Secular Wizard

Chapter 19

Ortho the Frank stopped abruptly, holding up a hand. The horseman behind narrowly managed to avoid a collision, and that only by swerving his cantering steed to the side, which made the rider next to Ortho sheer off, and the man behind him rein in with an oath, while the man to the side of the man to the side had to pull over, but not quite as much. A knot in the traffic flow developed, and the army ground to a halt. Fortunately, Queen Alisande had been on Ortho’s other side-in fact, that was why the rider behind had swerved wide though the huge presence of Stegoman the dragon might have had something to do with that, too. But she was nonetheless peeved at having her cantering army coming to a stop. Still, she knew better than to tax a wizard while he was doing his job. After he was done with his job, maybe… She wrenched her mind away from a sudden craving for oatmeal with sauerkraut sauce and asked, ‘What moves, Ortho?“

“Your husband.” Ortho’s voice seemed distant, reverberating from a long journey bouncing off cavern walls. “He is in great trouble, very profound.”

The thrill of fear banished all thoughts of oatmeal, even if that sauerkraut sauce would be delicious right now. “Is he in peril of his life?”

“Nay. There is no danger of death.”

Alisande relaxed a little and couldn’t help thinking that sauerkraut was vastly underrated. She put the notion aside with resolute insistence and focused her attention on the problem. “What danger can he be in, then?”

“Danger that he may be doomed to dwell in a dungeon cell,” the wizard breathed, “that he may never win free again, never return.”

Panic gripped Alisande all over again. To be bereft of her husband, and especially at a time like this… ! She turned in her saddle, waving a clenched fist aloft. “Onward, men of mine! To Venarra! We must pry open the king’s castle as if it were a nutshell!”

A shout of approval answered her, but as it died, a different kind of shout went up from the vanguard. Alisande turned, wondering what it might be. “A courier comes,” said Sir Guy, and beside him the dragon Stegoman lowered his great scaly head to say, “He wears King Boncorro’s colors.”

Alisande turned to the messenger with a glare that could have melted a glacier. “What does your master wish, sirrah!”

The courier pulled in his horse, amazed and frightened by the total absence of protocol. “Your Majesty!” he stammered, and dismounted to kneel. “I bear greetings from King Boncorro, through the mouth of his chancellor, Lord Rebozo!”

Which meant that the king might not know of this errand-but if he did, the words had better be to Alisande’s liking. “What says the Lord Chancellor?”

“He bids you welcome to Latruria, Majesty, and asks if you have come seeking Lord Matthew Mantrell.”

Alisande stiffened. “I have indeed!”i “Then he bids you be easy in your heart as regards the Lord Wizard’s welcome here, your Majesty, for Lord Matthew is no longer in Latruria!”

Alisande stared, feeling the frisson of danger, very sinister danger, spreading icy needle jabs all over her skin. “Is he not, then?”

“Nay, Majesty, though, says the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Wizard was severely lacking in courtesy not to announce himself openly, but to come in secret, like a spy.”

All expression left Alisande’s face; the criticism felt like a slap. “You may tell the Lord Chancellor that my husband has ever had a taste for going in disguise among the common folk, that he may have a truer sense of their needs-and that I am sure it was concern for the relatives of Merovence’s folk that led him across your borders. But where has my Lord Matthew gone?”

“Why… the Lord Chancellor did not say!” the courier stammered. “I would be surprised if he did know, Majesty!”

“He speaks the truth,” Ortho muttered, his gaze still halfway in some other world. The truth as he knew it, Alisande amended. She, however, was quite sure that Chancellor Rebozo did indeed know where Matt had gone, and suspected that what Rebozo knew, his master knew. “You may give the Lord Chancellor my greetings and tell him that I am pleased to learn of the hospitality he has offered my husband. Tell him that I shall find a way to return the favor in equal measure.” There, she thought, let him hear that and tremble. “But tell his Majesty that, since I have come this far, I shall press on to Venarra and make a visit of state. I have not, after all, had the opportunity to congratulate him on his coronation.”

