Below the Wizards' Tower (The Royal Wizard of Yurt Book 8) (3 page)

The kingdom of Yurt was two hundred
miles from the great City, so none of us got here very often.
 
I had been sent off with a shopping list
of items not easily accessible at home.
 
I had an appointment with the Master of the school for late morning, but
before then I had plenty of time to pick up a few things—and to look for
signs of Marcus.

The streets were full of people
hurrying about their business.
 
Gulls floated on the air above the city, looking ethereal and white
until they spotted something edible, not yet found by the street-sweepers, and
screamed at each other as they tugged and fought over it.
 
I examined my shopping list.

Both the queen and her aunt had
requested lace, apparently to decorate a clothing item that I, as a man, would
never see, for their written description had emphasized the requisite delicacy
and added, “As appropriate for certain personal items.”

I found a shop that specialized in
lace and ribbons, well up the hill from the harbor, and peered in the window,
trying to decide if what I saw was delicate enough.
 
And suddenly I heard a delighted voice,
“Marcus!”

A woman came hurrying out of the
shop and seized me by both hands.
 
“Why didn’t you tell me you were back in town?
 
And what have you done with your beard?”

“Um,” I managed, looking down into
soft brown eyes, “I think you’ve confused me with someone else.
 
I’m not Marcus.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t know you?”
she said with a chuckle.
 
“Hoping to
fool me?
 
I know you too well for
that!”

This was getting ridiculous.
 
Did I somehow have a long-lost twin
about whom my parents had somehow never told me?
 
And did the lace-maker know the
waitress?

“Look at me closely,” I said, hoping
that no long-lost twin existed.
 
“You’ll find that it isn’t just the color of my beard that makes me
different from Marcus.”

She looked me up and down, in full
daylight and from closer than the waitress had been last night, and after a
moment released my hands.
 
A slow
flush spread up her cheeks.
 
“But
the way you walk, the way you stand, even the sound of your voice
—
 
You
must
know him!”

“I’m sorry to have confused you,” I
said gently, “but I’ve never met him.
 
I’m a wizard, visiting the wizards’ school.
 
I assume Marcus is not a wizard?
 
I thought not.
 
But to make up for confusing you, how
about if I buy some of your lace?”

I hurried away a few minutes
later,
with quite a bit of lace that I hoped would do for
“certain personal items.”
 
When the
young woman asked if I wanted white lace or cream, I had no idea and got both.

Where was I going to find
Marcus?
 
I could visit every pretty
girl in town and see if any of them could give me some specifics, since he
seemed to know them all.
 
But the
two so far had seemed surprised to see me, suggesting he hadn’t been here for a
while.

I walked as I thought, past the
cathedral (completed now, it had still been under construction when I was a
boy), and my feet unguided found their way through the crowds and down toward
the harbor, to where my family had once had a warehouse.
 
Curious, I looked for and found the
building, though it now had someone else’s name painted on it and looked
overall much better maintained than it had when I had to sell it after my
grandmother’s funeral.

There was a tavern across the street
from the warehouse, which had seemed exciting and exotic to me when I was a
boy, probably because I was forbidden to go in.
 
In the evenings shouting, laughter,
snatches of song, and an occasional fight would burst from it, but this morning
it just looked wan and tired.
 
A
young woman, her hair tied up in a kerchief, was down on her knees scrubbing
the front steps.

She looked up, noticed me standing
there, and smiled.
 
“Back so soon,
Marcus?
 
But I thought you’d lost
all your money at cards last night.
 
And
what
have you done with your beard?”

Last night?
 
So he was in town after all!

“Marcus is back!” she called over
her shoulder to someone inside.
 
She
dropped the scrub brush, stood up, and turned to me.
 
“Did you have to bleach it as some sort
of forfeit after you ran out of money?”

Denying I was Marcus was rapidly
getting old.
 
But I stopped with the
denial half-formed on my lips.

Yesterday, down close to the water,
I had seen someone who looked strangely familiar.
 
The lace-maker had thought she
recognized Marcus in the way I stood, the way I walked.
 
I knew now why that
back-lit
person had seemed so familiar.

He had reminded me of my own image
in the mirror.

“I’ll explain about the beard
later,” I muttered and went inside.

The tavern was
low-ceilinged
and quiet except for the creaks in the floor boards.
 
A man stood behind the bar, polishing
glasses.
 
“Did you lose something
last night?” he asked with a smile.
 
“Besides all your money, of course!”

“In fact,” I said, “I’m looking for
a person:
 
Marcus.
 
And no, I’m not Marcus myself.
 
I’m, um, his long-lost twin.”

He frowned at me.
 
“Are you sure?
 
You
sound
enough like him.
 
But the beard’s wrong.
 
Is this another one of your jokes,
Marcus?”

I found a coin in my pocket and
flipped it to him.
 
“I’ll make it
worth your while if you can help me find him.”
 
And then I realized what I should have
thought of before, demonstrating that I was a wizard, and made a quick illusory
fishing boat on top of the bar.

He seemed more impressed with the
coin than the illusion, which soon started to fade.
 
“If you really were Marcus,” he said,
“I’d have to ask where you’d gotten this after you were wiped out last night.”

“But do you know where he’s
staying?”

The barkeeper looked at me from
under his eyebrows.
 
“If you’re a
wizard
and
his twin, shouldn’t you know
already
?
”

The young woman had come in behind
me.
 
