I took off in my air cart in late afternoon, but instead of heading toward Yurt I flew southeast from the City. With Sengrim’s death, everything seemed wrapped up to everyone else’s satisfaction, but not to mine. After half an hour I saw a castle’s towers rising before me in the darkening air. More than twice the size of the royal castle of Yurt, it perched on a high pinnacle above a fertile river valley. As I approached magic lamps winked on in all the windows.
The air cart stopped abruptly, jerking me forward. The wings continued to flap, but we made no progress. I probed for spells and discovered that the air had been made solid: impermeable, as far as I could tell, to any sort of magical flying creature, but not, I discovered as I thrust an experimental hand through, to me. It looked as if someone had been taking lessons from the nixie.
I set the air cart down at the base of the rocky pinnacle and ascended the steps, my heart beating fast. Guards with halberds barred my way at the top. “I would like to speak to Elerius, your Royal Wizard,” I said, but already I could see a black-bearded figure coming up behind them. He must have been warned by the triggering of the protective spells he had set up to guard his castle from creatures from the land of wild magic.
“How delightful to see you, Daimbert,” he said, as hearty and welcoming as good old Book-Leech on the mountaintop in the borderlands. I just wished I could believe him equally sincere “Come to my study. And I understand that congratulations are in order!”
Then I had reached him before the news that I had refused the position at the school. “I turned the Master down,” I said casually. “How much role did you play in setting up the offer?”
This startled him. He stopped dead in the middle of asking a deferentially hovering servant to bring us tea, then whisked me up the stairs into his study and slammed the door. I had never seen so many books in one place in my life. In a moment Elerius had regained his cheerful composure, but I could tell it was not the same.
“Zahlfast and the Master must have been quite surprised!” he said, smiling while his hazel eyes looked me over intently. “How could you refuse an offer to join the permanent faculty-something they have offered no one in thirty years? Is Yurt so charming, or do you have your eye on a bigger kingdom somewhere else? Or,” and he paused for a few seconds, “is that witch in Caelrhon more appealing than the City?”
That was the final evidence I needed. That he would threaten-even obliquely threaten-to blackmail me meant I must have information about him that he wanted kept secret.
“Don’t smirk, Elerius,” I said quietly. “You can guess and insinuate all you like. But if you push me too far I’ll just tell the Master I’m leaving organized wizardry to spend the rest of my life doing illusions at fairs-after I tell him that you were behind Sengrim every step of the way.”
We were interrupted before he could answer by the entry of servants with tea. It was quite a production: four servants in livery, one to open the door, one to carry the teapot, one to carry the tray with cups and spoons, and one to carry a plate of gingerbread puffs baked in brightly-colored foils. I bit into one when it became clear that the servants would not go until everything had been found satisfactory. Not bad, although Yurt’s cook’s were better.
Elerius had had time to prepare his response by the time the servants finally left. “I did befriend Sengrim a few years ago,” he said good-naturedly, pouring tea, “back when he was trying to persuade the school that we needed to do more with fire magic and no one else would listen to him. Everyone at the school knows about that. But that hardly means I was ‘behind him every step of the way’!”
“It means you brought a fanged gorgos to Caelrhon which nearly killed me,” I said, looking at him levelly over my teacup. “Sengrim would never have managed that on his own. He had to be working with a demon-and Zahlfast said he wasn’t-or else an extremely good wizard. Theodora-the witch you seem to know about-touched a wizard’s mind in the cathedral city, but this wizard was not anyone she recognized. And that means it wasn’t Sengrim, not even in his disguise as the old magician. Both the cathedral cantor and the construction foreman mentioned dealing with a wizard, but somebody young, not old like Sengrim.”
Elerius’ teacup gave a sudden rattle in its saucer. I looked at him sharply but he only smiled, waiting for me to continue.
“And then Zahlfast and the Master seemed well informed about the bishop’s inaugural sermon, saying there was another wizard there. They didn’t say who, but it must have been someone they trusted. You knew all along I was in Caelrhon, because you sent me a letter urging me to leave, realizing full well it would have exactly the opposite effect; I should have been suspicious at the time that you even knew I was there. The Master forgave me for being indirectly responsible for Sengrim’s death. Did you think he would forgive you for being directly responsible for mine?”
