The Ninth Talisman (29 page)

“Sea breezes can do that,” Snatcher remarked.

Boss shook her head. “This wasn't an ordinary sea breeze. This was a whirlwind. I tried to take shelter under some trees overhanging the road, hoping they wouldn't mind, but then a man fell out of the sky and landed in a heap in front of me.”

“A wizard,” Seer said.

“Of course,” Boss replied. “A wizard. One I hadn't met before, an old man. He lay there on the road, and I could hear him breathing, deep rattling breaths, but he didn't say anything, didn't move.

“I was cautious, but I approached him and knelt beside him and said, ‘Are you all right?'

“He just moaned.

“I took his shoulder and tried to roll him over, but he was heavier than he looked, the way old men sometimes are, but he pushed himself up so I could see his face, and there was blood smeared in his beard and across the bottom of his nose, and one eye was blackened.

“ ‘I think my leg may be broken,' he said, and I looked, pulling up the hem of the blue robe he wore, and there was a bruise on one leg from knee to ankle, starting to turn purple, but I didn't see any swelling or dislocation. ‘I think it's all right,' I told him. ‘It doesn't
look
broken.' “

“Can you really tell from just a look?” Bow asked.

“Usually,” said the Seer. “Go on, Boss.”

“Well, anyway, we got him straightened out and sitting up, and discussed his leg, and I said, ‘You're lucky I was here,' and he said, ‘It wasn't luck. I was looking for you.'

“I didn't like the sound of that, and said, ‘What do you mean?'

“ ‘You're the Leader of the Chosen, aren't you?' he asked, and I admitted I was.

“ ‘Then I was looking for you,' he said. ‘The Wizard Lord has gone mad and started killing innocent wizards!'

“ ‘How do you know they were innocent?' I asked.

“ ‘Because he tried to kill
me!'
the old man said. ‘And while the Blue Lady might have done something, and Kazram could have gone rogue, I know
I
had done nothing at all but go about my own business as I always have.' ”

“He could have been lying,” Sword said.

“Of course he could,” Boss agreed. “Though it was a little hard to think of this old man with a bruised leg as some dire scheming monster.”

“But . . .”

“Did I say I believed him?”

“Uh . . . no.”

“In fact, I reserved judgment, and asked him to explain himself. Which he eventually did.

“As the old man told it, he had been minding his own business in his home in the southern hills when a group of about twenty men in red-and-black uniforms, with
ara
plumes on their sleeves and helmets, came marching up to his house. Their leader pounded on the door, demanding to speak with him, and when he answered he found this man there while four others stood behind him with swords drawn, five more behind them with spears raised, and the other ten farther back with bows ready and arrows nocked, spaced out so that a single air elemental could not reach them all before they loosed.

“He asked what this was about, and the man who had knocked on his door announced that they had come on the Wizard Lord's orders to inquire after certain forbidden objects. He asked the wizard to step outside to discuss the matter.

“The old man claims he had no idea what they were talking about,
but he didn't like the look of all those weapons, so instead he dove back inside and slammed the door.

“The spokesman tried to coax him out, but he refused, whereupon the men set fire to his house. He extinguished the fire, since he commanded several fire
ler,
but he decided not to stay around and argue; instead he climbed out an upstairs window and flew away.

“The archers shot at him as he fled, but his aerial
ler
were able to deflect all the arrows—though only with great difficulty, since they were all fletched with
ara
feathers.”

“Can you
do
that?” the Archer asked, with sudden intense interest.

“So he said,” Boss replied. “I don't really know.”

“They aren't as stiff as flight feathers,” Bow muttered, “since
ara
don't fly, but maybe . . . ”

“Go on,” Sword said, cutting Bow off. “Then what? He flew to find you?”

“Oh, no,” Boss said. “He flew to find one of his friends and fellow wizards, someone named Kazram of the Bog. And he found him, all right—or at least his head, stuck on a pole in front of the burned-out ruins of his mansion. The rest of him wasn't anywhere to be seen.”

