Is This Apocalypse Necessary?

by C. Dale Brittain_Wizard of Yurt 06

  It took me half an hour to find the right spot, probing magically for bones that might still bear some of the imprint of the great creature to whom they had once belonged. The first time I thought I had found the dragon’s remains the aura seemed somehow wrong, and when I dug with a stick in an earthy mound, which my magic told me was full of bones, I brought only beef bones to light. Beef bones? Some long-forgotten garbage pit, I decided, dropping the T-bone I had picked up and wiping my hand on my trousers. The dragon must be somewhere else. I found it at last, the spot well away from the castle. Again I started digging with a stick, decided that was too slow and too undignified for a wizard, and recklessly used powerful spells to throw cubic yards of dirt aside at a time.

  It had been thirty years, and there was not much left of the dragon other than the bones—even its scaly skin survived only in patches. But anyone coming across this skeleton, tumbled about as it was, dug up and chewed by foxes and badgers over the years, would have known that this was no garbage dump—unless the dump of monstrous giants. The massive ribs still survived at least in part, the long leg-bones, the thin, lightweight bones that would once have supported the wings, the long claws—and the teeth.

  I tugged at the teeth, longer than my hand, working them loose while being careful to avoid the still-sharp points. I didn’t like the way the skull’s empty eye sockets looked at me, or how the dead jaws gaped, disarticulated. Even Elerius, I told myself, could not suddenly reclothe these bones with flesh and skin and put a living, ferocious brain back into this empty skull. But I still felt better once I had assembled a pile of teeth and could throw dirt back across the dragon’s remains.

  Now that I had the teeth, all I had to do was figure out what to do with them. Lifting them with magic so I wouldn’t have to handle them any more, I headed up the hill and home.

  Between my funeral, where everyone had spoken so well of me, and this homecoming to Yurt, where everyone in the castle, from the queen to the stable boys, was first stunned and then overjoyed, I could be in serious danger, the voice in the back of my head commented, of thinking myself something special. Even the flying beast received a great deal of attention and some of the melons he so richly deserved.

  But I had no time to enjoy hearing how much everyone had missed me. It was already late afternoon, and I still had to figure out how to make warriors out of a pile of sharp and dirty teeth, how to control them, and how to get them to a castle two hundred miles away—all before either Elerius attacked the royal encampment outside his castle, or the kings got so restless they decided to attack themselves.

  My study was disconcertingly neat, and for a moment I really did fear that the queen had been cleaning out my effects, until I remembered that Theodora had gone through my papers.

  She didn’t seem to have removed anything, other than the old Master’s letter naming me his heir, but she had demonstrated a flair for organization generally lacking amid her cloth scraps and pattern pieces in Caelrhon. All my books were shelved in rational order, my own notes placed tidily in folders in the drawers, and my pens and pencils lined up, ready for use.

  I immediately destroyed the pristine order by piling my desk with books: old Naurag’s register, Count Basil’s primer of the gruesome magic of blood and bone, my predecessor’s notebooks, even the books belonging to a long-dead ducal wizard who had died well before I even came to Yurt. I slapped the two volumes of Ancient and Modern Necromancy on top of the pile in the hope that a little school magic could give at least a semblance of calm and order to the old undisciplined magic—and to Basil’s dark spells. The Cranky Saint could not foresee the future, I reminded myself, could not say for certain what I might or might not do, but he was clearly worried that I would find the enormous power of evil too tempting in my fight against Elerius, and I didn’t want to take any chances.

  Ancient and Modern Necromancy did indeed talk about dragons’ teeth—I knew I had heard about them even before coming to Yurt as a young wizard. However, the reference was buried in a chapter on outmoded, messy practices interesting chiefly for their historic value, to show how far organized wizardry had come. No wizard today would ever dream of making undead warriors, the book announced dismissively, not like some of those misguided wizards back before the Black Wars. Besides, it asked rhetorically, wouldn’t a wizard who had successfully killed a dragon for its teeth have enough power already that a restless army that would not listen to reason would be more of a hindrance than a help to him?