“You were never in serious danger, Daimbert,” said Elerius, passing the gingerbread puffs. This wasn’t how I remembered it. “I was of course interested to see how you would do against a gorgos with your particular style of magic, but I was there, disguised, among the townspeople.” The image of a face I had seen in the crowd, past Lucas’s shoulder, as I lay on the paving in front of the cathedral suddenly clicked into place. “Another minute in your fight with the gorgos, or another move by Caelrhon’s crown prince, and I would have had to intervene.” I didn’t like his timing; there hadn’t been any minutes or moves to spare. “And you would never have been in any danger at all if you hadn’t been so precipitate. Sengrim was intending to defeat the gorgos himself-with my help, of course.”
“You say Sengrim intended to overcome a gorgos he had himself brought from the land of wild magic,” I said slowly, peeling foil with fingers that I kept from trembling by sheer will. “You realize, Elerius, that this makes no sense whatsoever. So far you’ve helped a renegade wizard turn on his own employer, attack a cathedral, summon a hundred dragons from the land of magic, and nearly kill scores of people at the coronation of the king of Yurt. This is scarcely suitable in the school’s best graduate! I came to talk to you before telling the Master any of this, but if you don’t have an adequate explanation I’m heading straight back to the City tonight.”
Unless you imprison me, I thought, keeping my thoughts well shielded, or unless you instructed the servants to poison the gingerbread puffs.
“A good idea, talking to me first,” said Elerius with a remarkably genuine smile. “I know there have been a few occasions in the past, Daimbert, where you ended up looking like a fool. It’s this habit of acting on instinct, you know. It may serve you well in your personal sort of improvisational magic, but it’s a poor guide in ordinary affairs. No sense letting the school think they had a narrow escape when you turned down their position!”
I waited silently, knowing he would have to say more. Outside it was fully dark, and the magic lights were reflected in the windows. On the wall hung Elerius’s diploma from the school, nearly six feet long, with his name written in letters of fire at the top and the lower half dense with mentions of honors, distinctions, and areas of special merit. Stars twinkled all around the edge. Mine in my chambers in Yurt had my name and the twinkling stars and nothing else.
“Sengrim, as I mentioned,” Elerius said at last, “first came to my attention several years ago when he was trying to persuade the school that they ought to offer at least a series of lectures on fire magic-with him teaching it, of course. The Master wasn’t interested; there’s that one course I occasionally teach myself on the old magic, and he seemed to feel that was enough. Besides, I believe he wasn’t sure Sengrim would be an appropriate mentor for the young wizards-he was acting rather strangely even then. He wouldn’t even say how he’d learned fire magic …”
“I know how he did,” I said shortly. “Go on.”
Elerius lifted sharply-peaked eyebrows at me but continued. “I was interested myself, however, both for my own course and because I believe wizards shouldn’t reject anything that might prove useful. And that’s why Sengrim came to consider me his friend, and why he turned to me this spring when he quarreled with his prince, pretended in a fit of pique to blow himself up, and then decided rather belatedly to try to reestablish himself at Caelrhon. I agreed, somewhat reluctantly I must say, to Sengrim’s plan to prove to his king and prince what a good wizard he really was. I have to admit I originally thought his plan as nonsensical as you do: first to bring a monster from the land of magic and then to overcome it in a very public setting to show his competence, amazing everyone by his extremely timely return from the dead. But when it became clear that he would do it with or without me, I decided it would be better to help.”
“So he decided after talking to the construction foreman,” I said slowly, “that a gorgos would serve his purposes nicely, and you helped him go up to the borderlands and capture one-as well as a horse for the Romneys, who he was afraid might reveal that the ragged old magician in the area was in fact the supposedly deceased Royal Wizard in disguise. You helped with that disguise too, didn’t you-something thorough enough to fool even another wizard. Just out of curiosity, exactly where near Caelrhon did you manage to imprison Sengrim’s gorgos?”
“There’s a little grove a mile outside of town, a grove thick with unchanneled magic. It wasn’t difficult to channel it, to make a chamber in the ground under the spring where the gorgos could be bound until it was wanted.”