The courier paled, catching the implied rebuke-which, of course, he was very right to do; Alisande was still smarting at not having been invited, though she knew well that inviting the ruler of a kingdom dedicated to the Rule of Right to the coronation of a king dedicated to the Rule of Might was like inviting a dozen wildcats to a dogs’ party. The courier ducked his head in a bow, leaped up and scrambled back onto his horse. If anything, his face was paler than before. He turned his mount… And found himself hemmed in by a sea of hostile faces. “Conduct our guest to the edge of our army,” Alisande purred, “and see him on his way with every courtesy. We would not, after all wish our message to go astray.”

“It has already been heard,” Ortho breathed, like a breeze in leafy branches. Alisande didn’t doubt it for a second; she had dealt with sorcerers before. She had noticed a beetle clinging to the courier’s shoulder and had thought that it might indeed be enchanted to send the sound and sight of this meeting to Chancellor Rebozo, or or least to allow him to focus on the scene in his crystal ball, or a bowl of ink. “Send him forth with all ceremony! For surely, it is ceremony that is our concern now!”

The courier glanced at her with apprehension. She noted with approval that the man must know the ways of the court well, to catch the implication that she knew that King Boncorro knew that she was thinking that he was thinking, so that all that was left to do was to go through the motions. She watched the man ode away, reflecting that he was wise to be apprehensive. Only the motions, yes, but those motions might be the handshake of peace or the blows of war. Her attention turned inward for the moment; reflexively, she pressed her hand to her abdomen, hoping for the first time in her Me that it would not be war, not now.

Yes, she hoped indeed that King Boncorro would receive them with outward hospitality, would go through motions that at least said they were not enemies, though also not friends. She found herself hoping that his kitchen stocked sauerkraut.

Bad enough that everything was misty-now it was getting dark, too! Matt had finally summoned the willpower to risk a very tentative step, and when the yielding surface had held up as he gradually transferred his weight from one foot to the other, he had risked a second step, then a third. There was a floor there, all right, and occasionally he actually saw wisps of dry grass poking through the mist around his ankles, so he assumed it must be ground.

Besides, it was very uneven, and he stumbled a lot. After a while dim shapes seemed to be hulking in the mist, darker gray amidst lighter gray, but when he moved toward them, they faded. Were they really mirages, or was he somehow going astray when he thought he was going right at them? At least he wasn’t going to die of thirst-all he had to do was open his mouth, and in a minute enough moisture condensed to calm his needs. He was definitely getting hungry, though, and very tired. Then the light began to go. The only thing worse than twilight in a strange place is darkness when everything has been twilight already. It did occur to him that he might have been in London on a bad day, but it didn’t seem very likely-unless the whole city had gone on vacation at the same time. Besides, they would have had streetlights, and here he couldn’t see any light at all.

So, everything considered, he was overwhelmingly relieved when one of the shadow shapes lasted long enough for him to come up to it, though it filled his whole field of view-even if it was the darkest, gloomiest, most forbidding castle he had ever set eyes on, made of black granite and dripping with rivulets of moisture. As he came up to it, the fog seemed to lift, becoming a lowering sky instead of an environment in its own right. Off to his left he saw a brackish, turgid lake that extended a pseudopod to feed the castle’s moat. Looking down, Matt saw dark water with a greenish tinge-the first color he had seen in this alien environment. Now that he thought of it, he glanced down at his own parti-colored clothing, but instead of brilliant red and blue and yellow, it all seemed to be just different shades of gray, with only a hint of hue.

Anxiety touched him-this dampness had to be bad for his lute! He had to get it indoors, preferably near a roaring fire-if this strange pocket universe had fire… He looked down at the moat again and thought he saw lumps in it. If he did, they were moving. He looked away with a shudder, thinking that he would have preferred to see teeth and glowing eyes. But the drawbridge was down, the portcullis drawn up, and never mind if its spikes did look like fangs, if the doorway itself reminded him of a hungry mouth, he took a step onto the tongue-no, that was a drawbridge-and another step, and another, until he was nearly at the doorway.