  I didn’t like the part about a restless army that would not listen to reason. My dragons’ teeth were supposed to create a force to go up against Elerius, not wander dangerously through the Western Kingdoms. Ancient and Modern Necromancy pointed out in a final note that such warriors could not bear the light of the sun, which would decrease their dangerousness but also their utility.

  Oh, right. I knew that.

  The queen herself knocked on my study door to ask me to accompany her into dinner, finding me with my fingers in my hair, staring at the much more upbeat discussion of dragons’ teeth in Count Basil’s volume. Here at least was a spell to transform and activate the teeth, which Ancient and Modern Necromancy had failed to provide, but he too was quite discouraging about the effects of daylight.

  Dinner thoroughly distracted me, at least briefly, from thinking about dragons’ teeth. A roaring fire kept the autumn chill away, the brass choir played, the steaming platters held the most delicious food I could remember eating for months, and the chaplain led everyone in a prayer of thanks for my miraculous safe return. “Next time, Wizard,” said the queen with a smile and a twinkle in the emerald eyes she had passed on to Paul, “if you’re planning to die, warn us that you’re also planning to come back to life, so that we can skip the mourning period and go straight to the celebration!”

  But as soon as I had finished dessert—raspberry pudding, my favorite—I rose to return to my books. So far I had managed to avoid having to give a speech, but I didn’t want to press my luck.

  I turned now to my predecessors’ notebooks, thick with references to herbs I didn’t know, and dotted with cryptic references to some other spells he had worked out, which I didn’t understand either. But he had determined, over long months living by himself after I had replaced him as Royal Wizard in the castle, that it was possible to make a creature from old bones that could endure the sun. The more I read the more it seemed that I ought to be able to do this—improvise a combination of old herbal magic and eastern magic to make my own warriors who would fight Elerius’s.

  But I liked the idea less and less the more I read—even the most optimistic reading of Basil’s spells suggested they would be almost uncontrollable, once given motive force, and I didn’t want to have to kill Elerius’s knights.

  Especially since they were really Hadwidis’s knights.

  No way to tell unless I tried. The castle was dark and silent as I made my way out into the courtyard, carrying a magic lamp. The light made a yellow stripe across the cobblestones that reached Naurag: asleep, floating a few feet in the air, his head under one wing.

  But his head popped out as I approached. I rubbed his forehead and swung onto his back, carrying the dragons’ teeth in a bag. “So far,” I told him, “you’ve seen dragons, an Ifrit, and great armies. How would you like to watch me make dead creatures move without life?”

  IV

  Far from the royal castle I flew, up toward the high limestone plateau at one end of the kingdom. Cut into the plateau was the narrow bed of a river, flowing out of a cave sheltered by a grove of trees. That grove was both the home of a wood nymph and the site of the shrine of the Cranky Saint.

  Neither was in evidence, late on a dark November night. The hermit who served the shrine always used to have a group of apprentice hermits, I remembered, but it was too dim to make out their huts. This valley still held some of the intense magical forces left over from the world’s creation, which was why the wood nymph lived here—and which was why I hoped my
spells might work if I tried them here. Leaving Naurag and the magic lamp at the edge of the grove, I lit up the moon and stars on my belt buckle and made my way cautiously between black rivulets of water.

  I came around a beech tree’s ghostly white trunk and saw it: the shrine of Saint Eusebius. On a rough stone altar sat his reliquary, shaped from gold into a giant toe. Even on a moonless night it glowed.

  Down on my knees in front of the Holy Toe, I murmured a quiet prayer—quiet because I didn’t want to wake up the hermit whose hut backed up to the shrine. I asked the saint, as fervently as I could, to keep his eye on the undead warriors I was about to make, and to destroy them and keep them from hurting anyone else if they ended up killing me at the moment of their creation.

