The Witch & the Cathedral - Wizard of Yurt - 4 (42 page)

"You were never in serious danger, Daimbert," said Elerius, passing the gingerbread puffs. This wasn't how I remembered it. "I was of course interested to see how you would do against a gorges with your particular style of magic, but I was there, disguised, among the townspeople." The image of a face I had seen in the crowd, past Lucas's shoulder, as I lay on the paving in front of the cathedral suddenly clicked into place. "Another minute in your fight with the gorges, or another move by Caelrhon's crown prince, and I would have had to intervene." I didn't like his timing; there hadn't been any minutes or moves to spare. "And you would never have been in any danger at all if you hadn't been so precipitate.

Sengrim was intending to defeat the gorges himself—with my help, of course."

"You say Sengrim intended to overcome a gorgos he had himself brought from the land of wild magic," I said slowly, peeling foil with fingers that I kept from trembling by sheer will. "You realize, Elerius, that this makes no sense whatsoever. So far you've helped a renegade wizard turn on his own employer, attack a cathedral, summon a hundred dragons from the land of magic, and nearly kill scores of people at the coronation of the king of Yurt. This is scarcely suitable in the school's best graduate! I came to talk to you before telling the Master any of this, but if you don't have an adequate explanation I'm heading straight back to the city tonight."

Unless you imprison me, I thought, keeping my thoughts well shielded, or unless you instructed the servants to poison the gingerbread puffs.

"A good idea, talking to me first," said Elerius with a remarkably genuine smile. "I know there have been a few occasions in the past, Daimbert, where you ended up looking like a fool. It's this habit of acting on instinct, you know. It may serve you well in your personal sort of improvisational magic, but it's a poor guide in ordinary affairs. No sense letting the school think they had a narrow escape when you turned down their position!"

I waited silently, knowing he would have to say more. Outside it was fully dark, and the magic lights were reflected in the windows. On the wall hung Elerius's diploma from the school, nearly six feet long, with his name written in letters of fire at the top and the lower half dense with mentions of honors, distinctions, and areas of special merit. Stars twinkled all around the edges. Mine in my chambers in Yurt had my name and the twinkling stars and nothing else.

"Sengrim, as I mentioned," Elerius said at last, "first came to my attention several years ago when he was trying to persuade the school that they ought to offer at least a series of lectures on fire magic—with him teaching it, of course. The Master wasn't interested; there's that one course I occasionally teach myself on the old magic, and he seemed to feel that was enough. Besides, I believe he wasn't sure Sengrim would be an appropriate mentor for the young wizards—he was acting rather strangely even then. He wouldn't even say how he'd learned fire magic. . . ."

"I know how he did," I said shortly. "Go on."

Elerius lifted sharply peaked eyebrows at me but continued. "I was interested myself, however, both for my own course and because I believe wizards shouldn't reject anything that might prove useful. And that's why Sengrim came to consider me his friend, and why he turned to me this spring when he quarreled with his prince, pretended in a fit of pique to blow himself up, and then decided rather belatedly to try to reestablish himself at Caelrhon. I agreed, somewhat reluctantly I must say, to Sengrim's plan to prove to his king and prince what a good wizard he really was. I have to admit I originally thought his plan as nonsensical as you do: first to bring a monster from the land of magic and then to overcome it in a very public setting to show his competence, amazing everyone by his extremely timely return from the dead. But when it became clear that he would do it with or without me, I decided it would be better to help."

"So you decided after talking to the construction foreman," I said slowly, "that a gorges would serve his purposes nicely, and you helped him go up to the borderlands and capture one—as well as a horse for the Romneys, who he was afraid might reveal that the ragged old magician in the area was in fact the supposedly deceased Royal Wizard in disguise. You helped with that disguise too, didn't you—something thorough enough to fool even another wizard. Just out of curiosity, exactly where near Caelrhon did you manage to imprison Sengrim's gorges?"

"There's a little grove a mile outside of town, a grove thick with unchanneled magic. It wasn't difficult to channel it, to make a chamber in the ground under the spring where the gorges could be bound until it was wanted."

