someone had been taking lessons from the nixie.
I set the air cart down at the base of the rocky pinnacle and ascended the steps, my heart beating fast. Guards with halberds barred my way at the top. “I would like to speak to Elerius, your Royal Wizard,” I said, but already I could see a black-bearded figure coming up behind them. He must have been warned by the triggering of the protective spells he had set up to guard his castle from creatures from the land of wild magic.
“How delightful to see you, Daimbert,” he said, as hearty and welcoming as good old Book-Leech on the mountaintop in the borderlands. I just wished I could believe him equally sincere “Come to my study. And I understand that congratulations are in order!”
Then I had reached him before the news that I had refused the position at the school. “I turned the Master down,” I said casually. “How much role did you play in setting up the offer?”
This startled him. He stopped dead in the middle of asking a deferentially hovering servant to bring us tea, then whisked me up the stairs into his study and slammed the door. I had never seen so many books in one place in my life. In a moment Elerius had regained his cheerful composure, but I could tell it was not the same.
“Zahlfast and the Master must have been quite surprised!” he said, smiling while his hazel eyes looked me over intently. “How could you refuse an offer to join the permanent faculty-something they have offered no one in thirty years? Is Yurt so charming, or do you have your eye on a bigger kingdom somewhere else? Or,” and he paused for a few seconds, “is that witch in Caelrhon more appealing than the City?”
That was the final evidence I needed. That he would threaten-even obliquely threaten-to blackmail me meant I must have information about him that he wanted kept secret.
“Don’t smirk, Elerius,” I said quietly. “You can guess and insinuate all you like. But if you push me too far I’ll just tell the Master I’m leaving organized wizardry to spend the rest of my life doing illusions at fairs-after I tell him that you were behind Sengrim every step of the way.”
We were interrupted before he could answer by the entry of servants with tea. It was quite a production: four servants in livery, one to open the door, one to carry the teapot, one to carry the tray with cups and spoons, and one to carry a plate of gingerbread puffs baked in brightly-colored foils. I bit into one when it became clear that the servants would not go until everything had been found satisfactory. Not bad, although Yurt’s cook’s were better.
Elerius had had time to prepare his response by the time the servants finally left. “I
“It means you brought a fanged gorgos to Caelrhon which nearly killed me,” I said, looking at him levelly over my teacup. “Sengrim would never have managed that on his own. He had to be working with a demon-and Zahlfast said he wasn’t-or else an extremely good wizard. Theodora-the witch you seem to know about-touched a wizard’s mind in the cathedral city, but this wizard was not anyone she recognized. And that means it wasn’t Sengrim, not even in his disguise as the old magician. Both the cathedral cantor and the construction foreman mentioned dealing with a wizard, but somebody
Elerius’ teacup gave a sudden rattle in its saucer. I looked at him sharply but he only smiled, waiting for me to continue.
“And then Zahlfast and the Master seemed well informed about the bishop’s inaugural sermon, saying there was another wizard there. They didn’t say who, but it must have been someone they trusted. You knew all along I was in Caelrhon, because you sent me a letter urging me to leave, realizing full well it would have exactly the opposite effect; I should have been suspicious at the time that you even knew I was there. The Master forgave me for being indirectly responsible for Sengrim’s death. Did you think he would forgive you for being directly responsible for mine?”
“You were never in serious danger, Daimbert,” said Elerius, passing the gingerbread puffs. This wasn’t how I remembered it. “I was of course interested to see how you would do against a gorgos with your particular style of magic, but I was there, disguised, among the townspeople.” The image of a face I had seen in the crowd, past Lucas’s shoulder, as I lay on the paving in front of the cathedral suddenly clicked into place. “Another minute in your fight with the gorgos, or another move by Caelrhon’s crown prince, and I would have had to intervene.” I didn’t like his timing; there hadn’t been any minutes or moves to spare. “And you would never have been in any danger at all if you hadn’t been so precipitate. Sengrim was intending to defeat the gorgos himself-with my help, of course.”
