C. Dale Brittain_Wizard of Yurt 05

by Daughter of Magic

  At least Antonia was safely in Yurt. “That’s good to hear, Joachim,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say without more information. “Let me know how it all works out.” As I returned to my chambers I thought that this man, whoever he was, seemed to have found the one certain way to defuse the bishop’s suspicions.

  His questions might all be answered, but mine were just beginning. I found Antonia sitting in my best chair, legs straight out in front of her, poring over a book as though actually reading it. I smiled and reached for my copy of the Diplomatica Diabolica.

  Leafing through it was not encouraging. I sneezed from dust; it had been a long time since I had had this volume off the shelf. It confirmed what I already knew, that a demon in human form would not be able to wander, unsummoned, into a cathedral. But a person who had sold his soul to the devil, who was using the black arts for supernatural effects, would still be able to do all the ordinary things, like enter churches, that the rest of us did, those of us who might well be damned but didn’t know it yet.

  The book, being written by and for wizards, did not directly address the question the bishop might have asked, whether someone who had sold his soul could still save it by becoming a priest. But it was not encouraging. The book didn’t offer any way out at all for such a person—short perhaps (and only perhaps) of skilled negotiations by a demonology expert.

  I reshelved the volume slowly, wondering if a demon would have too much sense of self-preservation to let the person who had summoned it spend time in close association with the saints who always clustered around churches. Saints, I told myself hopefully, should be perfectly capable of returning a demon to hell all by themselves, no matter what the book said.

  “What’s this word, Wizard?” asked Antonia.

  I realized with a start that she was not just pretending to read but was actually reading Elements of Transmogrification. “It’s the Hidden Language,” I said, scooping the book from her lap and returning it to the shelf. “Your mother and I will teach it to you when you’re older.”

  She jumped down from the chair, indignant. “I was reading that! Give it back!”

  “No, no. I’m sorry, Antonia, but it’s really not suitable for you.”

  Tears started from her sapphire eyes, and she stamped a foot hard on my flagstone floor. “It’s not fair! You can’t just take my book away! Where’s my mother? I want my mother!”

  I picked her up, trying to soothe her, but she wiggled free and began to cry in good earnest. “I was reading!”

  “You’re just cranky because you didn’t have your nap,” I said encouragingly, feeling panic set in. “Maybe if you have your nap—”

  “I am not cranky!” she shouted, tears pouring down her cheeks.

  I gave up trying to calm a distraught little girl and lifted her from the floor with magic, startling her so much she stopped crying for a moment, and flew across the courtyard with her to the twins’ suite.

  III

  They were both there, Hildegarde wearing her leather tunic and sword belt but sitting disconsolately in the window seat, and Celia reading her Bible with an aggrieved angle to her chin as though finding things in it different from what the bishop had told her.

  “You haven’t seen Paul, have you?” Hildegarde asked me but not as though she really cared. “The king really liked Justinia’s dress,” she added over her shoulder to her sister. “Maybe you should get one like it, Celia, if Father ever takes us to Xantium as he keeps saying he will,” but even this teasing sounded half-hearted. “Here,” to Antonia. “Stop crying and I’ll let you hold my knife.”

  I was horror-struck, but Antonia gulped back her sobs and reached for the knife. Hildegarde closed the girl’s small fingers around the handle. “Hold it very carefully,” she said, “so nobody gets hurt.”

  “The wizard wouldn’t let me read my book,” said Antonia, looking at me from under lowered eyebrows and holding the knife in a way I would have called threatening.

  I stood back a safe distance. “I think the king went riding after lunch,” I said to Hildegarde. Paul tended to react to anything which he had to think over by taking his stallion out for a miles-long run. Even if he didn’t end up exploring some ruined castle or scenic waterfall, he might be gone for hours, occasionally even days. No one, not even the queen mother, had ever been able to persuade him that a king should have an escort when galloping around the countryside. Besides, no other horse in the kingdom could keep up with Bonfire.

