Is This Apocalypse Necessary? - Wizard of Yurt - 6 (30 page)

He understood me far too well. Even assuming I could ever capture Elerius, what could I threaten him with? Apparently everyone throughout the civilized world knew that good old Daimbert wouldn't really hurt a fly.

I took a deep breath and tried harder not to show what Basil discreetly called my "distaste" for him, his magic, his castle, and his pet. I would have called it horror and revulsion myself, but one had to be polite. "You are right, Count, that I need help, and you may be in a position to offer it.

But before I accept your assistance, welcome as it might be, I need to know: what will you want in return?"

His blood-red lips twitched in a small smile: proud of me for being cautious. But then he leaned forward, white hands clasped together, lightless eyes extremely sober. "A promise from you, sworn on magic itself: when you are the head of organized wizardry in the West, you will not, as I realize that other wizard plans to do, use the conjoined forces of all of you school-trained wizards to conquer our kingdoms east of the mountains."

I didn't need to hear this again. Everyone from the old Master to Elerius to this strange pale-faced wizard seemed convinced I could become head of the school. Just because I wanted to stop Elerius didn't mean I wanted to make his ambitions my own—in fact, just the opposite, as I would have hoped would be self-evident.

Apparently not. I smiled as genuinely as I could. "I will be happy to swear such an oath, because I have no intention of heading organized wizardry. Even if I did, our school's purpose is to help mankind, not invade other parts of the world.

"But—" I added quickly, before Basil could jump up and start his packing to come with me, "—you may be able to help me best from right here." The white lizard cocked a disapproving eye at me, but Basil's face stayed dead still. "You were reluctant, I know," I hurried on, "to let your castle be seen by the people who were with me yesterday, and yet they're going to be with me for the rest of the trip. I would much rather have you here than someone like Vlad, and you don't want to take chances on another wizard moving in."

"You know, Bone," Basil commented to his pet, "I do not think he wants us to come with him."

Now I had hurt his feelings. I knew from his insistence that his castle stay invisible that he was deeply reluctant, when it came to it, to leave darkness and solitude for sunlight and other people. Yet it must be lonely sometimes even for him, with no company but a white lizard. "You could help me best," I said brightly, "by letting me have this magic skull."

He insisted for several minutes that he would not mind associating with other people—though I tried to suggest, without actually saying so, that many of these people would feel enormous "distaste" for his pet. He was also reluctant to part with the skull, especially since he remained convinced that all it would show me was the Eastern Kingdoms. But Vlad himself had made it, not Basil, and Basil might not know all its tricks—or so I fervently hoped.

But after a quarter hour of discussion, during which I tried to convince him that I personally would be delighted with his company, even though my companions might be a bother, Basil agreed to stay where he was but to let me have his magic artifact.

"After all," he said to his lizard, looking on the bright side, "making a new one will keep me happy and busy for a while. And finding a new skull for the face section shouldn't be too hard, should it, Bone?"

I swore the oaths he wanted, hating the solemnity of swearing to something which I knew would never be an issue anyway, and took the skull in both hands. As I looked at it I tried to reassure myself that since Vlad had not sold his soul to the devil, the one bit of evil he had never undertaken, I would not be endangering my own soul in using it.

"Now you have made me feel guilty, Daimbert," Basil said suddenly.

"You helped me gain my castle by killing Vlad, and you have promised not to invade our kingdoms, and all I am offering you in return is an artifact which may not serve your purposes. Here. Let me give you this instead. I am hoping for an apprentice of my own some day, so I have started composing a primer of the magic of blood and bone. It will be easy enough for me to write out a new one. This one is for you."

Startled, I took it and pushed it in my jacket pocket with no more than a glance. Another handwritten book of old spells. Maybe I would have done better all along if I had just concentrated properly on studying modern technical magic.

"Thank you very much," I said as graciously as I could manage on short notice. "And one last thing. Everyone in the West thinks I'm dead. Please don't mention my visit to your old friend the chancellor." Or, I added silently, to Elerius. The pit of my stomach remained convinced that this was all an elaborate plot to capture me.

