“Try drawing a map of your own,” suggested Gwennie. “Try drawing Yurt.”
Homesickness, keen and unexpected, hit me as I sketched the shape of the kingdom, the location of the castle, the roads and rivers, the plateau cut by the valley of the Cranky Saint.
“Don’t forget the nunnery,” put in Hadwidis.
Elerius had never threatened Yurt directly, but as I drew I knew in my heart that I was opposing him for the sake of my kingdom and my family, as much as for any principle. This is where Elerius’s influence must never come.
But when I looked at the map through the crystal eyes of the skull, it refused to come alive. All I could see was a series of pencil marks, hard to make out in the dim light and slightly distorted by the crystals. Yurt lived but not on paper.
“When we mages of Xantium need to communicate over long distances,” said Maffi confidently, “we say certain words over deep pools, and can see the person with whom we wish to communicate.” I was happy to let him try, but his ‘certain words’ had no effect here.
Hadwidis had been watching quietly. “Don’t try to do it all at once,” she suggested suddenly. “Start by making your own map of the Eastern Kingdoms. If you can make the skull work at all, you can then start working on other places.”
“What a good idea,” I said, rousing myself to give her a grin and tousle her hair. She had been out of
the nunnery long enough that her hair was worth tousling.
It was now so dark that we had to work by firelight, me drawing and the other three arguing about where the rivers ran which we had crossed over today. I emphatically drew Basil’s hill complete with the obsidian castle. The one part of the map on which we could all agree was the woodland clearing in which we now sat.
“Let me try this now,” I said, again holding the skull to my face. The map remained stubbornly ill-lit and unfeatured, but for a second I thought I caught a hint of a spell, almost a trailing thread—
“That appears akin to something I know,” said Maffi, serious now, not simply trying to persuade me of the superiority of his training with Kazalrhun over mine at the school.
I still thought of him as the boy he had been when I first knew him, but he was, I reminded myself, probably older now than I had been when I first came to Yurt as Royal Wizard. I nodded and shifted to give him room beside me. We each held the skull in one hand and, mind to mind, worked together at teasing out its magic.
What I had spotted was more than a trailing thread; it was the beginning of a spell shaped in something very like the magery of Xantium, though with some odd twists—
“There,” said Maffi suddenly, breaking the mental contact. I wiped my forehead with my sleeve. His mind had been even stranger than I expected. But between us we had found the tiniest gap in the magic of the seeing crystals, a gap apparently meant to be bridged by the ensorcelled map Basil had had on the table beside it, but which might be filled in with certain other spells instead… And I thought we had it.
“I shall attempt the map now,” Maffi said, then grinned. “You know,” he commented with a wink for Gwennie, “I would have to characterize you of the West as strange.” I let him have the skull, and he bent over the map. There was a long silence.
It was night now, and the piece of paper on which I had drawn my map was no more than a firelit rectangle. The wind was rising, sighing in the trees and bringing back the suspicions I thought I had left behind at Basil’s castle, that Elerius was cautiously and invisibly approaching. Hadwidis put her hand on my arm, and I squeezed it.
Maffi pulled the skull from his face, his eyes huge. Worldlessly he passed it to me, and I bent eagerly over the map. Instantly it came to life.
It was a disquieting life, lit by more than the fire. Parts of the map were extremely sharp, including the obsidian castle with its jagged towers, and most of the road we had followed both on our way there and leaving. In other places a smoothly-running river simply disappeared, though I knew I had drawn its entire length, only to reappear again after an unfeatured, misty gap. Those parts of the Eastern Kingdoms which I had not tried to sketch, that is most of them, also faded almost immediately into vague whiteness.
The skull must be able to bring to life only those parts of the map which were drawn to correct scale—and the misty gaps were the parts over which we had argued.
And then, moving my eyes very carefully, I saw us.
