Is This Apocalypse Necessary? - Wizard of Yurt - 6 (3 page)

Or—since the Master had apparently not told anyone else that he was dying, did he expect me to carry this glad news to Elerius myself? He could not have chosen a messenger less willing to carry such a message.

"For years," he said slowly, "I acted as though I thought I would live forever. Of course I was sick a few times, and of course I knew that magic can only delay, not deny, the natural rhythms of life and death. But I never arranged for my succession. The faculty has never even discussed what method might be used to find a new Master. Well, if I had been suddenly killed somewhere along the way in the last century or so, which indeed almost happened several times, I presume they would have talked it over, become very irritated with each other, refrained by sheer will from turning each other into caterpillars, and finally settled on the same method the Church uses to elect new bishops: having the men who will be governed by the new Master choose him from among themselves. Probably an admirable method in its own right, but as long as I am here, as long as I know that I'm dying far enough ahead of time that I can do something about it, I consider it far too risky. I want to designate my successor myself."

Here it comes, I thought. Should I smile and make some comment about Elerius's remarkable magical abilities—not that they needed any praise from me? Or should I make a desperate attempt to talk him out of it?

"I think you know what I'm about to say," he said with a faint smile,

"though you're doing your best not to show it." I was indeed doing my best not to show how truly worried I was about the future of organized magic.

"Daimbert, I want you to succeed me as the new Master of the wizards'

school."

This was all a dream. That was the only explanation. Yes, that was it.

Very soon now I would awaken to a knock at my door, and it would swing open not on mysterious hooded wizards but on a pretty serving maid, who would bring me tea and cinnamon crullers.

I waited expectantly, but no tea and crullers appeared. I toyed with an alternate explanation, that the Master in his illness had mumbled something hysterical that only
sounded
as if he wanted me to succeed him, and in a minute he was going to say something else on another topic altogether. But he was watching me with an intensely pleased smile.

Perhaps I should answer.

"This is an even better joke, sir, than having me kidnapped."

He shook his head, still smiling. "No joke, Daimbert. I can see you didn't expect this. And that's exactly why it has to be you. I acquired the kind of power and authority I have here in the West essentially by accident. No one, especially not a wizard with awesome powers, can be trusted to take charge of institutionalized magic if it is his driving goal to do so.

"You mean, you want me as the new Master because I don't have any particularly awesome powers?"

"I want you as the Master because you are the only one who can stop Elerius."

I covered my eyes again. "I'm sorry sir," I mumbled. "I know you're sick and I know you're trying to do what you think is best. But there's no possible way I can keep Elerius from becoming Master." Even as I spoke I was thinking with a kind of amazement, So he knew all along that Elerius couldn't be trusted. He didn't always think, along with everyone else at the school, that Elerius's opinion was as certain as the sunrise to be good.

"You're the only one who has been able to curtail any of his plans in the past, Daimbert," said the Master, still smiling. "I've been watching you since you first climbed up to the school from the warehouse sector of the City to beg me to take you on as a student. Several times I almost despaired of you, but you've got an improvisational flair that makes up for a grasp of academic magic that has sometimes been, shall we say, patchy.

Every time you've had to face a challenge, even a challenge that would have daunted many more experienced wizards, you've risen to it. I believe indeed you have abilities of which you are not yet even aware yourself.

Part of it may be your capacity to make friends who will be there to aid you when you most need them. And you've got a quality I hardly ever see in a powerful wizard: you're good-hearted toward the weak, not just because you've been sworn to help them, but because you're personally concerned about them."

"And it's that concern," I said at once, "that makes me know I would be your worst possible choice."

"You've also got an unparalleled improvisational flair, and you have never been proud and boastful." He continued to smile, enjoying using what might be his last strength to surprise someone who was not delighted at the surprise but horrified. "You invented the far-seeing attachment for telephones, one of the more useful breakthroughs in technical magic of this generation, but I still hear you modestly insist that you know no technical magic."

"Sir, that was over thirty years ago, and I did it by accident!" I had spent those years quietly proud of my accomplishment, but if I didn't repudiate it fast I would find myself, with no experience whatsoever in organization, trying to supervise a group of wizards who were all much older and better than I was, failing miserably, and seeing Elerius take over after all.

The Master nodded, as though I had just unwittingly proved his point for him. "That's exactly what I mean, Daimbert. And you recognized Elerius for what he is long before the rest of us. Even now most of the faculty would vote for him if there were an election, which is why I have to make certain there will not be one."

I realized slowly what the Master was really saying and went cold inside.

Even before his present illness would lead to his death, it had already taken his magic from him, so that he did not trust himself to oppose Elerius directly. But where had he gotten this idea that I somehow could?

"He'd be more than delighted to take over the school," the Master continued, "with his calm belief that he knows better than people do themselves what is best for them, and that if a few rules have to broken along the way it scarcely matters as long as his own self-evidently laudable goals are reached. I've run this school as successfully as I have for as long as I have by realizing that grand organizational plans won't work—the world is too messy and too unpredictable for any wizard to direct it all, even one as good is Elerius."

I closed and opened my eyes as the Master stopped for breath. For twenty years I had distrusted Elerius. The entire time, whenever I didn't doubt my own judgment of him, I had been convinced that no one else would accept the opinion of someone who had graduated from the school only by the skin of his teeth over that of the school's newest and most honored faculty member.

But was the Master himself seeking to establish his own laudable goals through the faulty means of forcing me on an unwilling school? And in the highly unlikely event that I actually became Master, was I then supposed to ram through my own choice of successor, regardless of whether everyone else wanted Elerius and his followers?

