Mage Quest

IV

The corridor was lit only by the wizard’s candle. “Is this your principality?” I asked, standing between him and the doorway so that he could not close the doors before I was sure what I was getting into.

“It certainly is,” he said with a slow blink. His eyelids, I noted, were translucent, like the eyelids of a snake, and did not hide the stone eyes behind them.

“And yet you’re a wizard,” I said unevenly, holding onto the door frame. I was suddenly swept with a terror so profound that for a moment I wasn’t even sure I could stand unaided. This was either irrational fear of something outside my previous experience, or good sense telling me to escape while I was still alive.

“Of course. I know over in the western kingdoms you wizards serve the kings and the aristocracy, but here we prefer to be our own masters.”

In the shadows behind him I thought I saw-although it could have been the shadows from his candle-a viper moving slowly across the floor.

And then I knew the source of my terror. It had nothing to do with this wizard, strange though he might be. It was memories of another long corridor down which I had groped nearly ten years ago, the closest I had ever been to death and damnation. And that corridor had been in Yurt. If I was going to find safety, I would have to create it for myself, wherever I was.

I pushed myself forcibly away from the door. “I’m curious, Prince,” I said. “Is this castle real?” The door frame, at any rate, was solid under my hand.

“It depends on what you mean by real,” he answered ambiguously and turned his back to me. He certainly seemed unafraid of me. “Come with me, and I think you’ll find out several things about which you’ve been wondering.”

As soon as his back was turned, I tried another quick magic probe to reassure myself that he was human and no demon. But then I followed, watching the floor for snakes. The door stayed open behind me, but beyond it was only night and wolves.

Candles held by invisible hands proceeded us down the corridor. Prince Vlad led me into a room off the corridor where I had hoped there would be more light, but it was windowless. Heavy hangings covered the wall, worked black on black, with brief shots of white in a design confused and disconcerting enough that I tried not to look.

“I’ve been waiting for you ever since my old friend, King Warin’s chancellor, said you were coming this way,” he said, sitting down in one black leather chair and motioning me into another.

“Warin? You know him?” The terror I had tried to dismiss by the doorway was back again in full strength.

“I already told you I know a number of interesting things, including the answers to many questions I’m sure you’ve asked yourself.”

“And what do you want in return for this information, Prince?” I asked, trying to make his eyes meet mine.

“Very good, Daimbert,” he said as though pleased. “I knew you would not disappoint me. Of course I want something. What I want is knowledge from you.”

“I don’t think I have any knowledge that you would want,” I said slowly.

“Of course you do,” he said with another smile. I wondered briefly how many teeth he actually had. “You’re a school-trained wizard and know the wizards’ secret of perpetual youth. It’s obvious-you’ve got a white beard and hair, and yet you’re still youthful and vigorous. What age are you really? A hundred? A hundred and fifty?”

“I’m not yet forty.” I had no intention of telling him about the incident that had turned my hair white overnight. “School magic has no secret of youth. Wizards in the west may live well past two hundred, but if we do it’s because of the same spells that wizards used for generations, even before the school was founded-the same spells, I expect, available to you.”

His stone eyes managed to convey disappointment. He pursed his thin lips, then smiled again. “We’ll return to this in a moment. But you in the west know how to see and to hear someone over a great distance, I understand.”

“Telephones,” I agreed. “But don’t ask me, Prince. I’ve never been any good at technical magic.” I was not going to explain that the far-seeing attachment, while my own invention, had been discovered essentially by accident. “The wizard you probably should ask is Elerius, who used to work for King Warin. By the way, does the king know that you consider his chancellor your friend?” I leaned forward and then wished I hadn’t, because the wizard’s white face up close was like a mask, and for a moment I felt irrationally convinced that beneath that mask was the face of a corpse. “You said you had information for me. The first information I want is how you knew we were coming.”

“Warin’s chancellor sent me a message as soon as you left his kingdom.”

I was about to interrupt and ask how that message was sent, since pigeon messages between the eastern and western kingdoms were notoriously unreliable, and this wizard had no telephone, but I reminded myself that there were certainly other ways-a fast-riding messenger, even a spell-captured eagle of the high peaks. My guess was that Warin, even if he were a sorcerer, had no idea that his trusted chancellor was also in this wizard’s pay- which thought made me wonder briefly if there had also been activities of Elerius’s which he had not known about.

“My friend knew that I’d been waiting for a long time for visitors from Yurt,” Prince Vlad added.

“I know who you are,” I said suddenly. The king’s younger brother might not be someone to produce terrifying stories, but this man certainly was. “You’re the wizard who was employed, fifty years ago, by Prince Dominic of Yurt.”

“It was difficult tracking you across all those miles between the mountains and here,” Prince Vlad continued without denying my guess. “Someone in your party is extremely good.” I would have to tell Ascelin if I lived to see him again.

He motioned toward a black marble table on the far side of the room. “That is how I knew where you were.” I went over to look. On the table was a three-dimensional map of what appeared to be this part of the eastern kingdoms. “Try the skull.”

By the map was the face of a skull, with crystals set in the eye sockets. When I put it in front of my own face to look through the crystals, the model of the eastern kingdoms became enormous, as though I were an eagle flying over it. I could see armed men on the roads, houses tucked into clearings, castles at the river crossings. The tiniest movement of the head, even of the eyes, took one’s line of vision miles. It would be hard to find people who were deliberately hiding, even with this magic, but my hands trembled as I slowly set the skull down again.

“It was only because so many of the other wizards of the eastern kingdoms owe me favors-either princes and counts in their own right or allied with kings-that I was able to keep track of you at all. Troop movements are a rather awkward way of easing people you can’t quite see in the direction you want, but it was eventually effective. After all, you’re here now.”

“Wait,” I said, without enough time to wonder how many of the soldiers we had seen and hidden from were actually being moved for our benefit. “You died of wounds and the fever fifty years ago.”

“There are many versions of death,” he said vaguely, pulling his translucent lids down over his eyes.

“But you are that wizard?” I demanded, determined to find out at least one clear piece of information.

“That’s what you want most to know?” he said, opening his eyes again. He seemed to be able to see with them, but I was more and more convinced they were something artificial. “Yes, I might as well tell you that I am. If you’re as young as you claim, you won’t have known Prince Dominic, but I never trusted him. He told me he could fight a dozen men at once, but it took only ten to overcome him when we were both struck down. Even after his manservant and I buried the prince, I feigned a much worse fever than I actually had.”

“He didn’t trust you either,” I said. I paused, pushing back terror, and continued, “So you didn’t actually die?” More than anything else, at the moment I wanted reassurance that, whatever he might have done with his body, his dead soul had not been sent back to earth from hell.

But he did not give me that reassurance. “Because I did not trust Prince Dominic, I didn’t tell him that part of the magic necessary to uncover the Wadi’s secret was an opening spell I attached to the ruby ring itself.”

“What a shame,” I lied. “We left the ruby ring home in Yurt.”