Mage Quest - Wizard of Yurt 3 (10 page)

“Wel, most merchants don’t,” I said, speaking from my own experience.

“Maybe not, but merchant families who live like aristocrats—which we certainly always did—have households like aristocrats and that includes chaplains. My father always employed a chaplain and, of course, Claudia herself is from an aristocratic background. But the chapel in the house is now closed up and they have to go to town for church service—if they go at al.”

“They don’t keep a wizard, either,” I said. “Even some of the smaler City merchants employ wizards.” The sharp business practices which Joachim had felt he could not folow at least did not include using ilusion to improve the quality of the merchandise.

But Joachim wasn’t interested in wizards. “It was not Arnulfs idea to dismiss his chaplain,” he said. “It was the Lady Claudia’s.” He abruptly stopped looking concerned. “You know, Daimbert, if I had decided to stay here, it would have been because of Claudia. But service to God took precedence, of course. It may not be a very humble thought, but I have wondered once or twice if the reason why she dismissed their chaplain, when they got married five years later, was some sort of oblique attack on the priesthood that had taken me.” His eyes looked slightly ashamed but stil highly amused at his own thoughts. The queen had worried that the king might come back changed from his experiences in the Holy Land. We weren’t more than six weeks out of Yurt, but so far, so many new sides of people’s personalities were being revealed that the royal court might not even recognize us—assuming, of course, we reached home again.

If Joachim thought that the Lady Claudia was trying to make up for lost time now that he was here again, he didn’t say so. I wondered if her singing had al been quite innocent and if I had an impure mind to imagine otherwise.

Hugo had asked Arnulf to let him look at some of the books in his study. He found the ful story of King Solomon’s Pearl there, and he entertained us al at lunch with other accounts he had found of creatures who lived in distant countries.

I wondered, listening to him, how much of it he realy believed or to what extent he was teasing Dominic, who took it al very seriously. “And did you know,” said Hugo, his eyes bright with excitement, “that if you go around to the far side of the world the people there al have enormous feet and toes so that they can cling to the earth and not fal off?”

“Don’t be sily,” said Ascelin, but as though he was thinking of something else. “You can’t fal off the earth. Besides, there’s nothing but the Outer Sea on the far side of the globe.” It was hard to tel how many of the travelers’ tales Hugo had picked up were real and how much imagination. Much worse monsters than anything he described could and did live in the northern continent of wild magic, even though I did not think they frequently visited the East—or at least hoped not. Ifriu’ were real, but I was not nearly as sure about the people whose faces were in their belies. Amulf, who must have had excelent information about the East, made no attempt to contradict Hugo on anything.

But this thought gave me another. I had been assuming that Arnulf must make the journey east regularly, but maybe if one were a very wealthy merchant one did not, relying instead on one’s agents. If he had been personaly attacked and his caravans were beginning to disappear, he might wel prefer to send someone else—such as us—than to go himself.

The next morning, our horses were finaly ready, our clothes al clean, our boots resoled, our armor and harnesses polished. The air seemed sultry for this early in the summer as we mounted our horses in the wide courtyard.

“We were delighted to have you al,” said Arnulf genialy. “Be sure to stop here again on your way home.”

The Lady Claudia came out of the house at the last minute, carrying a smal foil-wrapped parcel that looked, from the way she held it, heavy for its size. Paying no attention to anyone else, she walked up to Joachim’s horse.

“I want you to have this,” she said in a low voice, not meeting his eyes.

“What is it?” he asked with a smile.

“It’s a present. But don’t open it yet. Wait to open it until you’re far from here.”

I had a sudden dreadful suspicion of what that smal package contained.

Joachim shrugged and unbuckled his saddlebag to slide it in on top of his Bible. He took Claudia’s hand affectionately for a moment, but I did not see him look back as we al rode out a moment later.

I, however, glanced back over my shoulder to see the Lady Claudia, looking quite smal in the spacious court of her manor house, waving her handkerchief after us.

There were rumblings of thunder in the distance as we headed back toward the great eastern route. “Do you have your weather spels ready, Wizard?” Dominic asked.

