Table Of ContentIs This Apocalypse Necessary?
By C. Dale Brittain
Part One The Master
I
The midnight knock came sharp and hard. I had no way of knowing that the
knock meant that in two minutes I would be kidnapped and in three weeks
dead. I rolled over, too sleepy to bother with a spell. It had to be someone from
here in the castle, so eager for my wizardly wisdom that he couldn’t wait until
morning. “Mmm?” The knock came again. “Come in,” I mumbled, not recalling
for the moment how rarely my wisdom was sought this eagerly. “The door’s
unlocked.” It slowly creaked open, letting in a cool, damp wind but at first
nothing else. It was the darkest hour of the night, the hour when it seems that the
sun must tis time be gone for good, and the furniture has taken advantage of its
absence to metamorphose into something large and predatory. I sat up, abruptly
wide awake. Through the doorway stepped a pair of hooded figures, barely
visible in the shadows. Just inside, they paused to light a magic lamp, but their
hoods hid their faces from the lamp’s glow. The aura of wizardry emanated from
them like heat from a stove. Two strange wizards, in a kingdom where I was the
only one? My heart slammed against my ribs as I scrambled belatedly for a spell.
“Don’t struggle, Daimbert,” said one, “and don’t make a sound.” His was no
voice I recognized, though he seemed to know who I was. “Is anyone here
with you?”
“No!” I said loudly and stretched out a hand, adding the two quick words that
should have knocked them flat.
The words had no effect.
Instead a loop of air around my chest suddenly became solid. They were using a
binding spell on me.
I struggled to free myself, but with two of them joining their magic together I
didn’t have a chance. The binding spell held me tighter than any rope and kept
my mouth closed, so I could do no more than thrash and make inarticulate grunts
as they advanced toward the bed.
“We told you not to struggle, Daimbert,” said one reprovingly. “And stop
making that sound before we have to paralyze you, too. Good thing we practiced
our binding spells before we came!”
So they wanted me alive. I stopped grunting and rolled around so that I could
look at them. I could see their faces now but still didn’t recognize either one. The
first wizard’s hair was snowy white above a pink and youthful face that looked
as if he usually wore an expression of enthusiastic good-humor, though now
he was frowning and shielding his eyes from the glow of the magic lamp.
The other had a prominent cleft chin which he carried with pride. It was he who
had addressed me. Young wizards, I thought, with the complacency that comes
from having carefully-practiced spells work right the first, time, but without the
experience to know that no wizard’s command of magic is ever flawless.
And I had better find the flaw in their magic, and fast.
The one with the chin said the words of the Hidden Language to lift me slowly
into the air and move me toward the door.
I let him do so, lying still as though in resignation but probing furiously at the
binding spell that held me. It was very tidily done, just like in the book—a spell
right out of the wizards’ school.
A student prank? I wondered as the cold night air hit me. The last time I had
been at the wizards’ school I seemed to remember spotting a white-haired, pale-
skinned young man among the students, but I didn’t get to the City very often
and had not paid much attention. And I had tended to avoid the school ever
since Elerius had joined the faculty.
In my own student days I had carried out a certain number of pranks, and Whitey
looked as if he would enjoy a joke at someone else’s expense, but it seemed
unnecessarily elaborate for them to have flown two hundred miles, from the
great City to the tiny kingdom of Yurt, just to play a trick on its Royal Wizard,
me.
They extinguished their magic lamp and looked cautiously from side to side, but
the castle courtyard was dark and quiet. Everyone must have long been asleep;
there was no sound but the whispering of the wind. The only sign of life was a
faint glow from the watchman’s lantern, near the gate.
I considered trying somehow to attract his attention, but he would have had even
less luck against these wizards than I was having.
“This way,” said Chin quietly. He seemed to be the leader. “Back over the wall.”
They sailed me up over the castle battlements while I silently cursed myself for
not having magical spells in place that would have alerted me to any invader. I
had placed such spells at one time, years ago, when Yurt was attacked by
unliving warriors made of hair and bone, but the spells had been too hard to keep
going during the peaceful years that followed.
Beyond the moat I could make out a squat, winged shape, which in a second I
recognized as an air cart. It was the skin of a purple flying beast which, even
long after the beast had died, would keep on flying if given magical commands.
The school’s air cart? I thought in amazement. Could Chin and Whitey have
stolen it?
Either these two young wizards had gotten themselves involved in a student
prank so serious that expulsion from the school would be a pathetically weak
punishment, or else others were involved, faculty as well as students.
