Is This Apocalypse Necessary? - Wizard of Yurt - 6 (40 page)

Whitey and Chin collapsed where they stood. It was almost a physical relief to break contact with their minds, which had struck me all day as sloppy and greasy. But as I leaned against Naurag's flank I realized I was not through yet. I still hadn't worked out how I was going to control the warriors, but they had better be out in front, ready to march in the vanguard, because I very much doubted I could get them to detour in an orderly way around the camp, and I didn't even want to think about them, alive, marching through its center. With no energy to try more than one at a time, I slowly started moving the warriors through the air, over the royal encampment, to set them down in a line facing the enemy.

I had to work fast, before the last of my own strength went. If there were any chance they were going to come to life during the night, then even more reason for them all be on the same side of the camp, the side toward Elerius.

From the corner of my eye I caught motion, a small, slim person running toward me. "Let me practice my lifting spells," said Antonia. I nodded, concentrating too hard to speak, and she immediately began, using the same skills she had used on a volleyball in the castle courtyard, in a distant time that could have been years earlier. Teeth set in her lip, she lifted one of the warriors, carried it through the air in a great arc a quarter mile long, over the soldiers and horses and tents and watchfires, and set it down on the camp's opposite side, on the edge of the trampled no-man's territory. She gave me a quick grin and started the spells for another. After a moment I realized she was moving hers faster than I was moving mine.

"They're impressive, Wizard," said King Paul behind me, which made me jump. But it was good, I thought as I nodded to him, for the commander of this camp always to know what was going on in it.

"Dragons' teeth, you said? They're almost like—you remember that time."

I did indeed. "But why are they so still?"

"Not activated yet," I said shortly.

Antonia was now experimenting with two warriors at a time, carefully keeping them spaced so they didn't stick together. I gave up trying to help her and just took deep breaths.

"Well," said Paul, looking out toward Elerius's castle, "I've told King Lucas and the rest that they can expect to attack at dawn. Do whatever you need to do to get these creatures activated, and I'll match your magical monsters against anyone's!”

He turned his back on the castle and the warriors then, his head cocked to listen to a distant challenge; it sounded as if someone had just ridden into the camp. The king hurried off to investigate. But I had no time to wonder who it was or what message he might bring. In the flare of the torches I was quite sure I had just seen one of my creatures move.

A quiet voice spoke beside me, Theodora. "That one's trying to wake up."

I was so tired that for a moment my mind went blank. Would a paralysis spell work? Would I have to disassemble it altogether? If it woke up would it bring all the rest of the warriors to life?

It stopped twitching abruptly. Startled, I checked with magic. It had a very tidy if rather unorthodox binding spell wrapped around it.

"There!" said Theodora. "Now aren't you glad you didn't send the two of us away?" Sometimes it was very useful being married to a witch.

I hugged her, weak with relief as well as exhaustion. "Then as long as you're here, could you help Antonia and me shift the rest of these?" which really meant, help Antonia. "And for God's sake, stay back out of their way!"

In a few minutes we had finished moving the last one. Antonia told me she had checked, and none of the others were showing any signs of life. I was too tired to do anything but take her word for it. "First thing in the morning," I said, "we will give them life, and we'd all better hope they charge in the right direction."

There was a murmur behind us, and I turned to see, picking their way through the tents by torchlight, King Paul, accompanied by the bishop.

The bishop! For a moment I was too delighted to do anything but gape.

Joachim had been my best friend for years, even before I met Theodora, and when I decided to oppose Elerius it had been with the bitter knowledge that I might never see him again. And though he might never know it, according to Saint Eusebius it had been in part the bishop's prayers that had brought the saint to the castle just in time to save Elerius's soul and my life. "Good to see you, Joachim," I said, too overcome to be able to produce anything beyond a platitude.

But he, much less disconcerted than I, stepped forward and seized me in a hard embrace. "Thank God we are together again!" he said. "Don't ever pretend to die again, Daimbert, without first warning me!"

