The corridor was lit only by the wizard’s candle. “Is this your principality?” I asked, standing between him and the doorway so that he could not close the doors before I was sure what I was getting into.
“It certainly is,” he said with a slow blink. His eyelids, I noted, were translucent, like the eyelids of a snake, and did not hide the stone eyes behind them.
“And yet you’re a wizard,” I said unevenly, holding onto the door frame. I was suddenly swept with a terror so profound that for a moment I wasn’t even sure I could stand unaided. This was either irrational fear of something outside my previous experience, or good sense telling me to escape while I was still alive.
“Of course. I know over in the western kingdoms you wizards serve the kings and the aristocracy, but here we prefer to be our own masters.”
In the shadows behind him I thought I saw-although it could have been the shadows from his candle-a viper moving slowly across the floor.
And then I knew the source of my terror. It had nothing to do with this wizard, strange though he might be. It was memories of another long corridor down which I had groped nearly ten years ago, the closest I had ever been to death and damnation. And that corridor had been in Yurt. If I was going to find safety, I would have to create it for myself, wherever I was.
I pushed myself forcibly away from the door. “I’m curious, Prince,” I said. “Is this castle real?” The door frame, at any rate, was solid under my hand.
“It depends on what you mean by real,” he answered ambiguously and turned his back to me. He certainly seemed unafraid of me. “Come with me, and I think you’ll find out several things about which you’ve been wondering.”
As soon as his back was turned, I tried another quick magic probe to reassure myself that he was human and no demon. But then I followed, watching the floor for snakes. The door stayed open behind me, but beyond it was only night and wolves.
Candles held by invisible hands proceeded us down the corridor. Prince Vlad led me into a room off the corridor where I had hoped there would be more light, but it was windowless. Heavy hangings covered the wall, worked black on black, with brief shots of white in a design confused and disconcerting enough that I tried not to look.
“I’ve been waiting for you ever since my old friend, King Warin’s chancellor, said you were coming this way,” he said, sitting down in one black leather chair and motioning me into another.
“Warin? You know him?” The terror I had tried to dismiss by the doorway was back again in full strength.
“I already told you I know a number of interesting things, including the answers to many questions I’m sure you’ve asked yourself.”
“And what do you want in return for this information, Prince?” I asked, trying to make his eyes meet mine.
“Very good, Daimbert,” he said as though pleased. “I knew you would not disappoint me. Of course I want something. What I want is knowledge from you.”
“I don’t think I have any knowledge that you would want,” I said slowly.
“Of course you do,” he said with another smile. I wondered briefly how many teeth he actually had. “You’re a school-trained wizard and know the wizards’ secret of perpetual youth. It’s obvious-you’ve got a white beard and hair, and yet you’re still youthful and vigorous. What age are you really? A hundred? A hundred and fifty?”
“I’m not yet forty.” I had no intention of telling him about the incident that had turned my hair white overnight. “School magic has no secret of youth. Wizards in the west may live well past two hundred, but if we do it’s because of the same spells that wizards used for generations, even before the school was founded-the same spells, I expect, available to you.”
His stone eyes managed to convey disappointment. He pursed his thin lips, then smiled again. “We’ll return to this in a moment. But you in the west know how to see and to hear someone over a great distance, I understand.”
“Telephones,” I agreed. “But don’t ask me, Prince. I’ve never been any good at technical magic.” I was not going to explain that the far-seeing attachment, while my own invention, had been discovered essentially by accident. “The wizard you probably should ask is Elerius, who used to work for King Warin. By the way, does the king know that you consider his chancellor your friend?” I leaned forward and then wished I hadn’t, because the wizard’s white face up close was like a mask, and for a moment I felt irrationally convinced that beneath that mask was the face of a corpse. “You said you had information for me. The first information I want is how you knew we were coming.”
“Warin’s chancellor sent me a message as soon as you left his kingdom.”
I was about to interrupt and ask how that message was sent, since pigeon messages between the eastern and western kingdoms were notoriously unreliable, and this wizard had no telephone, but I reminded myself that there were certainly other ways-a fast-riding messenger, even a spell-captured eagle of the high peaks. My guess was that Warin, even if he were a sorcerer, had no idea that his trusted chancellor was also in this wizard’s pay-which thought made me wonder briefly if there had also been activities of Elerius’s which he had not known about.
“My friend knew that I’d been waiting for a long time for visitors from Yurt,” Prince Vlad added.
“I know who you are,” I said suddenly. The king’s younger brother might not be someone to produce terrifying stories, but this man certainly was. “You’re the wizard who was employed, fifty years ago, by Prince Dominic of Yurt.”
