Daughter of Magic - Wizard of Yurt - 5 (10 page)

Elerius finished brushing out the tangles and started braiding Antonia’s hair. A few magic words helped keep the strands in place until he could work them in. While he braided she took hold of a handful of his black beard and, humming, started brushing it.

“This may not have anything to do with the Lady Justinia, Daimbert,” said Elerius casualy. Antonia, having exhausted the immediate possibilities of his beard, was now braiding her dol’s yarn hair. “Consider this: it may rather be directed toward you.”

“Me?”

“Forget Xantium for the moment,” he continued, stil speaking in a casual voice Antonia happily ignored as she started singing to her dol. “Think about your trip years ago through the area where this sort of magic is widespread. I believe the others who were with you then are either now dead or at any rate not here in Yurt. Did you make any foes among the wizards of the Eastern Kingdoms?”

“I might have,” I said reluctantly. But al the hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood on end to hear someone else voice my worst suspicions.

It had been fifteen years ago on our way to the East, when we had met the dark, half-living wizard Vlad. Mostly by luck, I had been able to get us away and out of his snares without giving him what he wanted. Although I had not actualy intended to hurt him, when we fled, that eastern wizard’s body had been partialy destroyed, dissolved by sunlight. . . .

So if Vlad, who had screamed curses after me, had found me at last, what would he try next, now that I had been able to withstand his warriors just long enough for the dawn to come?

VI

There was no message from Celia al day. In early evening I left the castle ostentatiously, standing on the drawbridge talking to Paul for several minutes before flying away. The story Elerius and I put out in the royal court was that I was searching by night for whatever practitioner of black magic had unsuccessfuly attacked us, while he stayed on guard in the castle. We were doing more, however: testing to see whether the castle—including Justinia—was the target, or whether I was.

They raised the drawbridge and lowered the portculis behind me; a lot more than one watchman would be on guard tonight. Elerius also stood ready to put spels, far more powerful than anything I could have managed alone, al around the castle, to stop any further magical creatures in their tracks before they reached the wals. Antonia, perched on his shoulder, waved as I flew away.

I did not go far, only a few miles, before settling myself with my back against a tree. After last night I was exhausted, but there were spels to hold off sleep as long as I was wiling to put up with a bad headache. I built a fire and began to work ilusions: large, brightly lit ilusions, ones designed to proclaim to anyone within miles that there was a wizard here.

If Vlad—or whoever had attacked the castle last night—was after me, then I might not have long to wait. As long as I did not go to sleep, and as long as none of my friends or my daughter was in immediate danger, I should be able to fight back or escape. I hoped.

Unless Justinia, or perhaps some other member of the royal court for reasons I could not even imagine, realy was the target. After a few hours in which nothing happened except that I perfected a few details of my ilusions technique, I made a particularly large golden phoenix burning with realistic flames, donned a spel of invisibility, and darted through the night toward the castle.

It was quiet except for the knights in the courtyard, patroling slowly, exchanging comments, lifting their lanterns at the faint thump I made landing on the battlements. Justinia’s automaton hovered at her door.

I flew silently and invisibly across the courtyard to my own chamber windows. A magic lamp made a point of light within. Elerius sat reading, and beyond him I could just see a rounded shape on the couch that must be Antonia, asleep. Elerius lifted his head a moment, but I was fairly sure that even he, with al his abilities, could not see me. I flew upwards again and back to my slowly disintegrating phoenix.

The hours of the short midsummer night seemed to drag on forever. From being keyed up with anticipation of a magical attack, I went to being tired and bored. I replaced the phoenix with a pair of dragons who placed their claws on each other’s shoulders and did a tango, but my heart wasn’t in it. As a test, this seemed a dismal failure. I stared vacantly and gloomily out into the darkness beyond my fire. Whether aimed at the Lady Justinia or aimed at me, it looked like the next attack would not come for a whiles—just long enough to give us a false sense of security.

