The instant we were out of the passageway it disappeared, closing over our heads with a rumble and a last fall of gravel. The shortcut's gone, I thought, knowing Zahlfast would not have the strength to work that spell again. That meant that the only way back out was the regular way, the stairs down which Elerius must have come—and which, if they were not completely blocked by rubble, he would now be guarding.
I spun around, ready for an attack, but at first the cellars appeared rather innocuous. The corridor in which we had landed was whitewashed and fairly featureless, uniformly lit, and as dead silent as though a whole City were not built a few dozen yards above us. I strained for sounds of Elerius—or of some horror out of the Black Wars—and could hear nothing. The rows of heavy oak doors, all closed tight and faintly glittering with magical locks, gave no hint either of menace or of the school above that had so recently been destroyed. There were none of the signs of active life and wizardry that had permeated the school: no desks with salacious spells carved into them, or books set aside with a salamander marking someone's place, or the slowly dissolving remains of an illusion, or a forgotten cup of cold tea.
Only once had I been down here, while still a student, when one of the teachers had sent me here on an errand to find another one of the faculty. At that time a blue baby dragon had been kept in one of the cellar rooms, but I had only had a glimpse of it then, and I had heard that it had died a few years later.
Zahlfast sat catching his breath and rearranging the sheet he had wrapped around himself. It gave me a momentary shiver in its likeness to the winding sheet around a corpse, but he seemed, at least for now, somewhat stronger. "If I'd told all those other faculty members I was coming with you," he said, pleased with himself, "they would have tried to give me an argument."
"But why didn't you bring one of the more knowledgeable teachers instead of me?" I asked. "I've been off in Yurt for years, and have no way of knowing what's in these cellars. Wouldn't it have been better to have someone here who actually understood the dangers?"
He looked at me sideways from under bushy eyebrows. "No. All of the rest of the teachers understand the dangers far too well. We have at most an hour or two until Elerius starts breaking through some of the magic locks down here. I didn't want to spend that hour or two arguing that averting the potential danger to the City and all the kingdoms around was worth the very real mortal danger to ourselves."
Very real mortal danger! I thought but said nothing. After all, I had claimed all along that the only way to oppose Elerius was by being dead.
I helped Zahlfast to his feet, and we started walking slowly. He leaned on my arm, his sheet dragging behind him. "Doesn't look like Elerius has gotten over here, yet," he commented.
"What is down here, Master?" I asked, ignoring his snort when again I called him Master. "What things did the teachers find necessary to lock away from the students?"
"And sometimes each other?" he added with another snort. "The old Master started the collection, artifacts of great power that had been made by his teacher or his teacher's teacher." Naurag, I thought. "I believe there are a number of powerful objects here as well which were first created by those wizards' contemporaries. He and I always regretted that those old wizards weren't very conscientious in writing down their spells, but they were probably better than any wizard since—until Elerius."
This was a glum thought. I didn't answer.
"Then, when he started the school after the Black Wars," Zahlfast continued in his school-teacher voice, "he had all the wizards of the West bring him the weapons of terrible destruction which they had forged for use in those wars. Many he merely destroyed. For others, he carefully disentangled the spells in his search for new and different ways to order magic's four dimensions. By the time I joined him, and the school was already taking its first young wizardry pupils, all that were left were those most interesting for demonstration purposes—or those most terrible, where even the best wizard might find it difficult to control the forces such an artifact would unleash. As a one-time pupil here, I'm sure you can appreciate why we didn't want to allow the students easy access."
"Um, yes," I muttered, thinking of Evrard—and myself.
"Over the years, an occasional creature from the land of wild magic might appear in the lands of men, and some of those we captured and locked in the cellars as well. A few decades ago there was even a collecting trip up north, but it was not considered a success and not repeated."
As we slowly passed the series of identical and unmarked doors, I found myself wondering uneasily which one might hold a miniature gorgos, which an artifact second in power only to the Dragon's Sceptre, and which dark instruments of death, and hoping that the magical locks were able to hold them. If any of us emerged alive from this, proper identification tags on the doors should be a first order of business.
But then something Zahlfast had said a moment ago struck me. "You said you expected Elerius to break through the magic locks! I thought it was impossible to break one."
He gave me another sideways look. "I wondered when you would think of that. The Master decided a few years ago, when he recovered from his last serious illness, that it was a mistake to have all these doors keyed only to his palm print. Without him, none of us would ever be able to open them again. So he rekeyed them all, using two palm prints, his own and that of the faculty member he then thought most likely to succeed him—Elerius."
"But wouldn't you still need both people's hands to open the lock?"
"One should. But the magic of the lock is weaker by being divided between two hands. The old Master counted on Elerius being able to find a way to break down the spells once he himself was gone."
"Do you know how he could do that?" I asked, intrigued.
Zahlfast shook his head slowly, and when his answer came it was so quiet I almost didn't hear him. "I'm not that good a wizard."
