Elerius looked down at me quizzically. "I'm sorry, Daimbert. I should have realized when I saw you devouring the gingerbread that you had not had any dinner. Shall I order you a tray?"
I was not going to be talked out of valid suspicions and I was not going to be patronized. "Sit down," I said as though this were my study rather than his.
Surprisingly, he sat down at once. Emboldened by this small triumph, I leaned forward, still glaring. "Let me point out a few things that your explanation doesn't cover. You were not just trying to assist Sengrim in a plan to recover his position. You were using him for your own purposes."
"And what might these purposes have been?" Elerius asked as though I had suggested something rather amusing.
"You want to establish a firmer organization at the school. Zahlfast told me that at the beginning of the summer, and you just said the same thing yourself. The best way you knew to make the school draw tighter together was to make it feel threatened: threatened by an embittered wizard turned renegade, by a church that hated wizardry, by aristocrats threatening to dismiss all their wizards, and by dragons coming over the border. This all started without any help from you, when Prince Lucas quarreled with his Royal Wizard because Sengrim stopped him from a fight in which he would have been bested at once. But you took advantage of the situation because it fit in well with your own long-term plans. Did you think I would not find out that you yourself had installed the far-seeing telephone on the mountain at the borderlands—the phone that wouldn't work?"
"I heard about that," said Elerius easily. "But the spells for the far-seeing attachment have always been a little haphazard. Didn't you invent it yourself, Daimbert?"
I ignored this latest jab. Yurt's own telephones had worked perfectly for years.
"And what better way," I continued, "to make the school feel itself beleaguered by the church and the aristocracy than actually to make certain that it was? You showed up at Caelrhon's royal court in disguise, telling the king you were a City nobleman who had learned of the school's 'plots' against aristocrats, plots you invented in the hope—nearly realized—that threatened royal courts would turn against the school. I had been wondering for some time who this purported aristocratic friend of the Master's might have been, and I only realized now, when you mentioned being in the cathedral city, that Lucas's description matched you. I gather you play the nobleman well, Elerius. Haven't I heard some strange rumors about your parentage? Perhaps a birth on the wrong side of the blanket in some royal castle . . ."
But he did not take the bait, only following me intently, his eyebrows slightly raised, almost as though—pleased?
I pushed on. "By having me, a wizard, in the city of Caelrhon all summer even if no other wizard was in evidence, and by having the gorgos appear at the old bishop's funeral, you were certain the priests would blame the monster on institutionalized magic. Your only miscalculation was not taking Joachim into account—the dean of the cathedral, now bishop. He's the most powerful churchman in two kingdoms, but he's also my friend."
"That is something about you I have found intriguing, Daimbert," Elerius said as though in calculation.
"And which you mentioned to Zahlfast when urging him to hire me permanently at the school. This is the one aspect I haven't worked out yet: why you want me on the faculty, when your ultimate purpose is to reorganize the wizards' school—with yourself in charge!"
Elerius leaned back in his chair and laughed. "This is even better than I imagined, Daimbert! I enjoy watching your mind work. So now you suspect me of going renegade and hatching a plot to overthrow the school? You really should have your friend the bishop say a suitable prayer of gratitude that you didn't take this story to the Master!"
"It's more subtle than that," I said, watching him without smiling. "You aren't like Sengrim; you haven't lost control of your mind and your magic. You haven't even forgotten your oaths to help humanity. If you had, by now I'd probably either be dead or a frog—or both.
"This was all carefully planned," I continued. "You meant no harm to anyone, or at least that's what you tell yourself. But you have a vision of a drastically reorganized wizards' school, one in which the students follow a highly structured, highly rigorous program—a program from which I would never have graduated—and where the school continues to maintain careful control even after the young wizards have taken up their posts. Through no coincidence, you would be at the head of this school."
I paused to let him say something, but he only continued to listen, intent tawny eyes holding mine and an indulgent smile on his lips.
"Hints of danger from priests and aristocrats, you realized, would not be enough to give you the chance to remake the school in your own image. But again Sengrim gave you an opportunity. You knew I would work out eventually that he brought the gorgos to Caelrhon—and that even if he had overcome his bitterness toward me enough for rational conversation, he would have been too proud to mention your role in helping him. So you decided—and quite rightly—that if dragons attacked the school Sengrim would be blamed for that too."
"Then I am supposed to be responsible for those dragons?" He was still giving his indulgent smile.
"Sengrim could never have called that many by himself. He was in Yurt, with the lizards he had learned to master several years ago, when someone else brought dragons over the border. You didn't go to help the masters fight them even though your kingdom is so close to the City. You have spells of your own around this castle that would have warded off dragons. I'm sure you were able to persuade yourself that none of the faculty would actually be killed, that fighting dragons in the City streets would be messy but not actually fatal if everyone kept their heads and worked together. But a battered school with a badly-wounded faculty would need someone to step in and take charge, someone who would quickly assure that wizards, rather than being just one of the ‘three who rule the world,’ would be the only rulers."
