Mage Quest - Wizard of Yurt 3 (39 page)

It was incredibly sweet, as though the waking revelation of the magical abilities I had sometimes dreamed I had. I checked quickly to see what new spels I might know, found none, but felt even more intensely before the strange clarity of vision. This cave was the source of that clarity and it made everything around us seem so vivid that I hardly dared probe for what might be hidden within it.

And it wasn’t just magical clarity that poured out toward me. It was also quite irrational happiness.

Wizards are always more susceptible to magical influences than anyone else. We might be trapped here in the Wadi, with both the Ifrit and the emir determined that we not leave alive, and the desert determined that we not live even if we did escape, but at the moment it hardly seemed to matter.

There are footprints in the sand,” commented the king.

“If Warin was here, he did not win past this gate,” said Dominic. There is no obvious way to open it.” He gave it an experimental tug with his right hand, then drew back quickly as though it burned his ringers.

But the moment his hand touched the latticework, it began to buzz, a high keen sound that made us look at each other with disquiet.

“What kind of magical defenses would the caliph—” I started to ask Kaz-alrhun, then stopped, for something was coming, something that clattered as it came.

We looked behind us in horror. Coming around the boulders, claws extended and venomous tail arched over its back, was a twenty-foot scorpion.

Dominic pushed the king behind him and whipped out his sword, though I feared many of the bones we had seen had been of men who had tried to fight a giant scorpion with steel. Kaz-alrhun scrambled out of the way while I desperately tried to put a binding spel together.

But the scorpion came straight on, too powerful and moving too fast for my magic to bind. The leg joints clattered as it scrambled over the stones toward us. The claws reached for me and I found myself staring into its enormous insect eyes.

With a wild facility born of fear and the strange clarity that stil poured from the cave, I threw together a transformations spel and launched it at the scorpion. I had no time to put a proper spel together, not even time to find the words to turn the scorpion into a frog. Instead I grabbed at the spel I had discovered to transform something into itself, only larger, and I reversed it.

The clattering stopped I opened the eyes I had involuntarily shut and looked down. There I saw a normal-sized scorpion racing across the sand, toward the shelter of the boulders. Dominic stepped forward and crushed it with the heel of its boot.

I took a rather shaky breath and wiped my forehead. The scorpion had torn a hole with its claw in the front of my goat’s hair robe, just before I transformed it “That shouldn’t have worked,” I said. “You can’t put transformations spels on magical creatures—it would never work with the Ifrit”

“Perhaps this was not a magical creature,” suggested Kaz-alrhun, “but a normal scorpion an earlier mage had transformed to a larger size, so you merely freed it from that mage’s spel.”

“I didn’t notice you giving me much help,” I said to him testily, “especialy after you’d warned us against it”

“I do not think you needed my help,” said the mage with a grin. “And it was not against this that I warned you.”

Dominic put his sword away and peered again through the latticework across the cave. “The opening appears very smal, if there is a true opening at al.” The very air at the cave entrance sparkled, like air in a mountain meadow after a storm. I was hit again by a wave of irrational happiness and forgot al about being irritated with the mage. “Dominic,” I said,

“here is where we need your father’s ruby ring.”

Vlad had told me he had attached a special opening spel to the ruby. But I now knew that the spel which had made the ring pulse with light since we first approached the valey was nothing that that wizard had created, but something far more powerful. The magic attached to Dominic’s ring was as old as King Solomon if not older.

Dominic gritted his teeth and reached his left hand, with the ring, toward the marble latticework. I tried to find the words of the Hidden Language that would put the ring’s spel into action.

But I didn’t have a chance. A voice spoke from behind us, light and cheerful. “So there you are! By the way—don’t touch the lattice.”
IV

We al whirled around. I should have known. Standing there, looking lean and good-natured, was Sir Hugo’s red-haired wizard, Evrard.

I embraced him so hard that al the breath went out of him with a “Whoof!” In the desert sun he had developed more freckles than ever. For a moment the strange, sweet happiness that poured from the cave made al of us giddy and we laughed and slapped each other on the back.

“I’d hoped al along that if we got in trouble on this trip you’d come find me, Daimbert,” Evrard said with a grin, once he had his breath back. “It stil seemed to take you long enough to get here!”

