by Mage Quest
If Joachim thought that the Lady Claudia was trying to make up for lost time now that he was here again, he didn't say so. I wondered if her singing had all been quite innocent, and if I had an impure mind to imagine otherwise.
Hugo had asked Arnulf to let him look at some of the books in his study. He found the full story of King Solomon's Pearl there, and he entertained us all at lunch with other accounts he had found of creatures who lived in distant countries.
I wondered, listening to him, how much of it he really believed or to what extent he was teasing Dominic, who took it all very seriously. "And did you know," said Hugo, his eyes bright with excitement, "that if you go around to the far side of the world the people there all have enormous feet and toes so that they can cling to the earth and not fall off?"
"Don't be silly," said Ascelin, but as though he was thinking of something else. "You can't fall off the earth. Besides, there's nothing but the Outer Sea on the far side of the globe."
It was hard to tell how many of the travelers' tales Hugo had picked up were real and how much imagination. Much worse monsters than anything he described could and did live in the northern continent of wild magic, even though I did not think they frequently visited the East—or at least hoped not. Ifriti were real, but I was not nearly as sure about the people whose faces were in their bellies. Arnulf, who must have had excellent information about the East, made no attempt to contradict Hugo on anything.
But this thought gave me another. I had been assuming that Arnulf must himself make the journey east regularly, but maybe if one were a very wealthy merchant one did not, relying instead on one's agents. If he had been personally attacked, and his caravans were beginning to disappear, he might well prefer to send someone else—such as us—than to go himself.
The next morning, our horses were finally ready, our clothes all clean, our boots resoled, our armor and harnesses both polished. The air seemed sultry for this early in the summer as we mounted our horses in the wide courtyard.
"We were delighted to have you all," said Arnulf genially. "Be sure to stop here again on your way home."
The Lady Claudia came out of the house at the last minute, carrying a small foil-wrapped parcel that looked, from the way she held it, heavy for its size. Paying no attention to anyone else, she walked up to Joachim's horse.
"I want you to have this," she said in a low voice, not meeting his eyes.
"What is it?" he asked with a smile.
"It's a present. But don't open it yet. Wait to open it until you're far from here."
I had a sudden dreadful suspicion of what that small package contained.
Joachim shrugged and unbuckled his saddle-bag to slide it in on top of his Bible. He took Claudia's hand affectionately for a moment, but I did not see him look back as we all rode out a moment later.
I however glanced back over my shoulder, to see the Lady Claudia, looking quite small in the spacious court of her manor house, waving her handkerchief after us.
There were rumblings of thunder in the distance as we headed back toward the great eastern route. "Do you have your weather spells all ready, Wizard?" Dominic asked.
Normally I didn't like to use weather spells. Any magic, no matter how trivial, has far-ranging effects, and to change the weather for any reason less than protecting the crop from hail had never seemed very responsible. But I didn't want to get soaked to the skin any more than Dominic did. I pulled up my horse and shaped a few spells in the Hidden Language to move the densest of the clouds a little further away from us.
The sun came out above us though the air stayed damp, and the darkness over much of the landscape gave the sunlight an artificial quality. I was about to hurry to catch up to the others when I realized that Ascelin was standing beside me.
"What do you think, Wizard," he asked, his blue eyes intent. "Are we carrying the Black Pearl now?"
We both looked toward Joachim, riding with the others a few hundred yards ahead. It seemed horribly likely.
"But why would Claudia give it to us to take back to the East?" I asked.
"Maybe she wanted to get it out of their house before its curse affected her family. Or maybe, knowing its powers for good were so strong, she wanted to give it to a man she loved more than her husband."
I thought that Ascelin would have to tell Prince Paul some of the stories of his vivid imagination—assuming we made it home to Yurt. "If so," I said, "why didn't Arnulf object?"
"He may not have realized what it was."
If Ascelin could guess, Arnulf would certainly have guessed—unless he had deliberately had his wife try to renew her earlier friendship with Joachim for the express purpose of getting that package into his saddle-bag. I immediately thought of several other "presents" Claudia might also have given the chaplain, including a love potion to make him return to her, or a deadly viper sealed in a ceramic vase, ready to leap out and bite him when he broke the seal. More prosaically, the package could have held a miniature portrait of her in a marble frame, or even a new Bible. But I did not think so.
"We have to make him open it right away," said Ascelin.
"We can't 'make' the chaplain do anything," I said. "But I'll certainly ask him about it."
The others had stopped and were waiting for us. As Ascelin and I hurried to catch up, I wondered how I should ask to see a present I was sure was highly significant and highly dangerous.
PART THREE - BANDITS
I
"She said to wait to open it until we were far from there," Joachim told me. "We aren't far away yet."
His comment was quite reasonable if Claudia had given him a portrait of herself, quite unreasonable if it was actually the Black Pearl—or some other dangerous magic object that Arnulf wanted us to take into the East for reasons of his own.
I tried probing with magic to see inside Joachim's saddle-bag. A variation on the far-seeing spell would allow me—or so I hoped—to peek inside the foil-wrapped parcel. Unfortunately, it was completely dark inside. Delicate magical probing from the outside wasn't going to tell me much, other than that whatever was in there was not alive. Not a viper, then, I tried to reassure myself, and certainly not an Ifrit.
