“I don’t think you’ll be rid of me at all,” Matt said, “except maybe by asking me nicely to leave.”
“Will you not leave?”
Matt sighed. “Well, that’s not quite what I meant by ‘nicely,’ but I guess it will have to do. Okay, I’ll walk out-but I would appreciate answers to a few questions first.”
“I give nothing to any man!” The grubby one raised his staff as if to strike and began to recite something in that confounded antiquated tongue again. Matt got his counter in fast and first. “His heart is turned to stone; He strikes it, and it hurts his hand. His hand therefore, is stone, And all his body banned From flesh and bone. All is rock! His head alone Is live!”
The owner’s voice ran down into a croak and stopped. He stood poised, staff raised to strike, but unable to as his body turned grayish. “Well, now, that’s a bit better attitude!” Matt strolled up to go slowly around the man, inspecting him from every angle. “Actually, that posture isn’t really the best attitude in the world, but it could be worse.”
“You could not!” The man’s voice had an undertone of gravel. “Loose me, Wizard, or it shall be the worse for you!”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Matt said casually. “You’re a wand slinger, see, so I doubt any verse you come up with will have much effect without that stick to direct it-and what little power your spells might have, I’m sure I can counter.”
The yellow eyes gleamed with fury, and the sorcerer began to recite again. “Everything considered,” Matt said quickly, “it would be a lot easier for you just to answer a few questions for me. Then I could unfreeze you and go away.”
The sorcerer paused in mid-syllable. “Of course, if you do manage to do something lethal to me,” Matt pointed out, “I won’t be here to unfreeze you.”
“I can deal with that myself!”
“Sure. You could unfreeze somebody you had turned to stone,” Matt said, “but could you counter a spell of mine?”
The sorcerer just gave him a very black look. “Let’s start with: how did you get here?” Matt asked. “The king sent you, for openers.”
“Openers indeed! I was the first-but only the first of a dozen! And there shall be more!”
Matt nodded. “Makes sense. However, what the king didn’t explain to me, before he blasted me here, was why he didn’t just execute anybody who wouldn’t come to heel. You know, off with their heads, then burn the body just to make sure. Why not?‘
“He did that with the worst of them,” the sorcerer grated, “they who sought to overthrow him.”
“But you were no threat to him personally? You just didn’t want to stop torturing your peasants?”
“Something of the sort,” the sorcerer admitted. “I had no designs upon the throne.”
“Yes, I noticed it wasn’t terribly ornate. I thought Boncorro was tolerant, though. All you had to do was live by his laws.”
“And cease to slay priests?” the sorcerer demanded. “Cease to despoil nuns? Cease to seek to bring about the misery of every soul near me, that I might send them to Hell? What use would there be in living, then?”
“So. You were incorrigible and unreformable.” That put in a thought. “Did the king even try to reform you?”
“Oh, aye. He bade me mend my ways three times. At the last, his fool of a reeve shrank quaking from my sight, so I knew ‘twas not he who told the king how I had amused myself withthe peasant lass-so I know that King Boncorro must have had other spies within my castle, perhaps even the cat I had bought to attend to his other spies.”
Matt decided he did not like this man. “He appeared in my hall with the sound of thunder and with fires gushing away from him-the showy fool! ‘What?’ I said. ‘Will you send me to a monastery?’ ‘Nay, nor even presume to tell you to renounce your pact with Satan,’ said he, ‘for your soul is your own affair, and no reform will affect your Afterlife save that which you work yourself.’ ”
Matt listened closely. This didn’t sound like the atheist the king professed to be. “Sounds like common sense.”
“The more fool he, to presume to find laws that govern the consequences of the soul’s deeds! He commanded me to forgo my pleasures, though, ‘For what you do to my subjects,’ he said, ”is my concern.‘ The conceited prat! I spat in his face. It was for that he sent me here.“
“Three strikes and you’re out of his kingdom.” Matt nodded. “In fact, out of his whole world. Interesting that he still honors the number three.”
“There is nothing mystical in that!”
“That’s what they tell me. And you just happened to find this castle sitting here?”
The sorcerer stared. Then he laughed, a nasty, mocking sound. “Why, you understand nothing of the nature of this realm, do you?”
