He was right, of course, but as the days went by I kept feeling that I was astray in a strange world, with no landmarks and no way to find my way back to the world I had always taken for granted.
After a week the land below us began to rise sharply and all signs of human habitation disappeared. Soon we were crossing a jumble of sharp peaks, topped with snow.
“Wild magic starts not long after the mountains,” Vor told me, looking down at the air cart’s shadow far below us, darting wildly up and down the steep mountain sides.
“So you came south through the mountains?”
He nodded. “Years ago. That’s why I want to go back now.” He paused, then pointed down. “See that river?” A thin, dark line cut a twisting slice through the mountains. “There’s a track that follows it all the way through.”
At least one person, then, had known where we were going. The laconic suggestions he had made on our route in the previous days now made more sense. A cloud came toward us, looking, as always, incredibly soft, as though one could sink with delight into its feathery blue shadows. As always, when the air cart plunged into it the cloud proved to be nothing more than fog, blocking out the sun and putting drops of water on our hair and clothes.
“I know a good place to get rid of the gorgos,” Vor said suddenly. But he turned away from me as he spoke, discouraging questions. I wondered uneasily if he had a plan of his own for the monster.
If only, I thought, I were more confident of my magic. So far every spell I had needed on the trip had worked. But I had the disconcerting feeling that I had, before the bishop’s funeral, known more magic, and that not only the spells themselves but the knowledge that the spells existed had been wiped from my mind.
The teachers at the school had warned us against summoning as the greatest sin a wizard could commit, because it violated the integrity of the human mind. But, I thought now to myself, reckless summoning, practiced by someone remembering something he had learned twenty years earlier, might also destroy the person who practiced that spell. In summoning the monster, I might somehow have intermingled a part of its mind with my own.
“Did you ever decide where the fairy lights came from on the new cathedral tower?” asked Vor. “They weren’t caused by the gorgos, were they?”
“No,” I said slowly, “nor by one of your Little People. They were caused by a witch.”
He nodded as though he had expected as much. “Down in your part of the world, if it’s not a wizard with a heavy dose of formal magic it’s probably a witch.”
“Do you know anything about the witch?” I asked at once, trying to keep the eagerness out of my voice. But he shook his head.
I looked down at the trackless snowfields below and wondered if I would ever see Theodora again.
V
A steep mountain peak rose before us, far higher than any other we had passed. Its snowy top, thrusting into the sky, glinted like gold in the early morning sun. As we flew toward it I heard, first distantly and then increasingly clearly, a call coming from it, and realized it was calling me.
I gave the magical commands to turn the air cart. Instead of circling the peak we started straight up its side.
“There’s a wizard on the top of the mountain,” I told the princes, who looked toward me in surprise. “I’m going to talk to him.” Suddenly I did not feel as hopelessly lost as I had all week.
The air off the snow fields became rapidly colder, and we pulled blankets around our shoulders. I took mouthfuls of the thin, frigid air, my heart beating rapidly, either from the altitude or from excitement. For the first time since transforming the gorgos, I began to think I might someday be able to practice real magic again.
A sharp wind scraped ice from the peak into a swirling cloud that half obscured it. At the very top of the mountain, just under the final, jagged knife-blade of ice, was a small level area where all the snow had been swept away. Here was a bright blue house.
I set the air cart down by the door, vaulted out, and tied it to a ring in the doorpost. Leaning into the wind, I lifted a fist, but the door opened before I had a chance to knock.
A wizard put his head out. I recognized him at once. He had graduated from the wizards’ school three years before I had, then stayed on as a teaching assistant. I had not seen him in nearly twenty years, but he still looked exactly the same.
“Well!” he said with pleasure. “If it isn’t good old ‘Frogs’!”
I stiffened. I had had no idea the other students at school had given me a nickname derived from my disastrous experiences in that transformations practical. But several comments I had half-overheard at the time now became horribly and mortifyingly clear.
“My name,” I started to say in cold fury, “is Daimbert!” But I managed to stop myself. After all, I was delighted to see him.
I turned back toward the cart where the other three were hesitating. “Come on!” I called. “Prince Lucas, Prince Paul, Vor, I’d like you to meet an old friend of mine from the wizards’ school.”
They climbed out, and the princes gave the formal half-bow, while Vor dipped his head. “He graduated second in his class,” I continued cheerfully, having an inspiration how to get my own back, “and would easily have graduated first most years. We used to call him ‘Book-Leech’-behind his back, of course.”
Good old Book-Leech froze for a second, then smiled. “Welcome, welcome, come in! It’s much too cold to leave this door open.” As we filed past him, he said modestly, “Well, I don’t know if I ever could have been first in the class, as there’s always someone- But Elerius was good, wasn’t he! Do you correspond with him at all, Daimbert? I hear he’s Royal Wizard now at one of the most powerful of the western kingdoms.”
I graciously overlooked the inherent insult in this comment. Yurt might not be the most powerful kingdom, but I liked it best. And if the queen took me back, I would not have to live in a blue house three miles up on top of a snowy peak.
Inside the house a fire roared in the fireplace, and the morning sun through the windowpanes made rainbows on the floor and furniture. We pulled off our ice-encrusted jackets, and the wizard hurried to make tea.
“You have no idea how pleased I was when I first sensed another wizard’s mind here in the mountains,” he said. “It does get lonely here, in spite of all the advantages. I’d known you be coming across the mountains of course-they’d telephoned to warn me you were taking the air cart up to the land of magic. But I hadn’t dared hope you’d come so close that I could call you and have you stop.”
The water boiled and he poured it into the pot. Vor and the two princes sat rather stiffly against the wall, still startled to be suddenly in a real house again after days outdoors, much less a wizard’s house on an inaccessible mountain peak. This, I thought, would be an especially useful lesson for Lucas, to see wizards serving mankind even in the northern mountains.
“What happened to you?” the wizard asked. “Your face looks burned.”
“My hair caught fire,” I said. “I was fighting a fanged gorgos.”
“A gorgos? And you won?” He stirred the tea leaves and chuckled. “Well, you must have won or you wouldn’t be here. But how did you do it? Who wants sugar?”
He poured out the tea into a row of mugs. “I transformed the gorgos into a frog,” I said modestly. “I’ve got it out in the cart, inside a binding box. I know one shouldn’t be able to transform creatures of wild magic, but I put a summoning spell on it at the same time, and at least it’s now a very small and frog-shaped gorgos.”
He was actually silent for a moment, looking, I thought, suitably impressed. “Well,” he said to the others, “I should have known. ‘Frogs’ here always had a real genius for improvisation. The rest of us were always jealous.”