C. Dale Brittain_Wizard of Yurt 02

by The Wood Nymph;the Cranky Saint

  He stopped where the passage forked, and for a moment I thought he wanted to rest again. Instead he seemed to hesitate about the direction, for the first time since we had started into the cave. I took the opportunity to make a few more magic marks.

  "This way," he said, almost reluctantly, and not even as though he were addressing me, but then he started off again with renewed energy. I wondered if the monster were deliberately hiding from him.

  There was much here that the old wizard had not yet told me, but I could guess. He had started by putting a true seeing power into his creature, something that I tried unsuccessfully to persuade myself should not seem frightening to someone like me who had invented a far-seeing telephone. The next, however, was even worse.

  I caught up to him and glanced at his face. The magic light, from the silver ball held close in front of him, made his eyes gleam under his eyebrows. His next plan, I thought, was to go beyond seeing through his creature. He now intended to put his entire being into the creature's body.

  A body shaped and held together by powerful magic would not be the rapidly weakening body of someone far past two hundred. Even if built originally from dead bones, it should not crumble while the spells held.

  And here is where my predecessor had swum far out beyond his depth, even beyond sight of land. He had not yet found the spell to transfer his will into the creature's body, I guessed, but in attempting to give it the ability to receive true life, he had given it a generalized, unfocused search for life.

  But it was still a monster without mind or volition of its own, and all it could do was to seize upon living beings And being enormously strong, and incapable of reason, it could carry them, crush them, and, quite unintentionally but quite thoroughly, kill them.

  We squeezed through another narrow spot in the tunnel, and then there could be no doubt that we were approaching the river. No longer a distant sound, the rushing was very near.

  The old wizard stopped and held up his staff, and the silver ball on top burst forth in a new and brighter light. The passageway sloped down steeply before us, and at the bottom of the slope, just before the passage floor disappeared under water, stood the monster.

  It watched us with glittering eyes but did not immediately move. Behind it the river, whose sound reverberated in the narrow tunnel, looked jet black. We had reached a dead end. The passage went no further than the river, which plunged downwards and out of sight. We and the monster would leave here the way we had come or under water.

  III

  My predecessor took a deep breath, held out both hands, and started on the binding spell. I mentally shook off paralyzing fear and added my magic to his. I had never used a spell like this before, and as the words of the Hidden Language drew me into magic's four dimensions I felt the forces I touched tugging at me, as if I might be sucked down into magic just as a false step in this tunnel could drop us into the river.

  But it seemed to be working. I fought free of engulfing magic to return to myself, and found the old wizard staggering but the monster encased in magic and perfectly still.

  I held out a hand to the old wizard. He took it; crumbled leaves were pressed into my palm. He turned his face blankly toward mine, then slowly seemed to recover. His magic light, which had dimmed to almost nothing, brightened again. "Magic is hard work for an old man," he said hoarsely. "I hope they warn you young wizards at the school how much it can drain out of you."

  It was a good thing I had asked him to teach me the binding spell. I could not have done it completely on my own, certainly not in the short fifteen seconds it had probably taken us, and yet I was fairly sure three-quarters of the spell was mine.

  He sat down on the sloping floor and considered his creature. The eyes still moved, but the limbs were motionless. "Let's get it away from the river," he said. "No use having it topple in while we're working our spells."

  Without asking if he needed my help, I used a lifting spell to raise the monster up and move it slowly toward us. I knew he needed my help. Our minds no longer touched, but I felt I could almost read his thoughts. And he was exhausted, not just the exhaustion of a night in the cave, or three days of chasing his creature across Yurt, but of a lifetime of magic.

  I set his monster down prone on the slope below us. "Let's give it more features," he said. "The eyes work well, but it needs ears and nose and mouth. It will need to hear and need to speak, and it might as well be able to smell the spring flowers."

  "Master," I said urgently, "don't you think we should try to dissolve it rather than improve it?"

  "Of course not," he said with energy. "I already told you that. Now be quiet and let me work. I know they never taught you any of these spells."

  They most certainly had not. The old wizard closed his eyes, then began to speak in a very deep voice, that seemed to come from the rocks of the cave wall. The heavy syllables of the Hidden Language rolled and reverberated around us. I tried to follow it all and could not, in part because there were motions of the fingers also mixed in, which sometimes went by too quickly for me to catch, and even when he paused I was fairly sure he was continuing an aspect of the spell in his mind.

  He stopped at last, his own face gray and the lines in it more pronounced than ever. But the face of the monster lying before us had changed. The flesh on the sides of its head moved and shaped itself into ears; the center of the face twitched, grew, became a nose; and the lower portion of the face split and became a mouth.

  As soon as the mouth was formed, it began to roar. The old wizard and I were nearly pushed backwards by the force of that roar. He recovered almost immediately, however, and added a few more loops to the binding spell.

  The roaring stopped, though the eyes remained alive. I started surreptitiously checking the binding spell with magic. It did not seem as strong or as thorough as I would have liked.

