“Master,” I asked slowly, desperately trying to delay him until I could find some way to stop him, “what do you mean?”
“You know perfectly well what I mean,” he said in exasperation. “Why else do you think I brought you along, except to help me do it? You can make sure my creature doesn’t move, while I-” His voice trailed away on a note of glee.
My only idea was to carry him bodily back out of the cave-assuming I could find our way. I went so far as to throw the first loops of a normal binding spell onto him, but he broke it easily.
“None of that,” he said sharply, but then, unexpectedly, he smiled. “Worried that if somehow it doesn’t work, it will be all your fault, is that it, young wizard?” he went on more kindly. “Well, you can stop feeling so responsible, even if you
“But if it works! Then you can say you were there and took part in one of the world’s greatest advances in magic, that you helped your old master do something no other wizard had ever done before!”
This didn’t help. He wanted an appreciative audience to whom to demonstrate his power, but I could not simply watch. By being here at all I had become responsible for him. I was madly searching for an argument, anything to say to talk him out of it, when my attention was caught by something else.
“Master, your creature- I think it’s breaking out!”
“Nonsense. I cast that binding spell myself.”
I stopped trying to talk, too busy trying to reconstruct my spells instead. For the monster was indeed beginning to move, slowly sitting up, leaning forward, watching us with avid eyes.
The spell wasn’t working. I threw words of the Hidden Language together faster and faster, and then I realized what was wrong. This particular spell, a spell designed for a creature immune to normal binding spells, did not have an effect when that creature was moving.
I desperately tried to find a way to improvise something better, to bridge that gap in the old wizard’s spell, expecting him the whole time to add his magic to mine. But he did not come to my aid.
Instead the forces of magic were suddenly disturbed by a new and even more powerful spell. I came abruptly back to myself, to hear the narrow stone passage ring to words in the Hidden Language I had never heard before and did not want to hear again.
The wizard’s staff blazed so bright that the passage and the river below were illuminated as though the stone had cracked and mid-day had reached us. The monster staggered backwards, throwing an arm across its eyes. My own eyes squeezed involuntarily shut.
There was the sound of something hard falling, and I forced them open again. The old wizard’s staff had fallen from his hands and rolled past the monster, halfway to the river. The silver ball continued to glow, but far less brightly.
He was still on his feet, his arms held out, but wavering. The creature was motionless at last, frozen with one hand reached toward the wizard.
I scrambled to find the spell again, to try to imprison the creature in the seconds before it moved.
But the old wizard stopped me. “Let it come,” he said as though choking. “Let it come to me.”
I hesitated, not knowing if I would do more harm or good by obeying him. Ignoring me, the creature took one step toward the old wizard. For five seconds they stood face to face, their extended hands touching.
Then the silver ball on the wizard’s staff flashed a brilliant white, and his body crumpled to the cave floor beside me.
The monster bent over it while I sprang forward, horrified and unsure which spirit animated this creature of magic and dead bones. It poked at the tangled beard and cloak for a second, then suddenly seized the body and lifted it high.
I grabbed at the old wizard, both with my hands and with magic, but I was helpless before the monster’s strength. It glared at me in mindless fury, and from its mouth came a wordless roar. It whirled the wizard’s limp form over its head, dashed it to the ground, and raced past me, away down the tunnel.
The silver ball on the wizard’s staff still glowed just enough for me to be able to see him. His limbs lay twisted and bent at unnatural angles. I attempted to gather him up and put his head in my lap.
For a second I thought it was my imagination, but then his eyes moved beneath his eyelids and slowly opened. “I should have thought of that,” he whispered, highly irritated, but irritated with himself.
I tried to silence him with a hand on his lips, but he clearly found it important to talk. “That spell’s too powerful to be worked by any but the youngest and strongest wizard. And even then I should have realized I’d need something completely empty into which to transfer. I knew it had no mind of its own, so I thought I should be able to transfer my own mind directly into its body.”
He paused, and the breath rattled in his throat. He had not even tried to move anything except his eyelids and his lips. He went on in a moment, even more softly, so that I had to bend my face close to his to hear him.
“No mind was there, but there was still the motive force. My own spell. There was no room in him for my spell and my spirit at the same time. If you ever try it, young whipper-snapper, remember to get the motive force out first.” He stopped and twitched his jaw as though trying unsuccessfully to cough. “But without that spell it might have dissolved back into old bones, and I’d be no better off than I am now.”
He had been horribly broken, I knew, by being thrown to the cave floor, on top of the destructive final effort to transfer his spirit into the creature. “I’m going to try to lift you, Master,” I whispered. “I don’t want to pain you any more than I have to, but I’ve got to get you out of here. So if you-”
He interrupted me with what might once have been a snort. “I do like you, even if you are a whipper-snapper. But if you’re ever going to mature as a wizard you need more sense. Take my ring, but don’t worry about the rest. I knew all along I would never leave the cave in this body.”
He fell silent as though this speech had taken the last of his strength. I bent even closer and realized I could no longer hear or feel his breath. The light on the magic staff slowly went black.
IV
For a long time I sat motionless in the darkness, continuing to hold him, too full of sorrow to stand up or to cry. I may even have slept a little, for suddenly I jerked to attention as though abruptly waking from a dream.
The cave was still completely dark, so that there was no difference between opening and closing my eyes, and the only sound was the rushing of the river. I feared for a moment that I had heard the monster coming back. Then, when neither my ears nor my magic could find any nearby movement, I decided that a wakeful corner of my mind had recalled me from unconsciousness when the first edge was gone from exhaustion.
I still felt almost unbearably weary. I stood up slowly, easing the old wizard’s now cold body from my lap. When I turned on the image of the moon and stars on my belt buckle, it gave enough light for me to grope a short way down the slope toward the river and recover his staff. I illuminated the silver ball on the end, which gave a much better light than my buckle, and continued down to the river.
There I dunked my entire head under water and opened my mouth for a long drink. I came back up colder than ever and with my hair and beard streaming, but the water had certainly taken the last sleep from my eyes. The drink helped too, especially since I had managed to take it without swallowing a cave fish. For the first time I began to think about getting back out of the cave.
In spite of what he had said, I couldn’t leave him lying here. There was only one thing to do. I put together a lifting spell and raised him slowly. The necessary magic distracted my attention from the staff, so that the light of the silver ball began to dim, but in a minute I worked out a compromise. If I supported him partly with my shoulder as well as with magic, I could keep the staff bright enough that I could find the way.
I started slowly up and away from the river. At least for the moment, the passage was wide enough that the