A scrabbling and a thump, and a troll popped up from beneath the drawbridge, fangs guttering in its watermelon-slice mouth. Fingers with talons of steel reached for Matt. He backed up, but heard a splashing behind him, with a thrashing and thumping as something aquatic was climbing up onto the bridge, while two more trolls climbed up behind the first one, gibbering with insane glee, and two sea serpents reared their heads up from either side of the drawbridge, mouths yawning wide as they came toward him. All he could think was that whoever owned the castle had really overdone it. The fear was remote, not even pressing-this couldn’t be real, it was just too much. “Fooood,” said the smallest troll, the one only seven feet tall. ‘Toll!“ the foremost troll demanded. ”One arm!“

‘Toll!“ the second echoed. ”One leg!“

Matt cried,

The trolls howled in surprise and anger, and the sea serpents hooted in rage-but they disappeared, fading into the mists, and whatever was behind Matt gave a honk like an eighteen-wheeler in dire distress, but it only managed two more approaching thumps before its voice seemed to dwindle like a spray of mist. Matt turned quickly, but was only in time to get a vague impression of a bloated, elongated shape with lots of teeth in its tail-as well as all the hundred or so in front-before it, too, was gone.

Matt just stood there blinking for a minute. He had expected the spell to do some good, but not this much! Maybe to knock the monsters back for a minute or two, to give him time to figure out a plan of action-or even to have sent them all running away. But to just fade? As if they’d been made out of the mist itself? Illusions. They had to have been illusions, mere illusions and nothing more. No wonder he’d felt that the lord of the castle had been overdoing it!

He strode into the castle a bit more confidently-if all he had to worry about were illusions, he was perfectly safe. On the other hand, he’d been trying to banish his own illusions for a dozen years now and hadn’t had too much success. Of course, these were somebody else’s illusions… He stepped in under the portcullis, but it didn’t crash down on him at the last second, and no giggling microcephalic giant tried to bisect him with an axe. There wasn’t even a huge and horrible black hound from Hell pouncing on him with a howl. It made him very nervous. He ran through the entrance tunnel, then, very cautiously, he stepped through the archway at the end. Still no terrors attacked him.

He looked about him and found he wasn’t in a courtyard, as he had expected, but actually inside the castle proper-the great hall, in fact. There weren’t any windows, but there were torches in sconces along the walls, sending up trails of greasy smoke-and, at the far end, a dais with a canopy. But it looked old, almost rotted; if it hadn’t been for the torches, Matt would have thought he was in an abandoned ruin. Suddenly, twinkling lights glimmered on the dais and in the center of the room. Matt braced himself as the light turned into a coruscation, clouds of sparks that pulled together and settled and became… Gorgons.

Matt didn’t turn to stone, but he almost wished he had-they had snakes for hair, and their mouths opened into grins with fangs. Lamias joined them, and harpies, and something rustled and chirruped above his head. It was almost as if he had confronted the male monsters outside and the female monsters inside-except for the half-dozen old men with yellowed beards and obscenely carved staffs, who cackled and discussed him with gloating grins, then pointed at him all together and shouted, “Destroy him!”

With a shout of delight, the lamias and the gorgons charged, and whatever it was that was chirruping swooped. Matt dodged, just in time for a huge black widow spider to swing through the space where he’d just been and slam into the charging mob of monsters. They screeched, and the giant spider emitted a shrill blast of sound that sent the gorgons’ snakes stiff and made them clap their hands to their ears. It gave Matt time enough to sort them out.

The monsters all screamed, the spider loudest of all. Matt clapped his hands over his ears as he repeated the verse again, and louder, just for good measure. The monsters blew apart in showers of sparks, showers that faded, except for all the scrawny old men. They turned to Matt, pointing at him and shouting something in that blasted archaic language that he didn’t understand. He suddenly found himself sinking; the floor had become quicksand and was sucking him down-or was that himself melting from the feet up? He looked down, decided he was melting, and sang,

The pack of wizened men flung up their arms and started chanting, but Matt beat them to the punch line.

He just hoped none of the men were having an identity crisis. Of course, they were probably all just illusions, too… All the ugly men gave a chorused single squawk of outrage that diminished rapidly as they faded, shredded, blew away.