"I've tried to tell him the same thing," said Theodora.

"And you," he said to her with a smile, "don't leave the cathedral again without warning me either. One minute you and Antonia were safely under the Church's protection, and the next I knew one of my priests told me you had gone running out and were seen flying away in the skin of a purple winged creature!"

"We had to come help him," said Antonia. "Do you see all those warriors over there? I put them there myself!"

The bishop contemplated them thoughtfully. Arms upraised, mud and weed stuck all over their thick bodies, they waited for the command to attack and kill. Joachim was going to chide me for making creatures of war, for presuming on the creative powers of God. I just knew it.

But when he turned toward me again, deep eyes shadowed from the firelight, it was to say, "So was it to learn the secret of making these that you disappeared?" I looked for a frown and it wasn't there. Instead he was smiling again. Some time, I thought, I might have to explain to the bishop that just because he liked and respected me, he didn't have to assume that everything I did was for an excellent reason.

But not now. "Well, in some ways they were an afterthought—" I started to say. First I had been going to use the Dragons' Sceptre against Elerius, then the Ifrit, and dragons' teeth had been my fallback position when nothing else worked. But it was too complicated, and I was too tired. "Yes, they represent my secret plan."

"And Elerius will be very surprised in the morning!" added Antonia.

"Could you shrive us all at dawn, Father, before we go into battle?" Paul asked quietly.

We started walking slowly back into the center of camp. One of the knights from Yurt hurried up to say that a tent had been made ready for the bishop. Had he ridden here alone, I wondered, without any of the priests and soldiers who were supposed to accompany a bishop everywhere? I would ask him in the morning.

But all the plans for what we would do in the morning were wrong.

Suddenly there was a shout behind us, and exhausted as I was I spun around, fearing to see my soldiers springing to life and running wildly across the trampled earth.

It was worse. Elerius hadn't waited until morning. His own unliving warriors were upon us now.

Part nine * The Princess

Trumpets sounded behind me in the camp, and men poured out of the tents, falling over each other as they scrambled into their armor.

Shouting, clanging, trying to find their fellows by torch light when sleep still lay in their eyes, the armies of the west prepared for battle. The war cries of a dozen kingdoms rose above the tumult.

Elerius's unliving warriors, which I had last seen on a deserted island offshore from the great City, marched toward the camp. They were made of hair and dead bones, and their only features were their glowing eyes.

Ungovernable and violent as when Elerius first made them, they were only a hundred yards away and moving inexorably toward us.

What
was that spell of Basil's? And
where
was his book? In my pocket?

In the air cart? Able to see nothing but those advancing warriors, I wildly slapped my pockets, found the book, realized it was going to be impossible to read Basil's handwriting by torch light if I couldn't stop shaking, yelled for Whitey and Chin—

And heard a voice speaking next to me, words almost but not quite the Hidden Language that I knew. At those words, all the dragons' teeth warriors began to twitch.

Maffi stood beside me, concentrating hard on creatures made with no magic he had ever learned and giving them movement. All but the one that Theodora had bound spread their arms and stamped, but they made no move to attack. Maffi added another spell, which made the creatures whirl their arms wildly but still stay where Antonia had put them.

I blinked and was suddenly calm again. The sound of Maffi's words had nudged my panic-stricken brain. If Elerius had carefully created his warriors without the use of school magic, so that they could advance across the deserted fields where he had stopped all school spells, then Basil's spells should work here as well. I rattled off his activating spell, and the dragons' teeth surged into motion.

A war cry came almost in my ear, and I whirled. King Paul, riding his stallion, had gathered the cavalry around him. Horses reared, and drawn swords flashed in the firelight. In a remarkably short time, the knights of the western kingdoms had armed and were ready to face whatever Elerius sent toward us.

"No! Wait!" I cried. "Sire, listen to me! Don't charge— not yet!"

I couldn't see the king's face behind his helmet, but he pulled up his stallion at once. "Daimbert prepares the way for us!" he yelled over his shoulder. "Wait for Daimbert's signal!"

