A steep mountain peak rose before us, far higher than any other we had passed. Its snowy top, thrusting into the sky, glinted like gold in the early morning sun. As we flew toward it I heard, first distantly and then increasingly clearly, a call coming from it, and realized it was calling me.
I gave the magical commands to turn the air cart. Instead of circling the peak we started straight up its side.
“There’s a wizard on the top of the mountain,” I told the princes, who looked toward me in surprise. “I’m going to talk to him.” Suddenly I did not feel as hopelessly lost as I had all week.
The air off the snow fields became rapidly colder, and we pulled blankets around our shoulders. I took mouthfuls of the thin, frigid air, my heart beating rapidly, either from the altitude or from excitement. For the first time since transforming the gorgos, I began to think I might someday be able to practice real magic again.
A sharp wind scraped ice from the peak into a swirling cloud that half obscured it. At the very top of the mountain, just under the final, jagged knife-blade of ice, was a small level area where all the snow had been swept away. Here was a bright blue house.
I set the air cart down by the door, vaulted out, and tied it to a ring in the doorpost. Leaning into the wind, I lifted a fist, but the door opened before I had a chance to knock.
A wizard put his head out. I recognized him at once. He had graduated from the wizards’ school three years before I had, then stayed on as a teaching assistant. I had not seen him in nearly twenty years, but he still looked exactly the same.
“Well!” he said with pleasure. “If it isn’t good old ‘Frogs’!”
I stiffened. I had had no idea the other students at school had given me a nickname derived from my disastrous experiences in that transformations practical. But several comments I had half-overheard at the time now became horribly and mortifyingly clear.
“My name,” I started to say in cold fury, “is Daimbert!” But I managed to stop myself. After all, I was delighted to see him.
I turned back toward the cart where the other three were hesitating. “Come on!” I called. “Prince Lucas, Prince Paul, Vor, I’d like you to meet an old friend of mine from the wizards’ school.”
They climbed out, and the princes gave the formal half-bow, while Vor dipped his head. “He graduated second in his class,” I continued cheerfully, having an inspiration how to get my own back, “and would easily have graduated first most years. We used to call him ‘Book-Leech’-behind his back, of course.”
Good old Book-Leech froze for a second, then smiled. “Welcome, welcome, come in! It’s much too cold to leave this door open.” As we filed past him, he said modestly, “Well, I don’t know if I ever could have been first in the class, as there’s always someone- But Elerius was good, wasn’t he! Do you correspond with him at all, Daimbert? I hear he’s Royal Wizard now at one of the most powerful of the western kingdoms.”
I graciously overlooked the inherent insult in this comment. Yurt might not be the most powerful kingdom, but I liked it best. And if the queen took me back, I would not have to live in a blue house three miles up on top of a snowy peak.
Inside the house a fire roared in the fireplace, and the morning sun through the windowpanes made rainbows on the floor and furniture. We pulled off our ice-encrusted jackets, and the wizard hurried to make tea.
“You have no idea how pleased I was when I first sensed another wizard’s mind here in the mountains,” he said. “It does get lonely here, in spite of all the advantages. I’d known you be coming across the mountains of course-they’d telephoned to warn me you were taking the air cart up to the land of magic. But I hadn’t dared hope you’d come so close that I could call you and have you stop.”
The water boiled and he poured it into the pot. Vor and the two princes sat rather stiffly against the wall, still startled to be suddenly in a real house again after days outdoors, much less a wizard’s house on an inaccessible mountain peak. This, I thought, would be an especially useful lesson for Lucas, to see wizards serving mankind even in the northern mountains.
“What happened to you?” the wizard asked. “Your face looks burned.”
“My hair caught fire,” I said. “I was fighting a fanged gorgos.”
“A gorgos? And you won?” He stirred the tea leaves and chuckled. “Well, you must have won or you wouldn’t be here. But how did you do it? Who wants sugar?”
He poured out the tea into a row of mugs. “I transformed the gorgos into a frog,” I said modestly. “I’ve got it out in the cart, inside a binding box. I know one shouldn’t be able to transform creatures of wild magic, but I put a summoning spell on it at the same time, and at least it’s now a very small and frog-shaped gorgos.”