Except for one. Matt frowned at him. “Scat! Scoot! Go on! Get away!” He underscored it with shooing motions. “Get away yourself,” rasped the survivor. ‘This is my castle!“

Matt stared. “Oh! Sorry.” He tried to recover his aplomb and not stare-but really, the little old man looked as imaginary as any of the other monsters-scrawny, yellow-eyed, his beard grungy from lack of washing…

Matt frowned and looked more closely. He wasn’t really that old, actually-more like middle-aged. He just looked old, because of the white beard, and the white hair flowing down around his shoulders-only it wasn’t yellowed from lack of washing. That was its natural color. And he wasn’t really short or little or stooped with age-his shoulders were hunched up defensively, his head pulled down to glare. Sure, he was holding his staff in both hands, but he wasn’t really leaning on it-he was ready to wave it like a magic wand, which it probably was. He had to have done all that deliberately, to look like less of a menace than he really was. Didn’t he? But those yellow eyes were huge, with the whites showing all around them, and glittering with malice. His garments were soiled and faded, but they were sumptuous, or had been once-brocade and velvet.

Matt couldn’t help thinking that they were just the right thing for the climate; the only thing that would have been even better was a raincoat. The owner jabbed a finger at him and shouted something unintelligible, and Matt suddenly felt an irresistible interior urge, one that would ordinarily have sent him on a frantic search for the garderobe, only he was sure he didn’t have time, and besides, it was all just an illusion anyway, so he called out,

The urge went away, but the yellow eyes sparked with anger, and the staff snapped out as its owner spat another indecipherable verse. Sparks glittered all over the floor and turned into cockroaches, scurrying toward Matt; he could almost hear them thinking, Yum! He wondered what they thought he was-but while he was wondering, he was chanting.

For a moment he blushed with shame-how could he be so gauche as to mention Raid around a cockroach? But if the insects had noticed, they gave no sign-only turned and ran toward the lord of the castle. The old man cursed, then spent a few minutes in an anticockroach spell of his own. Matt used the time to think up an all-purpose antidisgustant verse-but when the bugs had coruscated and effervesced into nothingness, the yellow eyes turned back to Matt with undisguised loathing and said, “I shall not be rid of you so easily, shall I?”

“I don’t think you’ll be rid of me at all,” Matt said, “except maybe by asking me nicely to leave.”

“Will you not leave?”

Matt sighed. “Well, that’s not quite what I meant by ‘nicely,’ but I guess it will have to do. Okay, I’ll walk out-but I would appreciate answers to a few questions first.”

“I give nothing to any man!” The grubby one raised his staff as if to strike and began to recite something in that confounded antiquated tongue again. Matt got his counter in fast and first.

The owner’s voice ran down into a croak and stopped. He stood poised, staff raised to strike, but unable to as his body turned grayish. “Well, now, that’s a bit better attitude!” Matt strolled up to go slowly around the man, inspecting him from every angle. “Actually, that posture isn’t really the best attitude in the world, but it could be worse.”

“You could not!” The man’s voice had an undertone of gravel. “Loose me, Wizard, or it shall be the worse for you!”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Matt said casually. “You’re a wand slinger, see, so I doubt any verse you come up with will have much effect without that stick to direct it-and what little power your spells might have, I’m sure I can counter.”

The yellow eyes gleamed with fury, and the sorcerer began to recite again. “Everything considered,” Matt said quickly, “it would be a lot easier for you just to answer a few questions for me. Then I could unfreeze you and go away.”

The sorcerer paused in mid-syllable. “Of course, if you do manage to do something lethal to me,” Matt pointed out, “I won’t be here to unfreeze you.”

“I can deal with that myself!”

“Sure. You could unfreeze somebody you had turned to stone,” Matt said, “but could you counter a spell of mine?”

The sorcerer just gave him a very black look. “Let’s start with: how did you get here?” Matt asked. “The king sent you, for openers.”

“Openers indeed! I was the first-but only the first of a dozen! And there shall be more!”

Matt nodded. “Makes sense. However, what the king didn’t explain to me, before he blasted me here, was why he didn’t just execute anybody who wouldn’t come to heel. You know, off with their heads, then burn the body just to make sure. Why not?‘

“He did that with the worst of them,” the sorcerer grated, “they who sought to overthrow him.”

“But you were no threat to him personally? You just didn’t want to stop torturing your peasants?”

“Something of the sort,” the sorcerer admitted. “I had no designs upon the throne.”

“Yes, I noticed it wasn’t terribly ornate. I thought Boncorro was tolerant, though. All you had to do was live by his laws.”

“And cease to slay priests?” the sorcerer demanded. “Cease to despoil nuns? Cease to seek to bring about the misery of every soul near me, that I might send them to Hell? What use would there be in living, then?”

