A Wizard In The Way Read online

  A Wizard In The Way

  The Eighth Chronicle of

  Magnus D'Armand, Rogue Wizard

  By Christopher Stasheff

  ISBN: 0-812-54168-5

  1

  Someone hammered on the back door of the hut. Mira turned from the cookpot over the hearth and opened it, instantly worried-who was ill now?

  Little Obol stood there, panting, eight years old, eyes wide with alarm. "Run, Mira! There are soldiers coming toward your house, and one has a parchment in his fist!"

  Mira's heart lurched; dread weighted all her limbs. It had come at last. She gave the boy a sad smile. "There's no sense in running, Obol. If the magician wants one of his people, we've no choice but to go to him."

  "You can flee!"

  "Yes, to have his dogs sniff me out and his soldiers drag me back to him. No, I think I'd rather go with my head high and my clothes clean. But thank you, lad. Run along home, nowwe don't want them to know you've been telling tales."

  She bent and kissed his cheek. Obol blushed; he may have been only eight, but Mira was very pretty.

  Too pretty for her own good, Mira thought with a sigh as she closed the door. By the time she was thirteen, it was clear that the pretty child was going to become a beautiful womanbut her parents had warned her that Magician Lord Roketh would command her to his bed if she were beautiful, and Mira suddenly understood why the prettiest girls in the village wept as they went to the castle with the soldiers. She had thought it would be a fine life, living in the lord's keep to cook or clean instead of doing the same work in a peasant but all her life. Now, though, she understood why, when the girls came back to the village to buy food or cloth for their master, they seemed either timorous and fragile or hard and brazen. She vowed it would never happen to her and took pains to hide her beauty, tying her hair back in a severe bun and staying out in the sun so that her face would become tanned. She practiced looking spiritless and glum, only letting her natural cheerfulness bubble up at home.

  It had worked well for years, but as she turned eighteen, even the dimmest eye could see how exquisite she had become, and her magician lord Roketh was anything but blind.

  As were his soldiers. A fist pounded at the door. Quickly, Mira twisted her hair into a bun, secured it with a bone pin, then hurried to open the door, squinting against the sun. She didn't need to, but anything that made her look less attractive would help.

  Four of Roketh's guards stood outside, grim in their leather and iron. "Mira, daughter of Howell?" their leader asked. "I-I am she." Mira tried to make her voice sound gravelly. "You are summoned to Lord Roketh, maiden. You will present yourself at the castle tomorrow in your best skirt and blouse."

  "Yes ... yes, sir."

  "We shall come to accompany you, maiden. Be ready." With no more ceremony than that, the guard turned, barked a command to his fellows, and led them away.

  Mira closed the door, trembling inside. She might be a maiden when she went to the castle, but only for a day. She wondered how unpleasant that taking would be, then remembered Roketh's seamed old face, his glittering eye, the touch of cruelty in his smile as he rode through the village, and shuddered at the thought. She went to a curtain, lifted a corner, peered up at the castle that brooded over the town, and shuddered again. The gray stone pile was a fearsome place of sudden gouts of fire and crackling thunderbolts. Worse, Roketh himself was ugly and malicious, using his knowledge of healing to bribe and threaten, using his other magical powers to intimidate.

  Mira remembered the neighbor who had not been able to pay his taxes one year because the labor Roketh demanded on his fields had left the family with no time to cultivate their own garden. The thatch of their cottage had burst into flame in the middle of the night. They had all come running out-they were all alive-but they'd had to watch everything they owned burn to the ground.

  Then there was old Ethel, who had sworn a curse against Roketh when he had taken her daughter. Ethel's cow had gone dry the next day. Her pig had sickened and died, and her hens had lost their feathers and ceased laying. The next year, of course, she had not been able to pay her taxes, either.

