Is This Apocalypse Necessary Read online

  I knew that back in the days before the wizards' school was founded, western wizards quarreled with each other constantly, and in this case it looked as though a disagreement with another wizard had escalated until Naurag, whose ledger I now held, had been forced to flee his own kingdom. And what was this 'purple companion'?

  The creature seemed as devoted to Naurag as a large dog, readily obeying the wizard's magical commands even while he was still working out the exact words to use for them, sleeping with its wings spread over him at night as they fled across the Western Kingdoms, expecting in return only a steady diet of melons and gourds.

  Suddenly I realized what it must be. An air cart. Not the dead skin but the living purple flying beast from which it had originally been made. I knew that such beasts lived up in the northern land of wild magic, but I had never seen a live one. Too bad—this one sounded rather likeable.

  I wondered somewhat guiltily how the two flying beasts whose skins now served as the school's air cart and mine had happened to die. I rather hoped they had lived long and happy lives, watching little flying beasts grow up around them, until, rich with experience, they had expired naturally, happy in the knowledge that even when they were gone their skins would keep on serving the men who had been their friends.

  Out in the courtyard I heard the sound of hooves, then voices—King Paul, home again at last. He always took off for a miles' long run on his stallion whenever he had something to think over. In this case, I thought, turning a parchment page, his thinking was unlikely to have resulted in any satisfactory conclusions.

  This part of the memoir was rather disjointed, having apparently been written at odd moments as the wizard and the flying beast fled from their enemies. The kingdoms still had the same names, and it was disconcerting to see places I knew mentioned here as being ruled by cruel kings with savage and volcanic tempers, unlike the rather peaceable lot into which we wizards had, ever since the Black Wars, shaped the lords we served.

  "Having perfected the commands which my purple companion is most wont to obey, I hereby record them for the benefit of the next wizard who may essay to tame one of these creatures." The spells, written down carefully in the Hidden Language, were exactly what we still used to direct the air cart—the spells I had recently been teaching Antonia.

  I sat back, chewing thoughtfully on a pencil. The castle had grown quiet around me. Was this perhaps not a real memoir at all, but something the Master had created just for me? Were references to what the kings of men could do to each other without organized wizardry to oppose them supposed to make me realize how necessary it was for someone responsible to take over the school's direction?

  But I shook my head. The Master was dying, without nearly the energy to have forged an elaborate document that looked so convincingly like something eight hundred years old. Besides, he would have seen no need for such a ruse to work on my conscience—he thought I had already agreed to succeed him.

  And if the spells looked familiar, I thought as I pulled the volume toward me again, it was because school spells had not been created in a vacuum. Many were in origin the spells the Master taught to the wizardry students because he himself had learned them as an apprentice, from a wizard who had in turn studied with Naurag.

  But in here were spells that had never been taught, spells that were supposed to bind dragons. I found my place and kept on reading. These spells, if anyone was ever to use them again, were to be learned by me directly from Naurag.

  III

  I kept on reading long into the night, falling into bed only when my eyes began watering so badly I could no longer focus. A knock woke me what seemed only minutes later: not mysterious wizards this time, but my breakfast. "Leave it on the table," I mumbled, rolled away from the light, and went back to sleep.

  When I woke several hours later, it was again to the sound of a knock. I pushed the hair out of my eyes, pulled on my dressing gown, and opened the door.

  This time it was Gwennie. "I have come for your breakfast tray," she said stonily, not meeting my eyes.

  "Um, I haven't quite finished yet," I said, retreating. I took a quick swallow of cold tea and bit into a regrettably stale cinnamon cruller. "Maybe if you came back in a few minutes—"

  She followed me inside. Now that I thought about it, it was curious that Gwennie should be running kitchen errands. Ever since she had become castle constable in her own right, her mother the cook had given up her plans to make Gwennie her own successor.

  She slammed my door shut and showed no further interest in the tray. "Were you listening yesterday?" she asked, low and intense.