“It was difficult tracking you across all those miles between the mountains and here,” Prince Vlad continued without denying my guess. “Someone in your party is extremely good.” I would have to tell Ascelin if I lived to see him again.
He motioned toward a black marble table on the far side of the room. “That is how I knew where you were.” I went over to look. On the table was a three-dimensional map of what appeared to be this part of the eastern kingdoms. “Try the skull.”
By the map was the face of a skull, with crystals set in the eye sockets. When I put it in front of my own face to look through the crystals, the model of the eastern kingdoms became enormous, as though I were an eagle flying over it. I could see armed men on the roads, houses tucked into clearings, castles at the river crossings. The tiniest movement of the head, even of the eyes, took one’s line of vision miles. It would be hard to find people who were deliberately hiding, even with this magic, but my hands trembled as I slowly set the skull down again.
“It was only because so many of the other wizards of the eastern kingdoms owe me favors-either princes and counts in their own right or allied with kings-that I was able to keep track of you at all. Troop movements are a rather awkward way of easing people you can’t quite see in the direction you want, but it was eventually effective. After all, you’re here now.”
“Wait,” I said, without enough time to wonder how many of the soldiers we had seen and hidden from were actually being moved for our benefit. “You died of wounds and the fever fifty years ago.”
“There are many versions of death,” he said vaguely, pulling his translucent lids down over his eyes.
“But you are that wizard?” I demanded, determined to find out at least one clear piece of information.
“That’s what you want most to know?” he said, opening his eyes again. He seemed to be able to see with them, but I was more and more convinced they were something artificial. “Yes, I might as well tell you that I am. If you’re as young as you claim, you won’t have known Prince Dominic, but I never trusted him. He told me he could fight a dozen men at once, but it took only ten to overcome him when we were both struck down. Even after his manservant and I buried the prince, I feigned a much worse fever than I actually had.”
“He didn’t trust you either,” I said. I paused, pushing back terror, and continued, “So you didn’t actually die?” More than anything else, at the moment I wanted reassurance that, whatever he might have done with his body, his dead soul had not been sent back to earth from hell.
But he did not give me that reassurance. “Because I did not trust Prince Dominic, I didn’t tell him that part of the magic necessary to uncover the Wadi’s secret was an opening spell I attached to the ruby ring itself.”
“What a shame,” I lied. “We left the ruby ring home in Yurt.”
To my surprise, he seemed to believe me. The living map of the eastern kingdoms, I realized, would not give him enough detail to be able to see for himself. I presumed he didn’t trust King Warin’s chancellor either and had therefore not questioned him closely about the jewelry worn by the visitors from Yurt. I spread out my own hand ostentatiously, to show my eagle ring set with a tiny diamond.
“It’s probably gone from the Wadi by now anyway,” he said regretfully. “When that servant left for Yurt, he took the ring with him, and I was-well, too weak to stop him or follow him. And I certainly have never liked the idea of wandering the western kingdoms, threatened by school-trained wizards. So I have waited a long time for someone from Yurt to come east, and have never even bothered going to the Wadi.”
“What was hidden there?”
My question came out much louder than I expected and hung in the air between us. The wizard half turned away, then smiled slowly. “Maybe I don’t trust you, either, Daimbert. If you want to know that, you’ll have to teach me much more of the magic of glass and steel.”
“Glass and steel?” I said cautiously.
“That’s what we call school magic here in the eastern kingdoms, your technical magic that can keep working even without an active mind saying the spells. Our magic is a magic of bone and blood.”
I had assumed that the wizards of the eastern kingdoms, without anything comparable to the organization of the wizards’ school in the west, would be hard-pressed to restrain warfare. Instead, it sounded as though war and death were their normal occupations.
“What did you give King Warin’s chancellor in return for the information that we were coming?”
“You have so many questions, Daimbert!” he said, showing his teeth again. “And you’ve given me no information at all yet. Before I tell you anything else, I want to know that spell of yours that allows western wizards to live well past two hundred.”
I considered this for a moment, keeping my eyes on my companion’s black satin suit because I didn’t want to look at his face. The powerful spell that would slow down-though never reverse-natural aging was not taught until near the end of the eight-year program, and the teachers always impressed on us that our oaths to help humanity did not include meddling with nature’s cycle to give all our friends an extra century or two of life
But a wizard, even one here, surely knew that spell anyway. By showing him the spell I might be able to convince him that I had no secret knowledge he wanted. “Give me some paper,” I said. “I’ll write it out.”
