Antonia, telling me loftily that she could dress herself, retreated into my bedroom. Elerius asked me nothing about her; he might guess she was my daughter but I did not intend to confirm his guess.
He and I sat in the outer room while I told him about the warriors. He listened in silence, stroking his black beard and following me with intent eyes. At least, I thought, with my white beard and the Golden Yurt award now hanging by an attachment spell on the wall next to my diploma from the school, I looked more wise and venerable than he did.
“When I called you I needed to know how to dismantle them,” I finished, “but now that they’ve dissolved in sunlight all by themselves I’ve realized they probably aren’t the worst threat to Yurt: that will be whatever comes next.”
“Your success against them,” said Elerius, nodding slowly, “was supposed to give you a false sense of security, so you would be unprepared for whatever does come.” He smiled then. “And of course whoever sent these warriors must have hoped he might win with a single unexpected attack. I am glad you called me, Daimbert. This looks like the exact sort of case for which institutionalized magic was designed: renegade spells which must be opposed by wizards acting together.”
Elerius and I had disagreed strongly in the past on the purposes and goals of organized wizardry, but I certainly agreed with him here. It struck me that he might be acting so helpful in part to put me into his debt. But the difficulty with mistrusting Elerius’s motives was that he really did believe he always acted for the best-even if I often thought he didn’t. Besides, I needed him.
“Our best approach,” he said, “is to find out who wants to harm Yurt and why. Otherwise we could end up dealing with a long stream of different magical onslaughts.”
I hadn’t needed Elerius to tell me that. And it crossed my mind that, even assuming he himself had had nothing to do with the warriors, he was certainly acting quickly to position himself to take advantage of their attack. But it was hard to resent a faint patronizing tone from someone whom I had begged so desperately for help. “Let’s start with these bones,” I said and lifted them onto the table with magic, not caring to handle them again.
Outside in the courtyard were the sounds of a castle resuming its daily routine, when everyone believes disaster has just been averted and is wondering whether to be worried or grimly glad. I swung my casement windows shut.
Most of the spells that had held the warriors together had disappeared, along with their human shape, in the morning light. But enough of a hint remained that Elerius and I could probe magically, stepping into magic’s four dimensions together and communicating mind to mind. Here was a fragment of a spell I thought I recognized from years ago, here a familiar spell given a very unusual twist-
Elerius broke contact and raised peaked eyebrows. “It’s not school magic. It does not even seem like the magic previous generations of wizards used to teach their apprentices, although at first I thought it must be.”
“I think,” I said slowly, with an irrational but deadly cold conviction that I knew exactly what it was, “it’s what they call the magic of blood and bone over in the Eastern Kingdoms.”
The kingdoms east of the mountains had never had a wizards’ school, had never even had the peace that the western wizards had established in their kingdoms after the Black Wars. There the conflicts among wizards which still persisted even here, even between wizards who had gone to school together, had become part of the constant ongoing wars of the region.
“This will be an important project for the wizards’ school in years to come, Daimbert,” said Elerius. “The school has functioned very well in the past to coordinate magic in the Western Kingdoms, but we will need next to turn our attention to the wizards east of the mountains.”
But I was not interested in Elerius’s plans for when he eventually became Master of the school. “What this attack must mean,” I said, “is that the Thieves’ Guild of Xantium has overcome their aversion to the forbidden arts enough to hire a very powerful eastern wizard to pursue a princess.” I told Elerius briefly about Justinia’s arrival. “If these warriors were made by her enemies,” I added, “they must be very good and very fast to have found her within twenty-four hours of her arrival in Yurt. I’ll have to get her out of here before the next attack.”
But Elerius was shaking his head. “I cannot believe that Xantium’s greatest mage would have been so sloppy as to let the princess’s enemies know where she was going even before she left. For they would have had to know she was heading for Yurt to be able to start making unliving warriors even before she arrived.”
I nodded without speaking, wanting desperately to persuade myself that this had nothing to do with the East. From years of experience I knew that I often leaped to unwarranted conclusions, but I also knew that I had a tendency to try to disbelieve things I did not dare face.
“If the Lady Justinia is not the target here,” Elerius continued, “then her best safety will lie in staying quietly where she is. And if the warriors were indeed made by the magic of blood and bone, I would not be so quick to assume any mage in Xantium would embrace it.”
“I was in Xantium once,” I said in exasperation, “but I don’t understand their morality and laws at all. I would have considered thieves outlaws myself, but there they are an organized guild, with whom the governor negotiates. Who knows? Maybe they really would be fastidious about any magic different from their native magery. But if those warriors had nothing to do with Justinia, where can they have come from?”
Antonia came out of the bedroom at this point, wearing her blue dress, her shoes neatly laced and tied but her hair thoroughly tangled. “Who’s going to braid my hair, Wizard?” she asked me accusingly.
Elerius smiled and held out a hand. “I’ll do it. There’s a little princess in my kingdom who’s about your age. Would you like your hair styled like a princess’s?”
Antonia stayed put, looking at him in silent suspicion. Undaunted, Elerius said a few quick words in the Hidden Language. “Here, catch.”
An illusory golden ball arched through the air. Startled, Antonia reached up to catch it. But just before reaching her, the ball changed into a golden bird and flew, flapping wildly, up toward the ceiling where it disappeared with a pop. A single golden feather drifted down and dissolved back into air.
Antonia laughed and trotted over to climb on Elerius’s knee. “My wizard does illusions too,” she said. I thought it nice of her not to mention that I, the winner of an undeserved award, couldn’t do anything that complicated anywhere near as easily. “His name is Daimbert,” she added in explanation, as though Elerius might be unsure who I was. “I’m Antonia.”
“My name is Elerius,” he said, taking her brush. He was good at everything else; why should I be surprised that Elerius was also good with children? “Hmm, it looks like you’ve been trying to do some braiding yourself, Antonia, without being able to see what you were doing.”
“That’s because my friend Celia left yesterday,” said Antonia.
Celia! With everything else I had forgotten all about sending her to find out about the Dog-Man. It was too early to expect a message from her yet, but I might soon. And might that man, who performed very strange magic tinged with the supernatural, who had persuaded the bishop he wanted to be a priest, be behind the attack on Yurt?
Elerius finished brushing out the tangles and started braiding Antonia’s hair. A few magic words helped keep the strands in place until he could work them in. While he braided she took hold of a handful of his black beard and, humming, started brushing it.
“This may not have anything to do with the Lady Justinia, Daimbert,” said Elerius casually. Antonia, having exhausted the immediate possibilities of his beard, was now braiding her doll’s yarn hair. “Consider this: it may rather be directed toward you.”
“Me?”
“Forget Xantium for the moment,” he continued, still speaking in a casual voice Antonia happily ignored as she started singing to her doll. “Think about your trip years ago through the area where this sort of magic is widespread. I believe the others who were with you then are either now dead or at any rate not here in Yurt. Did you make any foes among the wizards of the Eastern Kingdoms?”
“I might have,” I said reluctantly. But all the hair on my arms and the back of my neck stood on end to hear someone else voice my worst suspicions.
It had been fifteen years ago on our way to the East, when we had met the dark, half-living wizard Vlad. Mostly by luck, I had been able to get us away and out of his snares without giving him what he wanted. Although I had not actually intended to hurt him, when we fled, that eastern wizard’s body had been partially destroyed, dissolved by sunlight …
So if Vlad, who had screamed curses after me, had found me at last, what would he try next, now that I had been able to withstand his warriors just long enough for the dawn to come?