He was actually silent for a moment, looking, I thought, suitably impressed. “Well,” he said to the others, “I should have known. ‘Frogs’ here always had a real genius for improvisation. The rest of us were always jealous.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “No one at the school was ever jealous of me.”
“Yes, we were!” he said, quite seriously. “All of the rest of us would spend hours with our books, preparing for an exam, but you would come strolling into class late, probably not having studied, doubtless having spent the evening down at the taverns, maybe not even owning the right books.”
Paul gave me an odd look. Perhaps it was good that he realize I had not always been the staid, even stodgy old wizard he doubtless imagined me to be.
“And then,” the wizard continued, turning to the others, “he’d try to make up for his lack of application with sheer flair. Sometimes of course he failed spectacularly-I’ll never forget the expression on Zahlfast’s face that time!” He chuckled appreciatively at the memory. I did not join in. “But more likely than not, he’d manage something. You know, Daimbert, I think you were the despair of our teachers.”
This at least I could agree with.
“I hear they had you teaching improvisation at the school this spring,” he said, sipping his tea. “How did it work out?”
“Not quite as well as I’d hoped,” I said. “Whenever I tried to explain to the students of the technical magic division that sometimes you have to put spells together in new or unexpected ways, they always wanted me to make explicit which ways, so that they could practice their improvisation and be ready.”
“Excuse me,” said Paul to the wizard, “but what are you doing here, on top of a mountain at the edge of the land of wild magic?”
“Guarding the border, of course,” he said in surprise. “Your wizard must have stopped here twenty years ago to meet the border-guards when he took his field trip up here from the school.”
“I was never invited to go on the field trip.” I was quite sure he knew this; after all, he had been one of the assistants taken along to help guide the few chosen wizardry students. “As you said, I think I was the despair of our teachers.”
“But why are you guarding the border?” Paul persisted.
“Making sure creatures of wild magic stay where they belong rather than coming down into the land of men.”
“Do you mean,” said Prince Lucas, speaking for the first time, “that there would be monsters down in our cities all the time if it weren’t for you wizards? I must say, you can’t have been doing a very good job or the gorgos wouldn’t have gotten to Caelrhon.”
“It’s not that simple,” said the wizard crossly. “Wild magic tends to stay in place north of the mountains, and it would most of the time even without us. And we can’t stop a creature that’s been called by very powerful or even black magic from going south. I expect that’s why you had gorgos problems. There were always hermit-wizards up here, but it’s all become much more orderly and reliable since the school was founded. Now we can stop most of the creatures that would otherwise wander south by accident, and we telephone the City to warn them about any unusual activity.”
“So you do have a telephone.” I glanced around without seeing one but assumed it was in the other room. The thought that the City was only a call away was very cheering.
“Yes indeed. With one of your far-seeing attachments, of course,” he added generously.
“But doesn’t it become dreary, being up here alone?” This was Paul.
“Not dreary. You lads won’t understand this, but Daimbert will. There’s something enormously seductive about the land of magic. All one’s spells work much better. Flying isn’t an effort any more. Even here, at the border, one can feel the difference. None of us are posted here very long, and they say it’s because they don’t want us to become too lonely, but I think in part it’s because they don’t want us going over the edge.
“It is lonely, of course,” he continued. “The air cart brings us supplies, but only irregularly, when no one else needs the cart. The school ought somehow to arrange for a second one. We can talk on the telephone, but it’s not the same. I’ve already been here two months, and I’ll be here for another two, and you’re the first people I’ve seen.”
“Then if you were at the wizards’ school two months ago,” I said in surprise, “you were there at the same time I was.”
He waved his hand vaguely. “Well, there are always a lot of people at the school, and one doesn’t see everybody.” It was true that, between the teachers, the students, the young wizards, and the older ones coming and going, there were always a lot of people at the school. But he had known I was there. He had just not wanted to see foolish old ‘Frogs’ until now, when he had no other wizards to talk to. “So I’m delighted I’m having a chance to see you now,” he added.
“I’m sorry in that case to have to leave,” I said, standing up, “but we really need to get the monstrous frog up further into the borderlands, somewhere we can dispose of it. Thank you for the tea. Maybe we can stop here again on our way back.”
“Then I’ll hope to see you all again in a few days. Very nice meeting you young fellows.”