“Charming,” Snatcher muttered.

“He asked a nearby farmer what had happened to Kazram, and the man told him that a group of the Wizard Lord's soldiers had come and killed him because the wizard had been stealing from the local priests. ‘
Was
he stealing?' the old man asked, and the farmer shrugged and said, ‘I suppose he must have been.' He didn't seem at all upset that his neighbor had been killed.”

“In my experience, wizards aren't very neighborly,” Bow remarked.

“Nobody likes wizards,” Sword agreed, remembering his experience with Young Priestess four years earlier.

“Go on,” Beauty said waving for Boss to continue.

“So he flew on,” Boss said, “and found out that three others were also dead—one he called the Blue Lady, one he called the Cormorant, and one he called Brownleg. The Blue Lady had been hanged—I was somewhat surprised that a wizard can be killed by something as simple as hanging, but he assured me that it was possible for those whose magic does not include any sort of flight, nor anything that might sever
the rope. Or in some cases, those whose talismans had been removed or destroyed might be unable to use any magical defenses. Brownleg and the Cormorant had been beheaded and staked, like Kazram, though in Brownleg's case there was apparently a fire involved somewhere as well, and the head on display was little more than a scorched skull.”

“Was he absolutely sure it was the wizard's, then?” Sword asked.

“He seemed certain of it, and I didn't argue,” Boss replied.

“So then he came looking for you?”

“Not exactly; he found four dead wizards, but he also found two live ones—he didn't tell me which. And they didn't believe him when he said the Wizard Lord was murdering wizards for no good reason. ‘They must have done something,' they said. ‘Perhaps they were plotting together, the four of them.' “

“Perhaps they were,” Bow said.

“The old man didn't think so, and he insisted that
he
certainly hadn't been plotting anything, and the soldiers had come for
him.
‘Well, perhaps you were a mistake,' the other wizards said. ‘And here you are, safe and sound.' They wouldn't listen when he tried to convince them something was wrong. Neither would any of the ordinary people he spoke to, the neighbors of the dead wizards; they all seemed to think that if the Wizard Lord said those four were rogues, why, then, those four were rogues, and killing them had simply been the Wizard Lord doing his job.”

“But the Wizard Lord didn't kill them,” the Seer said softly. “He didn't. I would have felt it.”

“His men did, the wizard told me. His soldiers in red and black. No one claimed the Wizard Lord himself did it.”

“But even then, I should have felt something when he gave the orders,” the Seer said.

“Really?” Sword asked. “Does it work like that?”

“I
think
so,” the Seer said, uncertainly.

“Even if he gave those orders last year in his Summer Palace atop the Eastern Cliffs?” Boss asked.

“. . . oh,” the Seer said quietly. “No. I wouldn't sense anything then.”

“But why would they
obey
him, if he didn't have his persuasive magic?” Bow asked.

“Because he's the Wizard Lord,” Sword said. “That's all he needs; no magic is necessary.”

“Sword's right about that,” Boss said, and Sword thought he heard a trace of bitterness in her tone. “People are generally quite happy to do what they're told, magic or no.”

“Willing, anyway,” the Seer said.
Her
bitterness was undisguised. “I don't know about happy.”

“At any rate,” Boss continued, “the soldiers had reportedly all said the Wizard Lord sent them, and they had marched openly out to the various wizards' lairs, they made no effort to keep their actions secret. The possibility that the Wizard Lord had
not
sent them certainly occurred to me, but it also seemed perfectly reasonable that he had indeed decided to kill several wizards, for one reason or another. And the old man had done the appropriate thing by coming to me, as the Leader of the Chosen, and asking me to investigate.

“So instead of going to Blackport I began to gather the Chosen, and to investigate what I could along the way, and here we are.”

“What happened to the old wizard?” Sword asked.

“I don't know for certain,” Boss said. “He flew away. He said he was going to the Western Isles, and would find a ship and flee Barokan until he received word that the Lord of Winterhome was gone.”

