“You mean the sign of the cross cut into the rock where the silk caravan disappeared?” I said as several things fell into place.
“The Ifrit’s wife wanted a bolt of silk, and originally I was going to make the Ifrit leave a message for people from Yurt-but then it turned out he didn’t trust my messages and couldn’t read or write himself! So I hoped that a sign of the cross would do as well, as an indication that an Ifrit had Christian captives.”
Dominic had stopped listening and was peering again through the latticework into the cave. “We’ll catch up on our stories later,” he said. “This, I believe, is where what I seek is hidden.”
“What is in there, Evrard?” I asked quietly.
He looked troubled for the first time. “I have no idea. All I know is that as long as I’m here, within about fifty yards of this cave-making sure not to touch the lattice, of course-I can work spells that will intimidate an Ifrit. Not make him
Could Evrard, with his combination of improvised spells and pure bluff, be the danger that the mage had warned me against? Kaz-alrhun had said nothing since Evrard had appeared, but all his attention, like Dominic’s, seemed turned toward the cave.
“This is where we find out at last,” I said. Dominic again reached out his hand so that the ruby, now flashing rapidly, was in contact with the marble gate over the cave entrance. With the strange clarity of vision whatever was in this cave had given me, I found the right spell to bring the magic in the ring to full potential. The words of the Hidden Language rumbled through the rift like the sound of rocks falling.
The latticework shivered, then slowly started to dissolve into vapor, losing its solidity even while it still held its shape. The sound of rocks falling continued even when I finished speaking, and as we watched the small opening beyond the gate grew larger. Dominic kept his hand extended until the cascade of stone had stopped, leaving an opening four feet high, and the white wisps of latticework vapor dissipated in the desert air.
We all shivered ourselves, then peered into the cave’s dim interior, blinking in an attempt to see. “Can you make a light, Wizard?” the king asked quietly.
Dominic didn’t wait for a light. He ducked his head to step within. But he stopped short almost immediately and backed out, rubbing his forehead. “There’s another barrier,” he said. “Is it glass?”
I probed quickly. “Not glass, but more magic.”
The ground beneath us rose and fell, as sharply and smoothly as a wave under a dinghy. A faint rumbling came from deep within the earth. We paused to stare at each other, but a minute stretched out, two minutes, and the tremor did not come a second time.
Dominic reached out his hand to touch the invisible barrier again and went straight through it, almost losing his balance. His head reemerged. “What are you doing, Wizard?”
“I’m not doing anything. It’s your ring.” I could see the spell clearly now, spread out like a highly-figured tapestry. “The latticework was just the first line of defense. The air itself is solid there, but your ruby ring is imbued with the power to pass through, apparently taking you with it.”
“Then I’d better go through,” said Dominic.
I glanced toward Kaz-alrhun, to see if he had any better ideas, but he stood a little way back, his thick arms folded, watching with interest.
I put a quick spell of light onto the ruby ring. Dominic stretched out his hand, and from the mouth of the cave we could see the ring’s firefly glow move away down a dark tunnel and disappear.
Evrard pushed against the air turned glass and tried a few spells of his own, but it remained impervious. I found I could not sense Dominic beyond the glass barrier. If the ground shifted while he was in there, we would have no warning he was about to be crushed. In the distance I thought I could hear a low murmur, which could have been the emir’s men, could have been the Ifrit, and could have been molten rock moving toward the earth’s surface.
But in a moment, we heard Dominic’s footsteps clearly again, and then the light of the ring reappeared. His head bent, he emerged from the cave carrying something awkwardly before him, and carefully put it down on the sandy floor of the Wadi.
It was a locked cabinet about a yard in height. The outside was enameled in geometric patterns, and the elaborate lock was iron. The magical clarity and the strange happiness intensified to the point that for a moment it was difficult even to think.
“It should be possible to open this lock with magic,” I said then. It would also have been possible to break the enameled cabinet, but I didn’t like to do that.
When Kaz-alrhun showed no sign of helping, I knelt beside the cabinet and began to twist and turn delicately at the lock. The iron was free of rust in spite of long being underground. I felt I could see the mechanism through its casing, and in a moment the lock gave a great click and came off in my hand.
I stepped back to let Dominic kneel down and open the cabinet door. He reached inside and took out a ceramic amphora, big enough to hold a gallon of wine, and sealed with lead.
Dominic tried the stopper, but it was set in very firmly, and his hand trembled. The amphora dropped to the ground and exploded into shards of pottery.
Lying on the ground amid the shards was a golden box, the size of Dominic’s two fists.
“No,” whispered King Haimeric. “It cannot be. It was within a golden box, within a sealed amphora, within a locked cabinet, but the cabinet was inside a derelict ship sunk in the deepest rift of the Outer Sea.”
There was no immediately obvious way to open the box, but when Dominic picked it up in his hand, the hand with the ring, a thin line appeared all the way around it. I tried the opening spell that had gotten us through the latticework without effect. But as Dominic held it, the thin line widened. With his other hand, he took hold of the top and carefully opened it.
Beyond expectation, beyond hope, lying in the box on a bed of black velvet was a black sphere. It was so dark that it appeared to absorb light, so smooth that when Dominic touched it with his finger it began slowly to spin: King Solomon’s Pearl.
It took us several minutes to be able to speak again. Instead we stood in silence, looking at it.
I don’t know about the others, but to me it seemed to have a voice, a low calling just beyond the edge of full intelligibility, speaking of magic before Solomon, before humans had made any attempts to channel magical forces into comprehensible or repeatable channels. And yet it was still magic, magic that I with my school training and my somewhat patchy knowledge of herbs could understand. This went beyond either ambition or happiness, but I knew that with the Pearl I could become the greatest wizard the world had ever known.
I looked toward Kaz-alrhun and Evrard and saw solemn expressions that I thought must match my own. The mage’s magical abilities, I felt suddenly certain, had returned to him.
In a few swift seconds a complete vision passed through my mind, of myself returning to the wizards’ school with the Pearl, demonstrating magical abilities beyond anything even the best and oldest of the masters had ever imagined. With my powers, I would immediately bring the eastern kingdoms and their wizards under the control of the west; I would stop all wars between aristocrats and wrangling between wizards; I would make the Ifriti into my agents; I would reconform both weather and geology to make the earth more comfortable; I would rewrite all the textbooks at the school to make them match my own magical vision; I would enrich the soil so that the crops never failed; I would regulate all trade closely so that all dealings were fair to everyone and goods were always available where needed; I would bring even the dragons of the wild northern land of magic under the control of organized wizardry … Daimbert the Wise, they would call me, Daimbert the Just, Daimbert the God.
And the first thing that happened would be that I would have all the headaches and responsibilities of administration. The second would be that all the wizards and priests and aristocrats, as well as all the villagers and townsmen of the west, and probably even the dragons, would unite to overthrow me.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, then opened them again. And I had thought Warin’s offer to be the Royal Wizard of a large and wealthy kingdom a temptation! Even with the Pearl, as I had always known and should always have remembered, no wizard can do more with magic than tug at the edges of the powers that had shaped the world. If this temptation to tug harder was what Kaz-alrhun had meant by unexpected and unimagined dangers, he had a point.
