Is This Apocalypse Necessary Read online

  "Is that illusion, Daimbert?" he asked. "No offense, but you usually don't dress this ostentatiously. And where are my assistants?"

  My finery was already starting to fade. I stood up, snapped my fingers to end the illusion, and drew the frogs out of my pockets. "I decided they'd be safer like this," I said. "Less likely to paralyze me and drop me out of the air cart by mistake while it was flying. Think how upset with them you'd have been."

  He looked at them thoughtfully, stroking his snowy beard. Whitey's hair was white because he had been born without pigmentation; mine had turned white overnight due to certain hellish experiences shortly after I graduated from the school; but the Master's was white because he had lived far longer than any wizard ever known: at least four hundred years by most accounts, though some said five hundred or even six.

  "I told them to bring you at once and to bring you quietly," he commented. He spoke with his accustomed assurance and authority, but there was a tremorous undertone to his voice I did not recall hearing before. "Perhaps they went beyond their orders. Could you turn them back into themselves?"

  A year ago he would have worked the magic himself in a second. I made no remark but set about undoing my spells. If Chin was jealous because the Master considered me special— certainly more special than he was—but wouldn't tell him why, he might well have chosen to misunderstand his orders. But why was I, Royal Wizard of one of the smallest of the western kingdoms, suddenly so special?

  In a moment I had turned my frogs back into young wizards. They staggered for a moment, then straightened themselves up, heels together. A minute ago I had thought of them as the power-drunk agents of Elerius. But if these were indeed the Master's assistants, I had to change my opinion of them. I saw them now as thoroughly humiliated students a whole lot younger and more inexperienced than I was, even if they might, given a chance, someday turn into better wizards. Though they now were grasping at dignity, they knew perfectly well that they had been showing off their newly-learned spells by trying to bring me here forcibly, and not only had they failed to do so, they would now have the shame of trying to explain why they had thought it such a good idea. The Master shook his head almost imperceptibly in their direction. "I'll talk to you two later," he said, and they turned around and shot from the room, slamming the door behind them without waiting for further dismissal.

  "By the way," I commented, "when you talk to them, ask them about breaking into the office and looking at old academic records."

  The Master's eyes twinkled, and for a second I allowed myself to think that he was in bed merely because it was still before dawn, a time when all sensible wizards should be sleeping off last night's dinner and wine. "I expect that in that case they discovered the results of that disastrous transformations practical exam of yours," he said, "where you had all that trouble with the frogs. Perhaps it will be educational for them to realize that wizards can keep on learning even if they're past thirty."

  They were never going to let me forget that incident here at the school. I managed a small smile. But I was distracted from humiliating memories by seeing a little pile of silver bells lying on the table. They brought back much happier memories, of learning the spells that would make such bells rise and fall in a constantly-repeating waterfall of soft and musical sound. An elegant touch for a wizard's chambers, but these were dusty and still, as though their spells had not been renewed for a long time.

  "But I didn't bring you here in such secrecy, Daimbert," the Master continued, suddenly completely serious, "to joke about frogs."

  I hooked a chair closer with a foot and sat down beside him. I was still recovering from the shock of discovering I would not have to face Elerius after all, but now that I thought about it, it seemed very strange that if the Master had something to say to me he had not simply used the magic telephones.

  He held my eyes for a moment. "Daimbert, I'm dying." My immediate reaction was to think that this must be one more prank. The Master couldn't possibly be dying. He had founded the school—it was his school. It was neither morally nor physically possible for him not to be here. He must have meant something quite different.

  I found myself speaking. "Are the doctors sure?" Dawn was breaking at last, and the first light came in through an eastern window.

  He smiled a little, but I could see clearly now the pallor of his cheek. His face had been lined as long as I knew him, but the lines had deepened and multiplied. "It's no use asking the doctors. All they have are the herbs and simple spells we wizards gave them generations ago. I'm sure. After all these years, I know this body better than any doctor ever could. Magic can slow aging, as I would have to be the first to affirm, but it has no ultimate power over the cycles of life and death. As long as one lives old body parts keep wearing away, and there are only a certain number of times one can renew the material."

