by Mage Quest
"Where's Dominic?" Ascelin asked then, looking up.
"Down in the Wadi. It is a dry watercourse. So far," I went on, remembering I had news of my own, "we've found the bottle the Ifrit was imprisoned in."
This took some of the despair from Ascelin's face. "Where is the Wadi?"
I looked around and could not see it. I had no idea what level of existence we were actually on, but at the moment it did not include the Ifrit, the Wadi, or Dominic.
Before I could try manipulating the spell again, King Haimeric stepped up beside me. Everything about him seemed old—his frail body, his wispy white hair, his wind-wrinkled cheeks—except for his eyes. They were bright and excited. "I'm not sure what you've been able to see, Wizard," he said, "but just before we got on that flying carpet I saw the blue rose."
I turned my attention fully toward him. "You saw the blue rose?" I repeated idiotically.
"There wasn't time to say anything then, but it's here in the valley. I always knew it was. That's why the emir didn't want us to come here."
I hesitated only a second. If we had lost everything, even our waterskins, we wouldn't live long enough for a second chance to find the king's rose. Dominic and Kaz-alrhun between them could take care of Warin while I was gone. I didn't think King Haimeric had yet realized we would never get home, but he might as well die with his own quest fulfilled.
"Rest a little longer," I said to Ascelin and the others. "I'll take you to the Wadi shortly." Then I turned to the king. "Let's find your rose, sire."
III
King Haimeric and I walked across the valley floor, leaving the others behind. Even without any visible landmarks, the king seemed to know exactly where we were going. I murmured spells that made the air around us shimmer with a kaleidoscope of shifting images, including again the silk caravan. But I did not see the group of people who might have included a red-headed wizard—assuming I had ever seen them at all.
"There it is," said the king, stopping short.
We stepped into a flowering garden and out of the layer of reality in which we had been. The garden was surrounded by a low wall and was filled entirely with rose bushes.
We walked silently among them. The green, glossy leaves looked completely out of place in the barren desert, and even the air around us was slightly damp. We passed enormous, showy red blooms; tiny pink buds no bigger than my littlest fingernail; and soft yellow blossoms whose scent threatened to overwhelm us. We saw no humans, but someone, I thought, must tend these bushes daily, for there were no insect borers, no faded blooms, and no weeds.
The garden was much bigger than it at first looked. We walked half a mile, and the colors began to change. Here were maroons, rich violets, like what we had seen in the emir's garden outside Bahdroc but somehow brighter and more vivid. The king walked faster and faster, until I was hard pressed to keep up with him.
But then he stopped so abruptly that I, following behind, almost knocked him over. Standing up from where he had been digging was the emir's swarthy rose grower.
I tried at once to shape a protective spell for King Haimeric, but I need not have bothered. After a surprised second, he sprang forward, and he and the grower clasped hands in delight at their meeting.
"I had in truth hoped that even a western wizard might be able to find the magic to bring you here," said the grower, a smile splitting his face.
"Won't the emir be furious with you?" asked the king in concern.
"He gave me no specific instructions concerning you. I did most carefully obey his orders, and I never explicitly told you or any other man how to find this garden."
He smiled again and added, "The emir considers this his garden, of course, but while emirs rise and fall, the roses endure. All the attention, the rivalry, and the weight of authority fall on the emir himself. As long as I am just his grower, I am free to do my crosses and to do what is most important in this life: to grow better roses."
"Are you working with the Ifrit?" I managed to ask.
"Of course. It was just last year, once stories of the blue rose began to spread, that the emir decided he must break part of my garden away from the rest, and transport it entire to someplace no one else would find it. Nothing but an Ifrit would have the power to do that, or to carry me quickly back and forth."
"A bronze bottle with an Ifrit in it was taken to the emir as something different and new," I said with sudden inspiration, "and the Ifrit agreed to help him in return for being released."