I closed my eyes for a second. I had been heedless of a number of things the day I went there with Theodora.
Elerius poured out the last of the tea. “I’m afraid, Daimbert,” he continued, “that you rather spoiled Sengrim’s plan for him. It was supposed to end with him triumphantly telling Prince Lucas that even the bravest and most able kings needed wizards to protect their kingdoms from wild magic, and being welcomed again into the royal court. Instead it ended with the prince threatening to kill you. Even though it could just as easily have been him, rather than feeling gratitude for your fast action Sengrim became extremely bitter toward you. And I understand the two of you had had some sort of earlier misunderstanding?”
I did not deign to answer.
“He was already furious with the school,” Elerius continued, “which he thought had unfairly given you opportunities he deserved himself. I seemed to be the only school-trained wizard he trusted as he started imagining plots against him from the faculty and trying to create counter-plots. At any rate, at this point it became obvious that he was growing seriously deranged, so I thought it best to distance myself from him. The rest, including the dragons and the unfortunate attack on your king’s coming of age festivities, was entirely his own work. I was pleased to hear that you had once again triumphed.”
He fell silent but looked at me as though waiting for my reaction. “So this is your entire story?” I said at last. “The story you would have told the Master if I accused you of being involved with Sengrim?”
“Of course. Truth is always wisest.”
“What about the rumors of the school plotting to put wizards in every castle and manor to seize control from the aristocracy?”
Elerius shrugged. “Rumors are always flying on one topic or another.”
“How do you explain leaving to his own wild devices a wizard you thought had become deranged?”
“You know I have no authority over any other wizard.” Elerius shook his head regretfully. “I have sometimes tried to persuade the Master and Zahlfast that the school needs tighter discipline, but as long as they keep only a loose, almost informal organization, there is really nothing a wizard can do in a situation like this.” He set down his empty cup and rose briskly to his feet. “Well, did you plan to return to that little kingdom of yours tonight, Daimbert, or would you like to stay here? I’m sure a set of chambers could be arranged.”
I gave him my best wizardly glare from under my eyebrows and remained seated. I had suspected Theodora of manipulating me coldly, Lucas of bringing the gorgos to Caelrhon himself, and Vincent of plotting to murder Paul and the queen. All of them had managed to talk me out of my suspicions. But someone, if not the princes of Caelrhon, had been working with Sengrim. And I would not give up these suspicions so easily.
Elerius looked down at me quizzically. “I’m sorry, Daimbert. I should have realized when I saw you devouring the gingerbread that you had not had any dinner. Shall I order you a tray?”
I was not going to be talked out of valid suspicions and I was not going to be patronized. “Sit down,” I said as though this were my study rather than his.
Surprisingly, he sat down at once. Emboldened by this small triumph, I leaned forward, still glaring. “Let me point out a few things that your explanation doesn’t cover. You were not just trying to assist Sengrim in a plan to recover his position. You were using him for your own purposes.”
“And what might these purposes have been?” Elerius asked as though I had suggested something rather amusing.
“You want to establish a firmer organization at the school. Zahlfast told me that at the beginning of the summer, and you just said the same thing yourself. The best way you knew to make the school draw tighter together was to make it feel threatened: threatened by an embittered wizard turned renegade, by a church that hated wizardry, by aristocrats threatening to dismiss all their wizards, and by dragons coming over the border. This all started without any help from you, when Prince Lucas quarreled with his Royal Wizard because Sengrim stopped him from a fight in which he would have been bested at once. But you took advantage of the situation because it fit in well with your own long-term plans. Did you think I would not find out that you yourself had installed the far-seeing telephone on the mountain at the borderlands-the phone that wouldn’t work?”
“I heard about that,” said Elerius easily. “But the spells for the far-seeing attachment have always been a little haphazard. Didn’t you invent it yourself, Daimbert?”
I ignored this latest jab. Yurt’s own telephones had worked perfectly for years.
