The Witch & the Cathedral Page 9

  His reaction did nothing to lessen my suspicions. He gripped his sword and his eyes narrowed. “And what are you doing in my kingdom?” he demanded.

  I took a step backwards as he thrust his face toward mine. “The monster,” I babbled. “The dean of the cathedral asked me to come. I heard that your own Royal Wizard had an unfortunate accident, so—”

  “We dismissed him even before his accident,” said Lucas, glowering. “We have no more use for magic-workers in Caelrhon.”

  “But— But why not?”

  “You keep it so discreet you think we won’t notice,” said Lucas coldly. “But after my experiences, my eyes were opened. We know you wizards are plotting to throw off the ‘service’ you claim to practice. ‘Establishing peace throughout the western kingdoms,’ you like to call it, but I know better. And now I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that you’re hoping to influence the election of the next bishop. If you really are here at the invitation of the cathedral—something I intend to find out!—then all I can say is that the bishop should know better.”

  Shocked at his open vehemence, I didn’t reply but made him the formal half-bow and hurried away. None of this made any sense. Even though Sengrim, Caelrhon’s wizard, had always treated me rudely, I could not imagine what he could have done to get himself dismissed with harsh feeling that would persist even after his death.

  As I walked I kept probing with magic but found no sign of either an enormous bat-winged monster or a giant lizard with hands. Regretfully, I had to conclude that neither of the princes of Caelrhon could be responsible if they no longer even employed a wizard. I reached the gates of the city and went out into the field where the Romneys had been camped a week ago. The new grass, growing rapidly, had nearly covered the marks left by their caravans.

  For a moment I hesitated, then rose into the air for the flight back to the kingdom of Yurt. If someone had brought monsters here and then taken them away again, he must have some where to imprison them. There was one place I knew where it might—maybe—be possible to do so, and the quickest way to find out was to look.

  I scrupulously went nowhere near the royal castle of Yurt, instead heading for the magical valley at the other end of the kingdom. Prince Vincent could now persuade the court all he wanted, I told myself, that aristocrats would be better off without their wizards; it no longer mattered to me.

  In the valley was concentrated a pocket of forces left over from the creation of the earth, as well as the home of a wood nymph and the shrine to Yurt’s own Cranky Saint, a place where spells always worked especially well. Here it might be possible for a master wizard to find the power to bind even a monster from hell.

  The saint’s shrine had been served by an old hermit when I first came to Yurt, but a much younger man, ascetic, earnest, and with a shaved skull, now lived at the hermitage. I thought gloomily that this was one more example of everyone around me growing older.

  I approached cautiously, but the little green valley dreamed peacefully in the sun. I slowly flew its length above the sparkling river, seeing no monsters and noting with some detachment that I was capable to being back in the kingdom, within thirty miles of the queen, without disturbing the emotional scab that had formed over my bitterness and pain.

  The valley was so permeated with magic that it was hard to find specific spells, but after half an hour I was fairly sure no one had used its powers to conceal the cathedral’s monster. It was afternoon when I arrived, hot and tired, back in Caelrhon, feeling intense frustration at not being able to find a monster that dozens of people had seen.

  Ox carts laden with cut stone were coming toward the city gates. The oxen plodded slowly, their wagons creaking and the loads appearing to rock dangerously. Walking beside the oxen or sitting on the loads were the drivers, lazily flicking long whips, more to remind the oxen of their duties than to hurry them on.

  But on one of the loads of stone rode a ragged magician.

  My discouragement fell away, and I stepped casually to the edge of the road. “Greetings, Magician,” I said as he drew even.

  Although from the nature of the magic that had been going on in the city I had expected a fully-qualified wizard, I felt I had solved the mystery at last. The unkempt beard and filthy clothes could conceal unusual abilities. After all, some magicians specialized to the extent that, in one small area of magic, they might be better than most wizards.