“It won’t hurt to tell him,”
she said.
 
“I’m sure Marcus is
staying where he always does, in that rooming house out near the ship-breakers.
 
I think the landlady likes him.”
 
She smiled rather wickedly.
 
“Guess he pays in what he’s got!
 
You
do
know where that is, don’t
you?”

“Yes, of course, I should have
realized that’s where he’d be,” I said hastily, having no idea where she
meant.
 
“I’d just thought the
landlady would have gotten tired of his not paying by now.”

The barkeeper looked at the coin I’d
given him as though wondering whether to return it, then pocketed it.
 
“If you give him any money,” he
commented, “you might want to come by this evening—before, rather than
after, he buys rounds for the house—and see if you can win it back.”

Out in the street again, I marveled
once more at Marcus’s ability to attract women.
 
He didn’t seem to have broken any
hearts, for they all appeared to think well of him.
 
I, on the other hand, had never had an
opportunity to break someone’s heart because I hadn’t won any in the first
place.

And why would Elerius, wizard at one
of the wealthiest of the Western Kingdoms, be interested in someone who never
had enough money to pay his landlady?

Assuming the person I had seen last
night really was Marcus, and that the woman in the tavern was right about his
rooming house, then I was going to have to find him here in the harbor area.

III

But the first person I encountered
was neither a wizard nor someone who looked strangely like me.
 
Rather, it was a priest.
 
Striding down the steep hill from the
cathedral toward the harbor came a tall, gaunt figure in black and white vestments,
someone I was delighted to see.

“Joachim!” I called, immediately
putting Marcus from my mind.
 
“I had
no idea you were in the City!”

He
at least recognized me as
myself.
 
“Daimbert!
 
How good to see you!”

Joachim did not smile very often,
but he smiled for
me,
which
I always took as a sign that I might really be a good, virtuous person after
all.
 
We shook hands
vigorously.
 
We got a couple of
curious looks from people passing by; the City was the home both of the
wizards’ school and of the most important of the West’s bishoprics, and usually
priests and wizards passed in the street without acknowledging each others’
existence.

“So what brings you here, Joachim?”
I asked.
 
In spite of the
long-standing rivalry between magic and religion, he and I had been close
friends ever since I first arrived in Yurt as Royal Wizard and found him there
as Royal Chaplain.
 
Probably it
would have been more suitable to call him Father, since he was now a cathedral
priest, but we had always called each other by our names.

“My bishop sent me,” he said.
 
Last year he had joined the cathedral
chapter of Caelrhon, in the next kingdom over from Yurt, and we had seen each
other much less than when we had served together in the same castle.
 
“He has decided to start building a new
cathedral and wants some ideas on architects and builders from the bishop here
in the great City.
 
Did you know
that the cathedral here was recently completed?”

“I knew.
 
But this is the harbor, not the
cathedral precinct.”

He smiled again.
 
“Perhaps it is silly, but I see the
ocean so rarely, and I always enjoy watching the dolphins out by the
breakwater.”

“Then let’s go look at them
together.”

Back when I was a boy, I always knew
I didn’t want to grow up to be a wool wholesaler, but it was only as a youth
that I really focused on the towers of the wizards’ school, always looming over
the City, and decided that I would become a wizard.
 
When I was younger, I planned to grow up
to be a dolphin.

The morning breeze off the bay was
fresh and the waves out beyond the breakwater all capped with white.
 
We watched for several minutes as the
dolphins leaped and swam, sometimes in a line as though in parade, sometimes
riding a wave high before rolling over in the air, always looking as if they
were having a joyous time.

“They can’t worry about anything,” I
commented.
 
“They just swim with
their friends, catch fish or eat the pieces the fishermen throw them, never
having to plan building projects or answer questions about where they’ve been
and what they’ve seen, or guess what another dolphin might be plotting.”

“I’ve always wondered,” said
Joachim, “why wizards never transform themselves into dolphins.
 
It must be a powerful temptation.”
 
He turned his deep-set dark eyes on
me.
 
“You could do it, couldn’t
you?”

“Well, yes.”
 
The idea was certainly attractive.
 
“The hard part would be transforming back
without having the right kind of mouth for the spells in the Hidden
Language.
 
Unless another wizard
turned you back, you’d be a dolphin forever.
 
Of course then, as I was just saying,
your worries would be behind you.”

I paused,
then
had a thought.
 
“I could transform
you
into a dolphin.
 
Just for a little
while, and I’d promise to transform you back!
 
Wouldn’t you rather be leaping the waves
than getting references for stone masons?”

But Joachim looked horrified.
 
“Dolphins do not have immortal
souls.
 
I’m a priest.
 
I could not do something so
dangerous.”
 
After a moment he added
in a somewhat conciliatory tone, “I would trust you, Daimbert, to turn me back.
 
But I cannot lose my own humanity when I
am responsible for bringing men and women to God.
 
I just enjoy watching God’s other
creatures at play.”
 
And he turned
and started determinedly away from the water’s edge.

Personally I suspected dolphins
might have perfectly good souls, but it never worked to argue theology with
Joachim.
 
But if they did have
souls, I asked myself, were they perhaps not
fallen
as
were humans?
 
That would certainly
explain why none of them were looking for someone who could have been a lost
twin or wondering what a supremely accomplished dolphin might be plotting.