“Oh. So you built it yourself?”
“Aye, with my own two hands,” the sorcerer said, sneering. “There is a quarry not far from here, and I am stronger than I seem.”
“Yes, that’s why I don’t want to get too close. Did you make the quarry, too?”
The sorcerer eyed him narrowly, finally beginning to realize who was mocking whom. “What a fool’s remark is that! How can one make a quarry?”
“I thought that here you could make anything-like that.” Man pointed at a wall, imagined a pickaxe, and willed it to appear. Sure enough, it did, swinging at the granite. “No!” the sorcerer cried in alarm, and a huge hand appeared, seizing the pickaxe and throwing it at Matt. Quickly, he willed it to disappear, and it faded into thin air. Then he imagined an even bigger hand holding a ruler, willed it to appear, and made it strike the sorcerer’s construct on the knuckles. “Well enough, then,” the sorcerer said with disgust. “I will banish mine if you will banish yours.”
Matt nodded. “On the count of three.”
“Nay-five!”
“Okay, five,” Matt sighed. He considered telling the man that five was a holy number in some religions, then thought better of it-apparently it didn’t matter, as long as the religion wasn’t Christianity. After all, this part of this world ran on Christian concepts, or against them. “One… two… three…”
“Four-five!” the other sorcerer counted, and Matt’s hand disappeared. The sorcerer laughed as his giant hand rushed at Matt’s head. Matt did some quick imagining, and a huge chain appeared fastened to a ring in the wall. The other end was fastened to a chain in the hand. It slammed down onto the floor and scrabbled its fingers furiously, trying to reach him. Matt’s hand appeared over it with the ruler again. “As you will,” the sorcerer sighed, and his hand disappeared. Matt nodded and banished his. The sorcerer growled, “If you know that all here is illusion, why did you ask?”
“I come from a school that likes to have its guesses confirmed,” Matt explained. “So this whole realm is a pocket universe so thoroughly saturated with magic that I can dream up anything I want?”
“Even so,” his enemy grunted. “This whole castle is the product of my imagination.”
Matt decided that this boy really needed a psychiatrist. “In this realm-between-worlds to which King Boncorro has banished us,” the sorcerer explained, “anything imagined can appear to be real.”
Matt shuddered. “The ideal place for people who want to delude themselves!”
“Oh, they need not come here,” the sorcerer said with a curl of the lip. “They who wish to find their Paradise on Earth are doing exactly that. Now that there is money enough, they are looking away from the Afterlife and toward the here and now, forgoing their families to seek only pleasure.”
Matt remembered the roisterers he’d met on the road south, and shuddered. The sorcerer gave him a toothy grin. “That pleasure is fleeting, of course-and only builds up a debt that must be paid. After summer’s plenty comes winter’s famine, and fools follow the search for pleasure into ways that lead them here-or to death and damnation. What an idiot is King Boncorro! For in seeking to make his folk happier, he has only given them the means of their own destruction!”
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br /> “He claims he doesn’t care, as long as it means more money for him.” But Matt frowned. “Are you trying to tell me that the king’s new order has actually produced more Hell-bound souls than King Maledicto’s reign?”
“Aye, for in place of the fear of old Maledicto and his devilish masters, Boncorro has given them-nothing. He does not punish the priests, but he has not brought them back, either.” The sorcerer grinned, savoring the idea. “The people have no guide in the use of their newfound prosperity, nothing by which to decide what to do and what to avoid.”
“You mean that because the people have lost any sense of religion, they can’t have faith in anything?”
The sorcerer winced. “Spare the words that burn, Wizard! You have almost the sense of it-it is not that they cannot have faith in anything, but that King Boncorro has given them nothing to have faith in! In place of the fear of Hell, he has given them no hope of anything beyond this world-so they pursue only worldly joys and pleasures. Not knowing what to do with the sudden leisure that has befallen them, they have themselves fallen prey to the temptation that comes their way.”
“You mean it’s harder for them to hold onto their faith, now that they don’t actually need it.”
“No, I mean that there is no faith for them to have! It is the king who sets the example, but he embraces no beliefs and preaches none-so his people have none, either!”
