Is This Apocalypse Necessary? - Wizard of Yurt - 6 (50 page)

Zahlfast might have been old and sick, but at least his terror had not paralyzed him. He began speaking in the heavy syllables of the Hidden Language, a binding spell, more complicated and far more difficult than anything I had ever been taught at the school. For a second the click of chicken feet on stone ceased, then, more slowly, they started moving toward us again.

Solomon's spell. The binding spell that would hold even an Ifrit in a bottle. I opened my mouth and found it almost too dry for speech. The dragging talons were coming closer. I tried again.

And shouted the spell that Levi had written out for me, the spell that Solomon had engraved on his golden signet. For a second the corridors echoed to my words, which seemed to come back at me from a dozen directions, and in that second the voice in the back of my mind asked how it felt to have paralyzed all of us.

But I hadn't. I moved both arms at once, almost toppling Zahlfast, then took a step forward, my eyes still averted.

"
Where
did you get that spell?" he demanded, his voice creakier than ever. "Whatever you did," he continued, "it worked—the creature cannot move now. And its serpent teeth cannot bite. But its eye could still turn us to stone."

We sidled toward it, trying to judge its location by its shadow and sideways glances that stopped just short of its head. Zahlfast was shaking far harder than I was. But he ripped a strip off the end of his sheet and, awkwardly because he couldn't watch what he was doing, wrapped it around and around the basilisk's serpent head.

"I'll look first," he said at last, and I watched his face as he turned his head, gazed for a rapid second, gazed longer, and finally looked toward me. "The bandage holds."

The frost was melting back off the walls, and the smell was receding, as I looked too: at a creature messily wrapped in a rag, a rag that completely concealed its eyes.

Zahlfast let out all his breath then and sat down on the cold floor. "By all the powers of magic, Daimbert," he said after a minute, "what spell was that?"

"Um, something out of the really old magic. King Solomon's own binding spell." It was too complicated to explain.

"I never did hear where you were when we all thought you dead," my old teacher said, with the faintest hint of a smile. "If we are not truly dead at the end of this night, it would be worth hearing. I thought all those years ago at the transformations practical exam, when you approached those frogs in such a spectacularly lame-brained way, and then got out of your mess so brilliantly, that you would either end up as one of the most innovative and successful wizards of your generation, or else would destroy the school. I never imagined until today that you would do both. Help me up. Elerius will not long delay once he learns what we have done to his basilisk."

I gave him a hand up off the floor, then was appalled when he picked up the basilisk by its stiff little chicken wings. He held it distastefully, well out in front of him. "And how long did you think," he said with a sideways glance, "before Elerius came to recover it, if we did not take it with us?

Besides," and for a second he almost chuckled, "if we suddenly come upon him, we can threaten to whip the rag from its eyes."

We kept on walking. We seemed to have been walking a very long time, yet the corridor looked always the same. Zahlfast was constantly trembling now, but he shrugged off the arm I tried to offer him. "Best only one of us be in living contact with this beast," he said. "If we can find the room from which Elerius freed it, we can throw it back in and lock it with our own palm prints."

"But don't you know where the basilisk was kept?" I asked.

"No," he snapped between shivering teeth, "because I don't know where we are. I thought I knew, and we have taken all the right turns, yet ..." His voice trailed away, then he suddenly snorted. "Illusion. We have been done in by the simplest trick. Elerius has changed the appearance of these corridors just enough that we could walk in circles in here for weeks and never find our way out."

Illusion I could deal with. It had been a subtle spell, one designed to leave no impression of its presence, but obvious once I looked for it. I broke the spell with a few words. The corridor looked to me exactly the same.

But it looked different to Zahlfast, for he lifted his head with new confidence. "Now I know where we are. A few more turns, and we will be at the stairs that used to lead up to the school."

The stairs to which Elerius would know we would have to come sooner or later, and which he would therefore have carefully fortified against us.

But he might be there himself. The whole purpose of being in the cellars, I reminded myself, was to find him.