The grower smiled and nodded. For a second I even dared hope I was teaching him respect for western magic.
But the Ifrit himself had told me that a mage had freed him from Solomon's enchantment, and I was quite sure the grower didn't know any magic. Besides, the Ifrit had been freed for five years, and the grower had just said this had only happened last year. But I didn't have a chance to work it out.
King Haimeric, showing no interest in Ifriti, had moved away, looking intently at the roses. The grower led us down the final pathway between the bushes. "Here," he said in a low voice.
The king drew in his breath but did not speak. This was it at last. A bush stood by itself, bearing a single blossom: an enormous, sapphire-blue rose. The three of us stood looking at it in silence. I probed quickly and surreptitiously with magic, but I already knew. At least where we were at the moment, this was no illusion but real.
It was as big across as a saucer, yet its stem easily held it upright. The petals were beaded with dew. From deep within the rose came a scent, both sweet and spicy, subtle yet unforgettable once caught. This was the blue rose the king had sought, and suddenly I understood why it was worth it.
"You're the first and only outsider to find the blue rose," said the grower to the king after a minute. "Do you wish a root cutting?"
"I would like a root cutting beyond all things."
The grower produced his trowel. "I have started several plants from seed in containers which the emir hopes to have in his palace in a few years, but you do not want a root-bound container plant for your garden. You need a piece from the adult far-spreading root."
We didn't need a piece of root but a way to get out of this valley, guarded against us both by the Ifrit and by the emir's men. Even if we got out, a cutting would quickly dry up in the desert air and be worthless long before we died of thirst, trying to get back to Xantium on foot. But I said nothing.
The grower knelt down and began digging again. I looked out, away from the well-irrigated garden. The dry land beyond could have been seen through a pane of glass.
The grower packed the piece of root carefully in damp earth and paper. "It should last a few days," he said, frowning for the first time. "But it really should be planted as soon as possible."
King Haimeric frowned as well. For a few moments, his expression had been beyond joy or happiness, but the grower's comment brought him back to reality—or whatever one might call this. "I'll see what I can arrange."
He turned to me. "Thank you, Wizard. It's silly, I know, but I would not have wanted to die in this valley, having come this close to the blue rose, without first seeing it." Then he understood our situation after all. "Now we should try to find Dominic and the Wadi Harhammi, to see if he can find what he has been seeking."
"You want the dry watercourse?" asked the grower. "We are at this moment in it, although you might never know it. The Ifrit insisted that if he took my garden away from Bahdroc, this is where he would take it. But if you leave the garden through that little gate over there, you shall find yourself in the Wadi."
I paused with my hand on the gate, wondering again if this rose garden could have been what the elder Prince Dominic had heard was in the Wadi. But the prince had been dead fifty years, and if we were to believe the grower, this garden had only been brought here very recently. With something so precious to him here, no wonder the emir's mood had changed when we mentioned we were seeking the Wadi, and no wonder that part of the agreement he had extracted from the Ifrit had been t
o guard it closely.
This was the same sort of gate through which we had entered, with apparently nothing but the valley floor beyond. But I had given up assuming that what I thought I saw had any relation to what I would discover. We opened the gate and stepped through.
We were immediately sliding down the steep side of the Wadi, raining pebbles on those beneath. The garden where we had been a second before was gone.
Dominic jumped out of our way. Kaz-alrhun sat to one side, apparently enjoying the experience.
"Where's King Warin?" I asked at once.
"He left right after you did," said Dominic, "saying he would find the Wadi's secret by himself—though why he should be able to find it now when he hasn't before, I cannot say," he added in disdain. "I think he didn't want to have to answer my case against him."
King Haimeric was quite incurious about Warin. He turned eagerly to Dominic. "I've seen it," he said. "The blue rose. And I have a cutting."
Dominic managed to smile, in spite of his own concentration on whatever might wait ahead. "That's excellent news, sire." He turned to me again. "We waited for you to go on."
