Paul paid no attention to his tone. “It was good that we were here,” he said, extremely seriously. “A man like that, who has guided the souls of our two kingdoms for forty years, deserves every gesture of respect we can pay him as he goes to his last rest.”
I found myself was thinking two quite different thoughts: that if Joachim became bishop I might be attending his funeral in forty more years; and that by the time I finally got used to Paul alternating between being a boy and being a man he would have stopped being a boy at all.
“Yes, as representatives of royal rule, it certainly was good that we-” Lucas stopped speaking abruptly. “What’s that?” he said in an entirely different voice.
Paul and I swung around. And then I felt it, a surge of enormously powerful magic which could only come from the wizard Theodora and I had been unable to find. Townspeople started looking up too, following Lucas’s arm. Most of the priests had come out of the cathedral. I heard one saying, “I wonder if it would be disrespectful to go get a drink,” before he caught the mood of the little group of people gathered around us.
“Look! Don’t you see it? It’s coming!” cried Lucas.
Now I could see it. It could have been a bird, but it was far too big. It flew faster than any bird, across the fields and straight into town toward the cathedral. It was five times the size of a man, and it had the wings of a bat.
Several of those around us began to scream. “Our swords!” Lucas yelled at Paul. “We must get our swords!” The two princes raced off while townspeople darted for cover. I saw the mayor upended in the rush, then he scrambled to his feet and ran, his gown hitched up to his knees. The priests flung them selves against the tide of people still coming out of the cathedral, fighting their way back inside.
Only I stood still, while the creature settled on top of the half-completed tower, the tower that was not yet consecrated, and stared down at me with burning eyes. Though vaguely human in shape, it was covered with scaly hide, and its mouth and fangs were much bigger in proportion to its face than any human’s could be. This was no illusion. This was real.
And this was why I was in the cathedral city. I took a deep breath and, without the slightest idea what I would do, launched myself into the air.
The creature watched my approach with interest. It had folded its wings and seemed content to sit where it was. As well as long fangs it had enormous, curved claws. As I flew closer it extended its claws as though in anticipation of sinking them into me.
My immediate need was to get it away from Joachim’s cathedral. I hovered thirty feet away and tried a lifting spell. It shifted a little but that was all. Either it was too heavy or its magic too strong against mine. The evil lips pulled back in a grin, and the bat wings rose slightly.
I backed up warily. A hideous stench wafted toward me. I had defeated a dragon once, but I had had the old wizard of Yurt to help me, and I still had come remarkably close to a funeral of my own. I caught a brief glimpse of white faces far below me and wondered if they would mention in the eulogy that I had been trying to destroy the monster when it killed me.
Abruptly and with a loud bang it was gone. But not gone, I told myself grimly, only invisible. I could still smell its stench, and somewhere in the air, horribly near, I heard a hungry slobbering.
There were faint, excited shouts from below, but I ignored them. I retreated rapidly toward the main body of the cathedral and braced myself on the slates of the roof, my feet in a rain gutter, hoping it would not follow me to a consecrated church. But it might still attack the people below, especially now that it was invisible.
Desperately and without success I tried two school spells, and then the powerful spell inscribed inside Theodora’s ring, to reveal all that was hidden. I shouted the words of the Hidden Language, my fingers grating on the slates and eyes staring.
It appeared directly in front of me, its mouth wide open and one set of claws only a foot from my chest.
I spun away and fell into space, expecting to feel its touch on my skin any second. But I did not hear the slobbering behind me, and in a quarter mile I looked back. It had resettled itself on the half-finished tower.
It was not alone. Scampering around the tower were several red lizards the size of dogs. They must have been there all along and only been revealed by the spell.
But I had no time for them. I approached cautiously, watching for the monster to leap toward me. For a second I thought I glimpsed in the square below a woman’s face with amethyst eyes, framed by nut-brown hair, but I could not look. I remembered Theodora’s spell to create a series of tiny flames and began saying it rapidly, over and over, until the very air around me began to burn, and I hurled balls of fire toward the monster.
It sprang backwards, spreading its wings, one of which was already scorched. It gave a guttural cry as it staggered toward the pile of cut stones set ready for the masons. With clawed hands, it heaved up a piece of rock as big as I was and flung it toward me.
I whirled out of the way, but the stone hurtled downward, toward the crowd below. I flew after it, madly seizing at it with spells until its fall was slowed. People had just enough time to see what was coming and scatter, screaming, before the stone crashed into an empty spot where seconds ago a dozen had stood.
I found my feet and looked up. The monster had another enormous stone ready to hurl.
“Into the church!” I shouted, though I wasn’t sure anyone could hear me through the general cries of panic. “Get inside the church!” I flew up, dodging the stone and trying to slow it with magic at the same time. Barely, just barely, I was able to reduce the speed of its descent, even guide it a little sideways. By the time it reached the ground, the construction site was nearly empty.
I could not take time to rest, but if I did not take at least a few seconds my lungs would burst. I leaned against the stone, which had shattered the paving where it landed, and took deep, sobbing breaths.
There was still wild scrambling at the cathedral doors but almost everyone was inside. One figure, however, watched with attentive interest: the foreman of the construction workers.
I flew back up. The monster’s eyes glowed, but it threw no more stones. My balls of fire had lit the scaffolding timbers, which now blazed merrily, and the monster seemed afraid of fire. I eyed it warily as I approached.
The scorched wing was extended at an awkward angle as though it might not be able to fly, but I feared a trick. I wrapped myself in the spell Theodora had taught me against fire and waded into the middle of the blaze, screaming insults and challenges at the monster.
I had suspected it was trying to mislead me with its wing, but I was not suspicious enough. With a single leap it was beside me, careless of the blaze. I ducked barely in time to avoid being disemboweled by raking claws. But the monster’s other arm caught me. It sprang into the air with a great flap of its bat wings and began to squeeze.
Desperately I raced through all my spells of attack, but I had never had very many of them, and none of them worked. The monster kept squeezing tighter. The only advantage I had was that I would already be unconscious when it began to eat me.
My last hope was a transformations spell. Zahlfast had taught me something important about transformations spells, I vaguely recalled, something highly important, something I ought to know right now-he had even been talking about it the day I visited his class. I did not have time to remember.
Because I could not wait to see if my spell would work, I coupled it with another spell, a spell I had never used in my life but which I, along with several of my friends at school, had looked up very late one night in the old Master’s library. It was the spell to summon a human mind. To summon another human against his will, we had been taught, was the greatest sin a wizard could commit. I found and summoned the monster’s mind and stuffed it into the middle of my transformations spell.