Below the Wizards' Tower (The Royal Wizard of Yurt Book 8) (9 page)

I lit up the sun and moon on my belt
buckle for enough light to see.
 
A
man with a white beard, wearing a tall hat covered with stars, sat on the
cell’s narrow cot.
 
His face seemed
oddly familiar.

I took a deep breath.
 
“Let me introduce myself.
 
I think you’re my long lost twin.
 
My name is Daimbert, and I believe you are
Marcus.”

VIII

The beard, I saw now, was not really
white but bleached, full of yellowish streaks.
 
The face was similar to but not identical
with what I saw in the mirror every morning:
 
the nose was a little wider, the chin a
little narrower, there were more freckles, and his eyes were blue where mine
were brown.
 
But the overall
similarity was striking.

A decade ago, when I had graduated
from the wizards’ school, I had learned the enormously powerful spells that
slow aging.
 
This man looked roughly
the same age as I did, which meant he was probably about ten years
younger.
 
We couldn’t be twins after
all.

He looked up calmly, doubtless doing
his own comparisons.
 
“I don’t
believe I have a long lost twin, Daimbert,” he said at last.
 
“I was an only child.
 
I am however happy to meet you.
 
Sorry it’s not under better
circumstances.”

I sat down next to him on the
cot.
 
“I was an only child too.
 
But people in the great City have been
mistaking me for you for two days.”

“My family came from the City
originally, and I was born there, although I grew up out in the country,” he
commented, apparently ready to enliven a dull evening in a cell with
conversation.
 
“My parents decided
farming was the only true occupation for an adult—a point on which I
thoroughly
disagreed once I was old enough to recognize the virtues of cities.
 
You and I might be cousins.”

“Why did the guard imprison you?” I
asked, temporarily leaving the interesting topic of long lost cousins.

He shrugged.
 
“He didn’t say.
 
Maybe I overplayed my role with the
cathedral priests.”

Slurred voices from the other cells
interrupted whatever I had been going to reply.
 
“Hey, keep it quiet!”
 
“We’re trying to sleep in here!”

Time to get out.
 
The guardsman should be far away by
now.
 
With a quick spell I opened
the lock on our cell, then the door to the
cell block
.
 
I briefly considered freeing the other prisoners
,
 
but
if drunks
wanted to sleep here in quiet, then I should probably let them.
 
When Marcus followed me out, I let the
outer door slam shut.

Reluctantly I turned in the opposite
direction from the inn.
 
By now the
guardsman was probably eating there himself.
 
Instead I led us back toward the little
castle, dodging through shadows, probing mentally for members of the
guard—or for Elerius.

No one stopped us.
 
When we reached the square I flew up,
found a window big enough to admit a man, and got it open.
 
The room inside was dark and musty.
 
Well, it had been a while since the
royal court of Yurt had been here.

“Stay still and relaxed,” I called
down softly, then lifted Marcus with magic and brought him inside with me.

“I see it could be an advantage
being a wizard,” he said, the first time he had spoken since we left the
cells.
 
“But my branch of the family
never went in for magic.
 
Any chance
of conjuring up some dinner?”
 
There
was just enough light for me to see his grin.

“Let’s find out if there’s anything
here to eat,” I said repressively.
 
“Magic is a natural power, not supernatural.
 
We can’t conjure non-existent things
into existence.”

With my belt buckle lit up again, I
found our way down three flights to the kitchens.
 
There we found an unopened jar of
strawberry jam, a dusty bottle of wine, a box of stale crackers, and a very
hard piece of cheese that the rats had either overlooked or rejected.
 
It would do.

Food, any food, is restorative.
 
After half an hour I felt my brain might
be functioning properly again.
 
I
had been thinking over all the possible meanings of Marcus’s comment that he
had “overplayed his role” with the cathedral priests.
 
But I was afraid of frightening him into
stubborn silence with accusatory demands from someone to whom he had barely
been introduced.
 
We had, I hoped,
until morning.
 
So instead I started
with family tree comparisons.

We were, we determined, probable
second cousins.
 
Grandfathers who we
each remembered only dimly had most likely been brothers.

“I think we’ve followed opposite
paths in our lives,” I said.
 
“I
grew up in the City and went to the wizards’ school there as a young man, but
for the last dozen years I’ve been very happy living far out in the countryside.”

“My beard was light brown until I
bleached it,” he said.
 
“How about
yours?”

“Chestnut colored,” I said.
 
But his mention of bleaching gave me an
opening.
 
“What made you decide to
go white?”

“It was the man who hired me.”
 
Elerius, I thought.
 
“My role was to play a wizard.”
 
He gestured toward the tall star-studded
hat, now sitting beside him on the table.
 
“Aren’t wise old wizards are supposed to have white beards
?—
like yours, though yours looks much more natural,”
he added generously.

“I may know the man who hired you,”
I commented as if casually.
 
“What’s
his name?
 
What does he look
like?”
 
But I thought I already
knew—black-bearded, with tawny, calculating eyes.

“It’s hard to say what he looks
like,” said Marcus, as if surprised.
 
“And if he told me his name, I don’t remember it.
 
Nothing memorable
about his appearance.
 
No
beard, so I guess he wasn’t a wizard, although he must know some wizards.
 
He was wearing a cap and a dark red
jacket.”

Either Elerius,
his identity concealed, or some renegade magician—at any rate almost
certainly the man who had left me paralyzed in the sea-cave.