* * * *
That made two of us. We walked on in silence for a minute. I was thinking that there was at least one artifact down here to which Elerius already had access, the one with which he had threatened to destroy me. Could he be lurking behind this door, I thought, looking both up and down the corridor, or that one? I tried a prayer to the Cranky Saint in an effort to calm my panicked heart beat. At the moment even he, bursting in with a blaze of celestial light from the realm of the supernatural, would have seemed like a friendly face.
These cellars must be solidly built; only a few cracks in wall and ceiling suggested that tons of masonry had collapsed on top of them, and the magical lights still functioned smoothly. The corridor intersected other passages, with no indication of which might lead to the stairs. We turned right at the first intersection, left at the next and the next, and in a few minutes I had lost any sense of where we had come in.
When the sound began, it was at first so faint I didn't notice it. But then I realized that neither my old teacher nor I were making a hissing sound. I looked at him questioningly, but he had already stopped, his head cocked.
"I feared as much," he said quietly. "I wondered why we had not seen him yet, if by some chance he didn't realize we were here. No, Elerius has declined to meet us."
"And that sound—" The hissing was closer now, and the temperature of the air in the corridor was dropping rapidly.
"When he decided to break a magic lock, he did not choose a door at random. He chose one door on purpose. I thought it might take him two hours, but I overestimated. He has it unlocked now."
Zahlfast leaned more heavily on me, and we waited as that sound slowly approached. "Whatever you do, Daimbert," he said between his teeth, "do not look it in the eye."
The corridor walls on either side were now white with frost. Even the cold could not conceal the smell that began sliding toward us, a smell like an open grave. Added to the hissing came a constant click-click, of talons against the floor.
Ahead of us another corridor crossed the one in which we stood. The magic lamps that lit the cellars cast
a shadow, a shadow of the creature which proceeded it past the corner: not very big for something of such horror, it walked on chicken legs, feathered wings emerging stiffly from its sides, but its head and tail were those of a serpent.
A basilisk. A creature of wild magic that should never have come to the land of men in the first place, and if it could not be destroyed should have been permanently locked away. And now Elerius had loosed it on us, and, after it had frozen us or turned us to stone, it would find its way out to do the same to the rest of the people in the City.
"Do not meet its eye," said Zahlfast again, just as the serpent head came around the corner.
Shivering uncontrollably, I stood as stiff and motionless as though the basilisk's gaze had already turned me to stone. My own eyes averted, I heard its taloned feet coming steadily toward us.
They freeze the air around them, I remembered from a long-ago lecture held in a classroom that no longer existed. They turn to stone those who meet their jeweled eyes. And they bite with the bite of death those they neither freeze nor transform to stone.
Zahlfast might have been old and sick, but at least his terror had not paralyzed him. He began speaking in the heavy syllables of the Hidden Language, a binding spell, more complicated and far more difficult than anything I had ever been taught at the school. For a second the click of chicken feet on stone ceased, then, more slowly, they started moving toward us again.
Solomon's spell. The binding spell that would hold even an Ifrit in a bottle. I opened my mouth and found it almost too dry for speech. The dragging talons were coming closer. I tried again.
And shouted the spell that Levi had written out for me, the spell that Solomon had engraved on his golden signet. For a second the corridors echoed to my words, which seemed to come back at me from a dozen directions, and in that second the voice in the back of my mind asked how it felt to have paralyzed all of us.
But I hadn't. I moved both arms at once, almost toppling Zahlfast, then took a step forward, my eyes still averted.
"Where did you get that spell?" he demanded, his voice creakier than ever. "Whatever you did," he continued, "it worked—the creature cannot move now. And its serpent teeth cannot bite. But its eye could still turn us to stone."
We sidled toward it, trying to judge its location by its shadow and sideways glances that stopped just short of its head. Zahlfast was shaking far harder than I was. But he ripped a strip off the end of his sheet and, awkwardly because he couldn't watch what he was doing, wrapped it around and around the basilisk's serpent head.
"I'll look first," he said at last, and I watched his face as he turned his head, gazed for a rapid second, gazed longer, and finally looked toward me. "The bandage holds."
The frost was melting back off the walls, and the smell was receding, as I looked too: at a creature messily wrapped in a rag, a rag that completely concealed its eyes.
Zahlfast let out all his breath then and sat down on the cold floor. "By all the powers of magic, Daimbert," he said after a minute, "what spell was that?"
"Um, something out of the really old magic. King Solomon's own binding spell." It was too complicated to explain.
"I never did hear where you were when we all thought you dead," my old teacher said, with the faintest hint of a smile. "If we are not truly dead at the end of this night, it would be worth hearing. I thought all those years ago at the transformations practical exam, when you approached those frogs in such a spectacularly lame-brained way, and then got out of your mess so brilliantly, that you would either end up as one of the most innovative and successful wizards of your generation, or else would destroy the school. I never imagined until today that you would do both. Help me up. Elerius will not long delay once he learns what we have done to his basilisk."
I gave him a hand up off the floor, then was appalled when he picked up the basilisk by its stiff little chicken wings. He held it distastefully, well out in front of him. "And how long did you think," he said with a sideways glance, "before Elerius came to recover it, if we did not take it with us? Besides," and for a second he almost chuckled, "if we suddenly come upon him, we can threaten to whip the rag from its eyes."
