Below the Wizards' Tower (The Royal Wizard of Yurt Book 8)

by C. Dale Brittain

  He took a firmer grip on my shoulder and hefted a club in his other hand. “Come quietly, and no one gets hurt. I don’t know how you escaped, but it’s not going to happen again!”

  I was so startled that I went meekly. Apparently he had taken me for some thief or disturber of the peace.

  “You’re making a serious mistake,” I said as he hurried me away from the smell of beef stew and back toward the municipal building. “I’m the Royal Wizard of Yurt.”

  “And I’m the crown prince of Yurt,” he said, not believing me for an instant. “You can tell the mayor all about it in court tomorrow.”

  The thought went through my mind that Elerius was losing his touch. Leaving me paralyzed in the sea-cave had worked fairly well, but trying to lock us in the cellars together had worked only for a short time, and my time in Caelrhon prison was going to be even shorter.

  But I let myself be marched around to the back of the municipal building. Better find out all I could. The guardsman produced a heavy key to let us into the cell block, unlit and quiet except for the sounds of several men breathing. No magic locks here, I quickly determined. Another key opened one of the cells, and the guardsman pushed me inside.

  “Better get your story straight by tomorrow,” he said, turning the key with a loud click. “Escaping only increases the penalty, you know.”

  He slammed the outer door of the cell block, and it became even darker. There was, I could tell, someone already in the cell where I had been pushed.

  I lit up the sun and moon on my belt buckle for enough light to see. A man with a white beard, wearing a tall hat covered with stars, sat on the cell’s narrow cot. His face seemed oddly familiar.

  I took a deep breath. “Let me introduce myself. I think you’re my long lost twin. My name is Daimbert, and I believe you are Marcus.”

  VIII

  The beard, I saw now, was not really white but bleached, full of yellowish streaks. The face was similar to but not identical with what I saw in the mirror every morning: the nose was a little wider, the chin a little narrower, there were more freckles, and his eyes were blue where mine were brown. But the overall similarity was striking.

  A decade ago, when I had graduated from the wizards’ school, I had learned the enormously powerful spells that slow aging. This man looked roughly the same age as I did, which meant he was probably about ten years younger. We couldn’t be twins after all.

  He looked up calmly, doubtless doing his own comparisons. “I don’t believe I have a long lost twin, Daimbert,” he said at last. “I was an only child. I am however happy to meet you. Sorry it’s not under better circumstances.”

  I sat down next to him on the cot. “I was an only child too. But people in the great City have been mistaking me for you for two days.”

  “My family came from the City originally, and I was born there, although I grew up out in the country,” he commented, apparently ready to enliven a dull evening in a cell with conversation. “My parents decided farming was the only true occupation for an adult—a point on which I thoroughly disagreed once I was old enough to recognize the virtues of cities. You and I might be cousins.”

  “Why did the guard imprison you?” I asked, temporarily leaving the interesting topic of long lost cousins.

  He shrugged. “He didn’t say. Maybe I overplayed my role with the cathedral priests.”

  Slurred voices from the other cells interrupted whatever I had been going to reply. “Hey, keep it quiet!” “We’re trying to sleep in here!”

  Time to get out. The guardsman should be far away by now. With a quick spell I opened the lock on our cell, then the door to the cell block. I briefly considered freeing the other prisoners, but if drunks wanted to sleep here in quiet, then I should probably let them. When Marcus followed me out, I let the outer door slam shut.

  Reluctantly I turned in the opposite direction from the inn. By now the guardsman was probably eating there himself. Instead I led us back toward the little castle, dodging through shadows, probing mentally for members of the guard—or for Elerius.

  No one stopped us. When we reached the square I flew up, found a window big enough to admit a man, and got it open. The room inside was dark and musty. Well, it had been a while since the royal court of Yurt had been here.

  “Stay still and relaxed,” I called down softly, then lifted Marcus with magic and brought him inside with me.