By evening, the thunderstorm had moved off, though the air stayed damp. We sat around our fire, eating Ascelin's cooking again. Joachim's brother had sent along a bag of rice as well as replenishing our other supplies, and Ascelin had made a fairly successful stab at cooking it. I wondered how rude it would actually be to open Joachim's present behind his back. Unfortunately the answer seemed to be, very rude.
But the more I thought about it, no matter what Ascelin believed, the more I doubted it was King Solomon's Pearl. In fact, I wasn't even sure there really were rumors that the Pearl had been found again, or if Arnulf had dragged up some old story to distract us from whatever real rumors might be running through the East. In that case, he might indeed have found whatever the bandits had been looking for in the silk caravan, and have had his wife try to renew the flames of old passion with Joachim so that the chaplain would take a package from her without any suspicion of what it really contained.
But here I came back to the original problem, that we were carrying an unknown magical object, and the wizard, me, who should have been able to deal with it, was held back by friendship and politeness from doing so.
I looked off toward the east. We were in an area of low, rolling hills, but in the rain-washed evening air a line of distant mountains marched along the horizon. Ascelin and the king had the maps out and were discussing the route.
"The main road cuts south toward the Central Sea," said Ascelin, "but it really is shorter to cross the mountains into the eastern kingdoms and come down to the sea on the far side. That way we also avoid the most dangerous part of the sea voyage. Arnulf recommended we come this way, and I probably would have anyway. I've hunted in these mountains and know the passes."
"But will the passes be open yet, or will they still be snow-bound?"
; "They should all be open except for the highest, and we won't need to take the highest. The lowest pass, in fact, is also the shortest route—it's directly east of here. It's not used very much, but that's only because the road is so narrow at points."
The king contemplated the map a moment. "I know Warin, the king of this kingdom. I wrote him this winter to say that I was going on a quest to the East, and he wrote back to be sure to stop and see him. He too had heard the rumors about the blue rose. He agrees with you about the mountain passes, by the way."
"My father telephoned us from King Warin's castle on his way to the Holy Land," put in Hugo.
"Since everyone seems to agree we should go that way," said the king, "it sounds as though we must!"
"I know King Warin too," said Ascelin.
I came over to look at the map myself, suddenly realizing that I knew the royal wizard of this kingdom. Elerius, three years ahead of me at the wizards' school and, it was rumored, the best student the school had ever had, had become Royal Wizard here when he graduated. I hadn't been in contact with him in several years, but I assumed he was still here. In spite of its somewhat isolated location, the kingdom was reputed to be enormously wealthy, with gold and jewels from mountain mines.
Elerius might well have heard of the Black Pearl, I thought. And I could use the castle telephone to call the wizards' school. Magic telephones were still scarce over in this part of the western kingdoms, and although Arnulf had one I had felt highly reluctant to call the school to check on his story with him right there.
We rode east for three days, the snow-capped mountain peaks coming closer each day. The landscape around us became uneven, cut with unexpected ravines. The hills were flinty with little topsoil, and the few villages we passed seemed to live entirely from grape-growing. The men working among the vines gave us sharp looks but did not wave. Joachim still showed no indication of opening his present, and I didn't like to press him.
We stopped at our second pilgrimage church, one listed in the appendix of Joachim's book because it was not on the main pilgrimage route, although apparently it had been highly regarded for fifteen hundred years.
As we came over a rise we saw before us a small, octagonal church, made of white marble, with the fluted columns of a structure built in the later days of the Empire. But as we came closer we saw that what I had at first thought was the entire church was in fact only the upper storey, and below it was another structure, this one made of rough, dark stone, with tiny windows, in the style of churches built in the chaotic years that followed the breakup of the Empire.
"This can't be right," said Hugo. "How could they have built the earlier building second?"
"Wait until you see the whole thing," said Joachim with a smile.
"You mean we haven't yet?"
But as we rode closer we saw that the dark stone structure we had thought was the church's lower storey was in fact built on top of another church, this one highly decorated with elaborate carvings; that under this was another level, where the stonework was smooth and polished and the stained-glass windows tall and pointed; and that at the very bottom was a fifth church, built in the modern asymmetrical style, where even though the walls had to be very thick to support the levels above there were still broad expanses of glass, and dark red stones had been set into the white walls to make abstract designs. The whole five-storey church was sunk into a wide hole in the ground.
"It used to be on a little hill," said Joachim, enjoying our surprise. "The hill was made mostly of small stones, and the stones became popular among pilgrims, as souvenirs of their visit—and even, for those of simple faith, holy relics in their own right. Soon the hill disappeared, leaving the original church standing well above the new ground level. So the priests here decided to add a new church, under the old one." He swung down from his horse and picked up a loose stone himself. "The process was repeated three more times."
We visited all five levels, and Joachim talked to the priests there. I tried to contemplate how many pilgrims it must have taken to wear away a hole as big as the one in which the church now sat. "There's a major pilgrimage here every Midsummer," said Joachim, consulting his book, "and two other smaller religious festivals. The hills are covered with the tents of the pious at Midsummer as far as two miles away."
