The Witch & the Cathedral Read online

  “Indeed.” Joachim attempted to look interested.

  “And there’s the magic of fire.” We had finished eating and were sitting back in our chairs, our legs stretched out under the table. “It’s a different branch of magic, with different rules and different spells. It doesn’t have very many applications unless you want to be able to start a blaze without flint and steel or to walk through fire without being burned.”

  “So could this be what the Romney children had seen, a magician practicing fire-magic? Might this be related to the lights the watchmen have seen on the tower?”

  If he thought I was trying to distract him from his concerns about the cathedral, he must feel I was doing a very poor job. “It’s possible,” I said, making one more attempt, “but the children also suggested they’d seen someone make himself invisible. That’s the magic of air, and hard magic—that ragged magician couldn’t possibly have done it, that is unless he’d somehow gotten hold of a ring of invisibility. You can attach a spell to a physical object, you know, and then the spell will work for anyone.”

  “We have to find out who is summoning monsters and make him stop,” said Joachim, abandoning any pretense of interest in different kinds of magic and their uses. “What will happen if enormous lizards start appearing all over the city? Half the cathedral priests are already terrified, thinking that we saw the devil last night and he’ll be back for them tonight. The other half are outraged that anyone dare mock us like this. We are trying to act for the glory of God, and we are either being threatened or laughed at by a beast from hell.”

  It did sound serious when he put it like that. I had been waiting to see if he would open a second bottle of wine, but instead he rose abruptly and started gathering the plates.

  “We should make it an early night,” he said. “The bishop will want to see you first thing in the morning.”

  I had expected the bishop to be tiny and frail. Instead there seemed to be a lot of him, or at least a lot of unexplained lumps under the blankets on the bed. Only his head protruded, propped up by pillows against a dark carved headboard. His skin was pale and he had no hair left.

  “Come here, my son,” he said in a voice that would have been appropriate for someone tiny and frail. I advanced slowly toward the bed, Joachim one step behind me. There was a faint movement under the blankets and a white hand emerged, beckoning. On the hand was a ring, an enormous ruby with a cross cut in its surface.

  I started, then probed magically, just one tiny respectful spell. But this ruby ring, unlike the last one I had been acquainted with, had nothing magical about it. I went down on one knee as Joachim had told me I had to do, murmured, “Your Holiness,” and kissed the ring. I just hoped the Master of the wizards’ school never heard about this.

  Then I took the chair toward which the bishop waved me and looked at his face properly for the first time. His wide eyes brimmed with love and intelligence but seemed to do so from a considerable distance, as though the real bishop were not lying here slowly dying.

  “My son the dean has told me he asked you to help us,” said the bishop. He spoke so softly that I had to lean forward to hear him. “I am afraid he called you without consulting me, but prompt action in the service of God is always commendable.”

  I nodded without speaking.

  “But he has put us in a delicate position,” the bishop continued. “If we are being threatened by magic, some of my priests feel the last person we should ask for help is another magic-worker.”

  Doubtless starting with the cantor Norbert, I thought. Joachim stirred beside me but I spoke first. “You aren’t being threatened by wizardry in the abstract,” I said. “You’re being threatened by someone working spells against the cathedral, and the dean knows that the quickest way to overcome magic spells is to find someone with powerful magic to break them.”

  “And do your spells have power against the devil?”

  “Of course not. Only God and those who serve Him have power against the devil,” I said generously. “But you aren’t facing the devil here. You’re facing a wizard working natural magic.”

  The bishop closed his eyes for a moment. The blankets rose and fell slowly, and for a moment I wondered if he had even heard me. But when he looked at me again it was unexpectedly shrewdly, as though the real bishop’s mind and ideas had come close to this room again. “You wouldn’t be casting magic spells yourself as an excuse for the wizards to get a toehold here, would you? I hear the wizards’ school in the great City is trying to expand its placement.”

  “I can assure you,” I said with dignity, “that I am not responsible for whatever is happening here.” So Lucas’s and Vincent’s accusations against wizardry had now even reached the cathedral. “I neither want to mock the church nor gain any ‘toeholds.’”

  The bishop started to cough. A young doctor in white, who had been standing silently on the far side of the room, came forward and offered him a cup. He took a sip and closed his eyes again. But when he opened them he continued as though there had been no pause. “When will you have banished evil magic from our cathedral?”

  “I hope soon. I’ve only been here twenty-four hours, and I didn’t see the monster myself. Until I have a better sense of who is working magic and what spells he is using, it may be difficult to counter him. I’ll do my best to be quick and discreet.”

  Joachim rose to his feet, so I did as well. He knelt to kiss the bishop’s ring before leaving, but I felt once was enough. The bishop’s eyes closed again as we went out.

  “It is an enormous responsibility he carries, and yet he seems able to do it still, in spite of his weakness,” said Joachim as we reached the street. “The doctors say he may only have a few weeks, but they have already said that many times.”

  I considered asking Joachim if he would expect me to kiss his ring once he became bishop but was able to resist doing so. I realized we were entering the side door of the cathedral, on our way to early service. No hope for breakfast then until service was over. But it was a good chance for some of the other cathedral priests to see me and realize how reverent and discreet a wizard could be.

