"This is lovely," I said. "Can anything live here, without light?"
The old wizard was not interested in the walls. I wondered if he might, during his close to two centuries in Yurt, have come here many times. "Not much lives here," he said absently. "Deep in the cave there are blind fish in the river—not just with unseeing eyes, but with no eyes at all."
But he was also not interested in cave fish. "Now, which way did he go?" he added, half to me and half to himself.
He moved off across the chamber, and I stayed close behind him and the light. I knew we were still very close to the entrance, that Nimrod, with the benefit of mid-day sun, had been able to come this far without any sort of light and still see well enough not only to find his way back out but to notice the walls. But outside it was now night, and in darkness I could have blundered into a different tunnel, thinking it the entrance, and been lost forever.
I told myself firmly that I should be able to make a magic light as good as my predecessor's, and that even in darkness I had only to follow the river. It helped a little.
But only for a moment. "This way," said the old wizard confidently. Leaving the river, the one reliable guide we had, he walked quickly across the chamber and into one of the wider tunnels. I had no choice but to follow him.
The tunnel descended slowly but steadily, heading as well as I could tell back into the heart of the plateau and away from the valley. The cave walls here were rough and plain, without any of the colors and fantastic shapes of the great chamber. I presumed that at some point in the ancient past a branch of the river had run here too, but if so it was long gone, leaving only a dampness on the walls.
We walked quickly for maybe a quarter hour, though almost immediately I began to feel that we were outside of time. The tunnel twisted, rising now, turning until I felt sure we would come back around on ourselves. I found myself staring into the blackness around us as intensely as if the force of my stare would make the dark dissolve into light.
Abruptly the old wizard stopped. My heart accelerated, but then I realized he was only pausing to rest.
"I don't walk that much any more," he said, half under his breath. "And these last few days, between flying and walking and running—" He sank to the floor, and I sat down beside him. The walls here were lined with crystals that shimmered like diamonds in the light of the old wizard's staff.
"You didn't bring any food, did you?" he asked after a few minutes of silence. "I should have known. No thought or consideration. One thing you'll have to do, young wizard, is learn more consideration for the other fellow."
I didn't answer. Now that I considered food, I too was hungry. As well as something to eat, we should have brought water; I didn't relish the idea of trying to lick moisture from the cave walls.
"You're sure it came this way?" I asked. Stumbling behind the old wizard, I had not had a chance to try my own magic.
He grunted in assent. His hands still glowed as if with blue fire.
There was a curious intimacy of sitting here with him, the two of us maybe a mile from the cave entrance, perhaps a quarter mile below the surface of the plateau, but surrounded by a silent darkness that put as much distance between us and the rest of the world as though we were on the moon. I wondered how long one would have to be here before vision atrophied and one became as blind as a cave fish. The glow at the end of his staff could have been the only light in the universe.
I took advantage of the rest stop to try again to find out something about his creature. "You know, Master," I began, my voice bringing him back with a start from his own thoughts, "I'm especially impressed by your creature's eyes. It has almost no features, no nose, no mouth, no ears, and yet the eyes seem alive."
"Of course they do," he said but did not elaborate.
I tried a different angle. "You made it partly with herbal magic and the magic of the earth, didn't you. I haven't seen anything like it in any of my books of spells from the school."
He looked at me almost fiercely for a second. I should have known better. Every time I tried to compliment him by saying how much better a certain spell of his was than something I had learned at school, he seemed insulted that I would think so little of his abilities as to compare them with the obviously inferior school magic in the first place.
"And you won't find it there, either," he said, as though trying to impress this on me. "This is my own spell. In part it's based on something my own master taught me two centuries ago, and in part it's the result of research I've been carrying on myself for many years."
My predecessor had had a room for his experiments at the top of the north tower of the royal castle of Yurt, into which I heard he had sometimes disappeared for days. The room had not been used since his retirement. My own chambers opened directly onto the court yard, and I had yet to develop many startling new spells in them.
It wasn't worth telling him that the old ducal wizard had known that a spell something like his existed, and that Elerius had learned—and even taught at the school—a more rudimentary version. Except for the simplest spells, magic is more than a mere series of words of the Hidden Language said in the correct sequence. It is a combination of intellectual understanding and of the instinct that comes only from long experience, of a sequence of words integrated into a format that will vary with every wizard.
"Could you teach me the spell?" I asked timidly.
He gave me a look again, but this time almost kindly. "It's not the kind of spell I could teach you the way you learn a few words of the Hidden Language. Maybe when you're my age you'll be able to learn it properly."
But by that time, he would have been dead and gone for two hundred years. While I temporarily had him in a friendly mood, I had to try to learn more. "Did you find the bones you used in the woods?" I hazarded. "Deer bones, perhaps?"
But I knew they hadn't been the bones of a deer. Deer do not have hands.
I had expected him to keep a stony silence, or at best to tell me it was none of my business. To my surprise he answered immediately. Perhaps he too had the feeling that we with our conversation were the only animate beings left in existence.
