He had gone far beyond jealousy that the Master preferred me. Telling him it had been my daughter, not me, who had used the Ifrit to drive him from the castle would only make things worse.
“This is my school,” he continued from between clenched teeth. “Neither the saints with whom you claim friendship, nor any magical creatures from the East, shall take it from me. You have disrupted my plans for the last time! Even if I do not succeed in persuading the West that everyone would be better off in yielding to my leadership—something of which they will see the wisdom much more clearly once you are gone—I shall have the satisfaction of knowing that you will never lead them either.”
So much for my first plan, of making one final effort to talk him out of here. Stalling for time while I tried to come up with a second plan, I said, “Magic’s stopped working here. We both know you could defeat me if it came to a contest of spells, but until you break your spell against spells, we may be reduced to the undignified alternative of wrestling on the floor. I’m not sure the queen would enjoy the spectacle.”
He glanced quickly toward her and made no effort to tackle me, though I flexed my newly-healed leg to be ready, just in case. He answered quietly, but the threat of violence gave a harsh undertone to his words. “A contest of spells will not be necessary. You are now utterly alone, and this time none of the friends of whom you’re so proud will be able to help you. In a few minutes you shall accompany me to the school cellars, and what we find there shall destroy you utterly.”
My heart, still beating hard from the climb, hammered wildly. He’s summoned a demon, I thought. And the saint, having answered my prayers once, was leaving the rest of this up to me.
“Dear God, Elerius!” I burst out. “If you kill me—” Was he really planning to kill me in cold blood? It was hard to doubt his ability to do so. “—how will you ever persuade any of the teachers to follow you?”
“When you are gone,” he said, even more harshly, “they shall have a final chance to agree to my authority, or they and the entire school shall be destroyed as well.”
Back when the Master said he wanted me to succeed him, I had tried to object by pointing out that I had no idea what the school kept in all those locked rooms down in the cellars. My objections had been even more pertinent than I realized. It looked as though I was finally going to find out.
I pulled back my lips in a desperate effort at a smile. “Goodness, Elerius, you almost had me believing you there for a minute!” I knew very well he wasn’t joking, but maybe if I
suggested he was, it might still give him a chance to back down. “But I am sure you aren’t planning to sacrifice yourself.” He bent toward me, glaring through the dimness. “It would be worth it, if I took you with me.”
The queen interrupted—for a second I had almost forgotten her, and her voice behind us made me jump. “Perhaps you are not the man I thought you were, Elerius,” she said, speaking clearly and loudly from one of the student seats.
“Threatening to kill a wizard who you imagine has been responsible for your own failures, preparing to destroy the wizards’ school you had told me you would be so proud to head—all this sounds to me like an admission of failure!”
That stopped him as nothing I could have said would have. “No, no, of course not. I said I would explain,” he said hurriedly, again with a faint pleading note. “This is triumph! Don’t you understand?”
“I understand nothing,” she said in a voice toneless with anger, “but that you have betrayed my affection.”
Maybe I could get out of here while she distracted him. Half a dozen steps, I thought, and I would be at the top of the stairs. I was sure I could run down them faster in the dark than he could. And when I reached the door, the door he had somehow magically sealed—
“Don’t try to run, Daimbert,” he said as my foot quietly began to move. “You will never get the doors open.” He wasn’t looking at me, but he didn’t have to—he would have been running himself under the circumstances.
So what was I supposed to do? I thought, looking at the back of his head. Something he wouldn’t think of doing himself, like throwing myself headfirst down the stairs so that I would be dead of a broken neck before he had the satisfaction of killing me?
He might accuse me of a penchant for self-sacrifice, but I had a powerful penchant for survival. I would somehow have to reach the teachers, wherever he had sealed them.
Zahlfast was in the infirmary, according to Whitey and Chin—that at least I thought I could find in the dark. With several of us working together, we might be able to find a way—
So, the voice in the back of my mind asked sourly, did I think that if the teachers couldn’t break through Elerius’s spells by themselves, my own patchy knowledge of herbal and eastern magic would be enough to do the trick?
“You were right, I realize now,” I heard him babbling to the queen, “to point out that it was silly of me to worry so much about the school these last few months. Once I have destroyed it I shall no longer be distracted, and you and I shall set ourselves up in a much better kingdom than the one your daughter has so rudely seized. In fact—”
He never had a chance to finish. The floor under our feet gave a sudden jerk, as though for a second Elerius’s spells had faltered. I reached for my magic, but it still wasn’t there.
But something was different. Had Evrard and the rest of them found a chink, no matter how small, in Elerius’s protective spells? I looked up at the skylights, where the last of the day’s light still lingered.
And saw a flash of flame, a yellow set of talons, and an enormous eye. The school was under attack by a dragon.
III
The floor jerked again, and just for a second sounds reached us from outside: a dragon’s roar, the scrape of mighty claws on the roof, and, faint in the distance, what could have been shouts of triumph.
