The Wizard at Home

by Rick Shelley

  THE SEVEN TOWERS 02

  THE WIZARD AT HOME

  Rick Shelley

  PROLOGUE

  This world once knew twenty gods, the sons and daughters of one couple. Their parents were so wrapped up in each other that they neglected their children, and the brothers and sisters turned to quarreling with each other. In time, the quarrels turned violent, deadly. The gods looked for allies, and for followers. At various times, one or another of the Twenty would look with favor on one of the religions created by men, and lend it his, or her, favor, giving power to that religion, molding it, and being molded by it in return. And using it.

  In the Year of Our Lord twelve hundred and seven, Rome called a Crusade, not against the Saracens but against Christian heretics in France. The White Brotherhood, long the dominant order of the orthodox Roman Church, rose to defend itself against the heresy of the Blue Rose, centered in the Burgundy region of France. People and towns were burned, but the evil of the Blue Rose was not totally extinguished. It merely went underground, biding its time, preparing for a comeback. And a comeback was possible. The Blue Rose had the power of gods behind it, an alliance of five gods of the eighteen who remained of the Twenty. But the White Brotherhood also had gods behind it. Mikel, the Unseen Lord of the Mysteries of the White Brotherhood, had taken the Roman Church under his sway at the time of Constantine. Church and god had accommodated themselves to each other over the years. Mikel's sway was never seriously challenged by any of his siblings until the growth of the Blue Rose.

  The Crusade in Burgundy did not end that conflict, though Mikel and his allies hoped it had. Thirty-one years later, in 1238, in the month of August, a great battle was fought among the gods and their armies. This battle was the culmination of the war for the domination of the Christian Church in Europe, a battle without mercy. In one horrendous confrontation that stretched from mother earth to the land of the gods, the heretics were destroyed, root and branch, leaving only powerless remnants behind. The Blue Rose would not rise again. The victory of Mikel and his allies was complete.

  In my solitude, I shed tears for all who died in the battle that was centered on the village of Mecq. Gods, mortals, demigods, and demons died in the fighting. The roster of the old gods was shortened by a third. The dead included Carillia, who had long been the most gentle and loving of the gods.

  Had the horror of Mecq sufficed to end the ages of deadly feuding among the divine siblings, it would have been a brutal but perhaps—ultimately—worthwhile lesson. But there was no sign that the deities would take that lesson. If anything, their bitterness toward each other, and toward the parents who had abandoned them in disgust and self-reproach, increased. For a time, they might lick their wounds and spare the mortal world their deadly conflict, but I had little hope that any respite would last long.

  Pessimist that I was and am, I still had no idea that the fighting would resume even before the wounds of Mecq had time to heal. The old war had ended, but the seeds of a new conflict had already been sown.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The battle was over. A dirty haze hung low over the village of Mecq—smoke and steam, wispy and malodorous, smelling of rotten eggs and rotting flesh—but the sun would soon cut through the fog. Even in the smoky haze, the promise of a rainbow could be seen. Life would go on.

  The Wizard Silvas, spearpoint of the battle for the White Brotherhood, had been one of the gravely wounded, brought to the church of Mecq unconscious, with the rest of the wounded. And the dead. It had been difficult to tell that he was yet alive.

  Silvas regained consciousness and began chants of healing for himself. In his weakened state, it would be a long and difficult magic. Then he noticed Carillia at his side, and he saw that her injuries were worse than his own. A goddess she might be, but she was dying.

  "You have always been my heart," Carillia whispered to him. Maria Devry, the daughter of the dead thane of Mecq, helped support Silvas as he rolled over onto his side, closer to Carillia. Maria was still holding Silvas when Carillia kissed him and infused him with her divinity. A bright white light illuminated all three of them, and the gift also passed into Maria.

  When the light faded, Carillia was dead, as were many others. Silvas could not change that. But the divine power she had given him let him heal all of the wounded. That done, Silvas's work in Mecq was finished.

  Silvas and Maria descended the steps of the church hand in hand, linked for all time by the gift of Carillia, and walked toward the column of smoke that concealed the entrance to the wizard's castle.

