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

Elerius’s digs were always carefully
worded so that no one could actually accuse him of being insulting.
 
Ignoring the comment, I said, “You still
haven’t told me where Marcus is, or why you don’t want me to meet him.”

“Daimbert, you do have a vivid
imagination,” he replied with a smile that did not fool me for a second.
 
“As I already said, I am very sorry to
have misled you, due to a simple misunderstanding.
 
Now, there is much I need to do before
heading home to my kingdom.”

And at that he hurried off, closer
to being caught in a bald lie than I had ever seen him.

The Master, meanwhile, was doubtless
preparing to question all the wizardry students, as to why they had locked up
two of the school’s graduates and a priest in the cellars.
 
I felt sorry for the students, but since
at this point the Master was not going to believe that Elerius had locked us in
himself, there wasn’t a lot I could do about it.

Yurt was apparently still unharmed,
but I was beginning to have doubts about Caelrhon.
 
Elerius had brought the kingdom up
several times in conversation, suggesting it was on his mind.
 

“You may need to get back to
Caelrhon very soon,” I said to Joachim.
 
“There may be something happening there.”
 
I paused.
 
“But I need you.”

His eyes gave a quick flash.
 
“I am not leaving while you are in
danger.”

Probably both his own bishop and the
chancellor here would be irritated with him.
 
I didn’t care.

I should fly there immediately.
 
Except that I was supposed to have
another wizard chaperoning me at all times, and I could not fly while carrying
Joachim.
 
I could have taken the air
cart, except that Elerius had, ever so conveniently, borrowed it himself for
the whole day.

I made a sudden decision.
 
“Come on,” I said to Joachim, loudly in
case anyone was listening.
 
“I’ll
see you to the door—the school can be confusing if you don’t know the layout,
and I’m sure a priest would prefer to spend as little time here as possible,
especially after being accidentally locked up!”

Joachim gave me an odd look but
followed as I walked briskly to the side door where Elerius had brought us
in.
 
We went outside together.

Then I murmured, “Get back to
Caelrhon as soon as you can.
 
I’ll
be there before you.”
 
And quickly,
before he could give me an argument, or the Master and Zahlfast could realize
that I was venturing out without another wizard to protect me, I shot into the
air and headed inland.

Only two hundred
miles to go.
 
Good thing I
had had a large lunch.

VII

Something was
happening,
something that Elerius did not want me to see.
 
His original plan, I thought
,
had been to leave me paralyzed in a cave for two days
while he carried out—whatever he was carrying out.
 
After Titus rescued me yesterday, he had
thought today to put me somewhere equally difficult to find, but Joachim had
thwarted that by insisting on staying with me.
 
Elerius’s fallback plan was to lock all
of us in the cellars, giving himself a perfect alibi in the process, but the
Master had found us far faster than he had hoped.

This would all make more sense if I
knew
why
he wanted me out of the way.

Flying is hard physical and mental
work.
 
A better wizard than I would
be able to fly faster than an air cart.
 
My only hope was that if Elerius was using the air cart to deliver some
destructive power on Caelrhon, as I had now convinced myself he was, that I
would get there not long thereafter.

At first I kept looking over my
shoulder for pursuit but saw none.
 
When the Master realized I had gone, he must have assumed I was on my
way back to Yurt and decided it was not worth trying to protect someone who did
not want to be protected.

Fields, woods, villages, rivers, and
small towns passed below me.
 
At the
end of the afternoon, I spotted the spires of Caelrhon cathedral, their shadow
stretching across the city.
 
No sign
of destructive flames or a ravening dragon.

I dropped into a quiet street without
attracting attention, caught my breath for a moment, and walked quickly toward
the municipal building that housed the city council chambers and the mayor’s
office.
 
Time to get some allies.

Even though I felt a desperate
urgency, I realized that here in Caelrhon I felt more confident of my abilities
to face whatever Elerius might do next.
 
Back in the City, I had been a boy again, a student wizard again, but I
had already been a Royal Wizard the first time I had come to Caelrhon.

No time to think about that
now.
 
I had to warn the city leaders
that something terrible was about to happen, even if I didn’t know what it was,
even if I would have to tell them to trust me, a wizard, about something
another wizard was plotting.

“The mayor’s gone home for the day,”
a clerk told me, with the implication that an old white-haired man ought to
know something as simple as the hours that the office was open.

“How can I reach him?
 
I need to warn him, Caelrhon may soon
experience a magical attack.”

This sounded as unlikely in my own
ears as it clearly did in the clerk’s.
 
“We are not experiencing any magical attacks,” he said crisply, “and if
we were, we have our own Royal Wizard to protect us.”
 
He pushed the door firmly shut, and I
could hear him locking it.

He had mistaken me for some carnival
magician, I thought.
 
Windblown and
exhausted from a long flight, I certainly did not look like a dignified Royal
Wizard.
 
I needed to find someone
who at least would recognize
me and then listen to me
.

I considered but almost instantly
rejected
Caelrhon’s
Royal Wizard, the man in whom the
mayor’s clerk put such confidence.
 
He would not be here in the city, but a few miles away in the royal
castle.
 
More importantly, I suspected
him of working with Elerius.

The cathedral might be my best
chance.
 
I had come over to Caelrhon
from Yurt shortly after Joachim joined the cathedral chapter, and he had
introduced me to several of the other priests.
 