But Basil smiled. "Of course not, Daimbert. It would be returning evil for good to betray you when you have just sworn to leave me my castle and my peace. Do come by when you have finished defeating this other wizard and tell me of your adventures. Perhaps, for you, even Blood will agree to come out during the day."

His pet lizard Bone was taking another morsel of something, clearly thinking it was not so tasty as I would be, as I staggered down the corridor toward the doors. They swung open at my touch, and I was back blinking in the sun, as the obsidian castle faded into invisibility behind me.

We were at least a hundred miles from Basil's castle before I waved to Maffi on the flying carpet that we should set down for the night. Evening was coming earlier and earlier these days, and the western sky, above the mountains we could now see rising to the west, was streaked with red.

"I'm going to have to adjust the skull's spells," I told Maffi as we munched on the last of the cucumber salad Kaz-alrhun had sent with us.

Just as well; the salad had become limp, and the flat bread into which it was packed was stale. "I'm sure it was designed to work only with the enchanted map of the Eastern Kingdoms, but I need to make it show me the West."

I had kept the account of my visit to the obsidian castle to a bare minimum, and now, with Basil far behind us and Naurag's warm flank between us and the wind, I could speak almost casually.

"Try drawing a map of your own," suggested Gwennie. "Try drawing Yurt."

Homesickness, keen and unexpected, hit me as I sketched the shape of the kingdom, the location of the castle, the roads and rivers, the plateau cut by the valley of the Cranky Saint.

"Don't forget the nunnery," put in Hadwidis.

Elerius had never threatened Yurt directly, but as I drew I knew in my heart that I was opposing him for the sake of my kingdom and my family, as much as for any principle.
This
is where Elerius's influence must never come.

But when I looked at the map through the crystal eyes of the skull, it refused to come alive. All I could see was a series of pencil marks, hard to make out in the dim light and slightly distorted by the crystals. Yurt lived but not on paper.

"When we mages of Xantium need to communicate over long distances," said Maffi confidently, "we say certain words over deep pools, and can see the person with whom we wish to communicate." I was happy to let him try, but his 'certain words' had no effect here.

Hadwidis had been watching quietly. "Don't try to do it all at once," she suggested suddenly. "Start by making your own map of the Eastern Kingdoms. If you can make the skull work at all, you can then start working on other places."

"What a good idea," I said, rousing myself to give her a grin and tousle her hair. She had been out of the nunnery long enough that her hair was worth tousling.

It was now so dark that we had to work by firelight, me drawing and the other three arguing about where the rivers ran which we had crossed over today. I emphatically drew Basil's hill complete with the obsidian castle.

The one part of the map on which we could all agree was the woodland clearing in which we now sat.

"Let me try this now," I said, again holding the skull to my face. The map remained stubbornly ill-lit and unfeatured, but for a second I thought I caught a hint of a spell, almost a trailing thread—

"That appears akin to something I know," said Maffi, serious now, not simply trying to persuade me of the superiority of his training with Kaz-alrhun over mine at the school.

I still thought of him as the boy he had been when I first knew him, but he was, I reminded myself, probably older now than I had been when I first came to Yurt as Royal Wizard. I nodded and shifted to give him room beside me. We each held the skull in one hand and, mind to mind, worked together at teasing out its magic. What I had spotted was more than a trailing thread; it was the beginning of a spell shaped in something very like the magery of Xantium, though with some odd twists—

"There," said Maffi suddenly, breaking the mental contact. I wiped my forehead with my sleeve. His mind had been even stranger than I expected. But between us we had found the tiniest gap in the magic of the seeing crystals, a gap apparently meant to be bridged by the ensorcelled map Basil had had on the table beside it, but which might be filled in with certain other spells instead... And I thought we had it.

"I shall attempt the map now," Maffi said, then grinned. "You know," he commented with a wink for Gwennie, "I would have to characterize you of the West as
strange
." I let him have the skull, and he bent over the map.

There was a long silence.

