by stillness 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 still in the castle I would never have come to Yurt.
“Your creature,” I began again, “always seems to be
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 killed. 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 kill 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 how long we waited. While we sat, a tiny layer of warmer 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.
II
Abruptly he pushed himself to his feet. “We’ll 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 well, 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 abruptly 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 be able to work free again.
Then the roof rose again, and we were back on our feet. “Watch your step,” the old wizard said laconically. 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 hear it hit.
We passed several more shafts which could have swallowed 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 all 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 else was indifferent about finding our way out again, but if we were still 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.
I realized I had been waiting unconsciously for the dawn, with the thought that we would be able to tell where we were once the light began to grow. But no dawn could be expected here, while earth and stone endured.
The old wizard stopped again, as abruptly as he had started forward. He sat down against the wall, pulled his cloak around him, and closed his eyes. His magic light became slowly dimmer, but the silver ball was close enough to his face that I could see all the deep lines the years had cut in it.
He had aged much more than two years in the time that I had known him. I had been highly impressed at the power of his whirlwind, but I had not before thought of the drain such magic must put on an old wizard.
I too was exhausted, but I didn’t even dare think about sleep. If we slept the old wizard could lose contact with his creature, which might then either attack us or burst back out into the valley.
“Master,” I said softly, and he opened his eyes. “Master, even if I couldn’t understand the spell by which you made your creature in the first place, don’t you think you should teach me a little of the spell by which we’ll catch it?”
He grunted, opened his eyes reluctantly, but then nodded. “The problem is,” he said, “as I already told you, this binding spell only works when it’s standing still.”
He leaned forward, opening a hand to show that he clutched a few dead leaves in it. It was from the leaves that the blue glow came. First he started to explain it to me in words of the Hidden Language, but then he abruptly started to speak to me directly, mind to mind.
Here communication was much faster, although I had to concentrate much harder to be sure I missed nothing. I held my own thoughts, terrified, back just out of reach of his touch, for I received not just the spells but the twist in his thinking.
The wizards at the school would have said that he was in danger of going renegade, Joachim that he was in danger of losing his soul. Neither seemed quite right. But I knew that his motivations, his assumptions, his purposes had all taken a turn somewhere, a turn I did not want to take, and which left me when he finally broke the mental contact trembling and bathed with sweat in spite of the cold.
“I haven’t determined yet if I can modify this spell to catch him while he’s moving,” the old wizard said. “Now that you know the spell, maybe you can have a try with your fancy school magic.”
School magic wouldn’t work here. Whatever had been the case with the creatures Nimrod had once helped track, this particular monster had been made specifically to be able to walk through normal binding spells. It wouldn’t have been any use even if I had been able to get word to Zahlfast. This creature was made with the combined magic of light and earth, and it would have to be caught the same way.
The old wizard pushed himself to his feet, and his staff glowed brightly again. “This way,” he said and started off in the direction from which I could have sworn we had just come. But almost immediately the passage narrowed, which I had not remembered it doing before. It was a good thing I was not trying to lead.
The passage became so tight we had to push and squeeze through. He went first, and immediately after the narrowest place the passage turned, so that he and the light were gone.
For a second I felt completely lost, without direction, surrounded by darkness so profound it seemed to sear my eyeballs, crushed by a hundred million tons of rock. But then I was through, around the corner, and able again to see his light, bouncing slightly as he walked. I put a quick magic mark on the wall and hurried to catch up.
After the tight squeeze, the passage widened, so that for the moment we could walk abreast. With a little more light, I did not stumble as often, even though I kept falling behind every time we passed a side turning and I paused to mark that we had continued to follow the straight way.
I glanced sideways at him as we continued, though he seemed almost to have forgotten my presence. His face was stern and his expression distant, as though he was still trying to see through his creature’s eyes.
Pride, Joachim would have called it. They had warned us against it in school, although most young wizards (including me), as I had come to realize, were still so marginally competent upon graduation that it was unlikely to be a problem. The Hidden Language did tap the human mind into enormous and elemental forces, but as long as one did only simple spells, one could stay as safe as a child wading in the tide pools of the western sea.
The truly idiotic young wizard might let himself be caught in an undertow, but the real danger was for the supremely good wizards. Their mastery of magic took them further and further out into it, until they tried a spell that brought magic breaking over them and their words of the Hidden Language with the force of the waves of a
