He moved off across the chamber, and I stayed close behind him and the light. I knew we were still very close to the entrance, that Nimrod, with the benefit of mid-day sun, had been able to come this far without any sort of light and still see well enough not only to find his way back out but to notice the walls. 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 follow 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 follow him.
The tunnel descended slowly but steadily, heading as well as I could tell back into the heart of the plateau and away from the valley. The cave walls 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 here too, but if so it was long gone, leaving only a dampness on the walls.
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 walls 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’ll have to do, young wizard, is learn more consideration for the other fellow.”
I didn’t answer. Now that I considered food, I too was hungry. As well as something to eat, we should have brought water; I didn’t relish the idea of trying to lick moisture from the cave walls.
“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 still glowed as if with blue fire.
There was a curious intimacy of 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 especially 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 spells 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 spell 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
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 court yard, and I had yet to develop many startling new spells in them.
It wasn’t worth telling him that the old ducal wizard had known that a spell something like his existed, and that Elerius had learned-and even taught at the school-a more rudimentary version. Except for the simplest spells, magic is more than a mere series of words of the Hidden Language said in the correct sequence. It is a combination of intellectual understanding and of the instinct that comes only from long experience, of a sequence of words integrated into a format that will vary with every wizard.
“Could you teach me the spell?” I asked timidly.
He gave me a look again, but this time almost kindly. “It’s not the kind of spell I could teach you the way you learn a few words of the Hidden Language. Maybe when you’re my age you’ll 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 tell 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 fellows who wander around without even the sense to find a shrine and settle down. They never get enough to eat, and the slightest illness will 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 thoughtfully.
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 actually partook of the living bandit’s murderous spirit, then the old wizard had summoned a demon to bring that bandit back from hell. I inched backwards until my back was pressed into the sharp crystals of the wall.
But then he laughed, and it was not a demonic laugh. “Imagining that I’ve been practicing black magic, is that it, young whipper-snapper?” 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 well, I
When he spoke rationally like this, in the voice I had grown to know well, I could believe him. Then I remembered the claimaints 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, then that might explain why his creature had gone first to the village.
“They probably have to warn you young wizards at the school against trying to get fancy results the quick way, by calling on the powers of darkness,” the old wizard continued. “Even
I was delighted to let myself to be persuaded. He was, I knew, perfectly capable of lying to me, but he would never allow 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