“So. You were incorrigible and unreformable.” That put in a thought. “Did the king even try to reform you?”

“Oh, aye. He bade me mend my ways three times. At the last, his fool of a reeve shrank quaking from my sight, so I knew ‘twas not he who told the king how I had amused myself with the peasant lass-so I know that King Boncorro must have had other spies within my castle, perhaps even the cat I had bought to attend to his other spies.”

Matt decided he did not like this man. “He appeared in my hall with the sound of thunder and with fires gushing away from him-the showy fool! ‘What?’ I said. ‘Will you send me to a monastery?’ ‘Nay, nor even presume to tell you to renounce your pact with Satan,’ said he, ‘for your soul is your own affair, and no reform will affect your Afterlife save that which you work yourself.’ ”

Matt listened closely. This didn’t sound like the atheist the king professed to be. “Sounds like common sense.”

“The more fool he, to presume to find laws that govern the consequences of the soul’s deeds! He commanded me to forgo my pleasures, though, ‘For what you do to my subjects,’ he said, ”is my concern.‘ The conceited prat! I spat in his face. It was for that he sent me here.“

“Three strikes and you’re out of his kingdom.” Matt nodded. “In fact, out of his whole world. Interesting that he still honors the number three.”

“There is nothing mystical in that!”

“That’s what they tell me. And you just happened to find this castle sitting here?”

The sorcerer stared. Then he laughed, a nasty, mocking sound. “Why, you understand nothing of the nature of this realm, do you?”

“Oh. So you built it yourself?”

“Aye, with my own two hands,” the sorcerer said, sneering. “There is a quarry not far from here, and I am stronger than I seem.”

“Yes, that’s why I don’t want to get too close. Did you make the quarry, too?”

The sorcerer eyed him narrowly, finally beginning to realize who was mocking whom. “What a fool’s remark is that! How can one make a quarry?”

“I thought that here you could make anything-like that.” Man pointed at a wall, imagined a pickaxe, and willed it to appear. Sure enough, it did, swinging at the granite. “No!” the sorcerer cried in alarm, and a huge hand appeared, seizing the pickaxe and throwing it at Matt. Quickly, he willed it to disappear, and it faded into thin air. Then he imagined an even bigger hand holding a ruler, willed it to appear, and made it strike the sorcerer’s construct on the knuckles. “Well enough, then,” the sorcerer said with disgust. “I will banish mine if you will banish yours.”

Matt nodded. “On the count of three.”

“Nay-five!”

“Okay, five,” Matt sighed. He considered telling the man that five was a holy number in some religions, then thought better of it-apparently it didn’t matter, as long as the religion wasn’t Christianity. After all, this part of this world ran on Christian concepts, or against them. “One… two… three…”

“Four-five!” the other sorcerer counted, and Matt’s hand disappeared. The sorcerer laughed as his giant hand rushed at Matt’s head. Matt did some quick imagining, and a huge chain appeared fastened to a ring in the wall. The other end was fastened to a chain in the hand. It slammed down onto the floor and scrabbled its fingers furiously, trying to reach him. Matt’s hand appeared over it with the ruler again. “As you will,” the sorcerer sighed, and his hand disappeared. Matt nodded and banished his. The sorcerer growled, “If you know that all here is illusion, why did you ask?”

“I come from a school that likes to have its guesses confirmed,” Matt explained. “So this whole realm is a pocket universe so thoroughly saturated with magic that I can dream up anything I want?”

“Even so,” his enemy grunted. “This whole castle is the product of my imagination.”

Matt decided that this boy really needed a psychiatrist. “In this realm-between-worlds to which King Boncorro has banished us,” the sorcerer explained, “anything imagined can appear to be real.”

Matt shuddered. “The ideal place for people who want to delude themselves!”

“Oh, they need not come here,” the sorcerer said with a curl of the lip. “They who wish to find their Paradise on Earth are doing exactly that. Now that there is money enough, they are looking away from the Afterlife and toward the here and now, forgoing their families to seek only pleasure.”

