“Call the gold a tutor’s fee if that helps you to lessen your own guilt for waylaying one as innocent as me!” he said.
The beggar laughed and bowed low. “Indeed, young priest, you are not like those of your order who greeted me at the library’s great door, those who were more concerned with their own failings to cure me than with the consequences of my ailment.”
That is why they failed, Cadderly knew, but he did not interrupt.
“It is a fine day!” Nameless went on. “And I pray you enjoy it.” He held up the purse and shook it. His whole body shaking in a joyful dance, he smiled at the loud jingle of coins. “Perhaps I will as well. To the Nine Hells with Carrion’s stinking alleys!”
Nameless stopped his dance and stood stock-still, eyeing Cadderly with a grave expression. Slowly, he extended his right hand, seemingly conscious, for the first time, of his dirty, fingerless glove.
Cadderly understood the action as a test, a test he was glad he could so easily pass. Without a thought for superstitious consequences, the young priest accepted the handshake.
“I pass by here often,” Cadderly said quietly. “Consider my offer of healing.”
The beggar, too touched to reply aloud, only nodded. Then he turned and walked briskly away, his limp more pronounced, as though he no longer cared to hide it. Cadderly watched him for few moments then turned and continued away from Carradoon. He smiled as more squirrels scrabbled overhead, but he hardly looked up to see them.
It seemed to the young priest that the day had grown finer and less fine at the same time.
Nameless smiled as a squirrel nearly lost its balance on a small branch, catching hold and righting itself at the last moment. The beggar tried to use that simple, natural movement as a symbol of what had just transpired between him and the curious young priest, viewing himself as the branch and Cadderly as the creature righting its course. The thought made the leper feel good, valuable, for the first time in a long, long while.
He couldn’t brood on it, though, and could hardly hope to meet enough people like the curious Cadderly, who would care to see their arrogance laid out before them. No, Nameless would have to continue as he had for more than a year, struggling daily to gain enough trinkets to keep his wife and children from starving.
He had at least a temporary reprieve. He tossed the purse into the air, caught it gingerly, and smiled again. It was indeed a fine day!
Nameless turned around, prepared to pay Jhanine and the children a long overdue visit, but his smile fast became a frown.
“So sorry to startle you, good friend,” said a puny man, his drooping, thick eyelids open only enough for Nameless to make out his small, dark eyes.
Nameless instinctively moved the coin-filled pouch out of sight and kept his arms in front of him.
“I am a leper,” he growled, using his disease as a threat.
The smaller man chuckled and gave a wheezing laugh that sounded more like a cough. “You think me a thief?” he asked, holding his hands out wide. Nameless blinked at the man’s curious gloves, one white, the other black. “As you can see, I carry no weapons,” the little man assured.
“None openly,” Nameless admitted.
“I see we both wear a mixed set of gloves,” Ghost remarked. “Kindred spirits, eh?”
Nameless slipped his hands under the folds of his badly fitting clothes, embarrassed for some reason he didn’t understand. Kindred spirits? he thought. Hardly. The fine gloves the little man wore, matched or not, must have cost more than Nameless had seen in many months, the young priest’s pouch included.
“But we are,” Ghost asserted, noticing the frown.
“You’re a beggar, then?” Nameless dared to ask. “Carradoon is but a mile down the road. I was going there myself. The take is always good.”
“But the young priest changed your mind?” the stranger asked. “Do tell me about that one.”
Nameless shrugged and shook his head slightly, hardly conscious of the movement.
“Ah,” the little stranger said, his arms still wide, “you don’t know young Cadderly.”
“You do?”
“Of course,” the man replied, motioning to the pouch Nameless tried to hide. “Shouldn’t all those of our ilk know one as generous as Cadderly?”
“Then you are a beggar,” Nameless reasoned, relaxing a bit. There was an unspoken code among the people of squalor, an implied brotherhood.
“Perhaps,” the stranger answered. “I have been many things, but now I am a beggar.” He wheezed another chuckle. “Or soon I will be,” he corrected.
Nameless watched as the man unbuttoned the top of his surcoat and pulled the woolen folds aside.
“A mirror?” Nameless muttered then he said no more, transfixed by his own image in a silver mirror.
Nameless felt an intrusion. He tried to pull away, but couldn’t, held firmly by strange magic. He saw nothing except for his own image, lined in black as though he had been transported to some other place, some dark, otherworldly place. Nameless tried desperately to look around at his surroundings, tried to make sense of them, find some familiarity.
He saw only his own face.
He heard a clap then he was moving, or he felt as though he was moving, even though he knew that his physical body had not stirred in the least. There came a brief, sharp pain as his spirit left his body and floated helplessly toward the effeminate vessel that awaited it.
The pain came again.
Nameless blinked, fighting against the heavy droop of his eyelids. He saw his own image again, wearing gloves, black and white. His confusion lasted only until he realized that it was no longer a reflected image he saw, but his own body.
“What have you done to me?” the beggar cried, reaching for the stranger in his body. Every movement seemed to drag. His arms had little strength to convey his fury.
