Is This Apocalypse Necessary?

by C. Dale Brittain_Wizard of Yurt 06

  I hesitated a moment, trying unsuccessfully to see what was in the black passage beyond the portcullis. This was worse than Basil’s castle in the Eastern Kingdoms—there all that awaited me was a wizard with a man-eating lizard on his shoulder. In here was a wizard who imagined he could save the world by destroying it.

  Maybe, I thought, still hesitating, I should have had Hadwidis draw a detailed map of the major rooms of her castle, so that I could, by using the ensorcelled skull, have had an idea of what Elerius was up to before I arrived. But then I shrugged and forced my feet forward. My leg twinged, but I ignored that too.

  The castle was dark, but as I entered, all around I could sense powerful spells, spells that must be keeping a potential dragon attack away and observing the royal armies. I saw no one, not the queen mother or the young prince about whom Hadwidis was so worried, and none of the dozens of wizards Elerius might have with him. But doors opened before me, magic lights flicked on, and as I strode forward the lights behind me went out and the doors slammed. I kept my head up and one hand in my pocket, trying to walk the way a man would who might at any moment brandish the Dragons’ Sceptre.

  The halls and the doors were leading me straight up to Elerius’s study. I considered improving my appearance with illusion as I had when visiting Levi but rejected the idea; I had looked ridiculous as the illusion faded, and I needed my attention for far more important things than lace cuffs. How many wizards would Elerius have standing by him, I wondered, ready to neutralize any spell of attack I might try, even before the words were fully shaped?

  Or how many knights might he have positioned, whose swords could pierce me before I could paralyze them all?

  The study door opened before me without anyone touching it. Lamplight spilled out into the dark hallway. My feet, acting on their own, stopped moving. “Come in, Daimbert,” said Elerius’s voice. “I’ve been expecting you for weeks.”

  I took a deep breath, closed my eyes for a quick prayer to the Cranky Saint in case he really was trying to help me, and forced my feet forward into the doorway.

  No hordes of wizards or knights with drawn swords awaited me—just Elerius. He sat in a large chair in the middle of the room, arms crossed, looking expectantly toward the door.

  The only person with him was a boy, a boy Antonia’s age. His shock of dark hair was the exact same shade as the wizard’s beard. He slid off his own chair as I came through the door, landing somewhat awkwardly—I realized with a start that one of his legs was ever so slightly twisted. But I had no time to think about that now. He looked up at me haughtily but then spoiled the effect by smiling. “Hello, Wizard. Are you the famous Daimbert?”

  Elerius answered for me. “So he is, Prince.

  And he has come to join us.”

  Join them! Elerius thought I might still be talked into becoming his co-ruler, and he called the boy Prince. So I had two pieces of useful information already, I thought, turning around a chair and straddling it backwards, leaning my arms on the back and doing my best to give him a wizardly glare. He wasn’t planning to kill me immediately, and he had not yet told young Walther that he was his father.

  “I’m afraid your wizard has misled you, Prince Walther,” I said to the boy, who seemed surprised that I knew his name. Now I just had to hope that the pounding of my heart wasn’t as loud in the room as it was in my own ears. “It is true that I am Daimbert, but I have not come to join your wizard but to oppose him. And he has not been expecting me for weeks but only for an hour or two.”

  “You told me Daimbert was our friend, Wizard,” said Walther uneasily, stepping back closer to Elerius.

  He was a tenderly-raised young prince, I thought, with none of his father’s supreme self-assurance. I couldn’t hurt him myself any more than I could have hurt Antonia, but I might be able to maneuver Elerius by hinting that at any moment I might do so.

  Already I could tell that this conversation was not going the way Elerius had planned. I would have smiled if it had not been so deadly serious. He had arranged to meet me alone except for his son, as a demonstration of his goodwill and his trust in me.

  Instead of being swayed by the loving family picture of the two of them together, I must suddenly seem like someone dangerously likely to say things he didn’t want the boy to hear.

