nap, Wizard,” she said, “you picked me up without touching me and lifted me high in the air. Is that magic? Can you do it again? And you have to teach me how to do it to Dolly.”
With the duchess’s daughters gone, Antonia ended up on my couch that night in spite of Gwennie’s concerns. I was sound asleep when the clang of sword on sword resounded in the courtyard.
Not Paul again! I thought, swinging my feet reluctantly out of bed. But it could not be the king returning to the castle late because he had been here for dinner, too absorbed in the Lady Justinia even to notice that the twins were not there until someone else asked about them.
There came now a hoarse shout and the high winding of a horn-the watchman’s alarm signal, which I had never actually heard used before. The horn’s note blew a second time, then abruptly was cut off. This wasn’t just someone playing a joke on the night watchman. He was in serious trouble.
“Stay here!” I cried to Antonia, who was sitting up, wide-eyed and clutching her doll. I slapped a magic lock on the door as I swung it shut behind me.
Justinia’s elephant trumpeted in the stables, and shouts and clangs came from elsewhere in the castle-I was not the only one to hear the watchman’s horn. But I was the first to the gate.
And saw row after row of warriors marching in across the drawbridge: shadowy, armored shapes, naked swords in their hands, and eyes that I could have sworn glowed in the darkness.
This couldn’t be real. It
I shouted spells in the heavy syllables of the Hidden Language, and the first warriors stopped as though they had run into a wall-which indeed they had. But their feet kept on moving as though trying to push themselves through. Their eyes still glowed and their swords were ready if my spells weakened for even an instant.
Someone ran into the little room by the gate where the bridge mechanism was worked and cranked the wheel to raise the drawbridge. Beyond its end, I could see in the dim light more warriors advancing. The ones on the bridge slid off into the moat as it rose, but the ones behind them kept right on marching, straight into the water as though not even noticing the bridge’s absence.
The portcullis slammed down as I started looping binding spells around the warriors trapped between the gate and my magical barrier. One by one they stopped moving as my spells caught and held.
I paused to catch my breath. Magic is hard physical as well as mental work. It had been very close, I thought, but I had gotten out into the courtyard with my spells in time.
There was a shout from the wall. “They’re coming up!”
Swords and glowing eyes loomed against the starlit sky. Knights with lances swarmed to the battlements to thrust back into the moat men-or monsters-that seemed to have no individuality, no awareness of their surroundings, only a need to keep on coming.
They appeared to have marched underwater across the floor of the moat and be coming straight up the wall by finding finger holds among the stones. The knights’ lamps made crazy patterns of light and shadow among the castle’s defenders and whatever was clambering up toward them.
I would have to wait to catch my breath. The thought flitted through my mind that Hildegarde would be very sorry to have missed all this.
“By the saints!” someone shouted. “It’s as though they’re directed by the devil himself!”
King Paul was in the middle of it all. I threw spell after spell onto the advancing warriors, raw terror lurking just beyond my shoulder. “Shall we make a sortie, Wizard?” the king asked me quietly.
“Magic’s stopping them,” I gasped. “Don’t try fighting them with steel-they look like they’d keep on fighting even with their heads cut off. Where’s the watchman?”
“That dark shape on the ground just inside the gate,” said Paul. “He’s not moving.”
I paused for a second to wipe my forehead and cautiously lowered the magical barrier I had thrown up around the first warriors through the gate. They were now all secured by binding spells. Several people rushed to examine the watchman.
“He’s dead!” said a knight in amazement. I was not amazed. If the watchman had not blown his horn with his final breath, if I had been only a few seconds slower getting to the gate, there would have been a whole lot more people dead by now. Yurt had always been a very peaceful kingdom. It looked like it wasn’t anymore.
IV
It took me half an hour to get all the warriors, both inside and outside the walls, immobilized with magic. We lowered the drawbridge again, and knights carried the ones who had made it into the courtyard back outside. They used grappling hooks to retrieve the rest from the moat; being under water had not taken the light from the creatures’ eyes. The swans from the moat had all retreated to dry land, hissing and flapping their wings menacingly if anyone came near.
Though the knights tried to pry the swords from the warriors’ grips, they held on far too tightly, even encased in my binding spells. I didn’t count, but there must have been at least a hundred of them. Whatever they were, I thought, studying them by lamplight with fists on my hips, they weren’t human. Human in shape, holding swords in human hands, they had no minds inside their heads or souls behind their eyes. The sweat on me was cold now that I had finished my spells, but it was more than that that made me shiver.
“Demons incarnate!” gasped the chaplain, clutching his crucifix. He took a quick look and then retreated. The whole castle was roused and milling around the courtyard-everyone, that is, except the Lady Justinia, whom no one had seen.
“Not demons,” I said slowly. Several lay on the ground by my feet, no longer struggling against my spells but watching me with glowing eyes. “Demons would not have been stopped by my spells. But they’re not alive either. They look like they’re made from hair and bone.”
“Can magic do that?” asked the chaplain, hovering a short distance behind me as though not wanting to approach but not wanting to appear to retreat any further either. “Can it make life?”
“Not life. But there are spells in the old magic of earth and stone that can give the semblance of life. They don’t teach those spells at the wizards’ school, but back in the old days of apprenticeships wizards used to learn them, and I think they still use them over in the Eastern Kingdoms, beyond the mountains.”
“How would you make such creatures?” asked the chaplain, coming one step closer and sounding interested in spite of himself.
“The traditional way,” I said, then paused for a second to renew a binding spell that seemed tattered, “was to use dragon’s teeth.”
There was a long silence. “
“I have absolutely no idea.” It must be linked with the Lady Justinia’s arrival, I thought, but I was not about to say so until I had better evidence-no use having everyone in the castle treating with suspicion someone whom the mage had entrusted to me.
Then I remembered who else had been entrusted to me. Antonia! Where was she in all this? Yelling at one of the knights to call me the second any of these unliving warriors showed signs of breaking out of my spells, I raced back into the castle and to my chambers.
She had lit the magic lamp and was sitting in my best chair with a blanket wrapped around her. “What happened?” she asked, round-eyed. “And why,” with a wrinkling of her chin as though trying to keep back tears of terror, “did you leave me all alone?”
I snatched her up and held her close. “I’m so sorry, Antonia,” I murmured, stroking her hair. She was shaking and clung to me-no cool self-possession now. “But right here was the safest place for you. Some warriors tried to invade the castle, and I had to stop them.”
Slowly she stopped shaking as I held her. “I could have helped you,” she said then, pushing herself back to look me in the face. “I can do all sorts of spells. While I was waiting for you I turned Dolly into a frog.”
A quick glance at her doll showed it unchanged: a rag doll, embroidered with a smiling face I found almost