That wasn't exactly what I meant, but at least they stopped, the sweating horses jostling each other, as Paul's command was shouted back rank by rank through the army.

My warriors—with one exception—were off with Basil's spell, heading without anger or fear, only emotionless violence, toward the monsters Elerius had made. Theodora said something, and the last of my warriors, freed of her binding spell, sprang after the rest. Thuds, dull clangs, and scrapes marked the meeting of forces, but creatures without mouths cannot shout.

"My spells for automatons work but poorly on these creatures,"

commented Maffi in disappointment.

Better than anything of mine worked when my brain wasn't functioning at all. "Thank you for what you did," I said, attempting, without much success, to speak normally. The field before us was dark away from the torch light. "Can you see if they're destroying each other?"

He shook his head. "I perceive them not." I tried a magical flash of light, but Elerius must still have his defenses against school magic very well in place, for the spell dissolved ten yards from where we stood, doing little more than deepen the shadows around the undead warriors.

I glanced over my shoulder. Most of the knights had lifted the visors on their helmets and were watching me intently, expectantly. Clearly to stay quietly here, waiting to see if any of the creatures Elerius and I had made would come this way, was not an option for Daimbert, glorious savior of the west.

Antonia and Hadwidis would be back in the crowd somewhere. I didn't need to see their faces to know they would be watching just as expectantly.

"Come on," I said to Maffi, convinced I was heading toward my own death but almost too tired to care. "Let's go find out."

I stumbled with exhaustion and had to lean on his arm as we started across the rough field. Unable to fly in the area governed by Elerius's spells I realized how easy magic had always made life for me. Normally I didn't worry about walking into danger—I could always fly out. But now if Elerius's warriors broke through mine, or he took control of mine with his spells, Maffi and I would have no recourse but running, and I didn't think I would be able to run very far.

Close at hand I heard a rapid clicking noise—Maffi's teeth were chattering. I looked toward him, but he merely shrugged with one shoulder. "It is colder than I had anticipated in your western realms," he said, his flashing smile unconvincing.

The creaks and clanking ahead of us grew quieter rather than louder the closer we got—maybe there was something wrong with my ears. There seemed to be something wrong with my eyes too, for even as we approached, slowly, cautiously, ready to flee at any moment, I couldn't resolve individual warriors, but saw only vast untidy masses of darkness.

The night air blew damp and piercing toward us.

Maffi stopped, and I stopped with him. "They are no longer fighting,"

he said quietly.

Had they formed their own monstrous alliance, the voice in the back of my mind asked, to destroy their makers, both Elerius and me? It took a moment of terror and despair to realize what had happened. But then I felt a second's wild exhilaration. My plan had worked.

Writhing on the ground, pressed as tight together as welded pieces of steel, were Elerius's warriors and my own. His, stuck fast to mine, were still trying to march toward King Paul's army. Mine, powered with Basil's spell, were trying just as determinedly to march toward Elerius's castle.

The net result was mounds of creatures kicking ineffectively but not—at least for the moment—about to kill anybody. Use of the stick-fast weed, an old bit of simple magic out of herbal lore, something I had picked up years ago when a very new graduate of the school, had stymied both Elerius's carefully-wrought spells and my own much more ad hoc dragons' teeth.

"We'll have to dismantle them," I said, suddenly feeling confident again.

"What do you use when you no longer need an automaton?"

"Daylight," said Maffi firmly. "These spells require daylight."

I actually doubted that they did, but I could see his point. "Maybe we could erect some sort of magical shield around them for tonight," I suggested uncertainly, "if such a thing would work here." I didn't want Elerius coming out after I was asleep and finding a way to separate them and reactivate his.

But putting any further activity off until morning was suddenly not even to be imagined. From Elerius's castle came war cries and the harsh clang of swords being beaten against shields. Elerius might no longer be opposing us with undead warriors of hair and bone, but he had plenty of living warriors of flesh and blood.