The dean, I remembered, was the head of
the cathedral chapter, second in authority only to the bishop.
 
The bishop, always leery of wizardry,
would doubtless start with the assumption that a wizard was bringing demonic
magic into his church, but I might be able to get somewhere with the dean.

As I followed the narrow, twisting
streets toward the cathedral, passing shoppers making final purchases and
workers heading home for the evening, I noticed how much shorter the towers and
spires were than those of the cathedral of the great City.
 
Maybe that was why
they were talking here of building a new edifice themselves.

Sounds of singing came from the
cathedral.
 
Evening service, I
thought.
 
I waited respectfully
outside, by the door that led into the cobbled street where the cathedral
officers had their houses, trying to comb my hair and beard with my fingers,
until the service was finally over.

When the priests emerged, I spotted
the dean at once, a frail old man who walked with a cane.
 
I hurried up to him, doing my best to
have a respectful expression.

“Excuse me, Father, I don’t know if
you remember me.
 
I’m the Royal
Wizard of Yurt, and I—”

He interrupted.
 
“Of
course
I remember you.
 
I may need a cane, but I don’t yet
forget from one hour to the next!”

One hour to the next?
 
I pushed on.
 
“I’ve come to warn you that there may be
some sort of magical attack on Caelrhon, and—”

This time it was a young acolyte who
interrupted, one who was supporting the dean by the elbow.
 
“You really did
not
need to come around again, especially after what you said earlier!
 
Now, please.
 
Can’t you see that the dean does not
wish to be bothered?”
 
And he
escorted him briskly down to his house at the end of the street.

What I had said earlier?
 
I stood still as the rest of the
cathedral priests hurried past me, some pulling their vestments aside as though
wanting to avoid all contact.

In a few seconds I managed to
reassure myself that I had not, months ago, said anything grossly insulting to
the dean when I had first met him.
 
If I had, Joachim would have pointed it out.
 
He might be my friend, but he had never
been strong on tact.

Instead someone else had been here,
probably today, claiming to be me.

Marcus.
 
But why would someone who charmed all
the women and lost his money in the tavern be here, asserting that he was a
wizard and saying impolitic things to the cathedral officers of Caelrhon?

It had to be Elerius.
 
But I had even less idea than before
what plot he could possibly be hatching.

It didn’t look as though anyone was
going to listen to me until it was too late.
 
The mayor still seemed my best potential
ally, because the townspeople would believe him if he told them they had to
prepare for something, but I would have to wait until morning to find him.

Should I spend the night preparing
myself?
 
It was hard to know where
to begin.
 
And besides, I was
completely worn out, both from my ordeal yesterday and from the long flight
today.
 
Better to go to the little
castle here in the city, where the royal court of Yurt stayed whenever they
came to Caelrhon.
 
With a good
night’s sleep I might have some ideas in the morning.

I started across the city, which now
was growing dark.
 
Shutters were
closed, but yellow light emerged in thin strips, and I could hear the sounds of
conversation and the clink of forks.
 
That reminded me.
 
I was
hungry and hoped there would be something to eat at the castle.

But when I came around the corner to
the little square in front of it, I found it dark and forbidding.
 
The towers were a darker shade of night
against the sky.
 
No light peeked
through the shutters here, and when I tried the door I found it locked.

Well, I was a wizard, I could get
inside, but I had better find something to eat first.
 
Back down the street I went, listening
for the louder voices and clinks that would mark an inn.
 
I found one just a few streets away,
warm firelight streaming out open doors.
 
Someone was singing loudly, not quite in tune.
 
Something smelled very good—at a
guess, beef stew.

But as I stepped into the doorway I
felt a hand on my shoulder.
 
“Escaped, eh?
 
Hope you
didn’t think you could slip back here unnoticed!”

I swung around, spells all prepared
against Elerius.
 
But it was a
uniformed member of the municipal guard.

He took a firmer grip on my shoulder
and hefted a club in his other hand.
 
“Come quietly, and no one gets hurt.
 
I don’t know how you escaped, but it’s
not going to happen again!”

I was so startled that I went
meekly.
 
Apparently he had taken me
for some thief or disturber of the peace.

“You’re making a serious mistake,” I
said as he hurried me away from the smell of beef stew and back toward the
municipal building.
 
“I’m the Royal
Wizard of Yurt.”

“And I’m the crown prince of Yurt,”
he said, not believing me for an instant.
 
“You can tell the mayor all about it in court tomorrow.”

The thought went through my mind
that Elerius was losing his touch.
 
Leaving me paralyzed in the sea-cave had worked fairly well, but trying
to lock us in the cellars together had worked only for a short time, and my
time in Caelrhon prison was going to be even shorter.

But I let myself be marched around
to the back of the municipal building.
 
Better find out all I could.
 
The guardsman produced a heavy key to let us into the
cell
block
, unlit and quiet except for the sounds of several men
breathing.
 
No magic locks here, I
quickly determined.
 
Another key
opened one of the cells, and the guardsman pushed me inside.

“Better get your story straight by
tomorrow,” he said, turning the key with a loud click.
 
“Escaping only increases the penalty,
you know.”

He slammed the outer door of the
cell block
, and it became even darker.
 
There was, I could tell, someone already
in the cell where I had been pushed.