Daughter of Magic - Wizard of Yurt - 5 (17 page)

Celia was one of the first through the doors, but I reached the Lady Maria before she managed to descend from the building materials on which she had so precariously perched. She gave me a smile when she spotted me. “Right on time!” she announced and launched herself into the air. I was just able to catch her, both with my arms and with magic, and set her carefuly down.

“How nice to see you, Wizard,” she said conversationaly, straightening her dress. “And what a marvelous thing that a miracle-worker has come to the twin kingdoms and that our Celia is studying with him!” Things were happening much too fast for me. “So you came because Celia wrote you?” I asked, hoping for at least one solid piece of information. Celia had said something yesterday about teling al the people who had supported her in her religious vocation that Cyrus was going to teach her.

“And fortunately I got here just in time to see his first big miracle!” continued the Lady Maria cheerfuly. “Come on—we don’t want to miss the service!”

“What miracle?” I demanded, blocking her path.

“Restoring the burned buildings, of course,” she said blithely. “When I arrived this morning everyone was talking about it. Don’t tel me,” with a playful smile, “that just because you’re a wizard you’re going to pretend it never happened!”

“Um, go ahead into the church and I’l catch up,” I said and shot off without waiting for an answer.

But she was quite right. The burned street had been restored.

The buildings stood silent and empty now, since everyone was in church, but the charred remnants I had seen late last night were back to their former state, as solid as ever. Wood and plaster structures leaned over the high street, and sunlight glittered on windowpanes I had seen smashed. I wandered down the street, doubting my own eyes, and tried pushing against the timbers in a halfhearted and futile attempt to persuade myself it was al an ilusion.

I put my head into the doorway of an inn, blinking in the dimness. There was spiled ale on the wooden bar, filth in the straw on the floor, and dirty plates and mugs on the tables. A brown rat poked its nose out of the straw to look at me and scurried away again. Whatever saint had restored this street seemed to have been very literal. If I had been working a miracle, I would at least have cleaned up the place a little.

Flabbergasted, I leaned against the rough plastered wal outside. This certainly let the Romneys off from accusations of arson. The inn sign, its paint peeling, creaked over my head. Perhaps al the events of the day before had been my imagination, I thought wildly. But if so al the townspeople now at the cathedral, treating a quite wiling Cyrus as though this was al due to his own merit, shared the ilusion.

The air around me almost glittered with the force of the supernatural. The city always had a touch of the supernatural anyway, evident to any wizard, because of the presence of the cathedral, but this went much further.

Mixed with the aura of the saints was the faint but unmistakable imprint of evil.

III

Afternoon sun shone on the polished wood of the bishop’s study. Joachim, bareheaded but stil in his formal scarlet, sat behind his desk, his enormous dark eyes fixed on me. “I cannot leave my cathedral and my people now,” he said quietly, “not until I know what is happening here.”

“It’s not complicated,” I said, irritable because my insides felt so cold my legs were trembling. We could hear, faint in the distance, laughing and singing from the high street, where the innkeepers had announced free ale for everyone in honor of the miraculous restoration of their businesses. “Cyrus is working with a demon.” How, I asked myself, could I ever have imagined there was anything good about him?

“And as long as you won’t let me take him out of the cathedral there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“It could have been as he says,” Joachim said somewhat uneasily. Whatever else I might have done, I seemed to have made the bishop doubt his own judgment. “The saints might have answered his prayers and restored the buildings.”

“I thought you just said the saints don’t do things like that,” I shot back.

He shook his head slowly. “I have never known of such a thing. A saint might act to protect his own shrine, and saints of course keep demons out of the churches as long as the hearts of the priests are pure, but they do not usualy concern themselves with the material things of this world.”

“Then if it wasn’t a saint,” I said firmly, “it’s got to be a demon.”

“Even a demon could not restore a soul from death,” Joachim objected. He spoke quietly but his gaze was intense.

“We’re not talking about restoring a soul,” I said, looking away. This could not be any easier for the bishop than it was for me. Fingernails dug into my palms. “I think he’s made time run backwards, very localy. That’s how he rebuilt the houses, how he repaired the toys, even how he brought animals without souls back to life. Let me cal the demonology experts at the school.” Joachim lifted an eyebrow. “You did not cal them from the cathedral office when you said you needed to cal Yurt?”

