Wood Nymph and the Cranky Saint- Wizard of Yurt - 2 (29 page)

I realized I had been waiting unconsciously for the dawn, with the thought that we would be able to tel where we were once the light began to grow. But no dawn could be expected here, while earth and stone endured.

The old wizard stopped again, as abruptly as he had started forward. He sat down against the wal, puled his cloak around him, and closed his eyes. His magic light became slowly dimmer, but the silver bal was

close enough to his face that I could see al the deep lines the years had cut in it.

He had aged much more than two years in the time that I had known him. I had been highly impressed at the power of his whirlwind, but I naa not before thought of the drain such magic must put on an old wizard.

I, too, was exhausted, but I didn’t even dare think about sleep. If we slept, the old wizard could lose contact with his creature, which might then either attack us or burst back out into the valey.

“Master,” I said softly and he opened his eyes. “Master, even if I couldn’t understand the spel by which you made your creature in the first place, don t you think you should teach me a little of the spel by which we’l catch it?”

He grunted, opened his eyes reluctantly, then nodded. “The problem is,” he said, “as I already told you, this binding spel only works when it’s standing stil.” He leaned forward, opening a hand to show that he clutched a few dead leaves in it. It was from the leaves that the blue glow came. First he started to explain it to me in words of the Hidden Language, but then he started to speak to me directly, mind to mind.

Here communication was much faster, although I had to concentrate much harder to be sure I missed nothing. I held my own thoughts, terrified, just out of reach of his touch, for I received not just the spels but the twist in his thinking.

The wizards at the school would have said that he was in danger of going renegade, Joachim that he was in danger of losing his soul. Neither seemed quite right. But I knew that his motivations, his assumptions, his purposes had al taken a turn somewhere, a turn I did not want to take and which left me, when he finaly broke the mental contact, trembling and bathed with sweat in spite of the cold.

“I haven’t determined yet if I can modify this spel to catch him while he’s moving,” the old wizard said.

“Now that you know the spel, maybe you can have a try with your fancy school magic.”

School magic wouldn’t work here. Whatever had been the case with the creatures Nimrod had once helped track, this particular monster had been made specificaly to be able to walk through normal binding spels. It wouldn’t have been any use even if I had been able to get word to Zahlfast. This creature was made with the combined magic of light and earth, and it would have to be caught the same way.

The old wizard pushed himself to his feet and his staff glowed brightly again. “This way,” he said and started off in the direction from which I could have sworn we had just come. But almost immediately the passage narrowed, which I had not remembered it doing before. It was a good thing I was not trying to lead.

The passage became so tight we had to push and squeeze through. He went first and, immediately after the narrowest place, the passage turned, so that he and the light were gone.

For a second I felt completely lost, without direction, surrounded by darkness so profound it seemed to sear my eyebals, crushed by a hundred milion tons of rock. But then I was through, around the corner, and able again to see his light, bouncing slightly as he walked. I put a quick magic mark on the wal and hurried to catch up.

After the tight squeeze, the passage widened so that for the moment we could walk abreast. With a little more light, I did not stumble as often, even though I kept faling behind every time we passed a side turning and I paused to mark that we had continued to folow the straight way.

I glanced sideways at him as we continued, though he seemed almost to have forgotten my presence. His face was stern and his expression distant, as though he was stil trying to see through his creature’s eyes.

Pride, Joachim would have caled it. They had

warned us against it in school, although most young wizards (including me) as I had come to realize, were stil so marginaly competent upon graduation that it was unlikely to be a problem. The Hidden Language did tap the human mind into enormous and elemental forces, but as long as one did only simple spels, one could stay as safe as a child wading in the tide pools of the western sea.

The truly idiotic young wizard might let himself be caught in an undertow, but the real danger was for the supremely good wizards. Their mastery of magic took them further and further out into it, until they tried a spel that brought magic breaking over them and their words of the Hidden Language with the force of the waves of a winter gale.

