IV
“Good God, Evrard,” I cried, “you can’t be serious! You certainly can’t spend the rest of your life flying around the western kingdoms with it on your tail, but there must be a solution short of letting it kill you!”
“Such as?”
“If it would just stand still for a minute, I’d try this binding spell. It
Evrard looked at me from behind lowered eyelids. “I’ve got another idea. How about if I try dropping things on it? I know I can’t kill it that way, but with a boulder lying across it, it might be more susceptible to your binding spell.”
“Good idea,” I said, taking him by the shoulders to look at him and urgently hoping he had not been serious a moment before.
“As soon as I finish catching my breath, I’ll go collect some rocks. The monster can’t be stronger than a river, and I
In a minute, Evrard flew off toward the stream, and soon he was back, carrying a good-sized stone with magic. He dropped it in the middle of the clearing and went back cheerfully for another. The monster poked at the stone with its hand, then hurried after him. It pushed straight and unhesitatingly through the dense brush.
In fifteen minutes, while I desperately worked on spells, Evrard had accumulated a fairly good pile. Twice he stopped on the oak’s wide branch to rest, and all the time the monster prowled back and forth, following him from below. I did not trust its intent expression.
It was some of the hardest magic I had ever done. Not only was the spell itself fiendishly difficult, but I constantly had to hold steady the part I had already completed. A spell I had worked very quickly with the old wizard now appeared interminable when I tried it alone.
Evrard’s voice suddenly cut through the words of the Hidden Language. “Do you think this is enough rocks?”
I came back abruptly to myself, realized that it was probably very foolish to try such a complicated spell balanced on a tree branch, and shouted, “Let’s try it!”
Evrard, still hovering, took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and began lifting his rocks with magic.
I couldn’t help him and still keep the binding spell ready, and he could only manage one rock at a time while flying, but very rapidly he started lifting and dropping rocks on the monster’s upturned face.
The first few missed, and as the next bounced from its shoulder the monster began to run in circles. But then Evrard got into the rhythm, saying the words of the Hidden Language so rapidly that the spell was almost self- sustaining, and two lucky shots in a row knocked the monster off its feet. With a whoop of triumph, Evrard piled another dozen rocks on top if it, so that, at least momentarily, it lay still.
My turn now. This spell was too difficult to do while flying or even sitting in a tree. I came down to the ground, ignoring Evrard’s warning shouts, and threw the binding spell at the monster.
The loops of the spell caught and held. Crushed by stone and held by the old wizard’s magic, it lay looking at me with unblinking eyes.
Evrard’s feet hit the ground beside me. “So is that it? We’ve done it? We’ve done it!”
“It’s still very much alive,” I said, “and if we aren’t careful it-”
But I couldn’t speak and work magic at the same time. And the monster’s arm was starting to twitch, pushing upward again the stones that imprisoned it.
I threw another loop of the binding spell around it, and again it lay still. But it was no longer looking at Evrard. It was looking at me.
We darted back up into the oak. We had a second to catch our breaths, but a very precarious second. Even the old wizard, who had created this binding spell in the first place, hadn’t been able to keep his creature pinned down for long. I wiped my forehead with an arm. “We have to find a way to destroy it before it breaks free.”
“Can you teach me the binding spell?” asked Evrard eagerly.
“I’ll teach you the magic to keep it going.” The monster twitched again, and again I renewed the binding loops. “There, did you see what I did?” I pushed drooping bits of plant into his hand. “Just keep saying that spell.”
“Let’s hear it again.”
After hearing it once more, and after one abortive attempt of his own in which both of the monster’s arms threatened to break out, Evrard knew enough of the spell to strengthen it whenever it started to weaken, which seemed to be constantly.
“I might be able to improvise a way to dissolve the monster if I knew the spell that created it,” I panted. “Quick, teach me the spell you used for the rabbits, and I’ll try to extrapolate.”
It took twenty minutes for Evrard to teach me the spell, not because it was terribly complicated for someone who already knew a fair amount of the old magic, but because we had to keep stopping to rebind the monster.
I kept listening as we worked, wondering if the others were coming and praying that they weren’t. Evrard and I, sitting high in the tree, were relatively safe, but if the monster broke loose from a spell that was becoming increasingly tattered it could kill half the knights of Yurt.
But though I now could have made horned rabbits-or a soldier of hair and bone, and without even using dragons’ teeth-I still couldn’t dissolve this monster. The spell Elerius had taught was shot full of gaps, bridged almost tentatively by a few words of magic, so that anything made from it could be readily destroyed. The late Royal Wizard of Yurt had found a way to fill those holes.
I frowned in concentration, sifting through phrases of the Hidden Language. “Maybe if I looked again at the old wizard’s spell,” I started to say, then looked up to realize the monster had managed to kick all the rocks off one leg and was starting on the other. I couldn’t take the time now to pore over the written spell, to find in it a way to dissolve the monster. I had to make do with what I already knew.
All I knew was the spell that had given the creature its facial features, and that I had heard only partially. But dissolving a spell might require only an understanding of its general lines, not all its details. Trying desperately to remember theoretic discussions of spell structure, from lectures through which I had dozed, I tried reversing the spell, hoping that this might generalize enough to affect the entire creature. If not, I was completely out of ideas.
It was almost too late to try repairing the binding spell. I clung to the branch of the oak with both hands as the heavy words of the Hidden Language rang through the clearing.
Much more quickly than they had formed, the monster’s ears, nose, and mouth disappeared. The roaring stopped, and for a moment it stopped kicking, but the eyes still glowed at us.
“Keep going, Daimbert!” yelled Evrard, renewing the binding spell. He piled on a few more rocks for good measure.
But I was temporarily halted. I looked toward Evrard. He was as exhausted as I was, and only sheer will was keeping him going. I had maybe a minute before our weakening magic and the monster’s strength freed it, either to climb the tree after us or go to meet the knights of Yurt.
I pulled together everything I knew, the spell to create facial features, the spell to make great horned rabbits, and the first few words of the spell I had seen in the old wizard’s register; put on the twist that reversed spell structure; and tried it all in combination with the words that would break a normal spell.
It probably shouldn’t have worked, and indeed I could see no immediate change, but there was a sharp swirling in the local field of magic that suggested that a spell much more powerful than anything of mine was beginning to break up.
I tore my attention away from the spells just long enough for a glance at Evrard. Consciously or unconsciously, he had left the tree to move closer to the monster, as though trying to hold it immobile with the force of his personality as well as the spell that he was now working nonstop-or maybe he was now so tired that he didn’t trust his ability to project a spell any distance.
“Now!” I shouted and threw what should have been the spell of final dissolution onto the monster.
And trembling, burning, spreading like a fire, it began to dissolve the spells that held the old wizard’s creature together. But first it destroyed the binding spell that had held it down.
The creature rose with a crash, stones and pieces of its body both flying from it. It flung out an arm toward me, started to take a step, and collapsed into a heap of bones-but not before the largest boulder that had lain