I had also not really appreciated before how relatively scarce wizards were in the western kingdoms compared to priests. The latter would be found in every village, in isolated churches like this one, and in every—or nearly every—aristocratic court, whereas even a large kingdom might have only a handful of wizards. The king too took a stone when we left.
Toward the end of our third day of riding east, we saw an enormous castle rising before us at the very base of the mountains. Dozens of towers and turrets rose above high walls that encircled not just the castle itself but all the hilltops around it. Those walls, pierced with arrowslits and guarded by towers at every corner, must have been at least a mile long. I had once assumed the royal castle of Yurt was a good example of an impregnable castle built for war, but this journey was showing me I was mistaken.
We zigzagged up a steep approach beneath those walls, but the gates before us stood wide and welcoming. "Tell your king that King Haimeric of Yurt is here to visit him," the king told the armed guards man who met us. Although a second guardsman immediately stepped up to take his place as the first went off with the message, he showed no sign of attacking us, and instead gave us an interested look.
King Warin, word came back almost immediately, would be happy to receive us. We passed through the wall, up another zigzag stretch so steep we had to lead the horses, then across a bridge over a deep and narrow ditch and through another set of gates into the castle itself. We were then led through the courtyard, where servants took the horses, and into the great hall.
The hall was about the same size as the great hall in Yurt, but there the comparison stopped. The outer castle walls may have been dark granite, but the interior walls of this room were green marble, set with semi-precious stones that flashed in the light of the magic lamps. Even the flooring was marble. It seemed very cold, I told myself in loyalty to Yurt.
King Warin was seated on his throne on the far side, surrounded by liveried attendants. They backed away, bowing, as we approached, but six liveried knights remained close to the throne. Talking to the king was a man dressed in black and silver who I took to be the royal chancellor. The king lifted his grizzled head as we came up. He had an enormous ring on his forefinger, and the cloak thrown across his shoulder was made of wolfskin.
I expected him to frown at us in august majesty, but instead he rose to meet us with a smile. The knights stepped forward with him. "Haimeric! It's been years. I should have known the rumors about a blue rose would bring you out of that little kingdom of yours. And you," with a pleased look at Ascelin, "I know as well. You helped me when those undead creatures invaded my kingdom, many years ago. Prince Ascelin, that's it."
I glanced around surreptitiously as we were introduced, wondering where his wizard might be. But when I asked, King Warin told me what I should have expected. "We don't have a wizard right now, I'm afraid."
"What happened to Elerius?"
"He left nearly a year ago," King Warin said regretfully. "Another kingdom, closer to the City, needed a new Royal Wizard, and the teachers of your school recommended him. We were terribly sorry to lose him, but I don't think my kingdom held many challenges for him any more. You knew him, I gather?"
"I knew him when we were in school together," I said, thinking that Yurt still seemed to have plenty of challenges for me.
"He really was extremely good," Warin continued reminiscently. "I think that's why we haven't been satisfied with any of the other young wizards the school has tried sending out. Did you know, Haimeric, he installed our telephone system within three days of taking up his post? And then," with a laugh, "he apologized for taking so long, saying that if he had taken more courses in the technical divisio
n it would have taken only two!"
It had taken me six months, not three days, to get the telephone system working in Yurt, and then we had ended up with telephones unlike anyone else's. Fortunately King Haimeric did not mention this.
"Maybe you can help us, Wizard," added Warin thoughtfully.
For a second I felt again the cold majesty I thought I had sensed when we first came in, but which his friendly manner had belied. As a wizard I was highly sensitive to mood and partially-concealed thoughts, but as me I was also highly sensitive to my own imagination.
"Just after Elerius left, a group of pilgrims stopped here. They had a wizard with them. He left something he said was a ‘special message’ for another wizard. So far, none of the new wizards whom the school has tried sending us has been able to read it—part of the reason we decided not to keep any of them. Maybe you can; I'm sure Haimeric wouldn't keep an incompetent wizard!"
This was clearly meant to be a joke, but I took it seriously. "I'll have a look," I said as casually as I could.
King Warin lifted one hand in a lazy gesture, and his dour chancellor, who had been hovering just at the edge of our circle, hurried away. I was immediately convinced that the group of pilgrims had been Sir Hugo's party, and that the wizard who had left the magic message was Evrard.
II
The chancellor returned with a box so black it seemed to absorb the light from the magic lamps. "I'll need a little privacy for my spells," I said with what I hoped was calm dignity. If it actually was a message from Evrard, I wanted to read it before anyone else. And if it took a while to figure out the spells, no matter what wizard had left it, I didn't want an attentive audience.
The chancellor led me to a small parlor opening off the great hall. I probed carefully, trying to find what kind of spell permeated this box. No way to open it, not even a seam, was visible.
I had, over the years, grown to distrust my sudden convictions, which tended to be wrong most of the time. Evrard, I told myself, still wasn't a good enough wizard to have created a message that several highly-qualified graduates from the school couldn't read. Of course, the alternative was that some truly incompetent wizard had tried to leave a message and had only made something unreadable.