Mage Quest - Wizard of Yurt 3 (43 page)

“I am ready to obey, Master,” said the Ifrit in his deep below.

That stopped al of us. “Am I your master?” asked Dominic, held at the Ifrit’s face level, trying to maintain his balance with one arm and clutching the cabinet with the other.

“You control the Black Pearl and the Pearl controls al Ifriti. If you command me, I must obey you.”

“Then stop those soldiers!”

The Ifrit bared his yelow teeth m a grin. He reached out his other hand, the one not holding Dominic, and fire shot from his fingers. The emir’s soldiers, a hundred yards away, were suddenly blocked by a wal of flames that stretched the entire width of the valey.

“Is that what you wanted, Master?” asked the Ifrit.

“Exactly what I wanted,” said Dominic. This was, I thought appreciatively, much better than Prince Vlad’s wal of fire. The soldiers scattered backwards in panic.

“And get al my friends’ horses and supplies again!” commanded Dominic.

The Ifrit sprang upwards into the air and disappeared, Dominic stil in his fist. The soldiers, seeing them go, shouted and tried to shoot at them, but the arrows fel harmlessly.

“Is he gone?” said King Haimeric into the abrupt silence.

“He is not gone yet,” said Kaz-alrhun gravely.

First to appear again was a tumbling whirlwind of sand, which settled down to reveal our confused horses, their packs stil on their backs. And five minutes later the Ifrit was back with Dominic and, this time, Whirlwind.

The chestnut stalion landed unceremoniously on his side. But he scrambled to his feet at once and reared and kicked wildly until Dominic, stil sitting in the Ifrit’s hand, reached down to grab a handful of mane and slap his neck. “Easy, boy, easy,” he said as though the horse could understand. “They’l take you home.” The stalion stopped kicking and seemed to be listening. “Let someone else ride you besides me, al right?”

“Don’t forget that horse and I saved your life!” piped up Maffi.

Dominic frowned. “If I asked, Ifrit, could you turn this boy into a worm?”

“Or anything you liked, Master!”

Maffi sprang behind Kaz-alrhun s legs, but Dominic showed no sign of requesting an immediate transformation. His face was sober and he seemed al at once to have lost the momentum that carried him out of Ascelin’s grip.

“I realize something, little warrior,” the Ifrit said to him. “You and this western mage say you want to go to the Outer Sea, but while we’re gone al these people from Yurt are going to try to escape. I promised the first mage who freed me that I wouldn’t let them.”

“Then don’t go!” cried the king.

“Wizard?” said Dominic to me.

I glanced toward the wal of fire, wondering how long it would hold the emir’s soldiers before someone volunteered to charge through it. I didn’t want to answer Dominic because I felt that in doing so I was sending him to his death. But it was, I reminded myself grimly, his decision.

“Listen, Ifrit!” I said. “The power of King Solomon’s Pearl surpasses al other authority over an Ifrit—including wishes the Ifrit himself may have granted.

Additionaly, the mage to whom you promised to guard the Wadi betrayed you, by arranging for you to be imprisoned in your bottle again. His wishes have lost al validity.” I left out the emir, not wanting to confuse the issue further—besides, his wishes stil had validity. “Remember, you promised to keep the people from Yurt safe—their safety may, in fact, lie in escape!” The Ifrit’s dark green brow furrowed as he tried to work it out, but he nodded slowly, seeming to agree.

I expected Dominic to give the order for final departure at once, but he too frowned again, looking down at us from twenty feet in the air. “You seem to know al about this Pearl, Mage,” he caled to Kaz-alrhun. “What’s the limit on what I can make the Ifrit do?”

“There is very little limit,” said Kaz-alrhun, “on the powers of a man who commands the Black Pearl and has an Ifrit to obey him. Even without a working knowledge of magic, you could do much. But—” He paused for a long moment. “But you could do nothing to counter the Pearl’s curse when it began to work.”

Dominic bit his lip. “And the first workings of the curse would be that I would be tempted to make myself King Dominic of Yurt, of al the western kingdoms, of the world, and would stil think I was acting for good.” He wrapped an arm firmly around the Ifrit’s thumb. “Good-bye, sire! To the Outer Sea, Ifrit! We’re going now\

“Don’t worry!” Dominic added in a joyous shout as the Ifrit sprang up into the air. “You’l be safe from the soldiers because the curse is being ended before it has a chance to work!” He waved and the red of his ruby ring flashed in the evening light. “I have found the purpose of my life at the end of it!”

