Or you turned it loose, I thought. Aloud I said, “I know all about the magical forces here. They’ve kept me here for two days.”
“Don’t blame it on ‘magical forces,’” said the old wizard with a snort. “A wizard may find the raw power of magic appealing or seductive, but this valley couldn’t hold you against your will. You were just having too much fun with the wood nymph.
“The magical forces of the valley may make my creature a little harder to catch,” he went on. “Did you see how fast it could run? Even my magic wouldn’t give it that kind of speed anywhere else,” he added regretfully.
This, I thought gloomily, is exactly what I needed to hear: first my predecessor had made a creature almost too powerful for his own magic, and certainly much stronger than either Evrard’s or mine, and now its strength was increased dramatically.
“I’d better go see if I can find some herbs,” said the old wizard. “I’ll need them for my binding spell. You and the duchess’s wizard could try putting some kind of barricade across the opening to the cave. I don’t believe my creature will try to come out again during the day, after we all frightened it, but it might after dark. I’d ask you to help me, but you wouldn’t recognize the right herbs.”
His chief concern, I thought as I watched him stump off, was that we might have “frightened” his creature! This left it all up to Evrard and me-which meant, I was afraid, me.
Although I called the old wizard Master, he was not my real master. If I thought of anyone in the paternal role in which Joachim put his bishop, it was the Master of the wizards’ school, who had been willing to take on-and even keep-a young man who must have been a very unpromising wizardry student. Since my own parents had died when I was young, the white-haired Master of the school had been the closest I had had to a father.
Yet in the two years I had been in Yurt, I had come to admire my predecessor, in spite of his crankiness. And I had certainly learned a tremendous amount from him, not just the herbal magic they did not teach at the school, but, partly out of shame at his example, a lot of the school magic I had not learned properly the first time.
And now something had happened to him, whether he had been pushed into unwise new experiments by Evrard’s creature, overcome by pride, or (quite unaccountably) made jealous of me. Even aside from catching up to his creature, I knew I had to catch
Meanwhile I’d better make sure of my only other ally. “When you and my predecessor followed the monster into the cave,” I asked Evrard, “how far back did you pursue it?”
“Not far. He made a light on the end of his staff. It wasn’t very bright, but better than I could do and enough for us to see. We got back to where the cave widened, the room that Nimrod mentioned-or, rather, Prince Ascelin. It’s an enormous room, and a lot of tunnels open off it. The monster must have taken one of them. I’m afraid, like the prince, we fell into the river on the way back out.”
“I don’t trust the old wizard,” I said, “not his motivations, not even his magic. Catching this monster is going to be up to you and me.”
“Oh, please, Daimbert!” cried Evrard. “Let me catch it myself! Don’t you see, it’s my last chance to impress the duchess, before she gets fed up with me and sends me back to the City in exchange for a different wizard. And since the monster tried to carry her off, it’s my responsibility as ducal wizard to avenge her.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said, feeling that Evrard was more like ten years younger than me rather than two. “Neither one of us could possibly capture it alone. Our only chance is to do it together.”
“I guess you’re right,” said Evrard, but not as though convinced.
He would become convinced soon enough. “First,” I said, “it would help if we knew what the monster is made out of. Since this creature is no illusion, it has to be made of
Evrard had clearly never thought about this. Now his eyes grew so wide that white showed all the way around the iris. “But where would he have gotten human bones?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” I said grimly. “We’ve been worrying about the creature killing a person, now that we know it’s killed some chickens. But has the old wizard himself already killed someone?”
We both looked involuntarily down the valley where the wizard had gone. I thought I could see him a half mile away, where the valley started to curve, poking about on the river bank.
Evrard hugged himself as though standing in a bitterly cold wind. “But even the wizards trained under the old apprentice system must have taken the oath to help and guide mankind.”
“Exactly. And that’s why I can’t let you even try to go after the monster by yourself.”
Evrard shivered again and nodded. His desire to impress the duchess seemed greatly diminished. But then he looked at me with his head cocked to one side, his eyes almost back to normal. “I know what I can do,” he said. “Your predecessor had a good idea when he suggested we barricade the cave. I can practice my lifting spells by lifting some rocks to block the opening. Once I have them in place, I’ll put a binding spell on them, so that even a monster won’t be able to push them aside.”
“Good plan,” I told him enthusiastically, though I didn’t think this would work for long, and there might be other exits to the cave. But it would keep him busy and give me a chance to walk and to think. Anything was better than waiting here, either for inspiration-which seemed increasingly unlikely-or for the old wizard to come back.
V
I jumped up abruptly and started down the valley. It was late afternoon, and a soft white mist had begun to rise. It hung over the river and sent long arms out over the water’s grassy verges. As I walked downstream, I went into patches of fog so dense I could barely see ten feet in front of me, and then out again under a clear sky. The limestone formations on the valley walls looked even more like the ruins of old castles than usual.
The old wizard had still not told me why he had made such a creature in the first place, and maybe he didn’t know himself. I wished I could get word to the wizards’ school, but with the creature actually here I didn’t dare leave the valley myself, and even Evrard’s spells would be some help if the monster broke out.
I stopped in the middle of a patch of mist and looked around. I had not paid much attention to how far I had walked, but it was hard to tell distances with no landmarks. The only solid points in a white world were the road under my feet and the rushing river to my right. But where was the old wizard?
I came out of the mist again and saw him, standing under a tree, staring off down the valley. Heavy drops of moisture hung from the leaves above his head. He gave a start as I came up beside him. He looked as old as I had ever seen him, his full two hundred and fifty years, and much too weak ever to kill anybody.
“Did you find all the herbs you needed?” I asked.
“Herbs?” he said, as though coming back from a great distance and not sure what I could mean. Then he looked down at his hands, which were clenched around a wad of drooping plants. “Oh, yes.” He met my eyes briefly and turned away. “We can return now.”
We walked back up the valley without speaking. The fog was growing thicker, so that we would have lost our way if we were not following a clearly marked road. Even the river beside us seemed to be running much more quietly. My predecessor, I thought with a sideways glance at him, might already have lost his way.
When the shape of the trees and clearings was again familiar enough that I knew we were close to the Holy Grove, I tried once more. “Maybe I can help you, Master,” I began tentatively. “You know you’ve taught me a lot of herbal magic. I could help you put the spells together if I knew what you were trying to do. What’s driving your creature now, and how can we slow it down?”
“I already told you,” he said, but without his normal irritated tone, “that it’s the valley itself that’s made it move so fast. As to what’s driving it, I thought even you could recognize magic.”
I kept my temper. “But what kind of magic? What purpose is the creature serving? After all, here in the valley it seized two people within two minutes. Did you make it in order to capture people?”
He looked at me fully for the first time since I had found him on the river bank. “No, that wasn’t my purpose. But it does indeed like to put its hands on people.” He gave a malevolent chuckle and went on more vigorously. “It certainly wanted to lay hold of Prince Dominic. You should have seen them all trying to get away! But of course, outside this valley, it couldn’t run as fast as a horse.”
