“And you won’t find it there, either,” he said, as though trying to impress this on me. “This is my own spell. In part it’s based on something my own master taught me two centuries ago, and in part it’s the result of research I’ve been carrying on myself for many years.”
My predecessor had had a room for his experiments at the top of the north tower of the royal castle of Yurt, into which I heard he had sometimes disappeared for days. The room had not been used since his retirement. My own chambers opened directly onto the court yard, and I had yet to develop many startling new spells in them.
It wasn’t worth telling him that the old ducal wizard had known that a spell something like his existed, and that Elerius had learned-and even taught at the school-a more rudimentary version. Except for the simplest spells, magic is more than a mere series of words of the Hidden Language said in the correct sequence. It is a combination of intellectual understanding and of the instinct that comes only from long experience, of a sequence of words integrated into a format that will vary with every wizard.
“Could you teach me the spell?” I asked timidly.
He gave me a look again, but this time almost kindly. “It’s not the kind of spell I could teach you the way you learn a few words of the Hidden Language. Maybe when you’re my age you’ll be able to learn it properly.”
But by that time, he would have been dead and gone for two hundred years. While I temporarily had him in a friendly mood, I had to try to learn more. “Did you find the bones you used in the woods?” I hazarded. “Deer bones, perhaps?”
But I knew they hadn’t been the bones of a deer. Deer do not have hands.
I had expected him to keep a stony silence, or at best to tell me it was none of my business. To my surprise he answered immediately. Perhaps he too had the feeling that we with our conversation were the only animate beings left in existence.
“No, they were human right enough, as I’m sure you know. My guess is he might have been a bandit once, wounded and then abandoned by his friends. Or he could have been a hermit, one of those self-proclaimed saintly fellows who wander around without even the sense to find a shrine and settle down. They never get enough to eat, and the slightest illness will carry them off. Whoever he’d been, he’d been dead for quite some time when I found him. Flesh long gone, and the scattered bones bleached white. He might once have had a black beard,” he added thoughtfully.
This monster had never been a hermit, I thought. It had been a bandit, a murderer, someone who- “My God,” I said involuntarily, which earned me a cold and stony look.
The soul, the spirit of a murderer should be long gone by the time his bones were scattered by the forest animals. If this creature had more than magic motion without life, if it actually partook of the living bandit’s murderous spirit, then the old wizard had summoned a demon to bring that bandit back from hell. I inched backwards until my back was pressed into the sharp crystals of the wall.
But then he laughed, and it was not a demonic laugh. “Imagining that I’ve been practicing black magic, is that it, young whipper-snapper?” he asked in almost friendly tones. “No, I haven’t tried to bring back the soul that once went with my bones. As you know perfectly well, I am aware of the dangers of addressing demons.” If I hadn’t been afraid that he had lost his mind, I would have agreed with him there. “But I have started to wonder if the activities we do in life might lay down a pattern in our bones that will persist physically long after the spirit is gone.”
When he spoke rationally like this, in the voice I had grown to know well, I could believe him. Then I remembered the claimaints before the king, accusing each other of having dug up somebody related to their quarrel and hidden the body. If the old wizard had found those bones, then that might explain why his creature had gone first to the village.
“They probably have to warn you young wizards at the school against trying to get fancy results the quick way, by calling on the powers of darkness,” the old wizard continued. “Even you still have the moon and stars on your belt buckle, though I cautioned you about that the first time I met you. But back when I was trained, we all knew that only a very weak wizard, one who can’t get the forces of magic to respond to his own human powers, has to fall back on invoking the supernatural.”
I was delighted to let myself to be persuaded. He was, I knew, perfectly capable of lying to me, but he would never allow himself to be shamed, by boasting that he had not used the supernatural to assist his own magic if indeed he had, for I could check this at any time. I had in fact probed for the supernatural at his cottage and not found it.
Both of us relaxed, and I felt again the closeness of sitting with him in a tiny circle of magic light, surrounded by stillness so profound that the sound of my own blood was a roar in my ears. I wished I had known him when he was younger-but when he was younger he was Royal Wizard, and with him still in the castle I would never have come to Yurt.
“Your creature,” I began again, “always seems to be searching. Do you know what it’s searching for? Will it know it when it finds it?”
But this was something he did not seem to want to answer, at least not at once. He snorted briefly but then began a rumbling hum, as though working himself up to speech. My foot had gone to sleep, but I did not dare move it while I waited for what he would say.
“Life,” he said at last.
Death, I thought. I could not forget that this creature had killed. Not dead, not alive, in motion but without a human soul, it had taken on a direction of its own.
But might it indeed want life for itself? Like the wood nymph, at some level I didn’t even want to consider, was it searching for a human life and soul? Was it going to kill someone in order to get it?
Below the surface of the earth, the air was cold, not growing any colder, but clearly not getting any warmer no matter how long we waited. While we sat, a tiny layer of warmer air formed around my body, which I was loath to break by moving. But on the inside my blood felt like ice.
My predecessor shielded his eyes from the glow on his staff with one hand. “It’s dark,” he said distantly. “So dark. Nothing to see.” My blood, if possible, went even colder.
II
Abruptly he pushed himself to his feet. “We’ll just get stiff and even hungrier sitting here,” he said grumpily. “Only thing to do is to find my creature and bring it back out.”
I jumped up as well, staggered on the foot that had gone to sleep, and hurried after him. He set a determined pace through the tunnel, whose roof seemed now to be sloping almost imperceptibly lower.
This was why, I thought, the monster had kept seizing at anything living and then-sometimes-letting it go. It was searching for the old wizard. The life it wanted was the life of its maker. This was also why it had seemed to have living eyes: the old wizard himself was looking through them.
The tunnel roof abruptly became very low, so that we had to go down on our hands and knees and crawl. I fought an irrational fear that we were going into a narrower and narrower space and would never be able to work free again.
Then the roof rose again, and we were back on our feet. “Watch your step,” the old wizard said laconically. Almost directly in front of us a shaft dropped away. As I worked my way around the rough edge, a dislodged pebble bounced into the hole. I listened, but did not hear it hit.
We passed several more shafts which could have swallowed the unwary. Some, I thought as we corkscrewed upwards through narrow passages, must lead down to where we had been a few minutes before.