It took me half an hour to get all the warriors, both inside and outside the walls, immobilized with magic. We lowered the drawbridge again, and knights carried the ones who had made it into the courtyard back outside. They used grappling hooks to retrieve the rest from the moat; being under water had not taken the light from the creatures’ eyes. The swans from the moat had all retreated to dry land, hissing and flapping their wings menacingly if anyone came near.
Though the knights tried to pry the swords from the warriors’ grips, they held on far too tightly, even encased in my binding spells. I didn’t count, but there must have been at least a hundred of them. Whatever they were, I thought, studying them by lamplight with fists on my hips, they weren’t human. Human in shape, holding swords in human hands, they had no minds inside their heads or souls behind their eyes. The sweat on me was cold now that I had finished my spells, but it was more than that that made me shiver.
“Demons incarnate!” gasped the chaplain, clutching his crucifix. He took a quick look and then retreated. The whole castle was roused and milling around the courtyard-everyone, that is, except the Lady Justinia, whom no one had seen.
“Not demons,” I said slowly. Several lay on the ground by my feet, no longer struggling against my spells but watching me with glowing eyes. “Demons would not have been stopped by my spells. But they’re not alive either. They look like they’re made from hair and bone.”
“Can magic do that?” asked the chaplain, hovering a short distance behind me as though not wanting to approach but not wanting to appear to retreat any further either. “Can it make life?”
“Not life. But there are spells in the old magic of earth and stone that can give the semblance of life. They don’t teach those spells at the wizards’ school, but back in the old days of apprenticeships wizards used to learn them, and I think they still use them over in the Eastern Kingdoms, beyond the mountains.”
“How would you make such creatures?” asked the chaplain, coming one step closer and sounding interested in spite of himself.
“The traditional way,” I said, then paused for a second to renew a binding spell that seemed tattered, “was to use dragon’s teeth.”
There was a long silence. “You didn’t make them, did you?” asked the chaplain as though trying to make a joke. When I turned to glare at him, in no mood for a joke, he added hastily, “Well, I trust you did not, my son, but in that case who did?”
“I have absolutely no idea.” It must be linked with the Lady Justinia’s arrival, I thought, but I was not about to say so until I had better evidence-no use having everyone in the castle treating with suspicion someone whom the mage had entrusted to me.
Then I remembered who else had been entrusted to me. Antonia! Where was she in all this? Yelling at one of the knights to call me the second any of these unliving warriors showed signs of breaking out of my spells, I raced back into the castle and to my chambers.
She had lit the magic lamp and was sitting in my best chair with a blanket wrapped around her. “What happened?” she asked, round-eyed. “And why,” with a wrinkling of her chin as though trying to keep back tears of terror, “did you leave me all alone?”
I snatched her up and held her close. “I’m so sorry, Antonia,” I murmured, stroking her hair. She was shaking and clung to me-no cool self-possession now. “But right here was the safest place for you. Some warriors tried to invade the castle, and I had to stop them.”
Slowly she stopped shaking as I held her. “I could have helped you,” she said then, pushing herself back to look me in the face. “I can do all sorts of spells. While I was waiting for you I turned Dolly into a frog.”
A quick glance at her doll showed it unchanged: a rag doll, embroidered with a smiling face I found almost aggressively adorable, wearing a silk dress doubtless made from the scraps of something Theodora had sewn for a fine lady of Caelrhon. “Soon you’ll be a witch like your mother,” I said encouragingly.
For some reason I didn’t like the way that sounded, but we were interrupted by a shout from the courtyard. “Wizard!”
I bounced Antonia back into bed. “Go to sleep,” I said, trying not to sound too rough. “I may be busy the rest of the night.” And I darted out across the drawbridge to find one of the armored warriors pushing itself to a sitting position and raising its sword.
A few quick words of the Hidden Language restored the binding spell, but I thought, looking at the twitching collection of creatures before me, that there was a limit to how long I could keep them imprisoned. I had worked my spells fast, using shortcuts wherever I could, and the spells that made unliving hair and bones-and maybe dragons’ teeth-into manlike shapes were a lot stronger than mine. It would only be a matter of time until they all broke free again unless I found a way to dismantle them.
And I couldn’t do that and keep my binding spells going at the same time. I needed help.
“Do we have enough chains to chain them up?” I asked King Paul. Brute force might supplement magic in the short term. He took some of the knights to look while I hurried up and down the rows between the creatures, renewing spells and blinking in the lamplight as exhaustion pricked the backs of my eyes. But I could not let up my concentration for even a second. Warriors with swords in their unliving hands could have slashed me in two before I even realized my spells were weakening.
