Mage Quest

Ascelin’s eyes narrowed, but he slowly shook his head. “Those were made by an old magician, and he got away. The king was just delighted to have the creatures out of his kingdom.”

Ascelin’s distrust was general, then, not tied to any specific knowledge of King Warin. “Just curious,” I said and told him no more. Unfortunately, I knew Evrard was capable of making jokes in highly dubious taste.

King Haimeric was pleased to have an excuse to visit with his old friend Warin for another day, especially since we had been dodging rain ever since Arnulf’s house. This time, Ascelin did not let the weapons out of our room, and he polished off the few rusty spots that had appeared in the last four days himself-but then King Warin’s staff showed no sign of being as helpful as Arnulf’s.

The phone call from the wizards’ school came while we were at dinner. The king had been talking again about the Black Pearl, discussing our visit with Arnulf much more openly than I would have preferred, but I didn’t dare leave the school waiting while I tried to shift the conversation. This time, the chancellor did not accompany me but stayed at the table.

“I don’t have a lot,” the librarian said apologetically. “It is a fascinating story, but there’s very little to it.” I listened as he told the story of King Solomon’s Pearl, essentially as we had already heard it from Joachim’s brother and as Hugo had found it in Arnulf’s books. “The accounts stress that it would become enormously dangerous if used from base motives. I’ve asked around the school,” he finished, “and no one here has heard that it’s been found.”

“Has anyone talked to the merchants down in the City to see if they’ve heard such rumors?”

“I haven’t,” he said in surprise. “Why would merchants have information on magical objects not known to the wizards’ school?”

Though set in the middle of the great City, the white-spired wizards’ school had always held itself somewhat aloof from the City’s concerns. “All right,” I said. “Thank you.” So Arnulf was, as I had thought, trying to distract us from something else, and I couldn’t even imagine what that might be.

“Well, it’s always interesting to be asked about something different for a change,” said the librarian. He looked down at the heavy volume he held in his hands. “This is one of the books that used to belong to Melecherius, and I expect I’m the first person to have it off the shelf since he died …” He flipped to the sign-out slip tucked in the back and then said in surprise, “No, I’m wrong. It was checked out five years ago by Elerius.”

I didn’t have time to wonder, in the brief moments I might still have to speak without being overheard, why Elerius had been interested in the Black Pearl. “Is Zahlfast available?” I asked instead.

While waiting impatiently for him to come to the phone, I kept listening for a step in the corridor, for King Warin’s chancellor to overhear my conversation.

“You should know by now that we don’t like wizards calling us up all the time for advice,” Zahlfast began irritably when I finally saw him in the view screen.

But I interrupted. “Quick. Do you know what was in the message that Evrard left here?”

“Of course I do,” he said in surprise. I saw his eyes flick past my shoulder, and I looked back involuntarily myself, but there was no one else in the room. “Three extremely promising young wizards in a row have come back to the City in disgrace and told us about it. You’d think that someone would have had the sense to change the spells so that the message was something innocuous, rather than making the lame excuse that they couldn’t read it and then getting themselves dismissed for incompetence.”

I hadn’t thought of changing the spells either, being too startled by the content of the message.

“We don’t like to tell young wizards very much about their new posts,” he continued, “because it’s better if they can work everything out on their own, but this time it looks like we’d better. That kingdom is much too critically placed, just below the passes into the eastern kingdoms, not to have had a Royal Wizard for a year.”

“Did you ask Elerius about it?” I hoped my end of the conversation was bland enough that, even if the chancellor was lurking just outside the door, he would find nothing in it to pass on to his master.

“Of course we did, the first time a young wizard returned to the school with a wild story of sorcerers.” Zahlfast unexpectedly smiled. “So you’re wondering yourself whether to believe it? Don’t worry about it. Elerius told us it was a complete fabrication. I thought you knew Evrard well enough yourself to realize that he has a rather odd sense of humor sometimes.”

Yesterday I had thought Zahlfast worried. Today he did not seem worried at all. I was also irritated with him for having sent me in search of Evrard and yet not telling me the one solid piece of information they had, that Evrard had felt his party was in danger long before they reached the Holy Land.

But they had reached the Holy Land safely. King Warin was a dead-end for the purposes of our quest.

“The librarian’s told me about this Black Pearl,” Zahlfast continued with another smile. “Keep your eyes open in the East. I must say it all sounds rather far-fetched, but if it is real and has been found, the school will need to acquire it. A highly-charged magical object like that would be very dangerous except in the hands of skilled and thoroughly trained wizards.”

I heard at last the step I had been straining for. The dour-faced chancellor looked around the corner. “Excuse me, but the others are ready for dessert and wondered if you were going to eat any more of the main dish.”

I quickly said good-bye to Zahlfast and returned to the great hall, wondering why I should believe in my bones a message which both Zahlfast and Elerius had dismissed. All I had, against the word of a wizard who had lived here twelve years, was the strange contrast I kept feeling between Warin’s surface politeness and something underneath, and the fact that King Haimeric had thought he had aged rather slowly.

Well, King Haimeric had been sick for several years, a decade ago, so he might not be a good basis for comparison himself. And Warin had certainly put his youthful years behind him. If one were going to make a pact with the devil, I thought, it would be more sensible to ask for youth than for middle age.

Conversation at the table had shifted in my absence to Dominic’s father, who had apparently spent a few weeks in this kingdom fifty years ago, on his way east. King Warin looked up at me as I pulled out my chair.

“The school doesn’t know much about the Black Pearl either,” I said with my best attempt at cheerful normalcy. From what Warin had said earlier, Elerius did not seem to have passed along whatever he himself had learned about the Pearl to his employer. I therefore did not mention that he had read the school’s books on the topic several years earlier. “Thanks for waiting dessert for me.”

“Your father was a remarkable man,” Warin said to Dominic, picking up the conversation where I had interrupted. “You look a little like him. Prince Dominic could outwrestle any man living, won the heart of every woman between the ages of twelve and eighty, and feared nothing, either in this world or the next.”

“I didn’t know your father was named Dominic too,” said Hugo.

“You’re named for your father,” said Dominic. “Why shouldn’t I be named for mine?”

Dessert was iced lemon pudding, not what I would have chosen for a chilly evening even if I had been hungry. As I ate slowly, taking no part in the conversation, I wondered again how Elerius could have lived here for years and never felt what I now sensed about his king. There had been, I remembered, rather strange and contradictory stories about Elerius’s background and parentage. Could he perhaps have been a sorcerer’s son, this particular sorcerer’s son?

I licked my spoon and pushed the thought determinedly away. I was getting as bad as Ascelin.

III

We prepared to leave King Warin’s castle the next morning, but just as we were saddling our horses the chancellor came into the courtyard to tell me I had another telephone call. As I followed him inside I wondered if the school had found some further information, but the face in the view-screen was that of Elerius.

I was so surprised to see him it took me a moment to find my voice. But he spoke briskly and cheerfully. “So, you’re in my old kingdom, I hear! I gather King Warin is still waiting for a new wizard from the school. Like to change kingdoms, Daimbert?”

He said it as a joke, which I hoped was not intended as an insult. He looked at me from tawny hazel eyes under rather disconcerting sharply-peaked black eyebrows. I took a breath and started to ask him what he knew about the Black Pearl, but he interrupted me.