Mage Quest - Wizard of Yurt 3 (27 page)

Holy City, his quest and the search for Sir Hugo had become fused.

“I agree with you, Dominic,” said King Haimeric. “We should carry out my brothers last wishes and at least try to find whatever he and his wizard thought was hidden there. Tomorrow morning we can send a message to the queen, by those pilgrims who said they were heading straight back to the City, so that she’l know we’ve been delayed.”

“Whether we find anything in the Wadi or not,” said Hugo, “the emir’s city wil be the best place to look for my father’s tracks.”

“It should also be the best place to find the blue rose,” commented the king, brightening.

Ascelin rose to his feet and stretched, his hands brushing the ceiling. Then tomorrow we’d better buy provisions,” he said, “including more waterskins. It’s going to be a dry journey.”
II

The Holy City was at the southern end of Davids Kingdom. Beyond the city, once we left behind the irrigated vineyards and olive trees, a land I had thought was already dry became even drier. The sky stretched for a thousand miles above us, cloudless and pale. The last remains of western civilization were left behind.

Ascelin had bought us al, including Maffi, densely woven white robes to replace our badly worn pilgrimage cloaks. I examined mine criticaly and decided it was made of goat’s hair. I had been afraid the long robes would make us even hotter, but instead they reflected away the sunlight. The deep folds of the headdresses shaded our eyes; as long as we moved no more than necessary and stopped to rest in whatever shade we could find in the middle of the day, the dryness was more of a problem than the heat

I had expected the desert to be completely barren, but even here plants grew, scrubby gray-green bushes spaced far apart, though the soil between them was bare and stony. The low, steady wind kept up a continuous murmur in the bushes. It sounded like someone speaking, just too softly to hear, a commentary in the background that we could not understand and never quite ignore. In the early morning and late afternoon, lizards scampered across the open spots, but in the middle of the day the only living creature we saw, other than ourselves, was the occasional snake or high, soaring bird.

Fortunately the road we folowed led from oasis to oasis, spaced a day’s journey apart, so that we could drink deeply of the alkaline water and refil the containers for ourselves and our horses. Sometimes the water merely seeped into a shalow depression scraped out between the palm trees, but usualy there was a round basin, surprisingly deep, in which the water looked black though it ran clear when we ladeled it out. Ascelin warned us to be sure to shake out our boots every morning in case scorpions had crawled in during the night.

At the oases we exchanged a few words with other travelers, but there were not a lot of them, for the major trade routes between Xantium and the emir’s city toward which we were heading did not detour through the Holy City. A line of jagged mountains, like teeth two thousand feet high, lay to our right, separating us from the main north-south roads.

For the most part the other travelers kept to their tents and we kept to ours. But always when Dominic was rubbing down Whirlwind at least one man wandered over, as though casualy, to look the stalion over and remark on his size and strength. Whirlwind snorted both at them and at their own horses.

As the long, dry days succeeded each other, I kept looking for Kaz-alrhun, with or without the ebony horse, to swoop down on us from the sky, but he did not appear. I found myself hoping that if he did attack us he would do so soon, before we spent any more days crawling through this enormous and rocky landscape.

In the cool of the long desert evenings I tried without success to find the secret of the spel of the onyx ring. Maffi sat next to me, silent while I concentrated, his bony knees drawn up.

Al I could be sure of was what I had discovered immediately, that it was a school spel, which meant technical and complicated. If it had indeed been cast by Elerius, the best wizard the school had ever produced, I was afraid that meant it was too powerful for my resources. Maybe I would have done better my whole career if I’d tried learning eastern magic.

I teased at the edges of the spel and suddenly thought I had caught a loose, revealing thread of its magic construction, but when I tried to folow it up I only discovered a large black spot before my eyes, as though I were somehow looking into the center of the onyx.

I put the ring back on my finger without learning any more of its secrets and took out Melecherius on Eastern Magic. I stil hoped that somewhere in its pages was something that I could use against an Ifrit, if we met one guarding the secret of the Wadi Harhammi.

