The Witch, the Cathedral woy-4

by C. Dale Brittain

  “So you do have a telephone.” I glanced around without seeing one but assumed it was in the other room. The thought that the City was only a call away was very cheering.

  “Yes indeed. With one of your far-seeing attachments, of course,” he added generously.

  “But doesn’t it become dreary, being up here alone?” This was Paul.

  “Not dreary. You lads won’t understand this, but Daimbert will. There’s something enormously seductive about the land of magic. All one’s spells work much better. Flying isn’t an effort any more. Even here, at the border, one can feel the difference. None of us are posted here very long, and they say it’s because they don’t want us to become too lonely, but I think in part it’s because they don’t want us going over the edge.

  “It is lonely, of course,” he continued. “The air cart brings us supplies, but only irregularly, when no one else needs the cart. The school ought somehow to arrange for a second one. We can talk on the telephone, but it’s not the same. I’ve already been here two months, and I’ll be here for another two, and you’re the first people I’ve seen.”

  “Then if you were at the wizards’ school two months ago,” I said in surprise, “you were there at the same time I was.”

  He waved his hand vaguely. “Well, there are always a lot of people at the school, and one doesn’t see everybody.” It was true that, between the teachers, the students, the young wizards, and the older ones coming and going, there were always a lot of people at the school. But he had known I was there. He had just not wanted to see foolish old ‘Frogs’ until now, when he had no other wizards to talk to. “So I’m delighted I’m having a chance to see you now,” he added.

  “I’m sorry in that case to have to leave,” I said, standing up, “but we really need to get the monstrous frog up further into the borderlands, somewhere we can dispose of it. Thank you for the tea. Maybe we can stop here again on our way back.”

  “Then I’ll hope to see you all again in a few days. Very nice meeting you young fellows.”

  PART SIX — THE BORDERLANDS

  I

  The air cart came down out of the mountains. The snow lingered on the northern slopes, but finally we dropped enough that the land beneath us was green again, and we spotted miniature flocks of goats followed by miniature goatherds. These were the first humans, other than the wizard, we had spotted in three days.

  I filled my lungs with cold air and almost felt confident again of my ability to practice wizardry. But I reminded myself that this might only be due to the influence of the land of magic, not a sign of returning abilities.

  Vor pointed. “There’s my valley.” Ahead of the air cart was a deep gash in the mountain slope, perhaps a mile wide and ten miles long. The sun had not yet reached down the sides of the rift, but I could see a waterfall pouring into it from the mountains and a dark green river winding the length of the valley.

  The air cart slowly descended beside the waterfall, its roar loud in our ears. The tumbling water rushed downward like something solid, and drops of spray nearly reached us. Vor leaned what I considered dangerously far over the edge of the cart, staring ahead. The valley floor was a patchwork of fields, but there were no buildings. “So where do your people live?” I started to ask and then saw them.

  Their houses were built into the nearly vertical rocky sides of the valley, half-hidden by gnarled trees. A network of steep stairs, ladders, and toeholds connected the valley floor with the doors of dwellings burrowed back into the rock. Theodora, with her love of climbing, would like this valley.

  “How long is it that you’ve been gone?” I asked as though casually.

  “Years,” Vor replied briefly.

  “Why haven’t you been home again?” asked Paul.

  “Three thousand miles is a long way on foot,” said Vor. “My men and I reckoned we might not be home again in our lifetimes.”

  As we moved slowly downward, I could see people on the ladders, looking up. To them, I thought, we must appear as frightful, appearing without warning out of the sky, as the gorgos had appeared to the citizens of the cathedral city. “We don’t want to terrify anyone into falling,” I said anxiously.

  Vor tore his eyes away from the valley long enough to give me a quick, amused glance. “Everyone knows these purple flying beasts aren’t dangerous. The only surprise will be when they see us inside the skin.”

  I was interested to realize that the flying beast from which the air cart had been made was not unique, as I had always supposed. I found myself wondering if we could find an aged flying beast and induce it to come back south with us, so that after it died a natural death I could have an air cart of my own.

