Is This Apocalypse Necessary? - Wizard of Yurt - 6 (2 page)

Chin sprang forward, feeling around the bottom of the air cart as if thinking I might have just rolled to one side and been hidden by the shadows. Before us in the west the sky was still dark and star-studded, but the yellow lights of the never-sleeping City, ahead of us and a quarter mile below, made an island of brightness at the edge of a dim landscape.

Beyond, still black and unfeatured, stretched the sea.

Both young wizards were on their feet now, looking around wildly, with the desperate expression of those who realize they have just made a major mistake and are wondering what they can possibly do to correct it. I recognized that feeling; I had had it often enough myself.

"He can't have gone far," said Chin in sudden resolution. "I should be able to detect somebody working magic. In fact—"

He was just too late. He discovered and was dismantling my invisibility spell as I turned him and Whitey into frogs.

I collapsed back over the edge of the air cart, whose wings kept resolutely flapping, and wiped my forehead with a pajama sleeve. The frogs looked at me with human panic in their amphibian eyes. One of them was mottled green and brown, with an unusually prominent lower jaw for a frog, but the other was the color of chalk. I slowly caught my breath and waited for my heartbeat to return to normal before trying anything else. Flying was hard enough physical and mental work by itself without having to do so while invisible, much less transforming young wizards into frogs at the same time.

At the last moment I had decided against tadpoles. I had no jars of water with me, and if they had dried up and died while transformed they would have been just as dead when turned back into wizards. It seemed a bit excessive to put them to death for kidnapping me.

Besides, they were not my real enemies. Elerius was, and he was waiting just ahead.

The air cart began spiraling down, toward the sharp spires of the school on the highest central point in the City. The school was not one building but many, built or added to over the last two centuries and all connected together, glittering both with magic lights and with illusion. Below the spires, below the maze of offices, meeting rooms, lecture halls, and library, were storerooms, the rooms where the teachers had once kept a very small dragon (strictly for instructional purposes), and silent rooms closed with magic locks where, the new students told each other, demons lived, though I had always found that unlikely. I expected the cart to settle, as usual, into the school courtyard, but instead it tucked its wings tidily and dropped like a stone the last thirty feet, to land on a balcony jutting out from one of the towers.

The frogs were catapulted upward by the force of that bone-jarring landing. I grabbed one in each hand and stuffed them into my pajama pockets. Maybe there was an additional magical command one was supposed to give to make the final approach easier, a command I didn't know because I would never have presumed to bring the air cart down here— this was the balcony of the private suite belonging to the Master.

Which meant that Elerius must indeed have already disposed of him. I took a deep breath and climbed out. The frogs were giving their calls, which I had thought frogs gave only to attract mates, but presumably they had no other way to scream in terror—or warning? I paused for a second to cover my pajamas in illusion: a white linen shirt with lace at the cuffs, dark red velvet jacket and trousers, embroidered all over with the moon and stars, a golden pendant around my neck, and a long black cape over all. Then I stepped through the tall open window and inside.

A voice spoke from somewhere ahead. "Did you bring the wizard?"

The corridor before me was dark, but a magic lamp's glow came from an open doorway. In two strides I was at the door. "No thanks to your assistants," I said, "the wizard brought himself."

But something was wrong. That had not been Elerius's voice, and this was not Elerius before me. It was the old Master of the school, lying in bed propped up with pillows, looking up at me from frost-blue eyes.

I was so flabbergasted I didn't know what to say, and instead gave him the full formal bow, first the dip of the head, then the widespread arms, and finally the drop to both knees. Even if he'd ordered me kidnapped, he was still the head of organized wizardry in the west, and had been for forty years both my superior and the closest thing I had to a father.

"Is that illusion, Daimbert?" he asked. "No offense, but you usually don't dress this ostentatiously. And where are my assistants?"

My finery was already starting to fade. I stood up, snapped my fingers to end the illusion, and drew the frogs out of my pockets. "I decided they'd be safer like this," I said. "Less likely to paralyze me and drop me out of the air cart by mistake while it was flying. Think how upset with them you'd have been."

He looked at them thoughtfully, stroking his snowy beard. Whitey's hair was white because he had been born without pigmentation; mine had turned white overnight due to certain hellish experiences shortly after I graduated from the school; but the Master's was white because he had lived far longer than any wizard ever known: at least four hundred years by most accounts, though some said five hundred or even six.

"I told them to bring you at once and to bring you quietly," he commented. He spoke with his accustomed assurance and authority, but there was a tremorous undertone to his voice I did not recall hearing before. "Perhaps they went beyond their orders. Could you turn them back into themselves?"

A year ago he would have worked the magic himself in a second. I made no remark but set about undoing my spells. If Chin was jealous because the Master considered me special— certainly more special than he was—but wouldn't tell him why, he might well have chosen to misunderstand his orders. But why was I, Royal Wizard of one of the smallest of the western kingdoms, suddenly so special?

In a moment I had turned my frogs back into young wizards. They staggered for a moment, then straightened themselves up, heels together.

A minute ago I had thought of them as the power-drunk agents of Elerius.

But if these were indeed the Master's assistants, I had to change my opinion of them. I saw them now as thoroughly humiliated students a whole lot younger and more inexperienced than I was, even if they might, given a chance, someday turn into better wizards. Though they now were grasping at dignity, they knew perfectly well that they had been showing off their newly-learned spells by trying to bring me here forcibly, and not only had they failed to do so, they would now have the shame of trying to explain why they had thought it such a good idea. The Master shook his head almost imperceptibly in their direction. "I'll talk to you two later," he said, and they turned around and shot from the room, slamming the door behind them without waiting for further dismissal.

"By the way," I commented, "when you talk to them, ask them about breaking into the office and looking at old academic records."

