Mage Quest

Ascelin had bought us all, including Maffi, densely-woven white robes to replace our badly worn pilgrimage cloaks. I examined mine critically and decided it was made of goat’s hair. I had been afraid the long robes would make us even hotter, but instead they reflected away the sunlight. The deep folds of the head dresses shaded our eyes, and as long as we moved no more than necessary and stopped to rest in whatever shade we could find in the middle of the day, the dryness was more of a problem than the heat.

I had expected the desert to be completely barren, but even here plants grew, scrubby gray-green bushes spaced far apart, though the soil between them was bare and stony. The low, steady wind kept up a continuous murmur in the bushes. It sounded like someone speaking, just too softly to hear, a commentary in the background that we could not understand and never quite ignore. In the early morning and late afternoon lizards scampered across the open spots, but in the middle of the day the only living creature we saw, other than ourselves, was the occasional snake or high, soaring bird.

Fortunately the road we followed led from oasis to oasis, spaced a day’s journey apart, so that we could drink deeply of the alkaline water and refill the containers for ourselves and our horses. Sometimes the water merely seeped into a shallow depression scraped out between the palm trees, but usually there was a round basin, surprisingly deep, in which the water looked black though it ran clear when we ladled it out. Ascelin warned us to be sure to shake out our boots every morning in case scorpions had crawled in during the night.

At the oases we exchanged a few words with other travelers, but there were not a lot of them, for the major trade routes between Xantium and the emir’s city toward which we were heading did not detour through the Holy City. A line of jagged mountains, like teeth two thousand feet high, lay to our right, separating us from the main north-south roads.

For the most part the other travelers kept to their tents and we kept to ours. But always when Dominic was rubbing down Whirlwind at least one man wandered over, as though casually, to look the stallion over and remark on his size and strength. Whirlwind snorted both at them and at their own horses.

As the long, dry days succeeded each other, I kept looking for Kaz-alrhun, with or without the ebony horse, to swoop down on us from the sky, but he did not appear. I found myself hoping that if he did attack us he would do so soon, before we spent any more days crawling through this enormous and rocky landscape.

In the cool of the long desert evenings I tried without success to find the secret of the spell of the onyx ring. Maffi sat next to me, silent while I concentrated, his bony knees drawn up.

All I could be sure of was what I had discovered immediately, that it was a school spell, which meant technical and complicated. If it had indeed been cast by Elerius, the best wizard the school had ever produced, I was afraid that meant it was too powerful for my resources. Maybe I would have done better my whole career if I’d tried learning eastern magic.

I teased at the edges of the spell and suddenly thought I had caught a loose, revealing thread of its magic construction, but when I tried to follow it up I only discovered a large black spot before my eyes, as though I were somehow looking into the center of the onyx.

I put the ring back on my finger without learning any more of its secrets and took out Melecherius on Eastern Magic. I still hoped that somewhere in its pages was something that I could use against an Ifrit, if we met one guarding the secret of the Wadi Harhammi.

Melecherius was no more helpful this evening than he had been the evening before. Ifriti, the book told me with what I was increasingly sure was not first-hand knowledge, were essentially immortal, as full of unchanneled magic as dragons, and as dangerous. “Have you ever seen an Ifrit?” I asked Maffi.

“No,” he said thoughtfully, “but I know how to deal with them!”

“You do?” I asked in surprise.

“Of course. The tales tell all about it. Ifriti are cunning, but they’re also stupid-a bad combination. If you accidentally let one out of a bottle where it’s been imprisoned by some great spell in the past, you can always get it to go back in by taunting it. Tell it you can’t believe it ever fit in a space so small, and when it crawls back in to show you quickly slap in the binding stopper!”

This didn’t sound as though it would work unless Ifriti were even stupider than he suggested.

“Do you think I could learn to be a mage?” Maffi asked.

I looked over at his smile and bright eyes. “You probably could. I’m sure you’re intelligent enough. But I don’t know where you’d go to learn magic here in the East. I assume you’ll have to apprentice yourself to someone-do you think you’ll ever dare face Kaz-alrhun again?”

He laughed at that. “How about teaching me some of your school magic?”

“Well,” I said slowly, “magic is really the same force throughout the world. What makes western magic distinctive is its organization and some of its technical discoveries-like telephones.”

“I’ve heard about telephones,” said Maffi, who never admitted not to have heard of something. “But when we in the East need to communicate long distances, we find a deep, dark pool, say certain secret words, and then we see the face we’ve been looking for!”

“Well, I don’t know any communications spells that involve deep pools, but I could try teaching you something else. How about an illusion?”

There were surprisingly few people in Yurt interested in magic, beyond asking me to produce whatever effect they needed at the moment. Even the king’s brief interest in learning to fly was years in the past. I taught Maffi the elementary spell that would allow him to put an illusory spot of color on his arm or leg. He couldn’t get the words to work for the full range of colors, and the illusion faded of course after a few moments. But for most of the rest of our trip to the emir’s city he had a pink or purple spot on him somewhere.

“This land has been civilized for ten thousand years,” Joachim said to me. “There were cities and temples and emperors and trade here while the men and women of what are now the western kingdoms were all still dressed in skins and grubbing around in the woods after roots.”

“Then it must not have always been as dry as it is now,” I replied.

“The heat of summer may not be the best time to judge,” he said, “but I do think the climate must be drier now.” Among the broken stones that littered the side of the road were some that had clearly once been carved, as well as shards of pottery, the same tawny color as the stone but painted with dark concentric circles. Once I pulled up my mare to dismount and scoop up a silver coin from among the shards, its inscription so worn as to be illegible.

In the center of the day, when we sought out the narrow shadows of boulders and the heat beat on us like something solid, we sometimes saw mirages in the distance. A city, white-spired, lay just a few more miles down the road, flickering in welcome, though it always disappeared before we reached the place where it seemed to lie. It seemed as though the voice of that unreal city must be the voice in the wind talking to us.

“But it is a real city,” said Maffi. He had been experimenting with the spell I had taught him, and today had pink spots with purple centers on both hands. “Some people say that an Ifrit captured an entire city centuries ago, in the days of Solomon, and moves it around from place to place. But others say that cities are reflected from the desert sky as though from a mirror and appear and disappear before travelers. I think it’s all right to see a city. It’s when you start seeing lakes that you know you will soon die of thirst.”

I wasn’t sure whether to worry more about thirst, Ifriti, or bandits. The other travelers on the road, all of whom moved more swiftly than we did on their lithe, sure-footed horses, often gave us long looks from within the shadows of their headdresses, but none so far attempted to attack us, either by day or at night at the oases, under the dry and ominously rattling fronds of the palms. None of them seemed to be Kaz-alrhun or King Warin.

One morning Ascelin, whose watch it was, woke me shortly before dawn. “Could you watch for me, Wizard?” he asked quietly. “I’ll be back very soon.”

I crawled out under a sky brightening from gray to pink; he was gone before I could ask where. I relit our fire and started the water boiling for tea. As the sun’s orange rim slid up over the horizon, he reappeared, looking pleased.

“It was a desert fox,” he said, getting out the tin cups. “I saw her just at the edge of the oasis. I think she’d slipped down for a drink and had hoped to get away without being spotted. But I managed to track her-and it’s hard tracking, too, on this rocky soil! I’d show you, but I don’t want to frighten her. She’s got a den with three kits a half mile from here.”

The others were now stirring and coming to join us. “A desert fox has wonderful ears, very long,” Ascelin added. “She must need them to listen for mice-or for men trying to follow her!”