Below the Wizards' Tower (The Royal Wizard of Yurt Book 8) (4 page)

I hurried to catch up.
 
“While you’re here in the City, Joachim,
as well as discussing church architects, could you keep your eyes
open
for someone who looks like me?”

“Looks like you?”
 
He frowned.
 
“You mean another wizard with a white
beard?
 
I thought the City was full
of them.”

“Not a wizard.
 
And he has a brown beard.
 
But someone who walks like me, sounds
like me, I guess he’d be about my height and build.”

“I thought there weren’t any other
people like you,” said Joachim dryly.
 
This was probably meant to be a joke.
 
The problem with being good friends with
a priest is that half the time we didn’t even understand each other.
 
At least he didn’t add that it was good
that no one else had turned out as I had.

“Well, several people have mistaken
me for him,” I said hastily.
 
“Could
you just let me know if you see him?
 
I’m staying at the wizards’ school.”

“And I am staying with the
chancellor in the cathedral close,” said Joachim, assuming I knew where that
was.
 
“I do need to get started on
doing what I came for.
 
But it is
very good to see you, Daimbert!”

I turned back to the harbor as he
hurried away.
 
No time to wonder
about the cathedral close or the chancellor.
 
Right now I was looking for a rooming
house out near the ship-breakers.
 
At least I knew where to start looking.

When ships were old and leaky and
needed more repairs than they were worth, they were sold to the ship-breakers,
who dismantled them, throwing away all the rotted wood and cracked planks but
saving any timbers that were still sound and melting down the metal
fittings.
 
Some timbers, the longest
or strongest, were resold to the boat builders, but many ended up in houses in
town.
 
The ship-breakers were a long
way from the harbor, past the most disreputable parts of the City.

As a boy, I had been forbidden to
come out here, and I did have to approve of parental concern about my
safety.
 
I stayed on the beach,
walking on the hard-packed damp sand past swirls of wrack, ignoring the distant
sounds of drunken arguments and the crumbling buildings that lined the shore
here.
 
There were distinct
advantages to being a wizard, I thought; if danger threatened, I could fly away
or paralyze an attacker or just blast him with illusory flames.

The ship-breakers didn’t have much
in today, just a few small fishing vessels, covered with barnacles.
 
I left the beach and went in search of a
rooming house.
 
I tried probing
mentally for Marcus, but since I didn’t know him, he could have been any of the
many male minds I touched.

There did indeed seem to be a
rooming house nearby, a two story unpainted structure with a cockeyed
roof.
 
It appeared to be built
entirely of salvaged planking, cracked and salt-stained.
 
A sour-faced woman stood on the front
porch, watching me approach.

“You’re looking for Marcus too?” she
asked, wrinkling her nose to suggest that it was me, not her rooming house,
that smelled bad.
 
“Well, he’s not
here.”

Looking for Marcus
too
?
 
“I’m a friend,” I lied, pulling out a
coin.
 
She was the first woman who
knew Marcus who hadn’t mistaken me for him.
 
“I’ve got something for him.”

“Not sure why he suddenly has all
these well-dressed friends,” she commented.

Who
else
was
looking for him?

“Are you sure he’s not just upstairs
sleeping?” I asked, tossing her the coin, which she caught deftly in a dirty
fist.
 
I was having serious doubts
about the girl at the tavern’s theory of how Marcus had paid for his room.

She shrugged.
 
“Look for yourself if you don’t believe
me.
 
Second on the left.”

If I hesitated I wouldn’t go into
that foul interior at all.
 
My grandmother
in my head was telling me to head home at once.

I did my best to smile and brushed
past the woman and up some alarmingly creaky stairs.
 
Second on the left.
 
The door was open, showing a rumpled
bed, but nothing else in the room.
 
No clothes, no table, no chest, nothing.

I stepped
inside,
looking around cautiously for any indication that Marcus really had been
here.
 
Just for a second, I caught
the fluttering touch of the presence of another mind.

Someone else here?
 
The room was empty!
 
But sunlight was coming in the small
window, and
something
was casting a shadow….

Too late I reached for all the
magical defenses I had contemplated so smugly down on the beach.
 
A paralysis spell wrapped around
me.
 
For a moment I staggered,
trying to fight it, but whoever was casting the spell was a lot better wizard
than I was.
 
I toppled slowly,
unable to move arms or legs, unable even to call out.

But just before I hit the filthy
floor, a lifting spell stopped me.
 
I hung in the air while the person casting the shadow swung open the
window, then I was lifted up and through, feet first.
 
I just barely fit.
 
The window opened at the back of the
house, and no one seemed to notice or remark as what must look like a dead
white-haired man shot out, then settled to the street.

My vocal chords were paralyzed along
with everything else.
 
Desperately I
tried to reach the mind of whoever had captured me, to argue, to threaten, to
plead, but he clearly had his thoughts well protected.

For several moments I lay in the
street.
 
A gull landed next to me,
decided I wasn’t dead enough to be interesting, and flew away again.

No one was around, and the only
sounds were those of the waves and the distant hammers of the
ship-breakers.
 
Was I going to lie
here until the street-sweepers decided one day to get out this far, found me,
and buried me in the potter’s field?

Magic’s four dimensions shifted
around me, and when I glanced at myself I saw that I was no longer an old dead
man but a worn wooden plank.
 
