A Bad Spell in Yurt Read online

  The shadows from the candle made my companion’s eye sockets enormous and so dark that his eyes were invisible. I shivered involuntarily, not liking what I was thinking. Four years ago, the king had married, and, according to Dominic, had still been strong and vigorous. Three years ago, probably after their old chaplain had died unexpectedly, the kingdom had had to send for a new one. Not long afterwards, the king began to grow weaker.

  It was a small kingdom. When they wanted a wizard, the best they could do was me. When they wanted a chaplain, they got a young man, who perhaps had a dark stain they had already suspected at the seminary, and who took up his duties without all the fatherly guidance and assistance that was normally considered necessary. I liked to give the impression that wizards were familiar with the powers of darkness; priests had to deal with them every day.

  Joachim seemed content to let the silence stretch out. “The other day I came back to my chambers,” I said suddenly, “and the magic lock on my door had been broken.”

  He didn’t seem as shocked as I thought he should have, but then he wouldn’t know how hard they are to break. He didn’t look guilty either, but I found it hard to read his face. “It doesn’t sound as though a magic lock has any advantage over cold iron, then.”

  This, I realized, was supposed to be another one of his jokes. “You don’t understand. Someone would have to know a tremendous amount of magic to break it. It can’t be done with brute force.”

  He leaned forward, and his eyes reemerged from darkness. “But I didn’t think there was anyone else in the castle who knew magic.”

  I looked into my empty glass. “Neither did I.”

  He had no ideas about who might have known such a powerful spell, and I went back to my own chambers not much later. The bright glow of the magic lamp left by my predecessor was very reassuring. I sat up for several more hours, reading about such lamps, and by the time I went to bed I thought I had worked out the spells, though I was too exhausted to do them then.

  I set to work on the spells in the morning. I had known how to make something shine before, but the attachment spells and especially the spells to make the magic respond to the voice were much harder than I had imagined. After one more glance at my books, I closed the windows, pulled the drapes, and put the volume away. It takes too much concentration for the complicated spells to be able to look at anything else, even a book of magic.

  I started with my belt buckle, not daring to risk my oval of glass. First I started it shining, then slowly, in the heavy syllables of the Hidden Language, I pronounced the words to keep the spell attached. The moon and stars shone brilliantly, and I closed my eyes against them. I was alone in a deep tunnel where magic flowed, but as long as I kept on saying the words and saying them correctly the flow obeyed me. This was the most difficult part of all, to set up the translation between the Hidden Language and the language of men. “On. Out,” I said aloud, and my words were so loud that they startled me into opening my eyes.

  My chambers were dark, and the buckle in my hands was lifeless. “On,‘ I said, and the full moonlight shone. ”Out,“ and all was again night.

  I jumped up and pulled open my curtains. I wanted to tell someone about my triumph. But when I looked out the only people I saw were the stable boys, currying the horses. I thought of telling them but didn’t want to interrupt them. While putting my belt back on, I also decided against interrupting the chaplain just to show him my buckle; after all, since I had told him magic always worked, it would be silly to be this elated over having it work once.

  I pulled the curtains shut and started on my oval of glass. I knew the spells now, and everything went smoothly. As I stood at the edge of the river of magic, I knew exactly what to say, to have my mind control the spells without ever endangering myself.

  At the end I opened my eyes. “On. Out.” The piece of glass obediently shone out with a brilliance far beyond what I had expected, then darkened again. This, I thought, would make a remarkable improvement in the chapel stairs. I hoped Joachim would be suitably grateful.

  “On,” I said again, reaching for the curtains. My belt buckle lit up, but the glass stayed dark. I tried again, changing the modulation of my voice, but nothing happened. I tried probing the spell attached to the glass with my mind, but there was no magic there at all.

  I sat down. Somehow I must not have attached the spell properly, so that it had withered and returned to the deep channels of magic as most spells do. But I could not see where I had gone wrong. Magic really should work all the time if the wizard does it correctly.

  I shook my head, then shook my shoulders as well, dispelling the chilling unease that suddenly gripped me. I would try again.

  This time there was no problem at all. I threw open the windows and opened the door to my bedroom, where I had taken my predecessor’s magic lights so they wouldn’t come on and break my concentration.

  The spells had taken all morning. I tucked the oval of glass under my arm, planning to show the constable at lunch. I would let him find a way to attach it to the ceiling in the staircase. My predecessor might have been able to make his lamps hang suspended in the air, but at this point I thought glue would work just as well.

  As I pulled my door shut and attached the lock, I wondered again why my spell had not worked at first. Had I just said one of the many words wrong in setting up the spell, or had an outside magical force broken it for me?

  The seating arrangement at dinner the first night was maintained, and I ate every noon and evening between Dominic and the Lady Maria. Occasionally Dominic would be away in the middle of the day, but she and her golden curls were always at my right. The Lady Maria seemed, if possible, to be growing younger. She liked to engage me in lively conversation, punctuated with girlish laughter. If I tired of her laughter, I had only to look across the table to meet the chaplains completely sober eyes.