We kept on walking. We seemed to have been walking a very long time, yet the corridor looked always the same. Zahlfast was constantly trembling now, but he shrugged off the arm I tried to offer him. "Best only one of us be in living contact with this beast," he said. "If we can find the room from which Elerius freed it, we can throw it back in and lock it with our own palm prints."
"But don't you know where the basilisk was kept?" I asked.
"No," he snapped between shivering teeth, "because I don't know where we are. I thought I knew, and we have taken all the right turns, yet ..." His voice trailed away, then he suddenly snorted. "Illusion. We have been done in by the simplest trick. Elerius has changed the appearance of these corridors just enough that we could walk in circles in here for weeks and never find our way out."
Illusion I could deal with. It had been a subtle spell, one designed to leave no impression of its presence, but obvious once I looked for it. I broke the spell with a few words. The corridor looked to me exactly the same.
But it looked different to Zahlfast, for he lifted his head with new confidence. "Now I know where we are. A few more turns, and we will be at the stairs that used to lead up to the school."
The stairs to which Elerius would know we would have to come sooner or later, and which he would therefore have carefully fortified against us.
But he might be there himself. The whole purpose of being in the cellars, I reminded myself, was to find him.
Suddenly the floor around our feet came alive: scorpions, snakes, spiders, six-inch cockroaches. I stopped dead in horror, but Zahlfast kept on walking. "More illusions," he announced.
I swallowed the bitterness of revulsion and broke this illusion as well. The creatures disappeared as quickly as they had come.
"Of course, there are real cockroaches down here, but nothing that size—" Zahlfast was just saying, when I heard a new sound.
This one was almost metallic, a creaking and scrabbling of something very large coming toward us from down a side corridor. I put a hand on Zahlfast's arm. Illusions do not make noise.
After the basilisk I had thought I was prepared for anything. But I was wrong. I was not prepared for a cockroach ten feet high, filling the corridor from side to side, waving its tentacles and coming on fast.
Part Eleven:
Hell
I
A paralysis spell! I thought wildly. King Solomon's binding spell! Could I work that powerful a spell a second time down here without seriously weakening the walls that kept the ceiling above us? Would the basilisk's stare freeze the cockroach in its tracks as it would have frozen us?
While I was flailing around desperately trying to find the right magic, Zahlfast was already at work. He rattled off a spell, and the enormous insect stopped advancing. But it waved its tentacles and stared at us with its multiple eyes. It looked hungry. I wondered if we could feed it the basilisk.
Zahlfast spoke again, and abruptly it was gone. A small, brown, normal-sized insect scuttled across the floor. I took one step forward and crushed it beneath my sole.
"Good work, Master!" I said, attempting to sound nonchalant and scraping the residue off my shoe. "How did you manage to shrink it?"
Zahlfast had closed his eyes, swaying for a moment, then took a deep breath. I put an arm under his elbow without comment. I knew he wouldn't say how he really felt, and he didn't want me to seem to be fussing over him, but this constant series of spells must be a serious drain on a man already old and sick.
"It was in fact quite simple, Daimbert," he said after a moment. I noticed he hadn't had the energy to chide me for continuing to call him Master. "Elerius had transformed an ordinary cockroach into one swollen to extraordinary size. All I had to do was to reverse his spell. I hope you haven't forgotten that I am the head of the transformations facu
lty!"
"If he's resorting to transformed insects," I said, "he must not have managed to break any more magic locks. Either that—or he himself is frightened of what might be in the rooms."
"With good reason," said Zahlfast.
We kept on walking because there didn't seem to be much else we could do. It was bitter cold down here, even with the basilisk immobilized, a coldness that seeped into my bones. I was so tired that I thought that if I dared sit down I might fall asleep and never wake up—and it must be even worse for Zahlfast. I wondered with a kind of flat despair if Elerius might be long gone from the cellars, and if we would die from cold and exhaustion before we were able to find the way back out again.
I almost missed it. We were trudging down another corridor, when I realized that one of the doors we had just passed was not locked.
Silently I motioned to Zahlfast, then put my back to the wall next to the door and probed again. Definitely no magic lock here. Still no direct indication of Elerius, but he had to be somewhere. He would have had to unlock a door to go inside; I put a hand flat on it, trying to tell if he was in there— or if this room was just empty.
I couldn't be sure. Zahlfast stayed well back, holding the basilisk, also unsure. Very delicately I started turning the knob, preparatory to swinging the door open with a bang.
Still no sign of life. I gave the door an abrupt push and ducked back out of the way of whatever he might be using to defend himself.
But still there was nothing. Cautiously I put my head around the corner, and saw—
"What is it?" I asked in wonder after a moment. "Is this something left from the Black Wars?" In the center of the room was a great swirling mass of color, pouring from what appeared to be copper rods and steel wheels.
Zahlfast came up beside me to look. "That's nothing out of the old magic," he said with a snort. "That's something developed here by the technical division, only a few years ago. One powers it up with magic, and then it can keep a spell going almost indefinitely."
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