Is This Apocalypse Necessary? - Wizard of Yurt - 6 (41 page)

I spun around and shouted for King Paul. I tried magically amplifying my voice, but Elerius's spells against magic kept my spells from working.

It didn't matter. Paul heard me.

In a few seconds Maffi and I were surrounded by the warhorses of our army. Men gripped flaring torches in mailed fists as they galloped toward the enemy. The horses screamed and reared to avoid us and the mounds of unliving warriors, and for a moment iron-shod hooves flashed by our unprotected heads. Then the horses jostled, found their footing, and shot away toward the enemy.

I put my hand over my eyes. I didn't need to see this. Distant sounds of battle indicated that the armies had met. The Black Wars, the wars that had so sickened the West that there had been nothing been minor skirmishes between kingdoms ever since, were going to fade in comparison to the massive blood-letting about to take place.

After a moment I said to Maffi, "We're going to have to move or drag these warriors further from the castle, somewhere we can get a little light.

Did Kaz-alrhun teach you any lifting spells that Elerius might not be expecting?"

Maffi took a deep breath. "Perchance I can work without light. If I am to try spells, let them be the spells to deactivate an automaton."

The two masses of unliving warriors still struggled in each others' grip, so we stood well back as Maffi started mumbling spells. From the distant battle came what sounded like shouts of triumph among the screams and the clashes of metal on metal. Somebody must be winning, I thought dully, looking at the ground at my feet because it didn't seem worth looking anywhere else.

And that winning somebody, the thought struck me, should be the armies under Paul's command. Hope made me lift my head, though I still couldn't see anything. There were thousands of men in the army that had dedicated itself to my memory, whereas Elerius couldn't have fit nearly that many into his castle. He would not have been concerned about the size of his human army because it was supplemented by his undead warriors, not to mention his own spells and those of whatever wizards he had with him. But his magical warriors were out of action, and the forces he had erected against my spells worked equally well against his.

"Ha!" said Maffi suddenly, and one of Elerius's warriors collapsed into bits of stinking bone.

But, freed of the obstacle in its path, the dragon's teeth warrior against which it had been bound started forward again—marching this time not toward a foe, but toward the rear of Paul's army.

I stumbled after it, snatching at spells. As long as I could avoid school magic,
something
must still be working. Maffi had managed to disassemble something made by another wizard, made with spells that had only a tangential relationship to the magic he knew himself, and yet he had succeeded. Exhausted as I was, I ought to be able to deal with a warrior I myself had made.

The third almost-random series of commands in the Hidden Language worked, and the ferociously advancing creature stopped, quivered, and became nothing more than several long, razor-sharp teeth, lying in the dirt churned up by the cavalry.

"Let us coordinate our efforts, Daimbert," said Maffi, taking me firmly by the arm as though I were a recalcitrant student. I stood beside him meekly, working to remove the semblance of life from my warriors at the same time as he worked on Elerius's warriors. The two sets of creatures were not perfectly balanced—sometimes one of mine would start slowly pushing its way successfully forward, toward the clashing armies, and sometimes one of Elerius's would make a break toward the camp of the assembled kings. Scurrying around the writhing, dark mass of undead bodies, we were just able to stop those who threatened to escape and to break the spells that gave them motion.

It was excruciatingly slow, because our timing had to be perfect to destroy both warriors at once, and Maffi told me in disgust that no two of Elerius's creatures was put together precisely the same way—doubtless to foil somethng like what we were now doing. But somewhere in the back of my brain was the thought, which would have been joyful if I had had the energy to pay attention to it, that even Elerius's best spells could not stand against the combination of herbal and eastern wizardry.

We kept on working, slowly, carefully, knowing that if exhaustion made us sloppy we would not live long enough to get away. I tried to calculate when we might finish rendering all the warriors inactive, mine and Elerius's both, and reached the conclusion that it would be sometime tomorrow afternoon. "That can't be right," I thought, shaking my head, but felt too muzzy to try the calculations again. Besides, they might still give me the same answer.