“And Sir Hugo?” asked Dominic. “Is he alive as wel?”

“As wel as any of us,” said Evrard. “The Ifrit brings us food and water when he remembers. Mostly we’re hungry and bored from hearing al of each others’ life stories until we know them better than our own. Even touching the latticework and flying away from the giant scorpion lost its thril for me after a while—and the others didn’t even dare try.”

“We kiled the scorpion,” I said modestly, then stopped. Something was not right. “But why are you here?” I asked. “It wasn’t you who found a way to master the Ifrit?” Evrard laughed. “I don’t think anyone—except maybe Solomon—could master an Ifrit. I did manage to put this one back into his bottle temporarily, but at the moment we’re at something of a standoff.” I rubbed my forehead, wiling myself to understand at least something. “You didn’t let it out of the bottle originaly. But you tricked it into going back in by teling it you couldn’t believe something so enormous could fit into a bottle that smal.”

“That’s right,” said Evrard cheerfuly. “A traveler we met in the Holy Gty sold us the bottle—the same traveler who told us Noah’s Ark was hidden here in the Wadi. Did you happen to meet him? No, I can’t describe him. He never did let us get a good look at him. But I had the sense he was some sort of mage, even though he spoke like a westerner.”

“Go on,” I said. Maybe once I heard it al it might make sense.

“He suggested we present the bottle to the emir of Bahdroc as something new and marvelous, and at the same time ask his assistance in reaching the Wadi Harhammi. We’d already been trying to decide if we should go on south from the Holy Land, because the mage in Xantium—“He appeared to look at Kaz-alrhun properly for the first time. “But you’ve brought him with you!” That was one way to look at it. “So two different people directed you here,” I said. The traveler, with the same story of Noah’s Ark that Elerius had once told me, I had to dismiss for the moment as beyond comprehension. But I turned sharply to Kaz-alrhun. “Why did you tel Evrard to come here to the Wadi? Was it as bait for us?”

“Of course,” said the mage with his infuriating smile. “It is also good to note here the game the other player is playing.” And Kaz-alrhun would not have cared, I thought, whether Sir Hugo’s party was alive or dead as long as we came looking for them. But the mage had already made it clear that it was not he who set the Ifrit watching for people from Yurt. “Why didn’t you escape from the Wadi while you had the Ifrit imprisoned?” I asked Evrard.

“We weren’t in the Wadi then,” Evrard continued, clearly enjoying having a new audience after a year of only Sir Hugo and the same two knights. “We were stil north of Bahdroc. Imagine our surprise when we came over a rise and found an Ifrit asleep in the sun, and a human woman with him who claimed to be his wife!”

I suddenly felt sure of where four of the Ifrit’s wife’s rings had come from, but I didn’t say anything.

“Unfortunately, he woke up before we could get away,” Evrard continued, then paused to prolong the suspense. “First he asked if we were from Yurt! I took a chance and said we were and it’s a good thing I did, because otherwise he might have crushed us at once in his enormous hands. But he stil threatened us and said that even Solomon had feared his power so much that he’d had to imprison him. That’s when I thought of taunting him, of showing him the bronze bottle and teling him I didn’t believe he’d ever fit inside. He went back into it to show me and I was able to slap the stopper in!”

“But the Ifrit is out now,” said the king.

“I’m afraid my plan didn’t work as wel as I’d hoped,” said Evrard ruefuly. “When I first gave the emir the bottle, he treated us very hospitably and fed us bread and salt. I told him, too, that we were from Yurt. But his manner changed as soon as I asked directions to the Wadi Harhammi.

“We stayed in Bahdroc a week, but the atmosphere was tense the entire time, and we had gone only a few miles out of the city when the Ifrit captured us. We’ve decided that as soon as we left, the emir must have freed the Ifrit again in return for a promise to take us prisoner. For some reason the Ifrit stil hasn’t kiled us.” But with a wild Ifrit roaring after Sir Hugo’s party, no wonder the slave girl had told us the desert had eaten them.

“Both the emir and the slave girls remembered you,” I said.

Evrard smiled reminiscently. “One of the girls was realy delightful—I wished we could have taken her along.”

