up the street to light the magic lamps the school had installed all along the street that led to its main door, but nobody ventured out now.

  The door before us had continued to glow hot, but now, almost imperceptibly at first, then rapidly, the waves of heat ceased to pour from it, and its color returned to its normal shade. I held my breath, feeling more than seeing the magical barricades come down. Faint below us I heard a triumphant whoop—the young wizards must have sensed it too, and thought it was somehow their doing.

  Slowly, slowly, the door swung open. Inside it was dark, the hall empty. The dark entryway and Elerius's unseen presence were ominous, but if I was ever going to get inside the school, this was my one chance.

  The queen swung down from her horse and stamped inside. I was so close to her that she must have been able to feel my breath on her neck. I barely had both feet through the doorway when the heavy door slammed shut behind us, and all the locks clicked into place.

  II