“An evil presence,” said Zahlfast, as though this answered a question. “We’ve known in the City for several years that there was a supernatural focus here in Yurt, or at least nearby, but it was impossible to localize it precisely or even to say whether it was for good or evil. Several of the wizards at the school thought it might be a witch living in the forest who had taken the step into black magic.”
“It’s not in the forest,” I said positively. “It’s here in the castle. It was coming home to his kingdom that nearly killed the king.”
“I knew it was here in the castle when I got your letter.”
“But how could you know that? I didn’t say anything about it.”
“The very paper your letter was written on was permeated with the supernatural. Didn’t you know that? That’s why, when I arrived and discovered that the supernatural influence stopped at the moat, I asked you to meet me outside.”
“But how could you tell anything from the paper?” I demanded, intensely frustrated, thinking the wizards of the school had been deliberately withholding information from me. But then I saw Zahlfast smiling and said in a lower voice, “Was that maybe in one of the lectures I missed?”
It turned out that it was. There was a rather simple spell to recognize the presence of a supernatural influence, a modern, more universal spell than the one the old wizard had taught me for detecting magic potions. I glanced over the garden walls at the turrets of the castle and felt my heart sink. I didn’t want to try the spell. Yurt was my kingdom, and I loved it, and if I confirmed my fears I might never feel the same about it again.
“Do you think the king will become sick again?” I said.
“You think he was made ill by supernatural forces?”
“Dominic thought an evil spell had been put on him,” I said, “even though I didn’t believe him at first.” I gave Zahlfast a quick summary of the king’s three-year illness and miraculous recovery.
“If he really was healed miraculously,” said Zahlfast somewhat dubiously, “he should be safe from black magic, or at least from the effects of the particular evil spell that was put on the castle.”
“But will the spell now turn against someone else?” I said. “Such as the queen?” This was not a possibility I had contemplated until I said it, but it suddenly seemed fearfully likely. “Or do you think it’s not merely a spell, but a demon loose in the castle?”
Zahlfast did not answer for a minute. “I’m not the person to ask,” he said at last. “I specialize in transformations, not demonology.” I remembered then a conversation I had had with him in the City several years ago, during which it had become clear that he was just as terrified of demons as I was. But he stood up. “I’ll come into the castle with you and see what I can tell.”
But the first thing he said, as we entered the courtyard with its whitewashed walls and green shutters, was, “What a lovely little castle! None of the other young wizards can have as charming a kingdom.”
In my chambers, however, he looked around quickly, then said, “The supernatural influence is quite strong here.”
I was about to demand to know whether he thought I was practicing black magic myself, but then I looked at his face and decided it was safer not to ask.
Instead I said, “Let me show you my glass telephones. They don’t work, but they re very attractive.”
At this he actually laughed. “Somehow, when you left the school, I never imagined that you were the type of wizard who becomes a telephone technician.”
“Neither did I,” I said cheerfully. “That’s why they don’t work. But the queen wanted me to try.” I thought guiltily that it had been some time since I had tried anything new.
“I’ll show you something, though,” I said, reaching one of the telephones down from the shelf. “Watch the base.” I set the instrument down, lifted the receiver, and spoke the name attached to the wizards’ school.
“Pretty amusing, isn’t it?” I said as the faint ringing came through the receiver and the base lit up to snow the school’s telephone on its table, with someone reaching to answer it. “Wait; it gets even funnier. Try to talk.‘ I handed him the receiver.
Just as the Lady Maria and I had done, he shouted, “Hello? Can you hear me?” to an unhearing wizard at the other end, even though that wizard’s voice came through faint but clear.
But when the other wizard hung up and the telephone base went dark, Zahlfast was not laughing. “You realize, of course,” he said with what I might even have imagined was awe, “that no one’s ever been able to do this before: attach a far-seeing spell to an object.”
“But it doesn’t work as a telephone. Sometimes I’ve even thought that whatever evil spell was put on the castle was hindering my magic.”
“I think you’ll be able to make it work,” he said in his schoolteacher voice. “Keep working at it.”
At that moment we were interrupted by a knock. I opened it, expecting the Lady Maria ready to resume her lesson, and was surprised to see Joachim.
I tried to draw him inside, to introduce him to Zahlfast, but he wouldn’t let me.
“I’m going,” he said, “and I wanted to let someone know I probably won’t be back for morning service. The king and queen aren’t here.”
“I think they went hunting. But where are you going?”
He paused as though unwilling to say, but his enormous black eyes steadily met mine. “A girl down in the village, five miles from here, was bitten by a viper last week,” he said at last, as though there had been no pause. “The doctors have tried all their draughts and potions, but nothing has availed. She’s near death. They want me to pray for her.”
He turned and was gone before I could answer, striding across the courtyard to where one of the stable boys had a horse saddled and ready. A man in a brown tunic was mounted and waiting by the gate.
“Is that your friend the chaplain?” said Zahlfast behind me.