The Master's eyes twinkled, and for a second I allowed myself to think that he was in bed merely because it was still before dawn, a time when all sensible wizards should be sleeping off last night's dinner and wine. "I expect that in that case they discovered the results of that disastrous transformations practical exam of yours," he said, "where you had all that trouble with the frogs. Perhaps it will be educational for them to realize that wizards can keep on learning even if they're past thirty."

They were never going to let me forget that incident here at the school. I managed a small smile. But I was distracted from humiliating memories by seeing a little pile of silver bells lying on the table. They brought back much happier memories, of learning the spells that would make such bells rise and fall in a constantly-repeating waterfall of soft and musical sound.

An elegant touch for a wizard's chambers, but these were dusty and still, as though their spells had not been renewed for a long time.

"But I didn't bring you here in such secrecy, Daimbert," the Master continued, suddenly completely serious, "to joke about frogs."

I hooked a chair closer with a foot and sat down beside him. I was still recovering from the shock of discovering I would not have to face Elerius after all, but now that I thought about it, it seemed very strange that if the Master had something to say to me he had not simply used the magic telephones.

He held my eyes for a moment. "Daimbert, I'm dying." My immediate reaction was to think that this must be one more prank. The Master couldn't possibly be dying. He had founded the school—it was
his
school. It was neither morally nor physically possible for him not to be here. He must have meant something quite different.

I found myself speaking. "Are the doctors sure?" Dawn was breaking at last, and the first light came in through an eastern window.

He smiled a little, but I could see clearly now the pallor of his cheek. His face had been lined as long as I knew him, but the lines had deepened and multiplied. "It's no use asking the doctors. All they have are the herbs and simple spells we wizards gave them generations ago.
I'm
sure. After all these years, I know this body better than any doctor ever could. Magic can slow aging, as I would have to be the first to affirm, but it has no ultimate power over the cycles of life and death. As long as one lives old body parts keep wearing away, and there are only a certain number of times one can renew the material."

The blow hit at last, the realization that this was not a joke gone wrong, or any kind of joke at all. I put a hand over my eyes; he didn't need to see my sudden tears.

"You are," he said quietly, "the first I've told."

I lifted my head. Again, why me? "I'm terribly sorry, sir."

"You needn't be sorry on my account," he said with something of his old energy. "I've had a much longer and much richer life than any man could possibly expect to deserve, though all those priests with whom you're such good friends will probably tell you I should have spent more time thinking about my soul."

"I am not," I said crisply, "good friends with 'all those priests.' The bishop of Caelrhon is my oldest friend, but that has nothing to do with him being a priest."

Sorrow made me speak more sharply than I intended, but he let it pass.

"Well, if he asks you can tell him I'm still not particularly worried about the afterlife. Instead I'm worried about the school."

So was I, though it was still a secondary concern, much less important than the idea that I would never see him again. I nodded and waited for him to continue.

"When I established the school a hundred and fifty years ago," he said slowly, "I did not originally intend to establish an organization and structure that wizardry had never before had. At first my thought was only to regularize the teaching of magic, so that there would no longer be the enormous variety of training and methods that made it so difficult for wizards when we wanted to work together—as when we stopped the Black Wars." He caught my expression and lifted an eyebrow in amusement.

"Yes, I know that for you it's something out of ancient history, but I remember the Black Wars."

"But I've never heard you speak of them before," I said eagerly.

"At one time," he answered, looking out the window, "I'd planned to write my memoirs before I died, and I would have put everything in there.

It's too late now, but it really doesn't matter. There are enough written histories of that time already, and enough stories remembered among the wizards, all close enough to accurate that the accounts don't need my own view. I became a teacher rather than a historian. And I've succeeded much better than I ever expected. There are virtually no wizards left in the west trained under the old apprenticeship system, or at least not wizards in important posts. As of last month, I believe that every Royal Wizard in the Western Kingdoms has been trained here, under me."

My predecessor at Yurt had learned his magic as an apprentice over two centuries ago and had trained would-be wizards of his own in his time, but I had never been nor had an apprentice.

"Which means, Daimbert," the Master continued, looking back at me,

"that magic now has the kind of centralization that even the Church has never managed. I'm not just the head of the school. I'm the central authority over the way that wizardry is approached, understood, and practiced. Whoever became Master after me will be able to direct how wizardry functions for the next two centuries."

"In that case, sir," I asked tentatively, "why haven't you told Zahlfast you're dying? I mean, he's smart, I'm sure he's realized you're sick, but if he's suddenly going to have all this authority—"

"Who said anything about Zahlfast?"

"But," I said, still tentative, "he's been for years your second in command in almost everything here at the school. I know officially he's only head of the Transformations Faculty, but he's had a hand in all your decisions. So if you're not here—"

"—he'll just take over," the Master finished for me. "At one time I thought so too, Daimbert. I've never asked him what he thought himself."

He paused for a moment, breathing rapidly and shallowly. He was trying his best to treat this as a normal conversation, but I could see that, even aside from the subject matter, he was having trouble talking this much. Doctors might shortly be arriving to see how their patient had passed the night, regardless of his opinion of their abilities. I leaned forward; this could be the last chance I would ever have to speak with him alone.

"But Zahlfast is smart, as you observe," he continued after a moment, lifting a hand from under the covers to wipe a bead of sweat from his forehead. "He will recognize that he is old, not as old as I am but old enough that he will not outlive me by very many decades. What the school needs now is a younger man."

I closed my eyes. He was trying to break it to me that he had designated Elerius to succeed him. He knew that Elerius and I had had our differences in the past, and he was going to reassure me that someone that intelligent and that skilled would do an excellent job of reshaping the school in his own image.