Is This Apocalypse Necessary?

by C. Dale Brittain_Wizard of Yurt 06

  But she became subdued once we reached the church.

  Golden candelabra gleamed throughout, sending light flashing across the enormous mosaic depiction of the Last Judgment. We made our way across an onyx floor that was shot with gold, between porphyry columns, to the main altar. A group of pilgrims and purple-robed priests were already there; we knelt briefly in prayer at the edge of their group.

  As we rose and stepped quietly back, Hadwidis asked in a whisper, “Do they have nuns here in Xantium?”

  “Well, I’m sure they do,” I said in surprise. Maffi and Gwennie were walking slowly around the circumference of the church, looking at the mosaics. “But if they’re like the nuns in Yurt, I never would have seen them because they’d never come out of the nunnery.”

  “Just wondering,” she said, not looking at me. “In case I got tired after a while of being a thief and a tavern wench here.”

  I didn’t answer but reached up to readjust her head scarf, which had slid down over one ear. She was, I reminded myself, not much older than Antonia. She had never been very successful as a nun, and she was frightened of being forced into being a queen, but her reckless decision to find instead something else wild and irresponsible to do kept worrying her enough that she wanted an escape route.

  I wouldn’t have minded an escape route myself, but I didn’t think I was going to find one.

  V

  It was still dark when the door to my room creaked open. “Come, Daimbert,” came Kazalrhun’s voice, cheerful with a note I had learned to distrust. “If you would meet with an Ifrit, it were best to do it before dawn.”

  I rolled out of bed, grabbing my clothes. There had been too many pre-dawn risings lately to suit my taste. “So the Ifrit is near here?”

  “Very near, yet very far,” he said with a chuckle. “Going may be for you and me the work of ten minutes, yet you may find that days pass in the journey.”

  The mage set a lamp on the table, which cast just enough light that I could see my buttons, though leaving his face in shadow. “How about my companions?” I demanded in the middle of tying my shoes. “I can’t leave two young women alone here.”

  “Maffi need not accompany us. He will guard them and keep them from boredom.”

  That was what I was afraid of. “No. I brought them along because I want to keep them safely under my eye. They’ll have to come with us.”

  “Is one perhaps your daughter?” asked Kazalrhun in interest. “If so, you should have introduced her as such. I observed you closely, and I would say most definitely that neither is your lover.”

  “Almost my daughter,” I said vaguely. “I’ll get them.”

  “There is one difficulty, Daimbert,” said the mage with another chuckle. “The Ifrit’s wife has recently left him, having tired of a wild life in the desert and desiring to live her mature years among humans again. I understand that he is searching for a new woman to make his wife …”

  Well, he certainly wasn’t going to make either Gwennie or Hadwidis his wife, if I had anything to say about it.

  “Maybe I could turn them invisible—” I suggested uncertainly.

  “I have a better plan, Daimbert,” Kazalrhun announced. “Leave this to me. Rouse them now, but make haste.”

  In a few minutes, still rubbing the grit from my eyes, I followed Kazalrhun out through the heavy doors of his house.

  Gwennie and Hadwidis walked close on either side. There was no sign of Maffi. “King Paul has been talking for ages about coming to Xantium,” Gwennie said in my ear. “He’s going to be madly jealous when I tell him all my adventures.” She didn’t sound sympathetic at all.

  The mage carried a torch that flared and hissed as he walked, which he did with remarkable speed for one so old and so heavy. A massive hammer swung from his other hand. I hoped he would say more about the new methods for capturing an Ifrit at which he had hinted the day before, but he did not speak. The streets that had been jammed with humanity yesterday were nearly empty now, and most of the other people we spotted faded away down alleyways as we approached.

  But the first morning clatterings emerged from shuttered windows as we reached the city walls, and yellow streaked the eastern sky. The back gates of Xantium’s massive walls were locked and barred, but at a few quick words from the mage the bars lifted, and with a loud click the locks came open. The hinges creaked as the gate slowly swung ajar.

