Is This Apocalypse Necessary?

by C. Dale Brittain_Wizard of Yurt 06

  Dragons can’t talk. Still trying to keep Zahlfast right side up, I peered upward. Someone was actually riding the dragon, perched on its back at the base of the wings, a tall person with a mane of silver hair. In his hand he held something long, something that glittered with magic—

  It was Gir, the elf from the land of dragons, and he wielded the Dragons’ Scepter.

  I thrust Zahlfast’s motionless form at the other wizards. “Get away!” I shouted at Gir. “Get thedragons away from the school!” And I shot upwards, dodging the barbed tail of the great dragon, and settled onto its scaly back behind him.

  Gir glanced at me quizzically but shouted something himself and gestured with the Scepter. The old wizard Naurag had dreamed of starting a school, I thought, and his own magic had just destroyed it. The alarm bells were still sounding wildly, but the fire brigade wasn’t going to have much luck against dragons.

  With a final blast of flame that melted the mortar between the bricks of the front of the building, Gir’s mount gave an almost lazy flap of its wings and rose up into the black sky.

  “It is good to see you, Daimbert,” said Gir, as though this were a friendly social visit. All around us dragons snorted small flames, and on all their backs I could make out white-robed shapes. “It has been a great many years since we have been in the lands of men, and it has changed much.”

  Years ago it probably wasn’t overrun with dragons, I thought. I spotted the window that had, not very long ago, been the window to my room at the school. The glass was gone, and the roof above was peeled away.

  “We owe mastering the dragons, such as we have, to your example,” Gir continued. “A great challenge, and I fear it took us longer than we had hoped.”

  “Me?” I gasped in horror.

  “Your obvious friendship with the purple flying beast, the one you named for the old wizard Naurag, made us realize that we had been short-sighted. We had seen the dragons only as a danger, though a danger that also protected us. Why not, we began to think after you left, why should we not tame the dragons and ride them as you had your flying beast?”

  “These aren’t tame,” I said between dry lips. The dragons kept wheeling, making to descend again toward the City, and being jerked up again by the magic of the Scepter.

  Frustrated, they snapped at each other and at each others’ riders with razor-sharp fangs.

  Gir shook his head regretfully. “It may never be possible to make them our friends as you have befriended the one you call Naurag. But as we attempted at least to learn to ride them, the thought came to me: you had sought the Dragons’ Scepter originally to use against a too-powerful wizard named Elerius.”

  “I remember telling you that,” I mumbled. Even without dragon claws and dragon fire, the school below us was continuing slowly to disintegrate, a tile sliding suddenly free from the roof, a chimney toppling, a wall beginning to buckle.

  With a far-seeing spell, I could see that the teachers had retreated a safe distance down the street—it looked as though severalwere having to restrain the librarian from going back in.

  “We recalled,” Gir added calmly, “a time, perhaps a dozen years ago, when a wizard summoned a great number of dragons out of our northern land and down to the lands of men. His spells were very powerful—he drew the dragons from their valley even before we were aware of it, though we have always attempted to keep them safely there. And we began to think that that wizard might have been the same as the Elerius of whom you spoke.”

  I nodded, realized he couldn’t see me, and said, “Yes, that was he.”

  “I regretted then letting you return here without the Dragons’ Scepter you so obviously needed, or even any offer of assistance. Perhaps we have been too comfortable, too complacent—too selfish. Thus, as soon as we had mastered the dragons enough that we thought we could control them on a long flight, we determined to start south. A great burst of magic, which stirred up the dragons even thousands of miles away, told us your need was great.”

  The Ifrit, I thought. Nothing like his power had been seen in the West since the early days of the earth.

  “And when,” Gir continued, “we found the City where the old wizard who had given us the Scepter once lived, we also found here a group of young wizards. They told us the wicked Elerius was inside, so, since the dragons were restless anyway, we thought we should attack his fortress.”