  It was clearly no use pretending ignorance. Her eyes were unnaturally bright, her fists clenched at her sides. "I'm sorry, Gwendolyn, I'm afraid I couldn't help it," I said from behind the inadequate shield of a teacup. "My windows were open, and you and King Paul were right outside when—"

  "Then let me explain something," she said in a voice of ice. "You in fact heard nothing at all. He did not speak. I did not answer. Is that clear?"

  "Very much so," I said quickly, stopping myself just in time from adding, "My lady." At this point she would have considered it the gravest possible insult. "By the way," I ventured to add, "is the king around this morning? I had something I needed to ask him—on quite a different topic," I continued hastily, "than the topic which, of course, never came up in the first place."

  "I understand he is still lying lazily in bed this morning," she responded loftily, already moving back toward my door. "Some plaintiffs have come to receive his judgment, and I have been forced to make them wait." And she was gone, without taking my tray.

  I dipped the cruller into the rest of the tea and considered what I had learned last night. Paul had doubtless spent fruitless hours lying awake, alternately cursing Gwennie and himself, but I had actually discovered something. Spells to master dragons really might exist after all, and it was possible I could work them.

  So far this was just an intellectual exercise, I told myself while washing and dressing. Even if I did somehow manage to master some rather small dragon, this didn't mean I was going to head the school. Such a piece of antiquarian knowledge certainly wouldn't give me the wisdom and authority the new Master would need, much less make me capable of stopping Elerius if all the other faculty wanted him—though I still rather liked my idea of having a dragon eat him.

  Naurag and his 'purple companion' had eventually fled entirely from the Western Kingdoms, pursued by enemies about whom he made highly disparaging comments without ever saying explicitly why they were his enemies. They had traveled thousands of miles north, beyond the high frost mountains, to the realm of dragons and wild magic.

  I had once reached the borders of this land, and that had been plenty wild enough for me, but Naurag had traveled further and further north. Reading between the lines of his account, I saw a growing intoxication with the power and ease of his magic. Spells worked far better in the land of dragons than in the lands of men, as they had taught us at school; some of the best students (never of course including me) had even been taken on field trips to experience it themselves. Naurag had discovered that everything he wanted to do came easier and easier the further he traveled—until he had arrived one day in a valley full of dragons.

  I crossed the castle courtyard to the great hall. As always in the summer, the tall doors stood open to the air. Inside King Paul sat on his throne, scowling, listening to two men who each claimed the other had cheated him disgracefully in a business transaction. I went to stand beside my king.

  Back in the days of Paul's father, I had spent many days standing stiff and majestic beside the royal throne, lending I hoped an air of mysterious awe, while Joachim, who in those days before he became bishop was still royal chaplain of Yurt, had stood on the other side, lending a quite real air of spiritual authority. But Paul's law-giving tended to be more informal. In this case, he looked as if he didn't understand what either man was talking about and could use all the hel
p he could get.

  I didn't have to stand long. Paul suddenly slapped his knee with one hand. "That's enough!" he roared.

  The two plaintiffs stopped short. "Excuse me, sire—" one started to say.

  "You're both in the wrong! Both of you cheated the other. I don't want to hear another word of your whining! Instead you're each going to pay the royal treasury one hundred silver pennies as a penalty for wasting our time like this. Pay it to the constable on the way out—yes, that's right, the same young woman who showed you in. You're going to have to settle for yourselves whatever sordid quarrel brought you here. Well, what are you waiting for? Is it going to take the edge of the sword to teach you to listen to your king?"

  King Paul was not wearing a sword, but the two plaintiffs did not wait to see if he would summon a knight to back up his threat. They fled out the tall doors, while I wondered if back before the Black Wars scenes like this had been more common, except that then the kings and their knights would have followed through with immediate action against those who displeased them.

  Paul whirled on me. "What do you want, Wizard?"