For al I could tel he might have been making a joke. “Of course not. I don’t lie to you, Joachim. I caled Yurt because Antonia’s safety is even more important to me than your demon.”

“It is not,” he said, no trace of humor now, “my demon.”

The thought crossed my mind that if Cyrus indeed was working supernatural black magic, then he could not have been behind the undead warriors; that had been perverted but natural magic. Which meant that I had another faceless enemy to worry about as wel as the Dog-Man. “Whoever’s demon it is,” I snapped, “we need an expert to find it and send it back to hel.” The bishop rose with a swirl of vestments. “Let us go speak to Cyrus together then, Daimbert. I wil not have you or any other wizard bulying one of my seminary students.”

“He may be infecting the rest of your students with evil,” I said as we went out through the study door, the same one I had slammed behind me yesterday morning as I came to murder the bishop. A fine one I was to talk about infection—although the madness seemed to have passed off him as quickly as it had passed off me.

“If the saints heard his prayers and truly worked a miracle,” said Joachim, ignoring my comment, “he needs my spiritual guidance so that he does not become puffed up and proud. By now the crowds wil have dissipated, and I may even be able to cal my cathedral my own again.”

The only thing I had going for me, I thought as we walked the short distance down the cobbled street from the episcopal palace to the side door of the cathedral, was that the bishop now seemed as disturbed to have the Dog-Man and his purported miracles in his church as I was.

But the crowds had not yet completely dissipated. Cyrus, a thin black form, knelt in prayer at the high altar, and at least a dozen people, mostly women, knelt beside him. Colored light from the stained glass windows washed over them. Among them were Celia and the Lady Maria.

Hildegarde stepped out from behind a pilar to meet us. ‘They’ve been like that for ages,” she muttered. “I would have thought they’d be stiff by now.” The Lady Maria and several of the others, among whom I now recognized the mayor, were indeed shifting uncomfortably. But Celia, her head lowered and face very white, seemed transported beyond issues of physical comfort.

The bishop went down on his knees beside them. In a minute the townspeople seemed to become aware of him. Several lifted their heads and glanced toward each other uncomfortably. After a few more moments, a man rose and tiptoed quietly away. Joachim, his eyes closed, paid no attention. Two women folowed, then another. Last of al the mayor rose, murmuring, “I wil not forget,” and patting Cyrus’s shoulder as he turned to go. Soon Celia and the Lady Maria were the only people left kneeling beside the bishop and his newest seminary student.

Maria looked up, then got to her feet, shaking out her skirt, and came over to the front pew to sit next to me. “Our chaplain never expects us to kneel on the stones like that,” she said in a good-natured undertone, “or not us old ones anyway! But then a little suffering may be good for the soul, or so the priests tel us.” Both Cyrus and Celia lifted their heads then. I met the Dog-Man’s eyes fleetingly before he looked away, then reached for words of the Hidden Language to try to find indications of evil around him. A blatant but silent spel, worked directly contrary to what the bishop would have alowed me to do if I asked him, revealed no supernatural power beyond that of the saints. Maybe, I thought in disappointment, folding my hands and trying not to look like a wizard, Cyrus had checked his demon at the cathedral door.

Celia did not give me a chance to probe any further. “Holy Father, I am so glad for this opportunity to see you,” she said to the bishop, her voice low and vibrant “My life and my spiritual caling have long been confused, but now at last they are clear. I shal leave tomorrow for the Nunnery of Yurt, there to make my profession as a novice.” Just as I had feared al day. The bones’ infection had now gotten to someone else—not to Theodora, but to Celia. If Cyrus was responsible for the warriors—and the bones—then he had even more to answer for than perverting the people of Caelrhon. But I was also interested to notice that in those with a religious bent, like Celia and Joachim, this strange infection apparently made them want to throw away everything for quiet contemplation. Would the bones make another wizard as murderous as they made me? Perhaps, I told myself, dismissing the question, it was not good to ask too many questions about the differences between priests and wizards.