Normaly, I didn’t like to use weather spels. Any magic, no matter how trivial, has far-ranging effects and to change the weather for any reason less than protecting the crop from hail had never seemed very responsible. But I didn’t want to get soaked to the skin any more than Dominic did. I puled up my horse and shaped a few spels in the Hidden Language to move the densest of the clouds a little further away from us.

The sun came out above us though the air stayed damp, and the darkness over much of the landscape gave the sunlight an artificial quality. I was about to hurry to catch up to the others when I realized that Ascelin was standing beside me.

“What do you think, Wizard,” he asked, his blue eyes intent. “Are we carrying the Black Pearl now?”

We both looked toward Joachim, riding with the others a few hundred yards ahead. It seemed horribly likely.

“But why would Claudia give it to us to take back to the East?” I asked.

“Maybe she wanted to get it out of their house before its curse affected her family. Or, maybe, knowing its powers for good were so strong, she wanted to give it to a man she loved more than her husband.” I thought that Ascelin would have to tel Prince Paul some of the stories of his vivid imagination—assuming we made it home to Yurt. “If so,” I said, “why didn’t Arnulf object?”

“He may not have realized what it was.”

If Ascelin could guess, Arnulf would certainly have guessed—unless he had deliberately had his wife try to renew her earlier friendship with Joachim for the express purpose of getting that package into his saddlebag. I immediately thought of several other “presents” Claudia might have given the chaplain, including a love potion to make him return to her or a deadly viper sealed in a ceramic vase ready to leap out and bite him when he broke the seal. More prosaicaly, the package could have held a miniature portrait of her in a marble frame or even a new Bible. But I did not think so.

“We have to make him open it right away,” said Ascelin.

“We can’t ‘make’ the chaplain do anything,” I said. “But I’l certainly ask him about it.”

The others had stopped and were waiting for us. As Ascelin and I hurried to catch up, I wondered how I should ask to see a present I was sure was highly significant and highly dangerous.

Part Three. Bantrifs

I

“She said to wait to open it until we were far from there,” Joachim told me. “We aren’t far away yet.”

His comment was quite reasonable if Claudia had given him a portrait of herself, quite unreasonable if it was actualy the Black Pearl—or some other dangerous magic object that Arnulf wanted us to take into the East for reasons of his own.

I tried probing with magic to see inside Joachim’s saddlebag. A variation on the far-seeing spel would alow me—or so I hoped—to peek inside the foil-wrapped parcel. Unfortunately, it was completely dark inside. Delicate magical probing from the outside wasn’t going to tel me much, other than that whatever was in there was not alive. Not a viper then, I tried to reassure myself, and certainly not an Ifrit.

By evening, the thunderstorm had moved off, though the air stayed damp. We sat around our fire eating Ascelins cooking again. Joachim’s brother had sent along a bag of rice as wel as replenishing our other supplies, and Ascelin had made a fairly successful stab at cooking it. I wondered how rude it would actualy be to open Joachim’s present behind his back. Unfortunately, the answer seemed to be very rude.

But the more I thought about it, no matter what Ascelin believed, the more I doubted it was King Solomons Pearl. In fact, I wasn’t even sure there realy were rumors that the Pearl had been found again or if Arnulf had dragged up some old story to distract us from whatever real rumors might be running through the East. In that case, he might indeed have found whatever the bandits had been looking for in the silk caravan and have had his wife try to renew the flames of old passion with Joachim so that the chaplain would take a package from her without any suspicion of what it realy contained.

But here I came back to the original problem, that we were carrying an unknown magical object, and the wizard, me, who should have been able to deal with it, was held back by friendship and politeness from doing so.

I looked off toward the east. We were in an area of low, roling hils, but in the rain-washed evening air a line of distant mountains marched along the horizon. Ascelin and the king had the maps out and were discussing the route.

“The main road cuts south toward the Central Sea,” said Ascelin, “but it realy is shorter to cross the mountains into the eastern kingdoms and come down to the sea on the far side. That way we also avoid the most dangerous part of the sea voyage. Arnulf recommended we come this way, and I probably would have anyway. I’ve hunted in these mountains and know the passes.”