  “I am ready to be a friend to both of you, Prince Walther,” I continued, deliberately not looking toward Elerius because I knew it would annoy him. So far, my voice was staying fairly steady. “But friendship will be on my own terms, or else I am your enemy.” I had the initiative and I didn’t dare lose it—Elerius’s ability to plan and prepare must be slipping, what with trying to run a war, but at any moment he might regain control. “First—and this is fundamental—he must give up his mad plan to dominate the West. You can see all those armies out the window for yourself, Prince. They would happily be friends with you, but not until your wizard yields himself to me.”

  Elerius interrupted before I could start laying out the terms of surrender. “Come, Daimbert, you’re going to give the prince the wrong impression if you keep on talking like that! We cannot be enemies. I mourned as much as anyone when I believed you dead. You certainly did a good job of making the air cart look as though you and it had been chewed by a dragon—I would be interested to learn, some day, if you really were bitten by one. I know you never found the Dragons’ Sceptre, or you’d have brought a horde of dragons with you—” Was that real knowledge or just bluff? “— but your trip to the northern lands could easily have killed you. When you came to your own funeral, without dragons and therefore unsuccessful, I realized your death had just been a ruse, and I was delighted to know you had survived your adventures—but then you disappeared again!”

  “What do you know about my presence at my funeral?” I snapped, then realized that by going on the defensive I had already given him the chance to regain the initiative in this conversation.

  “Your invisibility spell or whatever you were using worked perfectly,” he said airily, smiling with his lips while his tawny eyes stayed sober and calculating. “But you’re carrying something in your pocket, something with a tracing spell attached to it—you had it in your pocket when you visited me in the City and, I thought, agreed to work with me. I recognized the spell just as I was leaving Yurt, but I left so rapidly that I couldn’t investigate.”

  “Actually I refused to work with you,” I mumbled. Paul’s ring. I had put that tracing spell on it myself, to help me find it if the women to whom he offered it kept throwing it away. “I may have let you believe I would help you run the world after the old Master died, but that was only be to be able to get away.”

  But if Elerius had known since my funeral that I was alive, he still hadn’t had any idea where I had been. I tried glaring again.

  “In spite of your protests, Daimbert,” he continued in tones of calm rationality, “it is clear that you wouldn’t have walked straight into this castle, all by yourself, if you weren’t intending to join us. Do these protests about being my enemy satisfy your conscience over some oath you gave to the kings before you came here?”

  I pulled back my lips in the semblance of a smile, which only succeeded in worrying Walther. “That’s because you think I’m like you,” I said. “I’m not. You should know better.” For a second Elerius’s confident smile cracked, as he did realize better. “You would have happily lied in my place if you thought that betraying the western kings would have been best for them in the long run. And you would never willingly walk into danger, because who would put your doubtless excellent plans into operation if you weren’t around to do so yourself? But I’m surprised you haven’t noticed that my own vision of a better future for the world doesn’t always require a world with me in it.”

  “You have always had something of a penchant for self-sacrifice,” Elerius said uneasily.

  But that was my final plan, which I hoped I didn’t have to use. Time to try reason, while I again had him off-balance.

/>   “So accept that I’m here alone, but here as your enemy,” I said firmly. “But not irredemiably your enemy. There’s still time, Elerius, to give up this war. You wanted to become the new Master of the school, and you would have if you had not been so precipitate in claiming the position as your right. Did you ever really think the teachers would elect someone else? But you did make a serious error when you quarreled with Zahlfast. Penitence and submission would have been a much better option—you could still have become Master eventually, even if you had to wait another twenty years.”

  “It’s much too late, Daimbert, for me to be penitent,” he said with a wizardly glare of his own. “The school will elect you as soon as they hear you’re back from your presumed death.”