  But in fact I started to like the Lady Maria. As long as I could keep her off the topic of how young and charming she still was, she had a lively mind that was hungry for new ideas and information. She repeatedly pressed me for details on the dragon in the wizards’ school cellars. I decided to have her help me with the telephones.

  During the two days that the armorer was making steel plates for my lights, I set to work trying to derive the right spells. I decided that the first step would be to make it possible for two telephones in the castle to talk to each other; if that worked, then maybe I could start on the much more complicated task of starting communication with telephones elsewhere.

  The king seemed stiff and said nothing more about learning to fly, and Dominic asked no questions about malignant spells, so I devoted full time to the telephones. It occurred to me that I was becoming obsessed with them, but at least at every meal the others all asked me interested questions about how I was coming and seemed, I thought, to be drawing comparisons between the old wizard and myself with the comparison favorable to me. I tried not to think what they would say when I gave up the project in despair.

  At first nothing worked at all. With one telephone in my study, I put the other out in the courtyard and had the Lady Maria listen while I tried to communicate. The knights and ladies, the boys who were being trained as knights, and the servants tended to flock from all over the castle to watch my latest attempt. At least they weren’t laughing at me, yet.

  “Did you hear anything?” I’d yell from the door of my chambers.

  “Nothing that time,” she would call back in what were meant to be encouraging tones.

  Then my steel ovals were ready, and I had an excuse to put the glass telephones back up on the shelf while I worked the spells of light. Since I had to do each individually, it took all day, and it took another day for the servants to attach them inside to the ceiling of the stairway. But on Sunday, in time for service, they were ready.

  I had Gwen wake me early and was at the bottom of the stairs before anyone else. “On,” I said in my deepest voice, and all the lights blazed on. The
glass light inside the door was the brightest of all, but the steel plates gave a rich and somber light that I thought most appropriate. I stood modestly outside the stairwell, letting everyone else precede me, smiling in spite of myself when I heard their admiring comments.

  But the telephones continued to elude me. After two more days of studying my books, I thought I had found the spell, and again set the Lady Maria in the courtyard with one instrument while I talked into the other. “All powers of earth and air must obey the spells of wizardry,” I said into my own telephone. Gwen had laughed at that until she could hardly stand up, but it seemed safe to say, since no one seemed able to hear me anyway.

  I hurried out into the courtyard. “Could you hear that?”

  The Lady Maria didn’t answer at first. The people with her were smiling, either in amusement or encouragement, but she looked both puzzled and somewhat concerned. She came toward me, carrying the glass telephone.

  “It’s very strange,” she said. “Nobody else could hear you, but I could.”

  “You could? You mean it worked? You know that, with a telephone, you have to hold the receiver to your ear, and other people don’t hear what’s being said.” I almost laughed with excitement. At last, I thought, I was making real progress.

  But she shook her head. ‘ I didn’t hear you through the receiver. I don’t think I even heard you with my ears. It was as though you were talking inside my brain.“

  “Bring the telephone into my study,” I said in despondency. I put both instruments back up on the top shelf. While I thought I was attaching communications spells to the instruments, I was instead discovering that, even though the Lady Maria was not trained in wizardry, it was still possible for me to communicate with her, mind to mind. While I had begun to like her, I didn’t want to do it again. Anyone else’s mind is always acutely strange if met directly.

  She started to leave, then hesitated. “Is it true that all powers of earth and air must obey the spells of wizardry?”

  At least she had heard what I’d said, rather than whatever random thoughts I may have been having. “Yes, if the wizardry is done right,” I said.

  “So a wizard can, if he knows his spells, exercise ultimate control over every being on earth?” It would have been more flattering if she had not still looked so puzzled.

  “ No,” I said honestly, “not ultimate control. Wizardry is a natural power. Like anything else on earth, it can be overcome by the supernatural.”

  “You mean by the saints?”

  “Or by demons.”

  “But who controls the saints and demons?”

  I shook my head and tried to smile. When I was at school, I had known I wasn’t a very good wizard, but at least I had believed in wizardry. Here in Yurt everyone seemed to want to remind me of wizardry’s limitations. “You’ll have to ask the chaplain about that. But no one really controls saints and demons. At best the priests learn how to ask them favors.”

  At dinner that night I told the constable that I was going to have to pause in my work on the telephone system for a while, until I had discovered the source of the anti-telephonic demonic influence.

  II

  I rode out of the castle on an old white mare. Although I had only been in Yurt a little over two weeks, my life in the City had begun to fade into the distant past. Life in the castle had settled into a comfortable pattern once I abandoned work on the telephones. The queen was spoken of every day, but she was still gone, and I found it hard to imagine what the castle would be like when she returned. To me, to whom two weeks seemed like a year, she had been gone forever, had indeed never been in Yurt, but to the others she was just a little over halfway through the month-long visit to her parents that she took every summer.