  But my predecessor seemed perfectly content with it. "Well, that's that," he said in satisfaction. "You know, young whipper-snapper, I'm glad you came with me. Even with your school training, you'll make a decent wizard someday."

  I was too startled by the open compliment to respond.

  He looked at me sideways. "You're surprised I never said anything of the sort before. Well, I didn't want to let it go to your head. And because I wanted to be sure you shaped up properly, I may once or twice have said something to you that the persnickety might find insulting.

  "But you've not been a bad companion for an old man, in spite of what that school tried to teach you. You show me proper respect, but you've never gotten all crawling and obsequious about it. If you'd come along fifty years earlier, I might even have let you be my apprentice."

  Again I did not answer, but I was quite sure I would not have wanted to learn the spells he was now working. For several moments we sat in silence.

  "Well," he said at last, "now that we've got my creature, I guess we should start thinking about getting back out of this cave. But it's silly to take three bodies out when we've only got two minds between us, isn't it? And doesn't it make sense to leave the weakest body behind?"

  "Master," I asked slowly, desperately trying to delay him until I could find some way to stop him, "what do you mean?"

  "You know perfectly well what I mean," he said in exasperation. "Why else do you think I brought you along, except to help me do it? You can make sure my creature doesn't move, while I—" His voice trailed away on a note of glee.

  My only idea was to carry him bodily back out of the cave—assuming I could find our way. I went so far as to throw the first loops of a normal binding spell onto him, but he broke it easily.

  "None of that," he said sharply, but then, unexpectedly, he smiled. "Worried that if somehow it doesn't work, it will be all your fault, is that it, young wizard?" he went on more kindly. "Well, you can stop feeling so responsible, even if you are Royal Wizard now. I've been planning this for years. This old body of mine wouldn't be good for much more anyway, so this looks like my last chance to give my
spell a try. I've already served five generations of kings of Yurt, so it won't matter if I don't see the new little prince grow up to succeed. If my spell doesn't work, nothing's lost—or nothing that wouldn't be lost soon anyway.

  "But if it works! Then you can say you were there and took part in one of the world's greatest advances in magic, that you helped your old master do something no other wizard had ever done before!"

  This didn't help. He wanted an appreciative audience to whom to demonstrate his power, but I could not simply watch. By being here at all I had become responsible for him. I was madly searching for an argument, anything to say to talk him out of it, when my attention was caught by something else.

  "Master, your creature— I think it's breaking out!"

  "Nonsense. I cast that binding spell myself."

  I had cast most of that binding spell myself, and it was weakening fast. "When you changed its face, that must have interfered with the other spell, and now—"

  I stopped trying to talk, too busy trying to reconstruct my spells instead. For the monster was indeed beginning to move, slowly sitting up, leaning forward, watching us with avid eyes.

  The spell wasn't working. I threw words of the Hidden Language together faster and faster, and then I realized what was wrong. This particular spell, a spell designed for a creature immune to normal binding spells, did not have an effect when that creature was moving.

  I desperately tried to find a way to improvise something better, to bridge that gap in the old wizard's spell, expecting him the whole time to add his magic to mine. But he did not come to my aid.

  Instead the forces of magic were suddenly disturbed by a new and even more powerful spell. I came abruptly back to myself, to hear the narrow stone passage ring to words in the Hidden Language I had never heard before and did not want to hear again.

  The wizard's staff blazed so bright that the passage and the river below were illuminated as though the stone had cracked and mid-day had reached us. The monster staggered backwards, throwing an arm across its eyes. My own eyes squeezed involuntarily shut.

  There was the sound of something hard falling, and I forced them open again. The old wizard's staff had fallen from his hands and rolled past the monster, halfway to the river. The silver ball continued to glow, but far less brightly.

  He was still on his feet, his arms held out, but wavering. The creature was motionless at last, frozen with one hand reached toward the wizard.

  I scrambled to find the spell again, to try to imprison the creature in the seconds before it moved.

  But the old wizard stopped me. "Let it come," he said as though choking. "Let it come to me."

  I hesitated, not knowing if I would do more harm or good by obeying him. Ignoring me, the creature took one step toward the old wizard. For five seconds they stood face to face, their extended hands touching.

  Then the silver ball on the wizard's staff flashed a brilliant white, and his body crumpled to the cave floor beside me.

  The monster bent over it while I sprang forward, horrified and unsure which spirit animated this creature of magic and dead bones. It poked at the tangled beard and cloak for a second, then suddenly seized the body and lifted it high.

  I grabbed at the old wizard, both with my hands and with magic, but I was helpless before the monster's strength. It glared at me in mindless fury, and from its mouth came a wordless roar. It whirled the wizard's limp form over its head, dashed it to the ground, and raced past me, away down the tunnel.

  The silver ball on the wizard's staff still glowed just enough for me to be able to see him. His limbs lay twisted and bent at unnatural angles. I attempted to gather him up and put his head in my lap.

  For a second I thought it was my imagination, but then his eyes moved beneath his eyelids and slowly opened. "I should have thought of that," he whispered, highly irritated, but irritated with himself.

