Wood Nymph and the Cranky Saint- Wizard of Yurt - 2 (28 page)

“Don’t slip,” said the old wizard. He bent over and led the way along the narrow ledge that paraleled the river. I scrambled through the cave entrance after him, a hand on the rough wal to keep my balance, trying to find a footing in the crazy patchwork of light and shadows as the soft glow from his staff was repeatedly blocked by his body.

Now that we were in the cave, there could be no

return until we found the monster. The prison of the valey seemed wide open in comparison with the pressing wals around me now.

But our cautious, bent advance only continued for two dozen yards. Abruptly, the crouching figure before me straightened. “This is as far as the ducal wizard and I got before,” he said. I reached cautiously over my head, felt only emptiness and stood up.

The magic light showed we were in a broad chamber that would nave seemed tal if it had not been so very wide. Near at hand, I could see several tunnels leading away, but farther from us, the gravel floor and the smooth ceiling disappeared into darkness.

After a quick magic probe indicated that the monster was not nearby, I looked at the wals. As Nimrod had said, they were spectacular. The slow dripping of water over the eons had left behind what looked like waterfals frozen into stone, colored with reds and blues that reflected and shot back the magic light. If the old wizard had told me the wals were covered with precious stones, I would have believed him.

“This is lovely,” I said. “Can anything live here, without light?”

The old wizard was not interested in the wals. I wondered if he might, during his close to two centuries in Yurt, have come here many times. “Not much lives here,” he said absently. “Deep in the cave there are blind fish in the river—not just with unseeing eyes, but with no eyes at al.”

But he was also not interested in cave fish. “Now, which way did he go?” he added, half to me and half to himself.

He moved off across the chamber and I stayed close behind him and the light. I knew we were stil very near to the entrance, that Nimrod, with the benefit of midday sun, had been able to come this far without any sort of light and stil see wel enough not only to find his way back out but to notice the wals. But outside it was now night and in darkness I could have blundered into a different tunnel, thinking it the entrance, and been lost forever.

I told myself firmly that I should be able to make a magic light as good as my predecessor’s and that even in darkness I had only to folow the river. It helped a little.

But only for a moment. “This way,” said the old wizard confidently. Leaving the river, the one reliable guide we had, he walked quickly across the chamber and into one of the wider tunnels. I had no choice but to folow him.

The tunnel descended slowly but steadily, heading, as wel as I could tel, back into the heart of the plateau and away from the valey. The cave wals here were rough and plain, without any of the colors and fantastic shapes of the great chamber. I presumed that at some point in the ancient past a branch of the river had run nere, too, but if so, it was long gone, leaving only a dampness on the wals.

We walked quickly for maybe a quarter hour, though almost immediately I began to feel that we were outside of time. The tunnel twisted, rising now, turning until I felt sure we would come back around on ourselves. I found myself staring into the blackness around us as intensely as if the force of my stare would make the dark dissolve into light.

Abruptly, the old wizard stopped. My heart accelerated, but then I realized he was only pausing to rest.

“I don’t walk that much any more,” he said, half under his breath. “And these last few days, between flying and walking and running—” He sank to the floor and I sat down beside him. The wals here were lined with crystals that shimmered like diamonds in the light of the old wizard’s staff.

“You didn’t bring any food, did you?” he asked after a few minutes of silence. “I should have known. No thought or consideration. One thing you’l have to do, young wizard, is learn more consideration for the other felow.”

I didn’t answer. Now that I considered food, I too was hungry. As wel as something to eat, we should have brought water; I didn’t relish the idea of trying to lick moisture from the cave wals.

“You’re sure it came this way?” I asked. Stumbling behind the old wizard, I had not had a chance to try my own magic.

He grunted in assent. His hands stil glowed as if

with blue fire.

There was a curious intimacy sitting here with him, the two of us maybe a mile from the cave entrance, perhaps a quarter mile below the surface of the plateau, but surrounded by a silent darkness that put as much distance between us and the rest of the world as though we were on the moon. I wondered how long one would have to be here before vision atrophied and one became as blind as a cave fish. The glow at the end of his staff could have been the only light in the universe.