Suddenly the floor around our feet came alive: scorpions, snakes, spiders, six-inch cockroaches. I stopped dead in horror, but Zahlfast kept on walking. "More illusions," he announced.

I swallowed the bitterness of revulsion and broke this illusion as well.

The creatures disappeared as quickly as they had come.

"Of course, there
are
real cockroaches down here, but nothing that size—" Zahlfast was just saying, when I heard a new sound.

This one was almost metallic, a creaking and scrabbling of something very large coming toward us from down a side corridor. I put a hand on Zahlfast's arm. Illusions do not make noise.

After the basilisk I had thought I was prepared for anything. But I was wrong. I was not prepared for a cockroach ten feet high, filling the corridor from side to side, waving its tentacles and coming on fast.

Part Eleven
*
Hell

A paralysis spell! I thought wildly. King Solomon's binding spell! Could I work that powerful a spell a second time down here without seriously weakening the walls that kept the ceiling above us? Would the basilisk's stare freeze the cockroach in its tracks as it would have frozen us?

While I was flailing around desperately trying to find the right magic, Zahlfast was already at work. He rattled off a spell, and the enormous insect stopped advancing. But it waved its tentacles and stared at us with its multiple eyes. It looked hungry. I wondered if we could feed it the basilisk.

Zahlfast spoke again, and abruptly it was gone. A small, brown, normal-sized insect scuttled across the floor. I took one step forward and crushed it beneath my sole.

"Good work, Master!" I said, attempting to sound nonchalant and scraping the residue off my shoe. "How did you manage to shrink it?"

Zahlfast had closed his eyes, swaying for a moment, then took a deep breath. I put an arm under his elbow without comment. I knew he wouldn't say how he really felt, and he didn't want me to seem to be fussing over him, but this constant series of spells must be a serious drain on a man already old and sick.

"It was in fact quite simple, Daimbert," he said after a moment. I noticed he hadn't had the energy to chide me for continuing to call him Master. "Elerius had transformed an ordinary cockroach into one swollen to extraordinary size. All I had to do was to reverse his spell. I hope you haven't forgotten that I am the head of the transformations faculty!"

"If he's resorting to transformed insects," I said, "he must not have managed to break any more magic locks. Either that—or he himself is frightened of what might be in the rooms."

"With good reason," said Zahlfast.

We kept on walking because there didn't seem to be much else we could do. It was bitter cold down here, even with the basilisk immobilized, a coldness that seeped into my bones. I was so tired that I thought that if I dared sit down I might fall asleep and never wake up—and it must be even worse for Zahlfast. I wondered with a kind of flat despair if Elerius might be long gone from the cellars, and if we would die from cold and exhaustion before we were able to find the way back out again.

I almost missed it. We were trudging down another corridor, when I realized that one of the doors we had just passed was not locked.

Silently I motioned to Zahlfast, then put my back to the wall next to the door and probed again. Definitely no magic lock here. Still no direct indication of Elerius, but he had to be somewhere. He would have had to unlock a door to go inside; I put a hand flat on it, trying to tell if he was in there— or if this room was just empty.

I couldn't be sure. Zahlfast stayed well back, holding the basilisk, also unsure. Very delicately I started turning the knob, preparatory to swinging the door open with a bang.

Still no sign of life. I gave the door an abrupt push and ducked back out of the way of whatever he might be using to defend himself.

But still there was nothing. Cautiously I put my head around the corner, and saw—

"What is it?" I asked in wonder after a moment. "Is this something left from the Black Wars?" In the center of the room was a great swirling mass of color, pouring from what appeared to be copper rods and steel wheels.

Zahlfast came up beside me to look. "That's nothing out of the old magic," he said with a snort. "That's something developed here by the technical division, only a few years ago. One powers it up with magic, and then it can keep a spell going almost indefinitely."

Someday I really had to stop feeling my whole mind go blank whenever someone mentioned technical magic. I took a step into the room. "What's it doing?"