Someone came racing toward us from the camp, surprising us so much in the middle of a spell that two warriors nearly got moving again before Maffi was able to bind them.

It was Hadwidis. "They've escaped!" she cried. "I saw them coming!"

"Who? What?" I managed to say from between parched lips.

"My mother and brother! I used that magic skull thing again to see what was happening in my castle, and I saw them slipping out through the postern gate! Come with me, Wizard! I have to go to them!"

I looked helplessly from her to Maffi, but the latter gave me a shove. "I would rest a moment from these spells," he said. "Go, and we shall resume on your return." Hadwidis took my arm and almost pulled me across the broken land, toward the clash of armies.

But not quite toward them. She angled around the base of the castle, running tirelessly while I staggered along behind. The ground was rough, dotted with rocks and little streams that would have made for difficult going even in daylight, even it had not been heavily trampled by mounted men, but she led the way through the darkness in perfect assurance: this was, after all, her kingdom.

We were close to the castle now, whose dark walls rose sheer above us.

Elerius was up in there—but he might not be able to see us magically with all school spells still blocked. A delicate stairway, only wide enough for one person, curved down the castle's side. Between us and that stairway, through the shadows, I could see two figures approaching.

Hadwidis skidded to a stop, abruptly shy. Almost she hid herself behind me for a second, though I couldn't imagine what protection or wisdom I could offer at this point. "Hello, Mother," she said stiffly.

The figures stopped abruptly, then the smaller one took a few steps forward—I would have guessed it was young Prince Walther, except that he walked erect, with no hint of a limp. "Who is there?" he said in a voice that would have been haughty had it not come out so high.

Her answer was low and expressionless. "Your sister."

"Hadwidis!" It was Walther after all. I could make out his features as he sprang toward us. "The saint has answered all my prayers! You're back to help me as I prepare to become king, and look! My leg is healed!"

The Cranky Saint had become
way
too active for my tastes, especially since he seemed more interested in making Hadwidis queen than in stopping Elerius's ambitions. I stood quietly aside while the brother and sister embraced, and she turned, awkward again, toward her mother. No one paid the slightest attention to me.

"You have left the nunnery?" the queen asked, her voice sharper than I would have expected from a woman being reunited with her daughter after years of separation. She was, as well as I could tell through the shadows, still a very attractive woman, much too well dressed to be scrambling around a muddy field at night. "Was leaving deliberate on your part," she added, "or did the abbess find your conduct unacceptable?"

A strained silence hung between mother and daughter for a minute, broken by the distant sounds of battle. But then Hadwidis laughed. "I'll tell you the whole story when I've got you safe," she said briskly, taking charge.

"Come on! We've got to get you further away from Elerius while he's still distracted."

She took each by the arm and dragged them away from the castle, while I tried to keep up. "What do you mean," the queen demanded, breathing hard at the pace Hadwidis had set, "by saying you need to 'get us away'

from Elerius?"

"He
sent
us away," provided Walther, "for our protection. Although I do think ..." His voice trailed off without finishing the sentence. He still wanted to believe in Elerius, I thought, in spite of what he had seen, and that wizard must have given him some sort of innocuous explanation for why he had tried to summon a demon, but there were definitely doubts in the boy's mind.

"What—?" Hadwidis almost stopped for a moment, then shook her head and forced her mother and brother to redouble their speed. I started falling behind. Trumpets sounded from the field of battle. Rallying the cavalry, I thought—or sounding retreat.

But what could Walther mean by saying that Elerius had sent them away? The queen had once been—and presumably still was—his lover, and Walther was his son. Was he planning to destroy Paul's army, now at his very gates, by blowing up the entire castle?

In which case, I thought grimly, he would blow up a lot of young, misguided wizards along with it. And there was nothing I could do about it.

"You look quite disreputable, Hadwidis," commented the queen, panting in an undignified manner. "I do hope you are not about to tell me that you have become a camp follower for the invading armies."

"What's a camp follower?" asked Walther, but no one told him.