  The rumbles and scraping sounds below us had steadily been increasing in volume. A rising damp wind pushed against weakened walls. Now, very slowly, those walls began to tilt. Stones that had stood solidly in place for centuries shifted and broke free of their mortar. The remaining turrets waved wildly for a moment, and then, almost majestically, the wizards’ school, the center of organized magic, collapsed with a deafening roar.

  IV

  There had been a number of embarrassing failures in my career as a wizard, starting with the disaster that had gotten me the nickname of Frogs. But this was the worst yet. I could blame

  it on Evrard and the rest of the young wizards, on the dragons, on Elerius himself. But assigning blame only distracted from the central fact, that the real one to blame was me.

  I stared dully down, listening to the shouts from the citizens of the City, the people who had managed for years to carry on ordinary lives in the shadow of the school, and now faced dragons and disaster. I could think of only two factors that kept this from being a total failure: Elerius must be dead, crushed in the rubble, and none of the teachers, after this, would possibly want me to be Master of whatever fragments of organized wizardry remained.

  Joachim might think it an advantage that people whom I met became interested in my cause. It just showed how wrong even a bishop could be.

  “Our work here seems done,” said Gir, looking down at the plumes of dust and smoke rising from the rubble.

  “We mean no harm to the people of this city, now that the evil wizard’s fortress is destroyed. Perhaps we should return to our own land.”

  And he probably expected me to be properly grateful. “Well, the cafeteria’s no longer serving,” I managed to say, “but if you’re hungry maybe I could get you something down at the wharfs—”

  But Gir just smiled and tossed back his silver hair. “We brought our own fruit with us. Thank you, Daimbert, but I am not sure what these dragons would do here if I were not constantly alert. Contact us again if we can help you further!”

  “Any time,” I mumbled, slid from the dragon’s back, just dodged a snap of its great jaws as Gir rapped it reprovingly with the Scepter, and descended slowly toward the remains of the school. With a final wave, Gir and the other elves shot away into the night, their dragons lighting up the sky with a last sheet of flame.

  The destruction seemed confined primarily to the school itself and to the area that had once been the elegant plaza at its base. The fires the dragons had set seemed to have been put out by the school’s building stones falling on top of them. The teachers stood, white-faced, in a little group, hardly seeming to hear the surrounding shouting and commotion. The librarian was turning over the books they had managed to rescue, barely keeping from sobbing.

  “First the Master. Now this,” another teacher said, his voice breaking.

  And there was even more than the loss of the school and its Master to leave them in despair and shock, I thought.

  All these teachers had assumed for years that, whenever the sad time came that they needed to elect a new head, they would be voting for Elerius. Even though Zahlfast had talked them out of their support for him, unlike the younger wizards who were ready for excitement whatever the cost, the older teachers had yet to come to terms with the deep betrayal they had experienced—betrayed by their own best judgment.

  Evrard came sauntering up, followed by a much more abashed-looking group of young wizards. “Even Elerius’s magic couldn’t stand up to dragon-fire!” he said, very pleased with himself and stroking his red beard. “I must say I was terrified when all those dragons appe
ared, until I spotted the dragon-riders and realized they were asking for you! The school’s got a lot of old memories buried in the mess, but now that you’re Master you’ll build it back better than ever. The plumbing, for example, was never—”

  I cut him off short. It had been my own fault that the young wizards were sitting outside the school, trying to find ways to break through its defenses, but I wasn’t going to let Evrard boast about it. “This is the greatest disaster that has ever befallen wizardry,” I said coldly. “We haven’t just lost the school building; we’ve lost untold numbers of books of magic—”

  “There must still be lots of copies of the new, printed ones,” Evrard said airily, “and who wants the old ones anyway?”

  “—as well as whatever magical artifacts were kept in the cellars. It will take years for institutionalized wizardry to recover.”

  “Well, at least we’ve gotten rid of Elerius,” said Evrard, uncowed.

