Mage Quest - Wizard of Yurt 3 (12 page)

The librarian tels me you’ve been asking him about some of the old stories,” Zahlfast continued. “If Evrard has disappeared due to old stories coming to life, we’l have to reconsider the efficacy of modern, organized magic.”

As a joke, it was a fairly weak attempt ZahHast, I thought, must realy be worried. I wondered if he had any information about the Pearl that he didn’t dare tel me.

“Give my greetings to the Master,” I said inanely and rang off.

The rest of our party had already gone to our wide, cold room. “Did the telephone work wel, Wizard?” the king asked. “I’l ask Warin tomorrow if I can cal the queen.” I nodded and drew Ascelin to one side. I had not yet told anyone my suspicions. “You knew the king here, years ago,” I said quietly. Tel me: do you trust him?”

“I don’t trust very many people in this kingdom,” said Ascelin with a glance toward the others, “and al of them are in this room.” I took a deep breath. So his ease in the great hal had been a facade for King Warm’s benefit—it had certainly been good enough to fool me. “When you hunted here, you helped track down undead creatures made of hair and bone. Did you have any suspicion that King Warin helped make them?”

Ascelin s eyes narrowed, but he slowly shook his head. “Those were made by an old magician and he got away. The king was just delighted to have the creatures out of his kingdom.” Ascelin’s distrust was general, then, not tied to any specific knowledge of King Warin. “Just curious,” I said and told him no more. Unfortunately, I knew Evrard was capable of making jokes in highly dubious taste.

King Haimeric was pleased to have an excuse to visit with his old friend Warin for another day, especialy since we had been dodging rain ever since Arnulfs house. This time, Ascelin did not let the weapons out of our room, and he polished off the few rusty spots that had appeared in the last four days himself—but then King Warin’s staff showed no sign of being as helpful as Arnulfs.

The phone cal from the wizards’ school came while we were at dinner. The king had been talking again about the Black Pearl, discussing our visit with Arnulf much more openly than I would have preferred, but I didn’t dare leave the school waiting while I tried to shift the conversation. This time, the chancelor did not accompany me but stayed at the table.

“I don’t have a lot,” the librarian said apologeticaly. “It is a fascinating story, but there’s very little to it.” I listened as he told the story of King Solomon’s Pearl, essentialy as we had already heard it from Joachim’s brother and as Hugo had found it in Arnulfs books. “The accounts stress that it would become enormously dangerous if used from base motives. I’ve asked around the school,” he finished, “and no one here has heard that it’s been found.”

“Has anyone talked to the merchants down in the City to see if they’ve heard such rumors?”

“I haven’t,” he said in surprise. “Why would merchants have information on magical objects not known to the wizards’ school?” Though set in the middle of the great City, the white-spired wizards’ school had always held itself somewhat aloof from the City’s concerns. “Al right,” I said. “Thank you.” So Arnulf was, as I had thought, trying to distract us from something else and I couldn’t even imagine what that might be.

“Wel, it’s always interesting to be asked about something different for a change,” said the librarian. He looked down at the heavy volume he held in his hands. “This is one of the books that used to belong to Melecherius, and I expect I’m the first person to have it off the shelf since he died ....” He flipped to the sign-out slip tucked in the back and then said in surprise, “No, I’m wrong. It was checked out five years ago by Elerius.”

I didn’t have time to wonder, in the brief moments I might stil have to speak without being overheard, why Elerius had been interested in the Black Pearl. “Is Zahlfast available?” I asked instead.

While waiting impatiently for him to come to the phone, I kept listening for a step in the corridor, for King Warin’s chancelor to overhear my conversation.

“You should know by now that we don’t like wizards caling us up al the time for advice,” Zahlfast began irritably when I finaly saw him in the view screen.

But I interrupted. “Quick. Do you know what was in the message that Evrard left here?”

“Of course I do,” he said in surprise. I saw his eyes flick past my shoulder and I looked back involuntarily myself, but there was no one else in the room. “Three extremely promising young wizards in a row have come back to the City in disgrace and told us about it. You’d think that someone would have had the sense to change the spels so that the message was something innocuous, rather than making the lame excuse that they couldn’t read it and then getting themselves dismissed for incompetence.”