  Those she had known of her own witness, but there were many other tales: a man who had refused to go out to Roketh's fields because his wife was sick abed and their child too small to be left alone had seen his own garden wilt and die. Another had refused to let his daughter answer Roketh's summons and had died of a strange and disfiguring ailment. Soldiers who displeased Roketh were likely to have their own weapons turn upon them. None in her village had ever been'rousted from their pallets in the middle of the night by terrifying, groaning, sharpfanged ghosts, but she had heard of many who had, if their masters were ghost leaders.

  Mira knew her beauty would not last long if she dared defy Roketh. On the other hand, she had seen what a night spent with him had done to the other maidens who had been ordered to his bed, and when he finally sent them home, grown too old to interest him, they were drained of all enthusiasm, turned into dull-eyed, spiritless drudges. Any questions about what the magician had done to them evoked only cries of terror and floods of tears. Rumor said they woke screaming from nightmares.

  What could Mira do? On the one hand, she was terrified at the thought of the ordeal the other maidens must have endured. On the other hand, she didn't want her parents or family to have to suffer hauntings, night terrors, or madness from having tried to protect her.

  There was one other choice. She would probably be captured and brought back in shame, but she had to risk it. The soldiers would not come until the next day, so that night, Mira slipped out the door and stole into the woods with a pack of travel rations.

  The forest was gloomy and filled with terrifying sounds, but she dared not hide and wait for dawn-she must be as far away as possible before Roketh could learn she was missing and send his soldiers searching for her. She could not have fled during the day, of course, or the soldiers would have been on her trail immediately-but oh, the night was terrifying! Thoughts of wolves and bears made her steps drag and the occasional moan that might have come from a ghost sped her heels amazingly. Thus, now running, now creeping, Mira made her way through the lightless forest with her heart in her throat and a prayer on her lips.

  The peasant paused to lean on his short handled hoe, gazing off into the distance, his stare so vacant it was hard to believe he was seeing anything. His legs were wrapped in rough cloth cross-gartered to hold it in place; his shoes were wooden. The man's only other garment was a tunic of coarse cloth. His mouth lolled open, his forehead was low, his hair a black thatch.

  Then a better-dressed man with boots and a sheepskin jacket, bearing a cudgel, came by and barked at the peasant. With a sigh, the man lowered his gaze again and set himself once more to chopping weeds.

  Alea couldn't hear his voice, of course-the picture had been taken from orbit, and though light may travel twenty thousand miles, sound waves have more limited range. She turned to Gar--well, Magnus, really, but she would always think of him as Gar--and said, "Bad enough, but I've seen worse. In fact, I've lived through worse."

  "So have I," Gar agreed. "This planet can wait. You must have more extreme cases on file, Herkimer."

  "Of course, Magnus," the ship's computer answered. "How extreme would you wish?"

  "The worst first."

  "The worst is thirty light-years distant, Magnus, and there are two lesser cases on the way."

  "If they're lesser," Alea said, "they don't need us."

  "Let's look anyway," Magnus said. "If the worst is dreadful, the lesser cases may be horrid. We might not be able to bring ourselves to pass them by."

  "Oh, all right," Alea said with a martyred sigh. "Which hard case is closest?"
<
br />   They sat in the sybaritic lounge of Magnus's spaceship Herkimer, computer and ship being so tightly interlocked that it would be impossible to tell the difference. They sat on deeply cushioned chairs that molded themselves to the contours of their bodies as they shifted positions. Between them was a slab of jade on legs of porphyry, and if the substances weren't strictly natural, only an electron microscope could tell. Around them stretched deep-piled carpet of a dark red. The walls were lost in shadow except for pictures lighted by camouflaged lamps, as were their two chairs. All the rest was hidden in scented gloom. Mozart played softly from hidden speakers.

  Alea twisted, feeling guilty at such luxury when people dwelt in the squalor pictured before them in midair, seeming as real as though the people and landscapes were actually before them in the room.

  "These are the people of Beta Taurus Four," Herkimer told them.

  Alea found herself staring at a circle of men and women wearing only loincloths and halters, bent low over the spokes of a turnstile that turned a mill wheel. An overseer in a leather jerkin and high boots stood watching, whip in hand. Behind him, oxen wandered, grazing.

