by Mage Quest
Hugo might think it an exciting game, and Joachim might think there would be great merit in dying on this pilgrimage. But if we ended up as six fresh heads on poles, like the ones we had seen last night, I doubted we would appreciate it.
I felt a new respect for the wizards of the eastern kingdoms, who I kept hoping to meet at some point, although about the only people we had met so far were frightened farmers from whom we bought food. Ending war in the western kingdoms, it appeared, had not made the western aristocracy any less interested in fighting, only more likely to go help the wars continue east of the mountains.
"That's the end of the troops," I said, rising cautiously to my feet. "Let's get the others."
We followed the main road a short distance, back in the direction from which the troops had come, and were just looking for a good place to leave the road again when Hugo, in the lead, reined in abruptly. "Look at this! They aren't— They're not real, are they?"
"I'm afraid they are," said Ascelin grimly.
Before us rose a pyramid made entirely of human skulls. An inscription carved in stone at the base told us proudly that these were the enemies that the local king had had killed within a single year. Amazed, I tried to calculate how many skulls might be in the pyramid and gave up. It towered at least twenty feet above the road. The skulls, all clean of flesh and hair or any identifying mark, were very neatly arranged to stare at us.
Hugo made no more comments about games; indeed, he said nothing more for the rest of the day. For that matter, the rest of us scarcely spoke either. We hurried on, but the shadow of that pyramid seemed still to fall between us and the sun.
"I have to apologize, Haimeric," said Ascelin as we sat around our fire that evening. We had taken lately to making very small fires. "I had no idea the eastern kingdoms would be this dangerous. Even though the main pilgrimage route is at least half again as long, we should have stayed with it. Although I'd never been east of the mountains myself, I know a number of men who have. They've spoken of battles, of course, but nothing this widespread. I don't know if it's the season of the year—I realize that they've mostly been here in the fall and winter—or if whatever 'strange' stories are coming out of the East are stirring up trouble here."
"The Bible tells us," commented the chaplain, "that in spring kings ride to war."
"Sir Hugo and his party came this way in the spring a year ago," said Ascelin, "and I'm sure they didn't have anyone with them as good as I am in finding the way and hiding tracks. And yet, from everything we know, they had no problems until they left the Holy Land. If I didn't know better, I'd think something we ourselves had done was responsible for all this."
In the next few days, however, we saw fewer troops, and slowly we began to hope that we had put the worst of the wars behind us. Ascelin still spoke darkly of how everything from the bandits to these wars seemed to be managed for our maximum peril, but he couldn't decide if Arnulf was behind it, King Warin, or perhaps someone else we did not even know.
One afternoon, tired from weeks of travel and from a long day's ride under a sun which had grown more and more intense, we came around a corner and found our path barred by a wall of flame.
Whirlwind reared up, but the rest of our horses, as tired as we, only stopped. I dismounted and approached cautiously. This was magic, but I wasn't yet sure what kind.
But just as I started probing with magic, the flames disappeared. The ground was not scorched, not even warm. Illusion, then, but those illusory flames had had a solidity my best dragons always lacked.
A powerful eastern wizard would notice immediately that another wizard had tried to probe his spells. In this war-torn land, where safety was always transitory, I did not view meeting him with eager anticipation, but it was better to face him than to have him at our backs. I squared my shoulders. "There's a wizard up ahead. He means for us to stop, so it's no use trying to dodge around. I'm going to go talk to him."
"I'll come with you," said Hugo.
"Not you, Hugo," said Ascelin at once. "It had better be me."
I shook my head at both. "Courage and swordsmanship won't be any use against magic." I hurried forward without giving Hugo a chance to say he wasn't concerned about his personal safety—or myself a chance to start contemplating whatever dangers lay ahead.
A few yards past where the wall of flames had burned, a paved track turned off from the road. The stones were cracked and uneven, heavily worn in the center as though from a millennium of feet. I had somehow not noticed the track before. I paused for a minute, wondering what else might appear that had, a moment ago, been invisible. But then I turned to follow the track, for dancing twenty yards ahead of me along it were pale, inhuman shapes that still somehow suggested something human.
The ground began almost immediately to rise, and the sky darkened overhead. I seemed to have stepped out of the visible world I had been in and into a world lying just beyond.
I stopped and looked back. My five companions were only thirty yards behind me, and I could see them clearly as they all dismounted and sat down in the shade of a tree, but they were separated from me as if by a wall of glass. The sun still shone brightly on them, though storm clouds now hovered a short distance above my head. I wondered if they could even see the clouds from where they were—or, for that matter, if I really was on a hillside, for a minute earlier I would have sworn the land beyond the wall of flames continued level and smooth.
The air, hot all day, now became sultry as well from the lowering clouds as the track twisted and crept between jagged boulders. I gave up walking and lifted myself six inches above the ground to fly on up the hill. Before me, although I had oddly not seen it until this minute, was the massive bulk of a castle. The sky beyond it darkened rapidly toward night. There were no windows or even slits looking out from the lower levels of the castle, but near the top were two large windows, lit from within by reddish light, that could have been eyes.