  He gave an abrupt start. “Greetings, Wizard,” he managed to say, though his voice came out an indistinct mumble. Squinty eyes stared at me from under scraggling brows. Between his eyebrows and beard, his face was almost completely obscured.

  I could have tried probing magically to get a better idea what he looked like, but another magic-worker would know at once what I was doing and be grossly insulted. He was certainly old: even the best magic cannot reverse or conceal the natural forces of aging. “Why don’t you get down so we can have a talk?” I suggested.

  He hesitated a moment, then grunted and slid down from the moving wagon “Thanks for the lift, driver!” he called.

  “How far have you been riding?” I asked.

  “Just a couple of miles,” he said in a surly tone. His small eyes kept shifting, not quite meeting mine. For a second I had an impression of great magical power here—maybe even, strangely enough, the spells of two separate wizards. But the next instant the impression was gone. I mentally shook my head. I was, I knew from long experience, highly capable of jumping to unwarranted conclusions and then convincing myself that they were true. And I so much wanted to believe that I had found here the source of the cathedral’s problems.

  “Look at my shoes,” the magician continued. “If yours were like this you wouldn’t walk a hundred yards further than you had to.” The uppers of his shoes were badly cracked and the soles flapped loose. “I begged a ride not far from the quarry, paid the driver with a few illusions—pretty racy ones, too!”

  I had never been sure what Zahlfast had seen in me in my student days, why he had passed me in spite of the disastrous transformations practical, but I knew how perilously close I had come to being a magician making his living by selling pathetic scraps of magic wherever he could. But this magician, I reminded myself, might have made a giant bat-winged creature appear on the new cathedral tower. “Where were you last night?” I demanded.

  “Asleep in a haystack, and getting pretty wet, too,” he said grumpily. “But what is it to you?” the last almost in a shout. “Since when does a wizard want to keep an honest magician from earning a living?”

  I would have offered him money except that I knew any such condescension would have made him even more indignant. “You were not perhaps here in the cathedral city, calling up a monster?”

  “No,” he said almost hesitantly, then “No!” quite explosively. “I’ve had enough of self-satisfied wizards like you without you starting to accuse me of nonsense!”

  “Glad to hear it,” I said, taking a step backwards.

  He had worked himself up into a fury. Half of what he said was unintelligible, and for the rest he seemed to group me with an apparently diabolical conspiracy of wizards from the school, all bent on starving him. He seemed to have several vicious things to say about other important members of society while he was at it. I took the opportunity while he was distracted by his own anger to check again for signs of great magical power and this time found nothing. The brief impression I had had of some sort of double power also disappeared on closer examination—just my overactive imagination again.

  “The reason I asked,” I said when he paused for breath, “is because whoever is practicing magic around the new cathedral will be in serious trouble, and I thought I should warn you to stay away.”

  “It wouldn’t be you, would it?” he snorted.

  I shook my head. “But if there’s a renegade wizard here in the city, especially one practicing black magic, I’m going to find him.”

  The shifty eyes became guarded. “I don’t call up monster
s,” he said after a minute, as though settling on a plan of attack. “I study the magic of fire.”

  He waved his hand, muttered a few quick words, and the grass around my feet burst into flame. I jumped back, and his beard split in a grin. But the damp grass blazed for only a few seconds, and I quickly stamped it out. A few final wisps of smoke curled up.

  “That’s marvelous!” I cried. “I don’t know how to do that. Can you teach me how? I’ll pay you well!” Elerius had apparently tried to persuade the school they should teach fire magic, but as far as I knew none of the teachers had ever learned any.

  But the old magician was backing away. “I guess they don’t teach you everything, then,” he said with a bitter laugh, “even the ones of you they coddle. Be jealous of me for once, and see how you like it!” Empty carts were coming back out of the city gates. The old magician waved one down.

  He was much too ragged for me ever to be jealous of him, no matter what skills he possessed. But I was delighted. I could no more have created fire out of air than I could have a few minutes ago, but in the moment when he made the grass blaze I at least thought I had an inkling how to begin.

