Daughter of Magic - Wizard of Yurt - 5 by C. Dale Brittain, Brittain Page A

blew back into my face. “Al right there?” I asked cheerfuly, holding her closer.
    “This is exciting, Wizard!” she shouted over the wind’s roar. Birds dodged out of our way. “Can we take Mother for a ride too?”
    “We’d better not—it’s too far to get to Caelrhon and be back before anyone misses the carpet.” And besides, I was supposed to be spending time alone with Antonia this week. Was it my fault that I too would rather have been with Theodora?
    “And I’m looking for something,” I added. I slowed the carpet’s flight with a few words in the Hidden Language, and we hovered while I put together a far-seeing spel to examine al the distant clouds in the sky before us.

    If Justinia was the object of an assassination plot, I wanted to make sure she had not been folowed to Yurt. Since Kaz-alrhun had entrusted her safety to me, I had to make sure she wasn’t kiled in our best guest-room. The mage, I thought, had probably done his best to get her off unnoticed, and he might not have told even the governor himself where he was sending her, but I didn’t like to take chances.
    “Nothing there,” I said to Antonia after a minute. “Just clouds.”
    “No dragons?” she said, making it into a joke.
    “No. Dragons would probably come from the north anyway. Let’s get back to the castle.”
    As we shot back home a chiling thought struck me.
    Suppose the arrival of the miracle-worker in Caelrhon— and his abrupt disappearance yesterday—were somehow related to the Lady Justinia’s arrival in Yurt?
    But I could not think of a plausible connection. He had already been in Caelrhon when Justinia left Xantium, and I could not imagine that anyone in the East would have learned where she was going and gotten an assassin here so far ahead of her arrival. And the lady herself was unlikely to have spent the last few weeks in hiding, disguised as someone who healed broken dols and dead dogs.

    II
    “I hope you realize,” said Zahlfast testily, “that I can’t send a demonology expert from the faculty racing off to Yurt unless you’ve actualy got a demon! We have classes here to teach.” When Antonia had been whisked away by the twins to take a nap after lunch, I had gone to telephone the wizards’ school. So far I wasn’t having any luck getting help there. Zahlfast, second in command at the school, had long ago become my friend in spite of my disastrous transformations practical in his course. But the faintest suggestion that I was being drawn into the affairs of the Church had always riled him.
    “Of course,” I said quickly. “I’m not asking for anyone to come here now. But since this magic-worker appeared suddenly and inexplicably in Caelrhon and then disappeared again just as inexplicably, I wanted to warn you in case he suddenly shows up again, working his miracles or whatever they are—with or without a demon—in some other part of the western kingdoms.”
    “Wel, certainly no other wizard has said anything to us about a—what did you cal him? A Cat-Man? And do you know what we would do,” Zahlfast continued, an edge to his voice, “if there was a strange magic-worker in your region, one there in fact as wel as in rumor? We’d ask a nearby wizard to look into it, someone experienced: one, say, who’d had his degree twenty-five years or so. . . .”
    “Oh, I’m investigating al right,” I said lamely, though there wasn’t a lot I could do unless the Dog-Man came back. When Zahlfast rang off I stared gloomily at the stone wal before me, short of good ideas.
    Part of my problem was that I felt too close to this situation. The irrational feeling kept nagging me that the Dog-Man had disappeared from Caelrhon in order to bring evil to Yurt Zahlfast thought I was overreacting, and maybe I was, but I could not take any situation lightly when it could affect my daughter. Although wizards were usualy in fierce competition with each other, in this case I would have been wiling to admit to