  “I see it could be an advantage being a wizard,” he said, the first time he had spoken since we left the cells. “But my branch of the family never went in for magic. Any chance of conjuring up some dinner?” There was just enough light for me to see his grin.

  “Let’s find out if there’s anything here to eat,” I said repressively. “Magic is a natural power, not supernatural. We can’t conjure non-existent things into existence.”

  With my belt buckle lit up again, I found our way down three flights to the kitchens. There we found an unopened jar of strawberry jam, a dusty bottle of wine, a box of stale crackers, and a very hard piece of cheese that the rats had either overlooked or rejected. It would do.

  Food, any food, is restorative. After half an hour I felt my brain might be functioning properly again. I had been thinking over all the possible meanings of Marcus’s comment that he had “overplayed his role” with the cathedral priests. But I was afraid of frightening him into stubborn silence with accusatory demands from someone to whom he had barely been introduced. We had, I hoped, until morning. So instead I started with family tree comparisons.

  We were, we determined, probable second cousins. Grandfathers who we each remembered only dimly had most likely been brothers.

  “I think we’ve followed opposite paths in our lives,” I said. “I grew up in the City and went to the wizards’ school there as a young man, but for the last dozen years I’ve been very happy living far out in the countryside.”

  “My beard was light brown until I bleached it,” he said. “How about yours?”

  “Chestnut colored,” I said. But his mention of bleaching gave me an opening. “What made you decide to go white?”

  “It was the man who hired me.” Elerius, I thought. “My role was to play a wizard.” He gestured toward the tall star-studded hat, now sitting beside him on the table. “Aren’t wise old wizards are supposed to have white beards?—like yours, though yours looks much more natural,” he added generously.

  “I may know the man who hired you,” I commented as if casually. “What’s his name? What does he look like?” But I thought I already knew—black-bearded, with tawny, calculating eyes.

  “It’s hard to say what he looks like,” said Marcus, as if surprised. “And if he told me his name, I don’t remember it. Nothing memorable about his appearance. No beard, so I guess he wasn’t a wizard, although he must know some wizards. He was wearing a cap and a dark red jacket.”

  Either Elerius, his identity concealed, or some renegade magician—at any rate almost certainly the man who had left me paralyzed in the sea-cave.

  “He gave my disguise what he called a test,” Marcus continued. “I went to the cathedral office in the great City and asked for the bishop. The priest I talked to said the bishop had no time for a wizard, so I guess the white beard was disguise enough to make me look like one.”

  “So he then brought you here to Caelrhon?” I asked cautiously.

  Marcus grinned. He had a very nice grin. “That was an experience. I rode in what he called an air cart. At first I thought it was a dragon—a small one. It was obviously dead, its body hollowed out, but it flew. That would have been worth it even without what he paid me.”

  He smiled again. “So, you say this is Caelrhon? I’ve never been here before. Do they have a lot of pretty girls?”

  “So what were you being paid to do?” I asked, ignoring the question about pretty girls. If a wizard had brought him, Elerius or an unknown renegade, then he might still be here in town.

  Marcus scraped the last of the strawberry jam out of
the jar. “He paid me well, too,” he said, not meeting my eyes. “Just like he promised, half when we made our agreement, half when I had played my part….”

  But then he looked up and shook his head. “Sorry, I’m being evasive, because it’s a little embarrassing. I would normally never have said things like that to a priest. But he persuaded me that it’s some kind of ceremony they do every year, and the person who usually does it is sick. It isn’t you, is it? Because he told me I looked sort of like the man who usually does it, which is why he picked me.”

  “The man who usually does what?” I demanded, wild with curiosity.

  “Well, insult the priests.” Marcus picked up a bit of cheese rind and nibbled at it, but there was really no cheese left. “He told me they have this special backwards day every year, where the priests are insulted rather than being treated with reverence, so they don’t forget their humility. Though I must say,” he added thoughtfully, “if I were trying to remind priests of their humility, I would have them dress in rags, not fine vestments.”