I had falen into a doze shortly before dawn when I was abruptly brought back to ful consciousness by the crack of a broken stick. My fire had burned down to cold ashes, and al my ilusions were long gone. I spun toward the sound to see a huge, dark shape coming over the hil, silhouetted against the eastern sky.

It was in the form of a man, a man who walked heavily and awkwardly with his arms straight in front of him, a man ten feet tal.

I shot away, my heart hammering. The creature folowed me, with a drag in its step like something dead that had forgotten how to walk, watching me with yelow eyes the size of saucers. There was an inteligence behind those eyes I did not recal seeing in the warriors. The creature’s heavy footfals seemed to shake the earth.

Al right, I thought. We know then that I’m the target. The test is a success. We can stop now!

The creature showed no sign of stopping. I kept ahead of it, but it moved surprisingly quickly for something so awkward. Elerius might have been able to help me against it, but I didn’t dare head back to the castle, trailing a creature of nightmare, to get him.

Hovering just ahead of it, I madly tried both binding and dissolution spels, but al were ineffective. Years ago I had been pursued by a creature something like this and had found a way to improvise; desperately I tried to remember the words of the Hidden Language that had worked then. But nothing seemed to work now, and it kept on advancing. When I glanced over my shoulder to see that it was indeed maneuvering me toward the castle, I darted off in a different direction.

“Come on,” I muttered toward the dawn. If this creature was made with the same magic of blood and bone that had held the warriors together only as long as darkness lasted, I should be safe in another few minutes.

The creature, ignoring my change in direction, continued toward the castle. I dropped to the ground, yeled to get its attention, and very slowly backed away on foot: slowly enough, I hoped, to focus it on me again.

My foot caught on an uneven tussock just as it made a spring at me. I ducked and roled, suppressing a scream of terror, and shot up into the air an inch ahead of its grabbing hands. The yelow eyes seemed to be considering me in thoughtful assessment.

Twenty feet above it, I tried taking deep breaths. Showing no more signs of starting toward the castle, the creature watched me patiently. The mouth, a slit in the face, opened in what might have been a smile.

Inside were quite real teeth.

I tried probing the spels that propeled it, hoping that if I could discover their structure I might find some way to reverse them. Slipping into the stream of magic, I probed there, and there—and came back to myself to find that my flying spel was disintegrating, and that I had descended almost within reach of the creature’s outstretched hands.

Again I dodged away just in time. Sweat poured down my face, both at the closeness of my escape and at what I had found. My quick magical probe had shown me no way that this creature could be dissolved, but it had revealed the sorts of spels that held it together, a mix of spels I had never seen together before: the old western magic of earth and herbs that long predated the school; the eastern magic of blood and bone; and, quite unmistakeable, a twist of school magic.

The rising sun lifted itself over the horizon at last, flooding the creature with pale light. It showed no sign whatsoever of dissolving.

“So some school-trained wizard has gone renegade,” I said to myself, “and has trained with Vlad—and may be here as his agent.” I would have to telephone the school at once—if I could only stop this creature first.

It had been reaching for me, but now it lowered its arms. Keeping its round yelow eyes on me, it opened its mouth and spoke. “This is a hard spel to keep going from a distance, Daimbert,” it said conversationaly. “But I am very pleased to see it works.”

And with that the creature colapsed. limbs fel off, the head tipped over, lost al the inteligence in the eyes, then dropped and roled away, and last of al the torso subsided to the earth.

My heart pounding harder than ever, I cautiously approached. The body parts were no longer those of a ten-foot creature. Most were bits of wood and leaf, but lying among them, inanimate and clearly recognizable, was the dead body of the night watchman.

And I had recognized the creatures voice. It was the voice of Elerius.

Back at the castle half an hour later, I dragged him out of my chambers and up on top of the tal northern tower, where I could curse him in privacy.

“Damnation, Elerius,” I said, low and furious, “what could you have been thinking in digging up the watchman’s body?! I’ve just had to rebury him, fast before anyone noticed.”