When the Ifrit rose from the valey floor, the wal of flames disappeared and the emir’s soldiers almost immediately regrouped.

“Do not concern yourself with that!” said Kaz-alrhun as I desperately started over again creating some sort of magical shield. “Everyone, onto the carpet!” He had increased its size.

King Haimeric didn’t want to go. “He was stil so young,” he said, the tears streaming unchecked down his cheeks as he stared into the empty sky. “My own life is nearly at an end, but there was so much Dominic could stil have done! Now we won’t even be able to visit his grave.”

“He fulfiled both his life and his quest,” I said, helping the king onto the carpet. I had to pick up and give him his carefuly wrapped rootstock or he would have left it behind.

“I never had a chance!” cried Hugo in genuine distress, sounding more like a boy than a blooded warrior. “I never asked him to forgive me for putting ribbons in his stalion’s mane!”

“Come!” caled Kaz-alrhun impatiently. “In pouring forth tears, there is little profit”

The Ifrit’s wife wouldn’t go. “I’l be fine,” she said. “The soldiers won’t find my oasis.” She thumbed the rings on her necklace and smiled at Sir Hugo’s party and, somewhat less jauntily, at Joachim, as she stepped back under the palms.

We lifted into the evening sky on the carpet, piled as closely together in the center as we could, only twenty yards ahead of the turbaned soldiers. A few arrows hit the bottom of the carpet but bounced away harmlessly. I leaned cautiously over the edge and watched the Ifrit’s oasis wink away into safety, to another level of reality or to non-existence.

Fountains sparkled in the glow of the magic lamps in the courtyard of Kaz-alrhun’s house in Xantium. The evening air was stil warm and, even here in the middle of the city, little stray breezes found us, scented with the tang of the sea and with desert sage. Automata, simple self-propeled serving carts on wheels, rattled over the flagstones to bring us a variety of hot and cold dishes.

“So you do not grow eggplants in Yurt?” the mage asked King Haimeric. Take some from Xantium for your queen. The market wil also have every kind of cotton fabric you might desire. And certainly buy coffee beans as wel, but remember you wil first have to grind them to a sandy consistency to brew the beverage.” When the king did not seem as pleased at this suggestion as Kaz-alrhun apparently expected him to be, he added, “You can buy al the presents for your queen in the government-regulated market if you prefer, rather than the Thieves’ Market.” The king tried to smile. “She’l be happy with anything I bring her, but none of it wil make up for coming home without Dominic.” The mage laughed, startling one of his automata, though it was able to recover without dumping its load of spiced lamb. “Is that it?” he asked, looking around the table at the rest of us. “Is this the reason you have al had long faces since we left the Wadi?” None of us answered. “I would expect at least you, Daimbert, to know better.”

“We shouldn’t have let him do it,” said Ascelin.

T would not say you ‘let’ him do it,” replied the mage with a chuckle. “If so, what do you do when you do not wish someone to go? I saw you try to hold him back. Or do you regret not wrestling the Ifrit as wel? Your Prince Dominic played his game briliantly at the end. He lifted the Pearl’s curse and sent the rest of you home safely on my flying carpet.”

“We have just enough money left to book sea passage from here back to the western kingdoms,” said the king. “Whirlwind should be able to carry Ascelin for the rest of our trip, so we’l make good time.”

“Nonsense,” replied the mage. “I already told you I would let your wizard borrow my carpet. It is late in the season for as long a journey as you stil have before you, especialy for an old man. And you know you shal need to plant your rootstock very soon if you wish to grow a blue rose yourself.”

When King Haimeric did not look cheered by this thought either, the mage leaned back and spread out his hands on the table. “I spent much of my career searching for King Solomon’s Pearl, first trying to find the secret of its location and then attempting to maneuver others into uncovering it in a way that would not bring its potential curse down on me. I found it at last, but I lost it almost in the moment of finding, and never even held it in my hands. life is a game and you play as wel as you can as long as you can, yet you must be prepared not to win every time. Dominic fared much better on his quest than I on mine and yet you do not see me bewailing my fate.”

None of us tried to answer. I was seated next to Joachim, who paid no attention to the rest of us or even to his dinner, as though his mind was already on his duties in the cathedral.

