The Witch, the Cathedral

descended, apparently not seeing whatever he was seeking. I preferred to think this was good.

Just before we landed, I spotted something odd about some of the boulders. Rather than being scattered, they seemed to be piled up, as though to form a monstrous hut. I nudged Vor and pointed, but he just shook his head, and in a second the hut or whatever it might be was hidden beyond other rocks. At any rate I saw nothing alive. We hit the ground hard, and the cart tilted to one side.

“So what do you suggest?” I asked Vor, picking up the binding box from where it had slid down with the rest of our baggage.

“Just take it out and release it,” he said shortly.

I put one leg over the edge of the air cart. “All of you stay here,” I said. “By now you’ve heard me say many times the two words of the Hidden Language that will get the cart off the ground. Use them if you have to.”

Carrying the heavy black box, I walked slowly away from the cart, trying to probe for magic. What I found was almost overwhelming. I was used to the orderly channeling of magic, but here magic whirled and spun in complete confusion. There was too much detail, too little focused, for me even to try to identify the source.

I closed my mind resolutely against these magical influences. This must be one of the spots in the borderlands where human habitation was only a short distance from wild magic.

Fifty yards from the air cart I set the black box down. Slowly, cautiously, I pulled open the lid and peeked inside. The frog was still there, glaring at me furiously. As soon as daylight touched it, it began to kick. The rope with the binding spell in which I had originally tied it was gone; I wondered if the frog had eaten it.

I swung the box forward, catapulting the gorgos frog out. It hit the side of a rock, rolled down, and righted itself. I realized I was trembling as I watched. It started to work itself along, although a frog’s feet do not do well on rough stone.

“Go ahead,” Vor called. “Turn it back into a gorgos.”

I hesitated. There seemed no reason not to leave it a frog. Sooner or later it might be able to overcome the transformation spell by itself, but in the meantime we should be able to get well away.

On the other hand, I feared that part of my own mind might still be attached to the gorgos. I had summoned it to me while transforming it, and there might still be enough attachment that it would be compelled to follow me.

Carefully, feeling my way into my own magic and trying to avoid the swirling alien magic around me, I put together the words to break the transformation spell. When I said the final syllables to restore the gorgos to itself, my mind leaped back out of the calm channels of magic into a body whose heart was pounding madly.

It had worked. The gorgos crouched on the ground where the frog had lain a second before. It was appreciably larger than I remembered, especially the fangs.

Both terrified and exhilarated, I started flying backwards toward the air cart. My mind was clearer than it had been for a week, and for a second I felt that nothing could overcome me and my magic. The gorgos seemed to be startled at its abrupt return to itself. It glared about with burning eyes and scratched its side with long, curved claws.

Then, behind me, I heard a shout. I spun around. It was Vor.

Beyond the tumbled boulders, in the direction in which I thought I had seen stones heaped into a hut, I heard an answering bellow.

The gorgos spread its bat-wings and rose into the air, looking back toward the bellow but moving toward me. I retreated more rapidly.

And then I saw, rising over the boulders, a second fanged gorgos.

The first gorgos, my former frog, saw it too. He turned from pursuing me and, with a great flap of its wings, launched himself toward it. The two monsters rushed at each other, slavering mouths wide open, claws ready to rend each other’s flesh. Just before they met, I thought I sensed something very odd about the second gorgos.

Not stopping to analyze it, I rushed after the air cart, which had taken off and by now was careening across the sky. The two gorgoi roared and screeched, apparently ripping off major parts of each others’ bodies.

I caught the cart after a mile’s pursuit. The magic words to lift off had put it into the air, but without further direction the purple flying beast’s skin had started flying on its own with little regard for the people in it.

Vor and the two princes clung to the edge, looking ill. I dropped inside, stopped the cart’s spinning, and straightened out the course. “Back to your valley?” I asked Vor, as calmly as if I dealt with gorgoi every day.

He blinked. “Yes. That would be good.”

Paul looked at me wide-eyed. “I don’t know how I could have gone all these years without realizing what a good wizard you are.” I nodded gravely at this praise from my future king.

The cart banked and started to return. I could still hear faint bellows in the distance. I turned from Paul to address myself to Lucas. “I trust, Prince, that you will be able to report to the dean that I did indeed destroy the gorgos.”

His lips tight, Lucas nodded slowly. I had plenty of questions for him now that my mind was abruptly clear again, but even more pressing were my questions for the construction foreman.

“You knew about the second gorgos, Vor,” I said. “Ever since the first one appeared in the cathedral city, you’ve been working to bring the two gorgoi together. Now that, I hope, they’re finishing destroying each other, I would like you to tell me what’s really been happening.”

Vor looked at me in silence for a moment. The two princes leaned back against the far side of the air cart, their elbows hooked over the side. Paul appeared interested and amused, Lucas suspicious.

“The second gorgos wasn’t really a gorgos,” I prompted Vor. “It’s something-or someone-turned into a gorgos. Was it a person?”

He smiled suddenly and fleetingly. “The prince is right-you are a good wizard.” I had scarcely received so many accolades in one day before. I hoped they would remember to relate all the details when we stopped at the blue house on top of the mountain on the way home.

“It used to be human,” Vor continued, “a man from my valley.” Once I had him talking, he seemed uncharacteristically willing to continue. “As I’m sure you already guessed, it was the man I mentioned to you, the one who determined he was going to kill a gorgos. He did kill it, too, but its gorgos spirit overwhelmed him, body and soul, as it died.”

“And that’s why you warned me not to try to kill the gorgos frog.”

He nodded. “Maybe another wizard could have overcome your gorgos with wizardry.” So much for the compliments! “But when it became clear that you were either going to have to take it back to the land of wild magic or else kill it by force, I decided I’d better come along. I knew where to find a second gorgos, and I knew if they killed each other they would both be dead, with no more humans taken over by their spirits.”

“There’s more to it,” I said, watching Vor’s face. His willingness to tell me all this now, I thought, was an attempt to hide something else. “You didn’t merely want to dispose of the gorgos from the cathedral city. You had always known about the gorgos here, and you had been wanting to kill it for years.” He blinked in what might have been agreement.

“You brought me and the transformed frog up here on purpose to kill the gorgos that was already here,” I continued, holding him with my eyes. “The gorgos here, the one that used to be a person: that was the reason you left your home in the valley originally. What did it do to you?”

Again he gave that fleeting smile. “It killed my father,” he said in his normal laconic tone.

As he seemed unwilling to add anything else, I said, “So is that why you had to leave? You couldn’t live on in your valley with your father unavenged, but you couldn’t avenge him without becoming a gorgos yourself?”

He did not answer. My brain, awakened fully from the miasma into which the gorgos had dragged it, had at last worked out something important. Let the others imagine that I had realized it all along. “Vor,” I said with my best wizardly scowl, “this all started when you became involved in the plots of a renegade wizard. Since his gorgos nearly killed me, I think I have a right to know about it.”

The two princes looked startled, but I ignored them.

“Nothing worked out as you had planned, Vor,” I said sternly, “at least until the two gorgoi destroyed each other. Did you think that I would believe it was sheer coincidence that a gorgos should appear in the very cathedral city where the foreman of the construction crew wanted revenge on a gorgos? No,” shaking my head, “it was not coincidence.”

The air cart flapped steadily, carrying us across the brown borderlands of the land of magic. I paused to let