Melecherius was no more helpful this evening than he had been the evening before. Ifriti, the book told me with what I was increasingly sure was not first-hand knowledge, were essentialy immortal, as ful of unchanneled magic as dragons and as dangerous. “Have you ever seen an Ifrit?” I asked Maffi.

“No,” he said thoughtfuly, “but I know how to deal with them!”

“You do?” I asked in surprise.

“Of course. The tales tel al about it. Ifriti are cunning, but they’re also stupid—a bad combination.

If you accidentaly let one out of a bottle where it’s been imprisoned by some great spel in the past, you can always get it to go back in by taunting it. Tel it you can’t believe it ever fit in a space so smal and, when it crawls back in to show you, quickly slap in the binding stopper!”

This didn’t sound as though it would work unless Ifriti were even stupider than he suggested.

“Do you think I could learn to be a mage?” Maffi asked.

I looked over at his smile and bright eyes. “You probably could. I’m sure you’re inteligent enough. But I don’t know where you’d go to learn magic here in the East I assume you’l have to apprentice yourself to someone—do you think you’l ever dare face Kaz-alrhun again?”

He laughed at that. “How about teaching me some of your school magic?”

“Wel,” I said slowly, “magic is realy the same force throughout the world. What makes western magic distinctive is its organization and some of its technical discoveries—like telephones.”

“I’ve heard about telephones,” said Maffi, who never admitted not to have heard of something. “But when we in the East need to communicate long distances, we find a deep, dark pool, say certain secret words, and then we see the face we’ve been looking for!”

“Wel, I don’t know any communications spels that involve deep pools, but I could try teaching you something else. How about an ilusion?” There were surprisingly few people in Yurt interested in magic beyond asking me to produce whatever effect they needed at the moment. Even the king’s brief interest in learning to fly was years in the past. I taught Maffi the elementary spel that would alow him to put an ilusory spot of color on his arm or leg. He couldn’t get the words to work for the ful range of colors and the ilusion faded, of course, after a few moments. But for most of the rest of our trip to the emir’s city, he had a pink or purple spot on him somewhere.

This land has been civilized for ten thousand years,” Joachim said to me. There were cities and temples and emperors and trade here while the men and women of what are now the western kingdoms were stil dressed in skins and grubbing around in the woods after roots.”

Then it must not have always been as dry as it is now,” I replied.

The heat of summer may not be the best time to judge,” he said, “but I do think the climate must be drier now.” Among the broken stones that littered the side of the road were some that had clearly once been carved, as wel as shards of pottery, the same tawny color as the stone but painted with dark concentric circles. Once I puled up my mare to dismount and scoop up a silver coin from among the shards, its inscription so worn as to be ilegible.

In the center of the day, when we sought out the narrow shadows of boulders and the heat beat on us like something solid, we sometimes saw mirages in the distance. A city, white-spired, ky just a few more miles down the road, flickering in welcome, though it always disappeared before we reached the place where it seemed to lie. It seemed as though the voice of that unreal city must be the voice in the wind talking to us.

“But it is a real city,” said Maffi. He had been experimenting with the spel I had taught him and today had pink spots with purple centers on both hands. “Some people say that an Ifrit captured an entire city centuries ago, in the days of Solomon, and moved it around from place to place. But others say that cities are reflected from the desert sky as though from a mirror and appear and disappear before travelers. I think it’s al right to see a city. It’s when you start seeing lakes that you know you wil soon the of thirst”

I wasn’t sure whether to worry more about thirst, Ifriti, or bandits. Hie other travelers on the road, al of whom moved more swiftly than we did on their lithe, sure-footed horses, often gave us long looks from within the shadows of their headdresses, but none so far attempted to attack us, either by day or at night at the oases, under the dry and ominously rattling fronds of the palms. None of them seemed to be Kaz-alrhun or King Warin.

One morning Ascelin, whose watch it was, woke me shortly before dawn. “Could you watch for me, Wizard?” he asked quietly. “I’l be back very soon.” I crawled out under a sky brightening from gray to pink; he was gone before I could ask where. I relit our fire and started the water boiling for tea. As the sun’s orange rim slid up over the horizon, he reappeared, looking pleased.