My predecessor had put spels from the old traditional magic together with spels he had created in years of study, to make not just something that could move and even look as though it were alive, but something as difficult to dissolve into its component elements as a real living being.

It had no face, other than its eyes, but at times he seemed able to see through those eyes. When it raced toward us out in the valey, carrying the duchess, it must have been a strange case of double vision for the old wizard: both seeing himself from the outside and seeing the creature running toward him. No wonder he had not been able to put any sort of binding spel together—even if the creature had slowed down long enough for a spel to work.

He stopped where the passage forked and, for a moment, I thought he wanted to rest again. Instead, he seemed to hesitate about the direction for the first time since we had started into the cave. I took the unit: suite we nciv. ou»

opportunity to make a few more magic marks. This way,” he said, almost reluctantly, and n

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not even

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as though he were addressing me, but then he started off again with renewed energy. I wondered if the monster were deliberately hiding from him.

There was much here that the old wizard had not yet told me, but I could guess. He had started by putting a true seeing power into his creature, something that I tried unsuccessfuly to persuade myself should not seem frightening to someone like me who had invented a far-seeing telephone. The next, however, was even worse.

I caught up to him and glanced at his face. The magic light, from the silver bal held close in front of him, made his eyes gleam under his eyebrows. His next plan, I thought, was to go beyond seeing through his creature. He now intended to put his entire being into the creatures body.

A body shaped and held together by powerful magic would not be the rapidly weakening body of someone far past two hundred. Even if built originaly from dead bones, it should not crumble while the spels held.

And here is where my predecessor had swum far out beyond his depth, even beyond sight of land. He had not yet found the spel to transfer his wil into the creature’s body, I guessed, but in attempting to give it the ability to receive true life, he had given it a generalized, unfocused search for life.

But it was stil a monster without mind or volition of its own and al it could do was to seize upon living beings. And being enormously strong and incapable of reason, it could carry them, crush them and, quite unintentionaly but quite thoroughly, kil them.

We squeezed through another narrow spot in the tunnel and then there could be no doubt that we were approaching the river. No longer a distant sound, the rushing was very near.

The old wizard stopped and held up his staff, and the silver bal on top burst forth in a new and brighter light. The passageway sloped down steeply before us and, at the Dottom of the slope, just before the passage floor disappeared under water, stood the monster.

It watched us with glittering eyes but did not immediately move. Behind it the river, whose sound reverberated in the narrow tunnel, looked jet black. We had reached a dead end. The passage went no further than the river, which plunged downwards and out of sight. We and the monster would leave the way we had come or under water.

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My predecessor took a deep breath, held out both hands and started on the binding spel. I mentaly shook off paralyzing fear and added my magic to his. I had never used a spel like this before and, as the words of the Hidden Language drew me into magics four dimensions, I felt the forces I touched tugging at me, as if I might be sucked down into magic just as a false step in this tunnel could drop us into the river.

But it seemed to be working. I fought free of engulfing magic to return to myself and found the old wizard staggering, but the monster was encased in magic and perfectly stil.

I held out a hand to the old wizard. He took it; crumbled leaves were pressed into my palm. He turned his face blankly toward mine, then slowly seemed to recover. His magic light, which had dimmed to almost nothing, brightened again. “Magic is hard work for an old man, he said hoarsely. “I hope they warn you young wizards at the school how much it can drain out of you.” It was a good thing I had asked him to teach me the binding spel. I could not have done it completely on my own, certainly not in the short fifteen seconds it had probably taken us, and yet I was fairly sure three-quarters of the spel was mine.

He sat down on the sloping floor and considered his creature. The eyes stil moved, but the limbs were motionless. “Let’s get it away from the river,” he said.

“No use having it topple in while we’re working our spels.”

Without asking if he needed my help, I used a lifting spel to raise the monster up and move it slowly toward us. I knew he needed my help. Our minds no longer touched, but I felt I could almost read his thoughts. And he was exhausted, not just the exhaustion of a night in the cave, or three days of chasing his creature across Yurt, but of a lifetime of magic.

