winter gale.
My predecessor had put spells from the old traditional magic together with spells he had created himself in years of study, to make not just something that could move and even look as though it were alive, but something as difficult to dissolve into its component elements as a real living being.
It had no face, other than its eyes, but at least at times he seemed able to see through those eyes. When it raced toward us out in the valley, carrying the duchess, it must have been a strange case of double vision for the old wizard: both seeing himself from the outside and seeing the creature running toward him. No wonder he had not been able to put any sort of binding spell together-even if the creature had slowed down long enough for a spell to work.
He stopped where the passage forked, and for a moment I thought he wanted to rest again. Instead he seemed to hesitate about the direction, for the first time since we had started into the cave. I took the opportunity to make a few more magic marks.
“This way,” he said, almost reluctantly, and not even as though he were addressing me, but then he started off again with renewed energy. I wondered if the monster were deliberately hiding from him.
There was much here that the old wizard had not yet told me, but I could guess. He had started by putting a true seeing power into his creature, something that I tried unsuccessfully to persuade myself should not seem frightening to someone like me who had invented a far-seeing telephone. The next, however, was even worse.
I caught up to him and glanced at his face. The magic light, from the silver ball held close in front of him, made his eyes gleam under his eyebrows. His next plan, I thought, was to go beyond seeing through his creature. He now intended to put his entire being into the creature’s body.
A body shaped and held together by powerful magic would not be the rapidly weakening body of someone far past two hundred. Even if built originally from dead bones, it should not crumble while the spells held.
And here is where my predecessor had swum far out beyond his depth, even beyond sight of land. He had not yet found the spell to transfer his will into the creature’s body, I guessed, but in attempting to give it the ability to receive true life, he had given it a generalized, unfocused search for life.
But it was still a monster without mind or volition of its own, and all it could do was to seize upon living beings And being enormously strong, and incapable of reason, it could carry them, crush them, and, quite unintentionally but quite thoroughly, kill them.
We squeezed through another narrow spot in the tunnel, and then there could be no doubt that we were approaching the river. No longer a distant sound, the rushing was very near.
The old wizard stopped and held up his staff, and the silver ball on top burst forth in a new and brighter light. The passageway sloped down steeply before us, and at the bottom of the slope, just before the passage floor disappeared under water, stood the monster.
It watched us with glittering eyes but did not immediately move. Behind it the river, whose sound reverberated in the narrow tunnel, looked jet black. We had reached a dead end. The passage went no further than the river, which plunged downwards and out of sight. We and the monster would leave here the way we had come or under water.
III
My predecessor took a deep breath, held out both hands, and started on the binding spell. I mentally shook off paralyzing fear and added my magic to his. I had never used a spell like this before, and as the words of the Hidden Language drew me into magic’s four dimensions I felt the forces I touched tugging at me, as if I might be sucked down into magic just as a false step in this tunnel could drop us into the river.
But it seemed to be working. I fought free of engulfing magic to return to myself, and found the old wizard staggering but the monster encased in magic and perfectly still.
I held out a hand to the old wizard. He took it; crumbled leaves were pressed into my palm. He turned his face blankly toward mine, then slowly seemed to recover. His magic light, which had dimmed to almost nothing, brightened again. “Magic is hard work for an old man,” he said hoarsely. “I hope they warn you young wizards at the school how much it can drain out of you.”
It was a good thing I had asked him to teach me the binding spell. I could not have done it completely on my own, certainly not in the short fifteen seconds it had probably taken us, and yet I was fairly sure three-quarters of the spell was mine.
He sat down on the sloping floor and considered his creature. The eyes still moved, but the limbs were motionless. “Let’s get it away from the river,” he said. “No use having it topple in while we’re working our spells.”
Without asking if he needed my help, I used a lifting spell to raise the monster up and move it slowly toward us. I
I set his monster down prone on the slope below us. “Let’s give it more features,” he said. “The eyes work well, but it needs ears and nose and mouth. It will need to hear and need to speak, and it might as well be able to smell the spring flowers.”
“Master,” I said urgently, “don’t you think we should try to dissolve it rather than improve it?”
“Of course not,” he said with energy. “I already told you that. Now be quiet and let me work. I know they never taught you any of
They most certainly had not. The old wizard closed his eyes, then began to speak in a very deep voice, that seemed to come from the rocks of the cave wall. The heavy syllables of the Hidden Language rolled and reverberated around us. I tried to follow it all and could not, in part because there were motions of the fingers also mixed in, which sometimes went by too quickly for me to catch, and even when he paused I was fairly sure he was continuing an aspect of the spell in his mind.
He stopped at last, his own face gray and the lines in it more pronounced than ever. But the face of the monster lying before us had changed. The flesh on the sides of its head moved and shaped itself into ears; the center of the face twitched, grew, became a nose; and the lower portion of the face split and became a mouth.
As soon as the mouth was formed, it began to roar. The old wizard and I were nearly pushed backwards by the force of that roar. He recovered almost immediately, however, and added a few more loops to the binding spell.
The roaring stopped, though the eyes remained alive. I started surreptitiously checking the binding spell with magic. It did not seem as strong or as thorough as I would have liked.
But my predecessor seemed perfectly content with it. “Well, that’s that,” he said in satisfaction. “You know, young whipper-snapper, I’m glad you came with me. Even with your school training, you’ll make a decent wizard someday.”
I was too startled by the open compliment to respond.
He looked at me sideways. “You’re surprised I never said anything of the sort before. Well, I didn’t want to let it go to your head. And because I wanted to be sure you shaped up properly, I may once or twice have said something to you that the persnickety might find insulting.
“But you’ve not been a bad companion for an old man, in spite of what that school tried to teach you. You show me proper respect, but you’ve never gotten all crawling and obsequious about it. If you’d come along fifty years earlier, I might even have let you be my apprentice.”
Again I did not answer, but I was quite sure I would not have wanted to learn the spells he was now working. For several moments we sat in silence.
“Well,” he said at last, “now that we’ve got my creature, I guess we should start thinking about getting back out of this cave. But it’s silly to take three bodies out when we’ve only got two minds between us, isn’t it? And doesn’t it make sense to leave the weakest body behind?”