“It was a desert fox,” he said, getting out the tin cups. “I saw her just at the edge of the oasis. I think she’d slipped down for a drink and had hoped to get away without being spotted. But I managed to track her—and it’s hard tracking, too, on this rocky soil! I’d show you, but I don’t want to frighten her. She’s got a den with three kits a half mile from here.” The others were now stirring and coming to join us. “A desert fox has wonderful ears, very long,” Ascelin added. “She must need them to listen for mice—or for men trying to folow her!” During the second week of our journey south I began to worry about the king. He dismissed my concerns with a smile, but during the day I kept a surreptitious eye on him. He realy was an old man, though he worked to make us forget that, and he was certainly the most frail of us in this searing and unforgiving land. He was very quiet, not talking even when Ascelin caled a halt to rest and to water our horses, sometimes forgetting to take a drink himself unless Dominic reminded him.

Hugo, on the other hand, became as active in the heat as a lizard. He began stroling over to the black tents of the other travelers during our evenings in the oases and striking up conversations about his father. A smal group of aristocratic western pilgrims and a red-headed mage should have been fairly conspicuous, but no one would acknowledge ever having seen them.

“We may have to appeal to the emir,” Hugo said at last. “I can’t tel if no one s realy seen them or if these people just distrust us. What they need is a command from an important political leader. I wonder if there’s the slightest chance the emir would even be wiling to see a band of westerners.”

We came down out of the stony desert hils among which we had spent three weeks and saw before us a white-waled city, the city of the mirages. It was surrounded by irrigated fields colored a fresh green we had almost forgotten existed, and orchards where both fruit and flowers grew together. Palm trees rustled in the wind along the fringes of the fields. To our right we could see a broad road coiling away to the northwest, the main route to Xantium.

“This is the fabled emirate of Bahdroc,” said Ascelin, unroling the map to show us. “We’re wel out of the Holy Land here, into a place where few westerners ever go. The last of the caliphs had his capital here a milennium ago and the current emir continues his rule, though on a much narrower scale.”

I shaded my eyes to look at the city. In the center rose a sharp outcropping crowned with more white towers. On the far side of the city stretched a glassy lake or arm of the ocean, disappearing into the distance, the color of weathered jade.

“This city faces east, not west,” Ascelin continued, “onto the landlocked Dark Sea, but if one crosses over the Sea one comes to the edges of the true outer ocean and to the harbors where spices and tea come in from the Far East”

“It’s not a real trading center like Xantium,” said Maffi somewhat smugly. “It’s not much more than a way station. Here, pilgrims every year start the last stage of their journey to the most holy sites of the Prophet, and here the spices of the East are transferred from ships to land transport.”

“Do they also import silk?” I asked.

Ascelin shook his head. “Silk comes overland from the northern part of the East and spices by water from the far southern parts. I don’t know of anyone who’s actualy been there, but the true East must be larger than al the western kingdoms put together.”

“I know someone who’d been to the East,” put in Maffi. “He said that the men there can grow no beards, even if they try their entire lives.”

“That seems unlikely,” Hugo began, as though feeling the boy was interfering with his monopoly on specious travelers’ tales.

But he did not get a chance to finish. The king startled us al by speaking for the first time that day. “Rosebushes!” He had his face turned up, testing the wind. We al sniffed as wel and caught it, a scent completely unlike the sharp smel of desert sage that had accompanied us the last three weeks: It was the smel of roses.

King Haimeric kicked his mare forward and the rest of us scrambled to catch up. We folowed the steep stony track down to where it abruptly became a broad, smoothly paved road, between fields where swarthy men worked. The king galoped another quarter mile, then puled up abruptly by a low fence. Beyond was a tangle of rosebushes.

Ascelin grabbed the mare’s reins as the king leaped off. Haimeric vaulted the fence in a show of energy I had not seen in him in years and plunged between the bushes. “They may have the blue ones here!” he caled back over his shoulder. “I see maroon and lavender, even a red darker than anything I’ve ever been able to grow, and—” He broke off as a man rose slowly from the middle of the bushes.