Below the Wizards' Tower (The Royal Wizard of Yurt Book 8) (7 page)

Elerius unhesitating turned left,
then right, then right again.
 
“Wait,” I said suddenly.
 
“Marcus can’t be working with Titus.
 
Titus hates these cellars.”

“Exactly,” said Elerius, so smoothly
that he must have had his answer all ready.
 
“Because Titus has an irrational fear of
enclosed spaces, he has arranged for other people to help him.
 
Marcus is just one of them.

“Now, I believe he was going to be
looking at
this
creature first,” he continued, stopping before a
door that was indistinguishable from all the others.
 
“The old master of magical creatures was
never sure what it was.
 
Now if they
had followed my suggestion and hired someone with more experience to replace
him….”

There was a magic lock glowing on
the door, but when Elerius slapped it with his palm it opened, slowly and with
a faint creak of the hinges.

The room inside was unlit and
silent.
 
Joachim, who had not said
anything since we came down the stairs, stepped back with a nod to
Elerius.
 
The latter shrugged, unconcerned,
and went right in.

“Marcus?” he said in the
darkness.
 
“Why did you put out the
light?”

Joachim and I followed
cautiously.
 
A quick magical probe
revealed no other mind here.

“Elerius,” I started to say in
warning, but it was too late.
 
The
door slammed shut behind us, and everything was black.

It only took a second to light up
the moon and stars on my belt buckle.
 
They cast a faint glow, showing a room completely empty.

“I
know
this is the room where we
had the creature,” said Elerius, in a tone of irritation that did not ring
completely true.
 
“Could he have
moved it elsewhere?
 
Well, let’s see
if we can find him.”
 
In two strides
he was at the door, feeling for the handle.
 
“This is odd.
 
The door appears to be locked.”

“You just locked it yourself,” said
Joachim.

“No, no!” Elerius protested.
 
The door was indeed faintly glowing with
the presence of a magic lock.
 
But
when he put his hand on it and muttered a spell, nothing happened.
 
“Someone else must be down here in the
cellars, and he’s locked us in!”

None of us said anything for a
moment.
 
Then Elerius fumbled in his
pocket and drew out a glass orb—a float from a fishing net.
 
“I picked this up on the beach yesterday
when we were all looking for you,” he said and attached a spell of light to
it.
 
It wasn’t very bright, but it
was better than my belt buckle.
 
“I’d hoped it might be a clue to the renegade magician.
 
It wasn’t, but it’s lucky I still had
it.”

I did not believe a word of it.
 
I went to the door myself and tried a
few spells of my own.
 
The door did
indeed seem thoroughly locked, and the impression of my own palm had no effect.

“The Master might be able to break a
magic lock,” said Elerius, sounding worried.
 
“I don’t know of another wizard who
could.
 
We’ll have to wait until Titus
comes down to check on his assistant’s progress.”

Except that Titus would not be
coming down into the cellars.
 
He
would not save me this time.

VI

Above us, I knew, were the towers of
the wizards’ school, thousands of tons of masonry.
 
They seemed to weigh down the very air
as I wondered how many hours—or days—we might have to wait for
rescue.

“We could sing hymns to make the
time pass,” suggested Joachim, but both Elerius and I ignored him.

“Why don’t you tell me,” I said
icily, “why you want me out of the way so badly—leaving me paralyzed for
hours yesterday, then trapping me here today.
 
Why do you want to make sure I never
meet Marcus?
 
And what plan, exactly,
are you carrying out that requires that I not be a witness?”

Elerius spread his hands in a
gesture of innocence.
 
“I?
 
I had nothing to do with whatever
renegade captured you.
 
And you must
think very poorly of me to imagine that I would contrive a plot that ended up
trapping myself down in the cellars!
 
I hope the Master and Zahlfast told you how hard I searched when you
turned up missing.
 
Of course I
should have realized there would be sea-caves somewhere along the shore here,
but unlike you and Titus, I grew up in a castle, not some hovel by the harbor….”

His voice trailed off.
 
Elerius had never shared any information
on his background, and normally I would have liked to hear much more about this
castle, but not today.

“Does this involve the Royal Wizard
of Caelrhon?” I demanded.
 
“The man
you thought should have been hired instead of Titus?
 
Since I know him all too well, did
you—”

“Him?
 
Of course not,” said Elerius, in a tone
so genuine that I
was close to believing
him.
 
“Certainly I thought he was more
qualified, but I am nothing more than one of the school’s many
graduates—as of course are you,” managing to sound patronizing.
 
“It was not my place to tell the Master
what to do.”

“And yet,” put in Joachim mildly,
“you must have had some purpose today in separating Daimbert from the young
wizard who was supposed to help protect him, and in telling him that Marcus was
here, when he clearly is not.”

Elerius might be able to deny all my
accusations easily, but he was having a harder time with Joachim.
 
“Well, I certainly was told that he was
here,” he said hastily.
 
In the
light from the
glass fishing
float, his eyes looked
calculating.
 
“Perhaps I
misunderstood….”

I would have pushed whatever
advantage I now had, but suddenly there was a step in the corridor outside, and
a voice speaking the heavy syllables of the Hidden Language.
 
It was the Master’s voice.

Elerius sprang to the door, put both
hands on it, and added some spells of his own.
 
In a few seconds the magic lock
vanished, and the door flew open.

“
What
are you doing down here,
Daimbert?” the Master demanded.
 
We
filed out, and he gave Joachim a heavy frown from under shaggy eyebrows.

