An illusory golden ball arched through the air. Startled, Antonia reached up to catch it. But just before reaching her, the ball changed into a golden bird and flew, flapping wildly, up toward the ceiling where it disappeared with a pop. A single golden feather drifted down and dissolved back into air.
Antonia laughed and trotted over to climb on Elerius’s knee. “My wizard does illusions too,” she said. I thought it nice of her not to mention that I, the winner of an undeserved award, couldn’t do anything that complicated anywhere near as easily. “His name is Daimbert,” she added in explanation, as though Elerius might be unsure who I was. “I’m Antonia.”
“My name is Elerius,” he said, taking her brush. He was good at everything else; why should I be surprised that Elerius was also good with children? “Hmm, it looks like you’ve been trying to do some braiding yourself, Antonia, without being able to see what you were doing.”
“That’s because my friend Celia left yesterday,” said Antonia.
Celia! With everything else I had forgotten all about sending her to find out about the Dog-Man. It was too early to expect a message from her yet, but I might soon. And might that man, who performed very strange magic tinged with the supernatural, who had persuaded the bishop he wanted to be a priest, be behind the attack on Yurt?
Elerius finished brushing out the tangles and started braiding Antonia’s hair. A few magic words helped keep the strands in place until he could work them in. While he braided she took hold of a handful of his black beard and, humming, started brushing it.
“This may not have anything to do with the Lady Justinia, Daimbert,” said Elerius casually. Antonia, having exhausted the immediate possibilities of his beard, was now braiding her doll’s yarn hair. “Consider this: it may rather be directed toward you.”
“Me?”
“Forget Xantium for the moment,” he continued, still speaking in a casual voice Antonia happily ignored as she started singing to her doll. “Think about your trip years ago through the area where this sort of magic is widespread. I believe the others who were with you then are either now dead or at any rate not here in Yurt. Did you make any foes among the wizards of the Eastern Kingdoms?”
“I might have,” I said reluctantly. But all the hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood on end to hear someone else voice my worst suspicions.
It had been fifteen years ago on our way to the East, when we had met the dark, half-living wizard Vlad. Mostly by luck, I had been able to get us away and out of his snares without giving him what he wanted. Although I had not actually intended to hurt him, when we fled, that eastern wizard’s body had been partially destroyed, dissolved by sunlight …
So if Vlad, who had screamed curses after me, had found me at last, what would he try next, now that I had been able to withstand his warriors just long enough for the dawn to come?
VI
There was no message from Celia all day. In early evening I left the castle ostentatiously, standing on the drawbridge talking to Paul for several minutes before flying away. The story Elerius and I put out in the royal court was that I was searching by night for whatever practitioner of black magic had unsuccessfully attacked us, while he stayed on guard in the castle. We were doing more, however: testing to see whether the castle-including Justinia-was the target, or whether I was.
They raised the drawbridge and lowered the portcullis behind me; a lot more than one watchman would be on guard tonight. Elerius also stood ready to put spells, far more powerful than anything I could have managed alone, all around the castle, to stop any further magical creatures in their tracks before they reached the walls. Antonia, perched on his shoulder, waved as I flew away.
I did not go far, only a few miles, before settling myself with my back against a tree. After last night I was exhausted, but there were spells to hold off sleep as long as I was willing to put up with a bad headache. I built a fire and began to work illusions: large, brightly lit illusions, ones designed to proclaim to anyone within miles that there was a wizard here.
If Vlad-or whoever had attacked the castle last night-was after me, then I might not have long to wait. As long as I did not go to sleep, and as long as none of my friends or my daughter was in immediate danger, I should be able to fight back or escape. I hoped.
Unless Justinia, or perhaps some other member of the royal court for reasons I could not even imagine, really was the target. After a few hours in which nothing happened except that I perfected a few details of my illusions technique, I made a particularly large golden phoenix burning with realistic flames, donned a spell of invisibility, and darted through the night toward the castle.
It was quiet except for the knights in the courtyard, patrolling slowly, exchanging comments, lifting their lanterns at the faint thump I made landing on the battlements. Justinia’s automaton hovered at her door. I flew silently and invisibly across the courtyard to my own chamber windows. A magic lamp made a point of light within. Elerius sat reading, and beyond him I could just see a rounded shape on the couch that must be Antonia, asleep. Elerius lifted his head a moment, but I was fairly sure that even he, with all his abilities, could not see me. I flew upwards again and back to my slowly disintegrating phoenix.
The hours of the short midsummer night seemed to drag on forever. From being keyed up with anticipation of a magical attack, I went to being tired and bored. I replaced the phoenix with a pair of dragons who placed their claws on each other’s shoulders and did a tango, but my heart wasn’t in it. As a test, this seemed a dismal failure. I stared vacantly and gloomily out into the darkness beyond my fire. Whether aimed at the Lady Justinia or aimed at me, it looked like the next attack would not come for a while-just long enough to give us a false sense of security.
I had fallen into a doze shortly before dawn when I was abruptly brought back to full consciousness by the crack of a broken stick. My fire had burned down to cold ashes, and all my illusions were long gone. I spun toward the sound to see a huge, dark shape coming over the hill, silhouetted against the eastern sky.
