by Mage Quest
This time Hugo did not answer. We sat in silence for hours. At any rate, I assumed it was hours; I quickly lost all track of time, and it began to feel that this night had already lasted as long as most weeks. From the sound of his breathing Hugo had dozed off, and I myself had to fight increasingly powerful waves of drowsiness. Bodies needed sleep, too, no matter who might live or die.
My mind had wandered far away, halfway between waking and dream, when a soft sound brought me abruptly back to full consciousness. That sound was my own name.
"Hugo?" I said, but Hugo was asleep. It was Joachim who had spoken.
"Daimbert, I must apologize," he said quietly. "I'm afraid I have given you a great deal of trouble and worry."
I put my face down next to his. "I don't care. It would be worth any amount of trouble and worry if I could save you from death."
"But I'm afraid it's all for nothing," he continued. I was weak enough that, against my will, tears began leaking down my cheeks. I was so unhappy that it took me five seconds to understand what he said next. "Because it looks like I'm not going to die after all."
I shook Hugo awake, crying hard now for no reason at all. "Light the lantern," I told him, and "Keep your eyes shut," to Joachim. Hugo and I carefully lifted my herbs away from the wound. The cut was clean, pink, and no longer infected.
Hugo scrambled out of the tent to tell the others. I broke the wad of herbs open, because while it was still damp in the center the outside had dried, and reapplied it. "Thank God," I managed to say, although my voice no longer seemed to be working correctly.
"I'm afraid my mind may have wandered again for a while," said Joachim, "but I have a vague recollection that, somewhere through the evil dreams, I heard talk of chicken soup. Do you think there might still be some?"
PART FOUR - THE EASTERN KINGDOMS
I
We stayed at our mountain campsite among the rocks and evergreens a week, by which time the cut on Joachim's throat was little more than a scab, and the horses were getting restive. I used the time to read Melecherius on Eastern Magic thoroughly. Ascelin hunted and made two more trips down into the village to buy bread and other supplies.
The fact that no one came by in all that time, not the bandits, not the king's chancellor to check on stories of travelers ambushed less than a day's ride from the royal castle, not any other traveler, made me even more convinced than I had been that King Warin was behind the attack on us. King Haimeric still refused to distrust his old friend, but he had discovered during the week that he was outnumbered, four to one, with the chaplain abstaining.
I thought grimly that if they were the same bandits who had tried to attack Arnulf last fall, then this was why Arnulf had sent whatever was in the package with Joachim rather than going anywhere himself, but I did not mention this to the chaplain.
Ascelin and King Haimeric looked again at the maps. "With spring another week along, we should have even less trouble with the passes," said Ascelin.
"Dominic's not the only one who wants to go to the eastern kingdoms to visit his father's grave," the king said. "I've never been there either."
When we started eastward again, Ascelin went first, his bow strung and ready, looking around with hunter's eyes at anything that could be an ambush. I rode at the rear, probing with magic. No one would be able to attack us by surprise this time.
In spite of the tension, all of us found our spirits rising just to be on the road again. We passed a number of narrow tracks branching off from the main road, which could have gone to the royal mines and could have gone to the bandits' hideout. The road quickly grew so steep that in several places we had to dismount and lead the horses.
As we climbed upward, I kept glancing surreptitiously at the chaplain out of the corner of my eye, fearing that he would find the ride too exhausting. If he did, he gave no sign, and in fact several times he appeared to be singing, half under his breath. This was the man, I reminded myself, who had thought that peril gave additional merit to the journey.
When the road finally leveled out, it clung halfway up the side of a gorge, with peaks high above us blocking out the sky and a rushing river far below. The stonework looked ancient, as though dating from the Empire, but the road appeared sound. A cold wind blew steadily through the gorge. In several places, waterfalls shot from the cliffs above us toward the river below, and the road went under them. As we passed beneath a solid, roaring mass of water, damp dripped onto our hair and gave life to vividly green ferns clinging to the rock wall, though on either side the cliffs were barren.