  We slipped through, then I stopped in sudden doubt. We had emerged into a broad field dotted with low structures. In the dim dawn light I recognized them as domed sepulchres. But Kazalrhun motioned us to hurry after him.

  “You must be below ground before the sun clears the horizon, Daimbert,” he said, leading the way in and out between the low white domes. All had gaping doorways, leading into empty, paved rooms. Gwennie was frowning next to me; she may have been reconsidering how jealous this adventure was going to make Paul.

  The mage stopped at one tomb that looked the same to me as all the rest but which clearly was significant to him. He handed me the torch, said a few words under his breath, and swung the hammer against the paving under the dome. On the first stroke it bounded back, but on the second stroke the stones splintered. We jumped to avoid the shards, then, at a sign from Kazalrhun, stepped forward cautiously.

  Under the paving was not the coffin I expected but rather a flat stone with an enormous iron ring set into it. “Pull up the trapdoor, Daimbert,” Kazalrhun ordered, his face inscrutable. Half the sun’s disk had risen over the horizon, making the torch’s light pale.

  I checked with a quick spell. There was enough wild eastern magic here to confuse a dozen school-trained wizards, but I was fairly sure no Ifrit lurked immediately under the stone.

  Slowly I pulled it back, adding a lifting spell to my arm’s strength when the stone proved even heavier than I had expected. Below was a dark staircase, smelling of damp earth and disappearing down.

  “You will need the torch, Daimbert,” said Kazalrhun, his gold tooth flashing. “When you reach the bottom, you shall see a black cat with a white tip to its tail. Burn three of those white hairs, and then you shall see a great marvel.

  Proceed now down these stairs, and your ‘daughters’ may follow you, but in a form that will make them safe.”

  “And you?”

  “It may be minutes, and it may be days, but when you return I shall be intrigued to hear of your encounter with the Ifrit.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said harshly. “You said you were coming with me.”

  “And I have. But I come no further.”

  “What am I supposed to do with an Ifrit?

  You’re the eastern mage. You’re the one who’s supposed to know how to master Ifriti.”

  “Your spells will serve you well,” said Kaz-alrhan, with much more confidence than I felt. “Hurry, for if the sun should rise any higher before you descend, this gate will be closed to you until tomorrow.”

  Gwennie took a deep breath, then spoke in the voice of Yurt’s castle constable. “I may enjoy an adventure, Wizard, but Hadwidis is just a young girl. I cannot agree to sending her down there.”

  Hadwidis started to protest, entirely unconvincingly, that she thought descending into a black hole under a tomb would be exciting, but she didn’t have a chance to finish.

  Kazalrhun’s hands darted out, and he seized Hadwidis and Gwennie by the arms. “I do not intend to risk angering the Ifrit for nothing. If you will not lead the way down, Daimbert, then you shall follow.” Before I could react, the two young women disappeared before my horrified eyes, and the mage was instead gripping two black dogs by their collars. With a quick motion, he tossed them down the staircase, where they disappeared with loud yelps.

  The last edge of the sun still lingered below the horizon. The mage hadn’t left me much choice. I snatched up the torch and leaped after the dogs. The trapdoor slammed shut above me.

  I flew downward, holding the flaring torch over my head, with a sick feeling that in a moment I
would see the black dogs stretched out awkwardly across the steps, their backs broken. If they were killed as dogs, there was no way my magic could bring them back to life as women. But I descended the entire staircase without seeing them. Near the bottom, a soft light began glowing around me, apparently from the walls themselves. The stairs ended in an empty marble hall, set about with columns of jasper.

  I looked around wildly, then jumped as a wet muzzle came up behind me and licked my hand.

  Both the dogs were there, looking at me with frightened human eyes. Both had smooth black fur and alert ears. On one the fur on top of the skull had been cut very short. I dropped the torch and wrapped an arm around each of their necks. “It’s just a transformation spell,” I said, trying to be reassuring. “I have no idea why the mage wanted to turn you into dogs, but I can get you turned back in just a minute.

