Mage Quest

entirely recognizable, sir.”

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” said the chaplain. “You’ve taken me for my brother. Are you his agents?”

One of the men glanced around and lowered his voice. “You’re quite right, sir. It’s better to maintain the disguise. We’ll accompany you to the Market.”

Joachim hesitated for a second, sliding a finger inside his collar and along the scar, but then stepped confidently forward, forcing the rest of us to follow. I looked again for Maffi and didn’t see him.

The shortcoming of even the best magic is that it cannot tell you what someone else is planning. These men, whom Joachim seemed ready to trust, could be leading us to our deaths. But beyond freezing their curved swords into their sheaths, which I did at once, I could think of nothing else to do but stay very close to the chaplain.

It had never been clear from Joachim’s account of his telephone conversation with Claudia-and it might not even have been clear to him-whether she had ever gotten the pigeon message he sent her from the mountains. If she had not heard until that phone call that whatever she had given him had been stolen, then Arnulf probably had not had time to get word to his agents here before we arrived. They should know, then, what it was King Warin’s bandits had stolen from us and expect us to have it.

“We’ll have to hope it is still for sale,” said one of the men. “I assume you’ve brought what he wanted, Arnulf.”

“I already told you,” said Joachim, too honest to maintain a deception that could have been very informative, “you’ve mistaken me for my brother.”

“But you did bring it with you?” The turbaned men seemed disturbed for the first time. They stopped and looked at Joachim fully. Ascelin and I tried unsuccessfully to ease between them and the chaplain.

“Bring what?” he asked.

“The magic ring, of course,” said one of the men in an undertone, with a quick glance around. “Hidden in a bag of money, as you said you would bring it to us.”

Dominic jammed his hand with the ruby ring into his pocket.

“My brother’s wife gave me a gift before we left,” said Joachim, in a voice clear enough that the turbaned men tried to shush him. “I never saw what was in it. But it was stolen as we crossed the mountains into the eastern kingdoms. The captain of the ship we took here suggested-obliquely, it’s true-that something stolen from us might itself end up in the Thieves’ Market.”

“We’re here now,” said one of the men cautiously. “Don’t you trust us either? At least we can find out if he’s sold it to anyone else.”

Ascelin looked at me with raised eyebrows. Short of seizing the chaplain bodily and carrying him away, we didn’t have much choice but to follow. The narrow street we had followed debouched into a broad square, just inside the city’s outer walls.

The sparse population of the last few streets was again replaced by noisy crowds. The square was full of booths, striped awnings protecting the people and goods from the harsh sun. Beneath the awnings was piled everything from clothing to weapons, and the spaces between were jammed with people. “I wonder if any of them sell rootstocks for roses,” said the king.

For a second, as our street sloped down into the market, we could see the crowds from above, but then we were down among them. There was the same wild mix of people we had seen in the city streets. “Watch out for pickpockets,” said Ascelin in a low voice.

But the turbaned men smiled. “In fact, the Thieves’ Market is probably one of the few places in Xantium where you don’t have to beware of pickpockets. The thieves patrol themselves. Of course, you do have to beware of everything else …”

Including you, I thought. My mind raced, trying desperately but unsuccessfully to think why Claudia would have sent a magic ring with us, assuming that was indeed what had been in her package.

We were now pushed on every side by sweating bodies so that it was hard to pick our way, and almost immediately I lost any sense of direction. The tiny alleys between the stalls were even more of a maze than the city streets. Voices on every side urged us to buy spices, armor, shoes only slightly used, silken robes, snacks, mirrors, and jeweled pendants. I caught glimpses of glittering brocade, of peacock feathers, of knives whose blades were inset with enamel, of tooled leather, and of bales of uncarded wool such as used to arrive in our ware house in the City. On the far side of the market, I thought I saw a carpet rising above the heads of the crowd with two men seated on it, but when I rubbed my eyes it was gone.

I tried probing with magic and found layers and cross-layers of spells so dense and so strange that I immediately gave up any attempt to understand them. I doubted Melecherius had understood them either. Even aside from a carpet that could fly, the colors and the quality of much of the merchandise must be heightened by illusion.

“Was everything here stolen?” Hugo asked Ascelin in an undertone.

One of Arnulf’s agents answered for him. “Not necessarily. Some of the merchants here just prefer a more, well, informal setting than the government-regulated market. But a lot of the merchandise is stolen, and the market is run by the thieves’ guild.”

“Why does the government allow it?” protested Hugo.

“Do you think the governor has a choice? Didn’t you know what he had to offer the guild in return for the safety and integrity of the harbor?”

I looked again for Maffi, but it was hopeless. The turbaned men found their way without hesitation through the dense crowd, taking advantage of every momentary gap in the press of humanity to move forward while we struggled behind them. Abruptly the crowd opened up, so unexpectedly I almost pitched onto my face.

We had reached a final booth on the very edge of the market. Its awning was closed, but a chess puzzle was set out on a board next to it. Unlike every other booth, this one was surrounded by a clear space ten feet wide. It was as though no one wanted to come too near.

One of the turbaned men let out his breath in a hiss. “I’d feared to hope, but it is still here. I can see the feet. Arnulf, or whoever you claim to be, you will remember, won’t you, all we have done to inform you and all we have done to bring you safely here?”

The striped awning hung to the ground, but in a second I saw an eye through a slit, and with a sharp whirl the awning was wound up. We were abruptly confronted by an enormous black stallion.

It was big enough even for Ascelin, and so still and so uniformly dark that it could have been ebony. After an amazed second, I realized it was ebony. It was a magnificent work of art, but it wasn’t real.

And then my eye was caught by something far more fascinating. Standing behind the ebony stallion was a mage.

Ascelin bit off a warning as I stepped forward into the space where no one else dared go. But I was too fascinated to care. A man bulging with fat, almost as dark as his horse, decked with odd bits of colored silk as though he made up for not being able to fit into ordinary clothes by wearing a lot of different small ones-all I saw was someone bristling with magic.

This was completely different from meeting the self-styled prince in the eastern kingdoms. His magic had been recognizable, even if dark and twisted with inturned evil. The magic I felt from this man was almost as novel as meeting magic itself for the first time.

“A mage who dares step up boldly,” boomed the mage in a voice between a bellow and a laugh. His smile showed a gold tooth as his dark eyes scanned the rest of our party from Yurt, apparently liking what he saw. “And not a local magic-worker, I would guess, but one from the western kingdoms!”

I met his eyes, a voice in the back of my brain telling me insistently that I ought to be wary and afraid, and feeling not at all afraid. Instead I felt fascinated, as well as both amused and disgusted with Melecherius, whose book had never prepared me for this. The mage’s eyes were pitch black, and the pupils completely filled the sockets, as though he did not have any whites. “Yes,” I heard myself say, “I am Daimbert, Royal Wizard of Yurt.”

The eyes widened, but still no white showed. The mage lifted his belly off the counter and came around his horse and out to meet me. “And I am Kaz-alrhun, the most powerful mage in Xantium. I have long hoped that someone from Yurt would visit me!”

I coveted the beautiful dark color of his skin and wondered briefly if he might be from Sheba.

“You’ve heard of Yurt?” I asked politely. The voice inside my head was now screaming that my absence of