"Aren't we up to the pass yet?" Hugo asked as the road emerged at last from the gorge but immediately started again to zigzag upward across a dry mountain slope.
"We won't be up to the pass for two more days," said Ascelin. "And it certainly won't be a smooth road from then on, either."
When we stopped for the night in a hollow sheltered by evergreens, Joachim asked me, "Why have you been watching me all day? Afraid your wizardry might not have healed me fully?" There was an amused glint in the back of his dark eyes.
"I didn't heal you with wizardry," I said patiently. "Let me explain it again. The words of the Hidden Language by themselves have little power either to sicken or to heal. Certainly there are herbs, potions, compounds, and the like, products of the earth, that will do both, and some wizards in the old days used to do as much with such compounds as with the real forces of magic. But nowadays most wizards avoid such messiness. All I did was what my predecessor in Yurt used to do: use the spells of wizardry to discover, and at most augment, the powers of growing things. Herbs' attributes can provide a shortcut, or even go where spells do not go, but they are inherently unpredictable. I can't be nearly as confident about a healing herb as I could be about a modern spell."
I stopped in the middle of this academic discourse and smiled at him. "And I think you know me well enough to realize that even my modern spells don't always work quite the way they're supposed to."
"I'll take my chances on the quality of your spells," he replied, with the same almost amused look. But then he became more sober. "I'm sorry, Daimbert, that I waited so long to open Claudia's present. Now you'll never know what was in it."
"It's not worth worrying about," I said. I didn't want to think any more about a woman who had hypocritically tried to remind her brother-in-law of her former love for him, just so she could give him an object so accursed it would nearly kill him.
But Joachim had more to say. "I hope you don't think me foolish, Daimbert, but in a way I was testing myself during our visit. I realized that, at some level, I had stayed away from my old home for so long because I was afraid that I might regret my decision to become a priest."
"And did you?" I asked in trepidation.
"Of course not, and that was one of the best parts of the visit. I deliberately spent time talking to Claudia, and was pleased to find that I felt brotherly affection for her as my brother's wife and my niece's and nephews' mother, but nothing more."
"Is that why you let her sing love-songs to you?"
The chaplain stretched out his long legs in front of him. I was relieved that he took my question with new amusement, rather than as an insult. "The songs she was singing had nothing to do with me. She's very happily married to my brother. I'm sure any particular affection she may have had for me vanished many years ago."
I looked at the chaplain thoughtfully. Joachim always assumed that everyone was a sinner, without letting it bother him, but it occurred to me that he also resisted thinking real evil of someone whom he liked and trusted. I had always hoped that the fact that he was willing to be friends with me was an indication that I was really virtuous the whole time. But that he would not even consider the possibility that Claudia had been trying to seduce him—or at least persuade him with seductive hints to take a "gift" from her unquestioningly—now made me wonder how deep my own virtue might actually go.
"The next time we reach a place with a telephone or a pigeon lo
ft," said Joachim, "I will send her a message and apologize for losing her present. I just hope it wasn't anything very valuable."
It grew slowly colder as we climbed during the next two days, and several times there were patches of snow in the ditches at the side of the road as well as on the towering peaks above us. But late in the afternoon of the second day we finally reached the pass and looked out eastward, a stinging wind in our faces.
Before us stretched broad green meadows, scattered with low wooden buildings and clumps of stunted trees. Cows grazed in the meadows, and smoke rose from several chimneys. But we were not looking at the meadows. Instead our eyes were drawn to the mountain to our left, which rose at least a mile higher than the high saddle on which we stood. We had caught glimpses of it as we climbed, but the mountain we were on had hidden its true size from us.
"The Snow Giant," said Ascelin, "and to our right is Diamond Mountain." This more southerly peak was scarcely lower. Storms swirled around their upper reaches, covering them with white mist, but suddenly a gust of wind a mile above us cleared the clouds away, and the peaks seemed to glare down at us with the same unbearable cold which I had felt, on a much reduced level, in the eyes of King Warin.