"No, they were human right enough, as I'm sure you know. My guess is he might have been a bandit once, wounded and then abandoned by his friends. Or he could have been a hermit, one of those self-proclaimed saintly fellows who wander around without even the sense to find a shrine and settle down. They never get enough to eat, and the slightest illness will carry them off. Whoever he'd been, he'd been dead for quite some time when I found him. Flesh long gone, and the scattered bones bleached white. He might once have had a black beard," he added thoughtfully.
This monster had never been a hermit, I thought. It had been a bandit, a murderer, someone who— "My God," I said involuntarily, which earned me a cold and stony look.
The soul, the spirit of a murderer should be long gone by the time his bones were scattered by the forest animals. If this creature had more than magic motion without life, if it actually partook of the living bandit's murderous spirit, then the old wizard had summoned a demon to bring that bandit back from hell. I inched backwards until my back was pressed into the sharp crystals of the wall.
But then he laughed, and it was not a demonic laugh. "Imagining that I've been practicing black magic, is that it, young whipper-snapper?" he asked in almost friendly tones. "No, I haven't tried to bring back the soul that once went with my bones. As you know perfectly well, I am aware of the dangers of addressing demons." If I hadn't been afraid that he had lost his mind, I would have agreed with him there. "But I have started to wonder if the activities we do in life might lay down a pattern in our bones that will persist physically long after the spirit is gone."
When he spoke rationally like this, in the voice I had grown to know well, I could believe him. Then I remembered the claimaints before the king, accusing each other of having dug up somebody related to their quarrel and hidden the body. If the old wizard had found those bones, then that
might explain why his creature had gone first to the village.
"They probably have to warn you young wizards at the school against trying to get fancy results the quick way, by calling on the powers of darkness," the old wizard continued. "Even you still have the moon and stars on your belt buckle, though I cautioned you about that the first time I met you. But back when I was trained, we all knew that only a very weak wizard, one who can't get the forces of magic to respond to his own human powers, has to fall back on invoking the supernatural."
I was delighted to let myself to be persuaded. He was, I knew, perfectly capable of lying to me, but he would never allow himself to be shamed, by boasting that he had not used the supernatural to assist his own magic if indeed he had, for I could check this at any time. I had in fact probed for the supernatural at his cottage and not found it.
Both of us relaxed, and I felt again the closeness of sitting with him in a tiny circle of magic light, surrounded by stillness so profound that the sound of my own blood was a roar in my ears. I wished I had known him when he was younger—but when he was younger he was Royal Wizard, and with him still in the castle I would never have come to Yurt.
"Your creature," I began again, "always seems to be searching. Do you know what it's searching for? Will it know it when it finds it?"
But this was something he did not seem to want to answer, at least not at once. He snorted briefly but then began a rumbling hum, as though working himself up to speech. My foot had gone to sleep, but I did not dare move it while I waited for what he would say.
"Life," he said at last.
Death, I thought. I could not forget that this creature had killed. Not dead, not alive, in motion but without a human soul, it had taken on a direction of its own.
But might it indeed want life for itself? Like the wood nymph, at some level I didn't even want to consider, was it searching for a human life and soul? Was it going to kill someone in order to get it?
Below the surface of the earth, the air was cold, not growing any colder, but clearly not getting any warmer no matter how long we waited. While we sat, a tiny layer of warmer air formed around my body, which I was loath to break by moving. But on the inside my blood felt like ice.
My predecessor shielded his eyes from the glow on his staff with one hand. "It's dark," he said distantly. "So dark. Nothing to see." My blood, if possible, went even colder.
II
Abruptly he pushed himself to his feet. "We'll just get stiff and even hungrier sitting here," he said grumpily. "Only thing to do is to find my creature and bring it back out."
I jumped up as well, staggered on the foot that had gone to sleep, and hurried after him. He set a determined pace through the tunnel, whose roof seemed now to be sloping almost imperceptibly lower.
This was why, I thought, the monster had kept seizing at anything living and then—sometimes—letting it go. It was searching for the old wizard. The life it wanted was the life of its maker. This was also why it had seemed to have living eyes: the old wizard himself was looking through them.
The tunnel roof abruptly became very low, so that we had to go down on our hands and knees and crawl. I fought an irrational fear that we were going into a narrower and narrower space and would never be able to work free again.
Then the roof rose again, and we were back on our feet. "Watch your step," the old wizard said laconically. Almost directly in front of us a shaft dropped away. As I worked my way around the rough edge, a dislodged pebble bounced into the hole. I listened, but did not hear it hit.
We passed several more shafts which could have swallowed the unwary. Some, I thought as we corkscrewed upwards through narrow passages, must lead down to where we had been a few minutes before.