The late summer evening was growing cool in this tower high above the plain. Elerius snapped his fingers, said two words, and lit the kindling in the fireplace. The flames quickly caught the dry wood. When he looked toward me expectantly, I said a few words of my own in the Hidden Language to light a tiny cascade of flames in the air before us.
"Not bad, Daimbert," he said appreciatively as they flickered back out of existence. "Did you come here then to match spells with me?"
I shook my head hard. "Your spells are better than mine. I've always known that. That's why I want to know why you seem to want me, whose only strength is in improvisation, in a school that you plan to remodel as rigorous, standardized, and monolithic."
"Don't assume your imaginings about my ‘plans’ are real, Daimbert," he said slowly, looking into the fire and not smiling any longer. "You have speculation but not a shred of evidence. If you tried to take any of this to the Master, you realize, I would only deny it all, and you would come out looking an even bigger fool than you did all those years ago at Zahlfast's transformations practical."
He spoke so soberly that for a moment I began to doubt my own reason, and I wished wildly for Theodora's ring of invisibility so I could escape before I embarrassed myself any further.
"But," and he turned his eyes sharply toward me, "let's assume for a moment that you're right."
I took a deep breath and let it out again.
"Don't you think the idea deserves better than your dismissal? For generations before the Black Wars, the aristocrats controlled the western kingdoms and used their strength and even their wizards against other kings and lords. The result was the bloody wars that so sickened the old wizards that they, contentious and individualistic as they were, finally banded together to stop the fighting. So we know that aristocrats can't be allowed to make the great decisions. And the priests with their prating about sin and morality would not be any better. So who does that leave but the wizards?"
"Why does anyone have to rule the world?" I demanded. "Why can't the townsmen rule their towns, the kings th
eir individual kingdoms, and the priests their churches?"
"Since in fact we already are the ultimate rulers," Elerius went on without answering my question, "then it would be best to plan ahead, rather than simply reacting to events. The Master did an excellent job in setting up the school in the first place, coordinating the teaching of wizardry, making sure young wizards learned magic's responsibilities as well as its spells. But the time has come to think of the next necessary steps. Those of us of the next generation, trained in the school and its methods but with visions of our own, are ready to go beyond the victories already won." He paused and smiled. "You realize, of course, I am speaking hypothetically."
"And what would I, hypothetically, have to do with all this?"
"You and I have crossed paths before, Daimbert," said Elerius thoughtfully, stroking his beard. "You have an uncanny knack of disrupting my plans. If I actually had intended to use dragons to attack the school, then I might be quite angry with you for warning Zahlfast in time. Some wizards in such a situation, I might imagine, would realize that you had most likely not told anyone in the City that you were coming here, and that with the king of Yurt thinking you were still at the school, the school thinking you were back in Yurt, and the witch in Caelrhon thinking you had loved her and left her, it might be a very long time before anyone came to my kingdom to ask awkward questions . . ."
"So far," I said evenly, clenching my fists until the nails bit into my palms, "you have tried denial, blackmail, and threats. All this has done is make me more certain than ever that I'm right."
"And you're holding out for bribery?" Elerius asked, showing his teeth in a smile. "Since this is all hypothetical and indeed quite imaginary, I can say honestly that you are providing me one of the most entertaining evenings, Daimbert, I have had in a long time. But I was about to add that I am not one of the wizards who reacts simply by eliminating all potential opposition. I already told you that I believe one should not reject anything that could prove useful. Anyone who has the ability to thwart me—even if not always intentionally—has strengths it might be best to have on my side."
"This is the bribe, then?" I asked, fists still clenched along my sides. "I get hired onto the permanent faculty of the school now, in part so you can keep a closer eye on me, and then you promise that when you take over I can stay?"
"Wouldn't you find this a tempting bribe, Daimbert—if I were making one?"
"No. I am Royal Wizard of Yurt. And I do not want to be part of any attempt to control the rest of the world. I know you are a better wizard than I could be in a thousand years, but even you can't control it. If I have thwarted you, it's not because I have outmaneuvered you. It's because the world, and that includes me, is much too messy and unpredictable, impossible for even the best wizardly planning to guide successfully." I rose abruptly to my feet. Get out while I was still alive. "Thank you so much for tea, but I should get home to Yurt tonight."
Elerius rose too and went to the door, the gracious host, to see me out. I followed him, feeling sweat trickling down my neck. Almost. I was almost out of here to safety. But he paused with his hand on the latch.
"Don't take accusations to the school, Daimbert, when you have no proof," he said quietly. "You can take pride in having kept organized wizardry unchanged if that was your goal. But I would still like to be your friend. Think over these ideas how the school might be improved. Anyone who can overcome a fanged gorgos with spells that shouldn't work, become friends with a bishop, and make such imaginative and highly romantic guesses about what I might have been planning, deserves closer study!" He opened the door. "Have a pleasant trip home—but keep in touch."
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