I nodded, watching the two ride through the gate and away. I knew, without the chaplain telling me, that the news of the king’s miraculous recovery must have spread at once throughout the kingdom, and that anyone now who needed a miracle would not be satisfied with their local priest but would want the castle chaplain.
“So tell me more about herbal magic,” said Zahlfast. Although I had had some success teaching a little magic to the king and the Lady Maria, it was extremely odd to be suddenly explaining something to my former teacher. It was also difficult to do with no herbs at hand; the sense that the old wizard had taught me, of how to determine a plant’s properties just by handling it, was difficult to put into words.
But I had been able to explain at least some of the basic principles when I heard voices, the sound of hooves, and the queen’s laugh in the courtyard, and realized the hunting party had returned. “You’ll have to stay for dinner,” I said, “and I’d be delighted to have you stay with me if you are willing to spend the night. Even for you, a two-hundred-mile flight can’t be easy.”
To my surprise, he agreed. At dinner, he took the chaplain’s chair across the table from me, which kept on startling me, as I would look up from my plate to see a face I had stopped being accustomed to see, in the context in which I had recently become accustomed to seeing another’s. He kept our table highly entertained, with gossip from the City and stories about the northern land of dragons, which he had visited. I saw even the servants at the next table leaning to catch his words.
“I’ll have to tell you something I tell all the young wizards after the first checkup,” he said as he prepared to leave the next morning. We were standing outside the castle gate, looking down at the red and golden foliage of the forest. “I doubt this would be a problem for you anyway, but some of the young wizards, when they find that the school is still interested in what they’re doing, feel they can ask for help for every little problem. We certainly want to make sure that magic is being practiced well throughout the western kingdoms, but we just don’t have the time to keep he
lping out fully qualified wizards who should know how to do magic on their own.”
But then his smile came out. “In your case, write me whenever you want. There were some of the teachers who had doubts you’d even learn enough magic to become a magician, but I knew from the beginning you’d someday be capable of becoming a good wizard.”
This would have been more of a compliment if it hadn’t been for the implication that “someday” had not yet arrived.
“Well, it was delightful to see you,” I said, inane once more. Zahlfast rose from the ground and sped away, west over the treetops toward the City. It really had been very nice to see him, even though I continued to feel extremely irritated that he and the Master had apparently engineered my position at Yurt for me, for reasons he had perhaps still not told me completely.
As I watched his flying figure disappear in the distance, I wondered again if he had in fact even told me the real reason for his visit. I realized there were a number of questions I had not asked him, or if I had asked he had not answered. He had never said where he thought the evil spell on the castle might come from, and I had not had a chance to ask his opinion of the old wizard’s empty tower room. Well, if I was supposed to be fully qualified to practice magic on my own, I would have to do so.
As I turned to start back into the castle, I saw a another distant figure, this one on horseback, coming up the road toward the castle. In a moment, I recognized Joachim and waited for him to reach me.
I became alarmed at his appearance when he came closer. His usually smooth hair was rumpled, his vestments wrinkled and stained, and his hand slack on the reins. The accentuated gauntness of his cheeks and his unseeing stare made me realize he was exhausted from more than riding five miles home after staying up all night.
I took the horse’s bridle to lead it across the bridge and helped him dismount. He seemed to notice me for the first time.
“Do you think it’s too late for me to hold chapel services this morning?” he asked, clearly concerned about this lapse.
“The king and queen have already left to go hunting again,” I told him. “Tomorrow’s Sunday; service can wait until then.”
“All right,” he said meekly and started moving slowly toward his room. He stopped then, looked back, and told me what I had already guessed. “The little girl died.”
Part Four
The Duchess
I
The first snow had reached Yurt. It wasn’t very much snow, a light dusting in the courtyard, but as evening came on it rose and whirled in the wind, and made all of us in the great hall linger around the fireplace after supper. Through the tall windows, I could see the moon, slightly orange and half obscured by whipping clouds—what Gwen told me they called in Yurt a witch’s moon.
The Lady Maria had been talking about dragons at supper. The combination of Zahlfast’s visit and the first volume of Ancient and Modern Necromancy, which I had given her to read when the first-grammar continued to prove frustrating, had given her enough information about the northern land of wild magic that she was talking as though she wanted to go there herself.
“But Maria, it’s terribly cold even here!” said one of the other ladies with a laugh. “Think how much colder it would be so much farther north.”
“Than maybe I’ll try to go there in the summer,” she said, undeterred. “Or maybe a dragon would come here.”
The other ladies, who clearly did not believe in dragons, or if they did certainly believed they had nothing to do with Yurt, all laughed thoroughly at this.
I at least knew dragons were real, and maybe it was to support the Lady Maria that I decided to make an illusory dragon. I had never tried to match my predecessor by producing illusions over dessert, but while most of the castle was lingering by the fire it seemed a good time to start.
