“The second gorgos wasn’t really a gorgos,” I prompted Vor. “It’s something-or someone-turned into a gorgos. Was it a person?”
He smiled suddenly and fleetingly. “The prince is right-you are a good wizard.” I had scarcely received so many accolades in one day before. I hoped they would remember to relate all the details when we stopped at the blue house on top of the mountain on the way home.
“It used to be human,” Vor continued, “a man from my valley.” Once I had him talking, he seemed uncharacteristically willing to continue. “As I’m sure you already guessed, it was the man I mentioned to you, the one who determined he was going to kill a gorgos. He did kill it, too, but its gorgos spirit overwhelmed him, body and soul, as it died.”
“And that’s why you warned me not to try to kill the gorgos frog.”
He nodded. “Maybe another wizard could have overcome your gorgos with wizardry.” So much for the compliments! “But when it became clear that you were either going to have to take it back to the land of wild magic or else kill it by force, I decided I’d better come along. I knew where to find a second gorgos, and I knew if they killed each other they would both be dead, with no more humans taken over by their spirits.”
“There’s more to it,” I said, watching Vor’s face. His willingness to tell me all this now, I thought, was an attempt to hide something else. “You didn’t merely want to dispose of the gorgos from the cathedral city. You had always known about the gorgos here, and you had been wanting to kill it for years.” He blinked in what might have been agreement.
“You brought me and the transformed frog up here on purpose to kill the gorgos that was already here,” I continued, holding him with my eyes. “The gorgos here, the one that used to be a person: that was the reason you left your home in the valley originally. What did it do to you?”
Again he gave that fleeting smile. “It killed my father,” he said in his normal laconic tone.
As he seemed unwilling to add anything else, I said, “So is that why you had to leave? You couldn’t live on in your valley with your father unavenged, but you couldn’t avenge him without becoming a gorgos yourself?”
He did not answer. My brain, awakened fully from the miasma into which the gorgos had dragged it, had at last worked out something important. Let the others imagine that I had realized it all along. “Vor,” I said with my best wizardly scowl, “this all started when you became involved in the plots of a renegade wizard. Since his gorgos nearly killed me, I think I have a right to know about it.”
The two princes looked startled, but I ignored them.
“Nothing worked out as you had planned, Vor,” I said sternly, “at least until the two gorgoi destroyed each other. Did you think that I would believe it was sheer coincidence that a gorgos should appear in the very cathedral city where the foreman of the construction crew wanted revenge on a gorgos? No,” shaking my head, “it was not coincidence.”
The air cart flapped steadily, carrying us across the brown borderlands of the land of magic. I paused to let Vor say something, but he seemed willing to listen in silence. “You had struck up a friendship with a certain wizard,” I continued, “and he knew you’d come from the borderlands. He asked you, very casually, what would be a good type of creature to call to the city. And this is where things began to go wrong. Not letting yourself think about why a wizard would want to call a monster, you suggested, equally casually, that a gorgos would be just right. If the gorgos who had killed your father left the borderlands for Caelrhon, you thought, you could go home again without shame-especially if, as you let yourself imagine, the wizard planned to destroy it. But he called the wrong gorgos!”
Vor answered at last. “It wasn’t like that! I would never have had anything to do with him if I’d known he was planning an attack on the cathedral. He told me the wizards’ school was trying to find a good kind of monster so that the young wizards could practice their new anti-monster spells.”
“And even when the gorgos, the wrong gorgos, showed up at the cathedral instead of at the wizards’ school,” I asked, “did you still hope these ‘new anti-monster spells’ were real?”
He did not meet my eyes, but a slow smile spread across his face. “I did admire your technique.”
“But who was the wizard?” I insisted, not about to be flattered now. “Was it that old ragged magician who knows fire magic?”
Vor looked surprised. “Not him. He could never master a gorgos. It was one of you school-trained wizards, but I’d never seen him before. A relatively young one-no gray in his beard.”
Lucas interrupted before I could press for details. “All right, Wizard,” he said brusquely, “you’ve made your point that wizards may occasionally be useful against creatures of wild magic. But now you have to answer to me!” He tapped his fingers on the pommel of his sword. “You and your friend the dean-and I certainly hope the cathedral chapter has enough sense not to elect him bishop! — may have forced me to come with you, but now that you can’t threaten me with your black box anymore, I think it’s time to teach you your place!”
II
“I’d credited you with more intelligence than this, Prince,” I replied sternly. “I don’t have to answer to you, but you to me! You’re three thousand miles from home, without a horse or a map. The only people here are half-fey themselves. If you try walking back south through the mountains, you will find very few people who have even heard of the kingdom of Caelrhon, and even fewer impressed by the crown prince of Caelrhon. It’s no use trying to overpower me, because you’d be trapped here without my magic.”
I took a deep breath. “Now! I’ll give you a choice: between explaining why you contracted with a renegade wizard to bring a gorgos to the cathedral city, or staying in the borderlands of magic the rest of your life.”
The hard curl of Lucas’s lip was very pronounced. He must know I was bluffing and looked obstinate enough to dare me to leave him behind. I did not want to have to explain to the king and the royal princess of Caelrhon that he wasn’t coming home. He had children, too, I remembered unhappily.
“You dare,” he began, “you dare accuse me of summoning a monster-”
And then he did the last thing I expected. He jumped me.
I was so startled that he had me on my back on the bottom of the cart, his hands around my neck, before I could react. The cart tipped wildly. “I know how to fly this air cart,” he grunted, digging a knee into my midsection, “and I-”
His eyes went wide and his grip slackened as the air went solid around his own neck. Gripped by a slightly tardy binding spell, he fell backwards as I pushed myself up, furious. “Suppose I turn you into a frog for the rest of the trip,” I said between clenched teeth, “so you don’t give me any more trouble.”
But suddenly my attention was distracted. The air cart was beginning to wobble badly as it flew. I glanced downward and realized we were no longer heading back south toward Vor’s valley. Instead we were heading east, much more rapidly than the cart normally flew. I gave the commands to correct the course, but the cart did not respond. Instead it picked up speed.
“This isn’t the way back to the valley!” cried Vor.
“Someone else has control of the cart!” Closing my eyes against the others’ alarmed faces, I slipped into the stream of magic, trying to find in the welter of influences around us the magic that made the cart ignore my commands. I found it in a few seconds, but finding it was no help. The wizards at the school had long ago worked out, by trial and error, commands the cart would obey, but someone here had specific knowledge of this kind of flying beast and had used that knowledge in the moment I had been distracted. Even a dead flying beast’s skin could not resist spells shaped especially for it.