The Wizard at Mecq

by Rick Shelley

  That relieved one of his worries... in part.

  Silvas let his chants die away and took stock of his body. He had no idea how much time had passed, but there had been improvement. He rolled over and then pushed himself up slowly, resting on his elbows before getting up to his knees and finally, most carefully, to his feet. There was still pain. It would take time and sleep to erase that and to finish the work of repair. He looked down at his body. He was naked. His robe was gone, tattered even more badly than his body. The belt with his dagger was on the floor, within the center space of the pentagram with him. Silvas leaned over with difficulty, picked up the belt, and strapped it around his waist. The lines of his many cuts were no longer bright red, but rather a rapidly fading pink, except where dried blood had crusted over the skin.

  A single word of command in the old language extinguished the magical glow in the room. Silvas walked out of the pentagram to Carillia. She hugged him gingerly, as if she feared that he might still be damaged. Velvet and Satin came to rub against him. They purred loudly until Silvas reached down to stroke their necks. That seemed to reassure them. They went over by the wall and sat down.

  Koshka came to the door and hesitated there. "A new robe for you, my lord," he said in his gurgling voice. He held up the garment and carried it in to Silvas.

  "Thank you, Koshka," Silvas said. "How has the rest of the Glade fared this night?"

  "A few slates were dislodged from the roof of this tower, my lord," the servant said. "Three men on the walls were bruised by hail before they could take shelter. No one has died. No one is likely to."

  Silvas nodded. "There is much to be thankful for, then."

  "Yes, lord." Koshka waited until Silvas put on the robe before he scurried from the room.

  Silvas slipped the robe on over his knife belt. He took Carillia's arm and led her toward the door. "Thank you for your help, my love," he said. "There was too much here tonight for simply an opening gambit."

  "Do you know who is behind it?" Carillia asked.

  Silvas shook his head slowly. He ached badly enough to avoid sudden motions. "What I do know is that Mecq is shaping up to be a major challenge."

  "A major challenge or the major challenge?" Carillia asked. There wasn't room enough for them to walk side by side down the first circular stairway. She let go of Silvas's arm and followed him to the next level.

  "By the time I know that, we'll be far deeper in the web than we are now." Silvas waited in the library for her.

  "You were badly hurt, my heart," Carillia said, her worry plain in her voice. "I've never seen you have such trouble with demons."

  Silvas couldn't deny that, yet he didn't want to voice a confirmation. "Tonight was unique, my love." He certainly hoped that it wouldn't be repeated.

  When they reached their living quarters, Silvas saw servants carrying hot water from the hoist to the bath.

  "I knew you would want it, my heart," Carillia said. "It will help you recover."

  "It will," he agreed. He looked at her. He had not mentioned his strange interlude to her. At first there had been simply too many other things on his mind, like the pain. But now his reticence continued, and he needed a moment to think about that.

  My love, I've trusted you with my life so many times I can't begin to count them, but I think I must keep my own counsel on this a while longer. Until I learn whatever lesson it was meant to teach me.

  "I need to check on Bay and Bosc before my bath" was what he said. The thought of making the long walk down to the stable and back was daunting. His entire body ached, even if the pain was less than before. But he could not put off this trip.

  "A glass of wine first?" Carillia suggested, and even before Silvas could agree, Koshka was coming in with a decanter and goblets.

  "You think of everything, my love," Silvas said, managing a smile. He was glad to have the wine to fortify him for the trek.

  —|—

  "I saw part of your struggle while I fought my own," Silvas told Bay. The horse showed no aftereffects, but Bosc had a rag wrapped around his left hand to stanch the flow of blood. Silvas went right to the groom and spoke the spells that would speed healing.

  "Vile gnomes," Bay said tightly.

  "Perhaps, but with considerable power behind them," Silvas said. "They did not act alone. They couldn't have." Bay nodded emphatically. Silvas watched Bosc's hand as it started to heal, peeling the rag away gently. There was only a single cut, but it was deep and ragged. The spells Silvas spoke started the mending with almost visible speed.

