We continued for what could have been an hour and could have been weeks. Several times the old wizard turned abruptly into a side tunnel, sometimes climbing upwards, sometimes slithering down on loose gravel. At each intersection, I paused long enough to place a magical mark to show which way we had gone. I realized I should have been placing them all along, but there had been so few turnings since we left the great colored chamber that I hoped that would not be a problem. My predecessor either knew the cave intimately or else was indifferent about finding our way out again, but if we were still alive after finding the monster I at least wanted a chance to find our way home.
We had been walking for some time when I realized that part of the rushing in my ears was not just my own blood but the sound of running water. By circuitous routes we were making our way back toward the river we had left behind near the cave entrance-either that, or we were approaching another river.
I realized I had been waiting unconsciously for the dawn, with the thought that we would be able to tell where we were once the light began to grow. But no dawn could be expected here, while earth and stone endured.
The old wizard stopped again, as abruptly as he had started forward. He sat down against the wall, pulled his cloak around him, and closed his eyes. His magic light became slowly dimmer, but the silver ball was close enough to his face that I could see all the deep lines the years had cut in it.
He had aged much more than two years in the time that I had known him. I had been highly impressed at the power of his whirlwind, but I had not before thought of the drain such magic must put on an old wizard.
I too was exhausted, but I didn’t even dare think about sleep. If we slept the old wizard could lose contact with his creature, which might then either attack us or burst back out into the valley.
“Master,” I said softly, and he opened his eyes. “Master, even if I couldn’t understand the spell by which you made your creature in the first place, don’t you think you should teach me a little of the spell by which we’ll catch it?”
He grunted, opened his eyes reluctantly, but then nodded. “The problem is,” he said, “as I already told you, this binding spell only works when it’s standing still.”
He leaned forward, opening a hand to show that he clutched a few dead leaves in it. It was from the leaves that the blue glow came. First he started to explain it to me in words of the Hidden Language, but then he abruptly started to speak to me directly, mind to mind.
Here communication was much faster, although I had to concentrate much harder to be sure I missed nothing. I held my own thoughts, terrified, back just out of reach of his touch, for I received not just the spells but the twist in his thinking.
The wizards at the school would have said that he was in danger of going renegade, Joachim that he was in danger of losing his soul. Neither seemed quite right. But I knew that his motivations, his assumptions, his purposes had all taken a turn somewhere, a turn I did not want to take, and which left me when he finally broke the mental contact trembling and bathed with sweat in spite of the cold.
“I haven’t determined yet if I can modify this spell to catch him while he’s moving,” the old wizard said. “Now that you know the spell, maybe you can have a try with your fancy school magic.”
School magic wouldn’t work here. Whatever had been the case with the creatures Nimrod had once helped track, this particular monster had been made specifically to be able to walk through normal binding spells. It wouldn’t have been any use even if I had been able to get word to Zahlfast. This creature was made with the combined magic of light and earth, and it would have to be caught the same way.
The old wizard pushed himself to his feet, and his staff glowed brightly again. “This way,” he said and started off in the direction from which I could have sworn we had just come. But almost immediately the passage narrowed, which I had not remembered it doing before. It was a good thing I was not trying to lead.
The passage became so tight we had to push and squeeze through. He went first, and immediately after the narrowest place the passage turned, so that he and the light were gone.
For a second I felt completely lost, without direction, surrounded by darkness so profound it seemed to sear my eyeballs, crushed by a hundred million tons of rock. But then I was through, around the corner, and able again to see his light, bouncing slightly as he walked. I put a quick magic mark on the wall and hurried to catch up.
After the tight squeeze, the passage widened, so that for the moment we could walk abreast. With a little more light, I did not stumble as often, even though I kept falling behind every time we passed a side turning and I paused to mark that we had continued to follow the straight way.
I glanced sideways at him as we continued, though he seemed almost to have forgotten my presence. His face was stern and his expression distant, as though he was still trying to see through his creature’s eyes.
Pride, Joachim would have called it. They had warned us against it in school, although most young wizards (including me), as I had come to realize, were still so marginally competent upon graduation that it was unlikely to be a problem. The Hidden Language did tap the human mind into enormous and elemental forces, but as long as one did only simple spells, one could stay as safe as a child wading in the tide pools of the western sea.
The truly idiotic young wizard might let himself be caught in an undertow, but the real danger was for the supremely good wizards. Their mastery of magic took them further and further out into it, until they tried a spell that brought magic breaking over them and their words of the Hidden Language with the force of the waves of a winter gale.
My predecessor had put spells from the old traditional magic together with spells he had created himself in years of study, to make not just something that could move and even look as though it were alive, but something as difficult to dissolve into its component elements as a real living being.
It had no face, other than its eyes, but at least at times he seemed able to see through those eyes. When it raced toward us out in the valley, carrying the duchess, it must have been a strange case of double vision for the old wizard: both seeing himself from the outside and seeing the creature running toward him. No wonder he had not been able to put any sort of binding spell together-even if the creature had slowed down long enough for a spell to work.
He stopped where the passage forked, and for a moment I thought he wanted to rest again. Instead he seemed to hesitate about the direction, for the first time since we had started into the cave. I took the opportunity to make a few more magic marks.
“This way,” he said, almost reluctantly, and not even as though he were addressing me, but then he started off again with renewed energy. I wondered if the monster were deliberately hiding from him.
There was much here that the old wizard had not yet told me, but I could guess. He had started by putting a true seeing power into his creature, something that I tried unsuccessfully to persuade myself should not seem frightening to someone like me who had invented a far-seeing telephone. The next, however, was even worse.
I caught up to him and glanced at his face. The magic light, from the silver ball held close in front of him, made his eyes gleam under his eyebrows. His next plan, I thought, was to go beyond seeing through his creature. He now intended to put his entire being into the creature’s body.
A body shaped and held together by powerful magic would not be the rapidly weakening body of someone far past two hundred. Even if built originally from dead bones, it should not crumble while the spells held.
And here is where my predecessor had swum far out beyond his depth, even beyond sight of land. He had not yet found the spell to transfer his will into the creature’s body, I guessed, but in attempting to give it the ability to receive true life, he had given it a generalized, unfocused search for life.