“Sensible,” Snatcher said.

“Not very brave,” Bow said.

“No one ever said wizards have to be brave,” Sword replied.

“What puzzles me, if this story is true,” Beauty said, “is that none of the dead wizards' neighbors said a word to protest their deaths. Didn't any of them have any friends to speak for them?”

“Probably not,” Snatcher said. “Wizards aren't generally the most pleasant people.”

“Nobody likes wizards,” Sword repeated. “And those people all love the Wizard Lord. He's brought Barokan together, made everyone wealthy with his roads and bridges, found work for all the bored young men who might have made trouble otherwise, removed dozens of annoying
little problems like the Mad Oak. Who wants to argue with him, on behalf of some scruffy old wizard living in the wilderness?”

“Especially since wizards have a tendency to get their living through theft, threats, or blackmail,” Boss said. “Most of them don't earn their way with their magic like priests, they just take what they want. Oh, they're not as bad as the ones in the old stories, they don't openly rape and plunder anymore, but they don't exactly win anyone's love or gratitude, either.”

“But they must have had
family,”
Beauty insisted.

“I suppose that's so,” Boss said. “For all we know, their brothers and sisters
did
object—but what could they do, once the wizards were dead?”

“They could have asked the Chosen to avenge the dead,” Bow suggested. “Isn't that what we're for?”

“But everyone loves the Wizard Lord,” Sword reiterated. “They don't
want
us to kill him, even if he
is
murdering wizards.”

“Killing him won't make the roads go away,” Boss pointed out. “They're there to stay, and now we all know how to build them.”

“They probably
believe
him when he says the wizards were plotting against him,” Snatcher said.

“They might even be right,” Bow said.

“They might be,” Boss said. “I don't know what really happened. I talked to people all the way here, but no one knew anything about any wizards, alive or dead. I don't know for certain that these wizards are really dead. If they are, I don't know who killed them. If the Wizard Lord's soldiers did kill them, I don't know whether the Wizard Lord ordered it or not. And if he
did
order it, I don't know whether he had a good reason.”

Sword shifted uncomfortably, debating with himself as to whether he should speak up. He had a theory as to why the Wizard Lord might have killed innocent wizards, but he had no real evidence for it.

And he had already told the Leader that the Wizard Lord was trying to eliminate magic; she must surely have made the same guess he had, that Artil wasn't just passively waiting for magic to fade away or die out on its own.

“That's why I've gathered us here,” Boss continued. “To find out
what
did
happen, and why. Sword, you said the weather is running wild because the Wizard Lord deliberately let it go when he went up to his summer home.”

“Well, he . . . Yes.”

“Did he say anything about killing wizards? Anything that might possibly be related?”

“Uh . . . ” Sword thought back, trying to remember everything he and Artil had discussed during those conversations over a year before. “I don't
think
so,” he said. “Except that he thought Barokan didn't need magic anymore.”

“But you only spoke with him off and on for four or five days.”

“Over a year ago. Yes.”

Boss nodded. “Well, then, all of you—have any of you seen any wizards in the past year, alive or dead? Spoken with them?”

The others exchanged wary glances, but heads shook and voices murmured, “No.”

“But I never see any anyway,” Beauty said.

“Few and furtive are the wary wizards,” Babble said. “I don't. . . yes, yes, I don't see . . . ” She didn't finish the sentence, but instead stared at the chimney piece with a baffled listening expression.

“I don't think
any
of us see wizards very often,” Sword agreed. “Except for the Wizard Lord, I haven't seen a wizard in four or five years. After all, there are only about a dozen and a half left in all of Barokan.”

The Seer looked at him, startled, at that. “That few?”

“Fewer, now, if the story Boss heard is true,” Snatcher said.

“Azir, you can't sense wizards the way you sense the Chosen and the Wizard Lord?” Boss asked.

“Not unless they're either nearby, or looking for me,” the Seer replied.