I closed my eyes for a second. I had been heedless of a number of things the day I went there with Theodora.

Elerius poured out the last of the tea. "I'm afraid, Daimbert," he continued, "that you rather spoiled Sengrim's plan for him. It was supposed to end with him triumphantly telling Prince Lucas that even the bravest and most able kings needed wizards to protect their kingdoms from wild magic, and being welcomed again into the royal court. Instead it ended with the prince threatening to kill you. Even though it could just as easily have been him, rather than feeling gratitude for your fast action Sengrim became extremely bitter toward you. And I understand the two of you had had some sort of earlier misunderstanding?"

I did not deign to answer.

"He was already furious with the school," Elerius continued, "which he thought had unfairly given you opportunities he deserved himself. I seemed to be the only school-trained wizard he trusted as he started imagining plots against him from the faculty and trying to create counterplots. At any rate, at this point it became obvious that he was growing seriously deranged, so I thought it best to distance myself from him. The rest, including the dragons and the unfortunate attack on your king's coming of age festivities, was entirely his own work. I was pleased to hear that you had once again triumphed"

He fell silent but looked at me as though waiting for my reaction. "So this is your entire story?" I said at last. The story you would have told the Master if 1 accused you of being involved with Sengrim ?"

"Of course. Truth is always wisest."

"What about the rumors of the school plotting to put wizards in every castle and manor to seize control from the aristocracy?"

Elerius shrugged. "Rumors are always flying on one topic or another."

"How do you explain leaving to his own wild devices a wizard you thought had become deranged?"

"You know I have no authority over any other wizard." Elerius shook his head regretfully. "I have sometimes tried to persuade the Master and Zahlfast that the school needs tighter discipline, but as long as they keep only a loose, almost informal organization, there is really nothing a wizard can do in a situation like this." He set down his empty cup and rose briskly to his feet. "Well, did you plan to return to that little kingdom of yours tonight, Daimbert, or would you like to stay here? I'm sure a set of chambers could be arranged."

I gave him my best wizardly glare from under my eyebrows and remained seated. I had suspected Theodora of manipulating me coldly, Lucas of bringing the gorges to Caelrhon himself, and Vincent of plotting to murder Paul and the queen. All of them had managed to talk me out of my suspicions. But someone, if not the princes of Caelrhon, had been working with Sengrim. And I would not give up these suspicions so easily.

Elerius looked down at me quizzically. "I'm sorry, Daimbert. I should have realized when I saw you devouring the gingerbread that you had not had any dinner. Shall I order you a tray?"

I was not going to be talked out of valid suspicions and I was not going to be patronized. "Sit down," I said as though this were my study rather than his.

Surprisingly, he sat down at once. Emboldened by this small triumph, I leaned forward, still glaring. "Let me point out a few things that your explanation doesn't cover. You were not just trying to assist Sengrim in a plan to recover his position. You were using him for your own purposes."

"And what might these purposes have been?" Elerius asked as though I had suggested something rather amusing.

"You want to establish a firmer organization at the school. Zahlfast told me that at the beginning of the summer, and you just said the same thing yourself. The best way you knew to make the school draw tighter together was to make it feel threatened: threatened by an embittered wizard turned renegade, by a church that hated wizardry, by aristocrats threatening to dismiss all their wizards, and by dragons coming over the border. This all started without any help from you, when Prince Lucas quarreled with his Royal Wizard because Sengrim stopped him from a fight in which he would have been bested at once. But you took advantage of the situation because it fit in well with your own long-term plans. Did you think I would not find out that you yourself had installed the far-seeing telephone on the mountain at the borderlands—the phone that wouldn't work?"

"I heard about that," said Elerius easily. "But the spells for the far-seeing attachment have always been a little haphazard. Didn't you invent it yourself, Daimbert?"

I ignored this latest jab. Yurt's own telephones had worked perfectly for years.

