Is This Apocalypse Necessary? - Wizard of Yurt - 6 (22 page)

"But how did you do that?" I asked, low and urgent. "Detection spells can't be calibrated for people."

She shrugged and gave me a saucy look. "Just shows that your school doesn't know everything there is to know about magic. I'll tell you sometime how I worked it out. And I was so glad yesterday to find out I was right about you! But did you really see a dragon, even if it didn't eat you? Are you going to stay in Yurt now? Is it still a secret? And why are you here, outside of Gwennie's chambers?"

"I need her to come with me," I said lamely, not wanting even to begin explaining about Hadwidis. "Nobody else can know yet that I'm alive. I'm trying to find and stop Elerius."

"Then I'll come too," said Antonia promptly.

I put my hands on her shoulders, disconcerted to realize how tall she had become. "I'm afraid I can't do that," I said quietly. "Your mother would never forgive me."

"Then take her too." Even in the faint dawn light my daughter's eyes were bright. "We can both help you find Elerius. We'll do a much better job than Gwennie could."

I shook my head. What was supposed to be an extremely brief stop at the castle seemed to be dragging out forever. Any minute now Hadwidis on Naurag would come flying over the wall to see what was keeping me. "If both of you suddenly disappeared, Elerius would guess immediately that you must be with me. He'd know then I'm still alive, so I'd lose any element of surprise."

"So that's why you let us think you were dead," said Antonia approvingly. "Good idea. But," suddenly troubled, "I hope I didn't give you away, by saying in front of everybody that I was sure you were still alive."

"Elerius may have some suspicion, but as long as your mother appears convinced I'm gone, he won't know for sure. That's why we have to keep this secret from her—as well as everybody else. Would you want your friends here in the castle to be subjected to torture if Elerius discovered you'd gone, and thought the rest of them must know where we were?"

But Antonia wasn't worried about the rest of the castle. "Mother's sad,"

she said accusingly.

"Then you'll have to try to comfort her—" I started to say, when I heard the click of Gwennie's latch.

Just as the door opened Antonia thrust her hand into her pocket and disappeared. Gwennie came out, dressed for travel, and thumbtacked a note to her door. "There. I've said I've decided to spend some time with an old friend. It's even true!" She took my arm with a smile. Smells of cooking were wandering down the courtyard now, and the sun would be up any minute.

"Good-bye," said my daughter's voice inside my head. "Don't go anywhere interesting without me."

Neither Antonia nor Paul would forgive me if they found out I had gone to look for an Ifrit and not taken them along. But then my chances of coming back successfully seemed so small that I was willing to risk their wrath. "Good-bye," I said silently to Antonia. "Let's go," I said aloud to Gwennie. I took her firmly by the arm and rose into the air, over the battlements and back to my flying beast.

Time to go seek help in the ancient magical lore of the East, accompanied by the suitably-chaperoned princess whom the Cranky Saint somehow thought could replace Elerius's son.

The last time I had journeyed from Yurt to the East had been on horseback. The trip had taken months, through the Western Kingdoms, across the high mountains, through the constant wars and dark treachery of the Eastern Kingdoms, by ship to Xantium, overland again to the Holy Land, and finally beyond to the vast, uninhabited deserts where Ifriti still lived, almost as old as the earth.

This trip was far shorter, even though Naurag could not fly nearly as fast with three on his back as he had flown coming south from the Land of Wild Magic. We followed the major rivers at first, paralleling the great pilgrimage and trade routes, south through the Western Kingdoms to the Central Sea, and then along its northern shore, east toward Xantium.

From the air one could see hundreds of square miles at a glance, and without the waterways to follow we would have been lost at once. Autumn had been advancing rapidly in Yurt and Caelrhon, but as we went south we caught up with the summer, and found again, to Naurag's delight, melons that were ripe.

Gwennie accepted Hadwidis's presence with only mild surprise. I introduced her as a princess who had once been a nun and now had no home, without going into detail about how Saint Eusebius had driven her from the nunnery in order to help me. Hadwidis now knew that I was Yurt's royal wizard, but since Elerius couldn't—I hoped—get to her while she was with me, her knowing my identity scarcely mattered. With another woman present—and several times Gwennie mentioned that I had a family as if this were perfectly normal and well-known—Hadwidis made no more impassioned attempts upon my virtue, which would have been a relief if the voice in the back of my mind hadn't complained that her giving up so easily might have been a comment on my desirability.