  Back under the night sky, a few hundred yards from the shrine, I shook the teeth out of the bag and considered them by lamplight. I doubted that God, looking at the muck from which He formed Adam, had felt anything like my reluctance. But this was no divine creation—and I was fairly sure that, if I asked Joachim, he would tell me that humans should not try to make themselves like God by doing what I was about to do.

  Was this what the saint had warned me against? I didn’t have much choice. I lined up the teeth and started on my spells.

  Count Basil’s spells worked spectacularly here in the Cranky Saint’s valley. As I spoke the slow, heavy syllables of the Hidden Language, the teeth stood up, transforming themselves with startling speed, from something I had wrenched out of a dragon’s dead jaws into something which—at least when viewed through shadows—looked almost human. I added the spells my predecessor had worked out, to keep such creatures from dissolving in the morning sun. As the magic infused them they all shook, but then went still again.

  They stood silently as though watching me, unliving, unbreathing, unmoving but ready to move. I shivered and stopped my spells, leaning against a beech and watching them in return. Basil had run together in his primer the spell to shape the creatures and the spell to activate them, but his version of the Hidden Language was close enough to what they taught at the school that I had spotted the transition point and emphatically stopped when I reached it.

  Almost indestructible, Basil’s primer called them. But if mine were indestructible, then Elerius’s warriors must be as well. Arming them would thus only make them dangerous to the castle knights, not to other creatures like them. And the whole point of risking my life and soul to make these creatures was to stop Elerius’s.

  Well, if they couldn’t stop the undead warriors now guarding Hadwidis’s castle, then maybe they could immobilize them. Primordial muck was going to be necessary after all.

  I raised gobs of mud from along the edge of the river and slathered it all over my manlike dragon’s teeth. But the mud would dry out. Stick-fast weed, that’s what I needed. Down along the stream I went, looking with the lantern until I found a patch of weeds, still growing tangled and robust this late in the season. I plucked a double handful and hurried back, half-afraid the creatures would be gone, but they still stood silent and waiting. Again using magic, I ripped up the weeds and flung the pieces against the mud. A few words made the combination of leaves and mud not just sticky but very sticky—almost anything that touched it would be trapped.

  Again I paused, catching my breath after working so much magic so fast. The next obvious step was to march them down to the coast, but I felt a deep reluctance to put them into motion.

  Maybe the Cranky Saint had good reason to worry about me—I couldn’t help but think how much easier all this would be if I could just use a demon’s power to blast Elerius and his castle to smithereens, rather than having all the mess of trying to make a viable army out of dragon’s teeth.

  A touch fell on my shoulder. I leaped five feet and spun around, wildly shaping protective spells against— Against a ragged man with a long beard, leaning on a staff. Not the saint, I realized after a terrified second, but a man younger by some fifteen hundred years: the hermit who lived here. He hadn’t had the beard the last time I saw him, but that had been a long time ago.

  “Are you dead, my son?” he asked me pleasantly.

  I leaned back against the tree and tried to slow down my heartbeat. “No. Or at any rate, not yet.”

  “You are the Royal Wizard of Yurt, are you not?” he continued. His voice was rough, as if little used, but he certainly was taking advantage of an opportunity for conversation.

  “Perhaps the account I heard of your death was mistaken. The duchess’s daughter came to the shrine of the Holy Toe to pray for your soul, but my conversation with her was very brief, so I must have misunderstood.”

  If I survived, I made a mental note never to fake my own death again. It made too many explanations necessary. For the moment I skipped the explanations. “I’m here to work some magic. I was hoping not to disturb you.”

  “I see many curious things here,” the hermit said gently, “from the wood nymph to visions of the saint to creatures that I am never sure later I really saw. So you must forgive me for wondering if I might now be seeing a dead man. Though I must say,” frowning toward my warriors, “those are some of the strangest things I have seen lately.”

  “Me too,” I agreed. I took a deep breath, preparatory to setting them into motion, then changed my mind. There was no way I could get them to obey me long enough to march obediently to Elerius’s kingdom without getting into trouble along the way. I was going to need help. But in the meantime I had to lock them up safely. “Would it disturb you if I put them into the cave?”