  IV

  I spent the morning irreverently practicing magic within twenty yards of the bishop’s palace. First I tried a number of spells from the collection I had brought, shaped to reveal a hidden magic-worker. I was disappointed that none of them worked, because it would have taken a master wizard to shielded his mind against all of them, but it was a further indication that whoever was working here was indeed a powerful wizard and not just a renegade magician with one good trick. I would certainly have been able to find the magician I had met the day before if he tried to sneak back into town, with his weak illusions and not enough flying ability to save his shoes. It was distracting that the face of the woman with the amethyst eyes kept appearing inexplicably in my mind in the middle of my spells.

  When this search got me nowhere, I started again trying to work out the principles of the magic of fire. My books had only the faintest hints but I had a few ideas, extrapolating from the other sorts of magic that I knew. Herbal magic, I recalled from when I had first learned it, was set up with its spells quite separate from the magic of light and air, as though on a track that started parallel but quickly veered away in a different direction.

  If the magic of fire worked similarly, I reasoned, I had to find the direction in which its magic veered. In the Hidden Language, one not only said specific spells but entered into the very fabric of magic’s four dimensions. The direction in which one entered that fabric exerted a very powerful flow, and one had to remember that other directions were always possible.

  Knowing that I was deliberately avoiding thinking about a bat-winged monster five times the size of a man and doing so anyway, I worked on a candle in my room. I could with no trouble make the wick glow and even emit a plausible cloud of smoke, but it remained obstinately cool. Yet perhaps with a spell from another angle—

  I emerged from a struggle with
the forces of magic and gave a shout of delight. Joachim’s servant put his head in, alarmed and then puzzled. I sat by a sunlit window, triumphantly holding up a lit candle.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I was just excited because I lit the candle flame. Will your master be home for lunch?”

  But the servant was gone, doubtless thinking that his master was harboring a madman.

  I extinguished the candle and lit it again to be sure that I could. Once more, with two words and a snap of my fingers I caused a blue flame to blossom on the end of the wick. It was a real flame, too, no illusion; I nearly burned my fingers. So far I could only create fire, not protect myself against it.

  I settled back, feeling a great reluctance to do anything else after my frantic efforts of the day before and then this morning’s unsuccessful attempts to find another wizard. Sitting in the dean’s house felt so safe and normal that I could almost imagine that nineteen years of romantic dreams were not shattered, that I had not resigned the only post I had ever had, and that an enormous monster with eye of fire had not landed a very short distance from here. If I didn’t think about any of this, maybe none of it would be true.

  Again I wondered why Prince Lucas had come to the city just now, and why he seemed so furious with organized wizardry. He might have come here at his father’s direction, I thought, to protect the largest community in their kingdom from a magical attack. In that case he might well suspect me of having something to do with the monster. But could he have learned of its evening appearance in time to arrive at dawn the next morning?

  When I heard the noon bells ringing in the cathedral, I began waiting for Joachim’s return. But time passed, time enough for the noon service and enough more that I realized he was not coming.

  Unless I merely waited for the monster to reappear, something neither the bishop nor Joachim would want me to do, I would have to search it out. By sheer will power I dragged myself to my feet. The cathedral tower might offer more clues if I looked again.

  As I shouldered my way through the crowded streets, thinking of my best approach, I suddenly froze in the middle of a step. A light touch once brushed across my mind. This time it was not just a touch but a voice.

  It spoke one word, “Wizard.” It might have been a statement, or it might have been someone addressing me. I looked around wildly but could find no clue. The mental touch was gone as quickly as it had come. But that single word inside my mind had sounded as though spoken with a woman’s voice.

  No wonder, I thought grimly, that the town seemed full of magic. It would appear to have almost as high a density of magic-workers as the great City. Besides me, there was whoever had the power to make a monster do his bidding; plus the magician I had seen outside the gates; plus the wizard who had impressed the Romney children; and finally whatever witch had first touched my mind up on the scaffolding and had just done so again.

  Then out of the corner of my eye I saw a head of nut-brown hair over a dark shawl.

  In two steps I was beside her, the monster and Prince Lucas forgotten. “Excuse me,” I said and touched her on the shoulder.

  She turned quickly toward me, but where I had expected a startled look I found a smile that put a dimple in her cheek.

  “I am Daimbert, Royal Wizard of Yurt,” I said, flustered. “But I’m afraid I don’t know who you are.”

  “My name is Theodora.” Her voice was almost musical in its lilt and deeper than I had expected.

  “Theodora,” I said. “It is a very lovely and unusual name.”

  “It was my mother’s and grandmother’s name, and I believe my grandmother’s mother’s and grandmother’s as well.”

  “Were all of them witches as well?”

  She burst into laughter. “I never thought of myself as a witch. Isn’t that something wicked?”

  “Well,” I said uncertainly, because she certainly did not appear to be wicked, “witches are women with strange powers.”

  “Sometimes I call on serpents from deep beneath the sea,” she said, looking at me with teasing amethyst eyes. “But they haven’t answered me yet. Does that make me a witch?”

