C. Dale Brittain_Wizard of Yurt 04

by The Witch;the Cathedral

  Doubtless starting with the cantor Norbert, I thought. Joachim stirred beside me but I spoke first. "You aren't being threatened by wizardry in the abstract," I said. "You're being threatened by someone working spells against the cathedral, and the dean knows that the quickest way to overcome magic spells is to find someone with powerful magic to break them."

  "And do your spells have power against the devil?"

  "Of course not. Only God and those who serve Him have power against the devil," I said generously. "But you aren't facing the devil here. You're facing a wizard working natural magic."

  The bishop closed his eyes for a moment. The blankets rose and fell slowly, and for a moment I wondered if he had even heard me. But when he looked at me again it was unexpectedly shrewdly, as though the real bishop's mind and ideas had come close to this room again. "You wouldn't be casting magic spells yourself as an excuse for the wizards to get a toehold here, would you? I hear the wizards' school in the great City is trying to expand its placement."

  "I can assure you," I said with dignity, "that I am not responsible for whatever is happening here." So Lucas's and Vincent's accusations against wizardry had now even reached the cathedral. "I neither want to mock the church nor gain any ‘toeholds.’"

  The bishop started to cough. A young doctor in white, who had been standing silently on the far side of the room, came forward and offered him a cup. He took a sip and closed his eyes again. But when he opened them he continued as though there had been no pause. "When will you have banished evil magic from our cathedral?"

  "I hope soon. I've only been here twenty-four hours, and I didn't see the monster myself. Until I have a better sense of who is working magic and what spells he is using, it may be difficult to counter him. I'll do my best to be quick and discreet."

  Joachim rose to his feet, so I did as well. He knelt to kiss the bishop's ring before leaving, but I felt once was enough. The bishop's eyes closed again as we went out.

  "It is an enormous responsibility he carries, and yet he seems able to do it still, in spite of his weakness," said Joachim as we reached the street. "The doctors say he may only have a few weeks, but they have already said that many times."

  I considered asking Joachim if he would expect me to kiss his ring once he became bishop but was able to resist doing so. I realized we were entering the side door of the cathedral, on our way to early service. No hope for breakfast then until service was over. But it was a good chance for some of the other cathedral priests to see me and realize how reverent and discreet a wizard could be.

  IV

  I spent the morning irreverently practicing magic within twenty yards of the bishop's palace. First I tried a number of spells from the collection I had brought, shaped to reveal a hidden magic-worker. I was disappointed that none of them worked, because it would have taken a master wizard to shielded his mind against all of them, but it was a further indication that whoever was working here was indeed a powerful wizard and not just a renegade magician with one good trick. I would certainly have been able to find the magician I had met the day before if he tried to sneak back into town, with his weak illusions and not enough flying ability to save his shoes. It was distracting that the face of the woman with the amethyst eyes kept appearing inexplicably in my mind in the middle of my spells.

  When this search got me nowhere, I started again trying to work out the principles of the magic of fire. My books had only the faintest hints but I had a few ideas, extrapolating from the other sorts of magic that I knew. Herbal magic, I recalled from when I had first learned it, was set up with its spells quite separate from the magic of light and air, as though on a track that started parallel but quickly veered away in a different direction.

  If the magic of fire worked similarly, I reasoned, I had to find the direction in which its magic veered. In the Hidden Language, one not only said specific spells but entered into the very fabric of magic's four dimensions. The direction in which one entered that fabric exerted a very powerful flow, and one had to remember that other directions were always possible.

  Knowing that I was deliberately avoiding thinking about a bat-winged monster five times the size of a man and doing so anyway, I worked on a candle in my room. I could with no trouble make the wick glow and even emit a plausible cloud of smoke, but it remained obstinately cool. Yet perhaps with a spell from another angle—

  I emerged from a struggle with the forces of magic and gave a shout of delight. Joachim's servant put his head in, alarmed and then puzzled. I sat by a sunlit window, triumphantly holding up a lit candle.

  "It's all right," I said. "I was just excited because I lit the candle flame. Will your master be home for lunch?"

  But the servant was gone, doubtless thinking that his master was harboring a madman.

  I extinguished the candle and lit it again to be sure that I could. Once more, with two words and a snap of my fingers I caused a blue flame to blossom on the end of the wick. It was a real flame, too, no illusion; I nearly burned my fingers. So far I could only create fire, not protect myself against it.

  I settled back, feeling a great reluctance to do anything else after my frantic efforts of the day before and then this morning's unsuccessful attempts to find another wizard. Sitting in the dean's house felt so safe and normal that I could almost imagine that nineteen years of romantic dreams were not shattered, that I had not resigned the only post I had ever had, and that an enormous monster with eye of fire had not landed a very short distance from here. If I didn't think about any of this, maybe none of it would be true.

  Again I wondered why Prince Lucas had come to the city just now, and why he seemed so furious with organized wizardry. He might have come here at his father's direction, I thought, to protect the largest community in their kingdom from a magical attack. In that case he might well suspect me of having something to do with the monster. But could he have learned of its evening appearance in time to arrive at dawn the next morning?

