We moved with Joachim and the king in the center of a square formed by the rest of us, even if it meant that we sometimes jostled the people we met against the housefronts. Ascelin was as alert as I, and Hugo seemed wound up almost to the breaking point. When the chaplain stopped abruptly, we all stopped.
We had come around a corner, and one side of this street was lined not with buildings but with a fence, and a shadowy courtyard lay beyond. A bell, with the same tone as the chapel’s bell in the royal castle of home, began to sound. Its note was sweet and restful, as though the noises of the street were a thousand miles rather than just a few feet away.
Looking through the fence, we saw a group of men in dark vestments walk through the courtyard in procession, carrying candles and singing. Their expressions were rapt, and anything on our side of the fence might as well have not existed. For a moment I thought they were priests, but the shaved crowns of their heads made them unlike any priests I knew. They disappeared through an archway on the far side of the courtyard, and the bell’s ringing came to an end.
Joachim turned and started walking again. “Monks,” he said to me. “We don’t have them in the west, and I’d never seen them before. They’re somewhat like hermits, except that they live together, under the fatherly direction of a leader.”
“More like nuns?” I asked.
Before the chaplain could answer, we heard another sound, a piercing, modulated wail coming from a minaret under which we were passing.
“It’s the priests of the Prophet,” said Ascelin, “calling the faithful to afternoon prayer.”
Considering that I was supposed to be a well-educated wizard, I didn’t seem to have had any idea all trip what we would see. Maybe when we met some eastern mages I’d have a chance to show off my own knowledge out of Melecherius on Eastern Magic.
But we reached the church of Holy Wisdom without meeting any mages. There was a tiny square in front of the great doors where a peddler was selling little bottles of purportedly holy water. We pushed by him without listening to his pitch and went up the steps and inside.
From the outside, it was impossible to tell the size of the church, but from the inside it was enormous. We all stopped in amazement to look around.
Candles gleamed from golden candelabra, lighting up a forest of porphyry columns and green marble arches. The floor beneath our feet was onyx veined with gold. Windows through which the sunlight poured pierced the dome high above us. The air was thick with incense. Mosaics, made of a hundred thousand glittering tiles, illustrated Bible stories.
As we walked slowly into the church we saw the biggest mosaic of all. The saved and the damned rose in alarm from their coffins to see the sky split open above them. I approved of the artist’s rendering of the scene. Christ in majesty, thirty feet high, dressed in brilliant blue and rimmed in gold, greeted us and them with a raised hand.
There were a large number of other people in the church, pilgrims, men who appeared to be priests even though their vestments were purple instead of black, women who seemed to have stopped in for a quick prayer on their way home from the market, and even some of the tall, turbaned men we had noticed earlier. But the size of the church swallowed us all up without even seeming to notice.
As we reached the main altar and Joachim went to his knees, I thought I saw a flicker of motion behind us, as though one of the other people in the church did not want us to see him.
I probed quickly with magic. Someone was there, all right. I rose two inches above the floor to be able to move silently and darted around the base of a column. A black-haired boy squatted there, looking around the far side. He turned and saw me just too late.
I had him by the back of the shirt as he jumped up to run. “I’m a mage,” I said. “I don’t want to hurt you, but if you try to get away you’re going to become a frog.”
He was apparently willing to believe me, for he went limp. I pulled him from behind the column and to the others without letting down my guard.
“Good work, Wizard,” said Ascelin. “Is this the person who’s been following us?”
“I think so. He doesn’t seem armed.”
“It’s a boy,” said the king. “Surely he can’t mean us any harm.”
“What did you mean, boy?” asked Ascelin.
He ducked his head, but he did not strike me as at all afraid of us, which I certainly would have been under the circumstances. His black eyes flashed and he gave me a grin before answering Ascelin.
“In the name of God, the all-merciful,” he said, “I wish you peace. I only want to help you. Perhaps you need a guide through the city streets? Perhaps you need to hire someone to take you where you’re going? Perhaps you’d be willing to pay someone to take you safely to the Thieves’ Market?”
Ascelin and King Haimeric looked at each other. “It’s certainly not shown on the city map,” said the king.
“I trust this boy explicitly,” said Ascelin pointedly. “How does he know what we might be looking for?”
“Many pilgrims who come to Xantium are looking for more than the route to the Holy Land,” said the boy.
“What’s your name?” asked the king.
“Maffi, revered lord,” said the boy, giving me another grin. At this rate I really would have to turn him into a frog just to prove that I was a wizard.
“If we hired you as our guide,” said the king, bending down to the boy’s level and ignoring Ascelin’s warning glare, “we’d have to wait until you’d taken us where we were going before we paid you. With the streets so crowded, you do realize that we’d worry you’d just dart away with our money and leave us stranded.”
“Of course, revered lord,” said Maffi. “And I’m so sure you’ll be pleased with me as a guide that I’ll be happy to take whatever you want to pay me, once we get there.”
“That’s settled, then,” said the king. “Shall we go?”
“As soon as we finish giving thanks for our safe voyage,” said Joachim.
Maffi, in spite of starting his conversation with us by praising God, remained standing while the rest of us obediently knelt in front of the altar. I looked at him sideways and wondered if he followed the Prophet rather than being a Christian. I had never known any of the People of the Prophet before.
II
Back out in the streets Maffi took the lead, slipping easily through the crowds while we tried to keep up with him.
“Do you think that wizard in the eastern kingdoms, the one who wanted to betray my father, has telephoned here?” Dominic asked me in a low voice. He seemed to have picked up Ascelin’s suspicions.
“He didn’t have a telephone,” I said. “And even if he had access to one, I don’t think there are any telephones in Xantium. It’s school magic, and school-trained wizards tend to stay in the western kingdoms.”
“But a renegade wizard might have installed one,” said Dominic darkly.
Ascelin kept track on the map as well as he could of where we were. Maffi led us first to an enormous plaza where an open-air market was being held, voices and odors rising from booths jammed close together. But this did not seem to be the market to which we were going, for he only cut through one corner and again hurried down narrow streets. He next led us through what seemed to be the city’s main governmental center. We had to step back abruptly as a curtained palanquin came straight toward us. Burly slaves carried the poles on their shoulders, and peacock feathers fluttered from the corners. The edge of the curtain lifted as the palanquin came even with us, but it dropped back into place before we could see the face within.
Here the streets temporarily grew broad, and there were even open, sunny squares with fountains playing in the center. For a moment we caught a glimpse of a white, domed palace. But then we plunged back into narrow streets and started downhill. As near as I could tell, we were on the far side of the main city hill from the harbor.