“And this pocket universe is the perfect example of what happens: when you have the chance to make your dreams come true, but no yardstick to measure which dreams are good for you and which are destructive, you get bogged down in your own neuroses.”
The sorcerer grinned wickedly. “Odd terms, but an agony of heart quite clearly stated.”
And it was, of course, what he was living day to day-unless he was one of the few who had control over his illusions, not letting his illusions control him. No wonder this was a prison fit only for sorcerers and wizards-for anyone else, it would begin as Paradise, then turn into a torture chamber of the subconscious, and finish by being a killing ground. The sorcerer’s eyes flashed. “Be sure that I can control my imaginings!”
“So the secular monarch needs to find some sort of values to replace religion.” All Matt could think of was how the Soviets had made Communism assume many of the aspects of religion. It had indeed been a secular religion, in its own way. All of a sudden he couldn’t take this conversation any more. This sorcerer was too right about what was wrong. “Think I’ll go looking and see if there’s anybody else here who really knows about mind control,” Matt said. “Thanks for the overview.” He turned and started for the gate, then remembered and whirled around, his finger stabbing out-just in time for him to think up a lightning bolt that exploded the elephant-headed giant belly dancer with carnivore’s fangs that was reaching for him with its trunk. It burst into a shower of sparks and was gone. “Don’t try it,” Matt told the sorcerer sternly, “because I’m making myself a little familiar, right now, to watch you closely and alert me if you come up with any other monstrosities for stabbing me in the back.”
The sorcerer glared at him. “You remove all the fun of this world!”
Matt suddenly realized that, to the sorcerer, he had been put there only for the man to play with-that, like all other people, his sole reason for existence had been to amuse this monster of depravity. Monster of depravity? Was that why all his creations were depraved monsters? “Just don’t try it,” he warned. “So far, I haven’t tried to hurt you. Don’t tempt me-I don’t have much resistance.”
“Oh, I think this realm will tempt you to your fullest,” the sorcerer assured him. Matt resolved, then and there, not to imagine up a single item for his own amusement or pleasure. Trouble was, he’d never been much good at keeping resolutions. But he did manage to walk out of the dank and fetid castle, his back prickling every inch of the way, expecting attack. A dragonfly from the moat zoomed past him, hit the wall, and turned into a tarantula. It scuttled up the stonework, and Matt relaxed. Just to test it, he glanced through its eyes, and saw the sorcerer making a wolf with a head on each end. Matt produced a huge saw, cut it down the middle, and made them all disappear. He walked on out, listening to the cursing behind him with great satisfaction-but he didn’t relax until he’d made it across the drawbridge and a hundred yards away. Then, with one final shudder, he loosed his binding spell, put the foul sorcerer from his mind, and set off to find out if there was anyone good in this befogged wasteland. Actually, he was ready to settle for someone just a little bit good. He wasn’t in any shape to be picky.
Chapter 20
They watched the herald out of sight. Then Alisande turned to Sir Guy, resolutely banishing thoughts of a strange chill-white concoction in a clear glass standing cup, with some sort of dark brown sauce oozing over the top of it, and said, “How now, Sir Guy? How shall we save Matthew without bringing a war down upon our heads?”
“I would say,” the knight said slowly, “that we must first discover how Matthew may be in dire danger, but not in Latruria.”
“Is he gone from Latruria?” Stegoman rumbled. “A good thought.” Alisande turned to Ortho the Frank. “How say you, Wizard? Is your teacher in Latruria, or not?”
“He is not.” Ortho’s gaze still probed a distance only he could see. “Yet he is nonetheless in dire peril.”
The ice of fear enveloped Alisande’s heart. Ice! That was the stuff in the standing cup! But not really ice, either… “He… he is not in… a realm of the Afterlife?”
“No,” Ortho said with complete certainty. “He is not in Hell, nor Purgatory, nor any of the realms of the dead. He is in a place that both is and is not…” He shrugged, his eyes coining back into focus. “I cannot explain it more clearly than that, your Majesty; we have not the words. It is a wizard’s realm; let it rest at that.”
Stegoman scowled. “A wizard’s realm, and Matthew cannot break free of it?”
