Below the Wizards' Tower (The Royal Wizard of Yurt Book 8) Read online

  I myself had had enough trouble mastering western magic, but it wasn’t worth saying, as he was probably thinking the same thing.

  “The Master just doesn’t seem to realize how limiting the curriculum here is,” he continued. “The youngest teacher, Titus, whom they’ve put in charge of teaching magical creatures— He probably knows everything in the books, but I doubt he’s ever actually seen a magical creature, other than on one or two field trips up to the northern land of magic, trips where he saw exactly what he was prepared to see. ‘Oh, look, a giant, just like the picture in the book.’ Even you, Daimbert, with your experience with Ifriti, probably have more appreciation of what real magical creatures are like.”

  “I’m sure when they hired Titus, they thought him the best-qualified wizard for the position,” I said stiffly.

  “There were other candidates,” Elerius replied, lifting one peaked eyebrow. “There was the Royal Wizard of that little kingdom, you know the one, it’s right next to your tiny kingdom of Yurt, nearly as small—”

  He must know perfectly well that the name of the kingdom to which he referred was Caelrhon, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of telling him. I let pass the slur on any kingdom smaller than his own. I also refrained from saying that I knew the Royal Wizard of Caelrhon all too well, and he would have made a terrible teacher.

  “Even though the number of school-trained wizards is constantly growing,” he continued, shaking his head, “the Master still runs it the way he must have when he first founded the school, when it was scarcely distinguishable from apprenticeship training. The organization of what we call institutionalized wizardry is still very loose, and even as students, young wizards are allowed to follow their own preferences, whereas it would make much more sense to have them all follow a prescribed course of rigorous study, exposing them to a great variety of magical systems.”

  I thought but did not say that I probably would not have graduated if such rigor had been in place.

  “What the school does so well,” he added, “is to make sure that magic is always carried out with the best motives, to assure the well-being of mankind. It would be best if all forms of wizardry were practiced from that perspective.”

  Here I actually agreed with him, though I wasn’t about to say so. I had long had a suspicion that he sometimes confused what was best for mankind with what was best for him.

  Elerius rose then and started closing and stacking books. “I don’t know about you,” he commented, “but every time I come to the City it seems there are more and more priests around. Ever since they finished that new cathedral, it seems that half the priests from the Western Kingdoms want to come an admire it. This was supposed to be the wizards’ city, but it won’t be much longer at this rate.”

  He smiled to show that he was joking. I kept silent.

  He stretched, arms above his head. “Well, if you like, you can look at these books tonight. I’ve been reading all day and am about ready to turn in.”

  “Thank you,” I said with dignity. “I think I will look at them at least briefly.”

  As he turned away I thought of something else. “By the way,” I said, with my best feigned nonchalance, “apparently someone has been visiting the City in recent years who looks a lot like me. Since you’re here more than I am, maybe you can tell me who he is.”

  For one second he froze, but when he turned back he spoke without hesitation. “A lot like you? No, I’ve never seen anyone like that. Probably just as well!” And he gave a thin smile, to show he was still joking, and was gone.

  I looked after him and shook my head. No one else would have thought his conversation insulting. But I had. Was my attitude just colored by jealousy?

  Meeting Elerius unexpectedly had certainly made me fully awake. So after he left the library I spent the next hour trying to find out more about eastern magic.

  Several of the books on the table were the volumes on magical creatures that had been missing from the upper shelves, but most were on the East. There was little enough here. I had to admit Elerius was right. If this was what Melecherius on Eastern Magic was based on, then it was not surprising that the handbook had proven so inadequate when we were actually in the East.

  For example, one book, that did include a fairly accurate sketch of an Ifrit, enormous and green, made it sound very easy to trick one into going into a bronze binding bottle. I could have told the author that even stupid Ifriti did not trick that easily, leaving aside the question of where one was going to pick up such a bottle.

  Elerius probably did have a point that student wizards ought to be exposed to more magic than the clean, modern spells of our textbooks. To really understand the magic of the East, someone would need to go and live for years with the mages, though I was quite sure that person was not me.

  I hated that Elerius was right all the time.

  But he had known who I meant when I mentioned Marcus, the man for whom the waitress had mistaken me. Now Titus could have eaten in the same restaurant as Marcus many times and never given him a second glance. A much bigger difference, to a wizard, than whether someone’s beard was white or brown was whether they were a magic-worker. Mere physical similarity would not cross that divide.

  But Elerius had seen the similarity. And he had not said, “You must mean old Marcus. He does look a little like you, now that I think about it.” For some reason he wanted to keep his familiarity with Marcus hidden from me.

  It looked as if tomorrow I was going to have to find this man myself. If nothing else, I could tell him that the waitress was hoping he’d stop by.

  The kingdom of Yurt was two hundred miles from the great City, so none of us got here very often. I had been sent off with a shopping list of items not easily accessible at home. I had an appointment with the Master of the school for late morning, but before then I had plenty of time to pick up a few things—and to look for signs of Marcus.