  Carefully, one at a time, I lifted the dragon’s-teeth warriors and transported them inside the mouth of the cave from which the river flowed. I lined them up so that they did not quite touch each other, not wanting them stuck together when I came for them. I also didn’t want them suddenly activated when I wasn’t here—for all I knew Elerius might have tracked my movements and be planning to set them loose the moment my back was turned. I erected a mat of branches across the cave mouth, held it in place with a magic lock, then slowly pulled out King Solomon’s golden signet.

  The Ifrit in his bottle I had left behind in the royal encampment, not daring to expose him to the intense magical forces of this valley, but the seal I had brought with me. I didn’t have any molten lead—mud would have to do this time. The hermit watched with interest as I pressed the seal into a dollop of mud and spoke the activating words I had learned from Kazalrhun. The mat of branches shivered and went stiff. As I stepped back, I could catch a glittering shimmer of magic from the mud. No undead warriors were going to get out of the cave through this entrance.

  “As I recall,” said the hermit with his gentle smile, “many years ago when I was still an apprentice hermit, the other apprentices and I offered you hospitality at our huts in the grove. Would you accept my hospitality again?”

  Back when he had been an apprentice I had been a much less experienced wizard, having neither a flying beast nor an air cart, and the long flight back from the valley to the royal castle had seemed much too hard to attempt late at night. Or maybe I was just getting too soft in my old age to find appealing sleeping on a hut’s dirt floor, with the cold, dank wind coming in the open doorway and only a crust to look forward to for breakfast.

  “Thank you,” I said, “but I could not dream of disturbing your devotions.” It might be for the last time in my life, but I was going to sleep in my own bed in Yurt again.

  But by midmorning I was back in front of Elerius’s castle, talking again to the kings. “I’ve created my own army of undead creatures,” I told them, leaving out the detail that I wasn’t sure I could control them, “and as soon as I transport them here we can attack.”

  “What did you make them out of, old wine bottles?” asked King Lucas sarcastically. Reverence for the wizard who had miraculously returned from the dead seemed to be fading rapidly. I didn’t dare ask Lucas whether his own royal wizard was back at the school or holed up with Elerius, but in either event he seemed to have
lost any respect for wizardry he might once have had.

  “I made them out of dragons’ teeth,” I said evenly, which at least silenced Lucas. I could hear several of the other kings asking each other in awestruck undertones how I could have possibly overcome a dragon—something I still sometimes marveled at myself. “And I’ll be bringing them here this evening.” At this I was pleased to note that several lookeddistinctly uneasy.

  “Have you tested them in battle?” asked one grizzled old king, who wore a battered steel and leather helmet that might actually have seen service during the Black Wars.

  Of course I hadn’t. “Their enemies will not escape them easily,” I said vaguely, trying to decide how I was going to get all the warriors down here without having them stick to every bush in half a dozen kingdoms. “With reinforcements on the way, I must ask you to wait until at least tomorrow morning to join the battle. Elerius would not listen to either reason or threats while he felt himself secure, but if my army can neutralize his we may still be able to avoid killing very many more of our men.”

  In the meantime, what was Elerius doing? His castle was silent and ominous. The sun had emerged today, but its rays were sharply slanted even in the middle of the day and did little to warm the chilly air. Leaving the kings arguing strategy, I went and found Hadwidis, sitting with Antonia, Theodora, and Gwennie beside her, staring toward the castle as though she could evict Elerius by gaze alone.

  I sat down next to the runaway nun. “I saw your brother,” I told her quietly. “He believes he is the heir to the kingdom, but he is learning magic with Elerius.”

  “Has he been turned to evil like that wizard?” she asked with a sideways glance toward me, then returned her eyes to the castle. A former nun, I thought, would still think in terms of good and evil. I wondered if she was regretting leaving the nunnery, in spite of her frustration with the restrictive atmosphere there, and in spite of the shove out the door the Cranky Saint seemed to have given her.