  The blow hit at last, the realization that this was not a joke gone wrong, or any kind of joke at all. I put a hand over my eyes; he didn't need to see my sudden tears.

  "You are," he said quietly, "the first I've told."

  I lifted my head. Again, why me? "I'm terribly sorry, sir."

  "You needn't be sorry on my account," he said with something of his old energy. "I've had a much longer and much richer life than any man could possibly expect to deserve, though all those priests with whom you're such good friends will probably tell you I should have spent more time thinking about my soul."

  "I am not," I said crisply, "good friends with 'all those priests.' The bishop of Caelrhon is my oldest friend, but that has nothing to do with him being a priest."

  Sorrow made me speak more sharply than I intended, but he let it pass. "Well, if he asks you can tell him I'm still not particularly worried about the afterlife. Instead I'm worried about the school."

  So was I, though it was still a secondary concern, much less important than the idea that I would never see him again. I nodded and waited for him to continue.

  "When I established the school a hundred and fifty years ago," he said slowly, "I did not originally intend to establish an organization and structure that wizardry had never before had. At first my thought was only to regularize the teaching of magic, so that there would no longer be the enormous variety of training and methods that made it so difficult for wizards when we wanted to work together—as when we stopped the Black Wars." He caught my expression and lifted an eyebrow in amusement. "Yes, I know that for you it's something out of ancient history, but I remember the Black Wars."

  "But I've never heard you speak of them before," I said eagerly.

  "At one time," he answered, looking out the window, "I'd planned to write my memoirs before I died, and I would have put everything in there. It's too late now, but it really doesn't matter. There are enough written histories of that time already, and enough stories remembered among the wizards, all close enough to accurate that the accounts don't need my own view. I became a teacher rather than a historian. And I've succeeded much better than I ever expected. There are virtually no wizards left in the west trained under the old apprenticeship system, or at least not wizards in important posts. As of last month, I believe that every Royal Wizard in the Western Kingdoms has been trained here, under me."

  My predecessor at Yurt had learned his magic as an apprentice over two centuries ago and had trained would-be wizards of his own in his time, but I had never been nor had an apprentice.

  "Which means, Daimbert," the Master continued, looking back at me, "that magic now has the kind of centralization that even the Church has never managed. I'm not just the head of the school. I'm the central authority over the way that wizardry is approached, understood, and practiced. Whoever became Master after me will be able to direct how wizardry functions for the next two centuries."

  "In that case, sir," I asked tentatively, "why haven't you told Zahlfast you're dying? I mean, he's smart, I'm sure he's realized you're sick, but if he's suddenly going to have all this authority—"

  "Who sai
d anything about Zahlfast?"

  "But," I said, still tentative, "he's been for years your second in command in almost everything here at the school. I know officially he's only head of the Transformations Faculty, but he's had a hand in all your decisions. So if you're not here—"

  "—he'll just take over," the Master finished for me. "At one time I thought so too, Daimbert. I've never asked him what he thought himself."

  He paused for a moment, breathing rapidly and shallowly. He was trying his best to treat this as a normal conversation, but I could see that, even aside from the subject matter, he was having trouble talking this much. Doctors might shortly be arriving to see how their patient had passed the night, regardless of his opinion of their abilities. I leaned forward; this could be the last chance I would ever have to speak with him alone.

  "But Zahlfast is smart, as you observe," he continued after a moment, lifting a hand from under the covers to wipe a bead of sweat from his forehead. "He will recognize that he is old, not as old as I am but old enough that he will not outlive me by very many decades. What the school needs now is a younger man."

  I closed my eyes. He was trying to break it to me that he had designated Elerius to succeed him. He knew that Elerius and I had had our differences in the past, and he was going to reassure me that someone that intelligent and that skilled would do an excellent job of reshaping the school in his own image.

  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."

  III

  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."