  When I heard the noon bells ringing in the cathedral, I began waiting for Joachim's return. But time passed, time enough for the noon service and enough more that I realized he was not coming.

  Unless I merely waited for the monster to reappear, something neither the bishop nor Joachim would want me to do, I would have to search it out. By sheer will power I dragged myself to my feet. The cathedral tower might offer more clues if I looked again.

  As I shouldered my way through the crowded streets, thinking of my best approach, I suddenly froze in the middle of a step. A light touch once brushed across my mind. This time it was not just a touch but a voice.

  It spoke one word, "Wizard." It might have been a statement, or it might have been someone addressing me. I looked around wildly but could find no clue. The mental touch was gone as quickly as it had come. But that single word inside my mind had sounded as though spoken with a woman's voice.

  No wonder, I thought grimly, that the town seemed full of magic. It would appear to have almost as high a density of magic-workers as the great City. Besides me, there was whoever had the power to make a monster do his bidding; plus the magician I had seen outside the gates; plus the wizard who had impressed the Romney children; and finally whatever witch had first touched my mind up on the scaffolding and had just done so again.

  Then out of the corner of my eye I saw a head of nut-brown hair over a dark shawl.

  In two steps I was beside her, the monster and Prince Lucas forgotten. "Excuse me," I said and touched her on the shoulder.

  She turned quickly toward me, but where I had expected a startled look I found a smile that put a dimple in her cheek.

  "I am Daimbert, Royal Wizard of Yurt," I said, flustered. "But I'm afraid I don't know who you are."

  "My name is Theodora." Her voice was almost musical in its lilt and deeper than I had expected.

  "Theodora," I said. "It is a very lovely and unusual name."

  "It was my mother's and grandmother's name, and I believe my grandmother's moth
er's and grandmother's as well."

  "Were all of them witches as well?"

  She burst into laughter. "I never thought of myself as a witch. Isn't that something wicked?"

  "Well," I said uncertainly, because she certainly did not appear to be wicked, "witches are women with strange powers."

  "Sometimes I call on serpents from deep beneath the sea," she said, looking at me with teasing amethyst eyes. "But they haven't answered me yet. Does that make me a witch?"

  "How about bat-winged monsters?" I said, finding it coming out much more harshly than I intended. "Do you call on them too?"

  "That's why the mayor sent for a wizard, isn't it," she said, sober for a moment, and I recalled that the first time I had seen her I had been coming from the municipal building. "I didn't see the creature myself, but it must have been terrible." Then her eyes danced again. "If you think I'm a witch, why are you surprised that I would want to meet the magic-worker brought in to deal with a monster?"

  "Why do you think the mayor himself would have sent for a wizard?" I asked, feeling reluctant to tell a witch that the cathedral dean had invited me here.

  "There are three that rule the world," she quoted, "the wizards, the Church, and the aristocracy. We who are the merchants and the artisans and the farmers don't count as rulers."

  "My family ran a warehouse in the great City," I said defensively. "Most wizards don't come from ruling families."

  "You have authority now. But this social structure gives someone like the elected mayor of a town a flexibility to do whatever he wants. He can ask for help from wizards or priests or aristocrats, whereas those three would be embarrassed to call on each other. I suppose," the dimple coming back, "if I called on monsters and they answered, then I probably would be a witch, but I'm not."

  "If you're not a witch," I said, trying not to sound accusing, "how were you able to speak inside my mind?"

  Instead of answering she took my arm. "If we're going to chat and get acquainted, let's not do it in the middle of the street. I was just going home for lunch. Won't you join me?"

  Stories I had half-heard twenty years ago flashed through my mind, stories of witches luring men into their caves, of what they did to them there in their mad lusts. The young woman beside me did not appear to be racked with mad lusts. Maybe I was developing an impure mind.

  "I'd be happy to eat with you," I said, "but you may not have enough to spare for a stranger. There's an inn right around the corner; I’ll even pay for both of us!"

  "Now," I said again when we were seated at the inn and I had ordered, "tell me, if you're not a witch, how you can speak with me magically, mind to mind?"

  She bent her head to reach up and unknot her shawl. Her profile and the angle of her neck made a delightful silhouette against the window beyond her. "Are you a witch?" she asked me.

  "I am a wizard. But only men can be wizards, because only men are trained properly in magic. A witch is a woman who has picked up a few rudiments of magic and, being untrained, uses them at best awkwardly and at worst in the service of darkness." Everything I said sounded in my ears as though I were charging her with unspeakable crimes.

  "I am a woman," she said with a laugh, "and I do know one or two rudiments of magic, but I would not say I was untrained, and I certainly don't serve the powers of darkness!"

  Our mugs of beer were brought, and she looked at me with dancing eyes over the rim of hers. I noticed how long her lashes were. I felt no touch in my mind, but her look implied that she could see all my thoughts and intentions and overall, surprisingly, rather liked what she saw.

  "Were you trained by an old ragged magician?"

  This she seemed to find the most amusing yet. "Of course not. My mother trained me. In fact, I taught the magician a little fire magic a few years ago. All he'd had before then were some rather flimsy illusions." If she had known him for several years, I thought, then I could give up my rather vague suspicions that he was a very powerful wizard in disguise, who had for reasons unclear come here to attack the cathedral.