  The air cart was now level with doors and windows, and heads protruded, staring at us. Paul waved cheerfully, and several people waved back. We landed with a bump in a meadow by the river, a mile downstream from the waterfall.

  Vor leaped out at once and was off, springing from tussock to tussock across the meadow’s damp surface. Other people came running toward him, all with the short stature and unusually long fingers and toes of the cathedral’s construction crew. He had seemed calm and unhurried the whole time I had known him, but now he spoke animatedly, waving his arms, pointing toward the sky and toward us. Several people threw their arms around him, and he embraced them with fervor. Everybody was talking at once; they seemed to be calling him a name I did not catch, but it was not Vor.

  “That’s curious,” commented Lucas. “From several things he said, I had the impression he’d had to leave home, yet everybody seems happy to see him back again.”

  I had had the same impression, but all I said was, “Long absence makes quarrels seem trivial.”

  Paul was looking not at Vor but at the houses. “Think what it must be like to live there!” he exclaimed. “In the heat of the summer, it would be comfortably cool, and in the winter it would be as cozy as a den. Will we still be here tonight? I can’t wait to see the hillsides all dotted with lamplight!”

  Vor came back over to the cart. “I don’t want to interrupt your reunion,” I said. “Perhaps we should leave you here and continue north, until we find a good place to get rid of the gorgos.”

  He was smiling as broadly as I had ever seen him. “We can go dispose of the gorgos whenever you like,” he said.

  The air cart rose back out of the valley, and, with Vor’s direction, I guided it northward. We rose over a last range of hills that protected his people’s valley. The high snowy peaks were behind us, and before us a dry rocky land stretched out desolate. All of Vor’s cheerfulness left him as soon as we left the valley, replaced by a tension so tight it almost vibrated.

  Thirty miles beyond the valley, just as I had been about to ask if he really knew where he was taking us, he pointed downward. “There. Put the cart down there.”

  I saw nothing to distinguish this particular patch of loose boulders from any other, but I obeyed. “Do you think we’re far enough from your valley?” I asked. He nodded emphatically and kept peering about as we descended, apparently not seeing whatever he was seeking. I preferred to think this was good.

  Just before we landed, I spotted something odd about some of the boulders. Rather than being scattered, they seemed to be piled up, as though to form a monstrous hut. I nudged Vor and pointed, but he just shook his head, and in a second the hut or whatever it might be was hidden beyond other rocks. At any rate I saw nothing alive. We hit the ground hard, and the cart tilted to one side.

  “So what do you suggest?” I asked Vor, picking up the binding box from where it had slid down with the rest of our baggage.

  “Just take it out and release it,” he said shortly.

  I put one leg over the edge of the air cart. “All of you stay here,” I said. “By now you’ve heard me say many times the two words of the Hidden Language that will get the cart off the ground. Use them if you have to.”

  Carrying the heavy black box, I walked slowly away from the cart, trying to probe
for magic. What I found was almost overwhelming. I was used to the orderly channeling of magic, but here magic whirled and spun in complete confusion. There was too much detail, too little focused, for me even to try to identify the source.

  I closed my mind resolutely against these magical influences. This must be one of the spots in the borderlands where human habitation was only a short distance from wild magic.

  Fifty yards from the air cart I set the black box down. Slowly, cautiously, I pulled open the lid and peeked inside. The frog was still there, glaring at me furiously. As soon as daylight touched it, it began to kick. The rope with the binding spell in which I had originally tied it was gone; I wondered if the frog had eaten it.

  I swung the box forward, catapulting the gorgos frog out. It hit the side of a rock, rolled down, and righted itself. I realized I was trembling as I watched. It started to work itself along, although a frog’s feet do not do well on rough stone.

  “Go ahead,” Vor called. “Turn it back into a gorgos.”

  I hesitated. There seemed no reason not to leave it a frog. Sooner or later it might be able to overcome the transformation spell by itself, but in the meantime we should be able to get well away.

