“Did you find all the herbs you needed?” I asked.
“Herbs?” he said, as though coming back from a great distance and not sure what I could mean. Then he looked down at his hands, which were clenched around a wad of drooping plants. “Oh, yes.” He met my eyes briefly and turned away. “We can return now.”
We walked back up the valley without speaking. The fog was growing thicker, so that we would have lost our way if we were not following a clearly marked road. Even the river beside us seemed to be running much more quietly. My predecessor, I thought with a sideways glance at him, might already have lost his way.
When the shape of the trees and clearings was again familiar enough that I knew we were close to the Holy Grove, I tried once more. “Maybe I can help you, Master,” I began tentatively. “You know you’ve taught me a lot of herbal magic. I could help you put the spells together if I knew what you were trying to do. What’s driving your creature now, and how can we slow it down?”
“I already told you,” he said, but without his normal irritated tone, “that it’s the valley itself that’s made it move so fast. As to what’s driving it, I thought even you could recognize magic.”
I kept my temper. “But what kind of magic? What purpose is the creature serving? After all, here in the valley it seized two people within two minutes. Did you make it in order to capture people?”
He looked at me fully for the first time since I had found him on the river bank. “No, that wasn’t my purpose. But it does indeed like to put its hands on people.” He gave a malevolent chuckle and went on more vigorously. “It certainly wanted to lay hold of Prince Dominic. You should have seen them all trying to get away! But of course, outside this valley, it couldn’t run as fast as a horse.”
We had stopped walking and were facing each other. I had always assumed he was taller than I and was surprised when I had to incline my head to meet his eyes. “And has it tried to seize you?”
“Yes. That always was a problem. That’s why, young whipper-snapper, I needed to give it my full attention the time your young wizard friend tried to let it out.”
His magic must have gone even more badly out of control than I had thought if something he had created turned on him. “The great horned rabbits,” I said, “dissolved when I put a binding spell on them, or for that matter when they were shot. Is there any similar way we can dissolve your new creature?”
“You and that magic-worker of the duchess’s can play children’s games with rabbits if you like. This is different.”
As I talked to the old wizard, he seemed almost the same as I had always known him—except marginally more civil. The aging, the loss of control over his own magic, I thought, were temporary, passing events. He would be himself for many more years to come, as long as we were able to catch his monster successfully. I wished I believed it.
“I know that a simple binding spell won’t dissolve your creature,” I tried again, “because I already attempted one without success, but are there other spells that might work?”
“I’m not at all ready to ‘dissolve’ it, as you say. And don’t get any bright ideas about trying to transform it into a fuzzy squirrel either; transformations spells won’t work on a magical creature, as I hope you know. This is the best thing I’ve ever made, far better than those illusions that used to impress the royal court over dessert. I’ve got a spell that will hold it, all right, but it has to be standing still.”
The sweat began again running down my back in spite of the cold mist around us. “Is there something from which you made this creature which might help account for its behavior?”
He turned abruptly. “I always did wonder about those bones.” And he started up the valley again without giving me a chance to answer.
There was no mist around the Holy Grove, but I did not at first see anyone. But then I spotted the youngest of the priests, talking to an apprentice hermit. The other two priests, the old hermit, and Joachim were in prayer at the shrine. I didn’t disturb them but went out of the grove again, following the river upstream. The water seemed much lower than I remembered. I decided to see how Evrard was coming with his lifting spells.
Even at this end of the valley, where the mist did not yet reach, it was rapidly growing dark. The old wizard was outlined against the white of the valley wall, crouching over his herbs. These last two hours, the steep walls had begun to seem the walls of a prison.
I walked toward the mouth of the cave, where I could still see Evrard’s flaming red hair in spite of the shadows.
But then there was a deep and hollow boom, a sharp grating of rock on rock, and a giant burst of water shot out from the cliff, propelling him in front of it.
“Evrard!” I shouted. He managed to find the magic to break his fall and landed on the soft ground near me. “What happened?” I cried. “Are you all right?”
“My plan didn’t work,” he said, dripping wet and in despair. I quickly determined he was more mortified than hurt. “But it seemed like such a good idea!”
“What didn’t work?” I demanded.
“Blocking the cave mouth. It might have kept the monster in, but it also kept the river in. But now I find the river was stronger than my rocks!” He shook his head, sending drops of water flying, and started squeezing water from his clothes. “And I’d just gotten dry from falling in earlier.”
That explained, then, why the river had seemed so low and quiet the last hour. Obviously if Evrard tried to fill the entire cave mouth with boulders, the force of the river would push them aside. Even a former city boy like me knew something about the power of running water. I was about to try to explain it to him when I saw my predecessor approaching.
He had pulled up his hood so I could not see his face in the shadows, but his voice emerged with its old strength. “Trying to make a noise loud enough to frighten my creature, is that your plan?”
“Well, no, Master,” Evrard began. “I didn’t think it had ears anyway. And you see—”
The old wizard waved his explanations aside. “I have the right herbs now, and the right spell.” I noticed then his fingers glowing with a pale blue light, as though the spell itself was held in his hands. “No more time for nonsense. We’re going in after it.”
Evrard, who had ducked behind me, pushed himself forward again in spite of obvious reluctance. “We’re ready,” he said, with a calmness I admired.
“Not you, young whipper-snapper.” I could sense Evrard wavering between indignation and relief. “This is a job for the Royal Wizard and me. That is,” the old wizard added after a long pause, with unexpected gentleness, “we both think we need someone to stay at the entrance of the cave, to make sure my creature doesn’t get past us and get out, and we think you’d be best for the job.”
“Of course,” said Evrard, still calmly.
“Find Joachim,” I said. “He and the other priests are all at the shrine. Tell him we’ve gone.”
Evrard patted me surreptitiously on the shoulder as I followed my predecessor toward the dark cave mouth. It felt as though he were saying good-bye.
PART SEVEN - THE CAVE
I
We had to pick our way around several small boulders that now littered the bank, and the limestone at the cave entrance was chipped, but the river flowed as swiftly as before. The evening light was at the point at which one imagines one can still see, but when the old wizard illuminated the silver ball at the end of his staff with magic, it showed how poorly I had been able to see a moment before. His face emerged from the shadow of his hood, looking determined and quite rational.
But his light also made all our surroundings darkly black, though seconds earlier they had only been dim. And where we were going it was black all the time.
“Don’t slip,” said the old wizard. He bent over and led the way along the narrow ledge that paralleled the river. I scrambled through the cave entrance after him, a hand on the rough wall to keep my balance, trying to find a footing in the crazy patchwork
of light and shadows as the soft glow from his staff was repeatedly blocked by his body.
Now that we were in the cave, there could be no return until we found the monster. The prison of the valley seemed wide open in comparison with the pressing walls around me now.
But our cautious, bent advance only continued for two dozen yards. Abruptly the crouching figure before me straightened. “This is as far as the ducal wizard and I got before,” he said. I reached cautiously over my head, felt only emptiness, and stood up.
The magic light showed we were in a broad chamber, that would have seemed tall if it had not been so very wide. Near at hand, I could see several tunnels leading away, but farther from us the gravel floor and the smooth ceiling both disappeared into darkness.
After a quick magic probe indicated that the monster was not nearby, I looked at the walls. As Nimrod had said, they were spectacular. The slow dripping of water over the eons had left behind what looked like waterfalls frozen into stone, colored with reds and blues that reflected and shot back the magic light. If the old wizard had told me the walls were covered with precious stones, I would have believed him.
“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.
The Wood Nymph & the Cranky Saint Page 22