Is This Apocalypse Necessary? - Wizard of Yurt - 6 (35 page)

I had never thought of it at all like that. Once again, he was assuming that I was like him. But he was far more bitter than I had expected.

Haughty defiance I had been prepared to face—not anger and jealousy because his best plans were rejected.

Walther spoke up then—for a moment I had nearly forgotten him, standing silent next to his father on his thin, slightly crooked legs. "But Wizard," he said to Elerius, "aren't
I
supposed to be your helpful little assistant? Isn't that why you've been teaching me magic?"

For a second Elerius's expression changed, and he gave the boy a smile and rested a hand briefly on his shoulder. "That's right, Prince," he said while I wondered if he was about to have Walther turn me into a frog. I'd better not lose track of the boy again.

"You forget," I said quickly, "that I have no interest in heading the school, with or without assistants. At this point, I'm sure the teachers would all agree that we'd be better off if the school didn't have a single head at all—or at most a person with enough administrative authority to make sure the tradesmen's bills got paid, but nothing like absolute power.

If you think about it, that's really how the old Master functioned." I took a deep breath and spread out my hands in a placating gesture. "There's still time to be penitent, Elerius, to rejoin the school and eventually play a role in shaping its policy, along with all the rest of us."

Maybe I shouldn't have said "us." But this was as reasonable as I could get. I wiped my sweaty palms on my trousers and waited for his answer.

I didn't have to wait long. Anger darkened his face, and he started to rise from his chair. Only Walther's presence, I thought, kept him from summoning lightning to fry me to a crisp. It was not good to have the best wizard in the West angry with me.

"No!" he shouted, then paused, taking a deep breath. Walther took a step away as he slowly sat back down again. "No," he said more quietly, "I have no interest in your 'penitence.' You've been spending too much time talking with men in the church—weaklings, all of them, without enough courage to take a firm stand on anything except for so-called sin." I recalled that his hand-picked candidate as bishop of the City had already resigned. "If the teachers of the school, sitting in their classrooms fretting about tradesmen's bills, don't want to join me, then I shall defeat them all!

This collection of royal armies at my gates will not take very long; then I shall turn my magical powers on the wizards. They shouldn't take much assurance from the school's protective spells—after all, I helped design them."

"You're going to kill everybody, knights and wizards both, who stands in your way?" I said in horror. "Elerius, are you insane? This is
not
helping humanity!"

He had glanced toward the window as though planning the great stroke that would reduce the armies outside to ashes. But now he shot me a sharp glance from under peaked eyebrows. "I would not have stood this insult from any other wizard, Daimbert. But you are the only man who has ever been able to disrupt my plans so consistently and so thoroughy. When I learned the old Master wanted you as his heir, I understood why at last."

If so, it was more than I'd ever understood. Elerius was speaking more calmly now, but there was a note of bitter coldness in everything he said.

"Your sometimes bumbling exterior," he continued, "must hide abilities equal to mine—maybe even greater, because I have long suspected that the Master had learned secret lore from earlier generations of wizards which he never taught at the school, and which even my years of research have not uncovered."

"Bumbling exterior" I let pass without comment—could he possibly be saying that he thought I was as good as he was?

"I allowed you to come here unmolested, Daimbert, because I have continued to hope that you would agree to work with me. Even now I do not entirely despair of you. Be reasonable, so that I need not turn to threats."

His voice was softer now, insinuating. "Haven't you often wished that academic magic was not so limited? We struggle to learn the most difficult spells, are exhausted in working them, and even then we can accomplish but a fraction of what we envision in imagination. But if the two of us worked together! Then there would be no further need to consult the wishes of others or engage their participation, when we could do everything ourselves. You with the secret knowledge the old Master gave you, me with my mastery of all known branches of western magic—we shall dominate the world!"

I had a very clear idea of what Joachim would say— Lucifer and the fallen angels must have talked like this just before their fall.

But then the implications hit me. I sprang backwards, knocking the chair over, no longer caring who had the initiative in this conversation.