  "There are far more people than cattle on this planet," Herkimer told them, "so the men and women labor while the oxen grow fat to provide tender meat for the lords' banquets. There are fifteen hundred rulers and a million serfs, with twelve thousand overseers and supervisors to keep them healthy enough to work and drive them to exhaustion."

  Alea shuddered. "Worse than the last by far." She turned to Magnus. "Where did Herkimer find this information?"

  "My father's robot downloaded it into him." Magnus tried not to think about the details of family and self that Fess had downloaded with it. "My father is an agent for SCENT, the Society for the Conversion of Extraterrestrial Nascent Totalitarianisms. After Terra managed to throw off PEST, the Proletarian Eclectic State of Terra, the reactionary government that cut off the frontier planets, SCENT surveyed those colony worlds to see how they had fared during their centuries of isolation. They smuggled in agents who traveled wherever they could, taking pictures with hidden cameras. When their ships picked them up and brought them back to SCENT headquarters, they filed these pictures along with reports of what they had seen." He shrugged. "PEST lost quite a few records of which planets had been colonized, and later explorers have happened upon some of them." He didn't mention that his own home world had been one.

  "So there may still be a great number left out there?" Magnus nodded. "To be truthful, no one knows how many. During the last century of colonization, a host of disaffected groups scraped together enough money to buy and equip their own colony ships and went plunging off into the galaxy to try to find habitable planets. Some sent back reports, some didn't. SCENT assumes a large proportion of those last have died out."

  "But some of them survived?"

  "Survived, and don't want to be found-or at least, their founders didn't. Some of the groups who set out from Terra to found their own ideas of an ideal society were careful not to let anyone know where they were going. Others meant to but were rather careless. We don't know which colonies survived and which didn't."

  Alea shuddered. "But we can't do anything about them, can we?"

  "Not unless we happen upon one accidentally, no."

  "And we have no idea what they're like?"

  "Well, we know they haven't developed interstellar travel, or we would have heard from them," Magnus said. "Other than that, we only know that some of the ones we've found have developed very bizarre cultures."

  Alea thought about what "bizarre" could mean and hid another shudder. The dread made her a bit more acerbic. "If you people in SCENT know-"

  "Not me," Magnus said quickly, eyes on the scene before him. "I resigned."

  Alea frowned; it was the first he had mentioned of ever having belonged to his father's organization. She needed to follow that up, find out why he had joined and, even more, why he had quit-but she could see from his face that the time wasn't right. Instead, she went on. "All right, those people in SCENT. If they know lords are oppressing serfs on so many worlds, why don't they do something about it?"

  "Because there are so many worlds," Magnus explained. "There are simply too many of them for SCENT to deal with all at once. After all, they have limited personnel, becoming more limited all the time as the old rebels who first staffed it die off or retire."

  "So who's going to take care of the colonies they haven't reached yet?" Alea demanded.

  "We will." Magnus flashed her a grin. Alea stared. Then, slowly, she smiled back.

  "Alert!" the computer's voice said. "I have just received a television signal."

  "Television?" Magnus turned back toward the display area, tense as a leashed hound. "In H-space?"

  "I can detect it, but I cannot receive it," Herkimer said. "Shall I drop into normal space and read it?"

  "Please do so!"

  Alea didn't understand the terms yet, but she wholeheartedly agreed with the sentiment There was no feeling of a change in motion-the ship's internal gravity saw to that but suddenly a woman and two men stood before them dressed in garish clothing. Behind them was an array of flashing lights and screens with abstract patterns. The woman had tears in her eyes and was trying to push her way between the men, who glared at each other as though ready to spring into a fight to the death. The colors kept blurring and bleaching, though, and the whole picture kept breaking into a sea of colored dots that lost their hues, then regained them, managing to pull together into the image again.

  "The signal is very faint," Herkimer said. "I shall have to digitize and process it to make it consistent."

  "Do so, please," Magnus said. "What is its source?"