  “How about bat-winged monsters?” I said, finding it coming out much more harshly than I intended. “Do you call on them too?”

  “That’s why the mayor sent for a wizard, isn’t it,” she said, sober for a moment, and I recalled that the first time I had seen her I had been coming from the municipal building. “I didn’t see the creature myself, but it must have been terrible.” Then her eyes danced again. “If you think I’m a witch, why are you surprised that I would want to meet the magic-worker brought in to deal with a monster?”

  “Why do you think the mayor himself would have sent for a wizard?” I asked, feeling reluctant to tell a witch that the cathedral dean had invited me here.

  “There are three that rule the world,” she quoted, “the wizards, the Church, and the aristocracy. We who are the merchants and the artisans and the farmers don’t count as rulers.”

  “My family ran a warehouse in the great City,” I said defensively. “Most wizards don’t come from ruling families.”

  “You have authority now. But this social structure gives someone like the elected mayor of a town a flexibility to do whatever he wants. He can ask for help from wizards or priests or aristocrats, whereas those three would be embarrassed to call on each other. I suppose,” the dimple coming back, “if I called on monsters and they answered, then I probably would be a witch, but I’m not.”

  “If you’re not a witch,” I said, trying not to sound accusing, “how were you able to speak inside my mind?”

  Instead of answering she took my arm. “If we’re going to chat and get acquainted, let’s not do it in the middle of the street. I was just going home for lunch. Won’t you join me?”

  Stories I had half-heard twenty years ago flashed through my mind, stories of witches luring men into their caves, of what they did to them there in their mad lusts. The young woman beside me did not appear to be racked with mad lusts. Maybe I was developing an impure mind.

  “I’d be happy to eat with you,” I said, “but you may not have enough to spare for a stranger. There’s an inn right around the corner; I’ll even pay for both of us!”

  “Now,” I said again when we were seated at the inn and I had ordered, “tell me, if you’re not a witch, how you can speak with me magically, mind to mind?”

  She bent her head to reach up and unknot her shawl. Her profile and the angle of her neck made a delightful silhouette against the window beyond her. “Are you a witch?” she asked me.

  “I am a wizard. But only men can be wizards, because only men are trained properly in magic. A witch is a woman who has picked up a few rudiments of magic and, being untrained, uses them at best awkwardly and at worst in the service of darkness.” Everything I said sounded in my ears as though I were charging her with unspeakable crimes.

  “I am a woman,” she said with a laugh, “and I do know one or two rudiments of magic, but I would not say I was untrained, and I certainly don’t serve the powers of darkness!”

  Our mugs of beer were brought, and she looked at me with dancing eyes over the rim of hers. I noticed how long her lashes were. I felt no touch in my mind, but her look implied that she could see all my thoughts and intentions and overall, surprisingly, rather liked what she saw.

  “Were you trained by an old ragged magician?”

  This she seemed to find the most amusing yet. “Of course not. My mother trained me. In fact, I taught the magician a little fire magic a few years ago. All he’d had before then were some rather flimsy illusions.” If she had known him for several years, I thought, then I could give up my rather vague suspicions that he was a very powerful wizard in disguise, who had for reasons unclear come here to attack the cathedral.

  Theodora looked down at her plate for a moment, then toward me again. “You’re one of the wizards he told me about, aren’t you, one of the ones who finished the whole progr
am at that school?”

  “Yes, I am, but that doesn’t mean I know all the different sorts of magic there are. Watch this.” I snapped my fingers, said two words, and the candle on the table came alight. “I worked that out this morning, but only this morning, and I’m afraid it’s all the fire magic I know. Could you teach me more?”

  “And could you teach me illusions? Yours, I know, would not be flimsy or pathetic. It hardly seemed worth it to ask the magician to teach me his magic, and I was always afraid he would think I was trying to compete with him, keeping an ‘honest magician’ from earning a living.”

  We both laughed at this. Our conversation seemed to be going nowhere, and almost every question was answered with a different question, but I felt intrigued. Something about her resisted my efforts to understand her, yet in a very few minutes I had started to feel I had known Theodora for weeks or even longer, and she seemed always to have known me.

  “Are you perhaps one of the Romneys?” I asked as we ate. I brought out the gold hoop earring I still had. “Did you lose this?”

  She brushed back the hair from both ears, tilting her head forward in the angle I liked. Long pendant earrings sparkled against her cheeks. “Doesn’t it look like I still have my earrings?”

  “But are you a Romney?” I persisted.

  “No, I’ve lived all my life in the kingdom of Caelrhon, and as far as I know all my ancestors have too,” she said, giving me a straighter answer than most. “But I’ve become friends with some of the Romneys. There’s one band that often camps outside the city.”

  I thought rapidly. “Why didn’t they want me to know about you?”

  “Did they try very hard to deny my existence?” she said with an amused glance.

  “Maybe not. The old Romney woman implied I would meet you.” I paused, remembering exactly what the woman had said. “But were they afraid of my discovering there was someone who knew magic in the city?”