Matt remembered the roisterers he’d met on the road south, and shuddered. The sorcerer gave him a toothy grin. “That pleasure is fleeting, of course-and only builds up a debt that must be paid. After summer’s plenty comes winter’s famine, and fools follow the search for pleasure into ways that lead them here-or to death and damnation. What an idiot is King Boncorro! For in seeking to make his folk happier, he has only given them the means of their own destruction!”

“He claims he doesn’t care, as long as it means more money for him.” But Matt frowned. “Are you trying to tell me that the king’s new order has actually produced more Hell-bound souls than King Maledicto’s reign?”

“Aye, for in place of the fear of old Maledicto and his devilish masters, Boncorro has given them-nothing. He does not punish the priests, but he has not brought them back, either.” The sorcerer grinned, savoring the idea. “The people have no guide in the use of their newfound prosperity, nothing by which to decide what to do and what to avoid.”

“You mean that because the people have lost any sense of religion, they can’t have faith in anything?”

The sorcerer winced. “Spare the words that burn, Wizard! You have almost the sense of it-it is not that they cannot have faith in anything, but that King Boncorro has given them nothing to have faith in! In place of the fear of Hell, he has given them no hope of anything beyond this world-so they pursue only worldly joys and pleasures. Not knowing what to do with the sudden leisure that has befallen them, they have themselves fallen prey to the temptation that comes their way.”

“You mean it’s harder for them to hold onto their faith, now that they don’t actually need it.”

“No, I mean that there is no faith for them to have! It is the king who sets the example, but he embraces no beliefs and preaches none-so his people have none, either!”

“And this pocket universe is the perfect example of what happens: when you have the chance to make your dreams come true, but no yardstick to measure which dreams are good for you and which are destructive, you get bogged down in your own neuroses.”

The sorcerer grinned wickedly. “Odd terms, but an agony of heart quite clearly stated.”

And it was, of course, what he was living day to day-unless he was one of the few who had control over his illusions, not letting his illusions control him. No wonder this was a prison fit only for sorcerers and wizards-for anyone else, it would begin as Paradise, then turn into a torture chamber of the subconscious, and finish by being a killing ground. The sorcerer’s eyes flashed. “Be sure that I can control my imaginings!”

“So the secular monarch needs to find some sort of values to replace religion.” All Matt could think of was how the Soviets had made Communism assume many of the aspects of religion. It had indeed been a secular religion, in its own way. All of a sudden he couldn’t take this conversation any more. This sorcerer was too right about what was wrong. “Think I’ll go looking and see if there’s anybody else here who really knows about mind control,” Matt said. “Thanks for the overview.” He turned and started for the gate, then remembered and whirled around, his finger stabbing out-just in time for him to think up a lightning bolt that exploded the elephant-headed giant belly dancer with carnivore’s fangs that was reaching for him with its trunk. It burst into a shower of sparks and was gone. “Don’t try it,” Matt told the sorcerer sternly, “because I’m making myself a little familiar, right now, to watch you closely and alert me if you come up with any other monstrosities for stabbing me in the back.”

The sorcerer glared at him. “You remove all the fun of this world!”

Matt suddenly realized that, to the sorcerer, he had been put there only for the man to play with-that, like all other people, his sole reason for existence had been to amuse this monster of depravity. Monster of depravity? Was that why all his creations were depraved monsters? “Just don’t try it,” he warned. “So far, I haven’t tried to hurt you. Don’t tempt me-I don’t have much resistance.”

“Oh, I think this realm will tempt you to your fullest,” the sorcerer assured him. Matt resolved, then and there, not to imagine up a single item for his own amusement or pleasure. Trouble was, he’d never been much good at keeping resolutions. But he did manage to walk out of the dank and fetid castle, his back prickling every inch of the way, expecting attack. A dragonfly from the moat zoomed past him, hit the wall, and turned into a tarantula. It scuttled up the stonework, and Matt relaxed. Just to test it, he glanced through its eyes, and saw the sorcerer making a wolf with a head on each end. Matt produced a huge saw, cut it down the middle, and made them all disappear. He walked on out, listening to the cursing behind him with great satisfaction-but he didn’t relax until he’d made it across the drawbridge and a hundred yards away. Then, with one final shudder, he loosed his binding spell, put the foul sorcerer from his mind, and set off to find out if there was anyone good in this befogged wasteland. Actually, he was ready to settle for someone just a little bit good. He wasn’t in any shape to be picky.