Illusion.

At the same time the wizard who had
captured me emerged into visibility next to me.
 
He was a fairly young man, no one I
recognized.

I had been convinced beyond question
that it had to be Elerius.
 
But this
man, beardless, dressed as a workman with a cap, was clearly not he.
 
He picked me up effortlessly, as though
I really were a half-rotten plank, and walked jauntily down toward the beach.

Who
was he?
 
If Elerius, had he somehow transformed
himself into someone else?
 
Or found
a way with illusion to make
himself
look totally different?
 
Not just my body was paralyzed—my
brain did not seem to be functioning very well either.

I was carried even further down the
beach, the towers of the City receding.
 
Here cliffs came down close to the water’s edge.
 
Worn into them were sea-caves, where
even at low tide there were always pools of mud and water.
 
I glanced at myself and saw that I was
again human, not a plank.
 
With no
one to witness, there was no reason to renew the illusion that had covered me.

The tide was coming in, I thought worriedly
as the man carrying me sloshed unhesitatingly toward a cave.
 
And I had no good idea how high it rose
here.

Inside several rocks lay tumbled, as
though they had broken from the cave ceiling and walls.
 
At least they were dry on top.
 
The man propped me up on top of one and
turned to go.

Different.
 
He looked different.
 
He was essentially the same, but
something had altered.
 
As he
splashed back out of the cave, without a backward glance, I realized.
 
When he had picked me up in the street
behind the rooming house, his jacket had been dark blue.
 
Now it was dark red.

The clothes then were illusion, I
thought, trying frantically to make at least
something
make sense.
 
And if the clothes,
then probably the face.
 
It
could be Elerius after all.

“Elerius!” I shouted mentally.
 
“Come back!
 
What are you doing?
 
Do you want me to drown?”

If he heard he made no
response.
 
The sound of his
splashing footsteps quickly receded.
 
It was very quiet and dim now in the cave, back from the sunlit
entrance.
 
The only sound was the
lapping of the waves, slowly, inexorably, coming in.

Those waves had carved out the
sea-caves in the first place.
 
In
the winter, I tried to reassure myself.
 
At a time of particularly high tides and storm.
 
Not on a summer day.
 
I was not reassured.

Would a paralysis spell wear off
after a while?
 
Maybe.
 
I tried to think, worried that this
particular one seemed to be growing stronger.
 
Paralysis was not a branch of magic I
had studied very much myself.

I could breathe and move my eyes and
not much else.
 
The waves were
entering the cave now, rippling in across the muddy floor and then shyly
retreating, before coming in even further the next time.

Who
could the wizard
be
who had left me here to drown?
 
Probably not Elerius after all, I concluded
reluctantly.
 
I had only thought of
him because I always distrusted him.
 
He was bound by the same enormously powerful oaths as the rest of the
school’s graduates, to help and not harm humanity, and he had no motive for
killing me.
 
Just last night he had
been friendly—even if patronizing.

Would anyone from the school come
looking for me?
 
It must be well
past the time I was supposed to meet the Master.
 
He would be annoyed, make some comment
about how I was just as irresponsible as I’d been as a student, and go back to
whatever else he was doing.

And even if someone tried to find
me,
where
would they look for me?
 
Certainly not out here.
 
I gave a great mental shout in case
there was a wizard within range but got no answer.
 
The water below my rock was now half a
foot deep.

Time passed.
 
The water grew deeper.
 
But the rock on which I lay was
dry,
I told myself, suggesting the last high tide had not come all the way up.
 
If I had known about these sea-caves as
a boy, I thought irrelevantly, I would have come and played pirates in them.

I listened in case I heard the sound
of oars, of pirates bringing their ill-gotten gold to hide in the mud at the
back of the cave.
 
But they would
not be coming in broad daylight.
 
They would wait until darkness, then come to find the prisoner their
renegade wizard had captured for them, the one they intended to hold for
ransom….

I hoped no one imagined the kingdom
of Yurt had great wealth to spend on ransoming its Royal Wizard.
 
But then I thought—of course!
 
Whoever had captured me had not intended
to capture Daimbert of Yurt.
 
He had
intended to capture Marcus.

For several minutes I pondered all
the enemies Marcus must have, from affronted lovers to people to whom he owed
money, but at last I had to give up the idea.
 
Whoever had put the paralysis spell on
me might be only half-trained, might be anyone from a wizardry student
concocting a prank, to a magician who had flunked out of the school, to someone
whose magic was learned in a long-ago apprenticeship up in the mountains, to
some dark mage whose enmity I had earned on our trip to the East, but he would
certainly have recognized me as a wizard.

Did it look as though the water had
stopped growing deeper?
 
From where
I was lying it was hard to tell, and I didn’t dare hope.
 
I tried another mental shout, on the
off-chance
someone, anyone, with magical training might be
nearby and might have pity.

Still there was no answer.
 
Staring at the water did not make it
recede.
 
I tried closing my eyes,
counting slowly to a hundred, and looking again.
 
I could see no change, but then it did
not seem to be rising anymore.

More time passed.
 
Outside the cave the light was becoming
the gold of late afternoon, and the tide was certainly going out.
 
Every now and then I tried another mental
shout.