  “And,” I said, seeing an additional glimmer of hope, “his library in his old kingdom had thousands of books, enough to fill at least some of the gaps caused by the destruction here. Since he won’t be needing his magical volumes now—”

  But one of the teachers lifted his head slowly, as though unbearably weary, and froze me widi the same look with which he had, years ago, frozen me in class. “Elerius is still alive.”

  I sat down amid the rubble, my head in my hands. I had compounded the destruction of the school by letting Gir leave too quickly. This is where we needed dragon-fire, to burn through the school’s foundations, down to the root of the hill to wherever he was hiding. My conversation with Elerius and the queen had made one thingvery clear, the one thing I had kept hoping I could avoid: we couldnot rest while he was free.

  Zahlfast had recovered a little in the cold airand roused himself to look toward me. “Even dragon-fire couldn’t get him out of the cellars,” he said as though reading my thoughts—for all I knew, he really was. “There are artifacts down there out of the old magic, created with spells stronger than anything we can work today, that would hold off even dragons.”

  Something left from the old wizard Naurag, I thought. Something he’d doubtless created up in the land of magic toward the end of his life, to protect his own home in the City now that he had given away the Dragons’ Scepter, and which, along with so much else, he’d failed to mention in his ledger.

  “We could just leave him down there,” Evrard suggested uncertainly.

  But no one else liked this plan. “You have no idea what other magical artifacts are down there,” one of the teachers told Evrard sternly. “If he has gone completely renegade, he could decide to destroy half of the Western Kingdoms.”

  I turned to Zahlfast and knelt beside him in the street. “You knew a way into the library, Master,” I said quietly, talking fast before he could reprove me again for calling him Master. “You’ve been at the school longer than any of us. Do you know anything—any secret passage, any spell, any magical force—that could cut through into the cellars?”

  He shivered and closed his eyes. For a moment I feared he had fainted again. But when he spoke his voice, though thin, was clear. “Now that the Master is dead,” he said, eyes still shut, “I know this school better than anyone. There used to be a way. I believe I can still remember the magic to find it again. It was a passage concealed with magic, shut with spells. The old Master—and the only Master, Daimbert!—and I built it years ago, a shortcut, we thought, down to the cellars and the powerful objects concealed there. I do not know that Elerius ever learned of it.”

  He gestured almost aimlessly. “Here. Under the street where we are now. The entrance lies under the paving stones.”

  “Then let’s find it,” I said determinedly. “If we’re ever going to get Elerius out, it will have to be now, before he has a chance to build new and stronger defenses of his own.”

  The other teachers still looked reluctant. “I think that Zahlfast—” one said uncertainly.

  The old wizard interrupted him, his voice creaky but resolute. “I think that Zahlfast wants to see if his passage is still there. I have been doing powerful spells since before you learned your first illusions, and I am not so sick that I have lost my command of wizardry! The magic to open the passage will not kill me. If Daimbert is willing to go in, then I am willing to help him find the way.”

  I wouldn’t have characterized myself as “willing” to go in, but Zahlfast had given me no choice. Some of the other teachers lifted him out of the middle of the street, and several of us used magic to wrench paving stones up and out of the way. That was the easy part.

  At first I couldn’t detect any secret passage, and really didn’t want to start digging around in the damp gravel, but Zahlfast seemed to know what he was doing. He leaned on his elbows, concentrating hard. And then slowly, his voice creakier than ever, he began speaking in the heavy syllables of the Hidden Language.

  This was no spell I knew, though it had certain affinities to spells in the old wizard Naurag’s ledger. It was enormously complex—I would have known even without hearing the strain in my old teacher’s voice what effort it took to shift magic’s four dimensions like this. I had planned to help, but realized immediately that while Zahlfast was moving earth and space I was best off out of the way.

  As he spoke, an opening grew in the center of what had once been a street: a round opening down which the gravel rattled. It swirled momentarily, almost like an illusion, then becamesolid. I tried to peer down it, both with my eyes and with magic, and could find no bottom. I looked uncertainly toward Zahlfast. The light was dim, but I could see sweat standing out on his forehead in the freezing air.

