I could have tried probing magically to get a better idea what he looked like, but another magic-worker would know at once what I was doing and be grossly insulted. He was certainly old: even the best magic cannot reverse or conceal the natural forces of aging. “Why don’t you get down so we can have a talk?” I suggested.
He hesitated a moment, then grunted and slid down from the moving wagon “Thanks for the lift, driver!” he called.
“How far have you been riding?” I asked.
“Just a couple of miles,” he said in a surly tone. His small eyes kept shifting, not quite meeting mine. For a second I had an impression of great magical power here-maybe even, strangely enough, the spells of two separate wizards. But the next instant the impression was gone. I mentally shook my head. I was, I knew from long experience, highly capable of jumping to unwarranted conclusions and then convincing myself that they were true. And I so much wanted to believe that I had found here the source of the cathedral’s problems.
“Look at my shoes,” the magician continued. “If yours were like this you wouldn’t walk a hundred yards further than you had to.” The uppers of his shoes were badly cracked and the soles flapped loose. “I begged a ride not far from the quarry, paid the driver with a few illusions-pretty racy ones, too!”
I had never been sure what Zahlfast had seen in me in my student days, why he had passed me in spite of the disastrous transformations practical, but I knew how perilously close I had come to being a magician making his living by selling pathetic scraps of magic wherever he could. But this magician, I reminded myself, might have made a giant bat-winged creature appear on the new cathedral tower. “Where were you last night?” I demanded.
“Asleep in a haystack, and getting pretty wet, too,” he said grumpily. “But what is it to you?” the last almost in a shout. “Since when does a wizard want to keep an honest magician from earning a living?”
I would have offered him money except that I knew any such condescension would have made him even more indignant. “You were not perhaps here in the cathedral city, calling up a monster?”
“No,” he said almost hesitantly, then “No!” quite explosively. “I’ve had enough of self-satisfied wizards like you without you starting to accuse me of nonsense!”
“Glad to hear it,” I said, taking a step backwards.
He had worked himself up into a fury. Half of what he said was unintelligible, and for the rest he seemed to group me with an apparently diabolical conspiracy of wizards from the school, all bent on starving him. He seemed to have several vicious things to say about other important members of society while he was at it. I took the opportunity while he was distracted by his own anger to check again for signs of great magical power and this time found nothing. The brief impression I had had of some sort of double power also disappeared on closer examination-just my overactive imagination again.
“The reason I asked,” I said when he paused for breath, “is because whoever is practicing magic around the new cathedral will be in serious trouble, and I thought I should warn you to stay away.”
“It wouldn’t be you, would it?” he snorted.
I shook my head. “But if there’s a renegade wizard here in the city, especially one practicing black magic, I’m going to find him.”
The shifty eyes became guarded. “I don’t call up monsters,” he said after a minute, as though settling on a plan of attack. “I study the magic of fire.”
He waved his hand, muttered a few quick words, and the grass around my feet burst into flame. I jumped back, and his beard split in a grin. But the damp grass blazed for only a few seconds, and I quickly stamped it out. A few final wisps of smoke curled up.
“That’s marvelous!” I cried. “I don’t know how to do that. Can you teach me how? I’ll pay you well!” Elerius had apparently tried to persuade the school they should teach fire magic, but as far as I knew none of the teachers had ever learned any.
But the old magician was backing away. “I guess they don’t teach you everything, then,” he said with a bitter laugh, “even the ones of you they coddle. Be jealous of me for once, and see how you like it!” Empty carts were coming back out of the city gates. The old magician waved one down.
He was much too ragged for me ever to be jealous of him, no matter what skills he possessed. But I was delighted. I could no more have created fire out of air than I could have a few minutes ago, but in the moment when he made the grass blaze I at least thought I had an inkling how to begin.
As I headed back into the city I glanced over my shoulder. The magician had successfully negotiated a trade of illusions for a ride. Over the ox cart rose the insubstantial form of a naked woman, not quite life-size, moving in awkward gestures apparently meant to be obscene. I turned my back.
I wanted to tell someone what I had just realized about fire magic, but I wasn’t sure whom to tell. In the meantime, although I did not like the coincidence of the magician appearing here only a day after the monster appeared on the tower, I was inclined to believe it had nothing to do with him. It was time to start searching the city itself more thoroughly.
But first, I thought as I walked through the gates, I needed to speak with the mayor. He might not be among the “three who rule the world,” but the elected head of Caelrhon had the right to be consulted about a monster in his own city.
“There must be a very powerful wizard operating nearby,” I told him. I had been ushered at once into the mayor’s study when I told the official at the door the reason for my visit, and the mayor seemed to have abruptly left a meeting in order to talk to me. “Creatures from the land of wild magic shouldn’t just appear by themselves in the lands of men. That’s why the cathedral dean sent for me at once.”
He played with the heavy chain of office that hung around his neck. It must have had twice as much gold in it as anything I had ever seen the queen wear. He looked as though his normal expression was genial, but it was not genial this afternoon.
“Fighting wizardry with wizardry,” he said thoughtfully and tugged at an earlobe, not quite meeting my eyes. “How can we be certain you are truly here to help us and are not the wizard who made a monster appear here last night?”
If this is what the city council had been discussing when I pulled the mayor out of the meeting, I had gotten here just in time. Had Lucas’s distrust of all wizards now infected the local merchants and artisans as well? “Good question,” I said with all the confidence I could. “But you see, I’m school-trained.”
“And why should we trust a school we’ve never seen, whose methods and purposes are hidden to us?”
This would have been easier with less astute questions. “Then don’t trust the school,” I said, seeking to be genial myself. “Trust the dean. He’s known me for twenty years.”
Unexpectedly the mayor smiled. It looked as though he had missed all day being able to smile. “You’ve chosen the best man in the city to be your guarantor. We would of course prefer not to have to rely on arcane spells. But if religion and magic can work together, perhaps we may still hope.”
When I left the arched porch of the municipal building a few minutes later, the streets were still full of people, shopping, offering goods for sale, carrying water from the fountain, hurrying somewhere. Most were too absorbed in their own concerns even to notice me.
But as I passed one young woman she looked directly at me. She had amethyst eyes and a mole high on one cheek. For a second she smiled. Then she was past me and I was left looking after her, at a swirl of loose nut-brown hair over a dark shawl.
In spite of people pushing me from behind I stopped dead in the middle of the street. For reasons I did not understand her glance brought back all my shame and sense of loss with the force of ripping the top from a wound. Only a short while earlier, I had begun to hope that time had already begun to heal; now I knew that I had only been numb.