I took advantage of the rest stop to try again to find out something about his creature. “You know, Master,” I began, my voice bringing him back with a start from his own thoughts, “I’m especialy impressed by your creature’s eyes. It has almost no features, no nose, no mouth, no ears, and yet the eyes seem alive.”

“Of course they do,” he said but did not elaborate. I tried a different angle. “You made it partly with herbal magic and the magic of the earth, didn t you? I haven’t seen anything like it in any of my books of spels from the school.

He looked at me almost fiercely for a second. I should have known better. Every time I tried to compliment him by saying how much better a certain spel of his was than something I had learned at school, he seemed insulted that I would think so little of his abilities as to compare them with the obviously inferior school magic in the first place.

“And you won’t find it there, either,” he said, as though trying to impress this on me. “This is my own

spel. In part, it’s based on something my own master taught me two centuries ago and, in part, it’s the result of research I’ve been carrying on for many years.’

My predecessor had had a room for his experiments at the top of the north tower of the royal castle of Yurt, into which I heard he had sometimes disappeared for days. The room had not been used since his retirement. My own chambers opened directly onto the courtyard and I had yet to develop many startling new spels in them.

It wasn’t worth teling him that the old ducal wizard had known that a spel something like his existed, and that Elerius had learned—and even taught at the school—a more rudimentary version. Except for the simplest spels, magic is more than a mere series of words of the Hidden Language said in the correct sequence. It is a combination of intelectual understanding and of the instinct that comes only from long experience, of a sequence of words integrated into a format that wil vary with every wizard.

“Could you teach me the spel?” I asked timidly.

He gave me a look again, but this time almost kindly. “It’s not the kind of spel I could teach you the way you learn a few words of the Hidden Language. Maybe when you’re my age you’l be able to learn it properly.”

But by that time, he would have been dead and gone for two hundred years. While I temporarily had Him in a friendly mood, I had to try to learn more. “Did you find the bones you used in the woods?” I hazarded. “Deer bones, perhaps?”

But I knew they hadn t been the bones of a deer. Deer do not have hands.

I had expected him to keep a stony silence or, at best, to tel me it was none of my business. To my surprise he answered immediately. Perhaps he too had the feeling that we, with our conversation, were the only animate beings left in existence.

‘ No, they were human right enough, as I’m sure

you know. My guess is he might have been a bandit once, wounded and then abandoned by his friends. Or he could have been a hermit, one of those self-proclaimed saintly felows who wander around without even the sense to find a shrine and settle down. They never get enough to eat and the slightest ilness wil carry them off. Whoever he’d been, he’d been dead for quite some time when I found him. Flesh long gone and the scattered bones bleached white. He might once have had a black beard,” he added thoughtfuly.

This monster had never been a hermit, I thought. It had been a bandit, a murderer, someone who ... “My God,” I said involuntarily, which earned me a cold and stony look.

The soul, the spirit of a murderer should be long gone by the time his bones were scattered by the forest animals. If this creature had more than magic motion without life, if it actualy partook of the living bandit’s murderous spirit, then the old wizard had summoned a demon to bring that bandit back from hel. I inched backwards until my back was pressed into the sharp crystals of the wal.

But then he laughed and it was not a demonic laugh. “Imagining that I’ve been practicing black magic, is that it, young whippersnapper?” he asked in almost friendly tones. “No, I haven’t tried to bring back the soul that once went with my bones. As you know perfectly wel, I am aware of the dangers of addressing demons.” If I hadn’t been afraid that he had lost his mind, I would have agreed with him there. “But I have started to wonder if the activities we do in life might lay down a pattern in our bones that wil persist physicaly long after the spirit is gone.” When he spoke rationaly like this, in the voice I had grown to know wel, I could believe him. Then I remembered the claimants before the king, accusing each other of having dug up somebody related to their quarrel and hidden the body. If the old wizard had

found those bones, that might explain why his creature had gone first to the vilage.