  The streets were full of people hurrying about their business. Gulls floated on the air above the city, looking ethereal and white until they spotted something edible, not yet found by the street-sweepers, and screamed at each other as they tugged and fought over it. I examined my shopping list.

  Both the queen and her aunt had requested lace, apparently to decorate a clothing item that I, as a man, would never see, for their written description had emphasized the requisite delicacy and added, “As appropriate for certain personal items.”

  I found a shop that specialized in lace and ribbons, well up the hill from the harbor, and peered in the window, trying to decide if what I saw was delicate enough. And suddenly I heard a delighted voice, “Marcus!”

  A woman came hurrying out of the shop and seized me by both hands. “Why didn’t you tell me you were back in town? And what have you done with your beard?”

  “Um,” I managed, looking down into soft brown eyes, “I think you’ve confused me with someone else. I’m not Marcus.”

  “Did you think I wouldn’t know you?” she said with a chuckle. “Hoping to fool me? I know you too well for that!”

  This was getting ridiculous. Did I somehow have a long-lost twin about whom my parents had somehow never told me? And did the lace-maker know the waitress?

  “Look at me closely,” I said, hoping that no long-lost twin existed. “You’ll find that it isn’t just the color of my beard that makes me different from Marcus.”

  She looked me up and down, in full daylight and from closer than the waitress had been last night, and after a moment released my hands. A slow flush spread up her cheeks. “But the way you walk, the way you stand, even the sound of your voice— You must know him!”

  “I’m sorry to have confused you,” I said gently, “but I’ve never met him. I’m a wizard, visiting the wizards’ school. I assume Marcus is not a wizard? I thought not. But to make up for confusing you, how about if I buy some of your lace?”

  I hurried away a few minutes later, with quite a bit of lace that I hoped would do for “cer
tain personal items.” When the young woman asked if I wanted white lace or cream, I had no idea and got both.

  Where was I going to find Marcus? I could visit every pretty girl in town and see if any of them could give me some specifics, since he seemed to know them all. But the two so far had seemed surprised to see me, suggesting he hadn’t been here for a while.

  I walked as I thought, past the cathedral (completed now, it had still been under construction when I was a boy), and my feet unguided found their way through the crowds and down toward the harbor, to where my family had once had a warehouse. Curious, I looked for and found the building, though it now had someone else’s name painted on it and looked overall much better maintained than it had when I had to sell it after my grandmother’s funeral.

  There was a tavern across the street from the warehouse, which had seemed exciting and exotic to me when I was a boy, probably because I was forbidden to go in. In the evenings shouting, laughter, snatches of song, and an occasional fight would burst from it, but this morning it just looked wan and tired. A young woman, her hair tied up in a kerchief, was down on her knees scrubbing the front steps.

  She looked up, noticed me standing there, and smiled. “Back so soon, Marcus? But I thought you’d lost all your money at cards last night. And what have you done with your beard?”

  Last night? So he was in town after all!

  “Marcus is back!” she called over her shoulder to someone inside. She dropped the scrub brush, stood up, and turned to me. “Did you have to bleach it as some sort of forfeit after you ran out of money?”

  Denying I was Marcus was rapidly getting old. But I stopped with the denial half-formed on my lips.

  Yesterday, down close to the water, I had seen someone who looked strangely familiar. The lace-maker had thought she recognized Marcus in the way I stood, the way I walked. I knew now why that back-lit person had seemed so familiar.

  He had reminded me of my own image in the mirror.

  “I’ll explain about the beard later,” I muttered and went inside.

  The tavern was low-ceilinged and quiet except for the creaks in the floor boards. A man stood behind the bar, polishing glasses. “Did you lose something last night?” he asked with a smile. “Besides all your money, of course!”

  “In fact,” I said, “I’m looking for a person: Marcus. And no, I’m not Marcus myself. I’m, um, his long-lost twin.”

  He frowned at me. “Are you sure? You sound enough like him. But the beard’s wrong. Is this another one of your jokes, Marcus?”

  I found a coin in my pocket and flipped it to him. “I’ll make it worth your while if you can help me find him.” And then I realized what I should have thought of before, demonstrating that I was a wizard, and made a quick illusory fishing boat on top of the bar.

  He seemed more impressed with the coin than the illusion, which soon started to fade. “If you really were Marcus,” he said, “I’d have to ask where you’d gotten this after you were wiped out last night.”

  “But do you know where he’s staying?”

  The barkeeper looked at me from under his eyebrows. “If you’re a wizard and his twin, shouldn’t you know already ?”

  The young woman had come in behind me. “It won’t hurt to tell him,” she said. “I’m sure Marcus is staying where he always does, in that rooming house out near the ship-breakers. I think the landlady likes him.” She smiled rather wickedly. “Guess he pays in what he’s got! You do know where that is, don’t you?”

  “Yes, of course, I should have realized that’s where he’d be,” I said hastily, having no idea where she meant. “I’d just thought the landlady would have gotten tired of his not paying by now.”

  The barkeeper looked at the coin I’d given him as though wondering whether to return it, then pocketed it. “If you give him any money,” he commented, “you might want to come by this evening—before, rather than after, he buys rounds for the house—and see if you can win it back.”