“But wil the passes be open yet or wil they stil be snow-bound?”

“They should al be open except for the highest, and we won’t need to take the highest. The lowest pass, in fact, is also the shortest route—it’s directly east of here. It’s not used very much, but that’s only because the road is so narrow at points.”

The king contemplated the map a moment. “I know Warin, the king of this kingdom. I wrote him this winter to say that I was going on a quest to the East and he wrote back to be sure to stop and see him.

He, too, had heard the rumors about the blue rose. He agrees with you about the mountain passes, by the way.”

“My father telephoned us from King Warin s castle on his way to the Holy Land,” put in Hugo.

“Since everyone seems to agree we should go that way,” said the king, “it sounds as though we must!”

“I know King Warin, too,” said Ascelin.

I came over to look at the map myself, suddenly realizing that I knew the Royal Wizard of this kingdom. Elerius, three years ahead of me at the wizards’ school and, it was rumored, the best student the school had ever had, had become Royal Wizard here when he graduated. I hadn’t been in contact with him in several years, but I assumed he was stil here. In spite of its somewhat isolated location, the kingdom was reputed to be enormously wealthy, with gold and jewels from mountain mines.

Elerius might wel have heard of the Black Pearl, I thought. And I could use the castle telephone to cal the wizards’ school. Magic telephones were stil scarce over in this part of the western kingdoms, and although Arnulf had one, I had felt highly reluctant to cal the school to check on his story with him right there.

We rode east for three days, the snow-capped mountain peaks coming closer each day. The landscape around us became uneven, cut with unexpected ravines. The hils were flinty with little topsoil and the few vilages we passed seemed to live entirely from grape-growing. The men working among the vines gave us sharp looks but did not wave. Joachim stil showed no indication of opening his present, and I didn’t like to press him.

We stopped at our second pilgrimage church, one listed in the appendix of Joachims book because it was not on the main pilgrimage route, although apparently it had been highly regarded for fifteen hundred years.

As we came over a rise, we saw before us a smal, octagonal church made of white marble, with the fluted columns of a structure built in the later days of the Empire. But as we came closer, we saw that what I had first thought was the entire church was, in fact, only the upper storey; and below it was another structure, this one made of rough, dark stone with tiny windows in the style of churches built in the chaotic years that folowed the breakup of the Empire.

This can’t be right,” said Hugo. “How could they have built the earlier building second?”

“Wait until you see the whole thing,” said Joachim with a smile.

“You mean we haven’t yet?”

As we rode closer, we saw that the dark stone structure we had thought was the church’s lower storey was, in fact, built on top of another church, this one highly decorated with elaborate carvings; that under this was another level where the stonework was smooth and polished, the stained-glass windows tal and pointed; and that at the very bottom was a fifth church built in the modern assymetrical style where, even though the wals had to be very thick to support the levels above, there were stil broad expanses of glass, and dark red stones had been set into the white wals to make abstract designs. The whole five-storey church was sunk into a wide hole in the ground.

“It used to be on a little hil,” said Joachim, enjoying our surprise. “The hil was made mostly of smal stones and the stones became popular among pilgrims, as souvenirs of their visit—and even, for those of simple faith, holy relics in their own right. Soon the hil disappeared, leaving the original church standing wel above the new ground level. So the priests here decided to add a new church, under the old one.” He swung down from his horse and picked up a loose stone himself. The process was repeated three more times.”

We visited al five levels and Joachim talked to the priests there. I tried to contemplate how many pilgrims it must have taken to wear away a hole as big as the one in which the church now sat. There’s a major pilgrimage here every Midsummer,” said Joachim, consulting his book, “and two other smaler religious festivals. The hils are covered with the tents of the pious at Midsummer as far as two miles away.” I had also not realy appreciated before how relatively scarce wizards were in the western kingdoms compared to priests. The latter would be found in every vilage, in isolated churches like this one, and in every—or nearly every—aristocratic court, whereas even a large kingdom might have only a handful of wizards. The king, too, took a stone when we left.