“And what better way,” I continued, “to make the school feel itself beleaguered by the church and the aristocracy than actually to make certain that it was? You showed up at Caelrhon’s royal court in disguise, telling the king you were a City nobleman who had learned of the school’s ‘plots’ against aristocrats, plots you invented in the hope-nearly realized-that threatened royal courts would turn against the school. I had been wondering for some time who this purported aristocratic friend of the Master’s might have been, and I only realized now, when you mentioned being in the cathedral city, that Lucas’s description matched you. I gather you play the nobleman well, Elerius. Haven’t I heard some strange rumors about your parentage? Perhaps a birth on the wrong side of the blanket in some royal castle …”
But he did not take the bait, only following me intently, his eyebrows slightly raised, almost as though-pleased?
I pushed on. “By having me, a wizard, in the city of Caelrhon all summer even if no other wizard was in evidence, and by having the gorgos appear at the old bishop’s funeral, you were certain the priests would blame the monster on institutionalized magic. Your only miscalculation was not taking Joachim into account-the dean of the cathedral, now bishop. He’s the most powerful churchman in two kingdoms, but he’s also my friend.”
“That is something about you I have found intriguing, Daimbert,” Elerius said as though in calculation.
“And which you mentioned to Zahlfast when urging him to hire me permanently at the school. This is the one aspect I haven’t worked out yet: why you want me on the faculty, when your ultimate purpose is to reorganize the wizards’ school-with yourself in charge!”
Elerius leaned back in his chair and laughed. “This is even better than I imagined, Daimbert! I enjoy watching your mind work. So now you suspect me of going renegade and hatching a plot to overthrow the school? You really should have your friend the bishop say a suitable prayer of gratitude that you didn’t take this story to the Master!”
“It’s more subtle than that,” I said, watching him without smiling. “You aren’t like Sengrim; you haven’t lost control of your mind and your magic. You haven’t even forgotten your oaths to help humanity. If you had, by now I’d probably either be dead or a frog-or both.
“This was all carefully planned,” I continued. “You meant no harm to anyone, or at least that’s what you tell yourself. But you have a vision of a drastically reorganized wizards’ school, one in which the students follow a highly structured, highly rigorous program-a program from which I would never have graduated-and where the school continues to maintain careful control even after the young wizards have taken up their posts. Through no coincidence, you would be at the head of this school.”
I paused to let him say something, but he only continued to listen, intent tawny eyes holding mine and an indulgent smile on his lips.
“Hints of danger from priests and aristocrats, you realized, would not be enough to give you the chance to remake the school in your own image. But again Sengrim gave you an opportunity. You knew I would work out eventually that he brought the gorgos to Caelrhon-and that even if he had overcome his bitterness toward me enough for rational conversation, he would have been too proud to mention your role in helping him. So you decided-and quite rightly-that if dragons attacked the school Sengrim would be blamed for that too.”
“Then I am supposed to be responsible for those dragons?” He was still giving his indulgent smile.
“Sengrim could never have called that many by himself. He was in Yurt, with the lizards he had learned to master several years ago, when someone else brought dragons over the border. You didn’t go to help the masters fight them even though your kingdom is so close to the City. You have spells of your own around this castle that would have warded off dragons. I’m sure you were able to persuade yourself that none of the faculty would actually be killed, that fighting dragons in the City streets would be messy but not actually fatal if everyone kept their heads and worked together. But a battered school with a badly-wounded faculty would need someone to step in and take charge, someone who would quickly assure that wizards, rather than being just one of the ‘three who rule the world,’ would be the only rulers.”
The late summer evening was growing cool in this tower high above the plain. Elerius snapped his fingers, said two words, and lit the kindling in the fireplace. The flames quickly caught the dry wood. When he looked toward me expectantly, I said a few words of my own in the Hidden Language to light a tiny cascade of flames in the air before us.
“Not bad, Daimbert,” he said appreciatively as they flickered back out of existence. “Did you come here then to match spells with me?”
I shook my head hard. “Your spells are better than mine. I’ve always known that. That’s why I want to know why you seem to want me, whose only strength is in improvisation, in a school that you plan to remodel as rigorous, standardized, and monolithic.”
“Don’t assume your imaginings about my ‘plans’ are real, Daimbert,” he said slowly, looking into the fire and not smiling any longer. “You have speculation but not a shred of evidence. If you tried to take any of this to the Master, you realize, I would only deny it all, and you would come out looking an even bigger fool than you did all those years ago at Zahlfast’s transformations practical.”