  On the other hand, I feared that part of my own mind might still be attached to the gorgos. I had summoned it to me while transforming it, and there might still be enough attachment that it would be compelled to follow me.

  Carefully, feeling my way into my own magic and trying to avoid the swirling alien magic around me, I put together the words to break the transformation spell. When I said the final syllables to restore the gorgos to itself, my mind leaped back out of the calm channels of magic into a body whose heart was pounding madly.

  It had worked. The gorgos crouched on the ground where the frog had lain a second before. It was appreciably larger than I remembered, especially the fangs.

  Both terrified and exhilarated, I started flying backwards toward the air cart. My mind was clearer than it had been for a week, and for a second I felt that nothing could overcome me and my magic. The gorgos seemed to be startled at its abrupt return to itself. It glared about with burning eyes and scratched its side with long, curved claws.

  Then, behind me, I heard a shout. I spun around. It was Vor.

  Beyond the tumbled boulders, in the direction in which I thought I had seen stones heaped into a hut, I heard an answering bellow.

  The gorgos spread its bat-wings and rose into the air, looking back toward the bellow but moving toward me. I retreated more rapidly.

  And then I saw, rising over the boulders, a second fanged gorgos.

  The first gorgos, my former frog, saw it too. He turned from pursuing me and, with a great flap of its wings, launched himself toward it. The two monsters rushed at each other, slavering mouths wide open, claws ready to rend each other’s flesh. Just before they met, I thought I sensed something very odd about the second gorgos.

  Not stopping to analyze it, I rushed after the air cart, which had taken off and by now was careening across the sky. The two gorgoi roared and screeched, apparently ripping off major parts of each others’ bodies.

  I caught the cart after a mile’s pursuit. The magic words to lift off had put it into the air, but without further direction the purple flying beast’s skin had started flying on its own with little regard for the people in it.

  Vor and the two princes clung to the edge, looking ill. I dropped inside, stopped the cart’s spinning, and straightened out the course. “Back to your valley?” I asked Vor, as calmly as if I dealt with gorgoi every day.

  He blinked. “Yes. That would be good.”

  Paul looked at me wide-eyed. “I don’t know how I could have gone all these years without realizing what a good wizard you are.” I nodded gravely at this praise from my future king.

  The cart banked and started to return. I could still hear faint bellows in the distance. I turned from Paul to address myself to Lucas. “I trust, Prince, that you will be able to report to the dean that I did indeed destroy the gorgos.”

  His lips tight, Lucas nodded slowly. I had plenty of questions for him now that my mind was abruptly clear again, but even more pressing were my questions for the construction foreman.

  “You knew about the second gorgos, Vor,” I said. “Ever since the first one appeared in the cathedral city, you’ve been working to bring the two gorgoi together. Now that, I hope, they’re finishing destroying each other, I would like you to tell me what’s really been happening.”

  Vor looked at me in silence for a moment. The two princes leaned back against the far side of the air cart, their elbows hooked over the side. Paul appeared interested and amused, Lucas suspicious.

  “The second gorgos wasn’t really a gorgos,” I prompted Vor. “It’s something-or someone-turned into a gorgos. Was it a person?”

  He smiled suddenly and fleetingly. “The prince is right-you are a good wizard.” I had scarcely received so many accolades in one day before. I hoped they would remember to relate all the details when we stopped at the blue house on top of the mountain on the way home.

  “It used to be human,” Vor continued, “a man from my valley.” Once I had him talking, he seemed uncharacteristically willing to continue. “As I’m sure you already guessed, it was the man I mentioned to you, the one who determined he was going to kill a gorgos. He did kill it, too, but its gorgos spirit overwhelmed him, body and soul, as it died.”

  “And that’s why you warned me not to try to kill the gorgos frog.”