Beyond the castle I could hear wolves howling, and I was briefly reminded of the wolf skin King Warin wore across his shoulder. A bolt of lightning, then another, struck the top of the castle before me, with a sharp crack and a lingering acrid smell but no following thunder. The sky was virtually black, and I could no longer see the bottom of the hill behind me. I stopped and probed for the supernatural. It was one thing to go to meet a wizard, another to walk into a demon's lair.
But I found no evidence of black magic. I tried to reassure myself that school magic, even my own occasionally less than perfect grasp of it, should be at least as strong as the magic the wizards of the eastern kingdom learned under their apprenticeship system, but this thought did nothing to dispel the cold prickles moving up and down my back.
I crossed a bridge, glancing over the side to see a deep ditch disappear beyond sight, and reached the entrance to the castle. The broad, nail-studded doors were thirty feet high. They could have been a mouth to go with the glowing eyes of the windows, and the portcullis suspended above them the teeth. The castle was built, I could now see, of obsidian, dead black, as smooth as glass and with the edges of the stones as sharp as knives. Another bolt of lightning struck just as I raised my hand to knock.
With an ominous, high-pitched shriek, the double doors swung open. I looked in, not wanting to enter until I knew what was there, but saw no one. Then, far down the black corridor, I saw a flicker of movement, disappearing away. It was not quite substantial, a ghoul or a ghost, and gone before I could probe with magic to see if it was illusion or real.
I waited. I was not entirely sure the castle itself was real, but if someone had created it for my benefit then he would certainly show himself. The air coming through the open doors was as cold as if it emerged from a hundred yards underground.
Then, echoing down the dark corridor, I heard a sharp click of heels. In the distance I picked out a pinpoint of light that quickly grew larger. A man was approaching, carrying a candle. And not just a man, I realized at once, but a wizard. As he neared the door I
could see that he was immaculately dressed in a suit of black satin, and that his face was as white as if it had been painted.
"Good evening, Wizard," he said with a smile that showed quite a few teeth but contained no good humor. "I've been expecting you."
I was about to protest that it was not evening, that it was only the middle of the afternoon, but an upward glance showed me that here, at any rate, it was night.
"You're from Yurt, aren't you," said the wizard before me. He had very strange eyes, expressionless even though they flicked constantly from side to side, almost as if they had been made of stone rather than living flesh.
"What do you know of Yurt?" I demanded.
"Princeps Yurtiae" it said on Dominic's father's tomb. But there were hundreds of other tombs in the church of the Holy Twins, and we were a great many miles from there. Yurt itself at the moment seemed a hundred thousand miles away, a place as peaceful and brightly lit as though it were Paradise.
"Come in, and I shall tell you a number of interesting things," the wizard said, again with the tooth-filled smile. "I do not, however, know your name."
"Daimbert," I said cautiously.
"Come in, Daimbert. My name is Vlad. You may call me Prince."
I had wanted to meet the wizards of the eastern kingdoms, I reminded myself. By offering to tell me interesting things, by knowing already that I was from Yurt, this wizard had tempted me to enter his castle in a way that offers of wealth and dancing girls never would have. I wrapped a protective spell around me, although I did not know what I was trying to protect myself from, and stepped inside.
IV
The corridor was lit only by the wizard's candle. "Is this your principality?" I asked, standing between him and the doorway so that he could not close the doors before I was sure what I was getting into.
"It certainly is," he said with a slow blink. His eyelids, I noted, were translucent, like the eyelids of a snake, and did not hide the stone eyes behind them.
"And yet you're a wizard," I said unevenly, holding onto the door frame. I was suddenly swept with a terror so profound that for a moment I wasn't even sure I could stand unaided. This was either irrational fear of something outside my previous experience, or good sense telling me to escape while I was still alive.
"Of course. I know over in the western kingdoms you wizards serve the kings and the aristocracy, but here we prefer to be our own masters."
In the shadows behind him I thought I saw—although it could have been the shadows from his candle—a viper moving slowly across the floor.
And then I knew the source of my terror. It had nothing to do with this wizard, strange though he might be. It was memories of another long corridor down which I had groped nearly ten years ago, the closest I had ever been to death and damnation. And that corridor had been in Yurt. If I was going to find safety, I would have to create it for myself, wherever I was.
I pushed myself forcibly away from the door. "I'm curious, Prince," I said. "Is this castle real?" The door frame, at any rate, was solid under my hand.
"It depends on what you mean by real," he answered ambiguously and turned his back to me. He certainly seemed unafraid of me. "Come with me, and I think you'll find out several things about which you've been wondering."
As soon as his back was turned, I tried another quick magic probe to reassure myself that he was human and no demon. But then I followed, watching the floor for snakes. The door stayed open behind me, but beyond it was only night and wolves.
Candles held by invisible hands proceeded us down the corridor. Prince Vlad led me into a room off the corridor where I had hoped there would be more light, but it was windowless. Heavy hangings covered the wall, worked black on black, with brief shots of white in a design confused and disconcerting enough that I tried not to look.
"I've been waiting for you ever since my old friend, King Warin's chancellor, said you were coming this way," he said, sitting down in one black leather chair and motioning me into another.