  I tried to silence him with a hand on his lips, but he clearly found it important to talk. "That spell's too powerful to be worked by any but the youngest and strongest wizard. And even then I should have realized I'd need something completely empty into which to transfer. I knew it had no mind of its own, so I thought I should be able to transfer my own mind directly into its body."

  He paused, and the breath rattled in his throat. He had not even tried to move anything except his eyelids and his lips. He went on in a moment, even more softly, so that I had to bend my face close to his to hear him.

  "No mind was there, but there was still the motive force. My own spell. There was no room in him for my spell and my spirit at the same time. If you ever try it, young whipper-snapper, remember to get the motive force out first." He stopped and twitched his jaw as though trying unsuccessfully to cough. "But without that spell it might have dissolved back into old bones, and I'd be no better off than I am now."

  He had been horribly broken, I knew, by being thrown to the cave floor, on top of the destructive final effort to transfer his spirit into the creature. "I'm going to try to lift you, Master," I whispered. "I don't want to pain you any more than I have to, but I've got to get you out of here. So if you—"

  He interrupted me with what might once have been a snort. "I do like you, even if you are a whipper-snapper. But if you're ever going to mature as a wizard you need more sense. Take my ring, but don't worry about the rest. I knew all along I would never leave the cave in this body."

  He fell silent as though this speech had taken the last of his strength. I bent even closer and realized I could no longer hear or feel his breath. The light on the magic staff slowly went black.

  IV

  For a long time I sat motionless in the darkness, continuing to hold him, too full of sorrow to stand up or to cry. I may even have slept a little, for suddenly I jerked to attention as though abruptly waking from a dream.

  The cave was still completely dark, so that there was no difference between opening and closing my eyes, and the only sound was the rushing of the river. I feared for a moment that I had heard the monster coming back. Then, when neither my ears nor my magic could find any nearby movement, I decided that a wakeful corner of my mind had recalled me from unconsciousness when the first edge was gone from exhaustion.

  I still felt almost unbearably weary. I stood up slowly, easing the old wizard's now cold body from my lap. When I turned on the image of the moon and stars on my belt buckle, it gave enough light for me to grope a short way down the slope toward the river and recover his staff. I illuminated the silver ball on the end, which gave a much better light than my buckle, and continued down to the river.

  There I dunked my entire head under water and opened my mouth for a long drink. I came back up colder than ever and with my hair and beard streaming, but the water had certainly taken the last sleep from my eyes. The drink helped too, especially since I had managed to take it without swallowing a cave fish. For the first time I began to think about getting back out of the cave.

  In spite of what he had said, I couldn't leave him lying here. There was only one thing to do. I put together a lifting spell and raised him slowly. The necessary magic distracted my attention from the staff, so that the light of the silver ball began to dim, but in a minute I worked out a compromise. If I supported him partly with my shoulder as well as with magic, I could keep the staff bright enough that I could find the way.

  I started slowly up and away from the river. At least for the moment, the passage was wide enough that the wizard's body did not scrape against the sides. Because worrying that the monster was coming back would only take more energy, I decided not to think about it at all. But I could proceed only at what felt like a snail's pace, having to concentrate on my magic, and constantly distracted, in spite of my resolve, by seeing the confrontation between monster and wizard repeated in my mind.

  I wondered vaguely what time it was in the outside world. It must be at least the morning after we had entered the cave, maybe the afternoon, maybe even night again.

  At the first
intersection where the passage forked, I propped the wizard's body against the wall for a moment while I said the quick words of the Hidden Language to light up my magic marks. They glowed an encouraging blue, showing me that the way back lay in the direction from which I was already sure we had come. Feeling somewhat heartened, I reapplied the lifting spell and kept walking.

  But soon I had to stop again, to work the spell to keep sleep at bay. My muscles found new strength as I lifted the wizard's body again, even though I knew my head would soon start aching. And the spell against headache would allow exhaustion again to claim me.

  As I walked I seemed to see again and again the old wizard reaching out to touch his creature's hand, and then slumping to the floor. I tried to decide what I should have done differently. Usually I had no trouble, after the fact, in finding my mistakes, but they did not seem as obvious this time. Certainly, I thought, there was something I could have done, even if I had to bind him against his will and carry him away by force.

  But even that would not have worked. I might be Royal Wizard of Yurt, but my predecessor's magic had been substantially stronger than mine, right until the very end.

  This thought did not make me feel any less responsible. I tasted salt and realized I had been weeping as I walked, large silent tears flowing unchecked and almost unnoticed down my cheeks.

  Suddenly I stopped, lowered the old wizard's stiffening body as carefully as if I might still hurt him, and increased the intensity of the light. I did not recall having passed any of my magic marks recently.

  There was nothing about the stone walls and rough floor of the passage to make it either familiar or unfamiliar. I tried the words of the Hidden Language to show my marks, but saw nothing in either direction, in the short distance before the passage curved out of sight. Could I with my attention distracted have walked right by a turning?