As they tumbled me into the air cart and Chin gave the command to lift off, I
thought I knew, with a cold certainty that chilled me much more than the night
wind. Elerius. He had to be behind this. When I looked toward Chin and Whitey,
darker silhouettes against the dark sky, I seemed to see not them but an
older, black-bearded wizard, contemplating me from under peaked
eyebrows with thoughtful, tawny eyes.
And all the time I kept on probing their binding spells, weakening them a tiny bit
at a time, first here, then there, so small a change in any one spot that they might
never notice that the solid air that held me was gradually diffusing back to
its natural state, until—I hoped—it would be too late.
The air cart’s wings beat steadily as it carried us away from Yurt and through the
night. The rain had ended, but clouds half covered the stars. It was impossible
for me, lying at the bottom of the cart, to determine our direction, but my guess
was that we were heading toward the coast and the great City. I hoped that
by staying perfectly quiet I might lull the two young wizards into an unguarded
conversation that would allow me to learn where we were going and why, but
they too were silent, except for occasionally giving a low command to correct
the cart’s course. At one point Whitey seemed about to say something, but Chin
shushed him.
The last of the binding spell that held me came apart. But I remained still, eyes
shut, breathing very shallowly.
Whitey bent over me and this time did speak. “Did we knock him unconscious?”
he asked, sounding worried.
“He’s only realized it’s no use struggling against superior magic,” said Chin,
sounding unconcerned. “Isn’t that right, Daimbert?” addressing me derisively. “I
told you this would work,” he continued to Whitey. “I looked up Daimbert’s old
academic records once, the time I got into the main office at night, and, you
know, he nearly flunked out of the school. He never stood a chance against the
two of us—in fact, one alone could have done it.” Don’t check your binding
spell, I thought desperately. Whatever you do, don’t check your spell.
He didn’t check his spell. Much too unconcerned, I thought. If these were
Elerius’s agents, he should have trained them better. I might indeed have almost
flunked out of the wizards’ school, but that had been over thirty years ago, and
I had picked up one or two magical tricks in the meantime. Chin was going to
pay for that remark. Very slowly, so cautiously that even an experienced wizard
might not have noticed, I started putting together a transformations spell. The
danger of having one’s magic work perfectly, as I had learned from experience
over the years but hoped they hadn’t, is that it makes one careless: even a spell
that comes out just like in the book may not be sufficient. Chin and
Whitey, thinking me securely tied up, must have forgotten that I still had a great
deal of magic available to me. Being turned into tadpoles would remind them.
Once they were safely transmogrified, I would give the air cart my own
commands and get back home to Yurt.
But I hesitated with my transformations spell incomplete. It might be better to
wait until actually brought before Elerius. I had always known I would have to
face him sometime, even though I would have preferred not to do so wearing
crumpled yellow pajamas. Much as I would have liked to distance myself by
several hundred miles from him and his schemes, I knew that if he wanted me he
would keep coming after me. Better to confront him now and learn his plans at
once than to go home and wait for his next attack.
Especially if I confronted him carrying his two treacherous agents wiggling in a
jar.
Elerius was the best wizard to come out of the school in my generation, or
probably any generation since it was founded. He had long played a waiting
game, readying himself for the day when he could take over the leadership of
organized magic and reshape it to suit his own vision. His ideas and mine on the
purposes and goals of institutionalized wizardry differed enough that I. doubted
he had sent for me to ask my opinions. But he had—rather inexplicably, I always
thought—concluded some years ago that I was a better wizard than I actually
was (though he had neglected to tell his agents this), and must have decided to
silence me before I could disrupt the plans he was even now putting into effect.
But he couldn’t be planning to kill me, I tried to reassure the cold fear at the pit
of my stomach. Chin and Whitey could have subjected me to much worse had
they wanted; clearly I was required intact. Of course, the logical conclusion
struck me with depressing force, it was also possible that Elerius wanted to kill
me himself to make sure there were no mistakes—and no survivors. I jerked my
mind from the question of my personal safety to the question of what might
actually be happening at the wizards’ school. All I could conclude was that
Elerius had managed to embroil some of the students in his schemes, but that
was not nearly enough to go on.
For starters, what were his schemes? It was no secret that he intended some day
to become the new Master of the school, but so far he had been content to wait.
He had always been enormously ambitious, and because he was smarter than
anyone else he had quite early decided that whatever he thought best actually
was for the best, but so far his self-assurance that he would always work for the
benefit of everyone had restricted his ambition. But had he now thrown aside
waiting and assassinated the old Master? Was he bringing to the City, one by
one, any other wizards he imagined might be rivals and killing them too?
“I don’t even know why he’s so interested in Daimbert,” Chin commented in an
irritated tone, startling me out of my train of thought. “You’d expect he’d trust us
enough to tell us why he wants him. What’s so special about this
wizard anyway?”