  I’ve known how to work these spells since I graduated from wizards’ school.”

  Or at least since not much later than that. But before I could start picking apart Kazalrhun’s spell, different from anything ever taught to western wizardry students, the dogs put their heads up, and one gave a short bark. A large black cat came strolling, white-tipped tail in the air, across the empty hall toward us.

  The two dogs wiggled in interest, collars clinking. I kept a tight hold on them and made calming sounds, halfway between what I would have said to them in their own forms and what I would have said to real dogs. The cat froze, all the hair on her back going straight up.

  If I was going to have to use magic that involved this cat, she had better not scoot away, or we could spend the rest of eternity beneath Xantium’s cemetery. With a last firm word to the dogs—I resisted telling them Stay!—I moved cautiously toward the cat. “Come on, puss puss puss. Don’t be frightened.”

  This had better not turn out to be some enchanted princess whom I had just mortally insulted.

  But the cat relaxed after a moment, and my ensorcelled companions stayed at the bottom of the stairs, where they both kept wagging their tails. I held out my hand for the cat to sniff, then she allowed me to pick her up, still making soothing sounds. “There’s a good puss, don’t dig your claws into my arm, that’s right, just relax while I stroke you, while I run my hand down your tail, while I pluck out three hairs—” At that she did dig her claws into my arm and shot away, but I had the white hairs. I returned in triumph to the guttering torch. “Stay back,” I told Hadwidis and Gwennie. “Kazalrhun said that if I burned these hairs I’d see some marvel, and if it’s an Ifrit you’ll want to be out of the way.” And not in human form, I added to myself. I had once known a woman an Ifrit had considered his wife; she in fact had enjoyed living with him, but it had still been clear that it wouldn’t have made any difference if she hadn’t.

  I dropped the hairs into the flame and waited. They burned with a cat-like hiss, twisting and shriveling for a second before disintegrating. And then, somewhere in the distance, a low note began sounding, like an enormous organ playing at the bottom of its range. At the same time, tendrils of smoke began wafting out from between the jasper pillars. As I watched, heart pounding, trying desperately to remember what little eastern magic I had once known—all the spells I had been going to review this morning before Kaz-alrhan and I together went in search of an Ifrit—the smoke began to coalesce.

  The eyes were the first to take solid shape, bloodshot eyes the size of my head. The black dogs behind me whimpered once. The smoke continued to thicken and take shape, now in a manlike form, but a man bigger, far bigger, than any human ever seen: a man with dark green skin, pointed ears, and clawed hands, whose enormous form nearly filled the marble hall. This is what I had come to the east to find, I told myself, backing until the first step of the staircase caught me in the leg. This was an Ifrit.

  “You have broken our pact, Kazalrhun!” he roared with a voice that shook the jasper columns. “By what death shall I slay you? We agreed that if I would not disturb you if you would not disturb me. But you have summoned me from my sleep at the hour when dreams are sweetest!”

  He snatched me up in one clawed hand, bringing me up to eye level to stare better. “But I’m not Kazalrhun,”

  I said as clearly and politely as I could through my panic. No use even trying a spell against a creature whose magic was so powerful that mine might not even have existed. All I had were my wits. “I have made no pact with you.”

  This technicality did not immediately register with the Ifrit. The fingers slowly started to close around me. I caught a look of horror from the black dogs, pressed under the stairs together. It appeared as if Gwennie wouldn’t find it necessary after all to push a pin into my body to make sure I was really dead.

  But the Ifrit didn’t kill me at once. Instead he loosened his fingers again to turn me this way and that, peering at me as though I were some intriguing insect, and he was hoping I wouldn’t sting him before he decided to go ahead and crush me. I smelled his sour breath and looked at the huge pores in the green cheek next to me. There was a very distinctive green mole on the side of his green nose. Just as I feared. It had been over twenty years, but it wasn’t the sort of thing one was likely to forget. This was the same Ifrit I had met before.

  “You’re a mage,” he said accusingly.

  “How am I supposed to keep track of all you little mages?

