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

  “You still haven’t told me how you got back to the City,” the wizard was saying darkly. “And what do you mean, ‘The priest will help me apologize for the insults’?”

  “I should never have agreed,” said Marcus loftily. “I’ll do something for a joke, but not if it will harm anyone. The priest has your money now. If you think I didn’t fulfill the bargain, you’ll have to get it back from him.”

  “No one was harmed by the joke,” the wizard replied, but distractedly, as though his attention was elsewhere. “I already told you about the annual ritual….”

  And I realized why he was distracted. He was putting together a paralysis spell.

  No time to counter it with a spell of my own—if I even had a spell that would stop magic that powerful.

  I turned Marcus into a seagull.

  He rose, flapping hard, and sailed away over the rooftops. I had long ago recognized where I had gone wrong in that disastrous transformations practical exam of Zahlfast’s, and I even imagined that I had become fairly good at transformations. If asked, Marcus would probably have preferred a dolphin to a seagull, but I couldn’t turn him into a dolphin in the middle of a dry street.

  The renegade wizard was so surprised that for a second he didn’t react at all. And in that second I was able to throw together a spell creating a tiny area devoid of magical forces to surround me. My wizardry wouldn’t work again until I stepped away, but neither would any spells aimed against me.

  “I’m assuming you’re Elerius,” I said, fast before he could counter the spell—or just push me out of its area of influence. “If you’re wondering, this is a trick I picked up in the East.” I probably shouldn’t have wasted precious seconds in boasting, but it was so rare that I got a chance to boast to Elerius. “Just admit that your plan has failed. I still don’t know what you were hoping to do, but it doesn’t matter, because you won’t be able to do it. The cathedral priests of Caelrhon know now that it was not the wizard of Yurt who insulted them, and the griffins you intended to set on the city are safely locked away.”

  “I don’t know you think I am,” the voice came out very deep, not Elerius’s voice at all, “but you had better be very grateful that this is a public street, with plenty of witnesses, or you would be dead by now.”

  “Why?” I demanded. “What have I ever done to you?” And added, “You should know before you try anything that one of the masters of the technical magic faculty is right around the corner.”

  But where was he, the senior wizard who was supposed to be protecting me?

  The man took half a threatening step forward, then paused. As if in sudden decision, he launched himself into the air. The last I saw of him he was detouring around the hill of the wizards’ school and flying east.

  But just before he went his eyes glinted for a second in the light of a street lamp. They were tawny, under peaked eyebrows.

  Now I just had to hope that Marcus, in the form of a gull, had the sense to fly back here to the restaurant.

  The restaurant! I hurried back, but it was too late. They had cleared away our plates, and I had eaten only half of my noodles with mushroom sauce.

  “Sorry!” I said loudly, for everyone’s benefit. I didn’t want the townspeople thinking that a wizard, and not even a student wizard, would duck out without paying. “We just saw someone in the street we had to talk to! My friend will be right back, and then we’ll be ready for the cheese course. Do you still serve that delicious raspberry pudding?”

  The other patrons, I realized, all looked disgruntled, but apparently not with me. The pretty dark-haired waitress stood in the corner, her teeth in her lip and a handkerchief to her eyes. The waiter was trying to talk to her, but she turned her shoulder sharply toward him.

  It looked like our departure had put a serious dent in the service.

  The waiter saw me, shook his head, and scurried around the tables. “I’m sorry. It will be out in just a minute. There was a delay. It will be ready very soon. Let me refill your wine. I’m sorry!”

  The waitress stalked toward me, eyes red and handkerchief balled in her hand. “So which one are you now?” she asked coldly.

  “Still not Marcus,” I babbled, “but he’ll be here soon. See, I’m back! I didn’t run away as soon as I heard your news. Congratulations, by the way. What’s its name? Boy or girl?”

  She did not respond to this highly inadequate apology. There was a flutter of wings, and a seagull put its head in the open door. It gave a long, piercing cry in my direction.