Oho, jealousy, I thought. I wasn’t going to learn Elerius’s plans by
eavesdropping, but might I be able to play on that sense of aggrieved pride
enough to swing these young wizards over to my side?
Of course it would have helped if I could talk. But doing anything beyond
grunting would advertise that I was no longer held by a binding spell. And this
time Chin might make his threat good and paralyze me, at which point I
wouldn’t even be able to think.
Time to take action. We had been flying long enough that the eastern sky, behind
the air cart, was gradually lightening from black toward gray. The clouds had
rolled away, and I could see the stars fading out. The two wizards’ faces were
just visible as I peered up at them from behind lowered lashes.
“There’s the City on the horizon,” said Chin quietly, gazing ahead and giving the
final magical commands that would guide the air cart to a landing at the school. I
waited until they both were looking away, then muttered under my breath the
words of the Hidden Language to make me invisible.
In the space of one second my body disappeared, and I was up and over the edge
of the air cart and flying along beside it, the wind whipping at my invisible
beard. It might be interesting to see how they explained my absence to Elerius.
“He’s gone!” gasped Whitey. So they still taught them at the school to recognize
the obvious.
Chin sprang forward, feeling around the bottom of the air cart as if thinking I
might have just rolled to one side and been hidden by the shadows. Before us in
the west the sky was still dark and star-studded, but the yellow lights of the
never-sleeping City, ahead of us and a quarter mile below, made an island
of brightness at the edge of a dim landscape. Beyond, still black and unfeatured,
stretched the sea.
Both young wizards were on their feet now, looking around wildly, with the
desperate expression of those who realize they have just made a major mistake
and are wondering what they can possibly do to correct it. I recognized that
feeling; I had had it often enough myself.
“He can’t have gone far,” said Chin in sudden resolution. “I should be able to
detect somebody working magic. In fact—” He was just too late. He discovered
and was dismantling my invisibility spell as I turned him and Whitey into frogs.
I collapsed back over the edge of the air cart, whose wings kept resolutely
flapping, and wiped my forehead with a pajama sleeve. The frogs looked at me
with human panic in their amphibian eyes. One of them was mottled green and
brown, with an unusually prominent lower jaw for a frog, but the other was the
color of chalk. I slowly caught my breath and waited for my heartbeat to return
to normal before trying anything else. Flying was hard enough physical and
mental work by itself without having to do so while invisible, much less
transforming young wizards into frogs at the same time. At the last moment I
had decided against tadpoles. I had no jars of water with me, and if they had
dried up and died while transformed they would have been just as dead when
turned back into wizards. It seemed a bit excessive to put them to death
for kidnapping me.
Besides, they were not my real enemies. Elerius was, and he was waiting just
ahead.
II
The air cart began spiraling down, toward the sharp spires of the school on the
highest central point in the City.
The school was not one building but many, built or added to over the last two
centuries and all connected together, glittering both with magic lights and with
illusion. Below the spires, below the maze of offices, meeting rooms, lecture
halls, and library, were storerooms, the rooms where the teachers had once kept a
very small dragon (strictly for instructional purposes), and silent rooms closed
with magic locks where, the new students told each other, demons lived, though
I had always found that unlikely. I expected the cart to settle, as usual, into the
school courtyard, but instead it tucked its wings tidily and dropped like a stone
the last thirty feet, to land on a balcony jutting out from one of the towers.
The frogs were catapulted upward by the force of that bone-jarring landing. I
grabbed one in each hand and stuffed them into my pajama pockets. Maybe there
was an additional magical command one was supposed to give to make the final
approach easier, a command I didn’t know because I would never have
presumed to bring the air cart down here— this was the balcony of the
private suite belonging to the Master.
Which meant that Elerius must indeed have already disposed of him. I took a
deep breath and climbed out. The frogs were giving their calls, which I had
thought frogs gave only to attract mates, but presumably they had no other way
to scream in terror—or warning? I paused for a second to cover my pajamas in
illusion: a white linen shirt with lace at the cuffs, dark red velvet jacket
and trousers, embroidered all over with the moon and stars, a golden pendant
around my neck, and a long black cape over all. Then I stepped through the tall
open window and inside.
A voice spoke from somewhere ahead. “Did you bring the wizard?”
The corridor before me was dark, but a magic lamp’s glow came from an open
doorway. In two strides I was at the door. “No thanks to your assistants,” I said,
“the wizard brought himself.” But something was wrong. That had not
been Elerius’s voice, and this was not Elerius before me. It was the old Master of
the school, lying in bed propped up with pillows, lookingup at me from frost-
blue eyes.