"And what better way," I continued, "to make the school feel itself beleaguered by the church and the aristocracy than actually to make certain that it was? You showed up at Caelrhon's royal court in disguise, telling the king you were a City nobleman who had learned of the schools "plots' against aristocrats, plots you invented in the hope— nearly realized—that threatened royal courts would turn against the school. I had been wondering for some time who this purported aristocratic friend of the Master's might have been, and I only realized now, when you mentioned being in the cathedral city, that Lucas's description matched you. I gather you play the nobleman well, Elerius. Haven't I heard some strange rumors about your parentage? Perhaps a birth on the wrong side of the blanket in some royal castle . . ."

But he did not take the bait, only following me intently, his eyebrows slightly raised, almost as though—pleased?

I pushed on. "By having me, a wizard, in the city of Caelrhon all summer even if no other wizard was in evidence, and by having the gorges appear at the old bishop's funeral, you were certain the priests would blame the monster on institutionalized magic. Your only miscalculation was not taking Joachim into account— the dean of the cathedral, now bishop.

He's the most powerful churchman in two kingdoms, but he's also my friend."

"That is something about you I have found intriguing, Daimbert,” Elerius said as though in calculation.

"And which you mentioned to Zahlfast when urging him to hire me permanently at the school. This is the one aspect I haven't worked out yet: why you want me on the faculty, when your ultimate purpose is to reorganize the wizards' school—with yourself in charge!"

Elerius leaned back in his chair and laughed. "This is even better than I imagined, Daimbert! I enjoy watching your mind work. So now you suspect me of going renegade and hatching a plot to overthrow the school?

You really should have your friend the bishop say a suitable prayer of gratitude that you didn't take this story to the Master!"

"It's more subtle than that," I said, watching him without smiling. "You aren't like Sengrim; you haven't lost control of your mind and your magic. You haven't even forgotten your oaths to help humanity. If you had, by now I'd probably either be dead or a frog—or both.

"This was all carefully planned," I continued. "You meant no harm to anyone, or at least that's what you tell yourself. But you have a vision of a drastically reorganized wizards'

school, one in which the students follow a highly structured, highly rigorous program—a program from which I would never have graduated— and where the school continues to maintain careful control even after the young wizards have taken up their posts. Through no coincidence, you would be at the head of this school."

I paused to let him say something, but he only continued to listen, intent tawny eyes holding mine and an indulgent smile on his lips.

"Hints of danger from priests and aristocrats, you realized, would not be enough to give you the chance to remake the school in your own image. But again Sengrim gave you an opportunity. You knew I would work out eventually that he brought the gorges to Caelrhon—and that even if he had overcome his bitterness toward me enough for rational conversation, he would have been too proud to mention your role in helping him. So you decided—and quite rightly—that if dragons attacked the school Sengrim would be blamed for that too."

"Then I am supposed to be responsible for those dragons?" He was still giving his indulgent smile.

"Sengrim could never have called that many by himself. He was in Yurt, with the lizards he had learned to master several years ago, when someone else brought dragons over the border. You didn't go to help the masters fight them even though your kingdom is so close to the City. You have spells of your own around this castle that would have warded off dragons. I'm sure you were able to persuade yourself that none of the faculty would actually be killed, that fighting dragons in the City streets would be messy but not actually fatal if everyone kept their heads and worked together. But a battered school with a badly wounded faculty would need someone to step in and take charge, someone who would quickly assure that wizards, rather than being just one of the 'three who rule the world would be the only rulers."

The late summer evening was growing cool in this tower high above the plain. Elerius snapped his fingers, said two words, and lit the kindling in the fireplace. The flames quickly caught the dry wood. When he looked toward me expectantly, I said a few words of my own in the Hidden Language to light a tiny cascade of flames in the air before us.

"Not bad, Daimbert," he said appreciatively as they flickered back out of existence. "Did you come here then to match spells with me?"

I shook my head hard. "Your spells are better than mine. I've always known that That's why I want to know why you seem to want me, whose only strength is in improvisation, in a school that you plan to remodel as rigorous, standardized, and monolithic."