IV
Dusk rose from the narrow streets of the city, punctuated only at intervals by the yellow gleam of lanterns, even while the sky above us was still pale blue. Laden with two princes, a wizard, a construction foreman, and a transformed monster, the air cart rose gracefully, spun around twice, and headed north. Though it flew no faster than I normally could, in my present exhausted state I could never have made the trip unaided, especially carrying a monstrous frog.
As the city dropped away behind us I leaned on the edge of the cart, looking back as intently as though I might be able to see Theodora from this height. I had not seen her for forty-eight hours.
If she had not been kidnapped, she must be hiding from me deliberately. But how would she have been so warm one day and flee me the next? Her reserve, the private inner thoughts to which I had only sometimes felt admitted, now took on an ominous interpretation. She was, after all, a witch. Had she never loved me at all, only set out to distract me while her partner in evil, the hidden wizard, brought his gorgos to Caelrhon?
I gritted my teeth until my jaw ached. I could have sworn she loved me as much as I loved her.
“So you’ve got the gorgos in the box,” said the foreman, leaning next to me, his long fingers folded over each other. I forced myself to stop thinking of Theodora. Cool air streamed by our faces. Everyone was avoiding the black box; Lucas especially made sure to stay on the far side of the air cart from it.
“That’s right, and I hope I can keep it there until we reach somewhere I dare let it free. You know, I’m afraid I don’t even know your name.”
“Call me Vor,” he said with a quick, sideways look that made me wonder if this really was his name.
“All right, Vor, maybe you can give me some suggestions what to do with an indestructible gorgos.”
“First you have to decide,” he said slowly, “whether you particularly want it dead.”
I hadn’t thought about it in those terms. “I would have killed it if I could,” I said, “to keep it from attacking the people in the city, but I don’t think I can. That’s why I’m taking it north. If I let it go, do you think it will return to its gorgos shape and come back to Caelrhon again?”
“But you don’t want to kill it out of revenge for nearly killing you?”
I looked at the motionless black box, a more solid piece of darkness inside the dark air cart, and wondered hopefully if the monster had suffocated. But Vor seemed to be asking something more. “No, I’m not interested in revenge.”
Vor nodded as though I had clarified an important point. Below us dim hills and valleys streamed by. The air cart was high enough that it only had to rise for the steepest hills. Tiny figures of men and horses were coming in from the fields to villages where firelight welcomed them. No one looked up to see us.
“You can’t actually kill a gorgos,” Vor said at last. “Or, if you do, they’re even worse dead than they are alive. I knew a man once who decided to kill one out of vengeance. Once it was dead it took possession of him, mind and body.”
He fell silent then. I decided that I was happier not knowing the details and started putting together the spell to slow the flight of the air cart. “We must have come over fifty miles already,” I told the two princes. “We’ll camp in a field tonight and fly on in the morning.”
It took us over a week of flying to reach the borderlands of the land of magic. The air cart did much of the flying on its own, needing only a steady low-level attention from my own spells to keep its flight smooth and on course. At first much of the land we crossed was rolling hills and farmland, similar to that of the kingdoms of Yurt and Caelrhon, but as we went north the season seemed to retreat, so that we started seeing again flowers that had already passed in the fields outside the cathedral city. Then we began to cross dense forests, where only occasionally we saw a track that might have been made by humans, and rocky, barren stretches where there were very few farms.
For most of the trip the weather was fair, and we flew during the day with the wind in our hair and slept under the sky at night. The stars were much brighter in the thin northern air, away from the smoke of the city, than I ever remembered seeing them. But one day it rained steadily for nearly twenty-four hours. I was able to rig a spell to keep us dry while the air cart flew on, but that night we had to overturn the cart in a partially successful attempt to keep the rain off, and all of us slept uneasily.
Being cramped in a small space all day was especially hard for Paul. Every evening, as soon as the cart touched down, he was off running, sometimes for as much as an hour. Prince Lucas, gathering fuel the first night for a fire to try to stew up some of the dried beef he had brought along, grumbled that the other prince was deliberately shirking his responsibilities, until Paul came back with fresh bread and lettuce bought from a farm house over the hill.
Vor exercised by walking on his hands, doing bends and twists of which I would not have thought the human body capable. Prince Lucas practiced swordplay against his shadow. I, still recovering from my wounds, mostly worried about the gorgos frog.
Paul and I sat by a small fire one evening, watching the sun set behind the graceful branches of an oak. He was back from his run but the others were still gone. The heir to the throne of Yurt pulled off his boots, stretched, scratched, and flopped back cheerfully on the grass. I found myself imagining that if I had met the queen on one of her trips to the City, back when I was a wizardry student and she still only a castellan’s daughter, he might have been our son.
A stream gurgled nearby, and the grass on which we sat was intertwined with wild flowers. “You know,” I said to Paul, “we’ll probably never see this spot again.”
This didn’t seem to bother him. “There are a lot of nice places,” he said lazily, “many of them in Yurt. But traveling like this has made me want to travel more, to see all the beautiful spots in the world. Mother makes a good regent; maybe I’ll just let her rule Yurt a few years more.”