  A week in Mecq had aged Silvas visibly. There were new wrinkles in his face. His eyes—dark gray, almost black, with flecks of lighter color—seemed to have sunk deeper in his face. He looked more gaunt than before. In his present weakness, he looked almost frail despite his brawny, muscled body. His hair, now wet, looked a dirty brown. A bath would bring back the lighter brown, streaked with sun-bleached blond.

  Maria had been changed as well, not by a week of trial, but by the instant in which Carillia's divinity had flooded over her and Silvas. Her dark bluish-gray eyes had a new depth to them, a look of wisdom rare in one of only sixteen years. Although she was nearly a foot shorter than Silvas, she gave the impression of being nearly as tall, even when they stood next to each other. On their first meeting, Silvas had thought Maria attractive in a wholesome, rural way. Now she carried herself with a new poise that seemed to have turned her into a beauty. While Silvas seemed hunched over by the burdens he had carried, Maria stood straight and tall. Her features were delicate and pleasant, her hair a glossy dark brown.

  Silvas and Maria had not yet had time to digest the gift they had received from Carillia, but they could feel the new divinity they shared, an intimacy that might take years to fully explore. It was as if much of Silvas's experience and... maturity had passed into Maria.

  Though the Glade, Silvas's castle, was hundreds of miles from Mecq, it was also as close as the pillar of smoke that stood in the village green. Carillia's body was borne before Silvas and Maria by an honor guard that had come out of the castle: equal numbers of gurnetz, Braf Goleg and his lupine soldiers; and esperia, Koshka and his porcine kindred. Bay, Silvas's immense, sentient horse and counselor, and Bosc, Bay's esperia groom and also counselor to the wizard, followed Silvas and Maria toward the pillar of smoke.

  The people of Mecq and the churchmen who had gathered to help battle the Blue Rose watched the slow procession in silence, honoring the sacrifice of Carillia. Knowledge of her divinity was just beginning to circulate among the villagers.

  Silvas and Maria stopped to look at the people standing in front of the church. Bosc and Bay went around them, following Carillia and her honor guard into the pillar of smoke. Silvas raised a hand, as if in benediction. He thought to say some final words, but could find no appropriate message. After a moment, he took Maria's hand again and they passed through the smoke, out of Mecq, and into the Glade, also known as the Seven Towers.

  The brightly colored birds of the Seven Towers, each a single brilliant hue, came to greet Maria and Silvas... and to sing their dirges over Carillia. Maria and Silvas stopped in the courtyard, as had the others.

  "My mind is numb," Maria told Silvas as she watched the birds caper overhead. They seemed to show all of the colors of the rainbow, one color to a bird. Their song reached inside to touch the souls of those who heard it, both celebration and requiem.

  "I know how you feel." As the words came out, Silvas realized how vast an understatement they represented. He knew how she felt because, with only the least effort, he could share that feeling intimately. The new linkage between them unified them so completely that the experiences of one could scarcely be escaped by the other.

  "The word is a
potheosis," Silvas continued, answering a question she had not voiced. "We share Carillia's final gift, her godhood."

  "It was meant only for you," Maria said with uncommon meekness. Although she had never heard the word "apotheosis" before, she knew what it meant, the elevation of a mortal to godhood. But, so far, it was all just words. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this gift.

  "I'm not so certain," Silvas said, straightening up, stretching, recovering yet from what had passed before. "I think that nothing Carillia ever did was accidental."

  "Even at the last extreme?" Maria asked.

  "Even so." Silvas stared at her with a new intensity. Until that moment in the church when Carillia's dying kiss had united them, Silvas had considered Maria something of a nuisance. Her importunate fantasies had been embarrassing. Now they shared something that so overwhelmed the past that Silvas looked at her as if he were seeing her for the first time. She no longer looked as young as she had on their first meeting, scarcely a week before. An eternity of divine past and their strange union had matured her beyond all mortal reckoning.

  "I think Carillia knew precisely what she was doing," Silvas said.

