The Witch & the Cathedral - Wizard of Yurt - 4 (37 page)

"I have a quick favor to ask you." He came back and stood before me, hands on his hips. "Could you see if you could find the Romney from whom you bought the horse? Even though"—I just barely kept myself from phrasing it as "Even if "—"you have no plots against Paul, it's possible someone else does."

He shrugged. "All right. But I don't want to be late for the tournament!" He went off through the tents, greeting the knights and joking with them as he went. In a few moments, I saw him reemerge from beyond the tents and this time go directly into the castle. At least, I thought, I had not actually created a diplomatic rift between the twin kingdoms.

A Romney man walked slowly toward me, not uncertainly but as though he wanted me to realize that he moved at his own pace, not mine. I swallowed my impatience and waited.

He sat down next to me and adjusted his red kerchief. "A lot of the knights of Caelrhon have horses they bought from me," he said casually. "Were you thinking of buying one yourself? I'm afraid we don't have much with us right now, but I could find you a good steed by next week."

I had to admire the Romney's ability to turn any opportunity into a potential sale. "I wanted to ask you about the red roan stallion you sold Prince Vincent at the beginning of the summer," I answered. "I might want one like that—no ordinary horse for a wizard!"

He gave me a shrewd look from intensely black eyes. Neither one of us believed for a minute the talk about buying a horse. "It might be hard to find one just like that," he said.

"Horses that good are scarce, as you realize. I might be able to have one in a few weeks. If you gave me a down payment now, it might make the search easier."

I abandoned the pretense of wanting a horse like Paul's. "You got that horse from a wizard, didn't you."

He looked at me in apparent disappointment, though I wasn't sure if he was disappointed at losing a sale or just at cutting our sparring short. "Well, I did," he admitted, "though I trained the horse myself. A beautiful animal it was when I got it, but wild."

"Have you seen the wizard at all recently? Might he be bringing more horses from wherever he got that one?"

He shook his head, almost imperceptibly. "I haven't seen him in months. Though of course I didn't tell him I'd buy anything he found, I think he realizes I would if they were like that stallion."

Vor, Norbert, and the Romneys had all been able to see this wizard—why couldn't I? And, I thought with a surge of jealousy, he must have an air cart of his own, to be able to transport horses from the borderlands. If I was somehow able to overcome him maybe I could have it for my own.

But this was an unprofitable line of thought. Much more pressing was whether the horse might still be a trap, though to be triggered by the wizard himself, not by Vincent.

"Thank you for the information," I said. "Do let me know if you have any horses like the red stallion again."

The Romney man returned to his caravans without pressing the issue of a down payment. At the bottom of the hill, ladies and attendants were already trying to find the best seats in the stands.

The chief outcome of my conversations was that I knew 1 had to find the wizard. But I seemed no closer to doing so. He must be here, but he was still thoroughly concealed. I realized uneasily that it had been some time since Theodora had gone to look for him. ...

A trumpeter appeared in the lists below. Lifting the horn to his lips, he blew a single long blast, then began a lively tune with the rhythm of horses galloping. To general shouts, the knights around the tents mounted their horses. Paul came out of the castle, riding Bonfire. His new armor shone like silver, and he carried a plumed helmet in one crooked arm.

For the tournament all weapons were to be blunted. Only the new king himself wore a real sword.

He was halfway down the hill when Vincent came out of the castle, pushing his horse to a trot. He waved as he went by. I had already seen Lucas going down, riding easily with no sign of pain from his ankle. A number of the castle staff, young Gwennie among them, hurried to join the lords and ladies in the audience.

In a few minutes the tournament was under way. The Romneys stood on the sidelines. From where I sat with the lizards, I had a clear view of the sky. I kept looking and kept seeing nothing but birds.

I heard a step beside me, jumped, and turned to see Joachim. He regarded the lizards curiously for a minute, then sat down on the grass beside me, arranging his robes around him.