"Elerius! This is black magic you're advocating. You've sold your soul to the devil!"

Young Walther was almost as terrified as I. He retreated rapidly in the opposite direction. I stood with my back against the locked door, the boy with his back against a window, and Elerius sat deserted in the middle of his study.

He actually managed a chuckle. "That would certainly justify all the evil things you've thought of me over the years, wouldn't it! But no, Daimbert.

My soul is still my own. As is my pride—which would suffer irrevocably if everyone knew my best effects were not due to my own magic but to the workings of a demon. Go ahead and check for the presence of the supernatural. You'll not find it here."

I checked at once, the same spell I had used in Basil's castle. Here, as there, I found no demonic influence, not even the faint taste of evil lingering at the edge of perception from a demon trying to hide itself.

"Come back, Prince," Elerius continued, fairly under control now and smiling. "I'm sorry if the wizard frightened you. But he won't hurt you."

Walther returned slowly, not crying but right on the edge of doing so.

I righted my chair with hands that just barely did not tremble. "Black magic or not, Elerius, you're still searching for powers beyond anything human."

He shook his head, still smiling. He was back in charge of the situation, jealousy and bitterness thoroughly concealed. "You're sounding like your priest friends again, Daimbert. You know I've warned you about that. And very soon I shall stop giving you any more second chances to change your mind and join me! Know that, with you or not, I
will
become ruler of the West. If you persist in being finicky about bloodshed, then I shall let you leave here alive, charged with telling all those kings and wizards to cease their opposition to me at once. That way I shall not have to kill anyone else, which of course would be my own preference too."

Reason had failed—time to try threats.

"I shall neither," I said clearly and conversationally, "join you in world domination nor try—unsuccessfully, I'm sure— to persuade anyone else that the world would be best if you ran it. I've given you a chance to end this without destroying yourself or anyone else, but now I shall have to destroy you."

He looked startled at this wild claim—but it was not entirely a bluff.

"You're so good at discovering things in people's pockets," I continued, fierce and grim now. "Tell me what I have in mine!"

He would have been wondering this ever since I came in the room. A magical object is normally hard to detect if it is not functioning, but in my pocket I had a bottled Ifrit, even now struggling and shouting tiny threats that I had long since ignored. A wizard as good as Elerius would have spotted it at once without necessarily knowing what it was.

"Where have you been," he demanded, "to be carrying something like that?"

"Still don't know what it is?" I asked teasingly, keeping an eye on Walther—Antonia would have been putting a spell together to work the object out of my pocket.

"If this is something the Master gave you instead of me—" he started to say, with another flash of jealousy. But he stopped himself and started over, though his good-humor now was entirely unconvincing. "Don't tell me you're planning to issue hollow threats against me in my own stronghold, Daimbert."

I jerked the Ifrit's bottle from my pocket. "The threats will not be hollow."

The bronze bottle lay heavy in my hand, shaped like a cucumber, green with age, sealed with lead imprinted by Solomon's dread seal. For a moment the room was dead quiet, still enough for the Ifrit's high, thin voice to carry. "I shall pluck the living nerves from your face, cast your body half way to the sun, set lizards into your guts—"

Both Elerius and Walther stared. The boy would never have seen such a bottle before, but I knew Elerius had. "Surely," I said, allowing myself to sound patronizing for a change, "you recognize an Ifrit's bottle when you see it."

Elerius actually blanched. For one second I enjoyed the rush of triumph, the knowledge that at least for this moment he feared me. But I brushed the sensation aside almost immediately. This was not about proving my own abilities, but about Elerius recognizing the inherent limitations in his.

"These are the choices," I said, speaking slowly to give my words added weight. "Either you immediately surrender— give up your resistance and throw yourself on the mercy of the school—or else I release this Ifrit from his bottle. Listen: you can tell he is eager for release! With the first of his wishes he will grant me, I shall blast you and your castle into pebbles. I shall ask the Ifrit if he will spare the boy's life, but I will make no effort to save yours!"