  "It's been a long while since the mere fact of our arrival sparked such activity," Bay said. He was also watching Bosc's hand. "A rider gallops away as hard as his horse will run, and then we suffer this attack the first night."

  "Are you suggesting that the two events are connected?" Silvas asked, turning his attention to the horse.

  "I make no suggestions one way or the other," Bay replied. "I merely flesh out an observation."

  "My own thought is that the rider was sent by Brother Paul to get instructions from his bishop in St. Ives." Silvas said.

  "As likely as the other," Bay admitted easily. "You may have to ask the vicar directly. Whatever he says, you should be able to discern the truth of the matter."

  "Perhaps," Silvas said.

  Bay snorted. "But you won't. It's not devious enough for you."

  "Get some sleep, Bosc," Silvas said. "That'll finish the mending for you. A day or two and even the stiffness will leave." When Bosc nodded, Silvas looked to Bay again. "Good advice for us all."

  —|—

  Silvas woke as the first light of dawn entered the bedroom. He had slept soundly once he got back to bed, though there was little enough of the night remaining. And he woke easily, without any real pain. Carillia was still asleep, breathing softly next to him. Likely she would continue to sleep for several hours unless there was more trouble. Silvas rolled over onto his back, away from Carillia. As soon as he moved, he heard the cats stir at the sides of the bed.

  Like to be a busy day, Silvas thought. He wondered if Mecq had been subject to the raid in the night. If so, I'll have villagers at the gate any minute.

  The Glade was mostly quiet. Silvas reached out with his mind. The wizard and his castle were linked closely at all times. Silvas listened to the sounds of the Seven Towers in its normal morning routines, sounds that would have been inaudible even to the cats. There were no harsh notes, nothing to indicate that there was anything unusual happening.

  The image of the stranger in the forest clearing forced itself to the front of Silvas's mind. The figure was still blurred. Silvas had the impression that the old man was somehow mocking him, that this image was current, not just a memory of the nocturnal encounter.

  I have to find out about him and his story, Silvas told himself. Quickly. The key to Mecq must be in that garbled tale.

  He got out of bed carefully, more to avoid waking Carillia than from fear of reawakening his pains. He dressed quickly. Motion brought only the faintest reminders of the night's agony—a slight ache, a little stiffness. Those would soon work themselves out. And the marks of the many cuts were nearly gone. Only by focusing closely could he make out the lines.

  I need to find that key quickly, Silvas thought as he left the bedroom. It may mark the difference between success and destruction. In all his years as a wizard, he had never experienced the kind of... interruption that he had been pulled into after his fight with the demons. He had never experienced a place where his power had no reality.

  Velvet and Satin started to follow Silvas from the room. He stopped and pointed back at the bed, and they retreated to their spots at either side of it, content to lie down again and relax.

  Silvas went up to his library.

  There were thousands of scrolls and bound books in the room, one of the largest collections in the Christian world, so many manuscripts that Silvas had no real idea how many there were. Auroreus had assembled the initial collection, and
Silvas had often added to it. There were works from everywhere that men wrote their languages down, some in the original tongue, some in translation. Some were even in the ancient language of magic, the tongue of the wizard's most powerful spells. There was no particular order to the collection. "As long as I can find what I want when I want it, what does it matter how they're sorted?" That had been Auroreus's line, and Silvas had never found it necessary to abandon. He stood in the center of the library now and surveyed the collection of books and scrolls piled and pigeon-holed on shelves and in racks of small slots. Silvas knew where he wanted to start, with a scroll that Auroreus had written out for him when he had first come to the Seven Towers, ignorant of virtually everything.

  "Your mind's a blank slate," Auroreus had told him the day he brought Silvas into the Glade. Silvas had understood even then that the old wizard didn't mean that as an insult. "We have to be careful to fill it with the right information." During the early years Silvas had often wondered at the information that Auroreus thought right for him to study—stories of famous people, reports of travelers to every part of the world, and (more than anything else) language studies. "The power of language is the power of command," Auroreus had often said.