I could understand Dominic waiting for me, but Kaz-alrhun was something of a surprise. He seemed remarkably deferential for someone who wanted to know the Wadi's secret himself, I thought as we continued. The ground underfoot was broken, and patches of soft sand made walking difficult. Boulders were scattered in our path, none obstructing our passage, but placed such that it was hard to see more than fifty yards ahead.
As we walked, we started occasionally to notice something hard and white that was not stone, half-buried in the sand. I reached down to loosen a piece and realized it was human bone.
"What's here?" I said, dropping the bone abruptly and turning to the mage. "Is this the unimaginable danger you warned us against?"
"I know not whose bones these may be," said Kaz-alrhun in interest, "nor why they are here, though I would guess they are from earlier seekers after the Wadi's secrets."
As we continued, the king picking his way carefully so as not to step on any, the bones became more frequent. I kept probing with magic and finding nothing but scurrying desert creatures. Some of the bones were made into neat stacks. They all seemed fairly old, though I realized I was looking hopefully for fresh ones from Warin.
We came around a boulder and found a cave cut into the side of the dry watercourse. We were now at least thirty feet below ground level. The low cave entrance was blocked by a latticework gate of white marble, which looked as though it should be in the emir's palace rather than here in this sandy wash. But while the others clustered around it, I staggered and leaned against a stone for support, because I felt a wave of magic pouring out of the cave toward me.
It was incredibly sweet, as though the waking revelation of the magical abilities I had sometimes dreamed I had. I checked quickly to see what new spells I might know, found none, but felt even more intensely before the strange clarity of vision. This cave was the source of that clarity, and it made everything around us seem so vivid that I hardly dared probe for what might be hidden within it.
And it wasn't just magical clarity that poured out toward me. It was also quite irrational happiness. Wizards are always more susceptible to magical influences than anyone else. We might be trapped here in the Wadi, with both the Ifrit and the emir deter mined that we not leave alive, and the desert determined that we not live even if we did escape, but at the moment it hardly seemed to matter.
"There are footprints here in the sand," commented the king.
"If Warin was here, he did not win past this gate," said Dominic. "There is no obvious way to open it." He gave it an experimental tug with his right hand, then drew back quickly as though it burned his fingers.
But the moment his hand touched the latticework, it began to buzz, a high keen sound that made us all look at each other with disquiet.
"What kind of magical defenses would the caliph—" I started to ask Kaz-alrhun, then stopped, for something was coming, something that clattered as it came.
We looked behind us in horror. Coming around the boulders, claws extended and venomous tail arched over its back, was a twenty-foot scorpion.
Dominic pushed the king behind him and whipped out his sword, though I feared many of the bones we had seen had been of men who had tried to fight a giant scorpion with steel. Kaz-alrhun scrambled out of the way while I desperately tried to put a binding spell together.
But the scorpion came straight on, too powerful and moving too fast for my magic to bind. The leg-joints clattered as it scrambled over the stones toward us. The claws reached for me, and I found myself staring into its enormous insect eyes.
With a wild facility born of fear and the strange clarity that still poured from the cave, I threw together a transformations spell and launched it at the scorpion. I had no time to put a proper spell together, not even time to find the words to turn the scorpion into a frog. Instead I grabbed at the spell I had discovered to transform something into itself, only larger, and I reversed it.
The clattering stopped. I opened the eyes I had involuntarily shut and looked down. There I saw a normal-sized scorpion racing across the sand, toward the shelter of the boulders. Dominic stepped forward and crushed it with the heel of its boot.
I took a rather shaky breath and wiped my forehead. The scorpion had torn a hole with its claw in the front of my goat's hair robe, just before I transformed it. "That shouldn't have worked," I said. "You can't put transformations spells on magical creatures—it would never work with the Ifrit."
"Perhaps this was not a magical creature," suggested Kaz-alrhun, "but a normal scorpion an earlier mage had transformed to a larger size, so you merely freed it from that mage's spell."
