Mage Quest

Ascelin stood up, breaking my train of thought. “Then if the boy’s coming with us, we’d better start on our way again.”

“First,” said Dominic, “I want to show you something I found, just a little way down the road.”

We followed him for a half mile, then he pulled up his stallion and pointed. Cut deeply into the stone by the side of the road was a sign, that could have been an X and could have been a cross.

“This then must be where my brother’s caravan disappeared!” said Joachim.

“And look at this,” said Dominic, pointing. Cut below the cross, rather shakily, was something much smaller, that might have been the letter Y. “Is this for Yurt?”

Ascelin stood with his hands on his hips, looking back toward Xantium. “Whatever it is, we’d better move on quickly. Kaz-alrhun will soon guess what happened to his ring if he doesn’t already know. Hugo, take the boy up behind you on your horse.”

“I’m sure if the mage pursues us,” said the king, “our wizard will be able to protect us, but it would be better not to give him the trouble.”

“Of course, of course, good thinking,” I said, sliding the onyx ring onto my finger and glancing back toward the city. I very much doubted I could protect anyone from Kaz-alrhun.

PART SIX — HOLY CITY AND EMIR’S CITY I

“The Church of the Sepulchre is the most holy spot in Christendom,” read Joachim from his guidebook. “Every year on Good Friday all the lamps and candles here, and indeed in all the Christian churches of the Holy City, are extinguished. On Easter morning fire from heaven kindles the lamps. Then all the bells in the churches of the city are rung, and the holy flame is used to relight the lamps in all those churches.”

I looked around, impressed in spite of myself. Normally I would have doubted a story of fire from heaven, as a tale for the credulous or else the work of an unacknowledged wizard. But in this small circular church, whose porter had waited to let our group in until the previous group of pilgrims had gone, it was impossible to doubt. Between the columns that ringed the church were mosaic depictions of the crucifixion and resurrection, and written all the way around at the top of the wall, in the old imperial language, was the message, “Grave, where is thy victory? Death, where is thy sting? For as in Adam all shall die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”

The church with its mosaics, altars dedicated by the various eastern and western groups of Christians, and silken hangings, was not the rough cave I had expected. In the center there was no roof, only a wide, circular opening through which the chaplain told us the fire from heaven descended. The hot air from the opening made the flames of the silver lamps sway, their light dancing on the precious stones of the altars.

“This way,” said Joachim quietly. He led us out not the way we had come but to a door on the opposite side which opened onto a dark, cramped stairway cut into the rock. Dominic and Ascelin kept their heads well down as we eased ourselves around the spiral. We emerged into the cave I had expected to find in the church above, the Sepulchre itself.

Candles burned at either end of a stone slab, two feet across and as long as a man. The slab, of course, was empty. It struck us, or at least me, even more powerfully than the decorations and the lamps of the church above. We did not speak but knelt by the slab until another porter came over and told Joachim in a low voice that the next group of pilgrims was waiting to enter.

We left by a narrow door at the far end, not quite looking at each other. But I at any rate, and I thought the rest, felt that we had truly reached the goal of our pilgrimage.

“The duchess and I should try to be here at Easter,” said Ascelin a little louder than necessary as we came up a flight of steps into bright daylight.

“We haven’t been to the Mount of Olives yet,” said Joachim, his solemnity falling away in the sunshine. For the last week or more he had been as eager and enthusiastic as a boy, as all the towns we passed began to be places mentioned in the Bible.

On the long overland trip from Xantium to the Holy Land, in spite of watching constantly for mages, for Ifriti, and for bandits, we had seen very little except an increasingly dense number of pilgrimage churches, all of which the chaplain insisted on visiting. Once we had entered David’s Kingdom, and especially the last few days here in the Holy City, we had done little besides visit churches.

“And we still need to see Solomon’s Temple,” said King Haimeric, “although I understand it is not actually the temple Solomon built himself but one rebuilt after the return of the Children of Abraham from the captivity in Babylon.”

“Of course,” said the chaplain. “It was to the Temple that the child Jesus was brought by his parents on the fortieth day after his birth.”

“And while you’ve been looking at all these churches,” said Maffi unexpectedly, “you still haven’t gone to look at the Rock.”

“The Rock?” asked the chaplain.

“Of course. The rock on which God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.”

Maffi stood next to Ascelin, the tall prince’s hand resting on his shoulder. Even though in the month since he had joined us the boy had shown no sign of trying to escape, Ascelin, Dominic, and Hugo had tacitly agreed to take turns in keeping close to him. Ascelin seemed to be growing oddly fond of him.

“The Rock isn’t in my guidebook,” said Joachim, leafing through, “but it certainly sounds as though we should visit it. Maybe after we see the Mount of Olives.”

I had already noticed this. For three days he had led us through the Holy City, a bustling, modern capital, much cleaner and better laid out than Xantium although also much smaller. The entire time it appeared that to him nothing built in the last fifteen hundred years, since the later days of the Empire when Christianity had become fully established, even existed. The city was sacred to three religions, but the chaplain had looked only glancingly at the sites holy to the Children of Abraham, taking us by the spired castle of the royal Son of David without a real look, and had not even slowed down when passing those sites holy to the People of the Prophet.

I wondered briefly if Maffi too considered this a pilgrimage, then remembered Arnulf’s agents telling me that the true pilgrimage goal for those who followed the Prophet was somewhere deep in the desert, very far to the south. I was afraid I had not paid very close attention.

“I realize what struck me as strange about this place,” said Hugo to me as we stood on the Mount of Olives, looking across the Valley of Josaphat at the tangle of city roofs on the steep slopes across from us. We had already seen the little church on the Mount which sheltered the stone from which Christ had ascended into heaven. “This city isn’t built on the water.”

He was right. The City back home and Xantium were both major ports, and even the small cities that dotted the western kingdoms tended to be built on rivers. “It’s probably because it’s never been a trading center,” I suggested. “It’s been a place for kings and priests, but never for merchants.”

“It also seems,” continued Hugo in a low voice, “too, well, wholesome a city for you to expect someone to disappear. If there really were rumors here last year about Noah’s Ark-and no one seems to have heard anything about it-then that too should be exciting but not perilous. Yet the last message my mother had from my father was the one he sent from here back to the City by another pilgrim, that he would go south a little way and then start for home.”

“Then we’ll go south as well,” I said, squinting into the distance. “The Wadi that Dominic’s looking for should be off in that direction somewhere.”

“I’ve tried drawing that boy out,” added Hugo, “and he won’t say anything definite, but I keep getting the impression he met my father’s party when they came through Xantium last year.”

“The mage Kaz-alrhun had also met Evrard,” I said, glancing toward Maffi. He stood beside Dominic now, quietly listening as the chaplain pointed out all the churches one could see from here, churches built on the sites of important events in the life of Christ and the apostles or of the martyrdoms of early saints, most of which we had already visited. “I don’t know about you, Hugo, but I keep feeling there are too many coincidences here. Everyone,