“You say Sengrim intended to overcome a gorgos he had himself brought from the land of wild magic,” I said slowly, peeling foil with fingers that I kept from trembling by sheer will. “You realize, Elerius, that this makes no sense whatsoever. So far you’ve helped a renegade wizard turn on his own employer, attack a cathedral, summon a hundred dragons from the land of magic, and nearly kill scores of people at the coronation of the king of Yurt. This is scarcely suitable in the school’s best graduate! I came to talk to you before telling the Master any of this, but if you don’t have an adequate explanation I’m heading straight back to the City tonight.”
Unless you imprison me, I thought, keeping my thoughts well shielded, or unless you instructed the servants to poison the gingerbread puffs.
“A good idea, talking to me first,” said Elerius with a remarkably genuine smile. “I know there have been a few occasions in the past, Daimbert, where you ended up looking like a fool. It’s this habit of acting on instinct, you know. It may serve you well in your personal sort of improvisational magic, but it’s a poor guide in ordinary affairs. No sense letting the school think they had a narrow escape when you turned down their position!”
I waited silently, knowing he would have to say more. Outside it was fully dark, and the magic lights were reflected in the windows. On the wall hung Elerius’s diploma from the school, nearly six feet long, with his name written in letters of fire at the top and the lower half dense with mentions of honors, distinctions, and areas of special merit. Stars twinkled all around the edge. Mine in my chambers in Yurt had my name and the twinkling stars and nothing else.
“Sengrim, as I mentioned,” Elerius said at last, “first came to my attention several years ago when he was trying to persuade the school that they ought to offer at least a series of lectures on fire magic-with him teaching it, of course. The Master wasn’t interested; there’s that one course I occasionally teach myself on the old magic, and he seemed to feel that was enough. Besides, I believe he wasn’t sure Sengrim would be an appropriate mentor for the young wizards-he was acting rather strangely even then. He wouldn’t even say how he’d learned fire magic …”
“I know how he did,” I said shortly. “Go on.”
Elerius lifted sharply-peaked eyebrows at me but continued. “I was interested myself, however, both for my own course and because I believe wizards shouldn’t reject anything that might prove useful. And that’s why Sengrim came to consider me his friend, and why he turned to me this spring when he quarreled with his prince, pretended in a fit of pique to blow himself up, and then decided rather belatedly to try to reestablish himself at Caelrhon. I agreed, somewhat reluctantly I must say, to Sengrim’s plan to prove to his king and prince what a good wizard he really was. I have to admit I originally thought his plan as nonsensical as you do: first to bring a monster from the land of magic and then to overcome it in a very public setting to show his competence, amazing everyone by his extremely timely return from the dead. But when it became clear that he would do it with or without me, I decided it would be better to help.”
“So he decided after talking to the construction foreman,” I said slowly, “that a gorgos would serve his purposes nicely, and you helped him go up to the borderlands and capture one-as well as a horse for the Romneys, who he was afraid might reveal that the ragged old magician in the area was in fact the supposedly deceased Royal Wizard in disguise. You helped with that disguise too, didn’t you-something thorough enough to fool even another wizard. Just out of curiosity, exactly where near Caelrhon did you manage to imprison Sengrim’s gorgos?”
“There’s a little grove a mile outside of town, a grove thick with unchanneled magic. It wasn’t difficult to channel it, to make a chamber in the ground under the spring where the gorgos could be bound until it was wanted.”
I closed my eyes for a second. I had been heedless of a number of things the day I went there with Theodora.
Elerius poured out the last of the tea. “I’m afraid, Daimbert,” he continued, “that you rather spoiled Sengrim’s plan for him. It was supposed to end with him triumphantly telling Prince Lucas that even the bravest and most able kings needed wizards to protect their kingdoms from wild magic, and being welcomed again into the royal court.
