He had pulled up his hood so I could not see his face in the shadows, but his voice emerged with its old strength. “Trying to make a noise loud enough to frighten my creature, is that your plan?”
“Well, no, Master,” Evrard began. “I didn’t think it had ears anyway. And you see-”
The old wizard waved his explanations aside. “I have the right herbs now, and the right spell.” I noticed then his fingers glowing with a pale blue light, as though the spell itself was held in his hands. “No more time for nonsense. We’re going in after it.”
Evrard, who had ducked behind me, pushed himself forward again in spite of obvious reluctance. “We’re ready,” he said, with a calmness I admired.
“Not you, young whipper-snapper.” I could sense Evrard wavering between indignation and relief. “This is a job for the Royal Wizard and me. That is,” the old wizard added after a long pause, with unexpected gentleness, “we both think we need someone to stay at the entrance of the cave, to make sure my creature doesn’t get past us and get out, and we think you’d be best for the job.”
“Of course,” said Evrard, still calmly.
“Find Joachim,” I said. “He and the other priests are all at the shrine. Tell him we’ve gone.”
Evrard patted me surreptitiously on the shoulder as I followed my predecessor toward the dark cave mouth. It felt as though he were saying good-bye.
PART SEVEN — THE CAVE
I
We had to pick our way around several small boulders that now littered the bank, and the limestone at the cave entrance was chipped, but the river flowed as swiftly as before. The evening light was at the point at which one imagines one can still see, but when the old wizard illuminated the silver ball at the end of his staff with magic, it showed how poorly I had been able to see a moment before. His face emerged from the shadow of his hood, looking determined and quite rational.
But his light also made all our surroundings darkly black, though seconds earlier they had only been dim. And where we were going it was black all the time.
“Don’t slip,” said the old wizard. He bent over and led the way along the narrow ledge that paralleled the river. I scrambled through the cave entrance after him, a hand on the rough wall to keep my balance, trying to find a footing in the crazy patchwork of light and shadows as the soft glow from his staff was repeatedly blocked by his body.
Now that we were in the cave, there could be no return until we found the monster. The prison of the valley seemed wide open in comparison with the pressing walls around me now.
But our cautious, bent advance only continued for two dozen yards. Abruptly the crouching figure before me straightened. “This is as far as the ducal wizard and I got before,” he said. I reached cautiously over my head, felt only emptiness, and stood up.
The magic light showed we were in a broad chamber, that would have seemed tall if it had not been so very wide. Near at hand, I could see several tunnels leading away, but farther from us the gravel floor and the smooth ceiling both disappeared into darkness.
After a quick magic probe indicated that the monster was not nearby, I looked at the walls. As Nimrod had said, they were spectacular. The slow dripping of water over the eons had left behind what looked like waterfalls frozen into stone, colored with reds and blues that reflected and shot back the magic light. If the old wizard had told me the walls were covered with precious stones, I would have believed him.
“This is lovely,” I said. “Can anything live here, without light?”
The old wizard was not interested in the walls. I wondered if he might, during his close to two centuries in Yurt, have come here many times. “Not much lives here,” he said absently. “Deep in the cave there are blind fish in the river-not just with unseeing eyes, but with no eyes at all.”
But he was also not interested in cave fish. “Now, which way did he go?” he added, half to me and half to himself.
He moved off across the chamber, and I stayed close behind him and the light. I knew we were still very close to the entrance, that Nimrod, with the benefit of mid-day sun, had been able to come this far without any sort of light and still see well enough not only to find his way back out but to notice the walls. But outside it was now night, and in darkness I could have blundered into a different tunnel, thinking it the entrance, and been lost forever.
I told myself firmly that I should be able to make a magic light as good as my predecessor’s, and that even in darkness I had only to follow the river. It helped a little.
But only for a moment. “This way,” said the old wizard confidently. Leaving the river, the one reliable guide we had, he walked quickly across the chamber and into one of the wider tunnels. I had no choice but to follow him.
The tunnel descended slowly but steadily, heading as well as I could tell back into the heart of the plateau and away from the valley. The cave walls here were rough and plain, without any of the colors and fantastic shapes of the great chamber. I presumed that at some point in the ancient past a branch of the river had run here too, but if so it was long gone, leaving only a dampness on the walls.
We walked quickly for maybe a quarter hour, though almost immediately I began to feel that we were outside of time. The tunnel twisted, rising now, turning until I felt sure we would come back around on ourselves. I found myself staring into the blackness around us as intensely as if the force of my stare would make the dark dissolve into light.
Abruptly the old wizard stopped. My heart accelerated, but then I realized he was only pausing to rest.
“I don’t walk that much any more,” he said, half under his breath. “And these last few days, between flying and walking and running-” He sank to the floor, and I sat down beside him. The walls here were lined with crystals that shimmered like diamonds in the light of the old wizard’s staff.
“You didn’t bring any food, did you?” he asked after a few minutes of silence. “I should have known. No thought or consideration. One thing you’ll have to do, young wizard, is learn more consideration for the other fellow.”
I didn’t answer. Now that I considered food, I too was hungry. As well as something to eat, we should have brought water; I didn’t relish the idea of trying to lick moisture from the cave walls.
“You’re sure it came this way?” I asked. Stumbling behind the old wizard, I had not had a chance to try my own magic.
He grunted in assent. His hands still glowed as if with blue fire.
There was a curious intimacy of sitting here with him, the two of us maybe a mile from the cave entrance, perhaps a quarter mile below the surface of the plateau, but surrounded by a silent darkness that put as much distance between us and the rest of the world as though we were on the moon. I wondered how long one would have to be here before vision atrophied and one became as blind as a cave fish. The glow at the end of his staff could have been the only light in the universe.
I took advantage of the rest stop to try again to find out something about his creature. “You know, Master,” I began, my voice bringing him back with a start from his own thoughts, “I’m especially impressed by your creature’s eyes. It has almost no features, no nose, no mouth, no ears, and yet the eyes seem alive.”
“Of course they do,” he said but did not elaborate.
I tried a different angle. “You made it partly with herbal magic and the magic of the earth, didn’t you. I haven’t seen anything like it in any of my books of spells from the school.”
He looked at me almost fiercely for a second. I should have known better. Every time I tried to compliment him by saying how much better a certain spell of his was than something I had learned at school, he seemed insulted that I would think so little of his abilities as to compare them with the obviously inferior school magic in the first place.