The king managed to persuade everyone but the knights to go back inside once they realized the immediate excitement was over. The chaplain, showing a calm authority I had not expected in him, took away the body of the watchman for last rites. By the time we had the warriors all chained together-and twice a knight of Yurt just missed being badly wounded while he tried to fasten links around a creature that had almost managed to wiggle free of my binding spell-dawn had streaked the eastern sky pink. Not too early, I thought, to make a phone call.
There was only one person worth calling. I gave the glass telephone the magical coordinates of Elerius’s castle.
It took several minutes before the wizards’ school’s best graduate appeared in the phone’s glass base. While I waited for him I tried to think how to frame my request for help so it wouldn’t sound as desperate as I felt. Elerius, though school-trained, had years ago also learned enough of the old magic from a renegade magician who had been hiding out high in the eastern mountains that he himself could give dead bones the semblance of life. I probably could have too, given enough time, but Elerius’s skills were so unusual that he had even been invited to give a series of lectures on the topic at the school.
He came to the phone at last and looked at me quizzically, his eyebrows making triangular peaks over tawny hazel eyes. His look always made me feel disconcerted but his tone was friendly. “What is it, Daimbert? It is good to hear from you after, what has it been, several years at least, but I assume you must have a serious problem to call me at such a time!”
“Well,” I said with assumed joviality, “sorry to awaken you at this hour and all, but we do have a little problem-” I gave it up; after all, I was desperate. “Please, Elerius,” I said, not caring how pathetically I begged. “You’ve got to come to Yurt. We’ve been invaded by scores of warriors who move without life. I’ve got them in binding spells for the moment, but I can’t dismantle them by myself. Please!”
He did not hesitate. “Of course,” he said soberly, with an expression that was probably supposed to convey reassurance. It was going to take more than an expression to reassure me. “I shall leave within minutes and be there in two hours-maybe less.”
“Wizard!” I heard a shout from outside. I slammed down the receiver and darted back out, nerving myself to face the entire horde come back to life and motion.
But none of the creatures were moving. Instead, as the dawn light touched them …
At first I did not dare believe it, but it was real. For a few seconds the sunlight showed them clearly, human in no more than shape, faces unfeatured except for their eyes, and then they began to disintegrate. As though melting in the sun, their hands shriveled away from their hilts, their eyes lost their glow and fell back into their sockets, and their struggles against my spells ceased abruptly. Their armor and swords rusted away as I watched until they were no more than fragments, like something dug up from an ancient burial mound. Their limbs collapsed, with a rattle of chain, into piles of scrap.
I closed and opened my eyes, saying a prayer of thanks to whatever saint might listen to wizards. Where a few minutes ago the grass had been spread with warriors who had very nearly killed us all in our sleep, it was now scattered with acrid heaps of bone and hair.
The knights of Yurt sent up a triumphant whoop. King and knights were haggard with exhaustion, and I was trembling all over, hardly able to stand in the weakness of relief. I still wore what had once been my best yellow pajamas, now ripped and filthy rags. High up in the courtyard wall I could see a light burning in the window of the chapel where they had laid out the body of the watchman. “That,” I said to myself, “was too easy.”
Elerius had already left for Yurt by the time I telephoned his castle again. Well, maybe he could help me determine where these warriors had come from, I thought, putting one set of bones aside for later magical analysis. The knights threw the rest onto a bonfire they built in front of the castle. The smoke rolled into the dawn sky, dense and black.
I went back across the bridge and into the castle. The people King Paul had sent to bed a few hours earlier had all reappeared, complaining about the horrible stench of the smoke. They should be glad, I thought, they had nothing worse to complain about, and decided to talk to the Lady Justinia before Elerius arrived.
No time yet for exhaustion. First I stopped by my chambers to wash, change clothes, and check on Antonia. She was sound asleep, lying on her back with her mouth slightly open and her doll held tight to her chest. I touched her cheek lightly with a finger on my way back out the door. This was the reason I would have died quite cheerfully if my death had kept the warriors out of the castle.
Justinia’s shiny automaton stood guard before her chambers, a sword at the end of each of its six arms. It stared at me from flat eyes, expressionless but implacable. I was not going to get by unless she wanted me to.
I called, “You can open the door, my lady! The warriors are gone!” There was a long pause, during which I tried magically probing the spells that gave the automaton the semblance of life. It whirled its swords menacingly but did not move away from the door. As I expected, the spells were intensely strange and intensely complicated; it would have taken me weeks to duplicate them, even with a passive automaton before me. At least it did not dissolve in the sun’s rays. But then I would not have expected anything made by Kaz-alrhun to have that kind of flaw.
The door swung open at last, and dark eyes glinted at me. I must have looked unthreatening, for Justinia said a quick word to her “servant” and motioned me inside.