Zahlfast frowned, probing. "I think he was using it to augment his own powers, first to keep any spells from working within the school, then, unsuccessfully, to strengthen the school's defenses against dragons.

Now—" He frowned again. "I don't know what it's doing now."

"Nothing any good," I said firmly. "How do I turn it off?"

The one advantage of technical magic is that, even if you don't understand it, you can usually operate it fairly easily. With a few suggestions from Zahlfast, and only one pinch when I got my fingers too close to the copper rods, I managed to turn off the apparatus. It sighed, and the swirling colors subsided. Now it was only a collection of metal cogs, rods, and tubes, dead and without motion.

Far down the corridor, I heard a shout of fury.

"Maybe he had a second basilisk, and it's bitten him," I said hopefully.

Zahlfast shook his head. "There was only ever the one."

But Elerius must still be down here. With his apparatus turned off, maybe the two of us might even stand a chance against him. I took Zahlfast firmly under the elbow, and this time he did not try to shake me off. We walked quickly, down one corridor and then another—and saw a door standing open.

We stopped, looked at each other, and looked toward that door, slightly ajar, a faint light emerging from inside. I didn't dare even whisper—but then it would not have been difficult for Elerius to spot us, even silent as illusions. I pointed toward the doorway and lifted an eyebrow, inquiring if my old teacher knew what had been stored in there.

But he seemed to interpret my question differently. He slid his elbow out of my grasp and handed me the basilisk.

In my surprise I almost dropped it. Its wings were stiffer and sharper than I expected, and it seemed to weigh as much as something ten times its size. No hissing—Solomon's binding spell held it tightly. By the time I had recovered, and made sure the face was aimed away from me, in case of any slippage of the rag over its eyes, Zahlfast had started forward.

He had thought I was asking who of us should go first, and he was volunteering.

He walked straight to the door and swung it all the way open. "You know better than that, Elerius," he said in his school-teacher voice. "Put that down and come out."

Put what down? Curiosity overcame reluctance. Still holding the basilisk in front of me, I took two steps forward. Zahlfast stood in the room's doorway, leaning against the frame. "Without the augmenter working, you'll never be able to make that function," he said crisply. "It's designed for two wizards."

I had no idea what he had there, even after I stepped up next to Zahlfast. It looked like nothing more than an old clay cup, sitting by itself in the middle of the floor. But there was something about that cup that seemed almost unbearably sinister. And behind it, clutching a crumbling leather-bound ledger, stood Elerius.

He had changed, was my first thought. He no longer looked like the most fearsome wizard in the West. Deprived of his kingdom, deprived of his lover, deprived of the respect of the wizards' school, his black hair stood wildly on end, and his hazel eyes were not calculating but wild. But if he no longer thought he was acting for the best, the voice in the back of my mind pointed out, there was no telling what he might do.

"You will notice," said Zahlfast, his voice calm on the surface though I could hear the enormous strain underneath, "that Daimbert has the basilisk. You do not want him to have to remove the rag from its eyes. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that when it turns you to stone, even I, with all my abilities, will be unable to transform you back. Now, come out and give up this mad plan. Neither one of us will act as the second wizard."

"If I don't try to channel it," Elerius said, low and harsh, "then I don't need a second wizard." He opened the ledger, keeping a wary eye on us.

I had no idea what they were talking about. My first thought was that he had somehow gotten hold of old Naurag's ledger, but I realized then that this was a different book. Not a library book, clearly—it must be something stored down here along with whatever that cup represented.

When I probed, I could see the magical influence it cast without understanding it at all. It seemed more sinister than ever.

Zahlfast stiffened. "This is the way of despair, Elerius," he said quietly.

"I know you don't want to end your life as well as those of all the people in the City—and all the wizards in the West."

"I don't care," said Elerius, and he looked past our old teacher's shoulder straight at me. "As long as Daimbert dies, I really don't care what happens to me or anyone else."

Zahlfast addressed me without taking his eyes off Elerius. Almost casually he said, "It is time to use the basilisk."