No time for theoretical speculation. "I'm very glad, sir, you realize Elerius would be nearly your worst possible successor, but there could still be one thing worse than having him in charge of the school. And that would be having a mildly competent wizard, who had almost flunked out himself thirty years earlier, suddenly elevated from Royal Wizard of a tiny kingdom into a position of power where he hypothetically could, if he wished, make even the mightiest kings obey him."

The Master stopped smiling at last. "You're going to try to refuse the position?"

I had been squeezing the arms of the chair so tightly that my palms were slick. I made myself let go and wiped my hands on my pajamas. "I'm sorry, sir, I appreciate the honor enormously, but I'm afraid you're entirely mistaken in your estimation of me. You tried to put me on the faculty once before, and I told you then to wait fifty years to see if I'd be ready. It hasn't been fifty years—it hasn't even been fifteen."

"Well, I foolishly thought then I might live another fifty years. Neither one of us has the time he thought he might have. The school needs you, Daimbert—the western kingdoms need you."

This was taking on a nightmare quality, and exhaustion didn't help.

"How could the school possibly need me?" I burst out. "I know nothing at all about how it's run. I don't have the first idea of its financial arrangements. I don't know what you have down in the cellars. I couldn't name you all the members of the faculty. I'm not even sure what the graduation requirements are—except I
am
fairly sure I never actually met them. There are whole branches of magic where I don't know even the simplest spells. There are—"

He interrupted me, a hand raised. The veins stood out like cords on the hand's back, brown-spotted with age. "That isn't what matters," he said quietly but firmly. "It's all in the files, and anyway Zahlfast can acquaint you with the principal details you'll require. What the school needs in its new Master is not someone who's memorized the library's shelf-list but someone who can set the direction for the next two centuries, both how students are trained and how the practice of magic is coordinated among all the western wizards."

I took two deep breaths, then spoke fast before I could change my mind.

I had been keeping this a secret from the school for years, and even here, snatched from my bed for a dawn conversation with a dying man, it was hard to break that silence. Theodora was going to be furious with me for betraying a secret that was hers as much as mine, but I had no choice.

"You can't possibly make me Master, sir. You couldn't even put me on the faculty. I've gone against all the traditions of wizardry. I'm married, and I have a daughter."

It was not until I saw how he had to turn his head to look up at me that I realized I had jumped to my feet as I spoke. He did not appear nearly as horrified as I had expected—he didn't even look surprised. After a moment I said, "Perhaps you didn't understand me."

For a second his eyes twinkled again; I noticed they had become bloodshot. "My body's going fast, and my grasp of magic isn't nearly what it used to be, but my mind is still perfectly functional, Daimbert. I've know for some time that you were married."

"To a witch," I said, sitting down faster than I intended.

"To a witch," he repeated.

"Elerius told you?"

He nodded. "I suspect in an attempt to turn me against you. And I have other sources of information as well. But this isn't nearly as startling news as both you and Elerius seem to think it should be. You needn't look so shocked! Wizards really don't marry in the normal course of things, because our first allegiance is to magic itself, but you certainly aren't the first wizard in the West to establish a long-term relationship with a woman, or to father a child." I started to say something, but he was still speaking. "Haven't you, for example, ever wondered about Elerius's own parentage?"

Too stunned to answer for a moment, I turned this over. The Master already knew my deepest secret, and Elerius had a secret that went even deeper. I had several times suspected he had grown up in an aristocratic court, although he never talked about it, and if he had grown up, say, the son of a Royal Wizard somewhere, and if that wizard had already begun teaching him magic when he was a little boy—the way I had begun teaching Antonia—

"Elerius's father was not school-trained," the Master continued, with an almost boyish delight in revealing what someone else had thought hidden.

"And Elerius keeps his private life private much better than you do—if anyone else had the same interest as I do in the Royal Wizard of Yurt, they too would have found out all about you and your witch. But the head of a school for wizards has ways of learning things. No, Daimbert, I can appreciate why you're reluctant to take on the responsibilities of leadership so abruptly, and perhaps I should have brought you to the school much sooner. But the fact that you've had a woman back home whom you've thought of as your wife won't stop you from becoming Master here."

The way he phrased it made it clear that for him Theodora and Antonia were no more than a trivial distraction, one I'd be happy to put behind me. One more reason to refuse to become Master. But we were interrupted before I could answer.

A bird called suddenly above my head, causing me to jump. I looked up to see that it was not a real bird but an automaton, silver inset with chips of quartz. It perched on an irregularity on the wall above the door, singing through its metal beak. Its silver was tarnished but the note was almost unbearably sweet.

"An announcement that someone's here," said the Master, enjoying my surprise, "someone to whom I've taught the spells to activate the bird from outside. Melecherius brought it back years ago from the East, where I gather the mages make such automatons. Didn't I give you his book to read once? Come in!" he called.

The door opened and Whitey came in, carrying a tray which he placed on the bed. He stood silently, doing his best to pretend I didn't exist, until the Master nodded dismissal.

"Have some breakfast with me, Daimbert," he said when we were alone again. He pushed himself slowly and carefully to a sitting position and then poured tea. "Were you thinking I was about to expire this morning?"

he asked, looking at me sideways in amusement. "You found me lying in bed because that's where all sensible wizards spend the night, not because I'm completely incapacitated. You'll still have several months to get used to your new position."

I shook myself and took the cup he offered. I appreciated his effort to make light of his approaching death, but I didn't believe him. The hot tea did only a little to take the chill from my insides. "By the way," I said, "do you think Elerius can hear us?"

He drank tea thoughtfully for a moment. "I do not believe so. Of course, he could theoretically overhear any conversation in the school if he wanted to, but not even he could be paying attention to what every single person is saying at all times. I brought you here in the dead of night, telling no one beyond my two young assistants, to make sure he would have no reason to pay attention right now."