When I had spoken to Elerius on the telephone, he had reassured me that no one in Yurt had started demonstrating inexplicable behavior. While I waited, listening through the receiver to the distant sounds of the royal castle of Yurt and thinking I might hear Antonia’s voice, he had probed the bones again. A subtle, almost invisible spel, very unlike any school spel, had dissolved by itself while he was trying to find a way to neutralize it. That should mean, I tried to reassure myself, that Celia would be the last.

But in the meantime she had just announced, publicly and unequivocaly, her intention to become a nun. “If that is your choice, my daughter,” said the bishop kindly, “and God has guided you in it, then of course I shal do al to assist you.”

“But, excuse me, Holy Father, she can’t!” cried Hildegarde. “Mother would kil her.”

“Christ said that those who would folow Him must forsake even father and mother,” put in Cyrus, “braving the cross for His sake.”

“You need her permission,” said Hildegarde, ignoring him and taking her sister by the shoulders. “You’re supposed to become duchess of Yurt. You can’t just throw it al over without even teling her!”

“We shal discuss this further in private,” said Celia in an icy tone that I myself would not have dreamed of arguing with. She dipped her head to the bishop— and to Cyrus?—and hurried down the nave, Hildegarde behind her.

The Lady Maria bounced up from the pew. “I should get over to the castle,” she said. “I brought the Princess Margareta with me, and she’s probably wondering what’s been happening al day. We got in first thing, you realize, and I knew something was up but that it would take a wise head to straighten it out, not the princess’s curls!” I had known the Lady Maria twenty-five years and had not yet once thought of her as having a wise head, but it was much too late to explain that to her. “So I’m afraid I’ve left the little princess sitting al by herself, when my plan had been to give her some amusement by taking her on this trip. I don’t think she ever had more than a schoolgirl’s infatuation for the king, of course, but after what’s occurred I thought it better to provide her with some change of scene.” And she pranced out, leaving me staring after her. What had occurred? I wanted to shout. Elerius had not said anything about Paul and the Lady Justinia having eloped, or whatever else they might have done, but then he probably would not see it in the same light as I would. I had needed to get back to Yurt for two days, now more than ever—if it weren’t for the matter of an acolyte working with a demon.

Cyrus, left alone now with Joachim and me, made as if to go, but the bishop did not give him a chance. “I need to talk to you, my son,” he said gently, “about the miraculous restoration of al the burned houses and businesses. Even the Bible does not record such events.”

“Compared to the Lord’s parting of the Red Sea,” said Cyrus, looking at me suspiciously, “the rebuilding of a few charred structures is trivial.”

“But you,” said Joachim thoughtfuly, “are not Moses.”

“No,” said Cyrus promptly, “and that is why I am so profoundly grateful to the saints who have listened to my poor prayer.” I bit my lip to keep from saying several things, mostly doubting and sarcastic. This was Joachim’s cathedral, and especialy now that Cyrus was starting to act as if it was his instead, the bishop would not want the interference of a wizard. “Why,” he said, even more gently, “do you credit your own prayers, my son, rather than those of others?” Cyrus looked up at him quickly, dark eyes shadowed. In his quiet answer there was a trace of something that I would have caled smugness. “Because the saints told me so, Father.” I couldn’t listen to him anymore. I walked halfway down the nave and leaned my forehead against a pilar. The only point on which I felt unsure was whether he was deliberately trying to mislead the bishop or whether he was deceived himself. He seemed horribly sure of himself, but was that because he did not even know that a demon was working beside him? Suppose the demon, who must be lurking somewhere in the city, waiting for him to emerge from the cathedral again, had deluded him into thinking that it was not a demon but a saint?

I turned my head to glance back toward the front pew where Joachim and Cyrus were talking. If he was now trying to deceive the bishop, then I would take him by the scruff of the neck with my strongest binding spels, regardless of what disrespect I might be doing the church, and drag him to the demonology experts at the school. (This of course assumed I would have the slightest success against someone who used supernatural power to oppose me—a point on which I did not want to dwel.)