It was in the form of a man, a man who walked heavily and awkwardly with his arms straight in front of him, a man ten feet tall.
I shot away, my heart hammering. The creature followed me, with a drag in its step like something dead that had forgotten how to walk, watching me with yellow eyes the size of saucers. There was an intelligence behind those eyes I did not recall seeing in the warriors. The creature’s heavy foot-falls seemed to shake the earth.
All right, I thought. We know then that I’m the target. The test is a success. We can stop now!
The creature showed no sign of stopping. I kept ahead of it, but it moved surprisingly quickly for something so awkward. Elerius might have been able to help me against it, but I didn’t dare head back to the castle, trailing a creature of nightmare, to get him.
Hovering just ahead of it, I madly tried both binding and dissolution spells, but all were ineffective. Years ago I had been pursued by a creature something like this and had found a way to improvise; desperately I tried to remember the words of the Hidden Language that had worked then. But nothing seemed to work now, and it kept on advancing. When I glanced over my shoulder to see that it was indeed maneuvering me toward the castle, I darted off in a different direction
“Come on,” I muttered toward the dawn. If this creature was made with the same magic of blood and bone that had held the warriors together only as long as darkness lasted, I should be safe in another few minutes.
The creature, ignoring my change in direction, continued toward the castle. I dropped to the ground, yelled to get its attention, and very slowly backed away on foot: slowly enough, I hoped, to focus it on me again.
My foot caught on an uneven tussock just as it made a spring at me. I ducked and rolled, suppressing a scream of terror, and shot up into the air an inch ahead of its grabbing hands. The yellow eyes seemed to be considering me in thoughtful assessment.
Twenty feet above it, I tried
taking deep breaths. Showing no more signs of starting toward the castle, the creature watched me patiently. The mouth, a slit in the face, opened in what might have been a smile. Inside were quite real teeth.
I tried probing the spells that propelled it, hoping that if I could discover their structure I might find some way to reverse them. Slipping into the stream of magic, I probed there, and there-and came back to myself to find that my flying spell was disintegrating, and that I had descended almost within reach of the creature’s outreached hands.
Again I dodged away just in time. Sweat poured down my face, both at the closeness of my escape and at what I had found. My quick magical probe had shown me no way that this creature could be dissolved, but it had revealed the sorts of spells that held it together, a mix of spells I had never seen together before: the old western magic of earth and herbs that long predated the school; the eastern magic of blood and bone; and, quite unmistakable, a twist of school magic.
The rising sun lifted itself over the horizon at last, flooding the creature with pale light. It showed no sign whatsoever of dissolving.
“So some school-trained wizard has gone renegade,” I said to myself, “and has trained with Vlad-and may be here as his agent.” I would have to telephone the school at once-if I could only stop this creature first.
It had been reaching for me, but now it lowered its arms. Keeping its round yellow eyes on me, it opened its mouth and spoke. “This is a hard spell to keep going from a distance, Daimbert,” it said conversationally. “But I am very pleased to see it works.”
And with that the creature collapsed. Limbs fell off, the head tipped over, lost all the intelligence in the eyes, then dropped and rolled away, and last of all the torso subsided to the earth.
My heart pounding harder than ever, I cautiously approached. The body parts were no longer those of a ten-foot creature. Most were bits of wood and leaf, but lying among them, inanimate and clearly recognizable, was the dead body of the night watchman.
And I had recognized the creature’s voice. It was the voice of Elerius.
Back at the castle half an hour later, I dragged him out of my chambers and up on top of the tall northern tower, where I could curse him in privacy.
“Damnation, Elerius,” I said, low and furious, “what could you have been thinking in digging up the watchman’s body?! I’ve just had to rebury him, fast before anyone noticed.”
“I needed a body for my experiment,” he said mildly. “Your predecessor used old bones back when he made an unliving creature, as I recall, but it didn’t work as well as it should have. I found his ledgers at the back of your shelves last night, and in reading over his notes, and putting together what I found with what we discovered yesterday from the remains of the warriors, and what I once learned myself from an old renegade magician up in the mountains, I decided that the fresher the body, the better. It isn’t as though I was hurting the watchman in any way; after all, he was already dead.”
I fumed in silence until he paused, apparently feeling he had answered my objections. “I hope you’re pleased that you terrified me with your creature as well as disgusted me with your methods,” I said angrily. “This does not seem like something the school’s best graduate should do-or would want widely known.”
He shrugged. “I feel confident you will not tell the school about this. After all, if you did I could mention to them the curious fact that a man without brothers or sisters has somehow produced a niece…. And I see no reason why a wizard should let conventional squeamishness influence him. Since it was becoming clear last night that we would not get any answers at once as to who attacked the castle, I thought I might use the time profitably to see if I could make an animate creature and, at least temporarily, put my mind into it. That eastern magic has a great deal of potential, but it was a real challenge to find a way to overcome its susceptibility to sunlight!”
