Normally I didn’t like to use weather spells. Any magic, no matter how trivial, has far-ranging effects, and to change the weather for any reason less than protecting the crop from hail had never seemed very responsible. But I didn’t want to get soaked to the skin any more than Dominic did. I pulled up my horse and shaped a few spells in the Hidden Language to move the densest of the clouds a little further away from us.
The sun came out above us though the air stayed damp, and the darkness over much of the landscape gave the sunlight an artificial quality. I was about to hurry to catch up to the others when I realized that Ascelin was standing beside me.
“What do you think, Wizard,” he asked, his blue eyes intent. “Are we carrying the Black Pearl now?”
We both looked toward Joachim, riding with the others a few hundred yards ahead. It seemed horribly likely.
“But why would Claudia give it to us to take
“Maybe she wanted to get it out of their house before its curse affected her family. Or maybe, knowing its powers for good were so strong, she wanted to give it to a man she loved more than her husband.”
I thought that Ascelin would have to tell Prince Paul some of the stories of his vivid imagination-assuming we made it home to Yurt. “If so,” I said, “why didn’t Arnulf object?”
“He may not have realized what it was.”
If Ascelin could guess, Arnulf would certainly have guessed-unless he had deliberately had his wife try to renew her earlier friendship with Joachim for the express purpose of getting that package into his saddle-bag. I immediately thought of several other “presents” Claudia might also have given the chaplain, including a love potion to make him return to her, or a deadly viper sealed in a ceramic vase, ready to leap out and bite him when he broke the seal. More prosaically, the package could have held a miniature portrait of her in a marble frame, or even a new Bible. But I did not think so.
“We have to make him open it right away,” said Ascelin.
“We can’t ‘make’ the chaplain do anything,” I said. “But I’ll certainly ask him about it.”
The others had stopped and were waiting for us. As Ascelin and I hurried to catch up, I wondered how I should ask to see a present I was sure was highly significant and highly dangerous.
PART THREE — BANDITS
I
“She said to wait to open it until we were far from there,” Joachim told me. “We aren’t far away yet.”
His comment was quite reasonable if Claudia had given him a portrait of herself, quite unreasonable if it was actually the Black Pearl-or some other dangerous magic object that Arnulf wanted us to take into the East for reasons of his own.
I tried probing with magic to see inside Joachim’s saddle-bag. A variation on the far-seeing spell would allow me-or so I hoped-to peek inside the foil-wrapped parcel. Unfortunately, it was completely dark inside. Delicate magical probing from the outside wasn’t going to tell me much, other than that whatever was in there was not alive. Not a viper, then, I tried to reassure myself, and certainly not an Ifrit.
By evening, the thunderstorm had moved off, though the air stayed damp. We sat around our fire, eating Ascelin’s cooking again. Joachim’s brother had sent along a bag of rice as well as replenishing our other supplies, and Ascelin had made a fairly successful stab at cooking it. I wondered how rude it would actually be to open Joachim’s present behind his back. Unfortunately the answer seemed to be, very rude.
But the more I thought about it, no matter what Ascelin believed, the more I doubted it was King Solomon’s Pearl. In fact, I wasn’t even sure there really were rumors that the Pearl had been found again, or if Arnulf had dragged up some old story to distract us from whatever real rumors might be running through the East. In that case, he might indeed have found whatever the bandits had been looking for in the silk caravan, and have had his wife try to renew the flames of old passion with Joachim so that the chaplain would take a package from her without any suspicion of what it really contained.
But here I came back to the original problem, that we were carrying an unknown magical object, and the wizard, me, who should have been able to deal with it, was held back by friendship and politeness from doing so.
I looked off toward the east. We were in an area of low, rolling hills, but in the rain-washed evening air a line of distant mountains marched along the horizon. Ascelin and the king had the maps out and were discussing the route.
“The main road cuts south toward the Central Sea,” said Ascelin, “but it really is shorter to cross the mountains into the eastern kingdoms and come down to the sea on the far side. That way we also avoid the most dangerous part of the sea voyage. Arnulf recommended we come this way, and I probably would have anyway. I’ve hunted in these mountains and know the passes.”
“But will the passes be open yet, or will they still be snow-bound?”
“They should all be open except for the highest, and we won’t need to take the highest. The lowest pass, in fact, is also the shortest route-it’s directly east of here. It’s not used very much, but that’s only because the road is so narrow at points.”
The king contemplated the map a moment. “I know Warin, the king of this kingdom. I wrote him this winter to say that I was going on a quest to the East, and he wrote back to be sure to stop and see him. He too had heard the rumors about the blue rose. He agrees with you about the mountain passes, by the way.”
“My father telephoned us from King Warin’s castle on his way to the Holy Land,” put in Hugo.
“Since everyone seems to agree we should go that way,” said the king, “it sounds as though we must!”
“I know King Warin too,” said Ascelin.
I came over to look at the map myself, suddenly realizing that I knew the royal wizard of this kingdom. Elerius, three years ahead of me at the wizards’ school and, it was rumored, the best student the school had ever had, had become Royal Wizard here when he graduated. I hadn’t been in contact with him in several years, but I assumed he was still here. In spite of its somewhat isolated location, the kingdom was reputed to be enormously wealthy, with gold and jewels from mountain mines.
Elerius might well have heard of the Black Pearl, I thought. And I could use the castle telephone to call the wizards’ school. Magic telephones were still scarce over in this part of the western kingdoms, and although Arnulf had one I had felt highly reluctant to call the school to check on his story with him right there.
We rode east for three days, the snow-capped mountain peaks coming closer each day. The landscape around us became uneven, cut with unexpected ravines. The hills were flinty with little topsoil, and the few villages we passed seemed to live entirely from grape-growing. The men working among the vines gave us sharp looks but did not wave. Joachim still showed no indication of opening his present, and I didn’t like to press him.
We stopped at our second pilgrimage church, one listed in the appendix of Joachim’s book because it was not on the main pilgrimage route, although apparently it had been highly regarded for fifteen hundred years.
As we came over a rise we saw before us a small, octagonal church, made of white marble, with the fluted columns of a structure built in the later days of the Empire. But as we came closer we saw that what I had at first thought was the entire church was in fact only the upper storey, and below it was another structure, this one made of rough, dark stone, with tiny windows, in the style of churches built in the chaotic years that followed the breakup of the Empire.
“This can’t be right,” said Hugo. “How could they have built the earlier building second?”
“Wait until you see the whole thing,” said Joachim with a smile.
“You mean we haven’t yet?”
But as we rode closer we saw that the dark stone structure we had thought was the church’s lower storey was in fact built on top of another church, this one highly decorated with elaborate carvings; that under this was another level, where the stonework was smooth and polished and the stained-glass windows tall and pointed; and that at the very bottom was a fifth church, built in the modern asymmetrical style, where even though the walls had to be very thick to support the levels above there were still broad expanses of glass, and dark red stones had been
