skulls, all clean of flesh and hair or any identifying mark, were very neatly arranged to stare at us.
Hugo made no more comments about games; indeed, he said nothing more for the rest of the day. For that matter, the rest of us scarcely spoke either. We hurried on, but the shadow of that pyramid seemed still to fall between us and the sun.
“I have to apologize, Haimeric,” said Ascelin as we sat around our fire that evening. We had taken lately to making very small fires. “I had no idea the eastern kingdoms would be this dangerous. Even though the main pilgrimage route is at least half again as long, we should have stayed with it. Although I’d never been east of the mountains myself, I know a number of men who have. They’ve spoken of battles, of course, but nothing this widespread. I don’t know if it’s the season of the year-I realize that they’ve mostly been here in the fall and winter-or if whatever ‘strange’ stories are coming out of the East are stirring up trouble here.”
“The Bible tells us,” commented the chaplain, “that in spring kings ride to war.”
“Sir Hugo and his party came this way in the spring a year ago,” said Ascelin, “and I’m sure they didn’t have anyone with them as good as I am in finding the way and hiding tracks. And yet, from everything we know, they had no problems until they left the Holy Land. If I didn’t know better, I’d think something we ourselves had done was responsible for all this.”
In the next few days, however, we saw fewer troops, and slowly we began to hope that we had put the worst of the wars behind us. Ascelin still spoke darkly of how everything from the bandits to these wars seemed to be managed for our maximum peril, but he couldn’t decide if Arnulf was behind it, King Warin, or perhaps someone else we did not even know.
One afternoon, tired from weeks of travel and from a long day’s ride under a sun which had grown more and more intense, we came around a corner and found our path barred by a wall of flame.
Whirlwind reared up, but the rest of our horses, as tired as we, only stopped. I dismounted and approached cautiously. This was magic, but I wasn’t yet sure what kind.
But just as I started probing with magic, the flames disappeared. The ground was not scorched, not even warm. Illusion, then, but those illusory flames had had a solidity my best dragons always lacked.
A powerful eastern wizard would notice immediately that another wizard had tried to probe his spells. In this war-torn land, where safety was always transitory, I did not view meeting him with eager anticipation, but it was better to face him than to have him at our backs. I squared my shoulders. “There’s a wizard up ahead. He means for us to stop, so it’s no use trying to dodge around. I’m going to go talk to him.”
“I’ll come with you,” said Hugo.
“Not you, Hugo,” said Ascelin at once. “It had better be me.”
I shook my head at both. “Courage and swordsmanship won’t be any use against magic.” I hurried forward without giving Hugo a chance to say he wasn’t concerned about his personal safety-or myself a chance to start contemplating whatever dangers lay ahead.
A few yards past where the wall of flames had burned, a paved track turned off from the road. The stones were cracked and uneven, heavily worn in the center as though from a millennium of feet. I had somehow not noticed the track before. I paused for a minute, wondering what else might appear that had, a moment ago, been invisible. But then I turned to follow the track, for dancing twenty yards ahead of me along it were pale, inhuman shapes that still somehow suggested something human.
The ground began almost immediately to rise, and the sky darkened overhead. I seemed to have stepped out of the visible world I had been in and into a world lying just beyond.
I stopped and looked back. My five companions were only thirty yards behind me, and I could see them clearly as they all dismounted and sat down in the shade of a tree, but they were separated from me as if by a wall of glass. The sun still shone brightly on them, though storm clouds now hovered a short distance above my head. I wondered if they could even see the clouds from where they were-or, for that matter, if I really was on a hillside, for a minute earlier I would have sworn the land beyond the wall of flames continued level and smooth.
The air, hot all day, now became sultry as well from the lowering clouds as the track twisted and crept between jagged boulders. I gave up walking and lifted myself six inches above the ground to fly on up the hill. Before me, although I had oddly not seen it until this minute, was the massive bulk of a castle. The sky beyond it darkened rapidly toward night. There were no windows or even slits looking out from the lower levels of the castle, but near the top were two large windows, lit from within by reddish light, that could have been eyes.
Beyond the castle I could hear wolves howling, and I was briefly reminded of the wolf skin King Warin wore across his shoulder. A bolt of lightning, then another, struck the top of the castle before me, with a sharp crack and a lingering acrid smell but no following thunder. The sky was virtually black, and I could no longer see the bottom of the hill behind me. I stopped and probed for the supernatural. It was one thing to go to meet a wizard, another to walk into a demon’s lair.
But I found no evidence of black magic. I tried to reassure myself that school magic, even my own occasionally less than perfect grasp of it, should be at least as strong as the magic the wizards of the eastern kingdom learned under their apprenticeship system, but this thought did nothing to dispel the cold prickles moving up and down my back.
I crossed a bridge, glancing over the side to see a deep ditch disappear beyond sight, and reached the entrance to the castle. The broad, nail-studded doors were thirty feet high. They could have been a mouth to go with the glowing eyes of the windows, and the portcullis suspended above them the teeth. The castle was built, I could now see, of obsidian, dead black, as smooth as glass and with the edges of the stones as sharp as knives. Another bolt of lightning struck just as I raised my hand to knock.
With an ominous, high-pitched shriek, the double doors swung open. I looked in, not wanting to enter until I knew what was there, but saw no one. Then, far down the black corridor, I saw a flicker of movement, disappearing away. It was not quite substantial, a ghoul or a ghost, and gone before I could probe with magic to see if it was illusion or real.
I waited. I was not entirely sure the castle itself was real, but if someone had created it for my benefit then he would certainly show himself. The air coming through the open doors was as cold as if it emerged from a hundred yards underground.
Then, echoing down the dark corridor, I heard a sharp click of heels. In the distance I picked out a pinpoint of light that quickly grew larger. A man was approaching, carrying a candle. And not just a man, I realized at once, but a wizard. As he neared the door I could see that he was immaculately dressed in a suit of black satin, and that his face was as white as if it had been painted.
“Good evening, Wizard,” he said with a smile that showed quite a few teeth but contained no good humor. “I’ve been expecting you.”
I was about to protest that it was not evening, that it was only the middle of the afternoon, but an upward glance showed me that here, at any rate, it was night.
“You’re from Yurt, aren’t you,” said the wizard before me. He had very strange eyes, expressionless even though they flicked constantly from side to side, almost as if they had been made of stone rather than living flesh.
“What do you know of Yurt?” I demanded.
“Princeps Yurtiae” it said on Dominic’s father’s tomb. But there were hundreds of other tombs in the church of the Holy Twins, and we were a great many miles from there. Yurt itself at the moment seemed a hundred thousand miles away, a place as peaceful and brightly lit as though it were Paradise.
“Come in, and I shall tell you a number of interesting things,” the wizard said, again with the tooth-filled smile. “I do not, however, know your name.”
“Daimbert,” I said cautiously.
“Come in, Daimbert. My name is Vlad. You may call me Prince.”
I had wanted to meet the wizards of the eastern kingdoms, I reminded myself. By offering to tell me interesting things, by knowing already that I was from Yurt, this wizard had tempted me to enter his castle in a way that offers of wealth and dancing girls never would have. I wrapped a protective spell around me, although I did not know what I was trying to protect myself from, and stepped inside.