  The stretcher with Carillia's body was carried inside the keep of the Seven Towers. She would be taken to the long parlor just off of the great hall, the room where Auroreus, Silvas's mentor and predecessor, had been laid out following his death—centuries before.

  "I wish there had been time for me to know her better," Maria said.

  "She is within us, there for us to know, to share," Silvas replied.

  Maria was shocked to find her mind suddenly drawn within, startled to see Carillia there, smiling at her with affection and—perhaps?—a touch of pity. Maria blinked rapidly, forcing herself back out of the pit of her mind. She looked up at Silvas.

  "You see?" he asked. Maria simply nodded.

  Bay and Bosc, visible extremes, remained nearby. The horse was a giant of his kind, remarkable even apart from his intelligence and gift of language. Bosc was scarcely three feet tall, his features more those of a pig than a human. Silvas's eyes met those of Bay and Bosc in turn, lingered on each, felt the sorrow they all shared.

  "I know not what comes now," Silvas said. "My heart is too full for clear thought. For now..."

  He suddenly stopped talking and strode across the courtyard. Maria moved with him as if they were yoked together, though she had difficulty matching his long strides. Bay and Bosc needed a moment to react, to follow. Silvas drew the ornately handled dagger from his belt. Near the curtain wall, Silvas scratched a series of lines on the stone pavement—a rectangle, 40 feet long and extending 25 feet from the wall into the bailey. The hastily scribed lines were as perfect as the lines were when he drew a magical pentagram.

  "I will raise a tomb, a shrine, here for Carillia," Silvas announced. "The finest stone from the Durin quarry. We'll hire masons from York. I want a fitting memorial."

  "We'll build a shrine, of course," Maria said, her soft voice a compelling contrast to Silvas's bolder tones, "but her true memorial is within us. Her memorial will be what we do with her gift."

  Silvas and Maria stared at each other, wordless communication taking place that the others were excluded from. After a moment, Silvas nodded. "We will be her other memorial." He had no idea yet what that might entail, but he realized that his old task was finished. I have fulfilled my vow to the Unseen Lord of the White Brotherhood.

  "Lord, look above," Bosc said, his voice low but quavering.

  Silvas quickly looked at the sky. "What?" he asked when he saw no immediate threat.

  "The sun." Bosc pointed. Silvas saw what was wrong even as Bosc spelled it out. "It's in the wrong place. That's the north."

  When Maria and Bay looked up as well, Silvas pointed to a spot in the sky to the left of where the sun actually was and said, "This time of the afternoon, the sun should be there."

  Where is the threat? Silvas demanded of himself. Who attacks the sun? Long-standing habit brought spells of defense and seeking to his lips. His mind sought the sky, but he was startled by the facility of his leap skyward—so sudden that he consciously willed it to slow. His senses tuned to an unprecedented fineness, Silvas sought any threat behind the unnatural placement of the sun and found none. Though his body remained standing in the courtyard of the Glade, Silvas had vision and hearing in the spirit far above the Seven Towers. He felt Maria's mind there with him, locked to his. Together, they searched through a complete circle, but there was no hint of any enemy.

  "I have no idea what the cause is," Silvas said when his awareness returned to his body. He did not add the "yet"; that was implicit. He would find the answer, somehow.

  "Someone should be assigned to watch how the sun now moves through its course," Bay suggested, his deep voice rumbling even when he spoke softly. He tossed his head. "This is most peculiar."

  "Yes," Silvas agreed. "I'll have Braf put a man to it straightaway." Braf, who looked as much like a wolf as Bosc looked like a pig, had gone on into the keep with the others. "But I can't feel the threat of it."

  Bay snorted. "Likely that will become apparent in time."

  Silvas continued to stare into the sky, careful not to look directly at the sun. You know the danger of that, he reminded himself. As a young apprentice new to the wizard's gift of telesight, he had once tried to look directly into the heart of a star and had nearly had the eyes burned out of his head. Auroreus, his teacher, had cured the burns and warned him, "Some visions are denied even to the gods." More than any other, Silvas had taken that lesson to heart.

