The alternative was that someone was watching us from hiding, and Zahlfast wanted to warn me without him overhearing, but this seemed highly unlikely. Whatever odd stories there might be about priests and the aristocracy resenting wizardry, I doubted it had progressed to spies infiltrating the school.
“Good-bye,” I said, shaking Zahlfast’s hand. “Thank you again for having me here.” I took off flying, soaring high over the City’s spires and then inland, where the dense urban area quickly gave way to the fields, woods, and isolated villages of the western kingdoms.
It was a beautiful day of late spring, and the earth below me was spread with a hundred shades of green, but I thought less of the scenery than of Zahlfast’s warning. It was tantalizingly unspecific. Several times I had wondered if the older wizards deliberately withheld information from us, perhaps as self-sufficiency training or even as a test, and they might be doing it again. I didn’t like it, especially since I hadn’t been their student for close to twenty years.
The magic required for flying is hard mental and physical work, so it was with relief several hours later that I saw the sharp cathedral spires of the little city that served as commercial and religious center of the twin kingdoms of Yurt and Caelrhon. To preserve the sensibilities of cathedral priests who might not know their dean had sent for a wizard-and who apparently hated and feared me-I dropped to the ground half a mile from the city and walked in.
A band of Romneys was camped in the meadow in front of the city gates. Horses and goats were tethered behind their brightly painted caravans. The smoke of a dozen fires rose lazily upwards. Several children came running to meet me, black eyes shining.
“A magic trick, a magic trick!” the oldest cried, while the younger ones whispered to each other in the Romney language. Even the smallest girl wore big gold hoop earrings.
“All right,” I said with a smile. A lot of people were suspicious of the Romneys, but I liked them. There were stories that they practiced a little magic themselves, secretly and without proper training, which meant that the unwary were in constant danger of slipping over into black magic. I myself had never seen anything either evil or magical about them.
I put a few words of the Hidden Language together and in a few moments had created an illusory scarlet dragon. It reared back on its fourth and final pair of legs, roaring silently and growing until it stood ten feet high.
The children seemed oddly unimpressed. “Well, it’s a
Even though illusions are among the first things taught at the wizards’ school, it takes years of practice to be able to do them quickly and consistently. The first time I had ever made an illusory dragon, it had not been nearly this good and yet it had thrown the royal court into a blind panic. Whose illusions had these children been seeing that they could refer to my dragon as “nice”?
“Rather than just an illusion,” continued the boy, clearly disappointed in me but trying to be polite, “could you show us some real magic? Maybe some invisibility, or a cloak of fire?”
Before I had a chance to answer, a woman in a red shawl came hurrying up. Both her front teeth were gold. She spoke quickly in Romney to the children, who dispersed reluctantly, looking back over their shoulders at me and my now dissolving dragon.
“I’m sorry, sir, if the children bothered you,” she said. “They’re just so curious, and they love to see magic. How about if I tell your fortune to repay you for your trouble? I’ll even do it for free!”
I was standing in what I thought of as my wizardly pose, absolutely still except for slow breathing, hands folded and eyes fixed intently on whomever I was facing. I had picked it up from the older wizards at the school and had become quite good at it.
But the Romney woman gave me a good-natured smile. I abandoned attempts at dignity and smiled back. “How will you tell my fortune? You know natural magic is useless for predicting the future, and I hope you aren’t stirring in a little of the supernatural!” I was able to speak lightly because I had already probed delicately for magic and not found any.
“We have our ways,” she said. If she was trying to be awe-inspiring, she was having no more success than I. “Now let me see!” She walked around me slowly, examined the front and back of my head, squeezed my arm above the elbow, plucked out a hair and held it up to the light, and finally stared at my shoes.
“Yes,” she said at last, and this time without a smile. “I can see your future. Shortly you will meet someone beautiful and mysterious, and you will fall deeply in love.”
This was so stereotypically what Romney women told young men at the fairs-and not even for free! — that I had to laugh. “Don’t you have any other fortunes? You know wizards never marry.”
“Love and marriage are two different things,” she said as though the platitude had great significance. “Now, if you will excuse me, sir.”
She returned to the caravans where the children had been watching us impatiently, and I continued toward the city gates. Although I was not particularly concerned about meeting someone beautiful and mysterious, I did wonder who had given the children a demonstration of magic. It is far harder to make something invisible than to make an illusion appear, and to be able to surround oneself in real fire without being burned takes powerful magic indeed.
Inside the gates, I threaded my way through the narrow streets to the little plaza in front of the cathedral. The last time I had been here it had been full of the carts and stalls of farmers, merchants, and food sellers. Now it was a construction site, jammed with lumber, heaps of cut stone, workmen’s huts, the vats where mortar was mixed, and the wooden forms used to lay out the stonework patterns on the ground before they were hoisted up. A huge windlass was being erected, its treadmill big enough for three men.
I paused for a moment at the edge of the site. The old cathedral was still intact, and they seemed to be planning to build the new, larger church around it. So far they had concentrated their efforts on the west front, building a new facade and towers thirty feet in front of the old main steps. One of the new towers, hung with scaffolding, was already as tall as the towers of the old cathedral.
After working out the route that would be least likely to end in something being dropped on my head, I hurried across the plaza toward the church’s entrance. Above the old doors, the figures of Christ and the apostles still stared stonily down, and the figures of the damned and the saved still pleaded or prayed at their feet.
All around the air was loud with the shouts of workmen and the sounds of hammers and stone chisels, and my nose was assailed by the mixed smells of mortar, sweat, and the sausages someone was grilling for lunch. But when I went through the heavy doors of the old cathedral I passed from noise and bright sunshine into the dimness and stillness of the church’s interior.
While I was still blinking a young man came up, a junior priest or a seminary student. “The dean’s expecting me,” I told him.
III
There was a quick step outside the little office off the nave where the young priest had put me to wait, and Joachim came in. “Good,” he said. “I’m glad you’ve come.”
I seized his hand, delighted to see him, even though lately he had always seemed older than I remembered. His handshake was still much stronger than mine, but the once black hair was gray at the temples, and his face had lines I had forgotten. My own hair and beard had turned snow white before I was thirty, but other than that I looked almost exactly the same as when I graduated from the wizards’ school. When I had learned the complex spells that slow down aging, I had not counted on all my friends leaving me behind.
“Sit down,” said the dean without preamble. “I have only a few minutes now, and I need to tell you about our problems.”
“Do you think you could have a demon here?” I asked cautiously. I had been wondering what would be serious enough to make Joachim call me.
“Of course not,” he said with a faint smile, about all he ever allowed himself. “Would a priest ask for help from a wizard against the supernatural? I think the problem’s natural, but it’s magic.”