“I needed a body for my experiment,” he said mildly. “Your predecessor used old bones back when he made an unliving creature, as I recal, but it didn’t work as wel as it should have. I found his ledgers at the back of your shelves last night, and in reading over his notes, and putting together what I found with what we discovered yesterday from the remains of the warriors, and what I once learned myself from an old renegade magician up in the mountains, I decided that the fresher the body, the better. It isn’t as though I was hurting the watchman in any way; after al, he was already dead.” I fumed in silence until he paused, apparently feeling he had answered my objections. “I hope you’re pleased that you terrified me with your creature as wel as disgusted me with your methods,” I said angrily. “This does not seem like something the school’s best graduate should do—or would want widely known.”

He shrugged. “I feel confident you wil not tel the school about this. After al, if you did I could mention to them the curious fact that a man without brothers or sisters has somehow produced a niece. . . . And I see no reason why a wizard should let conventional squeamishness influence him. Since it was becoming clear last night that we would not get any answers at once as to who attacked the castle, I thought I might use the time profitably to see if I could make an animate creature and, at least temporarily, put my mind into it. That eastern magic has a great deal of potential, but it was a real chalenge to find a way to overcome its susceptibility to sunlight!”

Stil furious but without any good answers to what he clearly thought were convincing arguments, I said, “You always have felt the ends justify the means, haven’t you. I don’t want a grave-robber in my kingdom. Get out.”

He smiled indulgently. “I must apologize, Daimbert, for apparently frightening you even more than I intended! I couldn’t tel you what I was doing, of course, because I wanted to observe what my creature’s effect would be on the unsuspecting, but I counted on a wizard being hard to frighten. And of course I was interested to see what sort of response you might improvise. You know you can’t be serious in wanting to send me away, not before we finish finding out al we can about those undead warriors, not while your kingdom may stil be in danger. By the way, while I was probing again those warriors’ bones you saved from the bonfire, I thought I sensed some kind of latent spel in them, something we hadn’t picked up before, so we should try to discover that as wel. Since it bothers you, I’l promise not to disturb any more graves while I’m here.”

“And stay away from Antonia,” I growled, no longer ordering him out of Yurt, not sure how I had lost the initiative but quite surely having lost it. He was right: I did need his help.

He smiled again. “Do not be concerned, Daimbert. I would never take a delightful little girl apart for an experiment, or whatever you’re imagining. My goal, like that of organized wizardry, is always the good of mankind. And knowledge of magic in al its forms is one of the principal foundations of wizardry.”

He turned without waiting for a reply and stepped off the parapet, floating majesticaly back down to the courtyard. I folowed slowly, not sure how to enunciate what was wrong with his approach to magic, yet feeling that, at least for now, I would have to continue to work with him. But I also felt an implacable conviction that his ways were not mine.

PART THREE. The Bishop I

That morning Justinia announced she intended to take her elephant for a ride. “She’s ordered me to accompany her,” Gwennie told me, standing in the doorway of my chambers and trying to decide whether to laugh or be irritated. “And you too, Wizard.”

Back in my chambers, I had been drinking tea and eating cinnamon crulers. As I ate I picked up one of the warrior’s bones I had saved and fingered it, wondering absently what spel Elerius might have spotted in it and whether he might already have a very good idea and be using this as a test for me. But I had no time to worry about him. Resignedly I pushed myself to my feet. Gwennie and an elephant would not be much protection for Justinia if whoever had sent the unliving warriors returned.

“Do I have to go ride on the elephant too?” Antonia asked dubiously.

“Not if you don’t want to,” I said, relieved that she didn’t. An elephant’s back struck me as a treacherous place. But if she was not with me, who would look after her? When I had first talked to Theodora about having our daughter visit Yurt, I had not imagined how much attention would go simply into taking care of one energetic five-year-old.

Elerius looked up from his reading. From his manner our quarrel this morning might not have even taken place. He seemed to be planning an extended stay in Yurt, during which he would read through, al of the big, handwritten volumes in which my predecessor as Royal Wizard had kept his notes. “I’l watch her for you, Daimbert,” he said with a slight lift to his brows, as though understanding and amused by my predicament.