He came to the phone at last and looked at me quizzically, his eyebrows making triangular peaks over tawny hazel eyes. His look always made me feel disconcerted but his tone was friendly. “What is it, Daimbert? It is good to hear from you after, what has it been, several years at least, but I assume you must have a serious problem to call me at such a time!”
“Well,” I said with assumed joviality, “sorry to awaken you at this hour and all, but we do have a little problem-” I gave it up; after all, I was desperate. “Please, Elerius,” I said, not caring how pathetically I begged. “You’ve got to come to Yurt. We’ve been invaded by scores of warriors who move without life. I’ve got them in binding spells for the moment, but I can’t dismantle them by myself. Please!”
He did not hesitate. “Of course,” he said soberly, with an expression that was probably supposed to convey reassurance. It was going to take more than an expression to reassure me. “I shall leave within minutes and be there in two hours-maybe less.”
“Wizard!” I heard a shout from outside. I slammed down the receiver and darted back out, nerving myself to face the entire horde come back to life and motion.
But none of the creatures were moving. Instead, as the dawn light touched them …
At first I did not dare believe it, but it was real. For a few seconds the sunlight showed them clearly, human in no more than shape, faces unfeatured except for their eyes, and then they began to disintegrate. As though melting in the sun, their hands shriveled away from their hilts, their eyes lost their glow and fell back into their sockets, and their struggles against my spells ceased abruptly. Their armor and swords rusted away as I watched until they were no more than fragments, like something dug up from an ancient burial mound. Their limbs collapsed, with a rattle of chain, into piles of scrap.
I closed and opened my eyes, saying a prayer of thanks to whatever saint might listen to wizards. Where a few minutes ago the grass had been spread with warriors who had very nearly killed us all in our sleep, it was now scattered with acrid heaps of bone and hair.
The knights of Yurt sent up a triumphant whoop. King and knights were haggard with exhaustion, and I was trembling all over, hardly able to stand in the weakness of relief. I still wore what had once been my best yellow pajamas, now ripped and filthy rags. High up in the courtyard wall I could see a light burning in the window of the chapel where they had laid out the body of the watchman. “That,” I said to myself, “was too easy.”
Elerius had already left for Yurt by the time I telephoned his castle again. Well, maybe he could help me determine where these warriors had come from, I thought, putting one set of bones aside for later magical analysis. The knights threw the rest onto a bonfire they built in front of the castle. The smoke rolled into the dawn sky, dense and black.
I went back across the bridge and into the castle. The people King Paul had sent to bed a few hours earlier had all reappeared, complaining about the horrible stench of the smoke. They should be glad, I thought, they had nothing worse to complain about, and decided to talk to the Lady Justinia before Elerius arrived.
No time yet for exhaustion. First I stopped by my chambers to wash, change clothes, and check on Antonia. She was sound asleep, lying on her back with her mouth slightly open and her doll held tight to her chest. I touched her cheek lightly with a finger on my way back out the door. This was the reason I would have died quite cheerfully if my death had kept the warriors out of the castle.
Justinia’s shiny automaton stood guard before her chambers, a sword at the end of each of its six arms. It stared at me from flat eyes, expressionless but implacable. I was not going to get by unless she wanted me to.
I called, “You can open the door, my lady! The warriors are gone!” There was a long pause, during which I tried magically probing the spells that gave the automaton the semblance of life. It whirled its swords menacingly but did not move away from the door. As I expected, the spells were intensely strange and intensely complicated; it would have taken me weeks to duplicate them, even with a passive automaton before me. At least it did not dissolve in the sun’s rays. But then I would not have expected anything made by Kaz-alrhun to have that kind of flaw.
The door swung open at last, and dark eyes glinted at me. I must have looked unthreatening, for Justinia said a quick word to her “servant” and motioned me inside.
Her chambers had been transformed since the day before. She must be planning to stay a while, I thought, for she had unpacked, spreading the flagstone floor with mats and pillows and hanging the walls with silk curtains. The flying carpet lay placidly in front of the hearth. Oil lamps burned in the room’s corners.
Justinia pushed the door quickly shut behind me. “Was it as I feared?” she asked, not succeeding at all this morning in sounding nonchalant about mortal danger. “Have my grandfather’s enemies found me already?”
“I’m afraid so.” I told her about the undead warriors out of nightmare, shaped to advance and to kill but without enough knowledge or will to stop at the edge of a moat or to try to run from a wizard’s binding spells.
But part way through the telling, I noticed she began to look first surprised, then disturbed. “But this cannot be!” she broke in. “There is no one in Xantium who would make such soldiers! These magical arts are forbidden!”
I was sure there was a distinction to be drawn somewhere between making warriors of hair and bone and making metallic automatons, but I did not want to get into arcane comparative legal systems. “Are you saying, my lady,” I said in astonishment, “that these warriors, such as have never been seen in Yurt before, invaded the castle as soon as you arrived but have nothing to do with you?”
“Most certainly,” she said, tossing her head imperiously. “Perhaps my uncle the mage chose poorly when he sent me to such a perilous kingdom.”
Either she was lying to me, I thought, about the likelihood that her enemies had sent them, perhaps because she was so terrified that she did not dare admit the true extent of the danger even to herself, or else she, with her own unaided magic, had caused this attack.
But there was nothing of magic about her, other than the automaton and its spells, and it seemed unusually counterproductive for someone to use mindless warriors to attack a castle where one was staying oneself.
“I shall try to see that you are not bothered further by such disturbances during your visit, my lady,” I said stiffly and rose to go. The automaton watched me all the way out.
The courtyard was packed. I turned, highly surprised, to see expressions of delight on every side. Smiling at me were all the knights and ladies, the castle staff led by Gwennie and her mother, and Antonia, still in her nightgown and trailing her doll.
“Here he is!” cried King Paul. “The hero of Yurt!”
A shout rose from everyone there. But I saw now the forced edge to the smiles, the grim realization behind whatever triumph this was supposed to be, that the watchman’s death was the first time since long before anyone could remember that someone in the royal castle had been violently killed.
Paul, still streaked with black from the bonfire and leaning on his sword, had put on the heavy gold crown of Yurt. “He destroyed the invading demons! The wizard has saved us all!” There was another great shout, then an expectant pause as though I was supposed to make a speech.
I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say. Paul had something large and shiny in one hand-some sort of medal or award, I thought wildly, which I most certainly did not deserve. “Well, thank you, thank you all,” I managed to say, which produced another shout. “But they weren’t demons. And I didn’t really destroy them. That is-”