He spoke so soberly that for a moment I began to doubt my own reason, and I wished wildly for Theodora’s ring of invisibility so I could escape before I embarrassed myself any further.
“But,” and he turned his eyes sharply toward me, “let’s assume for a moment that you’re right.”
I took a deep breath and let it out again.
“Don’t you think the idea deserves better than your dismissal? For generations before the Black Wars, the aristocrats controlled the western kingdoms and used their strength and even their wizards against other kings and lords. The result was the bloody wars that so sickened the old wizards that they, contentious and individualistic as they were, finally banded together to stop the fighting. So we know that aristocrats can’t be allowed to make the great decisions. And the priests with their prating about sin and morality would not be any better. So who does that leave but the wizards?”
“Why does anyone have to rule the world?” I demanded. “Why can’t the townsmen rule their towns, the kings their individual kingdoms, and the priests their churches?”
“Since in fact we already are the ultimate rulers,” Elerius went on without answering my question, “then it would be best to plan ahead, rather than simply reacting to events. The Master did an excellent job in setting up the school in the first place, coordinating the teaching of wizardry, making sure young wizards learned magic’s responsibilities as well as its spells. But the time has come to think of the next necessary steps. Those of us of the next generation, trained in the school and its methods but with visions of our own, are ready to go beyond the victories already won.” He paused and smiled. “You realize, of course, I am speaking hypothetically.”
“And what would I, hypothetically, have to do with all this?”
“You and I have crossed paths before, Daimbert,” said Elerius thoughtfully, stroking his beard. “You have an uncanny knack of disrupting my plans. If I actually had intended to use dragons to attack the school, then I might be quite angry with you for warning Zahlfast in time. Some wizards in such a situation, I might imagine, would realize that you had most likely not told anyone in the City that you were coming here, and that with the king of Yurt thinking you were still at the school, the school thinking you were back in Yurt, and the witch in Caelrhon thinking you had loved her and left her, it might be a very long time before anyone came to my kingdom to ask awkward questions …”
“So far,” I said evenly, clenching my fists until the nails bit into my palms, “you have tried denial, blackmail, and threats. All this has done is make me more certain than ever that I’m right.”
“And you’re holding out for bribery?” Elerius asked, showing his teeth in a smile. “Since this is all hypothetical and indeed quite imaginary, I can say honestly that you are providing me one of the most entertaining evenings, Daimbert, I have had in a long time. But I was about to add that I am not one of the wizards who reacts simply by eliminating all potential opposition. I already told you that I believe one should not reject anything that could prove useful. Anyone who has the ability to thwart me-even if not always intentionally-has strengths it might be best to have on my side.”
“This is the bribe, then?” I asked, fists still clenched along my sides. “I get hired onto the permanent faculty of the school now, in part so you can keep a closer eye on me, and then you promise that when you take over I can stay?”
“Wouldn’t you find this a tempting bribe, Daimbert-if I were making one?”
“No. I am Royal Wizard of Yurt. And I do not want to be part of any attempt to control the rest of the world. I know you are a better wizard than I could be in a thousand years, but even you can’t control it. If I have thwarted you, it’s not because I have outmaneuvered you. It’s because the world, and that includes me, is much too messy and unpredictable, impossible for even the best wizardly planning to guide successfully.” I rose abruptly to my feet. Get out while I was still alive. “Thank you so much for tea, but I should get home to Yurt tonight.”
Elerius rose too and went to the door, the gracious host, to see me out. I followed him, feeling sweat trickling down my neck. Almost. I was almost out of here to safety. But he paused with his hand on the latch.
“Don’t take accusations to the school, Daimbert, when you have no proof,” he said quietly. “You can take pride in having kept organized wizardry unchanged if that was your goal. But I would still like to be your friend. Think over these ideas how the school might be improved. Anyone who can overcome a fanged gorgos with spells that shouldn’t work, become friends with a bishop, and make such imaginative and highly romantic guesses about what I might have been planning, deserves closer study!” He opened the door. “Have a pleasant trip home-but keep in touch.”