It was extremely disconcerting to see oneself from the outside. I stared, fascinated, at the miniscule fire, the four tiny human figures, and the large, dark and shadowed shape which I recognized after one startled heartbeat as the flying beast. The miniature trees of the living map bent and swayed with the trees above us.
Though I stared until my eyes ached, I could make out no enemy creeping up on us.
I pulled it from my face. “Let’s try Yurt.”
It didn’t work. Though this map was much better than my sketch of the Eastern Kingdoms, it refused to come to life.
Maffi and I tried further adjustments on the spells, without effect.
Gwennie and Hadwidis gave up and went to sleep while we were still passing the skull back and forth, saying, “I think I have an idea,” and “Let me try just one more spell.”
I pulled out the primer of the magic of “blood and bone” which Basil had given me, but in flipping through its pages by firelight I saw nothing about far-seeing skulls. Spells worked with bodies dead three days, seven days, seven years were all there, as were constructions built on dragons’ teeth, spells to sicken from miles away, but nothing useful—now, or I thought, ever. I thrust the book back in my pocket and returned to school spells and improvisation.
Exhausted, Maffi and I stopped at last. I looked up at the sky, where a star peeking through the clouds could have been the watching eye of someone else with his own magic skull. As I watched the clouds shifted, and I could see that the star was not an eye but a shoulder of the Hunter, rising in the east over Xantium.
Feeling hunted myself as I wrapped up in a blanket, I only hoped that our failure to see Yurt didn’t mean that the kingdom no longer existed.
Part Seven Armies
I
From the Eastern Kingdoms we headed straight west, over the high range of mountains that separated eastern and western lands. I kept Naurag fairly close to the ground, following the passes. The high peaks towered over us, shutting out half the sky. The stinging wind off the eternal ice fields that topped the peaks was frigid and tasted of snow. We made camp for the evening in a relatively sheltered valley at the feet of the highest mountain.
Could people even live up there, Wizard?” Gwennie asked, craning her neck.
I considered. “You wouldn’t be able to breathe,” I said at last. “There’s less and less air the higher you go, and you wouldn’t have any breath for climbing.” A wizard, I thought, could probably fly up there with magic, perhaps creating some sort of spell to trap and bring air with him. But wizards are too practical to want to freeze to death three miles above the surface of the earth.
“Perhaps this trip will give me a new appreciation for the summer sun of Xantium,” commented Maffi as we tried to cook supper over a fire whose heat was sucked away by the bitter night sky. When we awoke in the morning, folded two to a side under Naurag’s warm wings, it was to see the ground lightly dusted with white.
Maffi considered it enormously exotic, and Hadwidis, declaring that they never let her build snowmen in the nunnery, promptly built one, using up most of the snow around our camp in the process. But I couldn’t enjoy it. I had still not gotten the skull to show me anything beyond the Eastern Kingdoms, and as I tried another spell this morning, even those lands seemed oddly faded. I rubbed my eyes, wondering if this was just due to glare off the new snow, but when I tried again my penciled sketch of the region east of the mountains still only resolved itself into a misty approximation of the living scenes I had been able to see before.
Basil had tricked me, I thought. He had given m
e a worthless artifact, made me swear not to attack him to forestall my trying to take its value out of his hide, and was probably thinking that when I came, peacefully, to complain, he could feed me to his lizard. But my certainty that it was hopeless did not keep me from trying new spells. I had to find out what was happening at home.
Naurag was inspired by the cold air under his wings to fly even faster, so in another day we were able to leave the highest peaks behind us and start down into the foothills. The first kingdom we would reach in the West, I recalled, was Elerius’s former kingdom. He was long gone, and the evil king who had ruled there was dead, but I didn’t want to take a chance on the royal chancellor.
According to Basil he was still there, and even if he had not been warned of my coming he would probably still recognize me.
So in spite of all three riders on the flying carpet waving and pointing to indicate that we should stop and ask hospitality at the enormous castle that sprawled at the mountains’ knees, I led us onward, to another cold camp but a safe one. Here at least the snow had not yet to begin to blow.