  As I headed back into the city I glanced over my shoulder. The magician had successfully negotiated a trade of illusions for a ride. Over the ox cart rose the insubstantial form of a naked woman, not quite life-size, moving in awkward gestures apparently meant to be obscene. I turned my back.

  I wanted to tell someone what I had just realized about fire magic, but I wasn’t sure whom to tell. In the meantime, although I did not like the coincidence of the magician appearing here only a day after the monster appeared on the tower, I was inclined to believe it had nothing to do with him. It was time to start searching the city itself more thoroughly.

  But first, I thought as I walked through the gates, I needed to speak with the mayor. He might not be among the “three who rule the world,” but the elected head of Caelrhon had the right to be consulted about a monster in his own city.

  “There must be a very powerful wizard operating nearby,” I told him. I had been ushered at once into the mayor’s study when I told the official at the door the reason for my visit, and the mayor seemed to have abruptly left a meeting in order to talk to me. “Creatures from the land of wild magic shouldn’t just appear by themselves in the lands of men. That’s why the cathedral dean sent for me at once.”

  He played with the heavy chain of office that hung around his neck. It must have had twice as much gold in it as anything I had ever seen the queen wear. He looked as though his normal expression was genial, but it was not genial this afternoon.

  “Fighting wizardry with wizardry,” he said thoughtfully and tugged at an earlobe, not quite meeting my eyes. “How can we be certain you are truly here to help us and are not the wizard who made a monster appear here last night?”

  If this is what the city council had been discussing when I pulled the mayor out of the meeting, I had gotten here just in time. Had Lucas’s distrust of all wizards now infected the local merchants and artisans as well? “Good question,” I said with all the confidence I could. “But you see, I’m school-trained.”

  “And why should we trust a school we’ve never seen, whose methods and purposes are hidden to us?”

  This would have been easier with less astute questions. “Then don’t trust the school,” I said, seeking to be genial myself. “Trust the dean. He’s known me for twenty years.”

  Unexpectedly the mayor smiled. It looked as though he had missed all day being able to smile. “You’ve chosen the best man in the city to be your guarantor. We would of course prefer not to have to rely on arcane spells. But if religion and magic can work together, perhaps we may still hope.”

  When I left the arched porch of the municipal building a few minutes later, the streets were still full of people, shopping, offering goods for sale, carrying water from the fountain, hurrying somewhere. Most were too absorbed in their own concerns even to notice me.

  But as I passed one young woman she looked directly at me. She had amethyst eyes and a mole high on one cheek. For a second she smiled. Then she was past me and I was left looking after her, at a swirl of loose nut-brown hair over a dark shawl.

  In spite of people pushing me from behind I stopped dead in the middle of the street. For reasons I did not understand her glance brought back all my shame and sense of loss with the force of ripping the top from a wound. Only a short while earlier, I had begun to hope that time had already begun to heal; now I knew that I had only been numb.

  I was in exile from the royal castle of Yurt, probably permanently. I had lost any chance to see and talk freely with the queen, as I had done for close to twenty years, and with it I had lost my home, all because I had been a complete fool.

  After a moment I forced myself to keep walking, trying to decide what it was about the young woman that brought this knowledge so vividly to me. It was not her appearance. As I tried to picture her face, I decided it was probably attractive, but it was nothing like the queen’s. I had passed dozens of other women in the street without any such reaction.

  But those women had all looked past me without even noticing. This woman had looked at me as though she were my friend.

  III

  “I saw a magician today,” I told Joachim that evening. We again ate at the table by his eastern window, watching the sky darken.

  “Did he summon the bat-winged monster?”