"Warin? You know him?" The terror I had tried to dismiss by the doorway was back again in full strength.
"I already told you I know a number of interesting things, including the answers to many questions I'm sure you've asked yourself."
"And what do you want in return for this information, Prince?" I asked, trying to make his eyes meet mine.
"Very good, Daimbert," he said as though pleased. "I knew you would not disappoint me. Of course I want something. What I want is knowledge from you."
"I don't think I have any knowledge that you would want," I said slowly.
"Of course you do," he said with another smile. I wondered briefly how many teeth he actually had. "You're a school-trained wizard and know the wizards' secret of perpetual youth. It's obvious—you've got a white beard and hair, and yet you're still youthful and vigorous. What age are you really? A hundred? A hundred and fifty?"
"I'm not yet forty." I had no intention of telling him about the incident that had turned my hair white overnight. "School magic has no secret of youth. Wizards in the west may live well past two hundred, but if we do it's because of the same spells that wizards used for generations, even before the school was founded—the same spells, I expect, available to you."
His stone eyes managed to convey disappointment. He pursed his thin lips, then smiled again. "We'll return to this in a moment. But you in the west know how to see and to hear someone over a great distance, I understand."
"Telephones," I agreed. "But don't ask me, Prince. I've never been any good at technical magic." I was not going to explain that the far-seeing attachment, while my own invention, had been discovered essentially by accident. "The wizard you probably should ask is Elerius, who used to work for King Warin. By the way, does the king know that you consider his chancellor your friend?" I leaned forward and then wished I hadn't, because the wizard's white face up close was like a mask, and for a moment I felt irrationally convinced that beneath that mask was the face of a corpse. "You said you had information for me. The first information I want is how you knew we were coming."
"Warin's chancellor sent me a message as soon as you left his kingdom."
I was about to interrupt and ask how that message was sent, since pigeon messages between the eastern and western kingdoms were notoriously unreliable, and this wizard had no telephone, but I reminded myself that there were certainly other ways—a fast-riding messenger, even a spell-captured eagle of the high peaks. My guess was that Warin, even if he were a sorcerer, had no idea that his trusted chancellor was also in this wizard's pay—which thought made me wonder briefly if there had also been activities of Elerius's which he had not known about.
"My friend knew that I'd been waiting for a long time for visitors from Yurt," Prince Vlad added.
"I know who you are," I said suddenly. The king's younger brother might not be someone to produce terrifying stories, but this man certainly was. "You're the wizard who was employed, fifty years ago, by Prince Dominic of Yurt."
"It was difficult tracking you across all those miles between the mountains and here," Prince Vlad continued without denying my guess. "Someone in your party is extremely good." I would have to tell Ascelin if I lived to see him again.
He motioned toward a black marble table on the far side of the room. "That is how I knew where you were." I went over to look. On the table was a three-dimensional map of what appeared to be this part of the eastern kingdoms. "Try the skull."
By the map was the face of a skull, with crystals set in the eye sockets. When I put it in front of my own face to look through the crystals, the model of the eastern kingdoms became enormous, as though I were an eagle flying over it. I could see armed men on the roads, houses tucked into clearings, castles at the river crossings. The tiniest movement of the head, even of the eyes, took one's line of vision miles. It would be hard to find people who were deliberately hiding, even with this magic, but my hands trembled as I slowly set the skull down again.
"It wa
s only because so many of the other wizards of the eastern kingdoms owe me favors—either princes and counts in their own right or allied with kings—that I was able to keep track of you at all. Troop movements are a rather awkward way of easing people you can't quite see in the direction you want, but it was eventually effective. After all, you're here now."
"Wait," I said, without enough time to wonder how many of the soldiers we had seen and hidden from were actually being moved for our benefit. "You died of wounds and the fever fifty years ago."
"There are many versions of death," he said vaguely, pulling his translucent lids down over his eyes.
"But you are that wizard?" I demanded, determined to find out at least one clear piece of information.
"That's what you want most to know?" he said, opening his eyes again. He seemed to be able to see with them, but I was more and more convinced they were something artificial. "Yes, I might as well tell you that I am. If you're as young as you claim, you won't have known Prince Dominic, but I never trusted him. He told me he could fight a dozen men at once, but it took only ten to overcome him when we were both struck down. Even after his manservant and I buried the prince, I feigned a much worse fever than I actually had."
"He didn't trust you either," I said. I paused, pushing back terror, and continued, "So you didn't actually die?" More than anything else, at the moment I wanted reassurance that, whatever he might have done with his body, his dead soul had not been sent back to earth from hell.
But he did not give me that reassurance. "Because I did not trust Prince Dominic, I didn't tell him that part of the magic necessary to uncover the Wadi's secret was an opening spell I attached to the ruby ring itself."
"What a shame," I lied. "We left the ruby ring home in Yurt."
To my surprise, he seemed to believe me. The living map of the eastern kingdoms, I realized, would not give him enough detail to be able to see for himself. I presumed he didn't trust King Warin's chancellor either and had therefore not questioned him closely about the jewelry worn by the visitors from Yurt. I spread out my own hand ostentatiously, to show my eagle ring set with a tiny diamond.