“I have another idea to coax this skull into compliance,” Maffi announced. I let him have it, along with the map of Yurt, not expecting him to have any more success than I had had up in the mountains.
But the moment he had the crystals before his eyes, he gave a shout. “God be praised, it is working!”
I snatched it from him without even a word of thanks and pressed the skull to my own face. He was right. Before me Yurt came to life.
“We mages of Xantium have many abilities,” said Maffi airily, trying to suggest without actually saying so that his magic had finally made it work.
“I think,” said Hadwidis loyally, “that Daimbert had done all the spells correctly, and you just triggered it.”
“No, no,” I said absently, staring until my eyes hurt. “I think the skull just has a limited range, and can only show you the region where you are. It’s a good thing, Maffi, that we didn’t spoil its inherent spells trying to work on it.” But even as I spoke my mind was far away.
There was the white castle of Yurt, banners flying from the towers. There was the brick road that led down the hill into the woods. There was one village, and another. There was the nunnery of Yurt. If I shifted my gaze cautiously, I could see the limestone plateau into which the river which bubbled up by the Cranky Saint’s shrine had cut its deep bed. It all looked very peaceful.
I lowered the skull and looked toward Gwennie, sitting still and white-faced. “Nothing seems to be happening there,” I said. “No marching armies, no volcanic craters, no fire-blackened woods.”
“Can I see?” she asked in a small voice.
I had been about to raise the skull to my face again, but I nodded and handed it to her instead, hiding my surprise.
Most people who are not trained as wizards prefer to watch from a safe distance, and Gwennie had never shown any inclination before to try a spell. Even now she hesitated, holding the skull with the very tips of her fingers. “If it will work here in the Western Kingdoms,” she said, “why didn’t Vlad bring it to Yurt when he came, rather than leaving it behind in his castle?” She was trying to speak casually, but she gave an involuntary shiver, both I guessed from holding something Vlad had made and from her memories of his magic. Hers must be as vivid as mine.
“He didn’t have a map of the West,” I said. “Remember, he had trouble even finding Yurt.” And I wished he’d had a whole lot more trouble. “And once he was there, it was easier just to look around than to try to create a map of what was right before his eyes.”
She nodded and took a deep breath, then lifted the skull to look through the crystals. She looked for several minutes, not speaking, and finally lowered it. “The king is not at home,” she said at last, somewhat distantly.
“He might be inside the castle,” Hadwidis suggested. A glance indicated she was itching to try the skull herself. “So you couldn’t see him.”
Gwennie shook her head, handing me back the skull and wiping her fingers on the grass. “His royal flag is not flying,” she said. “Ever since I have been constable I have made sure always to fly his flag when he is in residence.”
I met her eyes. Both of us were wondering where he was— and if he had decided to try to find adventure in my absence by galloping off after Elerius.
Hadwidis started to lift the skull from my lap, then stopped. “I really don’t need to see what’s going on in the nunnery of Yurt,” she said. “I already have much too clear an idea. I’m going to draw my kingdom.”
The wind kept catching the paper, and the flickering firelight gave her little enough to see by, but she drew determinedly, tongue between her teeth. “I may not have been there for a few years,” she said, “but I was born there. The nuns didn’t make me forget.” In fifteen minutes she had drawn a fairly detailed map, the area around the royal castle the most sharply-drawn, the villages and a seaport sketched more roughly, the rivers traced carefully, hills, valleys, and forests indicated with a tangle of pencil strokes. “Now, I’m going to see what my mother is doing. The nuns wouldn’t let me go home even for my father’s funeral, but they can’t stop me now!” She took the skull mask gingerly, peered through the crystals, then gave a startled cry and dropped it. But she snatched it up again before I could react and raised it again, this time more slowly.
We waited, holding our breaths, for her to speak.
