My predecessor took a deep breath, held out both hands, and started on the binding spell. I mentally shook off paralyzing fear and added my magic to his. I had never used a spell like this before, and as the words of the Hidden Language drew me into magic’s four dimensions I felt the forces I touched tugging at me, as if I might be sucked down into magic just as a false step in this tunnel could drop us into the river.
But it seemed to be working. I fought free of engulfing magic to return to myself, and found the old wizard staggering but the monster encased in magic and perfectly still.
I held out a hand to the old wizard. He took it; crumbled leaves were pressed into my palm. He turned his face blankly toward mine, then slowly seemed to recover. His magic light, which had dimmed to almost nothing, brightened again. “Magic is hard work for an old man,” he said hoarsely. “I hope they warn you young wizards at the school how much it can drain out of you.”
It was a good thing I had asked him to teach me the binding spell. I could not have done it completely on my own, certainly not in the short fifteen seconds it had probably taken us, and yet I was fairly sure three-quarters of the spell was mine.
He sat down on the sloping floor and considered his creature. The eyes still moved, but the limbs were motionless. “Let’s get it away from the river,” he said. “No use having it topple in while we’re working our spells.”
Without asking if he needed my help, I used a lifting spell to raise the monster up and move it slowly toward us. I knew he needed my help. Our minds no longer touched, but I felt I could almost read his thoughts. And he was exhausted, not just the exhaustion of a night in the cave, or three days of chasing his creature across Yurt, but of a lifetime of magic.
I set his monster down prone on the slope below us. “Let’s give it more features,” he said. “The eyes work well, but it needs ears and nose and mouth. It will need to hear and need to speak, and it might as well be able to smell the spring flowers.”
“Master,” I said urgently, “don’t you think we should try to dissolve it rather than improve it?”
“Of course not,” he said with energy. “I already told you that. Now be quiet and let me work. I know they never taught you any of these spells.”
They most certainly had not. The old wizard closed his eyes, then began to speak in a very deep voice, that seemed to come from the rocks of the cave wall. The heavy syllables of the Hidden Language rolled and reverberated around us. I tried to follow it all and could not, in part because there were motions of the fingers also mixed in, which sometimes went by too quickly for me to catch, and even when he paused I was fairly sure he was continuing an aspect of the spell in his mind.
He stopped at last, his own face gray and the lines in it more pronounced than ever. But the face of the monster lying before us had changed. The flesh on the sides of its head moved and shaped itself into ears; the center of the face twitched, grew, became a nose; and the lower portion of the face split and became a mouth.
As soon as the mouth was formed, it began to roar. The old wizard and I were nearly pushed backwards by the force of that roar. He recovered almost immediately, however, and added a few more loops to the binding spell.
The roaring stopped, though the eyes remained alive. I started surreptitiously checking the binding spell with magic. It did not seem as strong or as thorough as I would have liked.
But my predecessor seemed perfectly content with it. “Well, that’s that,” he said in satisfaction. “You know, young whipper-snapper, I’m glad you came with me. Even with your school training, you’ll make a decent wizard someday.”
I was too startled by the open compliment to respond.
He looked at me sideways. “You’re surprised I never said anything of the sort before. Well, I didn’t want to let it go to your head. And because I wanted to be sure you shaped up properly, I may once or twice have said something to you that the persnickety might find insulting.
“But you’ve not been a bad companion for an old man, in spite of what that school tried to teach you. You show me proper respect, but you’ve never gotten all crawling and obsequious about it. If you’d come along fifty years earlier, I might even have let you be my apprentice.”
Again I did not answer, but I was quite sure I would not have wanted to learn the spells he was now working. For several moments we sat in silence.
“Well,” he said at last, “now that we’ve got my creature, I guess we should start thinking about getting back out of this cave. But it’s silly to take three bodies out when we’ve only got two minds between us, isn’t it? And doesn’t it make sense to leave the weakest body behind?”
“Master,” I asked slowly, desperately trying to delay him until I could find some way to stop him, “what do you mean?”
“You know perfectly well what I mean,” he said in exasperation. “Why else do you think I brought you along, except to help me do it? You can make sure my creature doesn’t move, while I-” His voice trailed away on a note of glee.
My only idea was to carry him bodily back out of the cave-assuming I could find our way. I went so far as to throw the first loops of a normal binding spell onto him, but he broke it easily.
“None of that,” he said sharply, but then, unexpectedly, he smiled. “Worried that if somehow it doesn’t work, it will be all your fault, is that it, young wizard?” he went on more kindly. “Well, you can stop feeling so responsible, even if you are Royal Wizard now. I’ve been planning this for years. This old body of mine wouldn’t be good for much more anyway, so this looks like my last chance to give my spell a try. I’ve already served five generations of kings of Yurt, so it won’t matter if I don’t see the new little prince grow up to succeed. If my spell doesn’t work, nothing’s lost-or nothing that wouldn’t be lost soon anyway.