  Especially when you anger me?” with a snap of teeth the size of boulders.

  “I am not a mage, but a western wizard,” I managed to croak out fairly firmly. “And you can’t hurt me. I’m from Yurt.” It had worked before. I held my breath, waiting to see if it would work again, and imagining what I would do to Kazalrhun if I got out of here alive—preferably something much worse than the Ifrit might do to me.

  The Ifrit seemed to be thinking this over for a moment. Ifriti live an extremely long time, and I didn’t know if that meant that an event of twenty years ago would seem as fresh as yesterday to him, or whether millennia of memories would keep any one particular incident from staying with him.

  But the enormous hand still did not close around me. “Why did you think I wasn’t supposed to hurt people from Yurt?” the Ifrit grumbled, as though my words had struck a chord and his slow, dangerous brain was genuinely trying to remember.

  “Another one of us little mages,” I said as confidently as I could. “He freed you from a bottle, where you had been imprisoned under the dread seal of Solomon, son of David.”

  “You aren’t Solomon, honored be his name,” the Ifrit interrupted angrily. “And neither was that other mage.”

  “But Solomon bound you, remember,” I said, knowing I had to spell it out for him. “The mage I mean is the one who freed you. And in return you gave him two wishes. The first wish was that you would keep safe everyone from Yurt.”

  It was deeply ironic that the “mage” who had, over twenty years ago, found the bottle with the Ifrit in it, and dared to loosen the lead seal, was Elerius. He had been trying to lure us into the eastern deserts for reasons of his own. As part of his plans, he had ordered the Ifrit he freed to take us captive but not to hurt us. Since he had, as usual, convinced himself that he was acting for the best, he wouldn’t wish to actually damage us before he got what he wanted from us.

  As it turned out, he’d never gotten what he wanted, which was part of the reason he now seemed convinced that I was a potentially dangerous opponent. But he had most indubitably ordered this Ifrit not to harm anyone from Yurt, and I wasn’t going to dwell on the detail that Elerius had expected the Ifrit to keep us safe by keeping us captive. Instead I hoped that, if my luck just held longer than the five minutes it had lasted so far, I would be able to use Elerius’s own wish against him.

  “But that was before,” the Ifrit objected. “That mage couldn’t have meant I was supposed to keep people from Yurt safe forever.”

  “Quite true,” I said, extemporizing wildly. “But you granted him two wishes, and until he asks for the second you have to continue to honor h
is first one.”

  “Are you sure Kazalrhun didn’t tell you to wake me up this early?” the Ifrit growled, frowning again.

  “Quite sure,” I said, which was in fact true. “I had no idea even that you had made a pact with him, and I certainly didn’t know I would meet you here in this hall.”

  “I do not like Kazalrhun,” the Ifrit commented darkly. “And I do not like that other little mage, either. There’s a good reason why I never granted him his second wish.” His voice trailed off, as though he were trying to remember.

  I remembered perfectly, though I wasn’t about to remind him. “But until you do, his first wish is still in effect,” I said brightly, hoping to change the subject while I was still ahead. “And now—”

  “You talk too much, little mage,” said the Ifrit, with a scowl that dug a crease in his forehead like an eroded ditch. “And your talk is not amusing. As long as I’m supposed to keep you safe, you’re going to grant me wishes.”

  Wishes? How was I supposed to grant wishes to an Ifrit? Slowly the outer parts of his body started going all misty again, though the head and the hand that held me stayed disconcertingly solid.

  “Wherever we’re going,” I said desperately, “I need to take my dogs along!”

  The Ifrit saw the two black dogs then, and his expression softened. They did not however seem reassured and cowered under his gaze. “Dogs don’t demand wishes,” he said agreeably and snatched them both up in his other hand, ignoring their startled yelps. Then he turned and shot through the jasper columns, which dissolved around us. Air like a hurricane rushed past, and it was impossible to see. The world went black and seemed for a second to turn upside down, then slowly stabilized and grew quieter again. I tried not to retch and clung desperately to the Ifrit’s thumb.