“Elerius brought me here, claiming I
would meet Marcus,” I said quickly, before Elerius could get in some lie.

The Master made a low rumbling
noise, not quite a dismissive snort.
 
“That seems an odd reason to bring a priest into the school.
 
And
why
would this Marcus be down in
our cellars?
 
You told me he wasn’t
even a wizard.”

“Elerius said he was here,” I tried
again, feeling like a student who had messed up an exercise and was now trying
to shift the blame.

“I understood that he was working
down here for Titus, and I knew Daimbert wanted to meet him,” said Elerius,
when the Master turned his frosty gaze on him.
 
He didn’t sound much more
confident
than I did.

If Elerius didn’t sound confident, I
told myself, it was because his cunning plan was falling apart.
 
I gathered my courage.
 
“Let’s go talk to Titus right now and
get to the bottom of this,” I said while I had the momentary advantage.

“I am staying with Daimbert,” said
Joachim calmly when the Master frowned in his direction again.
 
“I promise not to invoke the
supernatural while here, to disturb any of your spells.”

Another joke! I thought.
 
Joachim dared make a joke to the Master
of the wizards’ school, which was more than I would have been able to do.
 
But his face was perfectly sober.

“How did you find us?” I asked the
Master as lightly as I
could
as we started
upstairs—not the same staircase that we had descended.

“When that young wizard came back
and said that Elerius was now with you,” he rumbled, “I knew you should be
safely back at the school soon.
 
But
when I sensed the two of you coming in, and there was a third man with you,
curiosity got the better of me.
 
And
I could not imagine why you would have gone down to the cellars.”

“It must be someone here in the
school
who
has gone renegade,” said Elerius, his voice
coming out just a little high.
 
“Because
someone
put a powerful locking spell on the
door.”
 
I noticed that he was
carefully deflecting the question of what we were doing in the first place in a
cellar room that someone could magically lock.

“I don’t know if even I could have
broken the spell alone,” commented the Master.
 
“But when you added your magic to mine,
it broke up so fast that I couldn’t tell who might have cast it originally.
 
I hate to suspect any of the students,
but they do sometimes carry their pranks too far….”

Elerius broke his own spell before
the Master could determine that it was his, I thought.
 
But if I accused him he would simply
deny it.
 
“Let’s talk to Titus right
away.”

He was in his study between classes,
quite surprised to find the four of us at his door.
 
“Marcus?” he said when asked.
 
“No, of course he wasn’t helping me.
 
I’ve never even met him.
 
I’ve just heard the name as someone of
whom Daimbert reminded somebody.
 
I
don’t even think he’s a wizard.”
 
He
rattled off the names of the half dozen young wizards he had helping him
identify and inventory the magical creatures spell-bound in the cellars.

“Ah, that’s it, that’s the name that
I mistakenly heard as Marcus,” said Elerius in tones of comprehension.
 
“Well, Daimbert, I must make my excuses
for misleading you.”

The Master nodded in
satisfaction.
 
“If I don’t hurry
I’ll be late for class,” said Titus apologetically and was gone.

And where had Elerius gotten his
story about finding Marcus and discovering that he came from the borderlands of
wild magic and introducing him to Titus as an assistant?
 
But the Master was already heading back
toward his own study, and I had no one to whom to make accusations except
Elerius himself—and Joachim, who had stayed quiet and in the background.

“Elerius,” the Master’s voice
suddenly came down the hall, and for a second I hoped that he too had seen
through this flimsy story.
 
“Did you
bring the air cart back yet?”

“No, not yet,” Elerius
answered.
 
The air cart was the skin
of a purple flying beast; it kept on flying even in death, and the school used
it for transporting heavy loads.
 
“Remember, I asked if I could have it until late this evening.
 
It’s an errand for my king.”

For his king.
 
I had a sudden sick feeling that all
this capturing was intended to keep me out of Yurt, where I could have
protected my own royal family from magical attacks.
 
“I’ve got to use the telephone,” I said.

Elerius waited in the hall outside
the telephone room.
 
The base of the
school’s telephone lit up to show a servant, dressed in the blue and white
livery of Yurt, hurrying to answer.
 
Normally I felt a surge of pride when using a telephone with the
far-seeing attachment I had invented, but not today.
 
I was too worried.

“Oh, hello, Wizard!” the servant
said as soon as his own telephone lit up to show me.
 
“Will you be home soon?
 
The queen was just asking this morning
if anyone knew how much longer you’d be away.”

“But what’s happening?
 
Is everyone all right?”

“Everything here is fine,” he said,
puzzled.
 
“Oh, except the stable boy
who was kicked by Prince Dominic’s stallion.
 
Did that happen before you left?
 
He’s not badly hurt, but the doctor
thinks he has a cracked rib.
 
The
king is talking now of selling the stallion after all.”

This did not sound like a magical
attack on
Yurt which
I could have prevented.
 
“Give everyone my greetings,” I said in
profound relief, “and tell them I’ll be home in a few days.”

Though I still had shopping to do.
 
I had found the lace I had bought, water
soaked and now dried into a hard ball, in the pocket of my ruined jacket.
 
I hoped if I soaked it in fresh water it
could be salvaged.

Elerius put his head around the
corner with a bright smile.
 
“So, is
everything well back home in Yurt?”
 
I didn’t trust him not to have listened.
 
“I’m sure your king would be able to
call on
Caelrhon’s
Royal Wizard if anything came up
in your absence.”