  “I doubt it,” I said, wishing I had a more productive answer. “At first I thought I sensed some strange power in him, but then I realized that was only because he knows fire magic, of a very different sort from the magic they teach us at the school.” I decided not to mention my fleeting impression of two different sets of spells lingering about him, not wanting to bother the dean with my highly unlikely speculations about Sengrim’s dead spirit returning bodiless to possess a carnival magician. “He probably didn’t have anything to do with the monster or the giant lizard, but I still warned him away. If I’m going to find who in this city is working renegade magic, I don’t want to be distracted by some half-competent magic worker. Do you have magicians here often?”

  “There is sometimes a magician in town for market day, and always for the big festivals,” said Joachim. “They do magic tricks on the corners for a few coins. But tell me: When will you find out why there was a monster on the tower and make sure there never is again?”

  I looked into his intent dark eyes and felt embarrassed. Both of us looked away. “I can’t tell you,” I said. “The whole city feels full of magic, but it’s very unfocused.” For some reason I was reminded of the woman with the nut-brown hair, but there was no way I could mention her or the effect she had had on me.

  We were both silent for a moment. “I called the wizards’ school from your office in the cathedral late this afternoon,” I added then. “I hope you don’t mind.” The dean shook his head without looking up. I thought about that conversation, about Zahlfast’s surprise that I was back in Caelrhon again. It had been disconcerting, after years of using telephones with far-seeing attachments, not to see him as I spoke to him.

  “I already warned you about the priests,” he had said, uncomfortably loudly and clearly considering that I was talking to him on the priests’ telephone. “And Elerius tells me that Sengrim had long had disagreements with the crown prince of Caelrhon.” I didn’t like the suggestion that Elerius knew more than I did about the kingdom adjoining Yurt, but I did not interrupt. “You knew, didn’t you, that Sengrim only received the final year or two of his training here at the school, but it’s no use yet trying to persuade the royal family that a completely school-trained wizard would be less irritating to them. Let the prince’s resentment die down before we introduce a new wizard into the kingdom.”

  “The Master was telling me there was some concern that aristocrats might be turning against their wizards,” I said. “You can reassure him that there’s nothing more to it than Prince Lucas.”

>   Zahlfast had not sounded as reassured as I expected. Instead he said slowly, “We’ve had indications that more is involved …”

  Joachim poured himself another half-glass of wine but did not drink it. Instead he stared at the bottle. “The bishop wants to see you in the morning,” he said at last.

  “The bishop? But I thought he understood that the cathedral needs a wizard here. Has Prince Lucas been talking to him?”

  “I don’t think he’s going to order you away,” said Joachim, slowly enough that I began to fear that was exactly what he would do. Since no one wanted me here, not Prince Lucas, not the city council, and not the school, it would be entirely appropriate if the bishop didn’t either. “But anyone who serves the interests of the cathedral is to some extent under his authority, and he wants to meet you.”

  I was not going to leave here without doing what I had come for, no matter who wanted me to go. The school, I told myself, was wrong, and I actively wanted to irritate the princes of Caelrhon. Besides, Joachim needed me. “Do you think I should entertain the bishop with some magic tricks?” I suggested.

  He smiled, although rather faintly. “I thought you were a fully-qualified and competent wizard, not a magician,” he said, which was apparently meant as a joke. “You won’t need to do any flashy tricks; I think he mostly wants reassurance that you are not acting with any disrespect for religion.”

  “That depends,” I thought but had the sense not to say, “on whether you’re defining religion as Christianity or the organized church.” Instead I changed the subject. “I was starting to tell you about this magician. His illusions are very poor; they wouldn’t fool anybody. But he knows the magic of fire!”

  “The magic of fire?” Joachim asked politely.

  “Even you priests know there are several different kinds of magic, corresponding to the different natural elements,” I said. “Most of the magic they teach in the school, including the whole technical magic division, is the magic of light and air. But there are other sorts of magic as well. There’s the magic of earth, herbal magic for the most part, which has never been incorporated into the school texts but which I learned from my predecessor at Yurt.”