“Coming, Wizards?” called the duchess.
“No,” I called back. After trying so long to leave, I now had to stay. “Down here” could be anywhere, could be at the far end of the valley, could be the Holy Grove, could be the bushes beside us.
A branch above us bent suddenly, with a faint creak of wood and fluttering of leaves. I staggered backwards, but as I looked up I saw that it was the wood nymph.
The old wizard saw her too. His stern expression changed at once. He called to her in the Hidden Language, not the spell I had derived from the old ducal wizard’s books but something comparable. “How would you two young wizards like to meet a nymph?” he asked as she came further along the branch toward us, then looked over our heads.
“In fact, we’ve met her and even-” Evrard began, but he never had a chance to finish.
Someone screamed. I spun around. The creature I had wanted to seek for so long had come to me.
Or rather, not come to me, but come to the knights of Yurt. I could see it now much more clearly than I had seen it in the glimpse through the old wizard’s door.
As tall as a man but twice as broad, it had a large blank oval for a face, its only feature its rapidly-moving eyes. It rose from behind a bush almost directly in front of the duchess. Over its shoulder was flung a ragged form which I identified as one of the apprentice hermits. From his choking cries, he was, for the moment, still alive.
The duchess’s gelding reared with a scream of its own. Diana fought for and lost her seat. As she sailed off, the monster threw the apprentice hermit away like a bag of flour and snatched her instead out of the air. Before any of us could move, it had raced up the track toward the grove.
After a horrified second, everyone moved at once. Nimrod grabbed his bow; Dominic forced his horse toward the waterfall with the knights behind him; the dogs foamed up the track; and the old wizard, Evrard, and I flew after the creature.
It ran far faster than I had expected, darting at much greater than human speed toward the grove. It dodged in and under the trees, where Evrard smacked into a trunk and sank to the ground, but the old wizard and I veered desperately as we tried to keep up. At least, on the basis of Diana’s wild kicks, she was still very much alive.
The creature came to the pool at the center of the grove, splashed straight through while the duchess yelled, made a wide detour around the shrine of the Holy Toe, where the amazed hermit stood watching open-mouthed, and shot out again into the sunlight.
Flying as fast as I could, I could barely gain on the creature. The duchess was in deadly peril, and both the old wizard himself and this creature he had made, with a magic much more powerful than any thing I could imagine wielding, filled me with horror. I even tried a prayer to Saint Eusebius on the off-chance he might listen.
Nimrod had his bow drawn, but I was very glad to see him lower it again. From what Joachim had said no arrow could harm the monster, but one of the huntsman’s stag arrows would certainly have a devastating effect on the duchess.
The creature ran toward the cliff face without even slowing down, altering its course at the last second. And then it headed straight toward the old wizard and me.
I threw both a binding spell and a paralysis spell at it, but my spells had no effect on the creature. Diana, however, stopped shouting and instantly became rigid. Wonderful. Now I’d made it easier for the monster to carry her. It held her motionless body high over its head while the dogs barked hysterically and snapped ineffectually at its ankles.
If the old wizard tried any spells, they had no more useful result than mine. Ten feet from us, the creature turned again, giving me a quick look from eyes I could have sworn were alive, and started scrambling down the tumbled rocks a short distance from the waterfall.
Dominic’s horse had fallen and him with it, but Nimrod, who had dropped his bow, sprang to intercept the creature. It dodged yet again as it reached solid ground, but he made a desperate leap and seized it by the leg.
The creature lost its balance for a second, and Diana dropped with a hard thump from its hands. It righted itself immediately, but Nimrod clawed his way up the creature’s body and seized it around the neck. The two crashed back to the ground, rolling and grabbing at each other, Nimrod shouting and the creature absolutely silent.
The dogs caught up again and began biting both of them. The old wizard and I reached them only a second later. Leaving my predecessor to deal with his monster, I snatched at words of the Hidden Language in a desperate attempt to break the spells I had inadvertently put on the duchess. If she could run, she might escape.
I didn’t know what the old wizard hoped to try, but he never had a chance. The creature lurched to its feet, thrust Nimrod effortlessly away, and raced up again toward the grove.
Diana came back to life with a start. “Christ!” she burst out. “What happened?” Dominic reached us at that moment, fell to his knees, and tried unsuccessfully to take her into his arms. Rather than tell her that I had paralyzed her myself, I took a quick five seconds to reassure myself that she was not badly hurt, then shot after the monster and the old wizard.
Evrard joined us near the shrine, rubbing his head somewhat woozily. But the creature was gone.
It was completely silent within the grove. Not even the leaves moved. “It came straight through here,” Evrard said, showing no desire at all to pursue it further. “It was following the river.”
I knew then where it had gone. I flew along the banks of the little river, out of the grove, and to the bottom of the cliff. The water poured sparkling out of the cave mouth as though nothing in particular had happened there, but there were a few deep scrambling marks in the gravel. A steady, whispering wind blew from the cave. I dropped down, looking into blackness, and probed with magic.
There was no question. My predecessor’s monster had gone this way.
“He’s back in the cave,” I said as the old wizard and Evrard came out of the trees. Let them chase it now. I flew back down the valley to make sure the duchess really was all right.
She had pushed Dominic away and was sucking a barked knuckle. “I would have been able to rescue myself, without help from anyone,” she said angrily, “if it hadn’t put some sort of spell on me.” As Diana was usually a rational person, I knew that this boast was a sign of how really frightened she had been.
So far we had been enormously fortunate. The creature had let both the apprentice hermit and the duchess go without killing them, or even badly wounding them. Next time we might not be so lucky. Had it deliberately chosen these two out of all of us in the valley, or would it seize randomly at different people-and maybe, or maybe not, let them go again-until it found some specific one it sought?
Nimrod-or rather Prince Ascelin-actually was in worse condition than the duchess. The priests and the knights had all come up, and he sat in the middle of an attentive circle, picking grit out of a bloody knee. There were several marks of canine teeth in his lower legs. “None of those dogs had better be rabid,” he said in irritation. “Don’t you knights of Yurt train them better than to bite the person they’re supposed to help?”
“But that’s exactly what we
The dogs now sat happily panting, not at all repentant. Diana was sitting beyond Nimrod, and I was surprised to intercept an amused glance she aimed toward his hunched shoulders.
The apprentice hermit whom the creature had originally seized did not look physically damaged as a result of his adventure, but he sat a little apart from the others, his knees up to his chin and his eyes enormous. The youngest of the three priests unbent far enough to go sit beside him and say things which I hoped were reassuring.
For a brief moment, like the pause between two claps of thunder, peace had returned to the valley. “I always forget a wizard can fly,” said one of the knights to me in what I hoped was admiration. In times of peace, which was now most of the time, Royal Wizards might do little more than illusions for months at a time. I didn’t point out that flying had so far been useless against an undead monster running across the ground.
“I’m impressed you were able to get the better of the monster,” I said to Nimrod, “even if only for a moment.”
“I never did have the better of it. Wrestling it was like trying to wrestle a boulder! All I could do was throw it off balance for a second. Did you have any better luck with magic? Where is it now?”
“It’s crawled back into the cave where the river comes out.” He looked up briefly and nodded. “My predecessor and the ducal wizard are pursuing it.” But the pursuers appeared a few minutes later, dripping wet and