  “Earlier he’d said he was going to show me some exercises. But I guess,” Hildegarde added with a deep sigh, “that he was just humoring me. He doesn’t think I can be a knight any more than anybody else does.”

  Either that, I thought but did not say, or Lady Justinia’s arrival had distracted him so much he had forgotten everything else.

  “I was going to be a wizard,” said Antonia with a dark look for me, “but now I think I’ll be a knight too.”

  “Knights need their naps,” said Hildegarde, unfolding herself from the window seat. “Don’t I remember tucking you in over an hour ago, you little scamp? And then,” with a laugh, “I looked up and saw you out in the courtyard with the wizard!”

  “What’s a scamp?” asked Antonia.

  “Scamps are mischievous people who have a mind of their own,” said Hildegarde. “I used to be a scamp myself.” I was surprised she put it in the past tense.

  Antonia allowed herself to be taken off to bed in a much better mood than I could have anticipated a few minutes ago. Hildegarde casually slid the knife from the girl’s hand back into her own belt.

  “Celia,” I said when the others had left the room, “I need you to do something for me.”

  “Of course, Wizard. Do you need to leave the girl with us again while you go somewhere?”

  “No,” I said slowly, “but I would like you to go somewhere for me. Down in Caelrhon there’s a man—someone whose name I don’t know but who has been nicknamed the Dog-Man—who wants to be a priest too. I wish you would talk to him.”

  Celia put her Bible down very slowly. “Is this a joke, Wizard?” she asked as though not quite sure whether to be irritated. “I remember the tricks you used to play to amuse Hildegarde and me when we were little. Because if you think you can make me forget—”

  “No, no,” I said before she could make this any messier than it already was. “I’m absolutely serious.” Some of the tricks I had played on the twins had been pretty good, I recalled; I should try them on Antonia if she was still speaking to me. There was the one where I pretended to snip off a girl’s nose with my fingertips, then presented a plausible illusory nose for her inspection, or the one where I tossed a butter knife in the air, went to catch it, gave a blood-curdling yell and presented my arm with the hand “cut off,” that is made magically invisible . . .

  But I shouldn’t be distracted. “This man, Celia, has apparently persuaded the bishop that he has been touched by God, but I’m suspicious of him. He’s hiding from me—which is part of the reason I’m suspicious. So I need someone who has a pure religious vocation, but someone who doesn’t automatically agree with the bishop on everything, to find out more about him.”

  “More about him?” said Celia, sounding bewildered.

  “Find out why he’s suddenly appeared in Caelrhon, how he’s doing what look like miracles—but maybe aren’t—learn how deep are his religious convictions: all the things the bishop is unwilling to ask him.”

  She gave me a level stare. “You’re asking me to do something behind His Holiness’s back?”

  “Well, yes, I guess so. But I can see,” I added hastily, “that it was probably wrong to ask you, that—”

  “I’ll do it, Wizard.”

  “You will?” I said, startled.

  “Women often understand people, both men and women, better than men do,” she said firmly. “This way I may be able to help the Church if your suspicions are accurate.” She suddenly grinned. “And if I can show the bishop
my powers of spiritual discernment, he may realize he’s made a big mistake. Now, tell me more about this man.”

  An hour later Celia rode away from the castle toward Caelrhon, telling me she hoped to be back in a few days and would send me a pigeon-message in the meantime if she discovered anything interesting. Hildegarde decided at the last moment to go with her, announcing that no future duchess should ride across two kingdoms without an armed warrior to accompany her and protect her. The twins had ridden up from the ducal castle unescorted, and Celia had dismissed my suggestion that a few of the castle’s knights ought to go with her to Caelrhon, and without Paul there to back me up there was no way I could change her mind.

  As I watched the twins’ horses disappearing, I hoped that the bishop would not be too insulted at my sending a woman to prove him wrong.

  Antonia, still partly asleep, came out with me to see them off, trailing her doll behind her. “Before I took my nap, Wizard,” she said, “you picked me up without touching me and lifted me high in the air. Is that magic? Can you do it again? And you have to teach me how to do it to Dolly.”