Elerius gave a strangled cry of dismay and sprang for the stairs. If dragons were about to come down through the skylights, I could see his point. I grabbed the flabbergasted queen by the elbow and pulled her after him.
“Coward!” she shouted after his retreating back as we stumbled down the dark staircase. “Will you save your skin and abandon me?”
“He’s not abandoning you, my lady,” I said, though I couldn’t have said why I still felt compelled to defend Elerius. “He’s hurrying down to the school cellars to work on the magical defenses.”
She ignored me. We could hear his footsteps, moving far faster than hers, growing far and faint before us. If he had sold his soul to the devil in return for protection, it must not have commanded a very high price, or else a dragon would never have gotten within miles of the school.
Could Evrard have possibly summoned a dragon? He had never had what I considered particularly good sense, but this went far beyond what even a marginally competent wizard with an over-active imagination should come up with. And how had he gotten a dragon down from the land of wild magic so rapidly?
We were most of the way down to the level of the front door when all of the magical lights suddenly went back on, and whatever powerful spell had blocked my knowledge of the Hidden Language dissolved away. “Hah!” I shouted, from the sheer pleasure of having my magic back. With the lights on I could see again, but the feeling of opening my eyes from blindness went far beyond vision.
The queen stopped, blinking in the sudden glare, but I pulled her on with new speed. Elerius must have shut down his spells to keep magic from working here in order to use the force to power his spells against dragons. But that meant it might be possible to find and rescue the teachers.
The front doors were locked, but I had learned the spells to unlock them back when I was still a student, sneaking in after a long evening down in the taverns. A few quick words in the Hidden Language, and they swung open. The horse the queen had ridden in on was still there, but the street, that had been empty when we came in, was now packed with citizens staring upward, open-mouthed.
B
elow us I could hear the city’s alarm bells ringing wildly.
“Straight down the hill, my lady,” I said, giving her an unceremonious shove. Above us I heard new roars and scrabbling sounds. My view was blocked by the bulk of the school itself, but I saw a red tail, a green wing, and flames shooting from several different points. How many dragons could Evrard have possibly summoned? “Get as far away from here as you can!”
“I shall not—” the queen started to announce, but I had already slammed the door, leaving her outside.
Now to find the teachers before the dragons dismantled the school.
It had been a while since I had lived here, and I had never spent much time in the infirmary, but my feet knew the way.
Some of the other teachers had become my friends over the years, but Zahlfast had been my true friend since I graduated—and, although I had not realized it at the time, even before. I shot down the halls, down turnings and steps, past offices and seminar rooms,past the entrance to the cafeteria, and skidded to a halt at the white door that marked the suite of rooms where sick students and members of the faculty rested and were treated.
I wrenched it open and burst into rooms smelling strongly of alcohol and medicinal herbs. A row of narrow beds were lined up, empty mattresses bare—except for one. Far overhead came crashes and thundering roars. The floor shook and shook again.
If Elerius was trying to set up spells against dragons, they weren’t working.
For a second I did not recognize Zahlfast, whom I had always thought of as a figure of strength and authority. He was out of bed but leaning on the headboard. The tall red hat that was always on his head was nowhere in sight. He wore a nightshirt and looked in it much thinner and more frail than I remembered. His fingers on the headboard went white with tension as he struggled to keep his feet while the whole school swayed around us. We are wizards! I shouted mentally. We’re not supposed to get old!
Zahlfast’s eyes had been downcast, as if in resignation, but then he looked up and saw me.
“I’m alive. I was never actually dead,” I said hastily, seeing the shock building. Faking one’s death really was more effort than it was worth. I didn’t want an old man, especially one already made ill by the unsuccessful struggle to keep organized wizardry together, pushed into apoplexy by seeing a ghost apparently welcoming him into the afterlife. “Elerius has lost control of the school’s defenses, and we’re under attack by dragons.
I’ve got to get you out of here before the whole structure comes down around us.”
I lifted him with magic and transported him toward the doorway, trailing a sheet. That last crash sounded closer.
Zahlfast shook his head hard and seemed to recover momentarily. “I can walk,” he said shortly, then unexpectedly smiled. “I should have known, Daimbert, all the way back during that disastrous transformations practical of yours. Saving the school by attacking it with dragons was exactly what you would think of first.”
I had never, even for a minute, planned to attack the school with dragons, but there was no time to go into that now.
“I’ll get you to safety, then try to find the rest. Do you have any idea where in the school they are?”
He was on his own feet now and wrapping the sheet around his shoulders like a cloak. “In the library. They had all gathered to try to decide what to do next, after the telephone message came through that Elerius was out of his castle. So when he showed up here instead, it was easy for him to capture them all.”
“I’ll get them as soon as you’re safe,” I started to say again, but he cut me off short.
“Aren’t you surprised, Daimbert, that they haven’t already come rushing down the halls, now that Elerius is distracted from most of his spells? I’ll have to go with you. The library has its own set of protective spells—I put them in place myself, years ago, with the help of an especially bright student named Elerius. He’s turned the spells inward to prevent the faculty’s escape, and even now I’m sure they are struggling to derive a countervailing spell, starting from first principles. I never let the knowledge of my protective spells spread, thinking the library would need to be defended from any wizard who went renegade—never realizing the worst renegade would be my own star pupil.”