The emir’s second wish in return for freeing the Ifrit, I thought, had been a request to transport the garden of the blue rose into hiding. Already constrained by a command to guard the Wadi against people from Yurt, it was no wonder the Ifrit had decided to bring the rose garden here. By promising to guard the valey, the Ifrit must have felttrappedhere.Itmust have been extremely tiresome for a creature who could easily pass from the highest mountains to the uttermost depths of the sea in half an hour: little wonder he tried to make us amuse him.

“I’ve been expecting you for months,” continued Evrard, ready to chat indefinitely. “Didn’t you get my message that we were held prisoner by the Ifrit?”

“You mean the sign of me cross cut into the rock where the silk caravan disappeared?” I said as several things fel into place.

“The Ifrit’s wife wanted a bolt of silk and, originaly, I was going to make the Ifrit leave a message for people from Yurt—but then it turned out he didn’t trust my messages and couldn’t read or write himself!

So I hoped that a sign of the cross would do as wel, as an indication that an Ifrit had Christian captives.”

Dominic had stopped listening and was peering again through the latticework into the cave. “We’l catch up on our stories later,” he said. “This, I believe, is where what I seek is hidden.”

“What is in there, Evrard?” I asked quietly.

He looked troubled for the first time. “I have no idea. Al I know is that as long as I’m here, within about fifty yards of this cave—making sure not to touch the lattice, of course—I can work spels that wil intimidate an Ifrit. Not make him do anything, apparently, but scare him into thinking I wil in another minute. I’ve been able to use the power that’s in there to make the Ifrit feed us and to promise not to kil anyone else from Yurt, but we haven’t dared leave the Wadi. I’ve spent the last year not being able to learn anything more about it.” Could Evrard, with his combination of improvised spels and pure bluff, be the danger that the mage had warned me against? Kaz-alrhun had said almost nothing since Evrard had appeared, but al his attention, like Dominic’s, seemed turned toward the cave.

“This is where we find out at last,” I said. Dominic again reached out his hand so that the ruby, now flashing rapidly, was in contact with the marble gate over the cave entrance. With the strange clarity of vision whatever was in this cave had given me, I found the right spel to bring the magic in the ring to ful potential. The words of the Hidden Language rumbled through the rift like the sound of rocks faling.

The latticework shivered, then slowly started to dissolve into vapor, losing its solidity even while it stil held its shape. The sound of rocks faling continued even when I finished speaking, and as we watched the smal opening beyond the gate grew larger. Dominic kept his hand extended until the cascade of stone had stopped, leaving an opening four feet high, and the white wisps of latticework vapor dissipated in the desert air.

We al shivered ourselves, then peered into the cave’s dim interior, blinking in an attempt to see. “Can you make a light, Wizard?” the king asked quietly.

Dominic didn’t wait for a light. He ducked his head to step within. But he stopped short almost immediately and backed out, rubbing his forehead. “There’s another barrier,” he said. “Is it glass?” I probed quickly. “Not glass, but more magic.”

The ground beneath us rose and fel, as sharply and smoothly as a wave under a dinghy. A faint rumbling came from deep within the earth. We paused to stare at each other, but a minute stretched out, two minutes, and the tremor did not come a second time.

Dominic reached out his hand to touch the invisible barrier again and went straight through it, almost losing his balance. His head reemerged. “What are you doing, Wizard?” Tm not doing anything. It’s your ring.” I could see the spel clearly now, spread out like a highly figured tapestry. “The latticework was just the first line of defense. The air itself is solid there, but your ruby ring is imbued with the power to pass through, apparently taking you with it.”

“Then I’d better go through,” said Dominic.

I glanced toward Kaz-alrhun, to see if he had any better ideas, but he stood a little way back, his thick arms folded, watching with interest.

I put a quick spel of light onto the ruby ring. Dominic stretched out his hand and from the mouth of the cave we could see the ring’s firefly glow move down a dark tunnel and disappear.

Evrard pushed against the air turned glass and tried a few spels of his own, but it remained impervious. I found I could not sense Dominic beyond the glass barrier. If the ground shifted while he was in there, we would have no warning he was about to be crushed. In the distance I thought I could hear a low murmur, which could have been the emir’s men, could have been the Ifrit, and could have been molten rock moving toward the earths surface.