  With the duchess’s daughters gone, Antonia ended up on my couch that night in spite of Gwennie’s concerns. I was sound asleep when the clang of sword on sword resounded in the courtyard.

  Not Paul again! I thought, swinging my feet reluctantly out of bed. But it could not be the king returning to the castle late because he had been here for dinner, too absorbed in the Lady Justinia even to notice that the twins were not there until someone else asked about them.

  There came now a hoarse shout and the high winding of a horn—the watchman’s alarm signal, which I had never actually heard used before. The horn’s note blew a second time, then abruptly was cut off. This wasn’t just someone playing a joke on the night watchman. He was in serious trouble.

  “Stay here!” I cried to Antonia, who was sitting up, wide-eyed and clutching her doll. I slapped a magic lock on the door as I swung it shut behind me.

  Justinia’s elephant trumpeted in the stables, and shouts and clangs came from elsewhere in the castle—I was not the only one to hear the watchman’s horn. But I was the first to the gate.

  And saw row after row of warriors marching in across the drawbridge: shadowy, armored shapes, naked swords in their hands, and eyes that I could have sworn glowed in the darkness.

  This couldn’t be real. It had to be a nightmare. But waking or dreaming I had to do the same thing: defend the castle of Yurt.

  I shouted spells in the heavy syllables of the Hidden Language, and the first warriors stopped as though they had run into a wall—which indeed they had. But their feet kept on moving as though trying to push themselves through. Their eyes still glowed and their swords were ready if my spells weakened for even an instant.

  Someone ran into the little room by the gate where the bridge mechanism was worked and cranked the wheel to raise the drawbridge. Beyond its end, I could see in the dim light more warriors advancing. The ones on the bridge slid off into the moat as it rose, but the ones behind them kept right on marching, straight into the water as though not even noticing the bridge’s absence.

  The portcullis slammed down as I started looping binding spells around the warriors trapped between the gate and my magical barrier. One by one they stopped moving as my spells caught and held.

  I paused to catch my breath. Magic is hard physical as well as mental work. It had been very close, I thought, but I had gotten out into the courtyard with my spells in time.

  There was a shout from the wall. “They’re coming up!”

  Swords and glowing eyes loomed against the starlit sky. Knights with lances swarmed to the battlements to thrust back into the moat men—or monsters—that seemed to have no individuality, no awareness of their surroundings, only a need to keep on coming.

  They appeared to have marched underwater across the floor of the moat and be coming straight up the wall by finding finger holds among the stones. The knights’ lamps made crazy patterns of light and shadow among the castle’s defenders and whatever was clambering up toward them.

  I would have to wait to catch my breath. The thought flitted through my mind that Hildegarde would be very sorry to have missed all this.

  “By the saints!” someone shouted. “It’s as though they’re directed by the devil himself!”

  King Paul was in the middle of it all. I threw spell after spell onto the advancing warriors, raw terror lurking just beyond my shoulder. “Shall we make a sortie, Wizard?” the king asked me quietly.

  “Magic’s stopping them,” I gasped. “Don’t try fighting them with steel—they look like they’d keep on fighting even with their heads cut off. Where’s the watchman?”

  “That dark shape on the ground just inside the gate,” said Paul. “He’s not moving.”

  I paused for a second to wipe my forehead and cautiously lowered the magical barrier I had thrown up around the first warriors through the gate. They were now all secured by binding spells. Several people rushed to examine the watchman.

  “He’s dead!” said a knight in amazement. I was not amazed. If the watchman had not blown his horn with his final breath, if I had been only a few seconds slower getting to the gate, there would have been a whole lot more people dead by now. Yurt had always been a very peaceful kingdom. It looked like it wasn’t anymore.

  IV

  It took me half an hour to get all the warriors, both inside and outside the walls, immobilized with magic. We lowered the drawbridge again, and knights carried the ones who had made it into the courtyard back outside. They used grappling hooks to retrieve the rest from the moat; being under water had not taken the light from the creatures’ eyes. The swans from the moat had all retreated to dry land, hissing and flapping their wings menacingly if anyone came near.

