Mage Quest

supervising the reshoeing of our horses, I thought with Ascelin’s suspicions, or else making sure we could not leave.

“Excuse me, my lady,” I said abruptly when Claudia came to the end of the song. “We’ve all been wondering, and perhaps you can tell me. Why did you and your husband ask our chaplain to come visit you now?”

Joachim frowned at my rudeness. But Claudia seemed too delighted that I had not asked her what she meant by singing love songs to a priest-and her husband’s brother at that-to mind. “It’s something to do with our trade caravans,” she said lightly. “We have of course hoped for years that Joachim would come home to visit, but there’s some business matter that made it especially urgent now. Arnulf can explain it to you, I’m sure; I never pay much attention to business myself.”

“Maybe you should,” said Joachim, but looking at me rather than her.

“You never did,” she said softly.

“But you never had any intention of becoming a priest,” he said with a smile, scrambling to his feet, “or, in your case, a nun.”

As he and I walked back toward the others, I wondered uneasily if Arnulf knew all the time what his wife was doing.

If he meant harm to us, he certainly treated us well in the meantime. Our horses were still not ready at the end of the day, but the first of our clothes came back clean from the laundry. Ascelin went white when we returned to our rooms and found our armor and weapons gone, but Arnulf’s constable reassured him that they had just been taken away to have the rust polished off and the edges sharpened. Even our boots were gone to be resoled.

After another luxurious meal, Arnulf invited us into his study while Claudia supervised preparing the children for bed. Candlelight gleamed on polished wood and brass. I scanned the shelves quickly, looking for books of magic, but saw mostly account books, books of history and geography, and a little literature. A bright fire took the chill from the spring evening.

“Joachim tells me you’re wondering why I asked him to come home now after all these years,” said Arnulf, stretching out his long legs. In the candlelight, the brothers looked more alike than ever. “I hadn’t meant to worry the rest of you with this, but maybe I could use your help.”

“What’s disappearing into thin air?” asked Ascelin intensely. He had gotten this from me.

“Wait, wait,” said Arnulf cheerfully. At least he and Joachim sounded different. “If I’m going to tell you about this, I’d better start at the beginning.”

“And what’s that?”

Arnulf was more than willing to answer. He had in fact, I thought, brought us to his study specifically to tell us. I wondered abruptly if anything he said was his real concern, or if he had created a story to distract us from something else.

“It’s believed,” began Arnulf, “and this, I must stress, is only a rumor, that King Solomon’s Pearl has been found again.”

IV

If the story was created for our benefit, at least the Pearl had not been, for King Haimeric too seemed to have heard of it. “But I didn’t think it could be found,” the king said slowly. “I’d always heard that it had been hidden inside a golden box, inside a sealed amphora, inside a locked cabinet, inside a sunken ship, in the deepest rift of the Outer Sea.”

“That’s right,” said Arnulf, “hidden by the Ifriti a thousand years ago. But if an Ifrit had hidden it in the sea, he might be able to find it again. And the story I have heard is that it is now somewhere in the East, and that someone has located its hiding-place.”

“And what is this Pearl?” asked Hugo.

“Since no one has seen it for a thousand years,” said Arnulf slowly, “we have only story and legend. But the legend is that it is an enormous, flawless black pearl, permeated from its creation with the forces that shaped the earth, and which the Queen of Sheba brought to King Solomon as a wedding gift. Something of such perfection, something of such historical significance, would always be beyond price.

“But there is more. King Solomon, it is said, imbued this Pearl with all his wisdom and magic. It gives power to those who hold it, so that they will always prosper, that their setbacks will be only temporary, and they will in the end find their hearts’ desire.”

The room was silent for a moment except for the crackling of the fire. The candle flames were reflected in the absolute black of the windows.

“But if it’s so priceless,” said Hugo at last, “why doesn’t the royal Son of David still have it?”

“The Captivity of Babylon,” said Joachim. I wondered how much of this he had already heard.

Arnulf nodded. “Exactly. The Sons of David after Solomon long had the Pearl, but when their city was sacked and the Children of Abraham were taken as slaves to Babylon, the Pearl was lost to them.”

“This doesn’t sound like a very reliable magical object to me,” I said, “if it let them all be enslaved.”

“It’s years since I heard about it,” said King Haimeric slowly. “But my impression was that the Pearl was stolen from the royal treasury, and that Babylon attacked shortly thereafter.”

“The Bible tells us,” commented Joachim, “that King Zedekiah had broken his covenant with the Lord.”

“Others have also suggested,” said Arnulf, “that the Pearl would only aid its owner as long as that owner acted from the purest of motives. We have so little information. But the story one hears most often is that this flawless pearl did have a flaw. It would always aid the people who held it, sometimes for a year, sometimes for five centuries. But sooner or later its powers would fail, only to be revived in the hands of someone new.”

I leaned back in my chair and shivered in spite of the fire’s warmth. Something out of the old magic, created long, long before modern wizardry had begun to shape and channel the forces of magic with reliable and reproducible spells, something carrying both enormous powers and a fatal flaw …

“Solomon himself,” Arnulf continued, “in all his wisdom, is said to have locked up the Pearl late in his life and refused to touch it again. For centuries after it was first stolen, the story goes, it kept appearing and disappearing around the East. From Babylon, it was taken deep into the inner desert by nomads. It was stolen and stolen again a hundred times, and every time it was stolen its flaw was revealed sooner. For a century, the governor of the imperial city of Xantium held it, and his city flourished beyond all others in power and in wealth. But then it was lost again, until it appeared again in the hands of the Prophet’s nephew-brought to him, I have heard, by an Ifrit. And the People of the Prophet flourished in might, and the caliphs held the Pearl for two hundred years.

“But after two centuries, either the Pearl began again to reveal its flaw, or the very desire for its power drove men mad, for fratricidal wars broke out among all the People of the Prophet. And it was then that the last of the caliphs renounced both its power and its perils, by sending the Ifriti to hide it deep in the sea.”

Arnulf fell silent. For several minutes we thought our own thoughts, until a log settled in the fireplace with a sharp crack. I looked toward Ascelin. I was still wondering if any of the magic I knew would be at all useful, but he looked as though he had reached some sort of decision.

But Hugo spoke first. “But what is the connection of the Pearl with you, and Father Joachim, and things disappearing into thin air?”

Arnulf looked uncomfortable. I wondered if what he was about to tell us was a lie. “It’s the caravans,” he said after a brief pause, “not just mine, but many of the luxury merchants’. Stories are running wild throughout the East that whoever found the Black Pearl is trying to smuggle it into the western kingdoms. All of us therefore have had to put on extra guards.”

The story was not just running through the East, I thought. It had already reached the lord of the red sandstone castle.

“We could understand it if our caravans were just being attacked by bandits-bandits have been a feature of the luxury trade as long as it has existed. Silks, spices, saints’ relics from Xantium-we all have to deal with them. Why, just last fall, when I wasn’t more than a week’s ride from here, I myself was set upon by bandits, though the knights with me fought them off successfully.