Is This Apocalypse Necessary?

by C. Dale Brittain_Wizard of Yurt 06

  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 hur
ried 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 the 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

  It was pitch black, and all my magic was gone. A brief attempt to reach Evrard’s mind was as unproductive as if I had never studied any wizardry at all. The magic lights were, naturally, not working. As soon as the door closed everything had gone completely dark, so that without sight or magic I would not have known if Elerius were two paces from us.

  What was Elerius using to power his spells? He had needed a cohort of young wizards in his castle to keep my magic from working, and here he was by himself, opposed by the best wizards in the West, and he was still neutralizing their spells. No wonder I hadn’t been able to find any trace of the school teachers’ magic from outside: Elerius had stopped all their spells before they began.

  And was continuing to do so, even with the very same young wizards who had once been his assistants now outside probing for flaws in his magic. The one bright spot was that in these conditions most of the magic Elerius knew would be as inaccessible to him as it was to me.

  The queen was not about to let a little darkness deter her. I kept on her heels as she stormed down the passage that led from the front door. “There are two steps up here, my lady,” I said, “and the passage then curves left.”

  She must have heard me because she avoided tripping on the steps or hitting the wall, but all her intent was focused on finding Elerius.

  If the magic lights weren’t working, I thought, and Elerius didn’t want to show himself at a window, he might well be operating out of the big lecture room, lit by skylights, up toward the top of the school. It was a long climb up there, especially in the dark—student wizards worked on their flying spells in part to make the ascent more easily. But I had never become particularly proficient at flying until after I left the school, and I still knew every step, though my student days were now decades in the past.

  Where were the student wizards? I wondered as we scrambled up the steep stairs. There had been a number of students at the school when the old Master died, but no one had mentioned them recently. The problem with being thought dead was that one lost all track of current events.

  The teachers must have sent them home, which at least meant they were out of the direct line of fire.

  We came up the last flight of cracked stone steps, seeing faint light in front of us. Other than turning where I told her to turn, the queen had given no sign of even realizing I was with her. But as we entered the large, unnaturally quiet room, with its rows of seats carved with the initials of generations of wizardry students, and the chalk dust hanging in the air, she turned toward me. She was breathing hard from the ascent but still
had enough breath to say sharply, “Thank you for showing me the way, Wizard, but I would prefer to speak with Elerius in private.”

  “So would I,” I said. “First we have to find him.”

  In the twilight shadows lurked in every corner. Normally, as well as the noises made by students creaking in their chairs, whispering, coughing, flicking pages in their textbooks, and scribbling notes, there was a constant faint sound from the skylights: the whistle of the wind, the rattle of a dead leaf on glass. But except for the sound of our own breathing, everything now was dead silent. The room was full of memories of lectures, by Zahlfast, by the old Master, by other teachers— even a few by me. Surely, it seemed, all that magic must be accessible here, but my spells still didn’t work.

  Into the silence came the faint sound of a footfall. Both the queen and I whirled, to see Elerius up on the dais, stroking his black beard and looking at us from under peaked eyebrows.

  “Just a moment, my dear,” he said to the queen, one palm held out. His voice sounded almost normal, but notquite— his confidence had been broken by the double blow of the saint and the Ifrit, and he didn’t have it back yet. “There has been a brief detour on our path to triumph, but I can explain my new plans to you as soon as I am through with Daimbert. Could you leave us?”

  “I,” she said, very cold, “shall not leave without first receiving satisfactory answers.”

  “Very well. But this may possibly prove unpleasant.”

  He took two steps down from the podium, now looking only at me. I was right. His confidence had been broken. His thoughtful tawny eyes held something I had never seen in them before—pure hatred.

  He was still trying to sound normal, especially with the queen there, but was rapidly becoming less successful. “If you have come with one more of your pathetic attempts to make me yield to your authority, Daimbert, I am afraid it is much too late.”