“He gave my disguise what he called
a test,” Marcus continued.
 
“I went
to the cathedral office in the great City and asked for the bishop.
 
The priest I talked to said the bishop
had no time for a wizard, so I guess the white beard was disguise enough to
make me look like one.”

“So he then brought you here to
Caelrhon?” I asked cautiously.

Marcus grinned.
 
He had a very nice grin.
 
“
That
was an experience.
 
I rode in what he called an air
cart.
 
At first I thought it was a
dragon—a small one.
 
It was
obviously dead, its body hollowed out, but it
flew.
 
That would have been worth it even
without what he paid me.”

He smiled again.
 
“So, you say this is Caelrhon?
 
I’ve never been here before.
 
Do they have a lot of pretty girls?”

“So what were you being paid to do?”
I asked, ignoring the question about pretty girls.
 
If a wizard had brought him, Elerius or
an unknown renegade, then he might still be here in town.

Marcus scraped the last of the
strawberry jam out of the jar.
 
“He
paid me well, too,” he said, not meeting my eyes.
 
“Just like he promised, half when we
made our agreement, half when I had played my part….”

But then he looked up and shook his
head.
 
“Sorry, I’m being evasive,
because it’s a little embarrassing.
 
I would normally never have said things like that to a priest.
 
But he persuaded me that it’s some kind
of ceremony they do every year, and the person who usually does it is
sick.
 
It isn’t you, is it?
 
Because he told me I looked sort of like
the man who usually does it, which is why he picked me.”

“The man who usually does what?” I
demanded, wild with curiosity.

“Well, insult the priests.”
 
Marcus picked up a bit of cheese rind
and nibbled at it, but there was really no cheese left.
 
“He told me they have this special
backwards day every year, where the priests are insulted rather than being
treated with reverence, so they don’t forget their humility.
 
Though I must say,” he added
thoughtfully, “if I were trying to remind priests of their humility, I would
have them dress in rags, not fine vestments.”

Annual ceremony indeed!
 
But that then explained why the dean and
the rest of the cathedral chapter had been so frosty with me.
 
“And they had you locked up for playing
your part?” I managed to ask.

“No, that wasn’t until this
evening.
 
I was just thinking where
to have dinner, since at the moment I have plenty of money, when the guardsman
picked me up.
 
‘Dangerous vagrant’
was the term he used.
 
I’m glad you
came along!” he added cheerfully.
 
“I really didn’t want to spend the night sober in a cell, next to some
drunks.
 
I only like to associate
with drunks when I’m drunk myself!
 
You never told me—why did they pick
you
up?”

“For being you,” I said, thinking
fast.
 
The air cart was the
key.
 
Elerius had borrowed it from
the school and had said he would have it back late this evening.
 
Therefore, he must be the man who had
hired Marcus, to play a role in a complicated plan I could not even imagine,
and he must be long gone from Caelrhon.
 
He would have tipped off the municipal guard to a “dangerous vagrant,”
and been safely back in his own kingdom doing something innocent, by the time
Marcus talked his way out of the mayor’s court.
 
It almost made sense….

Unless Elerius had an accomplice to
shuttle Marcus back and forth—
Caelrhon’s
own
royal wizard?
 
Or some carnival
magician Elerius was manipulating for his own purposes?

And suppose Elerius really had been,
as he said, using the school’s air cart for an innocuous errand for his king,
and some other wizard had acquired an air cart of his own.
 
Purple flying beasts, I had heard, were
fairly common up in the borderlands of the land of wild magic, and it shouldn’t
be too hard to find an old one about to expire anyway and turn its skin into a
cart.

Every time I thought I had the
answer, or a piece of an answer, all my suppositions fell apart.
 
I tried mentally probing the street
outside, to make sure that we were not discovered.

No sign of Elerius or any other
wizard—unless he had his thoughts well protected.
 
But there was
something
there, not in our square, over closer to the cathedral.
 
Something radiating
powerful, unfocused magic….

A creature from the land of wild
magic,
not locked up safely in the school cellars but
somewhere here in Caelrhon.
 
I went
cold all over.

“What, exactly, did you say to the
cathedral priests?” I got out through frozen lips.

Marcus looked down for a moment,
then
met my eyes with a rueful expression.
 
“I’ve always hoped that I would never
hurt anybody—except perhaps me—so I really do feel bad about
it.
 
I must have been insulting far
beyond what the man who usually plays the part does!
 
And it’s not much of an excuse that I
was only saying what I was told to say.”

“Which was?”

He gave an embarrassed chuckle.
 
“I told the priests that I was the Royal
Wizard of Yurt—thinking, of course, that they would know at once that I
wasn’t really a wizard, and that Yurt probably isn’t even a real kingdom.
 
But maybe they didn’t.
 
First I quoted them the old saying,
‘There are three that rule the world, the wizards, the church, and the
aristocracy,’ and added that the greatest of these is wizardry.
 
Then I said that ‘we wizards’ knew that
priests were all hypocrites, sinners, corrupt, and shameful.
 
I may also have used the word
malingerer.
 
Finally I said that
they would stop looking down their noses as wizards when their cathedral was
attacked by a horrible monster, and only a wizard could save them.”

This made no sense whatsoever.
 
I
was having
to
rethink my suspicions of Elerius; if he had some nefarious plot, it should at
least be rational.
 
This sounded
like the plot of a madman.