It was night now, and the piece of paper on which I had drawn my map was no more than a firelit rectangle. The wind was rising, sighing in the trees and bringing back the suspicions I thought I had left behind at Basil's castle, that Elerius was cautiously and invisibly approaching.

Hadwidis put her hand on my arm, and I squeezed it.

Maffi pulled the skull from his face, his eyes huge. Worldlessly he passed it to me, and I bent eagerly over the map. Instantly it came to life.

It was a disquieting life, lit by more than the fire. Parts of the map were extremely sharp, including the obsidian castle with its jagged towers, and most of the road we had followed both on our way there and leaving. In other places a smoothly-running river simply disappeared, though I knew I had drawn its entire length, only to reappear again after an unfeatured, misty gap. Those parts of the Eastern Kingdoms which I had not tried to sketch, that is most of them, also faded almost immediately into vague whiteness. The skull must be able to bring to life only those parts of the map which were drawn to correct scale—and the misty gaps were the parts over which we had argued.

And then, moving my eyes very carefully, I saw us. It was extremely disconcerting to see oneself from the outside. I stared, fascinated, at the miniscule fire, the four tiny human figures, and the large, dark and shadowed shape which I recognized after one startled heart-beat as the flying beast. The miniature trees of the living map bent and swayed with the trees above us. Though I stared until my eyes ached, I could make out no enemy creeping up on us.

I pulled it from my face. "Let's try Yurt."

It didn't work. Though this map was much better than my sketch of the Eastern Kingdoms, it refused to come to life. Maffi and I tried further adjustments on the spells, without effect. Gwennie and Hadwidis gave up and went to sleep while we were still passing the skull back and forth, saying, "I think I have an idea," and "Let me try just one more spell."

I pulled out the primer of the magic of "blood and bone" which Basil had given me, but in flipping through its pages by firelight I saw nothing about far-seeing skulls. Spells worked with bodies dead three days, seven days, seven years were all there, as were constructions built on dragons'

teeth, spells to sicken from miles away, but nothing useful—now, or I thought, ever. I thrust the book back in my pocket and returned to school spells and improvisation.

Exhausted, Maffi and I stopped at last. I looked up at the sky, where a star peeking through the clouds could have been the watching eye of someone else with his own magic skull. As I watched the clouds shifted, and I could see that the star was not an eye but a shoulder of the Hunter, rising in the east over Xantium. Feeling hunted myself as I wrapped up in a blanket, I only hoped that our failure to see Yurt didn't mean that the kingdom no longer existed.

part seven *
armies

From the Eastern Kingdoms we headed straight west, over the high range of mountains that separated eastern and western lands. I kept Naurag fairly close to the ground, following the passes. The high peaks towered over us, shutting out half the sky. The stinging wind off the eternal ice fields that topped the peaks was frigid and tasted of snow.

We made camp for the evening in a relatively sheltered valley at the feet of the highest mountain. "Could people even
live
up there, Wizard?"

Gwennie asked, craning her neck.

I considered. "You wouldn't be able to breathe," I said at last. "There's less and less air the higher you go, and you wouldn't have any breath for climbing." A wizard, I thought, could probably fly up there with magic, perhaps creating some sort of spell to trap and bring air with him. But wizards are too practical to want to freeze to death three miles above the surface of the earth.

"Perhaps this trip will give me a new appreciation for the summer sun of Xantium," commented Maffi as we tried to cook supper over a fire whose heat was sucked away by the bitter night sky. When we awoke in the morning, folded two to a side under Naurag's warm wings, it was to see the ground lightly dusted with white.

Maffi considered it enormously exotic, and Hadwidis, declaring that they never let her build snowmen in the nunnery, promptly built one, using up most of the snow around our camp in the process. But I couldn't enjoy it. I had still not gotten the skull to show me anything beyond the Eastern Kingdoms, and as I tried another spell this morning, even those lands seemed oddly faded. I rubbed my eyes, wondering if this was just due to glare off the new snow, but when I tried again my penciled sketch of the region east of the mountains still only resolved itself into a misty approximation of the living scenes I had been able to see before.