Below the Wizards' Tower (The Royal Wizard of Yurt Book 8) (13 page)

“The rest of the money I was paid
for that farce,” he said with a shrug.
 
“I don’t know how I could find the man who paid me originally, but I
certainly didn’t want to keep it.
 
And
I’m sure the cathedral will find a good use for it.
 
It does mean, I guess, that I’ll be
staying down by the ship-breakers again.
 
Probably the worst rooming house in the City, but it’s cheap.
 
The landlady there lets me pay whenever
I can, without expecting something every time.”

I remembered that rooming house all
too well.
 
“Come stay at the school
with me,” I suggested.
 
Zahlfast had
insisted that, given the sudden appearance of multiple griffins, the
possibility of a renegade wizard intent on harming me remained far too real.
 
“We can compare our ancestors some
more.”

XI

After sleeping the sleep of utter
exhaustion all afternoon, I woke in early evening to find Marcus pacing up and
down my room, frowning.
 
“Well, at
least I had plenty of time to write a proper letter of apology to the cathedral
priests of Caelrhon,” he said when he saw me opening my eyes.

“So you’ve been here all day?”

“The wizards insisted I stay here,”
he said in exasperation.
 
“I’ve
seen
the towers of the wizards’ school my whole life, every time I’ve been in the
City, but I’ve never been inside before.
 
And now that I’m here, they won’t let me explore.”

“Well, you could get into danger
without realizing it,” I said, stretching and beginning to think I might live
after all.
 
“Let’s go get some
dinner.”

The sun was just setting, and the
lamp-lighters
were out.
 
The towers of the school loomed above us against a pink-tipped sky.
 
As we left, a wizard—I thought I
recognized a teacher from the technical division this time, not one of the
young assistants—began following us at a discreet distance.
 
I pretended not to see him.

But I murmured to Marcus, “We’re
being followed, but don’t worry about it.
 
It’s a wizard who is supposed to be protecting me.”

“I hope my beard grows out quickly
and goes back to brown,” Marcus said, tugging at it.
 
“I should never have agreed to bleach
it.”

I chose
not
to go
to the restaurant where the waitress had first mistaken me for Marcus, not
wanting to confuse and embarrass her with apparent twins.
 
Instead I took him to a restaurant that
featured meals of vegetables and cheese.
 
My grandmother had taken me there quite a few times when I was a boy,
and I was hoping to find the food just as good as it used to be, especially the
dark rye bread.

The restaurant was dim, lit only by
candles on each table.
 
As we were
seated, I noticed a pretty dark-haired waitress at the back of the room start
forward eagerly, then suddenly retreat with an expression of dismay.
 
A young man ended up serving us instead.

“I’m glad you brought me here,” said
Marcus.
 
“I always like to eat here
if I can when visiting the City.”
 
I
could have guessed that, I thought, looking toward the pretty waitress, who was
keeping her back to us as she served others.
 
“It’s a good place if I have
some
money.
 
If I’ve just been paid,
however, there’s a really good seafood restaurant closer to the harbor.”
 
I knew all about it.

While we ate salad and noodles with
mushroom sauce, accompanied by rye bread, I kept trying to make the griffins’
appearance make sense.
 
It must
somehow connect with whoever had paid Marcus to insult the cathedral priests
and had kidnapped me.
 
In spite of
all my suspicions of Elerius, I found myself repeatedly coming back to Sengrim.

Caelrhon,
Sengrim’s
kingdom, was both where someone had had Marcus turn on the cathedral chapter,
while dressed up to look like me, and also where the griffins had appeared.

The griffins had been obtained
somehow
from the land of wild magic.
 
The
wizard who knew the spells to imprison them successfully seemed the one most
likely to have brought them to Caelrhon in the first place.

Sengrim had not reacted at all to
Marcus, but then most of the time that Sengrim had been with us it had been
dark, and Marcus had been asleep in the bottom of the air cart.
 
And as a wizard, Sengrim would have been
less likely than most to start finding comparisons between Marcus and me.
 
And I was impressed enough by his spells
to know that creating an illusory appearance, so that Marcus would not
recognize
him,
would have been easy.

But Sengrim had been home in bed in
his royal castle when we went to find him, not flying around the countryside
binding and loosing griffins, nor warning the city watch that Marcus needed to
be arrested as a dangerous vagrant.
 
And although Sengrim probably could have come down to the City to
capture me and hide me in the sea-caves, I wasn’t sure if the timing was right
for him to be taking Marcus to Caelrhon at the same time.

It was hard to think about.
 
It made my head hurt.
 
Maybe I wasn’t as recovered as I’d
thought.

“You’re quiet, Daimbert,” said
Marcus.
 
“I think I must have missed
a lot of excitement.
 
Was that a
sleeping spell, by the way?
 
I can’t
believe I would have slept through it all otherwise.”

I roused myself.
 
“Sorry.
 
I was just trying to understand what’s
been happening.
 
Yes, you were
accidentally put under the same spell that put the young griffin to sleep.
 
Though I still don’t understand why he
wasn’t where we left him….”

Marcus liked the idea of sharing a
spell with the young griffin.
 
“I do
hope that wizard isn’t going to separate the mother griffin from her chick,” he
said.
 
He glanced around the busy
room.
 
“I’ve not been in this
restaurant for over a year, but there used to be a very nice girl who worked
here
—
 
There
she is!”
 
He waved, grinning, making
it impossible for her to avoid us any longer.

She came over to our table, looking
uncomfortable.
 
“Is that really you,
Marcus?” she said, looking back and forth between us as though not sure which
one to address.
 