  After a moment's thought Silvas went directly to the scroll he wanted. Auroreus had written this one, a primer on the gods, himself. It had posed a lot of problems for the almost seven-year-old Silvas. Auroreus had written in a polyglot mixture of seven languages, including the ancient tongue of magic. The languages were mixed from sentence to sentence, sometimes even within the same sentence. Silvas had struggled with the manuscript for months before it even started to make sense to him.

  But now it was just what he wanted.

  Silvas scarcely noticed any longer when his reading jumped from one language to another. The tortures of learning had made him quite adaptable. The same facility carried over to spoken languages. When he talked with people, he replied in whatever language he heard, quickly sliding even into new dialects. To date, he had never encountered anyone who spoke a language he could not follow, though some local variations could be difficult at first.

  He pulled the scroll from its niche and went to the window seat to read. Auroreus had taken some pains in lettering the title DEI ET DEAE, but beyond that the script was in the scratchy, barely legible handwriting that Silvas remembered so well—difficult to make out in any language.

  Below the title GODS AND GODDESSES, the manuscript started, "The gods are real." Reading on, Silvas could almost hear Auroreus's voice reading it to him.

  "You forget that to your deadly peril. Our gods and goddesses do not overlook omission kindly, and those of us who follow the ancient path of the trimagister come often under their gaze."

  Silvas read on into the scroll, sometimes scanning quickly, sometimes considering each word carefully, finding the familiar lines that had called him to this scroll.

  "There are twenty gods and goddesses who look after our worlds in these times. They are all true brothers and sisters, children of the creators..."

  "Do not make the error of confusing the gods with the religions of our world. Religions are made by men exclusively. From time to time, one of the gods may choose to favor a particular religion with his patronage..."

  "Adepts of the Greater Mysteries of the trimagister must look beyond the dogma and rituals of any church..."

  "The gods have fought, from time to time, over the right to be worshiped in certain ways. The Church of Rome has known at least two different gods. The Unseen Lord who is our patron and benefactor became the god of the Roman Church at the time of Constantine the Great. He was so moved by the ardor and faith of Constantine that he went to war against his brother for the worship of Constantine and all of the new faithful that the Imperator brought to the church."

  A lot of the manuscript came back to Silvas as he read. Lines jogged his memory about other lines and about the lectures that had accompanied them. This scroll was only a primer, an outline. Auroreus had often talked to Silvas about the gods, sometimes taking hours to explain a single sentence from DEI ET DEAE.

  "When the gods do war among themselves," Auroreus had told Silvas late one evening, "it can be a dire time for any mortals who chance to get in their way. I have lived through two major wars of this kind, the one over the Christian Church in the time of Constantine, and then over the new church that Mahomet started. Men make churches as they will, designing new ways to worship the power that they sense but can never really know. A dreamer has a vision. A king feels the need to demonstrate divine support for his claims. Presto, a new religion is born. Perhaps most come and go without any of the gods taking notice, but sometimes, a new religion, or a reform in an old one, will look so pleasing to one of the gods that he will adopt it as his own. His power will then flow through the rituals of that religion, making it a real manifestation, giving it true power. Eventually his influence will modify the religion, bringing it closer to his own nature. If only one god is interested in a church, there is no conflict, but if more than one god desires to be the object of a particular religion's worship, or if a god covets a church that a brother or sister already claims, then their feuding can spill over from the land of the gods to our own world."

  "When the gods do war among themselves." While Silvas read on through the scroll, his mind kept returning to that one line from one of the hundreds of lectures Auroreus had given him. Silvas kept turning the phrase over in his mind. He finished DEI ET DEAE and tied the leather thong back around the scroll. But he didn't get up. He stared out the window, focused completely on that one line.