  He nodded. “Maybe another wizard could have overcome your gorgos with wizardry.” So much for the compliments! “But when it became clear that you were either going to have to take it back to the land of wild magic or else kill it by force, I decided I’d better come along. I knew where to find a second gorgos, and I knew if they killed each other they would both be dead, with no more humans taken over by their spirits.”

  “There’s more to it,” I said, watching Vor’s face. His willingness to tell me all this now, I thought, was an attempt to hide something else. “You didn’t merely want to dispose of the gorgos from the cathedral city. You had always known about the gorgos here, and you had been wanting to kill it for years.” He blinked in what might have been agreement.

  “You brought me and the transformed frog up here on purpose to kill the gorgos that was already here,” I continued, holding him with my eyes. “The gorgos here, the one that used to be a person: that was the reason you left your home in the valley originally. What did it do to you?”

  Again he gave that fleeting smile. “It killed my father,” he said in his normal laconic tone.

  As he seemed unwilling to add anything else, I said, “So is that why you had to leave? You couldn’t live on in your valley with your father unavenged, but you couldn’t avenge him without becoming a gorgos yourself?”

  He did not answer. My brain, awakened fully from the miasma into which the gorgos had dragged it, had at last worked out something important. Let the others imagine that I had realized it all along. “Vor,” I said with my best wizardly scowl, “this all started when you became involved in the plots of a renegade wizard. Since his gorgos nearly killed me, I think I have a right to know about it.”

  The two princes looked startled, but I ignored them.

  “Nothing worked out as you had planned, Vor,” I said sternly, “at least until the two gorgoi destroyed each other. Did you think that I would believe it was sheer coincidence that a gorgos should appear in the very cathedral city where the foreman of the construction crew wanted revenge on a gorgos? No,” shaking my head, “it was not coincidence.”

  The air cart flapped steadily, carrying us across the brown borderlands of the land of magic. I paused to let Vor say something, but he seemed willing to listen in silence. “You had struck up a friendship with a certain wizard,” I continued, “and he knew you’d come from the borderlands. He asked you, very casually, what would be a good type of creature to call to the city. And
this is where things began to go wrong. Not letting yourself think about why a wizard would want to call a monster, you suggested, equally casually, that a gorgos would be just right. If the gorgos who had killed your father left the borderlands for Caelrhon, you thought, you could go home again without shame-especially if, as you let yourself imagine, the wizard planned to destroy it. But he called the wrong gorgos!”

  Vor answered at last. “It wasn’t like that! I would never have had anything to do with him if I’d known he was planning an attack on the cathedral. He told me the wizards’ school was trying to find a good kind of monster so that the young wizards could practice their new anti-monster spells.”

  “And even when the gorgos, the wrong gorgos, showed up at the cathedral instead of at the wizards’ school,” I asked, “did you still hope these ‘new anti-monster spells’ were real?”

  He did not meet my eyes, but a slow smile spread across his face. “I did admire your technique.”

  “But who was the wizard?” I insisted, not about to be flattered now. “Was it that old ragged magician who knows fire magic?”

  Vor looked surprised. “Not him. He could never master a gorgos. It was one of you school-trained wizards, but I’d never seen him before. A relatively young one-no gray in his beard.”

  Lucas interrupted before I could press for details. “All right, Wizard,” he said brusquely, “you’ve made your point that wizards may occasionally be useful against creatures of wild magic. But now you have to answer to me!” He tapped his fingers on the pommel of his sword. “You and your friend the dean-and I certainly hope the cathedral chapter has enough sense not to elect him bishop! — may have forced me to come with you, but now that you can’t threaten me with your black box anymore, I think it’s time to teach you your place!”

  II

  “I’d credited you with more intelligence than this, Prince,” I replied sternly. “I don’t have to answer to you, but you to me! You’re three thousand miles from home, without a horse or a map. The only people here are half-fey themselves. If you try walking back south through the mountains, you will find very few people who have even heard of the kingdom of Caelrhon, and even fewer impressed by the crown prince of Caelrhon. It’s no use trying to overpower me, because you’d be trapped here without my magic.”