  Out in the street again, I marveled once more at Marcus’s ability to attract women. He didn’t seem to have broken any hearts, for they all appeared to think well of him. I, on the other hand, had never had an opportunity to break someone’s heart because I hadn’t won any in the first place.

  And why would Elerius, wizard at one of the wealthiest of the Western Kingdoms, be interested in someone who never had enough money to pay his landlady?

  Assuming the person I had seen last night really was Marcus, and that the woman in the tavern was right about his rooming house, then I was going to have to find him here in the harbor area.

  III

  But the first person I encountered was neither a wizard nor someone who looked strangely like me. Rather, it was a priest. Striding down the steep hill from the cathedral toward the harbor came a tall, gaunt figure in black and white vestments, someone I was delighted to see.

  “Joachim!” I called, immediately putting Marcus from my mind. “I had no idea you were in the City!”

  He at least recognized me as myself. “Daimbert! How good to see you!”

  Joachim did not smile very often, but he smiled for me, which I always took as a sign that I might really be a good, virtuous person after all. We shook hands vigorously. We got a couple of curious looks from people passing by; the City was the home both of the wizards’ school and of the most important of the West’s bishoprics, and usually priests and wizards passed in the street without acknowledging each others’ existence.

  “So what brings you here, Joachim?” I asked. In spite of the long-standing rivalry between magic and religion, he and I had been close friends ever since I first arrived in Yurt as Royal Wizard and found him there as Royal Chaplain. Probably it would have been more suitable to call him Father, since he was now a cathedral priest, but we had always called each other by our names.

  “My bishop sent me,” he said. Last year he had joined the cathedral chapter of Caelrhon, in the next kingdom over from Yurt, and we had seen each other much less than when we had served together in the same castle. “He has decided to start building a new cathedral and wants some ideas on architects and builders from the bishop here in the great City. Did you know that the cathedral here was recently completed?”

  “I knew. But this is the harbor, not the cathedral precinct.”

  He smiled again. “Perhaps it is silly, but I see the ocean so rarely, and I always enjoy watching the dolphins out by the breakwater.”

  “Then let’s go look at them together.”

  Back when I was a boy, I always knew I didn’t want to grow up to be a wool wholesaler, but it was only as a youth that I really focused on the towers of the wizards’ school, always looming over the City, and decided that I would become a wizard. When I was younger, I planned to grow up to be a dolphin.

  The morning breeze off the bay was fresh and the waves out beyond the breakwater all capped with white. We watched for several minutes as the dolphins leaped and swam, sometimes in a line as though in parade, sometimes riding a wave high before rolling over in the air, always looking as if they were having a joyous time.

  “They can’t worry about anything,” I commented. “They just swim with their friends, catch fish or eat the pieces the fishermen throw them, never having to plan building projects or answer questions about where they’ve been and what they’ve seen, or guess what another dolphin might be plotting.”

  “I’ve always wondered,” said Joachim, “why wizards never transform themselves into dolphins. It must be a powerful temptation.” He turned his deep-set dark eyes on me. “You could do it, couldn’t you?”

  “Well, yes.” The idea was certainly attractive. “The hard part would be transforming back without having the right kind of mouth for the spells in the Hidden Language. Unless another wizard turned you back, you’d be a dolphin forever. Of course then, as I was just saying, your worries would be behind you.”

  I paused, then had a thought. “I could transform you into a dolphin. Just for a litt
le while, and I’d promise to transform you back! Wouldn’t you rather be leaping the waves than getting references for stone masons?”

  But Joachim looked horrified. “Dolphins do not have immortal souls. I’m a priest. I could not do something so dangerous.” After a moment he added in a somewhat conciliatory tone, “I would trust you, Daimbert, to turn me back. But I cannot lose my own humanity when I am responsible for bringing men and women to God. I just enjoy watching God’s other creatures at play.” And he turned and started determinedly away from the water’s edge.

  Personally I suspected dolphins might have perfectly good souls, but it never worked to argue theology with Joachim. But if they did have souls, I asked myself, were they perhaps not fallen as were humans? That would certainly explain why none of them were looking for someone who could have been a lost twin or wondering what a supremely accomplished dolphin might be plotting.

  I hurried to catch up. “While you’re here in the City, Joachim, as well as discussing church architects, could you keep your eyes open for someone who looks like me?”

  “Looks like you?” He frowned. “You mean another wizard with a white beard? I thought the City was full of them.”

  “Not a wizard. And he has a brown beard. But someone who walks like me, sounds like me, I guess he’d be about my height and build.”

  “I thought there weren’t any other people like you,” said Joachim dryly. This was probably meant to be a joke. The problem with being good friends with a priest is that half the time we didn’t even understand each other. At least he didn’t add that it was good that no one else had turned out as I had.

  “Well, several people have mistaken me for him,” I said hastily. “Could you just let me know if you see him? I’m staying at the wizards’ school.”

  “And I am staying with the chancellor in the cathedral close,” said Joachim, assuming I knew where that was. “I do need to get started on doing what I came for. But it is very good to see you, Daimbert!”