  "That is part of the key," he mumbled finally. But what more is there to it? Which gods are going to war? And why? If it was going to touch Silvas, it had to involve his Unseen Lord, the god of the White Brotherhood and of orthodox Christians everywhere.

  "Does someone want to unseat him?" That was the most logical guess, but guesses would not be good enough. Silvas got up from the window seat and started to return the scroll to its place across the room. Halfway there, another question stopped the wizard in his tracks.

  "Why should I be a target at all?" How can I make any difference to the outcome? How can I be that important? It didn't make sense. Wizard though he was, he was still merely a mortal man. His power did not extend to the gods. He could not affect the outcome of their battles.

  "Or can I?" He felt a sudden chill, as if the summer morning had turned to a winter night. He looked back over his shoulder, toward the window. The sun was still shining brightly on the Seven Towers.

  Silvas shook his head and resumed his walk to the rack where his scroll belonged. Then he heard a thin, reedy voice calling him.

  "Lord Wizard!"

  The voice came from a distance. Silvas knew at once that it did not belong to any of the residents of the Glade. That meant it was coming from Mecq. He tossed the scroll to a table and hurried up to the turret that let him look out over the village. An old woman was standing near the pillar of smoke that would be all she could see of the Glade.

  "I'll be there in a moment," Silvas shouted out one of the narrow windows.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  There were no magical shortcuts from one part of the Glade to another. Silvas needed several minutes to get down to the gate. His lengthy strides across the great hall and courtyard helped banish the last of his stiffness and take the ache from the repairs to his flesh. He didn't slow down until he stepped onto the drawbridge. Then he took a deep breath and walked slowly through the curtain of smoke onto Mecq's village green.

  "You wanted me?" he asked gently. He came out of the smoke barely two paces from the old woman. She put both hands to her chest and turned quickly to face him.

  "I'm sorry," Silvas said. "I didn't mean to frighten you."

  "I be called Old Maga, and there not be much fer me ter be frighted of," the woman said. She was short and thin, with the wiry look of someone who had spent a lifetime at hard physical labor. Her hair was gathered be
hind her head, almost solidly gray. Her face was darkly tanned and deeply wrinkled. She wore a colorless dress that showed many repairs.

  "What can I do for you, Maga?" Silvas asked.

  "It's my sister's man. He needs curin'."

  "Come inside and tell me about it," Silvas said. That was a whim. He normally wouldn't have asked a villager into the Glade so readily—not from snobbery but to spare them the shock. Silvas wasn't certain why he thought he should make an exception now, but he gestured toward the smoke. Old Maga looked from him to the barrier.

  "In there?" Her voice climbed a little in pitch.

  "The smoke can't harm you. My home is through there." When Maga continued to hold back, Silvas added, "Sir Eustace's steward was there and came back out yesterday." Silvas assumed that Maga would know about Fitz-Matthew's coming and going, even if she hadn't seen him herself. Others had seen, and they had undoubtedly talked. But Silvas doubted that any word about what Henry Fitz-Matthew had seen within the smoke would have reached the village yet... though it would in time.

  "Take my arm and I'll guide you through." Silvas offered Maga his arm. She was still hesitant. Finally she shrugged and gripped his arm just above the crook of his elbow.

  "I be too old to have aught to fear." But her grip on Silvas tightened considerably when they entered the smoke, and when they emerged inside the Glade, Maga stopped abruptly and pulled her hand free.

  "Holy Mother of God." She crossed herself quickly and stepped to the side, away from Silvas.

  "I'm not the Devil, Maga, or one of his workers," Silvas said. He extended his hand. Old Maga looked at it and backed away another step. Silvas sighed. Perhaps his whim had been a mistake.

  "I told everyone yesterday that I would take no payment for my help," he reminded her, keeping his voice patient and friendly. "I'm not after anyone's money, honor, or soul." He waited a moment, but Maga didn't speak or come back toward him. At least she didn't move any farther away.