  At least he didn't bother telling me that I had never overheard a conversation he had invited me to overhear. "Um, excuse me, sire, I had a question about my position here."

  This wasn't exactly the best time to raise this, but I had begun worrying during the night that Elerius might try to get me out of Yurt. Finding a way to persuade Paul to fire me as Royal Wizard might, he would think, make me more likely to listen to his blandishments.

  "I hope you're not about to tell me," the king growled, "that I've been shamelessly cheating a wizard of your caliber by not paying you enough."

  So did Paul expect me to ask for a bribe in return for silence on his romantic affairs? "Oh no, sire," I said hastily. "Rather—" It was going to be hard to put this delicately. "If something happened, if you heard, for example, something about me from the wizards' school, would you be in a hurry to hire a new wizard?"

  The king was surprised enough to stop frowning. "Are you in trouble, Wizard? Is your school trying to drive you out of Yurt? It isn't that— They aren't going to hold it against you after all this time that you have a wife?"

  He winced a little on the last word but kept his concern for me, not himself. "No, well, I might indeed be in some sort of difficulty," I said vaguely. "Nothing serious yet, but it's hard to tell. And I was just hoping, sire— That is, I was hoping that whatever you heard, you wouldn't be too quick to replace me. And by the way," I added in a rush, holding out the diamond ring, "I think you dropped this."

  Paul pushed it roughly into his pocket. Then he took a breath, stood up, and slapped me on the shoulder. "I can tell, Wizard, that this is more serious than you like to admit. But don't add to your worries by wondering about your position. You'll always be my Royal Wizard. After all, didn't I award you the Golden Yurt? And in the meantime," his voice dropping, "if you need any help, do not hesitate to ask. Especially," he hesitated, then hurried on, "especially if there's some way to help you that will get me out of this castle."

  "I'll let you know!" I promised quickly and mendaciously, then returned to my chambers and Naurag's book. I was certainly not going to take the king along on a doomed attempt to stop Elerius just because he wanted to avoid the embarrassment of daily encounters with Gwennie.

  * * * *

  Even in Naurag's rather laconic style, his encounters with dragons sounded terrifying. Only two things saved his life: the rapid flying speed of his 'purple companion,' and the fact that the spells he used to communicate with it had certain affinities to spells that would get the attention even of dragons.

  Late last night I had reached a much more powerful spell than anything I had seen so far in the book, page after page written small, a spell in the Hidden Language that would, Naurag claimed, force a dragon to obey. "I compose these words," he interjected at one point, "at the borders of the magical realm, in a homey setting I would ne'er have expected to discover so far from man's accustomed habitations. The people here are wont to climb very high, building their very dwellings in the faces of cliffs. Their toes and fingers are most marvelously long, and their children seem quite taken with my purple companion." I had fallen asleep without seeing the end of the spell.

  I looked at it again in daylight to see if it might still appear as feasible as it had last night: if, starting with an air cart spell, one could ultimately gain the mastery of ferocious creatures of wild magic. The letter the old Master had given me, choosing me as his successor, was still tucked into the volume—I had been using it as a bookmark. Not wanting to chance one of the maids coming across it, I stuffed it into the back of a drawer and pondered Naurag's magic.

  I recognized what he was doing, beginning with a known spell, making some improvisational leaps based on a sound understanding of basic spell structure, adding other steps that came to him out of sheer desperation, and when even that was not enough, working in entirely different spells that would move one along quite unexpected paths within magic's four dimensions, in the brazen hope that one would eventually arrive somewhere recognizable. I had invented the far-seeing attachment for magic telephones much the same way.

  At least he didn't leave to the imagination any steps of what he had finally worked out. He broke in again, just as I was trying to decide if the unknown herb he found so necessary for the steps on the fourteenth page was something I might in fact know under a different name, or something for which I could substitute. When I turned the page, looking ahead to see what effect this herb was supposed to produce, instead I found the comment, "But alas! This spell which served me so faithfully in the dragons' valley, when my peril was greatest, turns to ashes here in the mountains' foothills, so that my certainty fades also."