He saw himself snap his fingers and the black and white gloves disappeared, replaced by the fingerless gloves. Nameless was pushed back by the man that inhabited his body, and he realized how useful that frail body had proven to the stranger—how benign and unthreatening, the body of a man even a young boy could defeat. Nameless watched his own body offer him a resigned shrug then advance on him. He could only whimper in confusion as his own wretched, diseased hands wrapped around the skinny neck he found himself in possession of.
Nameless fought desperately, as desperately as the stranger’s puny form had surely ever battled, but there was no strength in his arms, no power to loosen the larger attacker’s hold. Soon he stopped struggling, his resignation founded in grief for those he would leave behind.
Ghost contemplated the change with amusement, thinking it curious, even humorous, that one as obviously wretched as the leprous beggar would lament the end of his life.
There was no mercy in the wicked man, though. He had killed that frail body a hundred times, perhaps, and had killed his previous body a like number, and the body he had used before that as well.
The corpse slumped to the ground, and Ghost brought back his magical device and called upon its powers to watch the beggar’s spirit step out of the slain form. Ghost quickly pulled off the fine black glove and placed it on his unoccupied body. He closed his eyes and stiffened his resolve against the ensuing pain, for the simple act had transferred a part of his own spirit back into the corpse.
It was a necessary step for two reasons. The body would heal—Ghost had a powerful magical item concealed in one boot to see to that—and if the receptacle remained open, the beggar’s spirit would find its way back in. Also, if Ghost allowed the body to die, if he allowed the item in his boot to call back a spirit, the item’s regenerative powers would partially consume the form. Considering how many times Ghost had made the switch, the item would have burned up the puny form long ago.
But that wouldn’t happen. Ghost knew how to use the items in conjunction with each other. The Ghearufu, the glove-and-mirror device, had long ago shown him the way, and he had spent three lifeti
mes perfecting the act.
Ghost looked both ways along the empty road then pulled the slender body far from the trail, into some covering brush. He felt the disease in the new form he had taken. It was an unpleasant sensation, but Ghost took heart that he would not wear the disguise for long—just long enough to meet young Cadderly for himself.
He hopped back out to the road and wandered along, wondering how much of the day he would have to watch pass him by before young Cadderly returned down the road.
After the thief in the beggar’s body had departed, Nameless’s spirit stood beside the puny corpse, confused and helpless. If Cadderly, with his new insight, had gazed upon the spirit then he would have seen the shadows of Jhanine, Toby, and Millinea scattering to the four winds, fading like the images of hope that Nameless had never dared to sustain.
SEVEN
THE MAZE
Cadderly approached the steep-sided, round hillock and the tower of Belisarius with tentative steps, fully expecting that the wizard, as knowledgeable as he was, would offer him little insight into the strange things that had been happening to him. Actually, Cadderly had no idea if the wizard would grant him an audience. He had done some valuable scribing for Belisarius on several occasions, but he couldn’t really call the man a friend. Furthermore, Cadderly wasn’t even sure Belisarius would be home.
The young scholar relaxed a bit when a wide line up the nearly seventy-degree incline magically transformed from unremarkable grass to a stone stairway with flat, even steps. The wizard was home and had apparently seen Cadderly coming.
Seventy-five steps brought Cadderly to the hillock’s flat top and the cobblestone walkway that encircled the tower. Cadderly had to walk nearly halfway around the base, for Belisarius had placed his steps far to the side of the entrance. The steps never appeared on the same spot on the hillock, and Cadderly hadn’t yet figured out if the wizard created new steps each time, had some way of rotating the grassy knoll under the stationary tower, or simply deceived visitors of the steps’ actual location. Cadderly thought the last possibility, deception, the most likely, since Belisarius used his magic primarily for elaborate illusions.
The tower’s iron-bound door swung open as Cadderly approached—or had it been open all along, only appearing to be closed? Cadderly paused as he started over the threshold when there came the sound of grating stone. An entire section of the stone wall in the foyer shifted and swung out, blocking the inner entry door and revealing a cobwebbed stairway winding down into the blackness.
Cadderly scratched the stubble on his chin, his gray eyes flashing inquisitively at the unexpected invitation. He remembered the days when he had come to the tower with Headmaster Avery. Every time, the skilled wizard presented the duo with a new test of cunning. Cadderly was glad for the diversion, glad that Belisarius had apparently come up with something new, something that might take the young man’s mind from the disturbing questions the beggar had raised.
“This is a new path, and a new trick,” Cadderly said aloud, congratulating the wizard, who no doubt listened in.
Always curious, the young scholar pulled a torch from its sconce on the foyer wall and started down. Twenty spiraling steps later, he came to a low corridor ending at a thick wooden door. Cadderly carefully studied the portal for a long moment then slowly placed his hand against it, feeling the solidity of its grain. Satisfied that it was real, he pushed it open and continued on, finding another descending stairway behind it.
The next level proved a bit more confusing. The stairway ended in a three-way intersection of similar, unremarkable stone passageways. Cadderly took a step straight ahead then changed his mind and went to the left, passing through another door after repeating his pause-and-study test, then another after that. Again he had entered an intersection, but one much more confusing than the last, since each way revealed many side passages.