  "It will wait," Silvas said in a voice that was little more than a thought. "For now, we have Carillia to attend to." Carillia. They had shared centuries together with the Seven Towers. And for all our love, I never really knew you, he lamented.

  "We might as well go inside," he said.

  "Since there is nothing else to be accomplished here," Bay commented sotto voce, but there was none of the harshness of his usual irony. The horse waited to make sure that Silvas had no riposte, then turned and started toward the mews. Bosc trotted at his side, leaving Silvas and Maria alone.

  "Your love for her ran very deep," Maria whispered.

  "Much deeper than my knowledge of her," Silvas said. The words gave shape to an ache that had been developing since he first saw Carillia on the floor of the church in Mecq.

  "Greater knowledge would have put impossible dams around that love," Maria said.

  Silvas did not try to refute her observation. Its truth did little but increase his pain. "Let's go inside." He took Maria's hand again and they entered the keep together.

  There was considerable activity inside. Many of the castle staff were in or around the great hall, far more than would normally be there, except at mealtime. A human servant brought wine for Silvas and Maria. They sipped at it while Silvas surveyed the room. Maria also looked around. It was only her second time in the castle; she still looked at everything as a stranger.

  "It feels as if this place is but an extension of you," she said after several minutes.

  Silvas took a moment to consider that. "In many ways, it is. It's been my home for centuries."

  They were too closely linked for that to startle Maria. "It seems to pulse with the beating of your heart," she said.

  Silvas's attention kept returning to one doorway on the left side of the great hall. Maria realized that Carillia lay beyond it.

  "Koshka will be seeing to her," Silvas said. Although his strongest impulse was to go to Carillia immediately, he decided, "I'll wait for his word." Everything continues to function. In a way, that realization hurt, as if everything should come to a chaotic halt in the wake of Carillia's death.

  "How long will it take to get the masons from York?" Maria asked, hoping to turn his attention with a practical question.

  "It's a week's ride there, even on Bay," Silvas said.

  "We may not need to ride such distances now," Maria said. That drew Silvas's attention
fully.

  "That's true. We no longer have such limitations." All knowledge is there, once I look for it, Silvas marveled. Most knowledge, he amended. There were limits even for a god, but he was uncertain where those new boundaries might lie.

  It was several minutes before Koshka appeared in the doorway on the left side of the great hall, then came across to Silvas.

  "I have done what I may, lord," Koshka said, bowing his head.

  "Thank you, Koshka," Silvas replied. "Everyone waits to pay their respects?"

  "Aye, lord, but they will wait for you. I've sent word to the village as well. The lady Carillia was loved by all in our valley."

  "I know." With Silvas preoccupied by his travels around England, and occasionally beyond, for the Unseen Lord, Carillia had been more in evidence at the Glade than he for all of the centuries they had shared.

  "With your leave, they will also come to say their farewells," Koshka said.

  "Of course." The ache of sharing Carillia with so many would have to be borne.

  "Will you go in now, lord?" Koshka asked.

  Silvas hesitated before he nodded. Maria took his arm and they crossed the great hall. Silvas paused before he opened the door and went into the long parlor. The room was not dark. Two tall windows let in light. There were also torches along the walls, and candle stands at either end of the bier. The simple wooden frame was covered with soft jade green silk. Carillia lay atop it, dressed in her finest gown. It was the same brilliant emerald green as her eyes, now closed forever.

  "Her beauty is not bated the least whit," Maria whispered.

  "She could almost be but sleeping, ready to wake at any instant." Silvas forced the words past the intense pain they provoked.

  "Her memories will be with us always," Maria said. Though she had known Carillia only briefly, and superficially, in life, all of Carillia's past was there within Maria's mind now. She is part of me, or I am part of her, Maria thought. There was no wonder in that, not yet.

  Two tall chairs, of wood so dark with age that it was almost black, stood between the bier and the far wall. Silvas's tiger-sized house cats, Satin and Velvet, stood vigil over their fallen mistress. They had the colors and markings of Siamese cats, but despite their size, they were indeed pets. And more. They looked toward Silvas and Maria but did not move.