I lit all the magic lamps from both of my rooms and arranged them near my shoulders. I did not like to think of a wizard who had given his soul to the devil standing there in the dark, waiting, perhaps avidly, as I had blundered down the wet cellar corridors.
But how had he squeezed in and out the small window in the iron door? In a moment, I realized this wouldn’t be a problem for a highly competent wizard. He could temporarily transform himself into something much smaller, if necessary-even I could probably do so, now, though I preferred not to try. In the first transformation class they always told the story of the young wizard who had turned himself into a purple bird who couldn’t form the words of the Hidden Language with its beak. It had therefore been unable to turn himself back, and it had flown away in panic before any other wizards could help.
Someone I knew, I thought, someone in the castle, must have become involved with the evil wizard. This was the point where my speculations became very difficult. This evil wizard, even if he had been living near the castle, could have no reason I could think of to put an evil spell on the king three years ago and summon the supernatural into the castle. Therefore, someone else must have wanted that spell, someone else must have asked for his help. I was brought back again, in spite of my best efforts, to the arrival of the queen in Yurt.
I stood up determinedly to start getting ready for bed. If the stranger had been a former apprentice of the old wizard, I was impressed with the power of his magic, stronger than anything I had seen, even at the school, in its imperviousness to my best spells. The old magic still had something to offer someone trained in the City.
With my red velvet jacket in my hands, I stopped to consider again. There ought to be some record of the old wizard’s apprentices, who would after all have had to live in the castle. I pulled my jacket back on and hurried out into the night.
The constable and his wife were not yet in bed, but they were naturally surprised when I banged on the door of their chambers. “A list of the old wizard’s apprentices? You need that tonight, sir?”
“Yes, I do. I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you why, other than that it has to do with the dragon.”
“It might take a while to find the information. He never had an apprentice in the time that I’ve been at Yurt. I’d have to go through my predecessor’s records.”
“I’m sorry, I know you’re very tired, but I really need that information now.”
“I’ll help you find the right ledgers if you want,” the constable’s wife said to him. “Can’t you see how worried the boy is?”
I was glad enough for her support not to mind being called a boy, although I did wonder if she would ever think of me as a man. The constable unlocked a cabinet, and he and his wife started taking out old ledger books.
Previous constables, it turned out, had kept very careful track of everyone who lived in the castle; the present constable, I assumed, had noted just as assiduously the day that I had first arrived. When my predecessor had first come to Yurt a hundred and eighty years earlier, he had quickly acquired apprentices. Usually he had only had one at a time, but there were periods in which he had three or even four. Some left after only a short period; one stayed for a dozen years.
Then, a hundred and thirty or a hundred and forty years ago, the supply of apprentice wizards had dwindled. This would have been, I thought, at the time when the reputation of the wizards’ school in the City had begun to spread. I bent close over the ledger, squinting to read the faded brown ink of the then constable’s tidy handwriting. For a long time the wizard of Yurt had had no apprentices at all.
And then he had a final one, one who had stayed in Yurt for nearly ten years. “That’s right,” said the constable. “He was the last. He left eighty-two years ago. The final indication we have was that he had taken up a post of his own.”
This was it, I thought. It would be impossible to give the stranger a precise age, but, even though he must certainly have slowed down his own aging with powerful magic, I doubted he could be older than a hundred and twenty. “Where did he go?”
The wizard’s last apprentice, according to the ledgers, had left Yurt to become the wizard in a count’s castle in one of the larger of the western kingdoms, located a hundred and fifty miles away. Even that long ago, I thought, someone without a diploma from the school would have had to be satisfied with less than being a royal wizard.
I thanked the constable and his wife profusely and went back to my own chambers. My bones, I noticed, seemed less stiff. As soon as it was light enough for the pigeons to fly, I would send a message to that kingdom and begin to track down what had happened to the old wizard’s last apprentice.
IV
We prepared to leave early in the morning. The sky was grey and the wind damp and chill. I sent my message by the pigeons, asking that an answer be sent to the duchess’s castle. Since my message would have to be relayed through the City’s postal system, I could not expect an answer for several days.
When we had all ridden out, the drawbridge was raised, the first time I had seen it done since coming to Yurt. The gears turned with a rusty screech. The two men who had raised the bridge then came out of the tiny postern gate, and last of all the constable came after them. He locked the postern carefully and balanced on the stepping stones across the moat to join us. The castle looked dark and forbidding under the dark sky; I doubted very much that any thief would try to cross the moat and scale those high walls.
If the old wizard’s last apprentice was in the cellars, I thought, let him enjoy the empty castle. He’d certainly be able to break into the main storerooms if he needed food, but at least he wouldn’t be able to enjoy any of the cook’s fruitcake or Christmas candy, all of which was coming with us. I hadn’t wanted to tell anyone else that someone who had sold his soul to the devil might be rummaging through their rooms while they were gone. But I myself, as well as putting magic locks on my door and all my windows as carefully as I knew how, had brought along several of my most important books, including the Diplomatica Diabolica. The stable boy who helped me load a pack horse had not commented; let him think that wizards needed mysterious heavy objects wherever they went.
We rode as quickly as we could go with the horse litters; no one wanted to linger in the bitter wind. I rode next to Joachim, but we barely exchanged a word. He, I suspected, was wondering if I had had anything to do with the dragon’s appearance. I didn’t know how to reassure him that I hadn’t without also confessing that I had only a guess as to who had. At least, I thought, what the wizard had told me about the old chaplain’s death made it clear that the beginnings of evil in Yurt must have preceded, rather than coincided with, Joachim’s arrival.
Considering that I had been hired as the chief magic-worker in Yurt, I thought, there seemed to have been a very large number of people in the castle already who had become involved in magic. There was the stranger, who I was starting to assume was identical with the old wizard’s last apprentice; there was whoever had first put the spell on the king, who I kept fearing might turn out to be the queen, in spite of what she had told me on Christmas Eve; and there was the Lady Maria, who had certainly seen or been involved in black magic at some point.
The Lady Maria managed to position her horse next to mine after the brief lunch break. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to you for two days,” she said. “But I’ve been wanting to tell you how exciting and romantic it was to see you defeat the dragon.”