  "Extrapolating vector," Herkimer said, then a few seconds later, "There is no recorded planet in that vicinity."

  "No recorded planet?" Gar turned to meet Alea's eyes, and the same thought rang in both minds: Lost colony!

  Arnogle waited until the last glimmer of dusk had faded from the meadow, then came forth from the forest and stretched his arms upward, palms out. The tall cone of his hat pointed backward; his white beard and blue robe ruffled in the breeze, making the golden symbols embroidered there dance and ripple. Arnogle had told Blaize again and again that stretching the arms wasn't necessary to call ghosts but did help a man direct his thoughts toward them. It was only a trick, a technique, but Arnogle needed every bit of skill he could muster.

  Only one or two ghosts came in answer to his summons, rising from the long grass of the meadow like mist, and scarcely stronger than that vapor--rather sorry specimens of their kind, too minor even to groan. Given enough time, of course, Amogle could, with great effort and skill, call up a dozen or so middling powerful specters, but such summoning wasn't Arnogle's strength. That was why he had tracked down the teenaged boy who was making his village a virtual ghost town. Arnogle had sent one of his own peasants to trade with the villagers, making sure to mention what a kind lord his master was and how willing to teach his art Sure enough, Blaize had found a way to escape from his lord and flee to Arnogle, who had generously enlisted him as apprentice, thereby winning the eternal gratitude of both the boy, who escaped his neighbors' wrath and censure, and of the villagers, who breathed a massive sigh of relief at being rid of all the specters Blaize attracted. Arnogle had taught Blaize quickly enough how to control his ability to call the ghosts.

  He used it now, surreptitiously adding his own calling to Arnogle's-and sure enough, it wasn't necessary to spread his arms. The ghosts rose from the trees at the edges of the meadow, boiled forth from the stream, even materialized from the air itself. Scores of them flocked toward Arnogle with long, drawn-out moans.

  "Thank you, boy," Arnogle called, then bent to the silent task of cajoling the spirits, mind to mind, into helping him fight his enemy Pilochin.

  Blaize watched in admiration. He could scarcely talk to the ghosts he summoned-that he could do so at all was a testament to Arnogle's teaching. Given a f
ew more years of work under the master's expert guidance, he would probably be able to bargain with the ghosts well enough to achieve his ends, for Arnogle was as skilled a teacher as he was a ghost leader.

  If he survived! There, at the far side of the meadow, Pilochin came forth with a dozen men-at-arms and five apprentices, bearing the tank, hose, and nozzle of his magic. For a moment, Blaize entertained his old skeptical doubt that fire-casting was actually magical at all, but only a very clever use of devices and potions; its secrets were certainly well guarded. But he shoved the thought away-mechanics or magic, it could certainly slay himself and Arnogle this night, and every one of Arnogle's dozen guards to boot. Besides, Blaize couldn't deny that Pilochin knew all the minor spells for love philters, drying up cows' udders, disease curses, and all the other day-to-day magics that were necessary for any magician to keep his peasants in orderand bent to his will.

  Blaize understood that the peasants were going to have a master, no matter what, and if it weren't a kind and just master, it would be a tyrant-so he had determined to become a magician in order to oust the despot who ruled his home village and made his parents' lives miserable. Then Blaize would become lord himself-and would be a kind master.

  Tonight, though, he might be without a master himself. He knew that ghost-leaders didn't usually fare too well against firehurlers. When all was said and done, specters might be frightening, but fire was lethal.

  Arnogle must have finished, for the ghosts turned, howling like furies, and sped off toward Pilochin's men. The apprentices around the tank held their ground until the wraiths were almost upon them. Then one or two stepped back, then another-then all five were running pell-mell away, leaving Pilochin to saw the air with his arms, shouting in a rage at the ghosts, as though any of his spells could have stopped them. No, past him they went, chasing his men. Pilochin turned to glare at his rival, but Arnogle gave a shout of triumph. "Upon him, my men! Bring him home bound and trussed!"