“They probably have to warn you young wizards at the school against trying to get fancy results the quick way, by caling on the powers of darkness,” the old wizard continued. “Even you stil have the moon and stars on your belt buckle, though I cautioned you about that the first time I met you. But back when I was trained, we al knew that only a very weak wizard, one who can’t get the forces of magic to respond to his own human powers, has to fal back on invoking the supernatural.’

I was delighted to let myself be persuaded. He was, I knew, perfectly capable of lying to me, but he would never alow himself to be shamed, by boasting that he had not used the supernatural to assist his own magic if indeed he had, for I could check this at any time. I had, in fact, probed for the supernatural at his cottage and not found it.

Both of us relaxed and I felt again the closeness of sitting with him in a tiny circle of magic light, surrounded by stilness so profound that the sound of my own blood was a roar in my ears. I wished I had known him when he was younger, but when he was younger, he was Royal Wizard and, with him stil in the castle, I would never have come to Yurt.

“Your creature,” I began again, “always seems to be searching. Do you know what it’s searching for? Wil it know it when it finds it?” But this was something he did not seem to want to answer, at least not at once. He snorted briefly but then began a rumbling hum, as though working himself up to speech. My foot had gone to sleep, but I did not dare move it while I waited for what he would say.

“life,” he said at last.

Death, I thought. I could not forget that this creature had kiled. Not dead, not alive, in motion but

without a human soul, it had taken on a direction of

its own.

But might it indeed want life for itself? like the wood nymph, at some level I didn’t even want to consider, was it searching for a human life and soul? Was it going to kil someone in order to get it?

Below the surface of the earth, the air was cold, not growing any colder, but clearly not getting any warmer no matter now long we waited. While we sat, a tiny layer of wanner air formed around my body, which I was loath to break by moving. But on the inside, my blood felt like ice.

My predecessor shielded his eyes from the glow on his staff with one hand. “It’s dark,” he said distantly. “So dark. Nothing to see.” My blood, if possible, went even colder.

n

Abruptly, he pushed himself to his feet. “We’l just get stiff and even hungrier sitting here,” he said grumpily. “Only thing to do is to find my creature and bring it back out.” I jumped up as wel, staggered on the foot that had gone to sleep, and hurried after him. He set a determined pace through the tunnel, whose roof seemed now to be sloping almost imperceptibly lower.

This was why, I thought, the monster had kept seizing at anything living and then—sometimes—letting it go. It was searching for the old wizard. The life it wanted was the life of its maker. This was also why it had seemed to have living eyes: The old wizard himself was looking through them.

The tunnel roof suddenly became very low, so that we had to go down on our hands and knees and crawl. I fought an irrational fear that we were going into a narrower and narrower space and would never oe able to work free again.

Then the roof rose and we were back on our feet. “Watch your step,” the old wizard said laconicaly. Almost directly in front of us, a shaft dropped away. As I worked my way around the rough edge, a dislodged pebble bounced into the hole. I listened but did not near it hit.

We passed several more shafts which could have swalowed the unwary. Some, I thought as we corkscrewed upwards through narrow passages, must lead down to where we had been a few minutes before.

We continued for what could have been an hour and could have been weeks. Several times the old wizard turned abruptly into a side tunnel, sometimes climbing upwards, sometimes slithering down on loose gravel. At each intersection, I paused long enough to place a magical mark to show which way we had gone. I realized I should have been placing them al along, but there had been so few turnings since we left the great colored chamber that I hoped that would not be a problem. My predecessor either knew the cave intimately or was indifferent about finding our way out again but, if we were stil alive after finding the monster, I at least wanted a chance to find our way home.

We had been walking for some time when I realized that part of the rushing in my ears was not just my own blood but the sound of running water. By circuitous routes, we were making our way back toward the river we had left behind near the cave entrance—either that, or we were approaching another river.