A Bad Spell in Yurt - Wizard of Yurt - 1 by C. Dale Brittain Page A

of wizardry," I said into my own telephone. Gwen had laughed at that until she could hardly stand up, but it seemed safe to say, since no one seemed able to hear me anyway.
    I hurried out into the courtyard. "Could you hear that?"
    The Lady Maria didn't answer at first. The people with her were smiling, either in amusement or encouragement, but she looked both puzzled and somewhat concerned. She came toward me, carrying the glass telephone.
    "It's very strange," she said. "Nobody else could hear you, but I could."
    "You could? You mean it worked? You know that, with a telephone, you have to hold the receiver to your ear, and other people don't hear what's being said." I almost laughed with excitement. At last, I thought, I was making real progress.
    But she shook her head. "I didn't hear you through the receiver. I don't think I even heard you with my ears. It was as though you were talking inside my brain."
    "Bring the telephone into my study," I said in despondency. I put both instruments back up on the top shelf. While I thought I was attaching communications spel s to the instruments, I was instead discovering that, even though the Lady Maria was not trained in wizardry, it was stil possible for me to communicate with her, mind to mind. While I had begun to like her, I didn't want to do it again. Anyone else's mind is always acutely strange if met directly.
    She started to leave, then hesitated. "Is it true that al powers of earth and air must obey the spel s of wizardry?"
    At least she had heard what I'd said, rather than whatever random thoughts I may have been having. "Yes, if the wizardry is done right," I said.
    "So a wizard can, if he knows his spel s, exercise ultimate control over every being on earth?" It would have been more flattering if she had not stil looked so puzzled.
    "No," I said honestly, "not ultimate control. Wizardry is a natural power. Like anything else on earth, it can be overcome by the supernatural."
    "You mean by the saints?"
    "Or by demons."
    "But who controls the saints and demons?"
    I shook my head and tried to smile. When I was at school, I had known I wasn't a very good wizard, but at least I had believed in wizardry. Here in Yurt everyone seemed to want to remind me of wizardry's limitations. "You'l have to ask the chaplain about that. But no one real y controls saints and demons. At best the priests learn how to ask them favors."
    At dinner that night I told the constable that I was going to have to pause in my work on the telephone system for a while, until I had discovered the source of the anti-telephonic demonic influence.

    I
    I rode out of the castle on an old white mare. Although I had only been in Yurt a little over two weeks, my life in the City had begun to fade into the distant past. Life in the castle had settled into a comfortable pattern once I abandoned work on the telephones. The queen was spoken of every day, but she was stil gone, and I found it hard to imagine what the castle would be like when she returned. To me, to whom two weeks seemed like a year, she had been gone forever, had indeed never been in Yurt, but to the others she was just a little over halfway through the month-long visit to her parents that she took every summer.
    Some of the knights and the boys were riding out at the same time. Their horses were much livelier than mine, but as I had not ridden in a long time I was happy with my mount. She walked steadily and placidly down the brick road that led from the castle gates. While the knights turned off to the field where they were teaching the boys jousting, my mare and I continued past the little cemetery, dotted with crosses, where the chaplain's predecessor and presumably al former kings and queens and chaplains and servants were buried, and down the hil toward the woods. I was going to visit the old wizard.
    Although the "anti-telephonic demonic influences" I had used as an excuse to the constable had been my own invention, I didn't like the cold