Her chambers had been transformed since the day before. She must be planning to stay a while, I thought, for she had unpacked, spreading the flagstone floor with mats and pillows and hanging the walls with silk curtains. The flying carpet lay placidly in front of the hearth. Oil lamps burned in the room’s corners.
Justinia pushed the door quickly shut behind me. “Was it as I feared?” she asked, not succeeding at all this morning in sounding nonchalant about mortal danger. “Have my grandfather’s enemies found me already?”
“I’m afraid so.” I told her about the undead warriors out of nightmare, shaped to advance and to kill but without enough knowledge or will to stop at the edge of a moat or to try to run from a wizard’s binding spells.
But part way through the telling, I noticed she began to look first surprised, then disturbed. “But this cannot be!” she broke in. “There is no one in Xantium who would make such soldiers! These magical arts are forbidden!”
I was sure there was a distinction to be drawn somewhere between making warriors of hair and bone and making metallic automatons, but I did not want to get into arcane comparative legal systems. “Are you saying, my lady,” I said in astonishment, “that these warriors, such as have never been seen in Yurt before, invaded the castle as soon as you arrived but have nothing to do with you?”
“Most certainly,” she said, tossing her head imperiously. “Perhaps my uncle the mage chose poorly when he sent me to such a perilous kingdom.”
Either she was lying to me, I thought, about the likelihood that her enemies had sent them, perhaps because she was so terrified that she did not dare admit the true extent of the danger even to herself, or else she, with her own unaided magic, had caused this attack.
But there was nothing of magic about her, other than the automaton and its spells, and it seemed unusually counterproductive for someone to use mindless warriors to attack a castle where one was staying oneself.
“I shall try to see that you are not bothered further by such disturbances during your visit, my lady,” I said stiffly and rose to go. The automaton watched me all the way out.
The courtyard was packed. I turned, highly surprised, to see expressions of delight on every side. Smiling at me were all the knights and ladies, the castle staff led by Gwennie and her mother, and Antonia, still in her nightgown and trailing her doll.
“Here he is!” cried King Paul. “The hero of Yurt!”
A shout rose from everyone there. But I saw now the forced edge to the smiles, the grim realization behind whatever triumph this was supposed to be, that the watchman’s death was the first time since long before anyone could remember that someone in the royal castle had been violently killed.
Paul, still streaked with black from the bonfire and leaning on his sword, had put on the heavy gold crown of Yurt. “He destroyed the invading demons! The wizard has saved us all!” There was another great shout, then an expectant pause as though I was supposed to make a speech.
I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say. Paul had something large and shiny in one hand-some sort of medal or award, I thought wildly, which I most certainly did not deserve. “Well, thank you, thank you all,” I managed to say, which produced another shout. “But they weren’t demons. And I didn’t really destroy them. That is-”
Whatever I might have added next was drowned out in more hurrahs. “Step forward, Wizard,” said Paul in the formal tone that explained why he was wearing his crown, “and receive the accolades of a kingdom.” I could see now that he held a golden medal at the end of a loop of blue ribbon.
It was at this point that Elerius arrived.
“It’s all right!” I cried as the knights reached for their swords. A castle that has just been invaded by creatures considered demonic does not react calmly to someone shooting down from the sky and landing in the courtyard. “This wizard has come to help me!”
“Came a little late, didn’t he?” shouted one knight with a relieved laugh, and, “Didn’t notice you needing much help, Wizard!” shouted another.
“He’s just in time,” said Paul with a determined grin, “to see his fellow wizard honored.” He wiped soot from his forehead with an arm and became formal again. “The Golden Yurt award is given but rarely, at most once a generation. Although I have been your king only six years, I need not hesitate or wonder if someone more deserving may aid the kingdom in years to come. Our Royal Wizard has protected Yurt since before I was born, and now that he has destroyed a host of demons it is clear that this award is long overdue. Step forward, Wizard, and receive the praise of a grateful kingdom!”
It was much too late to explain that I had had nothing to do with the warriors’ dissolution in sunlight, or that if anyone was honored it ought to be the dead watchman. To his credit, Elerius restricted himself to only the faintest ironic smile as I stepped resignedly before Paul and let him slide the ribbon around my neck.
The medal itself was engraved with an image of the royal castle and had the heavy feel of solid gold. I turned it over and saw the names of all those to whom it had been awarded in the past. My name was at the bottom; the goldsmith must have worked fast. The last name before mine was the king’s cousin Dominic, with a small cross to indicate the Golden Yurt had been awarded to him posthumously.
To the repeated hurrahs of everyone, knights, ladies, and staff, I scooped up Antonia, nodded to Elerius to follow me, and retreated rapidly to my chambers, just escaping having to give a speech.