Mage Quest - Wizard of Yurt 3 (40 page)

But in a moment, we heard Dominic’s footsteps clearly again, and then the light of the ring reappeared. His head bent, he emerged from the cave carrying something awkwardly before him, and carefuly put it down on the sandy floor of the Wadi.

It was a locked cabinet about a yard in height. The outside was enameled in geometric patterns and the elaborate lock was iron. The magical clarity and the strange happiness intensified to the point that for a moment it was difficult even to think.

“It should be possible to open this lock with magic,” I said then. It would also have been possible to break the enameled cabinet, but I didn’t like to do that.

When Kaz-alrhun showed no sign of helping, I knelt beside the cabinet and began to twist and turn delicately at the lock. The iron was free of rust in spite of long being underground. I felt I could see the mechanism through its casing, and in a moment the lock gave a great click and came off in my hand.

I stepped back to let Dominic kneel down and open the cabinet door. He reached inside and took out a ceramic amphora, big enough to hold a galon of wine, and sealed with lead.

Dominic tried the stopper, but it was set in very firmly, and his hand trembled. The amphora dropped to the ground and exploded into shards of pottery.

Lying on the ground amid the shards was a golden box, the size of Dominic’s two fists.

“No,” whispered King Haimeric. “It cannot be. It was within a golden box, within a sealed amphora, within a locked cabinet, but the cabinet was inside a derelict ship sunk in the deepest rift of the Outer Sea.”

There was no immediately obvious way to open the box, but when Dominic picked it up in his hand, the hand with the ring, a thin line appeared al the way around it. I tried the opening spel that had gotten us through the latticework without effect. But as Dominic held it, the thin line widened. With his other hand, he took hold of the top and carefuly opened it.

Beyond expectation, beyond hope, lying in the box on a bed of black velvet was a black sphere. It was so dark that it appeared to absorb light, so smooth that when Dominic touched it with his finger it began slowly to spin: King Solomon s Pearl.

It took us several minutes to be able to speak again. Instead we stood in silence, looking at it.

I don’t know about the others, but to me it seemed to have a voice, a low caling just beyond the edge of ful inteligibility, speaking of magic before Solomon, before humans had made any attempts to channel magical forces into comprehensible or repeatable channels. And yet it was stil magic, magic that I with my school training and my somewhat patchy knowledge of herbs could understand. This went beyond either ambition or happiness, but I knew that with the Pearl I could become the greatest wizard the world had ever known.

I looked toward Kaz-alrhun and Evrard and saw solemn expressions that I thought must match my own. The mages magical abilities, I felt suddenly certain, had returned to him.

In a few swift seconds a complete vision passed through my mind, of myself returning to the wizards’ school with the Pearl, demonstrating magical abilities beyond anything even the best and oldest of the masters had ever imagined. With my powers, I would immediately bring the eastern kingdoms and their wizards under the control of the west; I would stop al wars between aristocrats and wrangling between wizards; I would make the Ifriti into my agents; I would reconform both weather and geology to make the earth more comfortable; I would rewrite al the textbooks at the school to make them match my own magical vision; I would enrich the soil so that the crops never failed; I would regulate al trade closely so that al dealings were fair to everyone and goods were always available where needed; I would bring even the dragons of the wild northern land of magic under the control of wizardry .... Daimbert the Wise, they would o: cal me, Daimbert the Just, Daimbert the God.

And the first thing that happened would be that I would have al the headaches and responsibilities of administration. The second would be that al the wizards and priests and aristocrats, as wel as al the vilagers and townsmen of the west, and probably even the dragons, would unite to overthrow me.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, then opened them again. And I had thought Warm’s offer to be the Royal Wizard of a large and wealthy kingdom a temptation! Even with the Pearl, as I had always known and should always have remembered, no wizard can do more with magic than tug at the edges of the powers that had shaped the world. If this temptation to tug harder was what Kaz-alrhun had meant by unexpected and unimagined dangers, he had a point.

Dominic broke the silence at last. “This is what my father meant us to find,” he said, then frowned, finding his remark somewhat inadequate. “It is indeed something wonderful and marvelous, something that makes those terms almost trite .... This Pearl,” he continued, quoting Arnulf, “gives power to the people who hold it, so that they wil always prosper, that their setbacks wil be only temporary, and they wil in the end find their hearts’ desire. But I stil don’t know how my father learned it was here.”