“I would never have
known you with a white beard.”

“
He’s
Marcus,” said Marcus with a
mischievous smile.
 
“I’m his twin
brother.
 
He’s delighted to see
you.
 
What’s it been, over a year?”

I gave him a quick glare but didn’t
want to confuse the waitress further.
 
“So you’re here!” I forced myself to say to her warmly.
 
“I didn’t see you as we came in, though
of course I was hoping to find you.
 
We certainly used to have some good times!”

In a moment, I hoped, she would be
called away.
 
But
apparently not yet.

“You never told me you had a twin!”
she said with a smile that brought out a dimple in one cheek.
 
In a moment, I thought, in spite of the
room’s dimness, she’d realize that my eyes were the wrong color and be
embarrassed all over again.

“Well, the topic never arose,” I
said vaguely, keeping my eyes down.

“When I saw
two
of you with white beards,” she continued, “I thought you couldn’t possibly be
Marcus.
 
I even thought you might be
some uncles!
 
And knowing what
uncles can be like, I didn’t want to say….
”
 
Her voice trailed away.

“Someone’s beckoning us from
outside,” said Marcus suddenly.
 
“I’ll go see what it is.”
 
And he jumped up so fast he knocked his chair over.

The waitress righted it and seated
herself.
 
I hoped she didn’t have
customers waiting for their cheese course.

She hesitated for a moment without
speaking, fiddling with Marcus’s glass.
 
Then she gave a low chuckle and said, “Well, it’s not
twins,
but I’m glad you’ve come so I can tell you.”

This had gone much too far.
 
I put my hand on hers and leaned forward
into the
candle-light
.
 
“I’m very sorry, Miss, but Marcus likes
to joke sometimes.
 
This should not
have been one of those times.
 
That
really is Marcus who just went out.
 
I’m his cousin, not his twin.
 
You need to tell him, not me.
 
I’ll get him.”

The dimple disappeared as
realization dawned.
 
She stared at
me in dismay and pulled her hand sharply back.

“Excuse me,” I muttered, moving
quickly for the door, realizing when I was already outside that it must look as
though Marcus and I were racing off without paying.

I was about to turn back when I saw
him talking to someone—a beardless man in a dark red jacket and cap.
 
The renegade wizard
who had paralyzed me and left me in the sea-caves.

“You still haven’t told me how you
got back to the City,” the wizard was saying darkly.
 
“And what do you mean, ‘The priest will
help me apologize for the insults’?”

“I should never have agreed,” said
Marcus loftily.
 
“I’ll do something
for a joke, but not if it will harm anyone.
 
The priest has your money now.
 
If you think I didn’t fulfill the
bargain, you’ll have to get it back from
him.
”

“No one was harmed by the joke,” the
wizard replied, but distractedly, as though his attention was elsewhere.
 
“I already told you about the annual
ritual….”

And I realized why he was
distracted.
 
He was putting together
a paralysis spell.

No time to counter it with a spell
of my own—if I even had a spell that would stop magic that powerful.

I turned Marcus into a seagull.

He rose, flapping hard, and sailed
away over the rooftops.
 
I had long
ago recognized where I had gone wrong in that disastrous transformations
practical exam of
Zahlfast’s
, and I even imagined
that I had become fairly good at transformations.
 
If asked, Marcus would probably have
preferred a dolphin to a seagull, but I couldn’t turn him into a dolphin in the
middle of a dry street.

The renegade wizard was so surprised
that for a second he didn’t react at all.
 
And in that second I was able to throw together a spell creating a tiny
area devoid of magical forces to surround me.
 
My wizardry wouldn’t work again until I
stepped away, but neither would any spells aimed against me.

“I’m assuming you’re Elerius,” I
said, fast before he could counter the spell—or just push me out of its
area of influence.
 
“If you’re
wondering, this is a trick I picked up in the East.”
 
I probably shouldn’t have wasted precious
seconds in boasting, but it was so rare that I got a chance to boast to
Elerius.
 
“Just admit that your plan
has failed.
 
I still don’t know what
you were hoping to do, but it doesn’t matter, because you won’t be able to do
it.
 
The cathedral priests of
Caelrhon know now that it was
not
the wizard of Yurt who
insulted them, and the griffins you intended to set on the city are safely
locked away.”

“I don’t know you think I am,” the
voice came out very deep, not Elerius’s voice at all, “but you had better be
very grateful that this is a public street, with plenty of witnesses, or you
would be dead by now.”

“Why?” I demanded.
 
“What have I ever done to you?”
 
And added, “You should know before you
try anything that one of the masters of the technical magic faculty is right
around the corner.”

But where was he, the senior wizard
who was supposed to be protecting me?

The man took half a threatening step
forward, then paused.
 
As if in
sudden decision, he launched himself into the air.
 
The last I saw of him he was detouring
around the hill of the wizards’ school and flying east.

But just before he went his eyes
glinted for a second in the light of a street lamp.
 
They were tawny, under peaked eyebrows.

Now I just had to hope that Marcus,
in the form of a gull, had the sense to fly back here to the restaurant.

The restaurant!
 
I hurried back, but it was too
late.
 
They had cleared away our
plates, and I had eaten only half of my noodles with mushroom sauce.

“Sorry!” I said loudly, for
everyone’s benefit.
 
I didn’t want
the townspeople thinking that a wizard, and not even a student wizard, would
duck out without paying.
 
“We just
saw someone in the street we had to talk to!
 
My friend will be right back, and then
we’ll be ready for the cheese course.
 
Do you still serve that delicious raspberry pudding?”