We hurried as best we could back up the stairs and toward the library, though several times we were thrown against a wall by the force of the building’s swaying. It couldn’t hold together much longer, I thought. Once all the magic lights went out for ten seconds, then came back on. Scrapes and creakings came from below us now as well as above, and a deafening roar suggested an entire tower had toppled. It should have been full dark outside, but whenever we passed near to where a window had been—and glass now lay in shards—sheets of dragon-fire lit up the sky. Twice parts of the ceiling fell into a corridor through which we had just passed.
“I’ve given my whole life to this place,” Zahlfast was mumbling.
“To the teaching of wizardry. Not to the building,” I said firmly, though my own heart felt wretched at seeing it being pulled to pieces around us.
The library, however, seemed untouched, the corridor leading to it free of rubble, even the sounds of disaster and collapse sounding more distant. Zahlfast sank to the floor by the door and for a moment leaned his head against the wall, his face gray.
“Master,” I said quietly, bending over him, “if you can just tell me the spells I’ll try them, you shouldn’t—”
He looked up at me with a glint of anger from under shaggy eyebrows. “I’m not as far gone as you seem to think, and I’m not the Master. You won’t saddle me with that! If we survive you’ll be the Master here, Daimbert—or should I say, Frogs?”
Stung, I stepped back, and after a brief pause he started on spells. In a moment I stopped being indignant enough that I began to try to help him, working mind-to-mind.
But what did he mean by using that old teasing nickname I had hoped had been forgotten for decades? And where had he learned magic like this? I didn’t know about the rest of the faculty, but it would have taken me many months to try to work out the spells he had set up around the library—the spells Elerius had used to capture the teachers.
Zahlfast had built an unusual twist into his spells, one I had never seen before, though I immediately realized how Elerius could have turned it around, to keep people from getting out of the library as well as to keep others from getting in.
Zahlfast worked steadily; he might be old but he had not lost track of how he had put this particular piece of magic together. Quickly he untwisted his spells, disentangled them from other bits of spells, and set the whole magical edifice into reverse.
He was doing all the real work. All I had to do was murmur a few words of the Hidden Language at appropriate moments to keep the spell structure from collapsing around him as he forced his way furiously through magic’s four dimensions.
Even amid the grating of stones against each other, the breaking of the spells around the library came with an almost audible ‘pop.’ The door swung open, and the best wizards of the west tumbled out, undignified and clutching armfuls of books to their chests.
But I had eyes for none of them. Zahlfast had slumped against the wall again, his eyes shut and his breathing shallow.
“Why didn’t you tell him I was still alive?”
I demanded, not finding the most polite way myself to greet my old teachers. I lifted him carefully in my arms; he seemed to weigh almost nothing. “He was sick, he was horrified to see me coming into the infirmary like an apparition, and he’s used the last of his strength freeing you because you weren’t alert enough to spot Elerius coming!”
They let my rudeness pass. “He’s down in the cellars,” said one teacher, an expert at mental communication.
“Still not working with a demon,” said another, one of the demonology experts. “Let’s grab the books and go!” cried a third.
His view prevailed. But even with all their lifting spells working together, they coul
d not carry more than a fraction of the library’s contents, down the narrow corridors toward the main doors. Not all the teachers were even carrying books; two were carrying between them a heavy box that I hoped held the school’s accounts and bank deposit receipts. Books dropped, fluttering, whenever we had to negotiate a sharp corner or a particularly steep staircase, but no one stopped to pick them up. “We’ll have to come back,” said the librarian, worried.
There were plenty of upper doors, but we hurried on toward the lower levels: no one wanted to go out into a night lit by dragon-fire.
“They’re not my dragons,” I panted, though no one except Zahlfast had accused me of summoning them. “I think Evrard must have somehow gotten them here.”
“Evrard skipped the whole section of the curriculum on dragons,” a teacher said crisply. “Got a waiver from the Master himself—a big mistake, I thought at the time.” I said nothing, having skipped the same section myself.
“He won’t have known the spells to summon dragons.”
But someone had. We were taking a short cut through a series of sitting-rooms some of the teachers used in the evenings, and the windows, still intact, suddenly shattered as an entire dragon’s snout was thrust through, all hot breath and great yellow fangs.
“Daimbert!” a voice shouted, a voice I didn’t recognize. I didn’t stop to find out who it was.
Clutching Zahlfast to me, I redoubled my speed. He hadn’t moved since we left the library. Scattering books behind them, the teachers flew down the corridors, and in a moment we shot out into the street at the school’s main level.
A dragon hovered, slowly flapping enormous leathery wings, in the air directly above us.
We dove back toward the doorway, but I was stopped by a voice that seemed to come from the dragon. “Daimbert!” it shouted again.
Is This Apocalypse Necessary? Page 37