  Before the startled waiter could shoo it away, I rattled off a few quick words in the Hidden Language, and Marcus reappeared. For a second he moved his arms as though still feeling them as wings to be folded, then he stepped inside.

  “Drinks for the house!” I called recklessly. The waiter, frowning heavily at me, burst instead into a smile.

  It took several minutes, but the restaurant settled down again. Patrons who believed—and were more than ready to say—that magical stunts had no place in a civilized eating place were mollified by free drinks, even though service continued very slow. The waiter ended up working all the tables, because the waitress was sitting with us. When our cheese and pudding finally arrived, she absently ate more than half of them.

  “So I’m a father,” said Marcus blankly. She had recovered from both her justifiable anger at his effort to switch personas and her fear that he had raced away the second he heard the news, and she had been able to give him a coherent account of the last year.

  “I’ve always liked you as well as any girl I know,” he continued. “So I’ll marry you if you like. But be warned—we may have to travel a lot, and that will be hard with the baby.”

  This was far from what I would have considered a romantic proposal, but I prudently kept silent.

  She didn’t seem to mind the lack of romance. She reached over and patted his shoulder. “It’s all right, Marcus,” she said, and the dimple was back. “You don’t have to marry me. Of course I wanted you to know about the baby, but I knew all along you weren’t one to settle down. For all I know you have sweethearts in dozens of other ports up and down the coast.”

  Or right here in the City, I thought, keeping silent some more.

  “He wants to marry me,” with an affectionate glance toward the harried waiter, “and has been after me to agree ever since you left town. Maybe I’ll just take him up on it. But why don’t you come by this evening, when my shift is over. I’m still in the same place. I’ll introduce you to our daughter.”

  The mention of her shift seemed to remind her that she was, after all, a waitress, and with a quick word of excuse she went to help the young man who was, apparently, now her intended.

  “That was a very nice dinner. Thank you,” Marcus said to me as I paid up, an hour later. Two dinners, drinks for the house, and a very large tip for the waiter cleared out the rest of my own money.

  Leaving me with just the money that had been sent with me to buy supplies. All I’d gotten so far was the lace—assuming it could still be used. I pushed the money into Marcus’s hand. “Give this to the girl. Even if you’re not going to marry her, you have to do something for her.” Those back in Yurt, I hoped, would understand, especially if I paid them back. The king paid me quarterly. They wouldn’t have to wait too long.

  I considered telling Marcus to go straight to the girl’s house, not stopping at a tavern on the way. But he was going to have to do this on his own.

  For a moment I contemplated the man who looked so much like me, and who others said sounded like me, though in my own ears my voice was much more firm and resonant than his. How close had I come to being just like him? If the Master of the wizards’ school hadn’t taken me on as a student, I too might have ended up wandering around the Western Kingdoms, never really living anywhere—certainly not in Yurt—picking up jobs and money wherever I could.

  Would I have been as generous with whatever money I had as he seemed to be, or would I have been more p
rudent with mine? Would I have been as easy-going about being locked up by the municipal guard or abruptly if briefly being turned into a seagull? Would I have loved a series of different women, rather than giving my heart only to one who did not love me? But I was quite sure that I would never have had nearly as many sweethearts as he did, nor, if I did, that they would still consider me fondly after I had loved them and left them.

  No one knew or cared where Marcus was most of the time, and he seemed to like it that way. But a man without a family that I was, I myself had developed deep connections, and I would not want to break them. The wizards’ school had taught me magic, given me friends, instilled in me a drive to help humanity, and made possible my home in Yurt.

  For Marcus, the school and its towers were just a feature of the City where he had been born. He had developed by himself his own determination not to hurt anyone, rather than always thinking of using his abilities to help others in the context of school lessons. But I could never get out of the shadow of the school.