I did not like at all the idea of him taking off across the western kingdoms, but I let this pass in silence, hoping he would forget it as quickly as he had forgotten wanting to become a wizard.
“This is silly,” Paul added after a moment, abruptly serious and looking off into the distance. “I’m going to be king very soon. I know I don’t have the wisdom Father had, and I don’t think I have the courage of Uncle Dominic, who loved Yurt more than his own life. He might even in other circumstances have become king instead of me. What do you think, Wizard, do I want to travel only because I’m afraid I won’t be an adequate king? But then you’ve probably never known what it’s like to feel unworthy of your position.”
There was no possible way to answer this. I watched the flickering of our fire for a minute, feeling the evening air grow chill around us. “We’ve come so far and so fast,” I said, “over land that none of us know. Sometimes I wonder if we’ll ever find our way home again.”
But this didn’t bother Paul. “Of course we will,” he said, cheerful again, lying on his back, supporting his hips on his hands and kicking long legs into the darkening sky. “If we get lost, all we have to do is go west until we reach the ocean, and then follow the coast south to the great City. It’s easy enough to get home to Yurt from there.”
He was right, of course, but as the days went by I kept feeling that I was astray in a strange world, with no landmarks and no way to find my way back to the world I had always taken for granted.
After a week the land below us began to rise sharply and all signs of human habitation disappeared. Soon we were crossing a jumble of sharp peaks, topped with snow.
“Wild magic starts not long after the mountains,” Vor told me, looking down at the air cart’s shadow far below us, darting wildly up and down the steep mountain sides.
“So you came south through the mountains?”
He nodded. “Years ago. That’s why I want to go back now.” He paused, then pointed down. “See that river?” A thin, dark line cut a twisting sl
ice through the mountains. “There’s a track that follows it all the way through.”
At least one person, then, had known where we were going. The laconic suggestions he had made on our route in the previous days now made more sense. A cloud came toward us, looking, as always, incredibly soft, as though one could sink with delight into its feathery blue shadows. As always, when the air cart plunged into it the cloud proved to be nothing more than fog, blocking out the sun and putting drops of water on our hair and clothes.
“I know a good place to get rid of the gorgos,” Vor said suddenly. But he turned away from me as he spoke, discouraging questions. I wondered uneasily if he had a plan of his own for the monster.
If only, I thought, I were more confident of my magic. So far every spell I had needed on the trip had worked. But I had the disconcerting feeling that I had, before the bishop’s funeral, known more magic, and that not only the spells themselves but the knowledge that the spells existed had been wiped from my mind.
The teachers at the school had warned us against summoning as the greatest sin a wizard could commit, because it violated the integrity of the human mind. But, I thought now to myself, reckless summoning, practiced by someone remembering something he had learned twenty years earlier, might also destroy the person who practiced that spell. In summoning the monster, I might somehow have intermingled a part of its mind with my own.
“Did you ever decide where the fairy lights came from on the new cathedral tower?” asked Vor. “They weren’t caused by the gorgos, were they?”
“No,” I said slowly, “nor by one of your Little People. They were caused by a witch.”
He nodded as though he had expected as much. “Down in your part of the world, if it’s not a wizard with a heavy dose of formal magic it’s probably a witch.”
“Do you know anything about the witch?” I asked at once, trying to keep the eagerness out of my voice. But he shook his head.
I looked down at the trackless snowfields below and wondered if I would ever see Theodora again.
V
A steep mountain peak rose before us, far higher than any other we had passed. Its snowy top, thrusting into the sky, glinted like gold in the early morning sun. As we flew toward it I heard, first distantly and then increasingly clearly, a call coming from it, and realized it was calling me.
I gave the magical commands to turn the air cart. Instead of circling the peak we started straight up its side.
“There’s a wizard on the top of the mountain,” I told the princes, who looked toward me in surprise. “I’m going to talk to him.” Suddenly I did not feel as hopelessly lost as I had all week.
The air off the snow fields became rapidly colder, and we pulled blankets around our shoulders. I took mouthfuls of the thin, frigid air, my heart beating rapidly, either from the altitude or from excitement. For the first time since transforming the gorgos, I began to think I might someday be able to practice real magic again.
A sharp wind scraped ice from the peak into a swirling cloud that half obscured it. At the very top of the mountain, just under the final, jagged knife-blade of ice, was a small level area where all the snow had been swept away. Here was a bright blue house.
I set the air cart down by the door, vaulted out, and tied it to a ring in the doorpost. Leaning into the wind, I lifted a fist, but the door opened before I had a chance to knock.
A wizard put his head out. I recognized him at once. He had graduated from the wizards’ school three years before I had, then stayed on as a teaching assistant. I had not seen him in nearly twenty years, but he still looked exactly the same.
“Well!” he said with pleasure. “If it isn’t good old ‘Frogs’!”
I stiffened. I had had no idea the other students at school had given me a nickname derived from my disastrous experiences in that transformations practical. But several comments I had half-overheard at the time now became horribly and mortifyingly clear.
“My name,” I started to say in cold fury, “is Daimbert!” But I managed to stop myself. After all, I was delighted to see him.