I hadn’t thought of changing the spels either, being too startled by the content of the message.

“We don’t like to tel young wizards very much about their new posts,” he continued, “because it’s better if they can work everything out on their own, but this time it looks like we’d better. That kingdom is much too criticaly placed, just below the passes into the eastern kingdoms, not to have had a Royal Wizard for a year.”

“Did you ask Elerius about it?” I hoped my end of the conversation was bland enough that, even if the chancelor was lurking just outside the door, he would find nothing in it to pass on to his master.

“Of course we did, the first time a young wizard returned to the school with a wild story of sorcerers.” Zahlfast unexpectedly smiled. “So you’re wondering yourself whether to believe it? Don’t worry about it. Elerius told us it was a complete fabrication. I thought you knew Evrard wel enough yourself to realize that he has a rather odd sense of humor sometimes.” Yesterday, I had thought Zahlfast worried. Today, he did not seem worried at al. I was also irritated with him for having sent me in search of Evrard and yet not teling me the one solid piece of information they had, that Evrard had felt his party was in danger long before they reached the Holy Land.

But they had reached the Holy Land safely. King Warin was a dead end for the purposes of our quest.

“The librarian’s told me about this Black Pearl,”

Zahlfast continued with another smile. “Keep your eyes open in the East. I must say it al sounds rather farfetched, but if it is real and has been found, the school wil need to acquire it. A highly charged magical object like that would be very dangerous except in the hands of skiled and thoroughly trained wizards.”

I heard at last the step I had been straining for. The dour-faced chancelor looked around the corner. “Excuse me, but the others are ready for dessert and wondered if you were going to eat any more of the main dish.”

I quickly said good-bye to Zahlfast and returned to the great hal, wondering why I should believe in my bones a message which both Zahlfast and Elerius had dismissed. Al I had against the word of a wizard who had lived here twelve years was the strange contrast I kept feeling between Warm’s surface politeness and something underneath, and the fact that King Haimeric had thought he had aged rather slowly.

Wel, King Haimeric had been sick for several years, a decade ago, so he might not be a good basis for comparison himself. And Warin had certainly put his youthful years behind him. If one were going to make a pact with the devil, I thought, it would be more sensible to ask for youth than for middle age.

Conversation at the table had shifted in my absence to Dominic’s father, who had apparently spent a few weeks in this kingdom fifty years ago, on his way east. King Warin looked at me as I puled out my chair.

“The school doesn’t know much about the Black Pearl, either,” I said with my best attempt at cheerful normalcy. From what Warin had said earlier, Elerius did not seem to have passed along whatever he had learned about the Pearl to his employer. I therefore did not mention that he had read the school’s books on the topic several years earlier. “Thanks for waiting dessert for me.”

“Your father was a remarkable man,” Warin said to

Dominic, picking up the conversation where I had interrupted “You look a little like him. Prince Dominic could outwrestle any man living, won the heart of every woman between the ages of twelve and eighty, and feared nothing, either in this world or the next.”

“I didn’t know your father was named Dominic too,” said Hugo.

“You’re named for your father,” said Dominic. “Why shouldn’t I be named for mine?”

Dessert was iced lemon pudding, not what I would have chosen for a chily evening even if I had been hungry. As I ate slowly, taking no part in the conversation, I wondered again how Elerius could have lived here for years and never felt what I now sensed about his king. There had been, I remembered, rather strange and contradictory stories about Elerius’s background and parentage. Could he perhaps have been a sorcerers son, this particular sorcerer’s son?

I licked my spoon and pushed the thought determinedly away. I was getting as bad as Ascelin.

III

We prepared to leave King Warm’s castle the next morning, but just as we were saddling our horses, the chancelor came into the courtyard to tel me I had another telephone cal. As I folowed him inside, I wondered if the school had found some further information, but the face in the view-screen was that of Elerius.

I was so surprised to see him it took me a moment to find my voice. But he spoke briskly and cheerfuly. “So, you’re in my old kingdom, I hear! I gather King Warin is stil waiting for a new wizard from the school. like to change kingdoms, Daimbert?”