Instead Hadwidis laughed again. "Of course not," she said, leaving out of the story her brief plan to become a tavern wench in Caelrhon. "King Paul has treated me with every courtesy since I arrived here."

"King Paul? Is he the one commanding this invasion? If so, I need to speak with him at once."

"Excuse me, my lady, but I don't think you'll want to wade into that battle in search of him," I said, managing to catch up again. "Paul will be in the front ranks."

We all paused and looked a minute toward the torch-lit battle that still surged around the base of the castle. "Highly improper," the queen pronounced. "The life of a commander is more important to any war effort than some boyish dream of glory." I wasn't going to say so but I had to agree with her.

Hadwidis squinted at her mother through the darkness. The distant flare of torches beneath the heavy sky gave everything a lurid quality. "I hope," she said quietly, "that you are acting as Elerius's ambassador, come to offer terms of surrender. I don't know what he's told you, but he can't possibly resist much longer. After all, we have Daimbert on our side."

My name did not seem to register. Elerius had told his son about me, I thought, but perhaps he had not told the queen. Or else she did not deign to pay attention to a wizard she considered so much inferior to her own.

She lifted her head with the same stubborness as her daughter and said, "I am indeed an ambassador, if any ruler survives to whom I might speak.

But I come to offer terms for the
invaders'
surrender."

A slightly different story, I thought, than Walther's version that they were sent away for their own protection. I had a sudden doubt whether the queen was acting entirely on Elerius's behalf or might have some deep plan of her own.

Hadwidis, continuing to tug her mother forward, focused on a different issue. "Do not call these invaders," she said fiercely. "This is
my
army, for I am the rightful queen here!"

The queen started to say something and changed her mind. Walther looked wildly from one to another. But before any of them could continue the topic, they were interrupted by a great roar from the sky. Something streaked above us, flaming like a comet, then altered course and plunged straight down before us.

Right where Maffi and all the undead warriors had been. I stumbled forward, wildly calling his name, temporarily forgetting Hadwidis and her family. Had Elerius summoned a demon to destroy the one wizardly ally on whom I could rely?

But it was not a demon. It was the Ifrit.

Freed from his bottle, even more enormous than I remembered, he dropped from the sky surrounded by a sheet of flame, straight into the middle of where my warriors and Elerius's struggled against each other.

How had he gotten free? A great boom shook the land, and even through my fear I could feel the magical currents swirling madly, as powerful spells were broken up. I staggered backwards as scraps of hair and bone and broken shards of dragons' teeth exploded in all directions.

Then with another great roar, the Ifrit rose and shot away, toward the castle. He was loose but, for the moment, he had let me live.

I didn't have time to wonder about it. None of the bits that had flown by me had looked like pieces of Maffi. I groped forward cautiously. Off in the distance, the shouts from the battlefield had changed their tone. Behind me, their differences forgotten, the queen, prince, and princess of this kingdom clung desperately together.

Maffi lay flat in the mud, unmoving. But when I touched his shoulder he jerked and lifted his head, his teeth a white flash in a filthy smear.

"Kaz-alrhun warned me that I might find your Western Kingdoms rather dull," he commented. "I must remember to chide him for this, for he was quite mistaken."

"That was the Ifrit," I said in amazement. "He destroyed all the warriors but left you untouched. All those spells we were working on—he dissolved them in five seconds!"

"And he is not done," said Maffi, gingerly pushing himself to a sitting position. "By the Prophet, I am glad I need not spend the next eighteen hours taking apart another's automatons!"

So his calculations on how long it would take had come out the same as mine. "What do you mean, he is not done?" I demanded.

Maffi lifted a muddy arm. "Look."

Again streaking the sky, the Ifrit had reached the castle. I wished desperately for a far-seeing spell and suddenly found that I had one.

School magic was working here again.

Hadwidis, I thought, was not going to like it at all if the Ifrit destroyed her castle—and neither might the Cranky Saint. I held my breath, waiting to see the towers torn from the castle like a toy ripped apart by a peevish child. Even with a reliable spell working for me again, it was hard to see through the dimness, but the brightly-lit windows of the castle stayed solidly in place.