“Not by himself, no.”
“And can you not aid him?‘ Sir Guy demanded. ”Alas, no,“ Ortho sighed. ”I am a willing wizard, Sir Knight, but not a terribly powerful one.“
“Then we must bring a terribly powerful one.” Stegoman swung his head toward Sir Guy. “Is this not the emergency of which the Witch Doctor spoke?”
“It is,” Sir Guy agreed, and turned back to Alisande. “A clear and present danger,‘ he said. This is a present danger, though its nature may not be clear.”
“Yet it is clearly a danger.” Alisande turned to Ortho. “Is it not?”
“Most clearly indeed, your Majesty, and if it is not present now, it will most quickly become so!”
“Then there is no more time to wait,” Alisande said to the Black Knight. “Summon the Witch Doctor!”
Sir Guy loosened his gorget and drew a most unspectacular bauble out from the protection of his breastplate. “This is the amulet he gave me.”
Alisande frowned at the ball on its length of dull iron chain. It was a globe of metal perhaps two inches across, perforated with dozens of tiny holes arranged in diagonal rows-serried ranks. “ ‘Tis most unprepossessing, Sir Guy.”
“It is,” the Black Knight agreed. “The Wizard Saul says appearances are of no importance-only function and substance do matter.”
Alisande shuddered. “I pity his lady, Angelique!”
“Be assured, she has their cottage well in hand,” Sir Guy told her, “and he rejoices in its appearance as he does in hers.”
Alisande frowned. “Does he not see that his pleasure in her beauty, and the loveliness she creates about her, give the lie to his claims not to care about the outsides of things?”
“With respect, your Majesty,” Ortho said, “Lord Matthew has told me that the wizard Saul has never been troubled by his contradicting of himself. What does the amulet do, Sir Guy?”
“It will take my words to him.” Sir Guy pressed a little nubbin on the side of the cylinder that held the amulet. “There is a charm I must recite, to make it carry my voice… �
�Breaker, breaker! Nine one one! Come in, Wizard Saul! Mayday! Mayday!’”
Alisande frowned. “But ‘tis mid-June, Sir Guy, nigh to Midsummer’s. ’Tis long past May Day.”
Sir Guy shrugged. “Who can comprehend the ways of wizards, Majesty? He told me that it means ‘help me’ in a language called French-muh aid-ay-but that makes scarcely more sense, for I have never heard of such a tongue.”
Alisande glanced quickly at Ortho, but he only shrugged, looking as baffled as she. “Nine one one! Mayday, Wizard Saul!” Sir Guy said again, then, “Oh! I forgot! He said I must loose the nubbin when I am done speaking!” He lifted his thumb, and the button rose. Saul’s voice crackled out of the amulet, surprising Sir Guy so much that he dropped it. Fortunately, it swung by its chain, reverberating with the little tinny voice that somehow they could recognise as Wizard Saul’s. “You’ve gotta let up on me button, Sir Guy! I’m talking, but you can’t hear me if you don’t let go! Raise your thumb! Lift up your finger!” Then, oddly, the voice broke into song. “I lift up my finger and I say,‘tweet, tweet, now, now, come, come,’
“Am I sounding as daffy as I think I am? Hey, wait a minute-how can you answer if I’m still talking? Okay, Sir Guy, I’ll give you a chance-I’ll shut up for ten seconds. You press the little button again and tell me if you can hear me. Remember the incantation? It’s, ‘I read you loud and clear.’ Got that? Okay, let’s try it.”
“He might give me a chance,” Sir Guy said, annoyed, then pressed the button. “As it happens, I do remember that-I read you loud and clear, Wizard Saul! Though I do not read you, truly, only hear you, and why you think this spell will work when it has neither meter nor rhyme, I cannot think!”
He let up on the burton just in time to hear Saul say, “Well, I knew that. Don’t worry about the verse, I enchanted it when I built it, and it will keep working unless you break the indicted thing. Over.”
“He says ‘over’ to signal that he is done talking,” Sir Guy explained, and pressed the button. “Wizard Saul, we have just received word that Matthew is in danger. He seems to be imprisoned, but we cannot say where-it seems to be some sort of wizard’s realm!”
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