He said it as a joke, which I hoped was not intended as an insult. He looked at me from tawny hazel eyes under rather disconcerting sharply peaked black eyebrows. I took a breath and started to ask him what he knew about the Black Pearl, but he interrupted me.

“I heard you’re looking for young Evrard,” he said, “and I realized I have some information that may help. I was in the East last year on private business and I spotted him across a crowd although I don’t think he saw me—a red-headed wizard is hard to miss!”

“Where was this?”

“In the Holy City. There were rumors flying throughout the city that Noah’s Ark had been found after al these centuries, somewhere far to the south, near the emirate of Bahdroc. They must have heard the rumors. Maybe the emirate was where Evrard and his employer have gone.” An expression I could not define flitted across Elerius’s face as he spoke; I decided it must be embarrassment to admit that he himself had been in the Holy Land.

“We know they reached the Holy City,” I said in excitement, “and their last message was that they were going south. That must be why. What do you think? Could there be any truth in the rumor? And have you heard the stories that King Solomons Pearl has been found?”

“Delightful stories but, I’m afraid, highly unlikely,” said Elerius lightly. “Give my regards to King Warin.” He rang off.

East of King Warm’s castle, the road along which his chancelor directed us became narrow and much rougher. We found ourselves climbing slowly but steadily in great arcs across a slope where a few scattered sheep grazed, but there was no sign of human habitation. At one point two rangy dogs came racing after us, but they slunk off when Whirlwind leveled a kick at them.

I decided to try again to persuade Joachim to open his present from Claudia—that is, if his saddlebag stil contained that present, if Warin had not stolen it and substituted something else. I had had enough time to imagine several more things it might be, such as the money to pay Arnulfs agents, which he did not dare send any other way now that bandits were becoming more frequent, or a special magic bottle designed to capture an Ifrit.

But I had voiced none of my fears to the chaplain. In fact, I realized I had spoken to him very little since we left his brother’s house. I wanted to know why Claudia had been singing love songs to him and if he realy thought it al as innocuous as he appeared to. Since I didn’t know how to ask this, I had said nothing else, either.

“When we’re a week away,” Joachim told me when I finaly broached the question again, “then I’l open it. Why are you so interested anyway?” I hesitated a minute, then decided he had the right to know. “Ascelin thinks she gave you King Solomon’s Pearl.”

We were riding two abreast on the narrow road, our saddles creaking and my harness bels jingling. Joachim looked at me incredulously, then came very close to laughing. “No wonder you’re so curious,” he said. “But I already told you: if Arnulf had something that would grant his heart’s desire, he wouldn’t be losing his caravans. And he would certainly not alow his wife to give it to someone else.”

“Wel, I don’t think it’s the Pearl, either,” I said. “But what could it be? Maybe Arnulf has some complicated and dangerous transaction he needs to have taken care of in the East and he’s sent the materials to do it along with us. Since you refused categoricaly to transact any business for him, maybe he’s hoping that this way you’l be tricked into doing so. Or maybe,” I paused for a second, then pushed on,

“Claudia has given you a love potion.”

Joachim smiled. “That would make no sense. She’s known since I left for seminary that I didn’t love her. And she’s a married woman, my own sister-in-law.” It was a good thing, I thought and not for the first time, that he was a priest. “But it has to be something?

“Al right, Daimbert,” said the chaplain indulgently. “Tour days’ ride may be far enough away. I’l open it this evening and you can help me in case it’s something dangerous and magical.” I was now immediately convinced that it was something completely prosaic, but I didn’t say so. I would find out for certain soon enough.

What had looked like the top of the slope as we climbed upwards turned out to be, when we finaly paused to rest the horses, only a short level area before stony crags began to rise again. The road before us disappeared into a defile overhung with forested cliffs.

But Dominic was looking back in the direction we had come, not forward. “What a view!” he said.

It was, indeed, quite a view of the western kingdoms, out across green hils and patches of woodland to wide pastures far beyond. The air was clear and we could see for countless miles. The land was scattered with compact vilages in the blue distance. Far below us, finaly looking smal, was Warin s royal castle.