I set his monster down prone on the slope below us. “Let’s give it more features,” he said. ‘The eyes work wel, out it needs ears and nose and mouth. It wil need to hear and need to speak, and it might as wel be able to smel the spring flowers.”

“Master,” I said urgently, “don’t you think we should try to dissolve it rather than improve it?”

“Of course not,” he said with energy. “I already told you that. Now be quiet and let me work. I know they never taught you any of these spels.” They most certainly had not. The old wizard closed his eyes, then began to speak in a very deep voice that seemed to come from the rocks of the cave wal. The heavy sylables of the Hidden Language roled and reverberated around us. I tried to folow it al and could not, in part because there were motions of the fingers also mixed in which sometimes went by too quickly for me to catch and, even when he paused, I was fairly sure he was continuing an aspect 01 the spel in his mind.

He stopped at last, his face gray and the lines in it more pronounced than ever. But the face of the monster lying before us had changed. The flesh on the sides of its head moved and shaped itself into ears; the center of the face twitched, grew, became a nose; and the lower portion of the face split and became a mouth.

As soon as the mouth was formed, it began to roar. The old wizard and I were nearly pushed backwards by the force of that roar. He recovered almost immediately, however, and added a few more loops to the binding spel.

The roaring stopped, though the eyes remained alive. I started surreptitously checking the binding spel with magic. It did not seem as strong or as thorough as I would have bleed.

But my predecessor seemed perfectly content with it. “Wel, that’s that,” he said in satisfaction. “You know, young whippersnapper, I’m glad you came with me. Even with your school training, you’l make a decent wizard someday.”

I was too startled by the open compliment to respond.

He looked at me sideways. “You’re surprised I never said anything of the sort before. Wel, I didn’t want to let it go to your head. And because I wanted to be sure you shaped up properly, I may once or twice have said something to you that the persnickety might find insulting.

But you’ve not been a bad companion for an old man, in spite of what that school tried to teach you. You show me proper respect, but you’ve never gotten al crawling and obsequious about it. If you’d come along fifty years earlier, I might even have let you be my apprentice.”

Again I did not answer, but I was quite sure I would not have wanted to learn the spels he was now working. For several moments we sat in silence.

‘Wel,” he said at last, “now that we’ve got my creature, I guess we should start thinking about getting back out of this cave. But it’s sily to take three oodies out when we’ve only got two minds between us, isn’t it? And doesn’t it make sense to leave the weakest body behind?”

‘Master,” I asked slowly, desperately trying to delay him until I could find some way to stop him, “what do you mean?”

‘ You know perfectly wel what I mean,” he said in

exasperation. “Why else do you think I brought you along, except to help me do it? You can make sure my creature doesn’t move, while I—” His voice trailed away on a note of glee.

My only idea was to carry him bodily out of the cave—assuming I could find our way. I went so far as to throw the first loops of a normal binding spel onto him, but he broke it easily.

“None of that,” he said sharply, but then, unexpectedly, he smiled. “Worried that if somehow it doesn’t work, it wil be al your fault, is that it, young wizard?” he went on more kindly. “Wel, you can stop feeling so responsible, even if you are Royal Wizard now. I’ve been planning this for years. This old body of mine wouldn’t be good for much more anyway, so this looks like my last chance to give my spel a try. I’ve already served five generations of kings of Yurt, so it won t matter if I don’t see the new little prince grow up to succeed. If my spel doesn’t work, nothing s lost—or nothing that wouldn’t be lost soon anyway.

“But if it works! Then you can say you were there and took part in one of the world’s greatest advances in magic, that you helped your old master do something no other wizard had ever done before!” This didn’t help. He wanted an appreciative audience to whom to demonstrate his power, but I could not simply watch. By being here at al, I had become responsible for him. I was madly searching for an argument, anything to say to talk him out of it, when my attention was caught by something else.