Still furious but without any good answers to what he clearly thought were convincing arguments, I said, “You always have felt the ends justify the means, haven’t you. I don’t want a grave-robber in my kingdom. Get out.”
He smiled indulgently. “I must apologize, Daimbert, for apparently frightening you even more than I intended! I couldn’t tell you what I was doing, of course, because I wanted to observe what my creature’s effect would be on the unsuspecting, but I counted on a wizard being hard to frighten. And of course I was interested to see what sort of response you might improvise. You know you can’t be serious in wanting to send me away, not before we finish finding out all we can about those undead warriors, not while your kingdom may still be in danger. By the way, while I was probing again those warriors’ bones you saved from the bonfire, I thought I sensed some kind of latent spell in them, something we hadn’t picked up before, so we should try to discover that as well. Since it bothers you, I’ll promise not to disturb any more graves while I’m here.”
“And stay away from Antonia,” I growled, no longer ordering him out of Yurt, not sure how I had lost the initiative but quite surely having lost it. He was right: I did need his help.
He smiled again. “Do not be concerned, Daimbert. I would never take a delightful little girl apart for an experiment, or whatever you’re imagining. My goal, like that of organized wizardry, is always the good of mankind. And knowledge of magic in all its forms is one of the principal foundations of wizardry.”
He turned without waiting for a reply and stepped off the parapet, floating majestically back down to the courtyard. I followed slowly, not sure how to enunciate what was wrong with his approach to magic, yet feeling that, at least for now, I would have to continue to work with him. But I also felt an implacable conviction that his ways were not mine.
PART THREE — THE BISHOP
I
That morning Justinia announced she intended to take her elephant for a ride. “She’s ordered me to accompany her,” Gwennie told me, standing in the doorway of my chambers and trying to decide whether to laugh or be irritated. “And you too, Wizard.”
Back in my chambers, I had been drinking tea and eating cinnamon crullers. As I ate I picked up one of the warrior’s bones I had saved and fingered it, wondering absently what spell Elerius might have spotted in it and whether he might already have a very good idea and be using this as a test for me. But I had no time to worry about him. Resignedly I pushed myself to my feet. Gwennie and an elephant would not be much protection for Justinia if whoever had sent the unliving warriors returned.
“Do I have to go ride on the elephant too?” Antonia asked dubiously.
“Not if you don’t want to,” I said, relieved that she didn’t. An elephant’s back struck me as a treacherous place. But if she was not with me, who would look after her? When I had first talked to Theodora about having our daughter visit Yurt, I had not imagined how much attention would go simply into taking care of one energetic five-year-old.
Elerius looked up from his reading. From his manner our quarrel this morning might not have even taken place. He seemed to be planning an extended stay in Yurt, during which he would read through all of the big, hand-written volumes in which my predecessor as Royal Wizard had kept his notes. “I’ll watch her for you, Daimbert,” he said with a slight lift to his brows, as though understanding and amused by my predicament.
Although I didn’t trust him, at the moment he appeared to be interested in my friendship, and it really did seem unlikely that he would harm Antonia while I was gone. When I went out a few minutes later, he was again absorbed in my predecessor’s spidery hand, and Antonia, with a quick glance at me and a self-righteous lift of her chin, had pulled down Elements of Transmogrification.
The Lady Justinia’s luggage had included a sort of double saddle with a roof, almost a little house, that could be strapped onto her elephant’s shoulders. The stable boys, grim and determined, managed to get it on, shaking their heads behind Justinia’s back. The elephant appeared almost as nervous as they were.
The automaton wa
tched without moving, then sprang up onto the elephant’s neck when it was ready at last to go. I lifted the lady and Gwennie with magic into the little house and perched myself behind them on the elephant’s back. The leathery skin was scattered with long, coarse hairs that pricked through my trousers. I gave the stable boys a companionable shake of my head. This was supposed to be a small elephant, but I felt disturbingly high above the ground.
It reached its trunk, as supple as a snake, up to Justinia, and she handed it an apple. The trunk’s end, I saw with fascination, was provided almost with fingers, or at least flexible protuberances. It thrust the apple in its mouth and ate it with evident enjoyment, made several rumbling noises that I hoped indicated a happy elephant, and then, at the light touch of a goad on its neck from the automaton, trotted briskly across the drawbridge and out into a lovely June day.
“The sun here is very faint and low in the sky,” commented the Lady Justinia.
Staying on an elephant’s back was even harder than I had expected. Remaining fairly stable and probing magically for potential enemies kept me fully occupied while the beast’s rolling gait took us down the hill and along the brick road that led eventually to Caelrhon. I left it to Gwennie to try to explain that this was a warm day of midsummer and that the sun here was never as high or as hot as the lady was accustomed to.
We entered the forest, and dappled shadows flitted across us. After a few minutes, I was able to work out a spell to keep myself more or less balanced on the elephant’s back, while allowing me the attention to keep a watch for bandits or anyone else who might try to attack. When the Lady Justinia, who had fallen silent after exhausting the possibilities of solar intensity, suddenly spoke again, I was so startled I almost fell off.
“Art thou,” she asked Gwennie, “the king’s concubine?”
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