Her eyes, distorted by the crystals, flicked up and down, back and forth. Then abruptly she hurled the skull aside and threw herself into my arms.
“It’s horrible, Wizard!” she cried, on the edge of tears. “Why did the Cranky Saint want me to leave the nunnery? Why couldn’t I just stay there? Does he expect me to deal with this?”
Gently I eased her out of my lap and took up the skull myself. I had wanted to know what was happening in the Western Kingdoms, and now I was going to find out. An old saying flashed through my mind, about not asking a question if you don’t want to learn the answer. As I put the mask to my face, Hadwidis’s penciled map came alive, lit from within. It was night in her kingdom as it was night here, but as I looked through the skull light seemed to follow my gaze. There was the great castle where Elerius was Royal Wizard, where Hadwidis and her half-brother, Elerius’s son, had grown up. The courtyard was packed with tents; an army appeared bivouacked there. Up in the towers magic lanterns burned, and through the windows I could see tiny figures passing back and forth against the light. Cautiously, reluctantly, I moved my eyes from an examination of the dark towers to the surrounding territory. Here again were encamped armies, watchfires burning. Armies! Tents and fires seemed to stretch to the horizon. Thousands of soldiers were there, tens of thousands. They were settling down for the night now, but sentries walked between the tents, and horses stamped and shook their manes. Shields hung from the tent posts. I doubted so many armed men had been assembled in one spot since the Black Wars. Feeling ill, I identified among the flags the royal insignia of Yurt. While I had been gone, Elerius must have retreated to his kingdom, protected by warriors and powerful spells, and much of the rest of the Western Kingdoms were assembling on his doorstep.
That they had not yet overpowered Elerius with their superior numbers suggested that his protective spells were holding. Either that, or human armies were reluctant to march into battle against undead creatures of hair and bone. And how many wizards might have joined him, to add their magic to his?
“They’re attacking my mother and my little brother,” Hadwidis said brokenly, and Gwennie tried unsuccessfully to comfort her.
It would take months, I thought, to starve Elerius out, much too long to keep an attacking army the size of that one calm and quiet. The kings of the West, delighted to have an excuse
for war after generations of peace, must be eagerly anticipating an open battle. All too soon, one of the kings would charge, then all would charge, and it would be impossible to restore peace out of the resulting carnage.
II
All of us now were eager for speed, but Naurag didn’t like to fly at night, and even Maffi was reluctant to pilot the flying carpet through darkness across kingdoms he didn’t know. We were still nowhere near either Yurt or Elerius’s kingdom when I decided late the following evening that we had to stop for the night.
I had recognized a castle. It was a small castle, built on a bridge arching across a placid river, where a family of swans swam and sheep grazed by the riverbank. The castle had a very distinctive roof: bright blue tiles, and gold leaf reflecting the last rays of sun from the peak of each tower. We had stopped there twenty years ago on our way to Xantium; the castellan, I recalled, had had a mother who was fourth cousin or something to King Paul’s father, the old king of Yurt, and he had been delighted then to put us up.
The same castellan was still there, grayer but still hospitable. He didn’t remember me, but he did remember old King Haimeric. “So how did that quest of his ever turn out?” he asked, while his servants bustled around to prepare rooms for us. We had left Naurag and the flying carpet over the next hill, but we must still have appeared a rather ill-assorted and scruffy bunch, standing inside the front doors on his blue-veined marble floor.
“It was exciting and dangerous,” I said truthfully, “but in the end I think we all found our hearts’ desire.”
“Well, I was very glad to welcome your group then,” he said cordially, “and I’m happy to welcome all of you for Haimeric’s sake. I’m afraid we’ve already had dinner—would you mind if we brought trays to your rooms? We do want to hear in the morning about your adventures, however. We see very few travelers, since we’re well off the main routes. And you say you’re coming from the Eastern Kingdoms? It must be quite a journey on foot!”
Is This Apocalypse Necessary? Page 24