  For that matter, neither could Sengrim, even though he seemed to think of the school primarily as a group of wizards who did not appreciate him properly. And Elerius? The school seemed always in his thoughts—and that gave me a germ of an idea….

  “Tomorrow I’ll be heading back to Yurt,” I said to Marcus. “Come by the school before I go. We should stay in touch.”

  “I’ll probably be moving on tomorrow myself,” he said. “It may be hard to stay in touch. With you off in one inland kingdom, that nice priest in another, and me going up and down the coast, we may seldom if ever all be together again. But I’ll certainly come say good-bye, Daimbert.” He grinned. “For one thing, I haven’t had a chance yet to tell you what it was like being a seagull. Did you know, when you’re a gull yourself, it’s very easy to tell which are the females?”

  XII

  The Master of the school denied that he had sent any wizard after me last night.

  I sat in his office with morning light coming in the window, hoping he would not give me an argument about going home to Yurt. Considering that graduates of the school were usually left to get into and out of trouble by ourselves, he and Zahlfast had seemed unusually solicitous for my safety. I was ready to explain that being trailed by another wizard hadn’t provided protection anyway. And the sooner I handed over what had once been delicate lace, so that the queen and her aunt could try salvaging it, probably the better.

  The Master did not give me an argument. But I didn’t like what he said instead.

  “After you went flying off to Caelrhon two days ago,” he said, smiling and stroking his beard, “it became clear that it would be pointless to have another wizard delegated to protect you. Either you don’t want to be protected, or you could protect yourself.”

  “But I saw a member of the technical magic faculty following me!”

  “Probably just heading out to dinner,” said the Master without concern. “Nothing to do with you at all. But the renegade wizard, the one who trapped you in the cave and threatened you last night, we have identified him.”

  I sat up straighter. “You have? Who is he? Where is he?”

  “It’s probably too generous to call him a wizard,” the Master continued. “Really just a magician.”

  A magician, someone who knew a little magic but not enough to become a wizard, could not have been responsible for the powerful paralysis spell that had imprisoned me—and had come close to imprisoning Marcus. But I nodded, waiting to hear more.

  “After you came in late last evening and told the doorkeeper what had happened, he told Elerius. And, while you slept, Elerius was able to track him.”

  “But—” I started to protest, then stopped. “Go on.”

  “He caught up to him, maybe fifty miles away. The magician was fleeing, doubtless realizing his error in trying to oppose someone with your abilities. Elerius says he recognized him, someone who had started at the school at the same time he had, but who had been forced to drop out because he just wasn’t good enough.”

  Someone who left only a year or two would not yet have learned to fly, I thought but did not say. And a disgraced former student would not have been down in the cellars, slapping magic locks on doors. I was having more and more doubts about this “renegade.”

  “I don’t know what Elerius threatened him with,” the Master continued with a chuckle, “but I think we can be sure that he won’t bother you again.”

  “So was he responsible for the griffins?” I managed to ask.

  The Master shook his head. “A partially-trained magician would not be able to control magical creatures, much less bring them down from the land of wild magic. They must have found their own way over the mountains and south into lands of men. Zahlfast spoke on the telephone this morning to Sengrim in Caelrhon, and he seems confident he can get them safely home again.”

  If the Master seemed satisfied, I couldn’t contradict him. “So has Elerius gone home to his kingdom?” I asked as if casually. “I really should thank him.”

  “I spotted him in the library just a little while ago. He was trying to get the librarian to agree that he could take some books away with him.”

  “Well, he and I both have pressing responsibilities as Royal Wizards,” I said vaguely. “Guess I’d better finish packing.” But when I left the Master’s office I went straight to the library.

  The librarian seemed to have stepped out, but several student wizards were reading there. My expression must have been grim, for they leaped up, excusing themselves, and hurried away without even taking their books and notes.

  Elerius looked up from his own reading and smiled blandly. “Heading back to your little kingdom? I trust the Master told you that that renegade magician won’t bother you again.”