  Annual ceremony indeed! But that then explained why the dean and the rest of the cathedral chapter had been so frosty with me. “And they had you locked up for playing your part?” I managed to ask.

  “No, that wasn’t until this evening. I was just thinking where to have dinner, since at the moment I have plenty of money, when the guardsman picked me up. ‘Dangerous vagrant’ was the term he used. I’m glad you came along!” he added cheerfully. “I really didn’t want to spend the night sober in a cell, next to some drunks. I only like to associate with drunks when I’m drunk myself! You never told me—why did they pick you up?”

  “For being you,” I said, thinking fast. The air cart was the key. Elerius had borrowed it from the school and had said he would have it back late this evening. Therefore, he must be the man who had hired Marcus, to play a role in a complicated plan I could not even imagine, and he must be long gone from Caelrhon. He would have tipped off the municipal guard to a “dangerous vagrant,” and been safely back in his own kingdom doing something innocent, by the time Marcus talked his way out of the mayor’s court. It almost made sense….

  Unless Elerius had an accomplice to shuttle Marcus back and forth—Caelrhon’s own royal wizard? Or some carnival magician Elerius was manipulating for his own purposes?

  And suppose Elerius really had been, as he said, using the school’s air cart for an innocuous errand for his king, and some other wizard had acquired an air cart of his own. Purple flying beasts, I had heard, were fairly common up in the borderlands of the land of wild magic, and it shouldn’t be too hard to find an old one about to expire anyway and turn its skin into a cart.

  Every time I thought I had the answer, or a piece of an answer, all my suppositions fell apart. I tried mentally probing the street outside, to make sure that we were not discovered.

  No sign of Elerius or any other wizard—unless he had his thoughts well protected. But there was something there, not in our square, over closer to the cathedral. Something radiating powerful, unfocused magic….

  A creature from the land of wild magic, not locked up safely in the school cellars but somewhere here in Caelrhon. I went cold all over.

  “What, exactly, did you say to the cathedral priests?” I got out through frozen lips.

  Marcus looked down for a moment, then met my eyes with a rueful expression. “I’ve always hoped that I would never hurt anybody—except perhaps me—so I really do feel bad about it. I must have been insulting far beyond what the man who usually plays the part does! And it’s not much of an excuse that I was only saying what I was told to say.”

  “Which was?”

  He gave an embarrassed chuckle. “I told the priests that I was the Royal Wizard of Yurt—thinking, of course, that they would know at once that I wasn’t really a wizard, and that Yurt probably isn’t even a real kingdom. But maybe they didn’t. First I quoted them the old saying, ‘There are three that rule the world, the wizards, the church, and the aristocracy,’ and added that the greatest of these is wizardry. Then I said that ‘we wizards’ knew that priests were all hypocrites, sinners, corrupt, and shameful. I may also have used the word malingerer. Finally I said that they would stop looking down their noses as wizards when their cathedral was attacked by a horrible monster, and only a wizard could save them.”

  This made no sense whatsoever. I was having to rethink my suspicions of Elerius; if he had some nefarious plot, it should at least be rational. This sounded like the plot of a madman.

  “You do realize,” I managed, “that I am the Royal Wizard of Yurt.”

  His mouth fell open. “Daimbert! You mean you usually call the priests hypocrites and sinners? But no! I can see that you wouldn’t! And Yurt is real?”

  “Maybe the smallest of the Western Kingdoms, but definitely real.”

  “It must all be some terrible prank! I must apologize to the priests at once. Do you think they’ll be in bed yet? And I have to find the man who hired me and give him his money back—though I don’t have it all anymore, I spent the first half of it already….”

  “The priests are all in bed by now,” I said firmly, with a vision of going down the street where the cathedral officers lived, being brusquely turned away from door after door and dragged off—and probably beaten—by the municipal guard. “We can go together tomorrow. Right now we have to take care of the ‘horrible monster’ you promised them.”

  “But that was just part of the prank, wasn’t it?” he asked in dismay.