We turned our attention then to the scene before us. The meadows, bright with flowers, sloped slowly down from where we stood, but several miles away the land started to rise sharply again, and grass gave way first to a line of dark evergreens and then to ice. The tips of the icy peaks were touched by pink from the sun behind us.
"I hope we're not going up those mountains," said the king. "I'm not sure my old bones would make it."
Ascelin laughed. "Don't worry, Haimeric. "We're out of the western kingdoms now and over the pass. Our road will swing around the bases of the rest of the mountains we meet."
"Does the king of this kingdom have a telephone?" asked Joachim.
"We're not in a kingdom," said Ascelin. "Up here in the mountains most of the countries are very small—even smaller than Yurt—and are run by elected councils. And I'd be surprised if anyone east of the pass had a phone. They're a little old-fashioned here."
"Come on," said Dominic. "Let's get down out of the wind."
For the next week we traveled through scenery so glorious that it would have been worth the journey by itself, and yet so over whelming that I felt exhausted from more than riding at the end of the day. I was constantly reminded that, while magic might draw on the powers that had shaped the earth, those powers were so immense that all the wizards who had ever lived could only move them very slightly.
Ascelin was right that the worst of our climbing was behind us. Our road stayed in the valleys, narrow or broad, beneath the peaks, or at worst worked its way across the grassy lower slope of a mountain. With a view that often stretched for miles in all directions, we worried less about a surprise attack. We passed a number of tiny, jade-green lakes caught in folds of the landscape, reflecting the peaks above them.
The first two nights we asked hospitality from farmers near the road. In return for a few coins, they cheerfully put us up in the haylofts in the back of their houses, warm with the breath of the cows beneath, and gave us cheese and pancakes with honey and wild strawberries for supper. At night, listening to the dull clang of bells as the cows moved below us, I began to relax for the first time since we had seen King Warin's castle rising against the sky.
At the second farm there were two little girls in starched white aprons and tight braids, who kept creeping up to see us and then dashing away in giggling excitement. Ascelin looked after them in what I considered inexplicable melancholy until I realized that they must remind him of his own twins.
By the third day, our road joined the first of the much more heavily used roads that crossed the passes further south, carrying trade and travelers between the eastern and western kingdoms, even though the main routes to the East were still to the west of the mountains. Now there were regular inns; their rooms, though small, were scrupulously clean, and the featherbeds were nearly as soft as the ones in the Lady Claudia's guest rooms. Cheese seemed to be featured at every meal.
The second inn had a pigeon loft. The innkeeper was a little dubious about trying to send a pigeon message any distance, especially over the high passes. He warned us darkly about the difficulties of messages that had to be transferred several times. But Joachim sent Claudia a letter, Hugo wrote his mother, and both the king and Ascelin sent letters to their wives. None of them told me what they put on the tiny rectangles which were all the pigeons could carry.
After a week in the mountains, our route began, almost imperceptibly at first, to lead us lower and away from the highest peaks. Then we rounded the base of a mountain and saw before us not another mountain but a glimpse of a distant blue plain. Ascelin, who had been striding in the lead, stopped short.
"This is as far east as I've ever gone," he said. "We're leaving the little mountain republics here, and once we reach the plain we'll be in the eastern kingdoms."
"Then we'll be leaving peaceful territory," said Hugo, "to go into a land of war."
"Well, almost," said Ascelin. "You have to realize that these mountains are so peaceful in part because all the restless young men go down to fight in the pay of the eastern kings."
There was a tiny church in the bend of the road. Although from the outside it was dark and undistinguished looking, the inside blazed with candle light on luxurious silk hangings and golden reliquaries. "Both those thankful to be coming down out of the mountains," read Joachim from his guide, "and those starting the hard and perilous climb up into them, have traditionally left a small offering here."
