“Vor,” asked Paul, “do you want to come back to Caelrhon with us, or do you want to stay here with your people?”
The air cart, I was happy to discover, had indeed obeyed my last commands after tipping us out, and it had returned to the valley. In the morning we were preparing to fly home.
“I’ll come back with you,” said Vor in his normal laconic style. “The lads will want me once they start construction again.”
And they might be starting again very soon, I thought. It had already been three weeks since the old bishop’s death, and I did not think they would delay the election of his successor for long.
Paul echoed my thought. “I wonder if we’ll be too late for the new bishop’s enthronement.”
“We can telephone from the mountain and find out what’s been happening,” I said.
And so once again, after a day of flying, we came up the icy vertical side of old Book-Leech’s mountain and landed next to the little blue house. I let Paul tell most of the story.
“Well, I’ve heard about nixies, of course, but I’ve never met one,” said the wizard, pouring out tea. “I’m sure you found it all a, well, interesting interlude.” Paul blushed up to his hairline. “There was certainly clever of you, young fellow, to find a way out of her grove-guess old ‘Frogs’ has been teaching you his tricks, eh?”
Paul had tried to downplay his role in saving us, but Book-Leech, of course, had realized what an accomplishment it in fact was. It really had owed nothing to me, and I said so.
“I’d like to use your telephone,” I said in a pause in the conversation. “The priests of the cathedral will want to know that the gorgos has been destroyed.”
I expected him to offer me the phone at once, but he hesitated before answering. “Well, you’re welcome to use it, of course, but I’m not sure it’s working.”
“Not sure it’s working?!”
“It may be because we’re so far away from any other telephone,” he said apologetically, “or because there’s interference due to the magical influences from the north.”
“But there have been wizards posted here for years-”
“Well, you see, it used to work. But it didn’t use to have a far-seeing attachment. It was just put in this summer, and, well … Elerius himself installed it, so I know it must have been working at first, and now I’m afraid I’ve broken it somehow. I’ve never been any good at technical magic myself. Could you look at it? It is, after all, your invention.”
I took a deep breath. I had invented the far-seeing attachment essentially by accident and still had no good idea how it worked; wizards from the technical division had had to take apart my rather haphazard spells to be able to duplicate it. “Let’s look at it together.”
He took it out of a drawer. “It does work for the school to call me. That’s why I didn’t realize at first there was a problem.”
A quick glance at his shelves showed that he, like me, owned no books that might have helped. “If you can’t telephone the City for help,” I asked, “what’s the point of having you posted here? I would think they would want to have this fixed immediately.”
“I can usually get it to work once,” he said, “so I could call the school if there was any sudden problem up in the land of magic. But- Well, I guess I can tell you this without embarrassment. I don’t like to tell the school that I, a thoroughly-trained wizard, can’t solve a magical difficulty.”
It was rather reassuring that someone who might in another year have been first in his class could also have patches of incompetence. But I myself had had so many blows to my pride over the years that I might have been willing to admit my failure in a case like this.
The two of us bent over the telephone, probing its spells, communicating mind to mind. Suddenly I thought I saw the problem. Breaking off pieces of the flow of magic with words of the Hidden Language, I adjusted the spells, reorienting the telephone within magic’s four dimensions.
“There,” I said aloud. “I think it should work now.”
“Of course it will. That’s the spell I have to use to get it to work at all. You can make one telephone call now if you like, but you won’t be able to make another until tomorrow. So who do you want to call?”
I considered. I could continue to try different spells on the telephone, but they were as likely to make the instrument stop working completely as to fix it. I wanted reassurance that the queen was alive and well, but whatever Prince Vincent might be plotting he needed her so he could marry her. I needed to talk to the wizards’ school, but it would have been much easier to do so without the princes standing there. One call should reassure me that no new monster had appeared in the cathedral city.
The telephone view-screen lit up, and I saw one of the young priests of the cathedral. “Hello?” He could not see me.
“I’d like to speak to the dean. Father Joachim,” I added as he seemed to hesitate. “This is Daimbert, the wizard who was staying with him.” The young priest’s face changed slightly. “I know he’ll want to talk to me,” I said urgently.
“The dean cannot speak with anyone at the present time,” said the priest in icy tones.
“Then give him my message, please,” I said, speaking rapidly. “Tell him that I’ve destroyed the monster and will be back in the cathedral city in a week.” I tried to read something into the young man’s motionless face. Could Joachim have left explicit orders that he did not want to talk to me? Had the cantor Norbert decided to get revenge for his humiliation by launching a new, more deadly attack against the dean, perhaps with the active assistance of an evil wizard? “No new monsters have appeared on the cathedral tower, have they?” I asked in panic.
“No, and I trust you are not disappointed.” And then he did ring off, leaving me hoping that he would convey my message.
“I’ll send the air cart back to the City as soon as we’re through with it,” I said as we were leaving the mountain top. Having not seen any other flying beasts in the borderlands, I had to give up my plan for an air cart of my own. “So the school will be able to send you more supplies whenever you need them. Swallow your pride and ask them to send out some technicians at the same time.”
He nodded ruefully. But during the week it took us to fly home I gave him no more thought.
Paul and Lucas spent much of the trip working out elaborate methods to trick and overcome whatever renegade wizard was operating in Caelrhon. Vor was unable to give any more exact description of him than that he seemed fairly young and had a black beard. He commented, rather surprised himself, that he could not really recall the man’s face, though he did remember his white jacket, emblazoned with yellow suns glowing by their own light, a jacket that I could certainly not remember anyone at the school wearing. The two princes speculated at some length on Vincent’s role, concluding that he must have been deceived by the renegade, and drew up plans in which they were able to gallop, formidable and glorious, across all their enemies. I could have told them none of them would work.
“I’ll be eighteen in two weeks,” said Paul. “I hope Mother has been going ahead with the preparations without me. You were going to be at my coming of age ceremony anyway, weren’t you Lucas? I’ll need you now especially, because the wizard may be planning some attack to coincide with the event.”
And if the renegade wizard was planning some outrageous further assault on the cathedral, I needed to warn the Church. Once Joachim was elected bishop I hoped that I could still get in to see him in spite of the other priests’ suspicions of magic-workers, suspicions doubtless increased by Norbert’s experiences.