  Though the knights tried to pry the swords from the warriors’ grips, they held on far too tightly, even encased in my binding spells. I didn’t count, but there must have been at least a hundred of them. Whatever they were, I thought, studying them by lamplight with fists on my hips, they weren’t human. Human in shape, holding swords in human hands, they had no minds inside their heads or souls behind their eyes. The sweat on me was cold now that I had finished my spells, but it was more than that that made me shiver.

  “Demons incarnate!” gasped the chaplain, clutching his crucifix. He took a quick look and then retreated. The whole castle was roused and milling around the courtyard—everyone, that is, except the Lady Justinia, whom no one had seen.

  “Not demons,” I said slowly. Several lay on the ground by my feet, no longer struggling against my spells but watching me with glowing eyes. “Demons would not have been stopped by my spells. But they’re not alive either. They look like they’re made from hair and bone.”

  “Can magic do that?” asked the chaplain, hovering a short distance behind me as though not wanting to approach but not wanting to appear to retreat any further either. “Can it make life?”

  “Not life. But there are spells in the old magic of earth and stone that can give the semblance of life. They don’t teach those spells at the wizards’ school, but back in the old days of apprenticeships wizards used to learn them, and I think they still use them over in the Eastern Kingdoms, beyond the mountains.”

  “How would you make such creatures?” asked the chaplain, coming one step closer and sounding interested in spite of himself.

  “The traditional way,” I said, then paused for a second to renew a binding spell that seemed tattered, “was to use dragon’s teeth.”

  There was a long silence. “You didn’t make them, did you?” asked the chaplain as though trying to make a joke. When I turned to glare at him, in no mood for a joke, he added hastily, “Well, I trust you did not, my son, but in that case who did?”

  “I have absolutely no idea.” It must be linked with the Lady Justinia’s arrival, I thought, but I was not about to say so until I had better evidence—no use having everyone in the castle trea
ting with suspicion someone whom the mage had entrusted to me.

  Then I remembered who else had been entrusted to me. Antonia! Where was she in all this? Yelling at one of the knights to call me the second any of these unliving warriors showed signs of breaking out of my spells, I raced back into the castle and to my chambers.

  She had lit the magic lamp and was sitting in my best chair with a blanket wrapped around her. “What happened?” she asked, round-eyed. “And why,” with a wrinkling of her chin as though trying to keep back tears of terror, “did you leave me all alone?”

  I snatched her up and held her close. “I’m so sorry, Antonia,” I murmured, stroking her hair. She was shaking and clung to me—no cool self-possession now. “But right here was the safest place for you. Some warriors tried to invade the castle, and I had to stop them.”

  Slowly she stopped shaking as I held her. “I could have helped you,” she said then, pushing herself back to look me in the face. “I can do all sorts of spells. While I was waiting for you I turned Dolly into a frog.”

  A quick glance at her doll showed it unchanged: a rag doll, embroidered with a smiling face I found almost aggressively adorable, wearing a silk dress doubtless made from the scraps of something Theodora had sewn for a fine lady of Caelrhon. “Soon you’ll be a witch like your mother,” I said encouragingly.

  For some reason I didn’t like the way that sounded, but we were interrupted by a shout from the courtyard. “Wizard!”

  I bounced Antonia back into bed. “Go to sleep,” I said, trying not to sound too rough. “I may be busy the rest of the night.” And I darted out across the drawbridge to find one of the armored warriors pushing itself to a sitting position and raising its sword.

  A few quick words of the Hidden Language restored the binding spell, but I thought, looking at the twitching collection of creatures before me, that there was a limit to how long I could keep them imprisoned. I had worked my spells fast, using shortcuts wherever I could, and the spells that made unliving hair and bones—and maybe dragons’ teeth—into manlike shapes were a lot stronger than mine. It would only be a matter of time until they all broke free again unless I found a way to dismantle them.