I turned back toward the cart where the other three were hesitating. “Come on!” I called. “Prince Lucas, Prince Paul, Vor, I’d like you to meet an old friend of mine from the wizards’ school.”
They climbed out, and the princes gave the formal half-bow, while Vor dipped his head. “He graduated second in his class,” I continued cheerfully, having an inspiration how to get my own back, “and would easily have graduated first most years. We used to call him ‘Book-Leech’-behind his back, of course.”
Good old Book-Leech froze for a second, then smiled. “Welcome, welcome, come in! It’s much too cold to leave this door open.” As we filed past him, he said modestly, “Well, I don’t know if I ever could have been first in the class, as there’s always someone- But Elerius was good, wasn’t he! Do you correspond with him at all, Daimbert? I hear he’s Royal Wizard now at one of the most powerful of the western kingdoms.”
I graciously overlooked the inherent insult in this comment. Yurt might not be the most powerful kingdom, but I liked it best. And if the queen took me back, I would not have to live in a blue house three miles up on top of a snowy peak.
Inside the house a fire roared in the fireplace, and the morning sun through the windowpanes made rainbows on the floor and furniture. We pulled off our ice-encrusted jackets, and the wizard hurried to make tea.
“You have no idea how pleased I was when I first sensed another wizard’s mind here in the mountains,” he said. “It does get lonely here, in spite of all the advantages. I’d known you be coming across the mountains of course-they’d telephoned to warn me you were taking the air cart up to the land of magic. But I hadn’t dared hope you’d come so close that I could call you and have you stop.”
The water boiled and he poured it into the pot. Vor and the two princes sat rather stiffly against the wall, still startled to be suddenly in a real house again after days outdoors, much less a wizard’s house on an inaccessible mountain peak. This, I thought, would be an especially useful lesson for Lucas, to see wizards serving mankind even in the northern mountains.
“What happened to you?” the wizard asked. “Your face looks burned.”
“My hair caught fire,” I said. “I was fighting a fanged gorgos.”
“A gorgos? And you won?” He stirred the tea leaves and chuckled. “Well, you must have won or you wouldn’t be here. But how did you do it? Who wants sugar?”
He poured out the tea into a row of mugs. “I transformed the gorgos into a frog,” I said modestly. “I’ve got it out in the cart, inside a binding box. I know one shouldn’t be able to transform creatures of wild magic, but I put a summoning spell on it at the same time, and at least it’s now a very small and frog-shaped gorgos.”
He was actually silent for a moment, looking, I thought, suitably impressed. “Well,” he said to the others, “I should have known. ‘Frogs’ here always had a real genius for improvisation. The rest of us were always jealous.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “No one at the school was ever jealous of me.”
“Yes, we were!” he said, quite seriously. “All of the rest of us would spend hours with our books, preparing for an exam, but you would come strolling into class late, probably not having studied, doubtless having spent the evening down at the taverns, maybe not even owning the right books.”
Paul gave me an odd look. Perhaps it was good that he realize I had not always been the staid, even stodgy old wizard he doubtless imagined me to be.
“And then,” the wizard continued, turning to the others, “he’d try to make up for his lack of application with sheer flair. Sometimes of course he failed spectacularly-I’ll never forget the expression on Zahlfast’s face that time!” He chuckled appreciatively at the memory. I did not join in. “But more likely than not, he’d manage something. You know, Daimbert, I think you were the despair of our teachers.”
This at least I could agree with.
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“I hear they had you teaching improvisation at the school this spring,” he said, sipping his tea. “How did it work out?”
“Not quite as well as I’d hoped,” I said. “Whenever I tried to explain to the students of the technical magic division that sometimes you have to put spells together in new or unexpected ways, they always wanted me to make explicit which ways, so that they could practice their improvisation and be ready.”
“Excuse me,” said Paul to the wizard, “but what are you doing here, on top of a mountain at the edge of the land of wild magic?”
“Guarding the border, of course,” he said in surprise. “Your wizard must have stopped here twenty years ago to meet the border-guards when he took his field trip up here from the school.”
“I was never invited to go on the field trip.” I was quite sure he knew this; after all, he had been one of the assistants taken along to help guide the few chosen wizardry students. “As you said, I think I was the despair of our teachers.”
“But why are you guarding the border?” Paul persisted.
“Making sure creatures of wild magic stay where they belong rather than coming down into the land of men.”
“Do you mean,” said Prince Lucas, speaking for the first time, “that there would be monsters down in our cities all the time if it weren’t for you wizards? I must say, you can’t have been doing a very good job or the gorgos wouldn’t have gotten to Caelrhon.”
“It’s not that simple,” said the wizard crossly. “Wild magic tends to stay in place north of the mountains, and it would most of the time even without us. And we can’t stop a creature that’s been called by very powerful or even black magic from going south. I expect that’s why you had gorgos problems. There were always hermit-wizards up here, but it’s all become much more orderly and reliable since the school was founded. Now we can stop most of the creatures that would otherwise wander south by accident, and we telephone the City to warn them about any unusual activity.”
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