It was a long spell and took a while. While I wrote, I thought over what little information I had from him so far. If King Warin, via his chancellor, had some sort of connection with the wizards of the eastern kingdoms, then that might explain why Evrard had called him a sorcerer. The strange form of magic that had shaped this castle and maybe even the physical being of the man across from me might look like the black arts, at least to someone like Evrard who had never actually met a demon.
This would mean that Elerius had not lived for twelve years in the castle of a man who had sold his soul to the devil, which was a relief, though I continued to suspect he might have picked up some form of magic he would prefer not to share with the masters of the school.
I still didn’t know what connection there might be, if any, between Joachim’s brother on the one hand, with his talk of King Solomon’s Pearl, disappearing caravans, and the very real present his wife had tried to send with us, and, on the other, the mysterious object of which Prince Dominic had learned shortly before his death. The only person who might understand the connection was King Warin. And I doubted Warin would trust this wizard either.
I passed the pieces of paper across to Prince Vlad. “Here it is, but I’m sure you already know this spell.”
He seized the paper avidly, but I thought I could again see disappointment in his features as he scanned the spell. “But this will do nothing to make someone younger!”
“That’s what I told you.” I hesitated, then pushed on. “For that you need the supernatural.”
He shot me a sudden glance from his stone eyes. “Or to know something that apparently even you don’t know.”
How to give motion to inanimate objects, I thought, how to prop up a sagging and decaying body with the dead flesh and blood of others, or even with wood and stone. If he had had to rebuild a badly wounded body with incredibly complex magic, no wonder he had not been able to restrain Prince Dominic’s servant from returning to Yurt. “I don’t know anything about it,” I agreed.
“Then it may prove less useful stopping you than I thought,” he said slowly, “unless- Unless you actually did bring the ruby ring with you from Yurt.”
Caught in my lie, I tried to brazen my way out. “We had no idea there was anything magical about that ring itself,” I said, which was true. “You must know that we stopped at Prince Dominic’s tomb to see if it might have any secrets to yield, which we wouldn’t have bothered doing if we’d known the secret was back in the treasury of Yurt.” I paused, then tried to give him an intimidating glare. “If you say you have information for me, why not prove it by telling me who opened that tomb? Was it you?”
This surprised him. “Why would anyone open Dominic’s tomb?”
“You’re lying,” I said, to conceal the fact that I had been myself. “You said we would exchange knowledge, but you opened the prince’s tomb to get something you hid there when he was buried.”
He didn’t take the bait. Instead he shook his head. “Maybe that servant-he always was a fool-let some information drop on his way home. Or our source of information on the Wadi Harhammi may have regretted letting that information out-and, before you ask, I’m not going to tell you what that source was.”
“But you know the opening spell,” I said suddenly, not admitting that we had the ring with us but not bothering to deny it any more either. “That must be more than anyone else has-except, possibly, this ‘source’ of yours. At least one other person is searching desperately for that information but doesn’t have it. Maybe what Prince Dominic called something wonderful, something marvelous, is still there! Do you want to come with us to the East to look for it?”
I jumped to my feet as I spoke. This wizard with the artificial eyes was the last person I would normally have chosen for a traveling companion, but if he was with us, where I could watch him, I would not have to worry what he was doing behind our backs.
“I do not leave my castle,” he said slowly. “I had hoped that, in return for the information you need, you would find it for me and bring it here.”
Something that even such a powerful wizard could covet for fifty years must be marvelous indeed. “You clearly don’t have any knowledge I need or want,” I said. “You’ve been bluffing, Prince.”
“I could tell you what’s concealed in the Wadi. I think you would prefer to know before rather than after you use that opening spell.”
“Come with us, then, and tell us as we go,” I said, “or we’ll find out for ourselves anyway. I’m offering to take you along, but if you stay here you know I won’t be back.”
“You won’t know what to do with it, even with the opening spell, even with the ruby. Swear to me by all the forces of magic that you will bring it back, and I will reveal its powers to you when you arrive.”
“And, once you have it, you’ll get rid of us? Not likely, Prince.”
His eyes came fully open as he pushed his face close to mine. “If you try to rush out of here now, even if your magic can fight past the powers that guard me, I think you’ll find that armies will pursue you all across the eastern kingdoms-until they catch you and kill you.”
I grabbed his arm. It felt almost like a normal human arm. “Then our only safety is having you with us. I don’t care if you don’t want to leave this castle. You’re going to now!”
With force and magic I dragged him from the room. He struggled against me, but I was stronger. The corridor, unlit by any candle, was completely black. I yelled out a spell, and for an instant it was lit up as bright as day, and I could see the corridor’s end and the studded nail doors, opening onto night.