  Theodora looked down at her plate for a moment, then toward me again. "You're one of the wizards he told me about, aren't you, one of the ones who finished the whole program at that school?"

  "Yes, I am, but that doesn't mean I know all the different sorts of magic there are. Watch this." I snapped my fingers, said two words, and the candle on the table came alight. "I worked that out this morning, but only this morning, and I'm afraid it's all the fire magic I know. Could you teach me more?"

  "And could you teach me illusions? Yours, I know, would not be flimsy or pathetic. It hardly seemed worth it to ask the magician to teach me his magic, and I was always afraid he would think I was trying to compete with him, keeping an ‘honest magician’ from earning a living."

  We both laughed at this. Our conversation seemed to be going nowhere, and almost every question was answered with a different question, but I felt intrigued. Something about her resisted my efforts to understand her, yet in a very few minutes I had started to feel I had known Theodora for weeks or even longer, and she seemed always to have known me.

  "Are you perhaps one of the Romneys?" I asked as we ate. I brought out the gold hoop earring I still had. "Did you lose this?"

  She brushed back the hair from both ears, tilting her head forward in the angle I liked. Long pendant earrings sparkled against her cheeks. "Doesn't it look like I still have my earrings?"

  "But are you a Romney?" I persisted.

  "No, I've lived all my life in the kingdom of Caelrhon, and as far as I know all my ancestors have too," she said, giving me a straighter answer than most. "But I've become friends with some of the Romneys. There's one band that often camps outside the city."

  I thought rapidly. "Why didn't they want me to know about you?"

  "Did they try very hard to deny my existence?" she said with an amused glance.

  "Maybe not. The old Romney woman implied I would meet you." I paused, remembering exactly what the woman had said. "But were they afraid of my discovering there was someone who knew magic in the city?"

  "Why would they do that?" she replied.

  "They certainly left town in a rush, I assume to avoid telling me."

  "But if I were with them, how can I be here now? Or is that just another of my witch-like tricks?"

  I was fascinated by her hair, a dark brown that caught gold highlights as she moved her head. It looked luxuriantly soft. "What are your other witch-like tricks?" I asked, almost wishing after all that I had accepted the invitation to her cave.

  "What I actually like to do best of all isn't even magic." She paused briefly; I could tell this was very important to her. "I like to climb."

  "To climb?"

  "I have to do it at night for the most part. It would cause scandal in the city to have a woman scrambling around on towers in broad daylight. But it gives me a sense of mastery, of power over my own body and over the world around me, to know there is nothing too steep or too tall for me to climb if I want."

  "Then you have a power over your body I don't have over mine. I went up the new cathedral tower last week, and it gave me vertigo. If you're not a Romney, are you perhaps related to those workmen working on the new church?"

  "I thought they were from far away in the north somewhere," she said with another smile. "Do they enjoy climbing too?" She had not actually answered my question, but it was too pleasant to have an attractive woman paying close attention to whatever I said to worry about it.

  V

  Even after we finished our food we continued sitting and talking, a conversation of unrelated questions and oblique answers, where she seemed continually amused by me. At last she looked out toward the street, where the movement of the sun over the house­ tops had cast the cobblestones into shadow. "I have a lot to do at home," she said, as though surprised herself at how much time had passed.

  "I'll walk you back."

  She took my arm again. "You school-trained wizards may luxuriate
in royal courts," she said with a smile, "pondering the meaning of magic, but those of us who work for a living actually have to work."

  We walked rapidly through twisting streets. Timbered house fronts leaned over us, seeming to stare down from multi-paned windows. We emerged in a quarter of small houses near the river, overlooked by the backs of the tall homes of the cathedral priests. Theodora stopped by a low door and turned her key.

  "Maybe it's just as well you didn't come here for lunch," she said apologetically as she opened the door. "I'd forgotten I left everything so scattered."

  Inside was a rather dimly-lit but completely conventional room. I had a brief glimpse of the black and white tail of a cat disappearing under a chair. Spread out on the table and chairs were brightly-colored embroidered pieces of cloth. "I do embroidery for some of the merchants and the garment retailers," she said. "The best piece I've done recently is no longer here, but if you're in the cathedral you'll see it: the cloth on the high altar."

  Joachim or whatever cathedral officer bought altar cloths, I thought, must not know that the skilled local embroideress he had hired was a witch. I was not going to tell him.

  "Usually I try to work at midday because the light is best," she said. "The drawback to fire magic is that you never end up with anything better than candlelight. But I did enjoy talking to you."

  "I hope I'll see you again," I said.

  "Of course you will. You promised to teach me some of your magic. An embroideress could use magic globes to shine beside her."

  I tore myself away and started back up the hill. I thought I knew now the source of the lights the watchman had originally seen on the new tower. But I knew even less the source of the bat-winged monster.

  The dean was very quiet at dinner that night, as though he had decided it would not be tactful to keep quizzing me on my progress. I took advantage of his silence to think about Theodora. But, as usual, tact lost out.