For a second I considered ordering him back into the safety of the castle, bishop or no bishop, then realized he was probably deliberately making himself visible in order to bring on a wizardry attack. "These are the creatures that were moving stones around on your new tower," I told him. "They can't do any harm now, as long as they're paralyzed, but if I leave them the wizard will probably break my spell at once."

In the field below the castle's hill the first event began, a horse race. I noted that Paul had had the good taste not to participate; Bonfire could easily have outrun any horse there.

"I've just talked to Prince Vincent. I'd believed all summer that he and a renegade wizard were planning a joint attack, but I realize now that this belief wasn't the product of wizardry insights, only of jealousy. Everything I saw as signs of a despicable plot—the way he and the queen behaved toward each other, the fact that Yurt and Caelrhon were once one kingdom, even Vincent's gift of a stallion to Paul—had a simpler and more innocent explanation. All my suspicions were so incomprehensible to Vincent that he decided I must in fact fear he would turn the young king against me. He forgave me. But while I've been wasting my time worrying about an attack on the queen and on Paul, the wizard may be doing something horrible down in the City."

I told him about the mass exodus of the teachers from the school. Joachim nodded slowly. "But these lizards show he's not ignoring Yurt," he said. "He may be attacking on two fronts."

The wind cut silver paths through the long grass on the castle's hill and the fields below. The area of the tournament was already becoming trampled and muddy.

"But where is he?" I burst out. "Is this all? If he's here, what will he do next?"

The knights in the tournament lists were now preparing for the tests of skill; mounted men would gallop at top speed toward a ring dangling from a thread and try to thrust their lances through it.

"Theodora's looking for him," I added, then stopped, realizing that I couldn't tell him more without revealing that she was a witch.

"I was glad to have a chance to talk to her yesterday while we were riding," said Joachim. "At first she seemed shy of me, almost awestruck. I had hoped that if I became bishop I could make people realize that bishops are not like princes, men of authority and command. Rather, we are shepherds, sinners ourselves but chosen by God to help and guide other sinners. But I've been bishop for over a week, and I'm still being treated as a lord of men."

This was much too complicated to try to explain to him now. Shouts from the base of the hill showed that one of the riders was doing very well; it appeared to be Vincent.

Theodora reminds me somewhat of you," Joachim continued, "especially you twenty years ago, when I first knew you. You both have the same sense of humor, where it's often difficult to tell if you're making a joke or not." Normally I would have been afire with curiosity to know if they had talked about me, and what they had said, but now I was too worried to care.

"What's my priest doing?" said Joachim in quite a different tone. I looked down toward some of the spectators milling around at the edge of the lists. The young priest who had come with the bishop was in the middle of a crowd of Romneys. I didn't know what it looked like to Joachim, but to me it looked like he was placing a bet.

"Maybe I should go down there for a little while anyway," said the bishop. "I cannot approve of battles, even mock battles, but I do not want to appear to be avoiding the festivities deliberately." He brushed himself off and walked quickly down the hill.

1 watched him go, feeling increasingly uneasy about Theodora. But then I saw a dark lilac dress approaching rapidly from the direction of the deserted Romney caravans. At the same time a servant in Yurt's blue and white livery shot out of the castle and over the bridge. He was running and reached me before she did.

"Come right away!" he cried. "It's a telephone call from—from someone named Zahlfast! He said he must talk to you at once, about the safety of the wizards' school!"

Theodora!" I shouted to her, jumping up. "Stay here and watch these lizards!"

"Wait! I have to tell you—"

"Tell me when I get back." I flew straight up and over the castle wall, the quicker to reach the telephone.

Zahlfast's face looked as haggard as I had ever seen it, and he breathed hard. He stared at me blindly; he must be calling from a telephone without a far-seeing attachment

"Thank you," he said. "I wanted to tell you we got the warning in time."

"What warning?" I appreciated the thanks but I had no idea what he was talking about.

"When I got back to the school from dinner last evening, the young wizard relayed your message that the phone in the watch-station up in the borderlands was broken. That fool hadn't told us, of course," meaning good old Book-Leech. "Instead he thought he'd try to fix it himself, though he's not competent to do so."

