“Kaz-alrhun does not have it any more,” said Maffi cryptically and gave another grin. “How about some food? When I realized Kaz-alrhun wasn’t going to take the loss of his ring with his usual good humor, I had to come to your inn so quickly I didn’t have time for dinner-or for breakfast!”
Dominic gave him bread and dried fruit. “Does King Warin have the ebony horse?” Ascelin demanded again.
“I already told you he did,” said Maffi ingenuously.
I hoped briefly but improbably that Kaz-alrhun had not told Warin the secret of the different pins and that the king had been unable to work it out for himself. Instead I tried to concentrate on the question of how King Warin had learned there was a flying horse for sale, and that the price was a magic ring from Yurt-or, at least, a ring carved with the kingdom’s name. The onyx ring was heavy in my hand.
“I think I understand,” said Dominic suddenly. “Arnulf had somehow heard about my ruby snake ring, and because he knew he had no way of getting it, he had this ring made by a goldsmith and hoped to pass it off to the mage instead of mine.”
“But the onyx ring can’t have the same magic properties yours does,” objected Hugo.
“Perhaps you all are right,” the chaplain said slowly, “and my brother did send that ring with me, by way of his wife, because he was ashamed to tell me openly what he wanted. I shall forgive him the deception, but I now find myself less eager to stop and visit him again on the journey home.”
“Wait,” said Ascelin, flicking his eyes sideways toward Maffi, who was peacefully finishing off his dried fruit. “Are you sure we should be discussing this, when …”
But Dominic shrugged. “It doesn’t matter what the boy hears or what he guesses, because he’s going with us. He won’t dare go back to Xantium after his latest theft, and we need to keep him under our eyes ourselves.”
Ascelin immediately objected, but I did not listen. I was rather thinking about the chaplain’s brother Arnulf.
Someone-the mage, King Warin, perhaps Arnulf himself-had started the search for a magic ring from Yurt by looking among the disordered bones in Dominic’s father’s tomb. But when it became clear that the real magic-imbued ring was not readily available, Arnulf had had the nearest wizard cast the spells for a substitute magic ring.
He and his family had never kept a wizard. Therefore, when Arnulf heard that an ebony flying horse was for sale, one that would allow him to fly to wherever the Black Pearl was concealed and get away again, and that the price was a magic ring, he had had to go in search of a wizard-perhaps the same wizard he had already hired a decade earlier to install his magical telephone system.
The wizard he found was the royal wizard of a kingdom not very far away, a kingdom located in the foothills of the eastern mountains. Arnulf had had the onyx ring made for him by Elerius.
I stared at the ring in my hand, not liking this at all. There was nothing unusual in a royal wizard performing such a task for someone without a wizard in his service, as long as it did not interfere with his own responsibilities. It had been a piece of luck for Arnulf that the nearest wizard just happened to be the one who was probably the finest graduate the school had ever produced. Arnulf must have offered him something quite extraordinary in return. I wondered uneasily what.
And Elerius would certainly have told his master, King Warin, what he had done. At the time, the king might not have found it significant. By the time he realized he wanted a magic ring himself, Elerius had moved on. So Warin had waited, knowing that sooner or later the onyx ring would make its way toward the east. He had, I remembered, written to King Haimeric about the blue rose and urged the king to stop and visit him on his trip. He had known there was something special about Yurt, and that it had something to do with the ring Arnulf had requested from his wizard. It must have seemed an answer to a prayer when we stopped by directly from Arnulf’s house.
Or perhaps not a prayer, I said to myself, remembering Evrard’s veiled warning that he had seen the king engaged in the black arts, but something much more ominous.
I mentally shook off this thought. Elerius had taken the same oaths to help mankind as did all wizards, and the best pupil the school had ever had was not going to dabble with demons or assist his master in crime. After all, I reminded myself, he had been off to a new post many kingdoms away by the time Warin set his bandits on us. I did not feel as reassured by this as I would have liked.
Ascelin stood up, breaking my train of thought. “Then if the boy’s coming with us, we’d better start on our way again.”
“First,” said Dominic, “I want to show you something I found, just a little way down the road.”
We followed him for a half mile, then he pulled up his stallion and pointed. Cut deeply into the stone by the side of the road was a sign, that could have been an X and could have been a cross.
“This then must be where my brother’s caravan disappeared!” said Joachim.
“And look at this,” said Dominic, pointing. Cut below the cross, rather shakily, was something much smaller, that might have been the letter Y. “Is this for Yurt?”
Ascelin stood with his hands on his hips, looking back toward Xantium. “Whatever it is, we’d better move on quickly. Kaz-alrhun will soon guess what happened to his ring if he doesn’t already know. Hugo, take the boy up behind you on your horse.”
“I’m sure if the mage pursues us,” said the king, “our wizard will be able to protect us, but it would be better not to give him the trouble.”
“Of course, of course, good thinking,” I said, sliding the onyx ring onto my finger and glancing back toward the city. I very much doubted I could protect anyone from Kaz-alrhun.
PART SIX — HOLY CITY AND EMIR’S CITY
I
“The Church of the Sepulchre is the most holy spot in Christendom,” read Joachim from his guidebook. “Every year on Good Friday all the lamps and candles here, and indeed in all the Christian churches of the Holy City, are extinguished. On Easter morning fire from heaven kindles the lamps. Then all the bells in the churches of the city are rung, and the holy flame is used to relight the lamps in all those churches.”
I looked around, impressed in spite of myself. Normally I would have doubted a story of fire from heaven, as a tale for the credulous or else the work of an unacknowledged wizard. But in this small circular church, whose porter had waited to let our group in until the previous group of pilgrims had gone, it was impossible to doubt. Between the columns that ringed the church were mosaic depictions of the crucifixion and resurrection, and written all the way around at the top of the wall, in the old imperial language, was the message, “Grave, where is thy victory? Death, where is thy sting? For as in Adam all shall die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”
The church with its mosaics, altars dedicated by the various eastern and western groups of Christians, and silken hangings, was not the rough cave I had expected. In the center there was no roof, only a wide, circular opening through which the chaplain told us the fire from heaven descended. The hot air from the opening made the flames of the silver lamps sway, their light dancing on the precious stones of the altars.
“This way,” said Joachim quietly. He led us out not the way we had come but to a door on the opposite side which opened onto a dark, cramped stairway cut into the rock. Dominic and Ascelin kept their heads well down as we eased ourselves around the spiral. We emerged into the cave I had expected to find in the church above, the Sepulchre itself.
Candles burned at either end of a stone slab, two feet across and as long as a man. The slab, of course, was empty. It struck us, or at least me, even more powerfully than the decorations and the lamps of the church above. We did not speak but knelt by the slab until another porter came over and told Joachim in a low voice that the next group of pilgrims was waiting to enter.