We continued for what could have been an hour and could have been weeks. Several times the old wizard turned abruptly into a side tunnel, sometimes climbing upwards, sometimes slithering down on loose gravel. At each intersection, I paused long enough to place a magical mark to show which way we had gone. I realized I should have been placing them all along, but there had been so few turnings since we left the great colored chamber that I hoped that would not be a problem. My predecessor either knew the cave intimately or else was indifferent about finding our way out again, but if we were still alive after finding the monster I at least wanted a chance to find our way home.
We had been walking for some time when I realized that part of the rushing in my ears was not just my own blood but the sound of running water. By circuitous routes we were making our way back toward the river we had left behind near the cave entrance—either that, or we were approaching another river.
I realized I had been waiting unconsciously for the dawn, with the thought that we would be able to tell where we were once the light began to grow. But no dawn could be expected here, while earth and stone endured.
The old wizard stopped again, as abruptly as he had started forward. He sat down against the wall, pulled his cloak around him, and closed his eyes. His magic light became slowly dimmer, but the silver ball was close enough to his face that I could see all the deep lines the years had cut in it.
He had aged much more than two years in the time that I had known him. I had been highly impressed at the power of his whirlwind, but I had not before thought of the drain such magic must put on an old wizard.
I too was exhausted, but I didn't even dare think about sleep. If we slept the old wizard could lose contact with his creature, which might then either attack us or burst back out into the valley.
"Master," I said softly, and he opened his eyes. "Master, even if I couldn't understand the spell by which you made your creature in the first place, don't you think you should teach me a little of the spell by which we'll catch it?"
He grunted, opened his eyes reluctantly, but then nodded. "The problem is," he said, "as I already told you, this binding spell only works when it's standing still."
He leaned forward, opening a hand to show that he clutched a few dead leaves in it. It was from the leaves that the blue glow came. First he started to explain it to me in words of the Hidden Language, but then he abruptly started to speak to me directly, mind to mind.
Here communication was much faster, although I had to concentrate much harder to be sure I missed nothing. I held my own thoughts, terrified, back just out of reach of his touch, for I received not just the spells but the twist in his thinking.
The wizards at the school would have said that he was in danger of going renegade, Joachim that he was in danger of losing his soul. Neither seemed quite right. But I knew that his motivations, his assumptions, his purposes had all taken a turn somewhere, a turn I did not want to take, and which left me when he finally broke the mental contact trembling and bathed with sweat in spite of the cold.
"I haven't determined yet if I can modify this spell to catch him while he's moving," the old wizard said. "Now that you know the spell, maybe you can have a try with your fancy school magic."
School magic wouldn't work here. Whatever had been the case with the creatures Nimrod had once helped track, this particular monster had been made specifically to be able to walk through normal binding spells. It wouldn't have been any use even if I had been able to get word to Zahlfast. This creature was made with the combined magic of light and earth, and it would have to be caught the same way.
The old wizard pushed himself to his feet, and his staff glowed brightly again. "This way," he said and started off in the direction from which I could have sworn we had just come. But almost immediately the passage narrowed, which I had not remembered it doing before. It was a good thing I was not trying to lead.
The passage became so tight we had to push and squeeze through. He went first, and immediately after the narrowest place the passage turned, so that he and the light were gone.
For a second I felt completely lost, without direction, surrounded by darkness so profound it seemed to sear my eyeballs, crushed by a hundred million tons of rock. But then I was thr
ough, around the corner, and able again to see his light, bouncing slightly as he walked. I put a quick magic mark on the wall and hurried to catch up.
After the tight squeeze, the passage widened, so that for the moment we could walk abreast. With a little more light, I did not stumble as often, even though I kept falling behind every time we passed a side turning and I paused to mark that we had continued to follow the straight way.
I glanced sideways at him as we continued, though he seemed almost to have forgotten my presence. His face was stern and his expression distant, as though he was still trying to see through his creature's eyes.
Pride, Joachim would have called it. They had warned us against it in school, although most young wizards (including me), as I had come to realize, were still so marginally competent upon graduation that it was unlikely to be a problem. The Hidden Language did tap the human mind into enormous and elemental forces, but as long as one did only simple spells, one could stay as safe as a child wading in the tide pools of the western sea.
The truly idiotic young wizard might let himself be caught in an undertow, but the real danger was for the supremely good wizards. Their mastery of magic took them further and further out into it, until they tried a spell that brought magic breaking over them and their words of the Hidden Language with the force of the waves of a winter gale.
My predecessor had put spells from the old traditional magic together with spells he had created himself in years of study, to make not just something that could move and even look as though it were alive, but something as difficult to dissolve into its component elements as a real living being.
It had no face, other than its eyes, but at least at times he seemed able to see through those eyes. When it raced toward us out in the valley, carrying the duchess, it must have been a strange case of double vision for the old wizard: both seeing himself from the outside and seeing the creature running toward him. No wonder he had not been able to put any sort of binding spell together—even if the creature had slowed down long enough for a spell to work.
C. Dale Brittain_Wizard of Yurt 02 Page 22