  I paused, noticing that my pencil was now chewed almost to splinters. It looked as if one needed not only an extremely powerful spell, but also to be fully into the land of wild magic itself. There was no way this spell could be tested; it would only work if one's magic had already been improved by traveling north until one stood virtually at the door of a dragon's lair.

  No longer reading the spell closely, I started leafing ahead. Naurag might have gotten a spell he created on the spot to work for him when several large dragons poked their fire-breathing snouts from their caves to see what strange creature had invaded their valley. But no two wizards' magic ever works exactly the same, unless one has memorized all the steps of the other's spells, and I didn't see much point in asking the dragons to wait while I carefully recited Naurag's spell, pausing occasionally to check the book and make sure I had each word right.

  The handwriting here was sloppy. I sympathized with Naurag's despair—I felt it too. He was pushing ahead with writing down the spell, but in knowing it wouldn't work where he was, in the borderlands, he must have started doubting whether he even remembered everything he had done correctly, and whether it would ever again work at all.

  Suddenly I stopped reading to stare blankly out the window. I thought I understood at last why the Master had decided I would be a good person to succeed him, and why he had given me this book. At first I was amused, then, the more I thought about it, appalled.

  The Master, in reading this account written by the teacher of the man who had taught him his own magic, must have decided that Naurag reminded him of me.

  IV

  At last I reached the place in Naurag's account that mentioned the Dragons' Scepter, the part for which the Master had given the book to me in the first place. Two wizards stood between me and Naurag: the Master and the man who had trained him. But as I read on it increasingly felt that I personally knew this man whose flesh had for centuries been dust, so that all that was left of him was a tattered ledger— and his spells.

  "In day's light," he wrote with new enthusiasm, "I ween that I may be able to improvise a solution to this difficulty which troubles me so sore." His improvisation, as he went on to discuss, centered on a wizard's staff he had brought
with him to the land of wild magic. Apparently he had stolen it from some other wizard during his flight from those he considered his enemies. "The power already latent in this staff," he wrote, "shall make it amenable as a matrix for my spells."

  I had never stolen anything from another wizard, I thought indignantly. If the Master of the school was likening me to Naurag, I hoped he kept that in mind.

  Greatly daring, Naurag, still with his 'purple companion,' had ventured out from the borderlands, north nearly to the central valley where the largest dragons lived, and there worked his spell again, attaching it as he went to the staff. "I baptize this staff the Dragons' Scepter," he wrote proudly, describing it all after the fact as though it had been a much simpler process than I suspected it really was, "baptized not in religion but in spells of my own devising, and with this instrument I can make the fiercest serpent bow its scaly neck to me."

  I glanced across the room to where an old wizard's staff leaned in the corner. It had once belonged to my predecessor here in Yurt. I didn't think it had any particular powers latent within it, but it crossed my mind to wonder if I might be able to attach Naurag's spell to it myself, up in the land of dragons, even if I couldn't find the original Scepter. The nagging voice pointed out that this was sounding more and more as though I planned a trip north soon.

  This was still an intellectual exercise, I reminded myself. Just because his spell had worked for him didn't mean it would work for me. Not even the Master himself had attempted to reproduce the spells that had created the Dragons' Scepter. Naurag was a better wizard than I could ever be if I lived far longer than the Master.

  The next few pages of the ledger were sheer boasting. If I could believe him, once Naurag had perfected his Scepter he spent several weeks commanding the dragons, lining them up like soldiers, forcing them to perform exhausting feats of precision flying, leading them, astride his purple companion, on flights to the icecaps of the ultimate north: breaking their will to resist, until when he finally decided to become more lenient they had laid their scaly snouts at his feet in sheer gratitude for his mercy.