But I would have been happy to stay in the mountains. As we wound down toward the distant plain, I once again began worrying about how to protect our party. I had been brought along as a wizard to do so, but so far was rather short on success. In odd moments I tried to work out new variations of spells, wondering which ones might stop an army. Back when the wizards in the west had stopped the Black Wars, I thought, they had either been much more proficient at magic than I, or else they had not had their best friends held hostage by the enemy.
As we came down the final steep slope into the eastern kingdoms, the rocky outcroppings on either hand yellow with gorse, we saw that the road ahead of us went through a massive stone gate. It was, I thought, rather useless as a gate, because there was no wall, but as a symbol of a boundary it was very dramatic. It was at least twenty feet high, and sprouting from the top were the carved stone heads of wolves.
As we approached the gate from one side I saw a dusty cloud rapidly approaching from the other. With a little quick magical probing, I discovered it was three mounted knights.
In a moment, the others saw them too. Hugo, Dominic, and Ascelin glanced at each other and drew out the swords they had bought, at what they all said were highly inflated prices, up in the mountains.
But I said, "Wait a minute," and rode forward, shielding myself and my mare with what I hoped was a suitably strong protective spell. When the riders were thirty yards away, I acted.
I pulled out a pebble to which I had earlier attached an almost fully-completed illusion and threw it as hard as I could. It bounced under the arch of the gate and turned into a dragon.
My dragon reared up, shooting fire, though the dramatic impact was somewhat lessened when its head passed directly through the stonework of the gate. The riders pulled up hard, as well they might, desperately circling their horses as they tried to stay on. But showing surprisingly good discipline, in a few seconds they dropped back and raised their spears.
I was ready for those too. I used magic to jerk their spears in quick succession from their hands, and sent them arching harmlessly away. They reached for their swords, with a presence of mind I admired, but I bellowed, "Stop!" in a voice amplified by magic.
Dissolving my dragon into a shower of sparks, I rode slowly forward, one empty hand raised before me. They had certainly stopped. Following King Warin's exampl
e, I tried to pierce them with my eyes, at the same time adding a few strengthening details to the spell that surrounded me.
"What do you mean, Wizard, trying to enter this kingdom with an act of undeclared war?" demanded the leader of the knights before me.
"I am not at war with anyone," I said with dignity. "We are peaceful pilgrims. But when I saw armed men galloping to attack my party, I felt I must act at once to protect us."
The knights looked at my cloak, embroidered with the cross, then past me to the others. "You're armed men yourselves, in spite of your pilgrim's tokens."
"Only in self-defense," I said. "We were recently set upon by bandits who nearly killed our chaplain."
The leader looked at me thoughtfully. I decided not to try to look honest and trustworthy for fear it would appear an unconvincing mask. "If you mean no harm," he then yelled to the rest of the party from Yurt, "put up your swords and approach slowly."
King Haimeric, I was pleased to see, kicked his horse forward immediately, and the others were forced to follow. We all met under the arch of the gate where my dragon had stood a moment before.
"We are, as my wizard told you, simply pilgrims," said the king. "You can see I'm not even wearing a sword myself. At the moment we're making for the Church of the Holy Twins."
"The Holy Twins?" asked one of the knights facing us. He hesitated for a moment then said slowly, "They don't get very many pilgrims there any more."
"Why not?" said Dominic, quickly and brusquely.
The leader eyed him for a moment. "It's probably just a foolish story," he said, "but hardly anyone's been buried there for a good fifty years."
"What's a story?" Dominic persisted. I, like him, had the chilling impression that there was something terribly wrong about the church, and these knights knew it.
"Just a tale of the sort told to frighten children. Supposedly a long, long time ago, in the darkest part of the night, an evil wizard, steeped in the black arts, brought the dead body of a magnificent warrior there for burial. There was something about the wizard, a sense that he might even be able to communicate with the dead, that made other people much less willing to see their relatives lying there . . . But I told you it was just a silly story," he finished briskly.