"I didn't notice you giving me much help," I said to him testily, "especially after you'd warned us against it."
"I do not think you needed my help," said the mage with a grin. "And it was not against this that I warned you."
Dominic put his sword away and peered again through the latticework across the cave. "The opening appears very small, if there is a true opening at all."
The very air at the cave entrance sparkled, like air in a mountain meadow after a storm. I was hit again by a wave of irrational happiness and forgot all about being irritated with the mage. "Dominic," I said, "here is where we need your father's ruby ring."
Vlad had told me he had attached a special opening spell to the ruby. But I now knew that the spell which had made the ring pulse with light since we first approached the valley was nothing that that wizard had created, but something far more powerful. The magic attached to Dominic's ring was as old as King Solomon if not older.
Dominic gritted his teeth and reached his left hand, with the ring, toward the marble latticework. I tried to find the words of the Hidden Language that would put the ring's spell into action.
But I didn't have a chance. A voice spoke from behind us, light and cheerful. "So there you are! By the way—don't touch the lattice."
IV
We all whirled around. I should have known. Standing there, looking lean and good natured, was Sir Hugo's red-haired wizard, Evrard.
I embraced him so hard that all the breath went out of him with a "Whoof!" In the desert sun he had developed more freckles than ever. For a moment the strange, sweet happiness that poured from the cave made all of us giddy, and we laughed and slapped each other on the back.
"I'd hoped all along that if we got in trouble on this trip you'd come find me, Daimbert," Evrard said with a grin, once he had his breath back. "It still seemed to take you long enough to get here!"
"And Sir Hugo?" asked Dominic. "Is he alive as well?"
"As well as any of us," said Evrard. "The Ifrit brings us food and water when he remembers. Mostly we're hungry and bored from hearing all of each others' life stories until we know them better than our own. Even touching the latticework and flying away from the giant scorpion lost its thrill for me after a whil
e—and the others didn't even dare try."
"We killed the scorpion," I said modestly, then stopped. Something was not right. "But why are you here?" I asked. "It wasn't you who found a way to master the Ifrit?"
Evrard laughed. "I don't think anyone—except maybe Solomon—could master an Ifrit. I did manage to put this one back into his bottle temporarily, but at the moment we're at something of a standoff."
I rubbed my forehead, willing myself to understand at least something. "You didn't let it out of the bottle originally. But you tricked it into going back in by telling it you couldn't believe something so enormous could fit into a bottle that small."
"That's right," said Evrard cheerfully. "A traveler we met in the Holy City sold us the bottle—the same traveler who told us Noah's Ark was hidden here in the Wadi. Did you happen to meet him? No, I can't describe him. He never did let us get a good look at him. But I had the sense he was some sort of mage, even though he spoke like a westerner."
"Go on," I said. Maybe once I heard it all it might make sense.
"He suggested we present the bottle to the emir of Bahdroc as something new and marvelous, and at the same time ask his assistance in reaching the Wadi Harhammi. We'd already been trying to decide if we should go on south from the Holy Land, because the mage in Xantium—" He appeared to look at Kaz-alrhun properly for the first time. "But you've brought him with you!"
That was one way to look at it. "So two different people directed you here," I said. The traveler, with the same story of Noah's Ark that Elerius had once told me, I had to dismiss for the moment as beyond comprehension. But I turned sharply to Kaz-alrhun. "Why did you tell Evrard to come here to the Wadi? Was it as bait for us?"
"Of course," said the mage with his infuriating smile. "It is also good to note here the game the other player is playing."
And Kaz-alrhun would not have cared, I thought, whether Sir Hugo's party was alive or dead as long as we came looking for them. But the mage had already made it clear that it was not he who set the Ifrit watching for people from Yurt. "Why didn't you escape from the Wadi while you had the Ifrit imprisoned?" I asked Evrard.