Gwennie, for her part, seemed to find it entirely natural that I should journey to the storied East with a runaway nun, which told me more about her attitude toward Yurt's Royal Wizard than I felt I really needed to know.

The two young women quickly became friends, but both maintained a certain reserve. It occurred to me that it was ironic that, although neither told the other this, both were running from the possibility of becoming queens: Hadwidis the queen of her father's kingdom, by exposing her brother's parentage, and Gwennie the queen of Yurt by marrying Paul.

The thought crossed my mind as we followed the curving coast of the Central Sea that perhaps the Cranky Saint wanted King Paul to marry Hadwidis. She was, after all, a suitably high-born princess, with a much more exalted ancestry in fact than Paul's own, and her time in and out of the nunnery could, with luck, all be excused as a girlish escapade.

Then I glanced at Gwennie's face, where the enjoyment of the adventure could not entirely conceal a constant low level of indignation and sorrow, and decided not to bring this up.

We came at last to Xantium harbor, an expanse of water as big as the biggest lakes of the West, almost completely cut off from the Central Sea by high rocky cliffs. On the ends of the twin promontories guarding the narrow passage into the harbor stood high towers, watching with both human eyes and magic. The harbor teemed with ships, commercial vessels, pleasure barges, and fishing skiffs, most with their sails rigged differently than those in the great City back home. Mixed with the salt in the air came the scent of oranges, halfway between tangy freshness and rot.

"The Princess Margareta said she wanted to visit Xantium for the silk dresses and ointments," said Gwennie, clinging to my belt and leaning past me for a good look. "Should we maybe bring her home a present?" I couldn't tell if she were being sarcastic.

Naurag's steady wing beats took us across the harbor to the city itself, which sprawled for miles behind its walls. Faint wailing reached us from the minarets below; it must be the hour at which those who followed the Prophet were called to prayer. I looked down at the tangle of streets, plazas, and alleys, the tall white spires and huts built virtually on top of each other, the palaces, inns, lawcourts, churches, and tenements, and decided it would be hopeless trying to find Kaz-alrhun's house after twenty years.

"Kaz-alrhun is—or used to be—the greatest of Xantium's mages," I told Hadwidis and Gwennie. "Oddly enough, he's always been well-disposed toward those from Yurt. He used to operate out of the Thieves' Market; I'm going to see if I can find him there."

The Thieves' Market I could locate even if I couldn't find Kaz-alrhun's house. Over the hill from the harbor, toward the back walls of the city, was a wide open area, packed thick with booths. We hovered high over it, looking down at a web of striped awnings stretched over booths where it seemed everything possible was for sale, from food to jewelry to weapons to clothing to peacock feathers to brightly-colored birds in cages.

I wrapped all of us in an invisibility spell as we descended, not wanting to cause a panic. Voices speaking in a dozen different accents rose to meet us, accusing, cajoling, reasoning, and shouting. A swirl of magic rose too from the booths, spells to improve the appearance of the merchandise and counter-spells to detect hidden flaws, all of it with the wild strangeness that eastern magic has to anyone trained in the West. Hadwidis had been silent since we first reached the harbor, but now she said, "I've changed my mind, Wizard. I'm not going to work in a tavern in Caelrhon after all.

I'm going to be a thief in Xantium."

I set Naurag down in a somewhat open spot in a corner of the market.

Heat radiated up from the paving stones. "It would be best for you two to stay here," I said a little uneasily, with visions of slave-traders trying to snatch two attractive young women. "I think I can make the invisibility spell last a while—"

But they were having none of it. "We didn't come to Xantium to cower in a corner," said Gwennie firmly. Though I couldn't see her, I could imagine her frowning with fists on her hips. "We'll take Naurag with us—nobody will bother two women who have what looks like a small purple dragon flying right over their heads! And besides, didn't you tell us that the Thieves' Market is one of the few places in Xantium properly patrolled against pickpockets? I don't know about you, but I'm not leaving Xantium without doing some shopping!"