When the automata began clearing the plates from the lamb course, Kaz-alrhun rose to his feet. “Come with me, Daimbert. I want to show you something.” I folowed him up narrow, dark stairs to a balcony at the very top of the house. The last light was fading from the sky above us. We looked out across the city where fairy lights gleamed and out across Xantium harbor. Voices and snatches of song rose faintly toward us.

The mage leaned on the railing for a moment, then shifted his massive bulk to look at me in the dim light. “This is what I wanted to show you,” he said, “Xantium, my city, where there are many religions and many conflicting forms of political organization, but only one supreme mage, myself. Are you not the supreme wizard in your own kingdom of Yurt?”

“I’m the only one,” I said. I wasn’t sure what point the mage was trying to make, but if he was saying that it was good to have one’s own home even without the Pearl, wel, the Pearl had never been my goal anyway.

“I want to ask you something,” I said. “During the long flight here I was trying to make sense of what happened. Was it indeed you who started the rumors that King Solomon’s Pearl had been found again?”

“That indeed was I,” he said, “as you know wel. When I decided to try again for the Pearl, I hoped that widespread—though false—stories of its discovery would bring you to the East if you ever planned to seek it yourselves. But I could not be sure what, if anything, the elder Prince Dominic had told you in Yurt of his quest. It had after al been fifty years since his death. It was even possible, I thought, that you knew neither the ruby ring’s powers nor of the very existence of the Black Pearl. So while broadcasting the general rumors of the Pearl, I also arranged for a separate rumor, one that might bring the ruby ring to me even if those of Yurt knew not its powers.

“I made sure that two separate stories folowed the trade routes to your western kingdoms, separate because I did not wish that anyone should realize I was the author of both. The second was sent very secretly, that my ebony horse was on sale in exchange for a magical ring from Yurt. This news I sent only to a few, those whom I already knew were sometimes unscrupulous.” That, I thought, certainly described Arnulf and Warm. “One of them, I hoped, would bring the ruby ring to me in Xantium without necessarily knowing its true value.” He cocked his head at me. “When you first approached my stal in the Thieves’ Market, flaunting the ruby ring on your prince’s finger but attempting an elaborate charade of buying my horse with some other ring from Yurt, I realized you knew ful wel that I was the author of both rumors, and that in mocking me you sought to establish yourself as a worthy opponent,” If he had thought me a worthy opponent, I didn’t plan to tel him how little I had understood when we first reached Xantium.

“I would also ask you something, Daimbert,” he continued. “Ever since I renewed my search for the Black Pearl, I have sensed another player in the game, but I have never been able to see him. He is a wizard or mage, of a certainty, but he has kept himself wel back from events, as though knowing the danger of the Pearl’s curse, and as though playing a long-term game where he felt no urgency to win at once.

At first I thought it had to be you.”

“Not me,” I said, startled. “I knew nothing of the Pearl until this year.”

“I realized it was not you when I met you, unless you had erected a highly skilful facade.” I was afraid this wasn’t a compliment.

“He and I seemed to be working in paralel,” the mage continued. “He traced the ruby ring from the caliph’s court as I had fifty years ago and he found the trail less thoroughly cold than it had been for me because of my own earlier search. like me, he initialy reached a dead end at the elder Prince Dominic’s tomb. And like me, when he finaly learned the ring was in Yurt, he knew better, because of the threat of the curse, than to use violence to obtain it”

“Or he recaled,” I said in a low voice, “the oaths al western wizards take on magic itself, to help and not injure mankind. It was Dominic’s ring. Another western wizard couldn’t have taken it from him by force any more than I could.” It was now ful night and the mage was only a silhouette against the slightly lighter sky.

“Do you know then who this wizard might be?”

I shook my head, reluctant to voice my suspicions, although I didn’t think he could see the gesture.

“Have you turned your thoughts, for example, to who might have freed the Ifrit from his bottle in the first place?” I was silent for several moments before answering. Down in the harbor a ship was coming in, lamps hung from its mast and along the rails.

“I have thought,” I said at last, “that the ‘mage’ who the Ifrit said originaly freed him must have been Elerius, a western wizard, the best wizard the school has ever produced. The chief reason I think so is that King Warin was his employer, and Warin seemed remarkably wel informed about the East. I also think it must have been Elerius who appeared, in disguise, to Sir Hugo’s party in the Holy City, urging them to go the Wadi. The only two people from whom I have heard the highly unlikely story of Noah’s Ark being found are Evrard, who said a ‘traveler told it to them at the same time as he sold them the Ifrit’s bottle, and Elerius, who said he thought they must have heard such a story.”