  Jealousy, I thought. Completely misplaced, of course. But half a heartbeat later I realized that something was wrong here—or else I had missed something crucial. I didn’t want to ask him anything because it would lose me what little momentum I had, but I had to know. Maybe his jealousy would obscure his judgment. “Why would the school elect me? I thought you had all the teachers here, working with you, with the single exception of Zahlfast.”

  “Most of them are still in the City,” he said in a low voice, looking away. I could tell this stung. “They haven’t joined the kings, but, unlike a lot of the younger wizards, they have also refused to support me.”

  “Then think of me as speaking with the voices of those teachers,” I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact and sympathetic. If I had drawn a map of the City instead of Yurt I might have known this already. I couldn’t dig at the wound to Elerius’s pride that the defection of the West’s most important wizards must represent—if I did, he would never listen to me. “I’m sure they’re as sick at all this as I am. None of us—starting, I know, with you—want to see a disagreement between wizards lead to more bloodshed than we’ve already had, especially not the deaths of the worldly leaders whom institutionalized wizardry should rather help and guide.”

  The last was gratuitous, intended to appeal to Elerius’s own vision of his mission. But he did not react as I hoped.

  Instead he shot me a vicious glance. “So what are you offering instead, Daimbert? That if I agree to leave this castle you’ll graciously engage to talk to the teachers at the school, to see if they’ll agree that, after you become the new Master, they’ll allow me to become your helpful little assistant?”

  I had never thought of it at all like that. Once again, he was assuming that I was like him. But he was far more bitter than I had expected. Haughty defiance I had been prepared to face—not anger and jealousy because his best plans were rejected.

  Walther spoke up then—for a moment I had nearly forgotten him, standing silent next to his father on his thin, slightly crooked legs. “But Wizard,” he said to Elerius, “aren’t I supposed to be your helpful little assistant?

  Isn’t that why you’ve been teaching me magic?”

  For a second Elerius’s expression changed, and he gave the boy a smile and rested a hand briefly on his shoulder.

  “That’s right, Prince,” he said while I wondered if he was about to have Walther turn me into a frog. I’d better not lose track of the boy again.

  “You forget,” I said quickly, “that I have no interest in heading the school, with or without assistants.

  At this point, I’m sure the teachers would all agree that we’d be better off if the school didn’t have a single head at all—or at most a person with enough administrative authority to make sure the tradesmen’s bills got paid, but nothing like absolute power. If you think about it, that’s really how the old Master functioned.” I took a deep breath and spread out my hands in a placating gesture.

  “There’s still time to be penitent, Elerius, to rejoin the school and eventually play a role in shaping its policy, along with all the rest of us.”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have said “us.” But this was as reasonable as I could get. I wiped my sweaty palms on my trousers and waited for his answer.

  I didn’t have to wait long. Anger darkened his face, and he started to rise from his chair. Only Walther’s presence, I thought, kept him from summoning lightning to fry me to a crisp. It was not good to have the best wizard in the West angry with me.

  “No!” he shouted, then paused, taking a deep breath. Walther took a step away as he slowly sat back down again. “No,” he said more quietly, “I have no interest in your ‘penitence.’ You’ve been spending too much time talking with men in the church—weaklings, all of them, without enough courage to take a firm stand on anything except for so-called sin.”

  I recalled that his hand-picked candidate as bishop of the City had already resigned. “If the teachers of the school, sitting in their classrooms fretting about tradesmen’s bills, don’t want to join me, then I shall defeat them all! This collection of royal armies at my gates will not take very long; then I shall turn my magical powers on the wizards. They shouldn’t take much assurance from the school’s protective spells—after all, I helped design them.”

  “You’re going to kill everybody, knights and wizards both, who stands in your way?” I said in horror.

  “Elerius, are you insane? This is not helping humanity!”

  He had glanced toward the window as though planning the great stroke that would reduce the armies outside to ashes. But now he shot me a sharp glance from under peaked eyebrows.

