The Wood Nymph & the Cranky Saint

by C. Dale Brittain

  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 through, 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 rea
lize, 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.

  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 earli
er, 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!”