Vor leaped out at once and was off, springing from tussock to tussock across the meadow’s damp surface. Other people came running toward him, all with the short stature and unusually long fingers and toes of the cathedral’s construction crew. He had seemed calm and unhurried the whole time I had known him, but now he spoke animatedly, waving his arms, pointing toward the sky and toward us. Several people threw their arms around him, and he embraced them with fervor. Everybody was talking at once; they seemed to be calling him a name I did not catch, but it was not Vor.
“That’s curious,” commented Lucas. “From several things he said, I had the impression he’d had to leave home, yet everybody seems happy to see him back again.”
I had had the same impression, but all I said was, “Long absence makes quarrels seem trivial.”
Paul was looking not at Vor but at the houses. “Think what it must be like to live there!” he exclaimed. “In the heat of the summer, it would be comfortably cool, and in the winter it would be as cozy as a den. Will we still be here tonight? I can’t wait to see the hillsides all dotted with lamplight!”
Vor came back over to the cart. “I don’t want to interrupt your reunion,” I said. “Perhaps we should leave you here and continue north, until we find a good place to get rid of the gorgos.”
He was smiling as broadly as I had ever seen him. “We can go dispose of the gorgos whenever you like,” he said.
The air cart rose back out of the valley, and, with Vor’s direction, I guided it northward. We rose over a last range of hills that protected his people’s valley. The high snowy peaks were behind us, and before us a dry rocky land stretched out desolate. All of Vor’s cheerfulness left him as soon as we left the valley, replaced by a tension so tight it almost vibrated.
Thirty miles beyond the valley, just as I had been about to ask if he really knew where he was taking us, he pointed downward. “There. Put the cart down there.”
I saw nothing to distinguish this particular patch of loose boulders from any other, but I obeyed. “Do you think we’re far enough from your valley?” I asked. He nodded emphatically and kept peering about as we descended, apparently not seeing whatever he was seeking. I preferred to think this was good.
Just before we landed, I spotted something odd about some of the boulders. Rather than being scattered, they seemed to be piled up, as though to form a monstrous hut. I nudged Vor and pointed, but he just shook his head, and in a second the hut or whatever it might be was hidden beyond other rocks. At any rate I saw nothing alive. We hit the ground hard, and the cart tilted to one side.
“So what do you suggest?” I asked Vor, picking up the binding box from where it had slid down with the rest of our baggage.
“Just take it out and release it,” he said shortly.
I put one leg over the edge of the air cart. “All of you stay here,” I said. “By now you’ve heard me say many times the two words of the Hidden Language that will get the cart off the ground. Use them if you have to.”
Carrying the heavy black box, I walked slowly away from the cart, trying to probe for magic. What I found was almost overwhelming. I was used to the orderly channeling of magic, but here magic whirled and spun in complete confusion. There was too much detail, too little focused, for me even to try to identify the source.
I closed my mind resolutely against these magical influences. This must be one of the spots in the borderlands where human habitation was only a short distance from wild magic.
Fifty yards from the air cart I set the black box down. Slowly, cautiously, I pulled open the lid and peeked inside. The frog was still there, glaring at me furiously. As soon as daylight touched it, it began to kick. The rope with the binding spell in which I had originally tied it was gone; I wondered if the frog had eaten it.
I swung the box forward, catapulting the gorgos frog out. It hit the side of a rock, rolled down, and righted itself. I realized I was trembling as I watched. It started to work itself along, although a frog’s feet do not do well on rough stone.
“Go ahead,” Vor called. “Turn it back into a gorgos.”
I hesitated. There seemed no reason not to leave it a frog. Sooner or later it might be able to overcome the transformation spell by itself, but in the meantime we should be able to get well away.
On the other hand, I feared that part of my own mind might still be attached to the gorgos. I had summoned it to me while transforming it, and there might still be enough attachment that it would be compelled to follow me.
Carefully, feeling my way into my own magic and trying to avoid the swirling alien magic around me, I put together the words to break the transformation spell. When I said the final syllables to restore the gorgos to itself, my mind leaped back out of the calm channels of magic into a body whose heart was pounding madly.
It had worked. The gorgos crouched on the ground where the frog had lain a second before. It was appreciably larger than I remembered, especially the fangs.
Both terrified and exhilarated, I started flying backwards toward the air cart. My mind was clearer than it had been for a week, and for a second I felt that nothing could overcome me and my magic. The gorgos seemed to be startled at its abrupt return to itself. It glared about with burning eyes and scratched its side with long, curved claws.
Then, behind me, I heard a shout. I spun around. It was Vor.
Beyond the tumbled boulders, in the direction in which I thought I had seen stones heaped into a hut, I heard an answering bellow.
The gorgos spread its bat-wings and rose into the air, looking back toward the bellow but moving toward me. I retreated more rapidly.
And then I saw, rising over the boulders, a second fanged gorgos.
The first gorgos, my former frog, saw it too. He turned from pursuing me and, with a great flap of its wings, launched himself toward it. The two monsters rushed at each other, slavering mouths wide open, claws ready to rend each other’s flesh. Just before they met, I thought I sensed something very odd about the second gorgos.
Not stopping to analyze it, I rushed after the air cart, which had taken off and by now was careening across the sky. The two gorgoi roared and screeched, apparently ripping off major parts of each others’ bodies.
I caught the cart after a mile’s pursuit. The magic words to lift off had put it into the air, but without further direction the purple flying beast’s skin had started flying on its own with little regard for the people in it.
Vor and the two princes clung to the edge, looking ill. I dropped inside, stopped the cart’s spinning, and straightened out the course. “Back to your valley?” I asked Vor, as calmly as if I dealt with gorgoi every day.
He blinked. “Yes. That would be good.”
Paul looked at me wide-eyed. “I don’t know how I could have gone all these years without realizing what a good wizard you are.” I nodded gravely at this praise from my future king.
The cart banked and started to return. I could still hear faint bellows in the distance. I turned from Paul to address myself to Lucas. “I trust, Prince, that you will be able to report to the dean that I did indeed destroy the gorgos.”
His lips tight, Lucas nodded slowly. I had plenty of questions for him now that my mind was abruptly clear again, but even more pressing were my questions for the construction foreman.
“You knew about the second gorgos, Vor,” I said. “Ever since the first one appeared in the cathedral city, you’ve been working to bring the two gorgoi together. Now that, I hope, they’re finishing destroying each other, I would like you to tell me what’s really been happening.”
Vor looked at me in silence for a moment. The two princes leaned back against the far side of the air cart, their elbows hooked over the side. Paul appeared interested and amused, Lucas suspicious.