“I do,” said Kaz-alrhun unexpectedly. “I told him about it.”

We al turned to stare at him. “If you know the history of the Black Pearl,” said the mage, “then you know that it was last seen a thousand years ago when the last of the caliphs, may God reward him, gave up both its powers and its perils by having an Ifrit hide it.”

“In the Outer Sea,” said King Haimeric again.

“No, although he let that story be generaly known. Instead he hid it here in the Wadi Harhammi, protected by Ifrit magic. As an additional precaution, although he kept this very secret, he put the opening spel that would alow one to reach the Pearl onto a ruby ring .... Because the Ifriti have been controled since the time of Solomon by the magic of his Black Pearl, not even al the Ifriti in the East togedier, and certainly no lesser power, could break dirough the combined magic of pearl and ruby to reveal its hiding place. A few true accounts were written and can stil be found in the great library in Xantium, and doubdess also in the Holy City and in Bahdroc, and odier accounts over the centuries hinted vaguely that diere was someding special in the Wadi.

“The caliph hoped to keep the Black Pearl hidden forever, even if he did hide it in a place from which he knew he could recover it again if he ever changed his mind. But he had ruled for over two hundred years and his whole region had come to depend on him personaly. When he died there was no one with the power and authority to take his place. In the civil war that folowed, the ruby ring was lost, its importance forgotten. When I first learned in Xantium’s library that the Pearl was here, I knew I had to find that ring.” From the corner of my eye, I thought I saw Ascelin’s blond head looking over the edge of the rift, but I was too absorbed in Kaz-alrhun’s story to do more than glance toward him.

The mage turned to Dominic. “Tracing the ruby’s movements over the past milennium took me—a certain interval. But by God’s decree I came upon it at last Fifty years ago, I met your father. You look like him; I would have recognized you when you approached my stal in the Thieves’ Market even without the ruby snake ring on your finger.

“This was in the time of the emir’s warlike youth. As he now controls this whole part of the east, he must have learned the secret of the Wadi, but he was in no position to uncover the Pearl himself. I was traveling in what you in the west cal the eastern kingdoms—the governor of Xantium and I had had a disagreement of sorts and the climate of the city had become oppressive enough that it seemed better to leave town for a while. I thought that the combination of my magic and the force of a strong sword arm would carry us past both the emir’s soldiers and the magery the emir would be able to command.”

“And you gave him the ruby ring?” asked Dominic. Kaz-alrhun’s gold tooth flashed as he smiled. “That he had already found for himself, captured with a cache of other precious jewels whose origins were long forgotten. But he did not know its value until he met me. I told him the true story; I could not, of course, take the ring from him by force.” I was surprised at this sudden fastidiousness in the mage, but he did not give me a chance to ask about it. “He agreed to accompany me to Bahdroc as soon as he had finished the campaign to which he was pledged. But what man wishes and God ordains often differ. The next thing I heard was that Prince Dominic was dead.”

And the prince had died without daring to send open information to his family about the Black Pearl. Even his wizard, Vlad, had waited until recently to begin again his search for it, through his friend, King Warm’s chancelor. This reminded me that we had not seen that king for a while ....

“But why,” asked Dominic, “did you wait for nearly fifty years to try again for the Pearl? And why did you take the onyx ring in return for your flying horse when you knew it was not the right ring?” He stil held the golden box open in his hands.

“When it became clear that I had lost that phase of the game,” said the mage, “I returned to Xantium, to wait and see if Prince Dominic’s mage—I never did trust him—or someone of the prince’s family would make an attempt to find the Pearl. It seemed at first that time was on my side. But I am an old man now, even if I stil am my city’s greatest mage—fifty years was long enough to wait.”

“But you stil took the onyx ring from King Warm for your flying horse,” Dominic persisted.