  I hooked a chair with my foot and sat down facing him, my elbows on the table. “I certainly hope you are not planning to kidnap either me or Marcus again,” I said in a voice much firmer and more resonant than Marcus’s.

  Elerius tilted his head in surprise. “Goodness, Daimbert, I hope you are not imagining that I had anything to do with your unfortunate treatment! You have always had a vivid imagination, it’s true.”

  “It took me a while, I admit,” I continued, trying to hold his eyes with mine, though his kept shifting away. “At first I suspected you, then Sengrim. But the answer should have been obvious. The two of you were working together.”

  He closed the book he was reading and pulled back his lips in a smile. “This is imaginative. I mentioned to you a few days ago that Sengrim might have made a better master of magical creatures than Titus, and from that chance remark you’ve constructed a whole conspiracy!”

  “I know what you did, even if I’m still not entirely sure why you did it,” I continued inexorably. “You observed Marcus here in the City and recognized how much he looks like me. You paid him quite handsomely to bleach his beard and claim to be me. You tested him out by sending him around to the cathedral here, where even priests used to seeing wizards every day did indeed take him for a wizard. Knowing then that you could use him while keeping your own hands clean, you flew him in the air cart up to Caelrhon to insult the priests of the cathedral there.”

  He shook his head, a faint smile on his lips. I pushed on.

  “This of course was to help Sengrim, who has disliked me since the day I first arrived in Yurt, and whose dislike has now progressed to hatred. Knowing I’m good friends with one of the cathedral priests of Caelrhon, he set out to make the priests hate me as much as he did. His plan came close to succeeding, too.”

  “So you think that the wizard of the neighboring kingdom to Yurt is conspiring against you,” commented Elerius, still with half a smile. “But I don’t see where I come into this.”

  “You had to be sure that I not appear in Caelrhon or talk on the phone with any of the priests while all this was going on, though you slipped up in not realizing immediately that Father Joachim was here in the City. So when you learned tha
t I was looking for Marcus, you paralyzed me and left me hidden in a sea-cave for the day.”

  “I would have thought you’d have recognized me—if it were indeed I,” he said lightly. “Your imaginative story still has a few gaps.”

  “It was simple enough to hide your identity with illusion,” I continued, “using the same disguise you’d already used when negotiating with Marcus. In fact, you’ve become quite adept at disguises. Just last night, you made yourself appear to be one of the members of the technical magic faculty. When I was freed from the cave after only one day, rather than the two of your plan, you had to lock me up again. It was quick thinking on your part to get yourself ‘trapped’ with Joachim and me in the school cellars, but unfortunately for you the Master freed us almost immediately.”

  “This is better than a story!” said Elerius. “Do you entertain your court on long winter nights with exciting tales of renegade wizards? But you really need to work a bit on the plot. So far this mostly revolves around the wicked wizard you’ve named after me, whereas you announced that the character of Sengrim would play a major role. He’s Royal Wizard of Caelrhon, so you’d think there would be some connection with griffins in that city.”

  “There is a connection. He wanted to prove his abilities both to his own king and to the churchmen of Caelrhon—as well of course to the school that had not given him the position he believed should be rightly his. What better way to show off than to have Caelrhon attacked by griffins, which he unaided would capture, with the cathedral convinced that it was hopeless asking for help from Yurt? So he had Marcus locked up, once he had played his part, so as not to accidentally reveal that he was not the wizard of Yurt. Then he set the first griffin loose….”

  Elerius’s tawny eyes had become calculating. “So,” he said slowly, without any of his earlier jocularity, “you are ready to accuse Sengrim of bringing griffins to the Western Kingdoms just because he is so good at dealing with magical creatures. But I fail to see why you think I would have played any role in this. You know that I always act from the best motives. Why don’t you believe me about the renegade magician, whom, as I told the Master, I discovered and warned away last night?”