Cadderly nearly laughed aloud, and silently congratulated the clever wizard. With a helpless shrug, he let his walking stick fall to the floor then followed the path determined by the unseeing gaze of the carved ram’s head. Any way seemed as good as another as the young priest moved along, left, right, right again, then straight ahead. Three more doors were left open behind him, and one passage sloped down at a noticeable angle.
“Excellent!” Cadderly exclaimed when he passed a sharp corner and found himself back where he’d started, at the bottom of the second stairway. His torch was beginning to burn low, but the curious young priest pressed ahead once more, consciously selecting different avenues than on his first time through.
The torch burned away, leaving Cadderly in utter blackness. He closed his eyes and recalled a page in The Tome of Universal Harmony. He heard a few notes of Deneir’s endless song and muttered the appropriate chant, pointing to the tip of his burned-out torch. He blinked many times and squinted against the glare as the magical light came on, much brighter than the flickering torch flame had been. When his eyes at last adjusted, he went on, turning corner after corner.
A scuffling, scraping sound made him pause. It was no rat, Cadderly knew. The animal, if it was an animal, that had made the sound was much larger.
An image of a bull came into Cadderly’s thoughts. He recalled a day as a youngster, out with Headmaster Avery, when he had passed a pasture full of cows. At least, Avery had thought they were cows. Cadderly couldn’t help but smile when he remembered the image of portly Avery huffing and puffing in full flight from an angry bull.
The scuffling came again.
Cadderly considered extinguishing his magical light, but reconsidered immediately, realizing the predicament that act would leave him in. He crept up to the next corner, took off his wide-brimmed hat, and slowly peeked around.
The thing was humanoid, but certainly not human. It towered seven feet tall, shoulders and chest wide and impossibly strong, and its head—no mask, Cadderly knew—resembled the bull in that long-ago field. Wearing only a wolf-pelt loincloth, the creature carried no weapon, though that hardly brought a sense of relief to the minimally armed young scholar.
A minotaur! Cadderly’s heart nearly failed him He was no longer so sure that his trek through the tower’s catacombs was arranged by Belisarius. It occurred to Cadderly that something pernicious might have happened to the congenial mage, that some dark force might have overcome the tower’s formidable defenses.
His thoughts were blown away, along with his breath, a moment later, as the bull-headed giant scraped one foot on the stone again and charged, slamming into Cadderly and launching him across the corridor. He cracked his shoulder blade as he smashed into the stone, and his torch flew away, though of course the magical light did not diminish.
The minotaur snorted and stormed in. Cadderly took up his walking stick defensively, wondering what in the Nine Hells the minuscule weapon could do against that awesome beast. The minotaur seemed none too concerned with it, striding right in to meet its foe.
Cadderly swung with all his might, but the skinny club broke apart as he connected on the brute’s thick-skinned chest.
The minotaur slapped him once then leaned its horned head in, smashing Cadderly against the stone. The young man freed one arm and punched the beast, to no avail. The beast pressed more forcefully and Cadderly could neither squirm nor breathe.
His estimate of how long he had to live shortened considerably when the minotaur opened its huge mouth, putting its formidable teeth in line with Cadderly’s exposed neck.
In that brief moment, the young priest recognized the fields of energy floating around him. He looked down at the floor, at his unbroken walking stick.
Cadderly jammed his free arm into the minotaur’s gaping jaws, and plunged his hand down its throat. A moment later, he retracted the hand, holding the bull-headed monster’s beating heart. The creature fell back a step, not daring to do anything at all.
“I have traveled down two stairways, which actually went up,” Cadderly announced firmly. “And through six doors, two of which were il
lusionary. That would put me in the west wing of your library, would it not, good Belisarius?”
The illusionary minotaur disappeared, but strangely, Cadderly still held the pumping heart. The scene reverted to its true form, the west wing, as Cadderly had guessed, and Belisarius, a confused, almost frightened look on his bushy-browed, bearded face, stood across the room, leaning on a bookcase.
Cadderly winked at him then opened his mouth and moved as though to take a bite of the thing in his hand.
“Oh, you!” the wizard cried. He turned away and put a hand to his mouth, trying to keep his stomach’s contents down. “Oh, do not! I beg, do not!”
Cadderly dismissed the gruesome image, willed it away, though he was not certain how he had brought it into being in the first place.
“How?” the wizard gasped, finally composed.
“My magic has … shifted recently,” Cadderly tried to explain, “grown.”
“That is no clerical magic I have ever heard of,” Belisarius insisted. “To create such perfect illusions …” Just the words made the wizard picture the heart, and he gagged yet again.
Cadderly understood something that Belisarius apparently did not. “I didn’t create the image,” the young scholar explained, as much to himself as to the wizard, “nor did I collect the magical forces necessary to create it.”
The wizard dismissed any remaining revulsion, too intrigued by what Cadderly hinted at. He moved quietly across the room toward the young priest.
“I saw the energies gathered,” Cadderly went on. “I discovered the trick for what it was and … perverted … your grand imagery.”