Illusions are among the first things they teach at the wizards’ school, and they are so much fun that wizardry students tend to stay up late challenging each other with different effects, which is why even carnival magicians are proficient at them. At any rate, even though I knew I could never equal my predecessor’s skill at lifelike creations, I started on a dragon.
It stayed rather flat-looking, and at certain angles one could see right through it, but that didn’t deter me, as I set out to make a dragon that would fill our entire end of the hall. It certainly didn’t hurt my efforts that the queen came over at once, eyes dancing, to watch the dragon being constructed.
First I did the tail, long and reptilian with a double row of spines down the center. When I had the tail lashing nicely, I started on the body, massive and scaled, with six legs and long, scaled wings. It was only coincidence, I told myself, that I made the iridescent scales emerald green. By now most of the castle was watching; even the servants who had taken the dishes down to the kitchen came back.
The head was the hardest part. I gave my dragon a gaping mouth with several hundred teeth, long fringed ears, and eyes of fire. It actually looked more like the dragon costume at the harvest carnival than like the rather small blue dragon in the basement of the wizards’ school, the only real dragon I had actually seen. But since no one else there had ever seen a dragon at all, this did not matter. They stood well back from its slowly lashing tail and watched with growing excitement.
And I decided to make it especially exciting. As soon as I had finished the last detail, the long forked yellow tongue, I gave the whole dragon the order to move and stood back to catch my breath. It was a dozen times larger than any illusion I had ever made before.
It moved spectacularly. Eyes burning and mouth opening and closing in frenzied snaps, it whirled away from me and started toward my audience.
It moved totally silently, but that was all right, because the screaming of ladies, servants, and even knights made plenty of noise. People raced for the walls or fell down flat. Dominic stood for ten seconds alone, deserted by the rest of the knights and apparently paralyzed, before he gave a shriek like an injured rabbit and dived under the table. My dragon kept on going. Its long tail and heavy body naturally passed through real human bodies without having the slightest effect, but they did not notice this, as they were too busy trying to avoid the head.
Even the king took refuge behind his throne. But the Lady Maria, sheltering in the doorway that led to the kitchen, with half the castle staff behind her, was watching in what I could only describe as avid delight.
Almost frightened by what I had done, I said the words to slow the dragon down, intending to make it curl up placidly before the fire before I broke the spell of illusion.
And then I saw two people advancing on the dragon from opposite directions. One was the chaplain, who held a crucifix at arm’s length before him, and whose eyes glowed with almost the same intensity as my dragon’s. The other, armed with a poker from the fireplace, was the queen.
This had gone far enough. I said the two words to break the illusion, and the dragon was gone, leaving nothing but a shower of sparks that lingered for five seconds and then were gone as well.
The hall was suddenly very silent, and I held my breath, wondering how I had managed to make my magic go so thoroughly astray. But then the silence was broken by the king clapping.
“Marvelous, Wizard, marvelous!” he cried. “I’ve never seen anything to match that!”
After only a second’s hesitation, the queen dropped the poker and began to applaud as well. The knights and ladies came slowly back toward the center of the room and joined in. Dominic came out from under the table as though trying to convey the impression he had never been there.
Everyone started talking at once, most apparently trying to persuade each other, themselves, and me that they had not in fact been in fear for their lives. The king did it most convincingly.
“Our old wizard used to do illusions all the time,” he told me, “and they were beautiful. I thought when he retired that I’d never see anything like that again. But his, well, they never moved like that!”
; There was a general laugh, and people started gathering up their hats and cloaks for the short trip from the great hall back to their chambers.
I looked around for Joachim. Although we had remained cordial since the king’s recovery, we had somehow never shared a bottle of wine in the evening again. If I had owed him something of an apology before, I was afraid I owed him one even more now. But he had already gone.
I glanced across the hall toward Dominic. He was standing next to the fire, talking to one of the knights with great laughs and many hand gestures, on a completely different topic. I had originally been hoping to talk to him this evening, but now I decided it would be better to wait until the next day.
The next morning, when the sun was melting the light layer of snow, I went to find Dominic. I had decided I had to be systematic, and even though I didn’t like the thought of talking to him just now, he had what I needed.
It seemed fairly clear that a spell had been put on Yurt. It was the spell that had nearly killed the king, and while the chaplain had broken its hold on him in particular, the spell was still there. I could still not sense the evil touch except obliquely, when least expecting it, but I was now armed with Zahlfast’s magic formula for detecting the supernatural.
So far, I had found high concentrations of supernatural influence in my own chambers, the chapel, and the chaplain’s room. I didn’t like this at all until I decided that the spell was just detecting a saintly presence from the chaplain, who had after all spent a number of evenings during the summer in my chambers.
But no wonder, I thought, that Zahlfast had wanted to visit me. When he received a letter reeking of the supernatural, and knowing there was already something odd happening in Yurt, he must have wondered if I had plunged into black magic. I was irritated enough with him for this lack of trust that I had not written him again.
A Bad Spell in Yurt Page 12