This was pure bluff. The Ifrit was no more ready to grant me wishes now than he had been when I first tricked him into the bottle. But Elerius did not know this. "Come, Elerius," I continued when he seemed to hesitate. "For all your talk of augmenting wizardly powers so that we can rule in absolute authority, you know that the Ifrit is more powerful than you or any wizard ever has been or ever can be."

Still he seemed to hesitate, watching me intently. Did he doubt my willingness to act? Did he know that all my talk of wishes was false? Did he sense my extreme reluctance to kill anyone, including him?

The silence between us stretched out. Earlier I had felt half-frozen with fear; now sweat ran down inside my shirt. He kept his tawny eyes fixed on me.

I broke first. "Dear God, Elerius, don't make me do this!" Because this wasn't a bluff any longer.

Slowly, giving him every last second to change his mind, I reached for the edge of the lead seal and started to pry it open. In one second the Ifrit, furious with all the frustrated rage of an enormously ancient and enormously powerful being, who had been created to help shape the world but who had been tricked into complete helplessness, would burst from the bottle. In two seconds he would have destroyed this castle with all its inhabitants, Prince Walther, Elerius, and me.

"Stop!"

I stopped.

Elerius's words came out low and rough. "Give me the bottle, Daimbert."

I clung to it with both hands. "
You
are surrending here," I said, my voice trembling. "Not me."

He rose then, for the first time since I had come in the room, and shifted his chair. The chair had concealed it, but I could see it now: a pentagram drawn in chalk.

In horror and despair, I nearly dropped the Ifrit's bottle. When he spoke again it was so quietly I could hardly hear him. "Don't you make
me
do this."

"You can't mean it," I managed to gasp. "You're not going to summon a demon!"

"I will if you do not surrender the Ifrit."

Should I give him the bottle and make a run for it, letting him discover for himself that the Ifrit was bent on destruction rather than granting wishes? But I immediately rejected the idea. It would be bad enough to sacrifice myself in making sure that Elerius too was dead. But I could not give him the means to end his life—and Walther's—while saving my own.

Besides, I did not trust the Ifrit not to become all accommodating and friendly if Elerius was able to get his attention in the bottle, to explain to him that he who was opening the seal was not the same person who had closed it. Elerius with an Ifrit beside him would be almost worse than Elerius with a demon.

He bent to touch up a few spots where the chair had scuffed a slight imperfection in his pentagram. Walther was again backed up against the window.

"You just told me," I said desperately, "that you didn't want to let anyone think your magic was not all your own."

"It would indeed be a blow to my pride," he said quietly, with a glance back at me over his shoulder. "But better to sacrifice my pride than not to take the rule that is rightfully mine."

"I don't believe you! You're bluffing!"

"A bluff? I am completely in earnest." He rose and dusted off the chalk on his trousers. His voice, louder now, filled the room, and at his voice the magic lanterns began one by one to go out. "By Satan, by Beelzebub," he cried, "by Lucifer and Mephistopheles!" And as he spoke the lines of the pentagram began to glow.

part eight
*
the
cranky
saint

Stop!"

Elerius stopped.

For a wild second I thought that I myself had spoken. But it wasn't me.

It was Prince Walther.

He was shaking hard, but he moved determinedly toward the pentagram. The light from the few lamps still burning cast wild shadows across the room. The prince's walk had only the slightest limp, and his chin was raised in a desperate attempt at hauteur. "You warned me," he said through the tremor in his voice, "you warned me against black magic yourself, Wizard. Don't do this! Daimbert is our friend."

"A friend," I added from between dry lips, "who will be able to get the seal off the Ifrit's bottle far faster than you will be able to negotiate with a demon for the sale of your soul."

"I think," said Walther in a low voice, cocking an eye at me and still trembling, "Daimbert doesn't really care if the Ifrit kills him too, as long as it kills you."

Where had the boy gotten such a good insight?