  “The passage is stable,” he gasped. “The opening is still where I remember it, and it still leads all the way down. If you’re going to go, Daimbert, go!”

  “But should I—”

  He shook his head without waiting for my question.

  He was panting now. “I don’t think I can hold it open much longer. Go!”

  None of the other teachers seemed ready to challenge me for the right to go down through a tunnel kept open with faltering magic, to meet a renegade wizard who intended to kill me.

  Already, I could see, Zahlfast was having trouble keeping his opening in place. I grabbed and squeezed his hand in case I never saw him again.

  And was startled to hear his voice in my mind, as sharp and as raspy as when he spoke aloud: “Take me with you.”

  No time for discussion. I grabbed my old teacher around the shoulders and dove, headfirst, into darkness.

  V

  A floor, faintly lit with a magical glow, came up to meet us, and I caught myself with a flying spell to land with only a small thump, setting Zahlfast down beside me. The instant we were out of the passageway it disappeared, closing over our heads with a rumble and a last fall of gravel. The shortcut’s gone, I thought, knowing Zahlfast would not have the strength to work that spell again. That meant that the only way back out was the regular way, the stairs down which Elerius must have come—and which, if they were not completely blocked by rubble, he would now be guarding.

  I spun around, ready for an attack, but at first the cellars appeared rather innocuous. The corridor in which we had landed was whitewashed and fairly featureless, uniformly lit, and as dead silent as though a whole City were not built a few dozen yards above us. I strained for sounds of Elerius—or of some horror out of the Black Wars—and could hear nothing. The rows of heavy oak doors, all closed tight and faintly glittering with magical locks, gave no hint either of menace or of the school above that had so recently been destroyed. There were none of the signs of active life and wizardry that had permeated the school: no desks with salacious spells carved into them, or books set aside with a salamander marking someone’s place, or the slowly dissolving remains of an illusion, or a forgotten cup of cold tea.

  Only once had I been down here, while still a student, when one of the teachers had sent me here on an errand to
find another one of the faculty. At that time a blue baby dragon had been kept in one of the cellar rooms, but I had only had a glimpse of it then, and I had heard that it had died a few years later.

  Zahlfast sat catching his breath and rearranging the sheet he had wrapped around himself. It gave me a momentary shiver in its likeness to the winding sheet around a corpse, but he seemed, at least for now, somewhat stronger. “If I’d told all those other faculty members I was coming with you,” he said, pleased with himself, “they would have tried to give me an argument.”

  “But why didn’t you bring one of the more knowledgeable teachers instead of me?” I asked. “I’ve been off in Yurt for years, and have no way of knowing what’s in these cellars. Wouldn’t it have been better to have someone here who actually understood the dangers?”

  He looked at me sideways from under bushy eyebrows. “No. All of the rest of the teachers understand the dangers far too well. We have at most an hour or two until Elerius starts breaking through some of the magic locks down here. I didn’t want to spend that hour or two arguing that averting the potential danger to the City and all the kingdoms around was worth the very real mortal danger to ourselves.”

  Very real mortal danger! I thought but said nothing. After all, I had claimed all along that the only way to oppose Elerius was by being dead.

  I helped Zahlfast to his feet, and we started walking slowly. He leaned on my arm, his sheet dragging behind him.

  “Doesn’t look like Elerius has gotten over here, yet,” he commented.

  “What is down here, Master?” I asked, ignoring his snort when again I called him Master. “What things did the teachers find necessary to lock away from the students?”

  “And sometimes each other?” he added with another snort. “The old Master started the collection, artifacts of great power that had been made by his teacher or his teacher’s teacher.” Naurag, I thought. “I believe there are a number of powerful objects here as well which were first created by those wizards’ contemporaries. He and I always regretted that those old wizards weren’t very conscientious in writing down their spells, but they were probably better than any wizard since—until Elerius.”