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THE WITCH AND THE CATHEDRAL
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 1995 by C. Dale Brittain
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises P.O. Box 1403 Riverdale, NY 10471
ISBN: 0-671-S7661-9
Cover art by Newel Convers and Courtney Skinner
First printing, April 1995
DEDICATION
For Bruce and Doug, who thought it would be mushy
Distributed by Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Part One: THE CATHEDRAL Part Two: THE QUEEN Part Three: THE WITCH Part Four: THEODORA Part Five: THE FUNERAL Part Six: THE BORDERLANDS Part Seven: THE BISHOP Part Eight: COMING OF AGE Part Nine: RENEGADE EPILOGUE
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36
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149
186
222
259
297
330
PART ONE
The Cathedral
That morning I thought my main problem was the three drunk newts. But that was before I got the telephone call from the chaplain. He was not in fact the chaplain anymore, but then a minute ago the newts had been three drunk students.
I had been sitting in on Zahlfast's class at the wizards* school. He paused in his description of the basic transformations spell to explain the dangers inherent in its use. Any magic spell, even illusions, can have repercussions far beyond the expected, and advanced spells if not done properly can lead to loss of identity or even life.
The three drunk wizardry students, sitting together and laughing quietly in the back, had apparently decided to test for themselves what these dangers might be.
We dived for die newts before they had a chance to disappear into cracks in the floor. "Hold on to those two, Daimbert," said Zahlfast "I'll start on this one."
Hie newts wiggled in my hands as I tried to hold their smooth bodies gently. The loss of a tail or a leg as a newt would mean permanent damage to the student as a human, and if they escaped as newts we might never be able to return them to themselves. They were quite
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attractive, light green with bright red spots, but their tiny newt eyes looked up at me with human fear.
The rest of the class had retreated to the back of the room. Zahlfast glared at them. "What are you waiting for? This is all the demonstration you'll get today." The students left in some confusion, and he returned to his spell.
It is harder to undo someone else's spell than one of your own. As I started on one of the newts I was holding, Zahlfast finished with his, and suddenly a student stood before him, or rather slumped. He was slightly green, but I think that was from feeling ill rather than the aftereffects of being a newt.
I finished with mine and handed the third to Zahlfast. "How can they be drunk so early in the day? I didn't think the taverns down in the City were even open yet."
Zahlfast spoke the final words in the Hidden Language to break the spell. "Bottles in their rooms," he said as the last dazed and frightened newt became a dazed and frightened wizardry student.
"We never had bottles in our rooms when 7 was a student here," I said self-righteously.
Zahlfast looked at me sideways, a smile twitching the corner of his mouth. "As I recall, you had plenty of trouble at the transformations practical exam, even perfectly sober."
I preferred not to recall all my embarrassment with those frogs, even twenty years afterwards, so I loftily ignored this comment. I had, after all, become a perfectly competent wizard in the meantime—or at least had managed to persuade the wizards' school of my abilities enough that they had invited me back for a few months as an outside lecturer.
"Now," said Zahlfast to the students. "Are you sober enough to listen to reason?"
"Spill a spell, spoil a spell," blurted one and collapsed on his face. I was interested to see that they still excused
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themselves for magical mixups with the same catch-phrase we had used years ago.
At that moment one of the other young wizards came in. "Telephone call for you, sir," he said to me. I excused myself and followed him out and down the hall.
I felt as I always did a stir of pride in using a telephone with a magical far-seeing attachment, allowing one to see as well as hear the person at the other end. Although I had invented the attachment essentially by accident, as my first and only success in technical wizardry, it had over the years become widely adopted.
The view-screen lit up, showing the face of the man waiting to talk to me: gaunt, with deep-set eyes over high cheekbones and a mouth that looked as though it rarely smiled. It was Joachim, dean of the cathedral of Caelrhon.
His dark eyes looked at me unseeing. Without a far-seeing attachment on his own telephone, he could not tell I was there until I spoke. The bishop, always dubious about magic, had doubtless considered it enough of a concession to institutionalized wizardry to allow the installation of even an ordinary magic telephone.
"Hello!" I said. "I haven't heard from you in ages!" Although traditionally priests and wizards never get along, Joachim and I had been friends, at least most of the time, since I had first taken up the position of Royal Wizard of Yurt and found him Royal Chaplain there.