“But if it works! Then you can say you were there and took part in one of the world’s greatest advances in magic, that you helped your old master do something no other wizard had ever done before!”
This didn’t help. He wanted an appreciative audience to whom to demonstrate his power, but I could not simply watch. By being here at all I had become responsible for him. I was madly searching for an argument, anything to say to talk him out of it, when my attention was caught by something else.
“Master, your creature- I think it’s breaking out!”
“Nonsense. I cast that binding spell myself.”
I had cast most of that binding spell myself, and it was weakening fast. “When you changed its face, that must have interfered with the other spell, and now-”
I stopped trying to talk, too busy trying to reconstruct my spells instead. For the monster was indeed beginning to move, slowly sitting up, leaning forward, watching us with avid eyes.
The spell wasn’t working. I threw words of the Hidden Language together faster and faster, and then I realized what was wrong. This particular spell, a spell designed for a creature immune to normal binding spells, did not have an effect when that creature was moving.
I desperately tried to find a way to improvise something better, to bridge that gap in the old wizard’s spell, expecting him the whole time to add his magic to mine. But he did not come to my aid.
Instead the forces of magic were suddenly disturbed by a new and even more powerful spell. I came abruptly back to myself, to hear the narrow stone passage ring to words in the Hidden Language I had never heard before and did not want to hear again.
The wizard’s staff blazed so bright that the passage and the river below were illuminated as though the stone had cracked and mid-day had reached us. The monster staggered backwards, throwing an arm across its eyes. My own eyes squeezed involuntarily shut.
There was the sound of something hard falling, and I forced them open again. The old wizard’s staff had fallen from his hands and rolled past the monster, halfway to the river. The silver ball continued to glow, but far less brightly.
He was still on his feet, his arms held out, but wavering. The creature was motionless at last, frozen with one hand reached toward the wizard.
I scrambled to find the spell again, to try to imprison the creature in the seconds before it moved.
But the old wizard stopped me. “Let it come,” he said as though choking. “Let it come to me.”
I hesitated, not knowing if I would do more harm or good by obeying him. Ignoring me, the creature took one step toward the old wizard. For five seconds they stood face to face, their extended hands touching.
Then the silver ball on the wizard’s staff flashed a brilliant white, and his body crumpled to the cave floor beside me.
The monster bent over it while I sprang forward, horrified and unsure which spirit animated this creature of magic and dead bones. It poked at the tangled beard and cloak for a second, then suddenly seized the body and lifted it high.
I grabbed at the old wizard, both with my hands and with magic, but I was helpless before the monster’s strength. It glared at me in mindless fury, and from its mouth came a wordless roar. It whirled the wizard’s limp form over its head, dashed it to the ground, and raced past me, away down the tunnel.
The silver ball on the wizard’s staff still glowed just enough for me to be able to see him. His limbs lay twisted and bent at unnatural angles. I attempted to gather him up and put his head in my lap.
For a second I thought it was my imagination, but then his eyes moved beneath his eyelids and slowly opened. “I should have thought of that,” he whispered, highly irritated, but irritated with himself.
I tried to silence him with a hand on his lips, but he clearly found it important to talk. “That spell’s too powerful to be worked by any but the youngest and strongest wizard. And even then I should have realized I’d need something completely empty into which to transfer. I knew it had no mind of its own, so I thought I should be able to transfer my own mind directly into its body.”
He paused, and the breath rattled in his throat. He had not even tried to move anything except his eyelids and his lips. He went on in a moment, even more softly, so that I had to bend my face close to his to hear him.
“No mind was there, but there was still the motive force. My own spell. There was no room in him for my spell and my spirit at the same time. If you ever try it, young whipper-snapper, remember to get the motive force out first.” He stopped and twitched his jaw as though trying unsuccessfully to cough. “But without that spell it might have dissolved back into old bones, and I’d be no better off than I am now.”
He had been horribly broken, I knew, by being thrown to the cave floor, on top of the destructive final effort to transfer his spirit into the creature. “I’m going to try to lift you, Master,” I whispered. “I don’t want to pain you any more than I have to, but I’ve got to get you out of here. So if you-”
He interrupted me with what might once have been a snort. “I do like you, even if you are a whipper-snapper. But if you’re ever going to mature as a wizard you need more sense. Take my ring, but don’t worry about the rest. I knew all along I would never leave the cave in this body.”
He fell silent as though this speech had taken the last of his strength. I bent even closer and realized I could no longer hear or feel his breath. The light on the magic staff slowly went black.