  Some of the knights and the boys were riding out at the same time. Their horses were much livelier than mine, but as I had not ridden in a long time I was happy with my mount. She walked steadily and placidly down the brick road that led from the castle gates. While the knights turned off to the field where they were teaching the boys jousting, my mare and I continued past the little cemetery, dotted with crosses, where the chaplain’s predecessor and presumably all former kings and queens and chaplains and servants were buried, and down the hill toward the woods. I was going to visit the old wizard.

  Although the “anti-telephonic demonic influences” I had used as an excuse to the constable had been my own invention, I didn’t like the cold touch that was never there when I looked but might surface, unexpectedly and fleetingly, while I was thinking of something entirely different. My predecessor should have some ideas.

  The green of the leaves in the forest below me had gone dusty in the heat of late summer, and the breeze across the hill made silver ripples in the grass. I was enjoying being out near fields and forest, and real forest, too, not the manicured parks I was used to near the City. I hadn’t told anyone where I was going, only that I was out for a ride. As my horse and I reached the edge of the woods, I was wondering again how I should address the old wizard.

  Casual conversation with the constable’s wife had informed me where his house was, but protocol was still a problem. I, now, was Royal Wizard, and he was only an old retired spell-caster. But he was two hundred years older than me and certainly knew a lot more about Yurt than I did. I had dressed formally in my red and black velvet but decided to address him with deference and respect.

  In the cool shade of the woods, birds sang in the treetops far above us and insects hummed closer to hand. The mare shook her head, making all the bells on her bridle jingle. I whistled as I rode, a little tune in minor that the trumpeters had played at dinner the night before. We were going parallel to the edge of the forest, and occasionally I could see the fields through a gap in the trees. The long summer’s day stretched before me, leisurely and lingering, with no thought of the night.

  After half an hour’s easy riding, I found the trail mark I had been looking for, a little pile of white stones. Just beyond, a narrow grassy track wandered away from the road, off between the beeches, and disappeared over a rise. I would never have spotted it except for the stones.

  The branches here were low enough that I dismounted and led the mare. We should be almost there. I stopped at the top of the rise, looking down into a valley with a stream at the bottom. Even the sound of the water on stones was sparkling. The grass was richly green on either hand, and the trees that surrounded the little valley cast dancing shadows.

  My horse snorted and made for the grass. I pulled her nose up and continued toward a little bridge. We passed a branch that had half-shielded my view of the bridge, and sitting on the far side was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life.

  She had thick golden hair that made the Lady Maria’s seem thin and lifeless, and it rolled in rich waves down her back and ten feet out behind her. She was wearing a dress of brilliant sky-blue, and when she lifted her head and looked toward me, her eyes were the same color. And most marvelous of all, an alabaster-white unicorn was kneeling beside her, with his muzzle in her lap.

  I dropped the reins and approached slowly, not daring to take my eyes from her. She lowered her gaze again but did not speak. “Um, hello,” I said. Gently she lifted the unicorn’s muzzle from her lap, rose to her feet, and began to walk away, her arm around the creature’s neck. Her hair floated in a weightless cloud behind her.

  “Wait,” I told myself sharply, resisting the initial impulse to run after her. I put my hand over my eyes, said two magic words, and looked again. She was gone.

  I recovered my horse and started forward again. As we crossed the bridge, I told the mare, “If that’s a typical sample of his illusions, the old wizard must really have impressed the castle over dessert.” The mare seemed uninterested, but I took a deep breath and wondered how abjectly it would be appropriate to address the wizard.

  The grassy valley continued to follow the stream. Within a hundred yards it turned and descended a steep hill, where the water foamed white. I w
as easing the mare’s steps down the hillside when I heard a twanging noise. The sound was repeated, and then again.

  I looked forward. Flying across the width of the valley in front of us, one after the other, was a series of golden arrows. I finished getting the mare off the hill, dropped the reins to let her graze, and walked a little closer. I probed them gently with my mind. Unlike the lady with the unicorn, these arrows were real.

  No one was shooting them, however. They were being propelled by magic. Our scrambling on the hillside must have triggered a magic trap.

  I thought about this for several minutes, waiting to see if the supply of arrows would become exhausted. When the steady twanging of an invisible bow and the whirr of each arrow continued, I decided that the arrows must be circling around somehow and coming back. The mare grazed unconcernedly.

  I carefully put in place what I hoped was a protective spell against arrows, a variation of the spell that had kept me dry in the rain but needing twice as much concentration. Leaving the mare behind, I went slowly forward, going down on my hands and knees to crawl under the flight of the arrows. Ten yards farther down the valley, I heard the twanging cease.

  I stood up, brushing the grass off my velvet trousers, and looked back. The valley was quiet and peaceful. For a moment I hesitated, wondering if I should go back for my mare, and then decided she would be fine where she was; she was unlikely to retreat back up the steep hill, and if she came forward she would be following me. If I went back, I was afraid I would set off the arrows again.

  The valley took another twist and suddenly widened into a clearing. On the far side, half tucked under the drooping branches of an enormous oak, was a small green house, and sitting in front of the door was an old man with a white beard down to his knees.