Kaz-alrhun smiled again. “When I saw the ruby on your hand in Xantium and realized that you and it were heading this way, it was, shal we say, easier to let you continue than to try to take it from you, especialy once I found your father’s letter on your wizard and knew for a certainty that you were making for the Wadi. The flying horse was no longer needed to draw you out of Yurt. Since I sensed that the second player had made the onyx magical, I thought I would give him a little room, see how he would play his game if he thought he had fooled me.” That was the second time he had mentioned another “player” in what he persisted in caling a game. I had to ask him about it once I had some guesses of my own. “I hope,” I now said, “that we are not going to start a quarrel over who should control the Pearl’s powers.”

The mage roled his pitch-black eyes at me. “Do not fear, Daimbert, that I shal do il by one who has done wel by me.”

“If Solomon’s Pearl wil make the holder always prosper,” said Dominic quietly, “I think it has enough power for al of us to share. By finding out for certain what happened to my father, by fulfiling his last wish, I have already found my heart’s desire.”

“In fact,” I said, “I think we’l have to share. Don’t you think that’s why the caliph finaly decided it was so dangerous he had to renounce it? It’s not like any magic they taught us at school, but I know it has one important similarity.” I paused, then gave them the condensed form of the lesson I had learned in my seconds of imagining the reign of Daimbert the Wise, “If one tried to use it jealously or with evil purpose, it would ultimately become one’s destruction.”

We had al been so intent on the Pearl, both with our normal senses and, for we three magic workers, with our magic, that we did not hear a step or sense a presence we should have heard and sensed.

There was suddenly a knife at Dominic’s neck and a hand on the golden box. “Thank you for getting this out of the cave for me,” said King Warm. “This is mine.”

“Have you been taking tips from your bandits, Warin?’ asked Dominic as the golden box was slowly a

taken from him. He did not stir a muscle, but his face turned dark red. “I shal add this to my bil of complaints against you once we’re home again.” If we ever got home. I did not dare try a spel. If Warin took Dominic with him as a hostage, he would be able to get back to the ebony flying horse, threaten the Ifrit with the Pearl’s power until the horse could fly again, and escape, leaving us to face the Ifrit and the emir’s soldiers.

King Warm’s hand closed around the Black Pearl as he backed slowly up the Wadi, Dominic necessarily backing with him as the edge of the king’s knife pressed against his neck. “Stay where you are,” he said warningly, but none of us had dared move.

“I tried to warn you to beware of him,” Evrard muttered out of the comer of his mouth.

A hundred feet from us Warin lifted his left fist, the Pearl in it, and held his arm straight toward us. His face lit up with triumphant joy. From his lips came words of the Hidden Language.

It was a paralysis spel, short and awkward, with half the words mispronounced. But with the Pearl in his fist and the correct form of the words in our minds, Evrard, Kaz-alrhun, and I were frozen where we stood. I would have gone stiff even if the spel had not worked. It was in the Hidden Language that controled eastern as wel as western magic, but its form was indubitably that of a school spel.

“You can’t stop me without your wizard, Haimeric!” Warin shouted mockingly. “And your nephew’s not going to be a lot of help against the Ifrit!” He gave Dominic an abrupt blow with the golden box on the back of the head, sending him sprawling on his face in the sand. Warin stood over him, the knife stil in his hand. “Should I finish him now and save the Ifrit the trouble?” Then he laughed a long and evil laugh. “But why should I waste my time with any of you? You’l never live anyway to chalenge me. I shal rule al the western kingdoms, including the pitiful kingdom of Yurt, with the powers the Black Pearl wil give me!” He gave Dominic a sharp kick and turned abruptly to run up the Wadi.

That is when Ascelin dropped on him.

Warin must have caught a glimpse of the prince coming over the rim of the watercourse from the corner of his eye, because he tried to whirl toward him, but it was too late. Ascelin landed on him with the ful force of a thirty-foot drop. Warm’s knife went flying in one direction, the Black Pearl in another.

I struggled desperately against the paralysis spel as Warin recovered from his surprise and fought back with what looked like inhuman strength. He yanked the prince from his feet and, when Ascelin roled and recovered, Warin threw himself on top of him. He tried to hold the prince down with one arm, as with the other hand he reached out, groping closer and closer to where the Black Pearl lay in the sand. At the last moment he thrust Ascelin away from him, snatched the Pearl with both hands, and leaped back up.