C. Brittain: Mage Quest

“And are you going to move up then, Daimbert?”

The chaplain was the only person in Yurt who used my name rather than calling me Wizard; but then I was the only one who called him Joachim rather than Father.

“No, of course not. I like life here in Yurt, and, besides, I’m not nearly a skillful enough wizard that a bigger kingdom would want me. And the school is unlikely to consider me a good person to guide the student wizards.”

“I talked to the bishop on the telephone this afternoon,” the chaplain said in an apparent change of subject. “You’ll be pleased to hear that he finally agrees with you, that magic telephones use perfectly innocuous magic and involve no pacts with the devil.”

“And what else did you and the bishop talk about?” I asked, deciding not to comment that the bishop was certainly slow enough to grasp the obvious, especially since it was almost a year since his own provost had had a telephone installed in the cathedral. I wasn’t particularly interested in the bishop, but it was better to talk than to sit in silence, feeling the emptiness of the unknown voyage before us.

“It really has been easier communicating with the cathedral this last year, rather than having to rely on the carrier pigeons,” said Joachim, not answering my question. I wondered if he and the bishop had discussed some spiritual issue or other which they thought was unsuitable for a wizard’s ears.

But after a moment of staring into the fire, Joachim spoke again. “He confirmed that the new chaplain will arrive here within the week. It’s always hard to get one on short notice, but he thought that this young priest would do very well here. I’m sorry I won’t be able to help him settle into his duties.”

The wizards’ school would certainly not send out a substitute wizard to Yurt while I was gone. For one thing, unlike priests who claimed to show each other Christian charity, wizards were well known for fighting all the time, and I would never have allowed it.

“I shall miss Yurt,” added Joachim. His comment didn’t seem to have anything to do with the bishop, but since it fitted in well with my own mood it seemed appropriate.

We sat in silence for a few minutes. The castle was quiet around us. My chambers opened directly onto the main courtyard, but no one came or went on this dark, damp night.

“The bishop once went to the Holy Land himself,” said Joachim as though there had been no pause in the conversation. “It must be over forty years ago, when he was a young priest. He did the pilgrimage thoroughly, too, starting in the great City by the sea and visiting the holy sites there and then stopping at most of the shrines on the way. Last week he sent me the guide book he’d used, with the shrines he visited all marked. It took him over a year to reach the Holy Land.”

I had met the bishop only once. As a wizard, I was always a little skeptical of claims of great authority by members of the organized Church, and our brief meeting hadn’t made me take to him personally. But I knew Joachim thought of the bishop almost as a father. I, on the other hand, had lost my parents when small and certainly didn’t consider the masters of the wizards’ school as substitute fathers-for one thing, I knew they would have resisted any suggestion that I was their son.

“Well, it would be silly for us to go west to the City to start our trip,” I said absently. “We know Sir Hugo and his party were fine when they left home. By going southeast, we’ll be able to pick up the pilgrimage route well along, without a lengthy detour.” But then something the chaplain had said struck me. “Wait a minute. I lived all my life in the City before coming to Yurt, and I don’t remember it having holy sites.”

Joachim looked up at me and smiled, something he didn’t do very often. “Of course it has holy sites, even if a merchant’s son and a young wizard never paid any attention to them. Christianity began in the Holy Land, but the City was the capital of an empire then, and early missionaries tried to establish the true faith there as well. Many of them were martyred in early years by imperial forces, and the places where their holy bones were laid to rest became shrines for the faithful.”

“Oh, churches,” I said with a shrug. “Of course the City has a lot of churches. We couldn’t visit every holy shrine in the western and eastern kingdoms anyway. It would take much too long to get to the Holy Land, and you’d never keep track of them all. Besides, Yurt has its own shrine, with the Holy Toe of Saint Eusebius the Cranky, if someone just wanted to see a holy site.”

Joachim didn’t answer. In the black linen of his vestments, he almost merged into the shadows of the room. I wondered if he had something else on his mind but didn’t like to press him. I turned on a few more magic lamps to brighten the dark corners and got up to pour more wine.

“It will be good to see my family,” the chaplain said unexpectedly as I handed him his refilled glass.

“Your family?” Joachim rarely spoke of his family, although I knew he had at least one brother. I had the sense from something he had once said that he had been supposed to inherit the family business, and a certain coolness had crept into his relations with his relatives when he decided to become a priest instead, but I had never had any details.

“Yes.” He glanced at me briefly, then looked away. “My brother has been asking me to visit for close to a year now. He says I should really meet his children before they grow any bigger, which is true, but I did not feel I could take the time away from my duties here. He wrote again this week and asked me to stop and see them on our way to the East. They’re only a short distance off our route, so when I talked to the king about it he said we would all go there. Now I’m trying to remember how long it’s been since I’ve seen him.”

So that was what had been on Joachim’s mind, I thought. I was relieved that he had not been worrying about the bishop. The bishop intermittently imagined some undue influence on the chaplain from his friendship with a wizard, although as far as I could tell I had never been able to influence Joachim in anything.

“You’ve seen your brother at least once since I became wizard here,” I said. “You met him over in the cathedral city of Caelrhon.”

“Six years ago,” said Joachim with a nod. “But I haven’t seen my brother’s wife since I left home for the seminary, and I’ve never seen their children at all.”

“Is there any particular reason why he wants to see you now?”

“He didn’t say specifically,” said Joachim, his dark eyes distant. “In his last letter he hinted at some problems coming out of the East and affecting the family business. For a moment, I even wondered if it might have something to do with Sir Hugo’s disappearance, but that would be too much of a coincidence. After all, almost all luxury trade is connected to the East in some way.”

I waited to give him a chance to say something more about his brother. When he didn’t, and silence again stretched long between us, I used his mention of Sir Hugo to bring the topic back to the major purpose of our coming quest.

“What do you think can have happened to Sir Hugo’s party?” I asked. I myself had no good ideas, in spite of six weeks of theorizing. Although Zahlfast and the other masters of the wizards’ school seemed relieved that someone had volunteered to go look for Evrard, they also had no ideas.

“Death, illness, imprisonment, loss of money, loss of will to return,” said Joachim, which seemed to sum up the possibilities. “If they are dead, I am glad they were first able to visit the holy sites where Christ’s feet trod.”

I decided not to respond to this last comment. Instead I said, “It is a perilous journey, even now.”