  “I would not have stood this insult from any other wizard, Daimbert. But you are the only man who has ever been able to disrupt my plans so consistently and so thoroughy. When I learned the old Master wanted you as his heir, I understood why at last.”

  If so, it was more than I’d ever understood.

  Elerius was speaking more calmly now, but there was a note of bitter coldness in everything he said.

  “Your sometimes bumbling exterior,” he continued, “must hide abilities equal to mine—maybe even greater, because I have long suspected that the Master had learned secret lore from earlier generations of wizards which he never taught at the school, and which even my years of research have not uncovered.”

  “Bumbling exterior” I let pass without comment—could he possibly be saying that he thought I was as good as he was?

  “I allowed you to come here unmolested, Daimbert, because I have continued to hope that you would agree to work with me. Even now I do not entirely despair of you. Be reasonable, so that I need not turn to threats.”

  His voice was softer now, insinuating. “Haven’t you often wished that academic magic was not so limited? We struggle to learn the most difficult spells, are exhausted in working them, and even then we can accomplish but a fraction of what we envision in imagination. But if the two of us worked together! Then there would be no further need to consult the wishes of others or engage their participation, when we could do everything ourselves. You with the secret knowledge the old Master gave you, me with my mastery of all known branches of western magic—we shall dominate the world!”

  I had a very clear idea of what Joachim would say—Lucifer and the fallen angels must have talked like this just before their fall.

  But then the implications hit me. I sprang backwards, knocking the chair over, no longer caring who had the initiative in this conversation. “Elerius! This is black magic you’re advocating. You’ve sold your soul to the devil!”

  V

  Young Walther was almost as terrified as I. He retreated rapidly in the opposite direction. I stood with my back against the locked door, the boy with his back against a window, and Elerius sat deserted in the middle of his study.

  He actually managed a chuckle. “That would certainly justify all the evil things you’ve thought of me over the years, wouldn’t it! But no, Daimbert. My soul is still my own. As is my pride—which would suffer irrevocably if everyone knew my best effects were not due to my own magic but to the workings of a demon. Go ahead and check for the presence of the supernatural. You’ll not find it here.”

  I checked at
once, the same spell I had used in Basil’s castle. Here, as there, I found no demonic influence, not even the faint taste of evil lingering at the edge of perception from a demon trying to hide itself.

  “Come back, Prince,” Elerius continued, fairly under control now and smiling. “I’m sorry if the wizard frightened you. But he won’t hurt you.” Walther returned slowly, not crying but right on the edge of doing so.

  I righted my chair with hands that just barely did not tremble. “Black magic or not, Elerius, you’re still searching for powers beyond anything human.”

  He shook his head, still smiling. He was back in charge of the situation, jealousy and bitterness thoroughly concealed. “You’re sounding like your priest friends again, Daimbert. You know I’ve warned you about that. And very soon I shall stop giving you any more second chances to change your mind and join me! Know that, with you or not, I will become ruler of the West. If you persist in being finicky about bloodshed, then I shall let you leave here alive, charged with telling all those kings and wizards to cease their opposition to me at once. That way I shall not have to kill anyone else, which of course would be my own preference too.”

  Reason had failed—time to try threats.

  “I shall neither,” I said clearly and conversationally, “join you in world domination nor try—unsuccessfully, I’m sure— to persuade anyone else that the world would be best if you ran it. I’ve given you a chance to end this without destroying yourself or anyone else, but now Ishall have to destroy you.”

  He looked startled at this wild claim—but it was not entirely a bluff.

  “You’re so good at discovering things in people’s pockets,” I continued, fierce and grim now. “Tell me what I have in mine!”

  He would have been wondering this ever since I came in the room. A magical object is normally hard to detect if it is not functioning, but in my pocket I had a bottled Ifrit, even now struggling and shouting tiny threats that I had long since ignored. A wizard as good as Elerius would have spotted it at once without necessarily knowing what it was.