Reluctantly I let my spell dissolve. There were startled shouts around us as the purple flying beast abruptly became visible, and a number of people left their booths to rush toward us—then, when Naurag yawned, showing his fangs, to press back. "What marvel is this?" "Where did it come from?"

"Is it real or illusion?" "No illusion, but is it an automaton?"

We stayed close together, next to Naurag. I was ready with the words of the Hidden Language to get us out of here in case the crowd proved threatening. In a moment, however, our novelty wore off. The boys who had been at the front of the crowd, staring, were the first to leave, playfully throwing pebbles at each other.

"It's just one of those western mages," someone pronounced. I realized he meant one of the wizards from what we called the Eastern Kingdoms, though they were still west from here. "He's probably trying to sell it. They all have shoddy merchandise." It took a lot, I thought, to impress the thieves through whose market funneled much of the treasures from around the Central Sea.

After a few more minutes I let Gwennie and Hadwidis go, pushing their way through the crowds, exclaiming over the merchandise in the booths they passed and ignoring the looks they received. Naurag floated lazily ten feet above them. I meanwhile set off to find a booth that sold automatons.

Xantium's greatest mage had always specialized in self-propelled magical creatures, some so realistic it was hard to tell them from creatures of flesh and blood, except that Kaz-alrhun's tended to be larger and more brightly colored than life. Others, however, were little more than simple self-propelled tools. If he was here, the appearance of a strange flying beast had not been enough to rouse him from his booth. When I heard the nightingale's song rising melodiously over the midday babble of the market place, and saw the bird perched on a silver-plated bough, eyeing passers-by with a jeweled eye, I knew I had found the right spot.

The striped awning was drawn across against the sun, with only a slit that showed shadows within, but on the counter in front of the booth several jeweled birds hopped about, and to one side stood a chessboard with ivory and ebony pieces, set up for a complicated puzzle.

I lifted the edge of the awning cautiously. "Kaz-alrhun?" There was a stirring inside and a flash of eyes, and a man emerged.

But not the one I expected. Xantium's greatest mage was enormously fat, almost as dark as his ebony chess pieces, and virtually bristling with the aura of magic. This man was far younger and slimmer, and though there could be no doubt from the instant I saw him that he too was a mage, there was none of the sense of an overflow of spells that seemed constantly to accompany Kaz-alrhun.

The young mage looked at me with inquiring black eyes from under a heavy shock of hair. Abruptly his face lit up, and before I knew what he was doing he had put an enormous pink and purple illusory spot on my chest: school magic.

"Daimbert!" he cried with a flash of white teeth. "In the name of the most merciful God! You should have warned us you were coming! And we received no word from the harbormaster that you had arrived."

And then I recognized him. "Maffi?" The last time I had seen Maffi he had been a boy, just starting an apprenticeship in magic with Kaz-alrhun.

He had traveled with us for part of the trip into the distant East, and during the trip I had taught him the rudiments of illusion. I was trying to work out how he had possibly managed to grow up since I last saw him when I recalled that he was the same age as King Paul, who too had been a boy when we left him behind in Yurt to travel east. That is the problem with revisiting a place that one has not seen in years. It rarely has the common courtesy to stay unchanged just because it has not altered in one's memories.

"Well, it was a spur of the moment decision to come," I said as Maffi hustled me back into the shade of his awning. I noted that Kaz-alrhun apparently still maintained his network of contacts that told him when anyone interesting arrived in Xantium. "Since you don't have telephones here, there was no way I could have sent a message that would have arrived before I did. And since we didn't arrive by ship, we didn't sign in with the harbor-master."

I looked around the dim interior of the booth and saw other automatons, piled together, inactive, but no one else was there. "Are you still working with Kaz-alrhun?" I asked as if casually. If Maffi could have grown up, I didn't trust Kaz-alrhun, already very old, not to have died on me. And I wasn't at all sure I had confidence in young Maffi's abilities to help me find and master an Ifrit.

"He does not leave his house often these days," said Maffi. "But he will of a certainty be delighted to see you! There is little business here this day—I shall take you to him at once." He whistled in the automatons from the front counter, put a quick binding spell on the awning that would prevent anyone else from entering, and took my arm to lead me away through the market. Magic came easily to him now; he must have finished his apprenticeship years ago.