King Warin’s hand closed around the Black Pearl as he backed slowly up the Wadi, Dominic necessarily backing with him as the edge of the king’s knife pressed against his neck. “Stay where you are,” he said warningly, but none of us had dared move.
“I tried to warn you to beware of him,” Evrard muttered out of the corner of his mouth.
A hundred feet from us Warin lifted his left fist, the Pearl in it, and held his arm straight toward us. His face lit up with triumphant joy. From his lips came words of the Hidden Language.
It was a paralysis spell, short and awkward, with half the words mispronounced. But with the Pearl in his fist and the correct form of the words in our minds, Evrard, Kaz-alrhun, and I were frozen where we stood.
I would have gone stiff even if the spell had not worked. It was in the Hidden Language, that controlled eastern as well as western magic, but its form was indubitably that of a school spell.
“You can’t stop me without your wizard, Haimeric!” Warin shouted mockingly. “And your nephew’s not going to be a lot of help against the Ifrit!” He gave Dominic an abrupt blow with the golden box on the back of the head, sending him sprawling on his face in the sand. Warin stood over him, the knife still in his hand. “Should I finish him now and save the Ifrit the trouble?”
Then he laughed, a long and evil laugh. “But why should I waste my time with any of you? You’ll never live anyway to challenge me. I shall rule all the western kingdoms, including the pitiful kingdom of Yurt, with the powers the Black Pearl will give me!” He gave Dominic a sharp kick and turned abruptly to run up the Wadi.
That is when Ascelin dropped on him.
Warin must have caught a glimpse of the prince coming over the rim of the watercourse from the corner of his eye, because he tried to whirl toward him, but it was too late. Ascelin landed on him with the full force of a thirty-foot drop. Warin’s knife went flying in one direction, the Black Pearl in another.
I struggled desperately against the paralysis spell, as Warin recovered from his surprise and fought back with what looked like inhuman strength. He yanked the prince from his feet, and when Ascelin rolled and recovered, Warin threw himself on top of him. He tried to hold the prince down with one arm, as with the other hand he reached out, groping closer and closer to where the Black Pearl lay in the sand. At the last moment he thrust Ascelin away from him, snatched the Pearl with both hands, and leaped back up.
Dominic, a dozen yards from them, pushed his face out of the dirt. “Don’t let him get away alive!” he shouted hoarsely. “Don’t let him escape with the Pearl!” In the middle of that shout, Ascelin made a dive for Warin’s legs. As the king lost his balance the prince’s long hunting knife slid smoothly upwards, between Warin’s ribs and into his heart.
I broke the paralysis spell on me and on Kaz-alrhun. “School magic,” I told him when he seemed surprised I could work any spell faster than he could. “It’s easier to break than your spells if you know the trick.” Evrard already had himself free.
Joachim’s and Hugo’s dark heads appeared over the rim of the Wadi, joined in a moment by Maffi and by the Ifrit’s wife. “You’ll have to go around to the top end of the watercourse and come down that way,” Ascelin called up to them, then sat down abruptly, his breathing ragged. He pulled his knife out of Warin’s body and slowly and mechanically started cleaning it, like the good hunter he was.
Dominic pulled himself shakily to his feet and went to retrieve the Black Pearl. It was spattered with Warin’s blood, which he wiped off carefully on his tunic.
Kaz-alrhun stood motionless for a moment, almost as though still paralyzed. Then he shook himself and flashed his gold tooth at me again. “God gives and God takes away,” he said with a shrug. It was a strange reaction, I thought, considering that he should be delighted that the Pearl was safe. But then something I did not have time to analyze began to nag at me as well.
King Haimeric sat down by Warin’s head and tried to listen for his breathing, but it was quite clear that he was dead. The body began to age before our eyes. In life Warin had looked middle-aged, no older than Dominic, but as we watched in horror his iron-gray hair whitened, his cheeks wrinkled, and the veins of his hands became pronounced. Within two minutes his shriveled body looked older than King Haimeric, indeed far older.
From further down the Wadi, where we had not gone, I suddenly heard voices. I whirled toward this new threat and saw three armed men coming around a boulder toward us, two young knights and one middle-aged lord.
They stopped abruptly, seeing us. “Don’t be concerned,” Evrard called to them. “It’s the forces of Yurt at last, come to rescue us!”
I had almost forgotten about Sir Hugo and his knights.
From up the Wadi came an abrupt cry, of joy so intense it was almost pain. Young Hugo pounded past us, barely slowing down to avoid Warin’s body, and threw himself into his father’s arms. Sir Hugo fell flat from the force of the onrush, and for a moment the two rolled together, laughing and shouting and crying all at once and pummeling each other.
The older man recovered first and eased himself to a sitting position. “Careful, there, Hugo, I’m not as young as you are! But what’s this? Who have you been fighting to get wounded like this?”
“I held off the emir’s men while our party escaped,” said Hugo proudly. I noticed he did not mention his fight with Ascelin.
“Then you did better than we ever did!”
Joachim came up to stand by Warin’s shriveled body. “I’d better say the rites for him.”
“I’m not absolutely certain,” I said, “but I think he’d sold his soul to the devil.”
Joachim fixed me with his enormous dark eyes. “Only God can judge him. The church’s rituals are to help us all, living and dead, saved and damned, in a fallen world where all of our salvations are uncertain.”
The Ifrit’s wife met the two knights who had accompanied Evrard and Sir Hugo and greeted them like very old friends.
Dominic had recovered the golden box and brushed the sand off the velvet before putting the Pearl carefully back into it. He sat down next to Ascelin. “You saved the Pearl, and you probably saved my life,” he said. “Yurt owes you more than I know how to repay. Ask whatever you will from me.”
Ascelin had been sitting with his face resting on his arms. Now he looked up, a slight smile crinkling the tanned skin around his eyes. “I thank you, Dominic, but the kingdom of Yurt has already given me more than I could ever have asked. You yourself might not be able to give me what I desire above all, but the Pearl may be able to do so. My heart’s desire is to see the duchess and our daughters again before I die.”
I stood to one side, listening to the faint, not quite intelligible voice of the Black Pearl. For reasons I could not define, the voice sounded different.
Joachim finished the litany for the dead and went over to Ascelin. The tall prince glanced up, then nodded without speaking. He pushed himself to his feet and walked slowly away down the Wadi with the chaplain, listening to him with his head bowed.
While they were gone, I told Evrard the highlights of our quest to the east to find him. “I’m flattered, Daimbert,” he said with a grin. “So finding me was your heart’s desire?”
I shook my head and smiled. “‘What you seek and what you find, will oft-times be of different kind.’ I wouldn’t go so far as to say you’re my heart’s desire, but I am delighted to have found you.”
But even as I spoke I realized that the sense of boundless happiness, along with the Pearl’s voice at the back of my brain, had altered, become less intense, or perhaps taken on a more somber hue.
Evrard looked thoughtful for a moment, and I wondered if he had been briefly contemplating the triumphs of the reign of Evrard the All-merciful. “The school’s going to want the Pearl.”
“I know. When I first heard the rumors it had been found, I told Zahlfast about it, and he said an object that powerful and dangerous would have to be controlled by highly skilled wizards-which I presume excludes you and me. We know it has enormous power, but Zahlfast is right that if that power is going to be channeled we’ll first have to find out how it works. I hope the masters of the school have the wisdom to realize how quickly it could become accursed if someone tried to appropriate all its powers to himself.” Evrard met my eyes. He knew exactly what I meant.