“Come here, my son,” he said in a voice that would have been appropriate for someone tiny and frail. I advanced slowly toward the bed, Joachim one step behind me. There was a faint movement under the blankets and a white hand emerged, beckoning. On the hand was a ring, an enormous ruby with a cross cut in its surface.
I started, then probed magically, just one tiny respectful spell. But this ruby ring, unlike the last one I had been acquainted with, had nothing magical about it. I went down on one knee as Joachim had told me I had to do, murmured, “Your Holiness,” and kissed the ring. I just hoped the Master of the wizards’ school never heard about this.
Then I took the chair toward which the bishop waved me and looked at his face properly for the first time. His wide eyes brimmed with love and intelligence but seemed to do so from a considerable distance, as though the real bishop were not lying here slowly dying.
“My son the dean has told me he asked you to help us,” said the bishop. He spoke so softly that I had to lean forward to hear him. “I am afraid he called you without consulting me, but prompt action in the service of God is always commendable.”
I nodded without speaking.
“But he has put us in a delicate position,” the bishop continued. “If we are being threatened by magic, some of my priests feel the last person we should ask for help is another magic-worker.”
Doubtless starting with the cantor Norbert, I thought. Joachim stirred beside me but I spoke first. “You aren’t being threatened by wizardry in the abstract,” I said. “You’re being threatened by someone working spells against the cathedral, and the dean knows that the quickest way to overcome magic spells is to find someone with powerful magic to break them.”
“And do your spells have power against the devil?”
“Of course not. Only God and those who serve Him have power against the devil,” I said generously. “But you aren’t facing the devil here. You’re facing a wizard working natural magic.”
The bishop closed his eyes for a moment. The blankets rose and fell slowly, and for a moment I wondered if he had even heard me. But when he looked at me again it was unexpectedly shrewdly, as though the real bishop’s mind and ideas had come close to this room again. “You wouldn’t be casting magic spells yourself as an excuse for the wizards to get a toehold here, would you? I hear the wizards’ school in the great City is trying to expand its placement.”
“I can assure you,” I said with dignity, “that I am not responsible for whatever is happening here.” So Lucas’s and Vincent’s accusations against wizardry had now even reached the cathedral. “I neither want to mock the church nor gain any ‘toeholds.’”
The bishop started to cough. A young doctor in white, who had been standing silently on the far side of the room, came forward and offered him a cup. He took a sip and closed his eyes again. But when he opened them he continued as though there had been no pause. “When will you have banished evil magic from our cathedral?”
“I hope soon. I’ve only been here twenty-four hours, and I didn’t see the monster myself. Until I have a better sense of who is working magic and what spells he is using, it may be difficult to counter him. I’ll do my best to be quick and discreet.”
Joachim rose to his feet, so I did as well. He knelt to kiss the bishop’s ring before leaving, but I felt once was enough. The bishop’s eyes closed again as we went out.
“It is an enormous responsibility he carries, and yet he seems able to do it still, in spite of his weakness,” said Joachim as we reached the street. “The doctors say he may only have a few weeks, but they have already said that many times.”
I considered asking Joachim if he would expect me to kiss his ring once he became bishop but was able to resist doing so. I realized we were entering the side door of the cathedral, on our way to early service. No hope for breakfast then until service was over. But it was a good chance for some of the other cathedral priests to see me and realize how reverent and discreet a wizard could be.
IV
I spent the morning irreverently practicing magic within twenty yards of the bishop’s palace. First I tried a number of spells from the collection I had brought, shaped to reveal a hidden magic-worker. I was disappointed that none of them worked, because it would have taken a master wizard to shielded his mind against all of them, but it was a further indication that whoever was working here was indeed a powerful wizard and not just a renegade magician with one good trick. I would certainly have been able to find the magician I had met the day before if he tried to sneak back into town, with his weak illusions and not enough flying ability to save his shoes. It was distracting that the face of the woman with the amethyst eyes kept appearing inexplicably in my mind in the middle of my spells.
When this search got me nowhere, I started again trying to work out the principles of the magic of fire. My books had only the faintest hints but I had a few ideas, extrapolating from the other sorts of magic that I knew. Herbal magic, I recalled from when I had first learned it, was set up with its spells quite separate from the magic of light and air, as though on a track that started parallel but quickly veered away in a different direction.
If the magic of fire worked similarly, I reasoned, I had to find the direction in which its magic veered. In the Hidden Language, one not only said specific spells but entered into the very fabric of magic’s four dimensions. The direction in which one entered that fabric exerted a very powerful flow, and one had to remember that other directions were always possible.
Knowing that I was deliberately avoiding thinking about a bat-winged monster five times the size of a man and doing so anyway, I worked on a candle in my room. I could with no trouble make the wick glow and even emit a plausible cloud of smoke, but it remained obstinately cool. Yet perhaps with a spell from another angle-
I emerged from a struggle with the forces of magic and gave a shout of delight. Joachim’s servant put his head in, alarmed and then puzzled. I sat by a sunlit window, triumphantly holding up a lit candle.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I was just excited because I lit the candle flame. Will your master be home for lunch?”
But the servant was gone, doubtless thinking that his master was harboring a madman.
I extinguished the candle and lit it again to be sure that I could. Once more, with two words and a snap of my fingers I caused a blue flame to blossom on the end of the wick. It was a real flame, too, no illusion; I nearly burned my fingers. So far I could only create fire, not protect myself against it.
I settled back, feeling a great reluctance to do anything else after my frantic efforts of the day before and then this morning’s unsuccessful attempts to find another wizard. Sitting in the dean’s house felt so safe and normal that I could almost imagine that nineteen years of romantic dreams were not shattered, that I had not resigned the only post I had ever had, and that an enormous monster with eye of fire had not landed a very short distance from here. If I didn’t think about any of this, maybe none of it would be true.
Again I wondered why Prince Lucas had come to the city just now, and why he seemed so furious with organized wizardry. He might have come here at his father’s direction, I thought, to protect the largest community in their kingdom from a magical attack. In that case he might well suspect me of having something to do with the monster. But could he have learned of its evening appearance in time to arrive at dawn the next morning?
When I heard the noon bells ringing in the cathedral, I began waiting for Joachim’s return. But time passed, time enough for the noon service and enough more that I realized he was not coming.