  “Part of the prank or not, it’s as real as Yurt,” I said grimly. I tried another mental probe. “Whatever it is, it’s loose and roaming the streets of Caelrhon.”

  IX

  Titus would know how to deal with a magical creature. He probably had all sorts of spells that would capture one. I of course didn’t have any. Ordinary paralysis and binding spells will not work on a creature of wild magic, I knew with depressing certainty.

  Equally depressing and certain was that Titus was two hundred miles away, and I didn’t have access to any telephone in Caelrhon. Why—other than my perpetual unease with technical magic—had I never considered installing one in the little castle here?

  Followed closely by Marcus, I hurried down the dark streets toward the cathedral. Whoever had hired him wanted the church to think it was under attack from institutionalized wizardry, which meant that he hoped for a quite real retaliatory attack by the priests against all magic-workers. Sermons preached against us from the high altar would just be the beginning.

  I didn’t like to think what might happen if organized groups of priests started some sort of perpetual prayer against organized magic. They always distrusted us, but this might push them to extreme measures—like calling in the supernatural. The saints listened to priests, at least some of the time, and I really didn’t want to see the wizards’ school blasted with fire from heaven.

  What wizard could possibly want that? If this was subtle plot, it was too subtle for me.

  In the meantime I had to find and somehow stop whatever creature I could now sense all too clearly. Even if I couldn’t bind it, maybe I could improvise something until reinforcements arrived.

  A squawk and the click of claws on cobblestone alerted me. I pulled Marcus back against a building, then peered cautiously around the corner.

  A griffin. I had never seen one before, but it was unmistakable: the head and wings of an eagle on the body of a lion. The wings were folded, but the eagle’s head was up and alert, yellow eyes seeming to glow in the dusk. But it appeared surprisingly placid as it looked around, not yet spotting us, and gave another squawk.

  Marcus drew his breath in sharply. “Is that the horrible monster?” he whispered. “Did I do something to bring it here?”

  I didn’t even bother answering.

  We were in a residential street, and my only hope was to lure it out of town before it started investigating some of the houses more closely. That beak and those claws could do deadly
damage. I devoutly hoped that whoever had brought it here to galvanize the priests against wizardry did not have some way to urge it to attack.

  But something did not seem quite right. The feathers on the griffin’s head appeared soft and fluffy in the moonlight. Its lion paws seemed unusually large for the size of its body which, now that I thought about it, was not nearly as big as I would have expected a lion to be.

  It was a young griffin, a juvenile, probably only recently out of the nest. (Nest? Did griffins have nests? Den?)

  Which meant that its mother might be very close by.

  I had to get it out of town, preferably without it ripping me to shreds, though that was certainly a possibility. I could not sense another griffin nearby, but the mother would surely follow her cub. (Cub?)

  “Stay here,” I murmured to Marcus and put a quick spell of illusion together.

  It was only an approximation, but when I stepped out into the street I looked more or less like the young griffin, only twice as big. A lion would have been able to tell in an instant by my scent that I was human, but eagles hunt by sight, not smell. I could only hope that griffins were the same.

  This one lifted its wings slightly as soon as it saw me and gave a louder squawk. Anger and annoyance? Or joyous recognition? I had to hope the latter. A window opened above us, as someone looked out to see what was making the noise. It immediately slammed shut again.

  I gave a squawk of my own, intended to suggest that the cub should follow me. It can’t have been as convincing as I intended, because the young griffin just gave me what I interpreted as a puzzled look, its eagle head cocked sideways. But when I lifted from the ground and started flying away, it spread its wings, somewhat awkwardly, and started after me.

  Good. In a moment I’d have it out of the city. Maybe by then I’d have thought of a way to keep it out of the city.

  We flew high over rooftops, detoured around the cathedral towers, and sailed past the city walls. Beyond was a field where tents were erected for market days and great feasts, but this evening it was empty. I descended into it, renewing my spell of illusion, and the griffin, who had been flapping hard to keep up, dropped down beside me.