Zahlfast paused, then continued in something closer to his normal schoolteacher tone. "Maybe we should make a series of courses in technical magic a required part of the curriculum, rather than an elective option. Because I've never found that kind of magic congenial myself, I'm afraid I haven't pushed for it, but in modern times all young wizards really should know modern magic." "But what's happened?" I demanded. "Where are you?"

"I'm not sure. We're in the royal castle of—" Someone behind him provided a name. "I think we're about a thousand miles north of the City"

"You and all the teachers?"

"Just three of us are here; the rest are spread out over hundreds of miles. It didn't take us long, once we'd heard that something was wrong with the phone at the watch-station, to guess that the weak attempt of a very small dragon to fly south was a feint and that something much worse would soon follow. So we tried to telephone to the watch-station at once—and got through. We could always phone him, which was why we hadn't realized there was a problem."

Zahlfast wiped the sweat off his brow. I almost danced with impatience. "As I'm sure you already guessed," he went on, "a whole horde of dragons had just flown up over the mountains and started south. Maybe a hundred of them."

I froze in horror. This was even worse than I expected. "Were they heading for Yurt?"

"No. They were heading for the City."

"And that’s why all the teachers went."

"The dragons scattered when they met us," Zahlfast continued. "One did come close to Yurt—it was finally killed a quarter mile from the cathedral city of Caelrhon."

Then those waiting to protect Joachim's cathedral from danger had seen something worth waiting for. I paused. "All of you overcame them all, I assume.

"Well, yes," said Zahlfast, with a flicker of a smile. "Otherwise, I wouldn't be talking to you. Thank you again."

"Wait, before you hang up! I have to ask you something. This spring when I left the school, you gave me a warning. You said that priests hated and feared the wizards and sought to destroy them. I know we've never gotten along well with the Church, but this was different. You were trying to keep me out of the affairs of the cathedral of Caelrhon. You have to tell me: had Sengrim, the Royal Wizard of Caelrhon, given you that warning before he died?"

"Yes, he did," said Zahlfast in surprise.

"He must have had an apprentice," I said grimly, "someone none of us even knew existed. Find him. He might be here in Yurt, or he could be anywhere. He's the one who disabled the telephone, and he's the one who summoned the dragons."

For one of the few times since I'd known him, Zahlfast looked shocked. I hung up and ran back outside. Even if the hundred dragons had not been successful in destroying Yurt or the school—or both—they had effectively kept me from having any help here from another wizard for at least another day.

Theodora waited by the motionless lizards. I had grown to despise the sight of them. "Come on," I said. "I'm going down to the tournament grounds to make an announcement.

Thank God, the worst that I'd feared is not going to happen."

"Daimbert, listen to me," she said desperately.

"Tell me in a minute. The bishop and Paul and probably a lot of the others know I've been expecting an attack of dragons or worse, and I have to reassure them it won't happen."

The knights had now finished riding at the ring and had begun the jousts, the heart of the tournament. One joust had just ended; neither rider had been unhorsed, and they were waiting for the judges' decision. The queen came up to me with a rather quizzical smile as we reached the lists. "Vincent's been telling me about a very odd conversation the two of you had," she began.

But I couldn't take time to listen to her right now any more than I could listen to Theodora. "I have an announcement!" I called, then realized no one could hear me. There was a spell to amplify one's voice; it took me a moment to find and apply it. "I have an announcement!" I tried again.

This time my voice boomed out gratifyingly loudly. The queen and Theodora, who had been standing on either side of me, both took a quick step back. The riders readying themselves for the next jousts had trouble reining in their startled horses.

"I've just been talking to the wizards' school," I said to a rapt audience, "and I wanted to tell you all that an attack on Yurt has just been averted!" It was in fact an attack on the school instead, but I didn't have time to go into detail. "A hundred dragons were summoned from the land of magic by an evil wizard. But the masters of the school were able to overcome them all."